Long before we began traveling the stars, our kind would glide gracefully above the deserts of our noble home. Today, we hunt as those first hunters did, but their packs were scattered, disorganized, and competitive. They roamed the desolate land for meat, for fibers, and for the Sacred Crystals. The lands shifted such that the land was new by the end of each century; the only stable respite being the mountains that tower above, fixed above the lands below. The few settlements the ancients kept, lay on said mountains to this day. The ancients lived their hunter life for eons, each pack competing amongst their tribe, each tribe atop a mountain of their own. They didn’t see trade as valuable, as their scarcity of materials meant that war was often easier than trade. Our kind fought war after war for Eons; so many were fought, that the tribes began having ritual warfare. As they started to prosper, they cultivated the mountains. They discovered how to farm, and figured out how to use the shifting land. Slowly they adapted, eventually becoming more like us, and less like the primal hunters they were before. Soon after the tribes began converging into larger communities, and they began to trade; they were visited by Starfolk who traded wisdom and technology for our baubles and textiles, as well as attempt to harness what they believed to be the source of the shifting lands. The Starfolk brought newfound prosperity to our people. An era of enlightenment followed for decades after their first arrival; however, as we learned more and more from them, the more we realized that they weren’t giving us back equal to what they took from us. Their harvesting of the shifting power would threatened to end our people’s way of life. We learned that the periodic shifting and renewal of the deserts was what allowed our world to survive. The world shifted, bringing fresh nutrients to the surface, allowing what scarce vegetation there was to flourish. Their harvesting of that power would have stopped the renewal entirely, they were willing to kill our world for the sake of their expedition. We were just a stepping stone for them, a refueling stop on a conquest to rule all there was to rule. The Ancients came to despise the Starfolk, whom we once saw as the ministers of our progress. Those whom we once worshipped nearest to gods, they learned were comfortable ending us entirely for the sake of their conquest. The elders were right not to share the power of the Sacred Crystals. At first, the ancients cried out publicly against the Starfolk, or as they preferred to call themselves, the Lethians. The Lethians pushed hard against our forefathers, they quelled our rebellion with an iron fist. They established bases in the desert, and imposed taxes on our people, taking half of everything we found of value. They fortunately never learned the secret of the Sacred Crystals. The Lethians grew ever hungrier for materials, and instead of taxing the Ancients, moved on to directly competing with them for resources. The ancients, no longer willing to compete with the power-hungry Lethians. The first conflicts had heavy tolls on the Ancients, as well as heavy tolls on the Lethians; however, it seemed to the Ancients that the Lethians had an inexhaustible supply of infantry to send upon them. With their numbers dwindling, the Ancients resolved to bitter truce, having little left in power to fight back. The Ancients, after those decades of conflict, moved on to espionage. Our senses well adapted to night-raids on their bases, one after another, we destroyed their extraction pumps. One after another, they were rebuilt. And day after day, the Lethians grew more intense in their efforts to take as much as they could from us. It took years of preparing, months of planning, weeks of moving soldiers, and days for the final raid to take place. Our forefathers pushed hard and destroyed every extraction pump we knew of. We sacrificed the cities, and hid our secrets amongst the tribes below. Our push was hard and swift, we used their own technology against them, improving upon what we could salvage from them, and developed our first flying ships for the purpose of the raids. Each pump fell, over the course of one night. Our push was so fast, that the Lethians were forced into retreat. They flew their ships up into the skies, and they aimed their weapons at us. It was then that we realized that they were preparing to wipe us out. Prepared to go with dignity, we sat, waiting for the end. We fought to scare away our oppressors, and their attempts to destroy us would rid them of that which they desired. We waited, the skies hung still. Each forefather waiting for the day that they’d be ended. Each day, tensions among us grew, each blaming the other for failing to force our oppressors away sooner. We started warring amongst each-other once again, while our oppressors hung silently in the sky above. Five years after the fateful battle, five new stars shone in the sky. One red, a great pyramid came, it bathed the Lethians in Red. One blue, a great vessel of the sea came, they brought down to us all the ancient texts the Lethians had stolen from us. One purple, a structure of stone and metal, put a dome over each of our mountains. One orange, a long ship with smokestacks atop carts, launched a lattice that destroyed the Lethian fleet, lessening the grip the fleet had upon our world. And one green, an amalgamation of all the others, yet overgrown with plants, came down and asked for two of our own, one male and one female, to come upon their ship. The first four stars slowly drifted away, their brightness faded away until they vanished. The green star came down, and returned the two whom they had taken, each unharmed by the endeavor. The green star faded away last, leaving behind a seedling, hoping for the prosperity of our kind. When the last of the five stars had vanished into a whisper amongst all the other stars, our forefathers began a great civil war. We would come to know the names of the leaders in the rebellion as the names of the warlords upon which our dark age was ruled. The great Nasaku, who ran the first raids on the pumps, also lead the first raids on the cities, in hopes of a unified military should oppressors come again. The grand Mahihara, the head strategist leading up to the raid, took control of the lowlands, and through espionage and theft, acquired as much of the Lethian tech as he could. The commanders after which I, and many others, were named. The mighty brothers, Kaluno and Teraku, fought amongst themselves for control over the highlands and midlands. Each wanting to take anything they could from the other, their factions wrought destruction in their path, many unaligned tribes were caught in their cross fire as our society tore itself apart. Ten years into civil war, the planet now almost renewed, an unaligned pack found a half-buried starship. They feared it, for it bore Lethian insignia, and may come to strike back at any time. They did whatever they could to provoke any action from it, while staying cautious should it actually arise. The ship awoke, and it told them that its drive was heavily damaged. The foolish unaligned didn’t learn from the horrors of the Lethians, and decided to tinker with the drive. They opened it up and found a broken crystal, one of the same shape and size as one of the Sacred Ones. The unaligned foolishly replaced the broken one with their crystal and attempted to power up the ship. First, the sun shone purple and dim. Next, the stars all one by one turned purple in color. There was a blinding light from both the north and the south, followed by nothing. Minutes later, an intense energy wave slowly crawled across our world. Each caught in its path broken down into their primordial components. The great warlords were fortunate to have been vying for the same city at the time, they all were able to get their followers, our ancestors from nearly five centuries back, into the safety of the city. The energy subsided, the planet ridden of our desert outposts, our forefathers shaken by what had happened. The sun and stars all returned to normal after a year had passed. The days of the warlords over, life as our forefathers knew it was over. We began a second period of renaissance, one born out of need for survival. Our culture had changed to one of cooperation, instead of warfare. We swore that we would never perform the acts of the Lethians, and we swore that we would never forgive them. The five stars never woke again. The Lethians never returned. We eventually discovered how to create our own drive. No longer were we bound to the desolate lands of Avalon, we were free to roam the stars. Our Sacred Crystals held the secret of instant communication, regardless of distance. We built a unified society, spread across the entirety of the galaxy. We discovered that the Lethians, were but one fleet of the grand Humans. We now despise the Humans, for we learned that they had the power and authority to stop the Lethian fleet, but did nothing to stop the Lethians from committing their atrocities. We had the pleasure of seeing their home world get destroyed. One of their own felt the universe owed them a favor. They sought to wipe out all non-human life in the universe, and their weapon turned on them and destroyed their home world. Their desire for injustice took from them what they tried to take from us. The other races, the five great stars of our salvation, all chipped in to help rebuild their society. They asked us to help, but we have no sympathy for the race that didn’t condemn their own for attempting to wipe our own out. We, my great children, now wander the stars. The Lethians, who once tried to wipe us out, catalyzed us to roam the stars. We now have outposts and communities throughout the stars, not thanks to the Lethians, but thanks to our own desire to rebuild after their atrocities. This is a piece that I wrote for a Creative Writing class, I felt like here's the best place to post it. In case you're reading this, Deidre, I put my file on D2L before I posted this here.
this actually makes a lot of Things make sense. avali cracking jokes about tentacles and homes when talking to humans, and humans calling the avali for turkeys and Raptors. also explains why some humans are very rude to avali players. maybe fevix can make another Codex containing this story.