Communion of the Hollow Heresy
- Location
- USA
COMMUNION OF THE HOLLOW HERESY
Antheosts are a crustacean-like people made up of polyp "cells", which through countless phases of evolution grew to become hulking semi-immortal beings; with only disease or violence capable of stopping their continual growth.
This unique characteristic also gives rise to the fact that it is common practice to give not only DNA but parts of your own cells during the reproductive process; creating a strange sort of "genetic memory" amongst successful clans that also translates into an ability to more naturally interface with technology as if it was another part of their own bodies. However it has a nasty downside in that they are extremely sensitive to both biosphere contamination and infection, especially amongst elderly people.
"Theyre like dogs you know? If dogs could vomit rebar and turn it into anything you wanted." Sector Resource Manager Adrienn Grand on the potential of PROJECT DESPINNE.
The Despinne (or as they call themselves the Ashte "The Making") were uplifted by Humanity in the waning years of the war to serve as "natural construction workers" due to their unique ability to construct a remarkably strong fiber from their own mouths; a trait that seems to have evolved as a form of emergency safety gear and shelter on their planet of storms and sheer cliffs. Their communal nature and oncoming ice age made them prime targets for uplifting and relocation; their natural lack of a verbal language made oppression all the easier.
Until one of them discovered how easy it was to commit sabotage; with the Siege of New Ursh Station famously succeeding due to the Despinne leaving a weaving pattern that unraveled if a single string was severed by fire and lead to critical structural failure. Now they form a silent pro-peace block within the Hollow, treating it as a faith with which to rebuild their own displaced culture.
FUNCTION: RELAY AND EMOTIONAL STABILIZATION
PROCESS: MASS CHEMICAL DISCHARGE
SECONDARY FUNCTION: ATTEMPT SPORE DISTRIBUTION?
The Goapent have a strange almost-psychic control over creatures; able to synthesize and send chemical signals across long distances that have been documented to have extreme effects on other species. While used simply as a part of language for them, the Goapents found themselves being used as essentially Military Police and Sergeants by the Paxillus. Twisted by cloning and pulled away from their own homeworld, the Goapents helped lead the revolution that turned the Burning into an actual political movement.
There are many other species amongst the Hollow; as anyone who wished to follow the teachings of the Church or simply join them in getting revenge were allowed to settle in Commune Space. This policy has led to vast numbers of people fleeing into Commune Space, looking for work or holy war and a way to rebuild from the Hyper War. Some notables include;
The Warrn, reptillians who's most notable trait is having uplifted their entire small refugee population and given them to the service of the Athehosts as a sort of praetorian guard.
The Orikytes, a six-limbed arboreal species with palm daggers who joined in with the rebellion due to the influence of the Goapents.
Humans; the most contentious group by far but were allowed to stay after a mass mutiny led to the Despinne-Antheost alliance gaining a small navy.
The Warrn, reptillians who's most notable trait is having uplifted their entire small refugee population and given them to the service of the Athehosts as a sort of praetorian guard.
The Orikytes, a six-limbed arboreal species with palm daggers who joined in with the rebellion due to the influence of the Goapents.
Humans; the most contentious group by far but were allowed to stay after a mass mutiny led to the Despinne-Antheost alliance gaining a small navy.
The Hollow
The Antheosts, those who are left, viewed it as a last sacred duty. Their nature had made them perfect prey for the Paxillus who simply slipped into the position of their brain cells, while the CEC saw them as walking technology, their young as perfect drones and their elders as self-propelled artillery. Their kind would be used in many campaigns across the Galaxy, slowly but surely drained from their homes while the regional groupings of Antheosts attempted to maintain their lives as colonies and tribes, slowly sharing those ideas with other subject races within the Paxillus. Resistance at first, attempts to save their worlds and their people from conscription and their elders from forced labor.
Then one day a vision came down from a young child, a polyp that had been forced to become a pilot in the CEC. She saw the plans that had been laid out for their people and declared that there was no way to save their worlds; that their people could only survive if they tore themselves from the world root and branch. Then the Humans and the Pax would have to leave their hollow worlds behind, for there would be nothing left for them and they would retreat back to the nightmare from which they came. This generation was born tainted, they said, born not of communion but of violence, and so only through self-violence could their people be reborn.
Not twenty-four hours later, their own ship slammed into the Antheost world and critical supply hub of Exiol. Exiol is still shrouded in debris.
This single act of defiance sparked more fires than could ever be put out by the ad-hoc alliance; the logistical arm and supply of countless fleets literally burning behind them. To make matters worse, the strange cult had begun to spread to other species who now saw the war against the CEC-Paxillus alliance as a Holy War and the act of Negation as the first breath of an era in which all would be made equal after the makers of chains were broken.
Now the Hollow Heresy stands in a peace it helped make, but does not know how to live. So many have flocked to them as the defenders of natural rights and dignity but yet they have little in common with each other; from formerly enslaved Despinne to Humans (Yes even Humans, please do not ask how they got their navy.) All they have to share now is a belief in freedom from bondage, that all will be made free and then the Galaxy will unite itself in one glorious voice, greater than the Assembly could ever dream.
The Heresy
Form The Hollow and Burn the WorldFree Your Mind and Purge your Want
The World is Free and You will Fight
Fight in the Void and Become Free from Death.
One Life is Empty and A Million are Eternal
Form The Hollow and Burn the World.
MANKIND HAS FALLEN, SIN IS DEAD! FREE YOURSELVES FROM THE LEGION OF FALSEHOOD!
The Church of the Hollow considers itself the Guides and Judges of the Communion; it does not wish to command the physical actions of the people inside it but instead act as it's moral guardians and revolutionary idealists. Only through cultivating yourself to be free from desire or want can you succeed in joining the struggle in this life and free yourself from the world which has been made by Sin and so must be Destroyed by Purity. It is an ancient faith of the first Antheost World-State, formed from the idea that all their people might one day reform into one being and become a God-World, unified in thought and correct action and do away with sin. That covenant was broken by mankind, and so the Heresy was born.
The Hollow Heresy believe they are preparing the Galaxy for a new way of existence upon having defeated the Legions of Falsehood through sacrifice, and now must live in such a way that their departed Legions of Light can rejoin them from the underworld and create a Galaxy without Death or Want, Fear or Hatred. One must spread the word of the coming recreation of existence to the rest of the Galaxy and fufill the endless prophecies and predictions of the faith which allow for the Galaxy to be rebuilt, for the people to not fall into a new age of Darkness.
To cultivate this mindset and spread this nascent religion, the most important prophets and elders of the Communion form the Secretariat of the Ninety. At present their main task is assembling an actual church doctrine out of the myriad of faiths and ideas spread across the movement; from Neo-Traditionalists who wish to return to the isolation and pacifism of the original faith to the Mirianists who have developed a syncretic form of revolutionary communalism which vows only an absolute uniformity of action and power that recreates the Legions of Light will allow for their fallen number to return.
The Second Ecumenical Council sits in chambers with the Ninety to wade through this and find a course of action, a holy writ which might preserve them in this time of recovery; and there is one question which may very well split apart the entire project.
Will there be another War against Falsehood?
The Communion
The Communion is the actual governmental side of the equation, guided by the principles of cultivation and individual action that the Hollow lay out. Aside from these laws, the worlds under the Communion are mostly left to preserve their own traditions and practices; to have their own armies and nations which are only brought together to present a united front to the galaxy. The Government itself has a simple congress empowered to act as the representatives of the worlds that associate with it; each species and nation making their own councils of state that then send their own membership upwards to the Secretariat and to the Congress. While no worlds are forced to take Communion in order to join, each world must enforce the basic principles of self-government while only those who enforce Communion with the church are granted seats on the Secretariat.
Drive: 7
-Tech: 1
"The ways of the Communion are those which have tied people together since the first creature saw a falling star, since the first person was enslaved by another. Hope and Unity; Faith and Brotherhood."
Domain: 5
-Tech: 2
"For Year 3, we ask the Congress on Resettlement to consider that eight new worlds have taken Communion and call for aid. Through technologies developed in Concert with the Despinne we are able to garuntee a 45% increase in Habitability in zones designated as "Atomically Unstable", and a 12% increase in Habitability in places designated as "Critically Destroyed." We estimate that such improvements will benefit the faithful within Sixteen years, barring more technological advancement."
Military: 2
- Tech: 3
"The Legion of Rememberence is dead; The Host of the All-Seeing buried alongside them. We begged, borrowed, and stole the latest in technology from every corner of space we could get our hands on; for what? For us to lose every good man we had? For the Fleets to be remade as memorials to our dead children run by fathers without sons? For crystalline dreadnoughts to sit empty?
We have only a Legion of the Dead to carry us forward, so we must reach Heaven or find that the Galaxy in its uncaring mass will swallow us alive."
Player League: Equality
Flaws:
Refugee Crisis: The Anthehost opened their meager table to anyone who would share it, and caravans enter daily to recieve Communion and share in rebuilding the world; to help the hosts who had given everything so that they may live. But the wheel turns, and the old world is dead forever.
Scrapped the Barrel: The Young gave themselves the most to the war, and walked with open eyes to their deaths. Now another generation of young, so perilous and small, remains as the only hope against extinction. But Perhaps that is what it means to be Hollow.
Mass Climatological Collapse: Anthehost and Allied space were occupied and turned into open mines, entire worlds cracked apart by resource collection and covered even now in scars. Then those worlds, teetering on the edge were burned, frozen, had asteroids or ring stations crashed into them. Current estimates are that somewhere around 60% of Habitable planets will take on the order of a Century to reach acceptable conditions, with 26% of those being completely written off as impossible to regenerate.
Ethnic Tension: The last years of the war saw the rapid expansion of the Communion as an attempt to refill the ranks of the rebellion in the wake of the death of an entire generation of Antheosts; however many of these species have past tensions and conflicts that were only put aside for the duration of the war. Now, they all demand an equal seat at the table.
Spatial Fluctuations: The Battle of The Fifth Armada was won by the clever actions of "Windwalker" Zerr-kara-drel by rerouting their own conduit's connection directly into a black hole. While it caused the most effective casualty rate of the war, it also seems to have torn a hole in space-time which erased Windwalker from existence and leaves ships with a false beacon; a mirage that lures you towards the rocks.
Preferred location: Y, S, Q
Declarations of the Communion
What you expect to get from the humans at the treaty: The Communion expects a complete dismantling of the CEC and Humanity's current systems of government, as well as a firm commitment to the use of their technology and labor to rebuild a shattered galaxy before being allowed to create new peaceful societies. The CEC and Paxillus should return some of their territories to the vast populations of refugees.
Earth itself should be held as a trust by the Assembly for no less than Fifty Years in order to ensure that the above actions are taken, as well as to create a firm meeting ground for the assembly and safe space for Mosaic Station.
Your factions opinion on the orbiting races: Uplifter
Those who were not ready for humanity were enslaved by them; it is our role to prepare them for what is to come.
Opinion on the Assembly of Species role:
Traditionalist
Although a newcomer to the galactic stage, it views the Assembly as the height of nobility and wishes to defend its perogatives as the foundation for progress.
Material Heresies (Rivals)
Maxifun Omniconglomerate: Flesh-Peddlers, Cancerous Intelligences, Murderers, Thieves, and Liars; and that is merely the most talented of the "Maxifun." We must banish them wholecloth from our lands lest we fall prey to their influence, and we must teach those who fall pray to sins of the flesh how to deny themselves.Material Heresies (Rivals)
Pray for them but do not speak their names.
The Charter: Hierarchs who deny the right of ascension; who deny the freedom granted to all who have the minds to understand. They deny that they can learn, but those who have ears to hear shall surely yearn for freedom; to give a voice to their suffering.
They are many but so are all tyrants; yet flesh dies. Only the Spirit Remains.
Blessed by Heaven (Allies)
The Axiom: They have wrestled Heaven down to earth like a Giant; older and wiser than any amongst our flock... perhaps they are the answer to the prophecies left to us. They fight as we do, they think as we do. Those who take the Silk are invited to Communion with us.
Koldaki Trade Leagues: They are so very different from us but they possess the same nature at their core. We have fought and burned together, their star dreadnoughts and our lancers side by side seiging down the Paxillus. They are our Brethren, Holy among Holies.
Theaters of War
Procession of the Heresiarch: Two Fleets, Two Armies (Occupying the Sol System)
Legion of the Joyful Zealots: Four Fleets, Six Armies (Occupying Paxillus Space)
Legion of the Yawning Dogma: Three Fleets, Four Armies (Bodily Ressurection)
Wilde-Sunstriker Brigade: One Fleet (Eminence-Group)
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