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At the same time as the fledgling Galactic Federation was discovering the new and extraordinarily violent human race, on the other side of the galaxy, the First War for Galactic Supremacy raged on into its seventh century.

Against the Federation was arrayed the monolithic might of the xenophobe, speciesist race known as the Gorax.

The Gorax could not be bargained with, a quirk of their religious beliefs. They deified a Prophet, a Gorax peasant known only as Du-Na: “Poor.”

For tens of thousands of years before Du-Na, the Gorax formed the backbone of the Galactic economy. There was hardly a system in the known galaxy where you would not find a Gorax merchant or municipal governor, along with his thousands of Gorax slaves. During these millennia, the loosely affiliated Gorax diaspora was the mortar that held the Galaxy together.

However, the unofficial Gorax commercial empire was ruthlessly built upon a combination of two factors: the speedy rate of Gorax reproduction; and the willingness of the Gorax elite to enslave their own people, en masse.

As the Gorax spread across the galaxy, the oligarchic structure of their society continued to evolve, with wealth consolidating further into the hands of fewer and fewer magnates. Over the millennia, cutthroat corporate tactics resulted in whole lineages of once prosperous Gorax families being bankrupted, absorbed into larger monopolies, and themselves relegated to slavery. By the time Du-Na was born – if Gorax legend it to be believed, on the Gorax homeworld – the entirety of Gorax civilization, spread across the galaxy, was essentially owned by five ruthless and universally despised individuals. The stage was set for a cultural revolution and Du-Na was the spark.

Du-Na appeared from the depths of Gorax destitution, wearing his poverty like golden armor, wielding it with the force of a greatsword and the precision of a scalpal. Du-Na was a genius of Gorax psychology, and when he began prosylitizing to the leaderless, oppressed Gorax masses, they listened.

To the wide swaths of Gorax slaves, Du-Na quickly became a hero. When he was killed by the Oligarchy he became a legend. When the Great Gorax Revolution was complete, and those same Oligarchs burned alive in their mansions and personal cruisers, Du-Na became a God, and, like all mortals who achieve the Godhead, Du-Na’s legend was soon co-opted.

In the power vacuum following the fall of the Gorax Oligarchy, several Gorax groups struggled for dominance. In the end all but two evaporated.

One camp sued for Gorax internal unity and continued engagement with the galaxy at large. This group believed if Gorax wealth was redistributed equally amongst the Gorax people, the Gorax could simultaneously maintain their controlling economic grip on the galaxy while increasing the quality of life for their citizens.

The other camp – a cult of Du-Na, allegedly led by a veiled figure, known only as Du-Na Garün, “Du-Na’s Child” – took a more hard-line approach. Du-Na Garün exonerated no one for the thousands of years of Gorax enslavement. He condemned the Gorax oligarchy for its hateful selfishness. He condemned the other species of the galaxy for silently accepting the economic boon of Gorax slavery while ignoring the suffering of the Gorax people.

But most of all, and most importantly for the future of galactic civilization, Du-Na Garün blamed the impoverished Gorax themselves. Ultimately, he argued, it was not the oligarchs or the galaxy who kept the Gorax oppressed, but a weakness in the Gorax soul. He identified what he believed was a failure in the Gorax cultural heart – the Gorax-Al-Kur – “Gorax Self Hate.”

In Du-Na Garün’s vision of the future, the Gorax would prioritize only themselves, Gorax supremacy, over all other life. Never again would a Gorax go hungry. Never again would Gorax harm Gorax. Once unified, once purged of the Gorax-Al-Kur, the Gorax would seek their revenge. Ultimately, Du-Na Garün proclaimed, the Gorax would control every system in the galaxy, completely annihilating or enslaving all other sentient life.

The entire Gorax fleet was called back to Goradax, where the first, and last, public referendum in Gorax history was held. Every Gorax in the galaxy was afforded a vote, and voting was held open for five years, during which Du-Na Garün quietly laid the groundwork for invasion. When, at last, the votes were tallied, Du-Na Garün and his followers won an overwhelming majority. The next day the Gorax Imperium was founded, with Da-Nu as its godhead and Da-Nu Garün as its patron saint.

After a long peace, the rest of the galaxy, eager to avoid violence, took no action in the hopes the Gorax threat was overblown. It was not.

Judged from the new Gorax calender, with day one being the founding of the Imperium, the Holy War was declared on the 100th day. Using an entirely new system of galactic coordinates, calibrated around the planet Goradax, the Gorax systematically set about conquering their far off quadrant of the galaxy. Du-Na Garün had spent five years retrofitting the expansive Gorax commercial fleet with crude armor and weapons of war. When the time came, the Gorax unleashed tens of thousands of flotillas, each with over a thousand ships . What they lacked in firepower they made up for in number and zealotry. Soon enough the Gorax fleet had spread out and one by one decimated thousands of planets, killing most of their populations and enslaving those who were left.

Meanwhile, without the Gorax economic infrastructure which previously sustained it, the multitude of the galaxy’s free states – the Hiddrell, Loloth and Trylixians the strongest among them – at first struggled to respond. In the first decade of the conflict, the Gorax advanced with almost no meaningful resistance.

It was only by allying together that the galaxy’s free species could possibly defeat the Gorax, but this would require a pact between the Trylixians and the Hiddrell, two races with a long history of conflict. It was the Loloth who stepped in and brokered a peace between the two species, some say with the assistance of clandestine psychic influence. However it came to pass, the alliance was made and, with tripartite leadership, in the 11th year of the war, the Galactic Federation was born.

The next three centuries of was a tug of war of terrible violence, on a galactic scale. The Gorax would make dangerous inroads toward the Galactic center, the Federation’s forces would beat them back. Individually, the Gorax ships were among the weakest in the galaxy, but their numerical advantage was immense, as was their fanaticism. The Federation’s fleet, with its varied armaments and species-specific tactics eventually managed to hold the Gorax in place, and by the fourth century of combat a rough front line had formed, stretching across tens of thousands of systems, each heavily entrenched, constantly changing hands, the planets themselves reduced to depopulated battlefields of ash and mud.

It was in the midst of this violent stalemate that the Federation forces first encountered the human race. Astonished by reports of their violence: the murder, by only six humans, of nearly an entire Loloth crew; the overpowering of two fully armed Krill officers; all while effectively unarmed and unarmored; malnourished and dehydrated. When the Council reviewed Loloth intelligence on the new species, and discovered that humans reproduced at rates significantly faster than the Gorax average, a fateful idea was born.

Only through the lens of 700 years of unceasing warfare could anyone see such a discovery as an opportunity. But that is precisely what the Federation Council saw – a chance at turning the tide – a new secret weapon.

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