The last great war ended two generations ago. Nobody won. The factions that remain have been negotiating the terms of an uneasy peace ever since — while quietly preparing for the next one.
The dominant galactic empire, assembled not through cruelty alone but through the promise of stability, infrastructure, and an end to the chaos that came before. Roads were built. Trade was secured. Wars between worlds were ended. The cost was sovereignty itself — the right of worlds to govern themselves.
By the time most worlds understood what they had agreed to, the infrastructure was too deeply embedded to remove. Power grids, shipping lanes, communication networks, financial systems — all of it routed through Sovereignty infrastructure. Withdrawing was technically possible. Surviving withdrawal was not.
What the Senate officially believes: the Sovereignty is the galaxy's best hope against the chaos that preceded it. What the Senate doesn't know: Regent Valos Edreen funds a secret directorate called the Null Protocol, quietly training Voidshapers as covert intelligence operatives while publicly sponsoring the Tidecaller Order. Both things are true. The contradiction is intentional.
Not built — stitched together from the wreckage of the Shattering. Refugee fleets, outlawed Tidecallers, species that refused annexation, scientists who asked the wrong questions. Named not for weakness but for history: it is made of fractured things that chose to hold together anyway.
The Coalition fights for the right to feel the Veil without a Sovereignty license and to exist as Veilborn without becoming an empire's property. They shelter unregistered Veilborn, run underground schools, and maintain a network of safe houses that the Sovereignty has been trying to map for twenty years with limited success.
Their biggest weakness: they agree on what they're against. What they're for is still being argued — loudly, constantly, in every meeting — which is simultaneously their greatest liability and the truest sign that they mean what they say about self-determination.
Older than the Sovereignty by centuries. The Order has its own hierarchy, its own scripture, and its own long memory — long enough to remember what the galaxy was before the empire, and long enough to have watched itself change in ways that make that memory complicated.
They serve the Sovereignty officially. But they serve the Veil first — or they are supposed to. The fault line between those two positions has widened into a schism: the Bound faction believes cooperation with the Sovereignty preserves the Order's ability to do good in practical terms. The Free faction believes the Order's soul has been slowly corroded by empire, and that what remains is a comfortable institution that has confused comfort with service.
The schism is close to open conflict. Both sides are avoiding that outcome because they know what happens to divided institutions when empires feel threatened.
Not a cult of destruction. A genuine philosophical movement with compelling arguments and a coherent — if terrifying — vision of the galaxy. Voidshapers believe the Veil is a form of cosmic dependence, and that severance is not loss but liberation. They operate in the shadows not from shame, but from practicality: the Sovereignty has formally outlawed unregistioned Voidshapers, while unofficially using them when it's convenient.
The Conclave is not interested in ruling the galaxy. It is interested in finding whatever built the Veil — so they can dismantle it. Every expedition, every act of intelligence gathering, every uncomfortable alliance, every moral compromise made by the Conclave traces back to this single goal. Archon Tessivane Drel has given her life to it. She is brilliant. She is not cruel. She is absolutely willing to do monstrous things if they bring her thesis closer to proof.
The inner circle — the Unnamed Twelve — are unknown even to most Conclave members. Their identities are the Conclave's most protected secret, because if the Sovereignty knew who they were, the Conclave's institutional memory would be dead within a month.
Not a government. Not a military. A trade network that has made itself so essential to galactic commerce that attacking it is functionally equivalent to economic self-destruction. Every major faction depends on Drift shipping lanes, credit systems, and information brokers. The Driftway station — their jewel, their headquarters, their permanent claim to relevance — sits at the intersection of every major transit route in the known galaxy.
The Drift sells to anyone. Serves anyone. Provided they can pay and do not conduct violence on Drift property, every faction is a customer. Every faction resents this arrangement. Every faction maintains it anyway because the alternative is finding out what the galaxy looks like when commerce stops flowing — and no one wants to find that out.
Guildmaster Priya Sorn has made deals with every faction and owes favors to none. This is not neutrality; it is balance maintained through extraordinary skill and the occasional deliberately-deployed threat that sounds like an observation.
The galaxy's premier mercenary guild — not a mob of sell-swords but a professional military organization with standards, training, a 200-year record of never breaking a contract, and an institutional culture built around the idea that reliability is worth more than any permanent allegiance.
The Ironclad have fought for every faction at least once. They hold grudges against none. They will fight against former employers without hesitation. No one finds this surprising. It's in the contract — and the Ironclad's contracts are airtight. The one place every faction agrees the Ironclad are indispensable: when you need someone who will absolutely do the thing you're paying them to do, without improvising, without going off-mission, without developing principles mid-assignment.
Even the Voidshaper Conclave hired them once. The Ironclad completed the contract. They have not spoken about what the contract was. The Conclave has not asked them to again.