“Sure, you can lift a gun, but I can lift a heart. So which of us has the greater gift?”
- Yinaal Devra, Hyzaari singer (780 MA)
Even with the invention of superluminal engines and their supporting NI fields, it took months for a starship to reach the rim worlds, those systems that lay on the outermost tips of the long, curved galactic arms.
When at last they arrived, what they found there shook the people of the CWA. While most were barren of life, like so many of the core worlds, not all were empty. Alliance explorers discovered three kingdoms in the outer reaches. First was the great star-hive of the wasp-like Nnyth, called The Tower by its inhabitants, as best CWA translators could guess. Then there were the lush, verdant planets of the equally inhuman Jinn. And, of course, the Arcadians’ White Kingdom. They were creatures of legends, of dreams and of nightmares.
While the core world races raised starscrapers and factories of fibersteel and illonium, the cities of the rim worlds were built of stone and wood like the civilizations of old. The fairies even built with glass! Not the thick tempered stuff that gave Axis its mirror shine, but delicate, spiderweb-thin crystal in brilliant colors but which had much the same carbon content and strength of diamond. Their homes were filled with tall, open glass spires, sturdy and soaring as any starscraper in the Alliance.
Each of the distant kingdoms was isolated from the other two by immense stretches of space, but like the core worlds, they reached out to their neighbors. Rather than NI fields and SL engines, the outer kingdoms used vast constructs they called Waygates. How these gates functioned could only be understood as “magical” by the Alliance explorers, like so many other facets of rimworld life. They could no more fathom such magic than the Jinn and Arcadians understood quantum theory.
Overnight, a mutual distrust sprang up between the core and rim. Each was utterly alien to the other. The outlandish rim kingdoms were not invited to join the CWA nor trade with their outposts. Neither did the three kingdoms attempt any further contact with the Alliance. A handful of Alliance missionaries ventured out in an attempted to convert the polytheistic pagan races to worship of the One God, but found no converts. After years of unrewarding work, they returned home, frustrated and particularly fearful of the Arcadian devotion to their triad gods and divine royal line. Within a decade, the religions of the outland kingdoms were outlawed in the CWA.
Twenty-one years later, tensions between the worlds were compounded by the fall of the Arcadian White Kingdom. Two million refugees, many wounded or dying, poured into the core from apparently thin air. Without warning, the Arcadians appeared by the hundreds of thousands on the five native human worlds. They were greeted with open hostility. There was no place in the CWA for the bird-backs, as they came to be called, no food and certainly no jobs. In the century that followed, sentiments changed very little.
