Verdance’s Ashes

Reunified during the Tenebrium Age, Verdance’s Ashes is named for the first colonist settler lost upon its soil. Like many reclaimed independent worlds, it resisted the return of factional culture and leadership, having grown for centuries in autonomy. Armada’s unification outreach began with logistics teams, civic architects, and technological exchanges. Armada biotech stabilized the populace against disease and the effects of lower gravity, Taelith refinements helped conquer the hostile climate, and improved industrial protocols and increased colonial production. 

Yet prosperity carried structure. Standardization protocols, Horizon Archives, and more, each gradually pushing the independents on Verdance’s Ashes towards Armada’s interpretation of Motion and order. Some colonists embraced the security and advancement offered. Others felt their traditions thinning beneath well-intended clarity, and so began a quiet divergence. Enclaves nodded politely and kept to their own ways in private. For them, Free Space had evolved in parallel and it could not return to the fold. But peace was maintained.

Then came the Sundering.

The Independent actions during the Severance Protocol were an unforgivable betrayal to the factions. Armada had shared everything to the colonists, and all they had asked in return was order. Loyalty. Integration. The raids during the Sundering brought a newfound fury upon all of Nullspace.

While the vast majority of colonists had no part in the raids, any distinction blurred in the aftermath. Armada forces scoured Verdance’s Ashes for rebels and Tenebrium. Unlike some reunified planets that resisted, leadership here surrendered to minimize the damage.

As the decades passed as Tenebrium reserves thinned, Armada’s hold on the planet weakened. Fleets no longer watched from orbit, reinforcements rarely arrived, and Armada’s focus has shifted to the Line Worlds. As the years have passed, the local clans on Verdance’s Ashes have increasingly pushed back and rebelled against the Armada forces.

Null Merc Commanders emerged to fight for Free Space, for scraps of Tenebrium, or for their hatred of the factions. Some are hunted. Others are bought or recruited directly by Armada, their void-touched abilities judged more valuable than the damage caused by rebellion.

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