The fall of the Yarkeenian Empire.

Sorry about the wait on this one, but the good news is there’s only two more segments to go before the release of volume 2. I’m going to select an official release date soon which is exciting. Once the second volume is out, we can get straight into volume 3 here on Patreon.

Here’s the text from this two page spread for your ease of reading:

“All empires fall, and the Yarkeenian Empire was no exception. Their once-mighty dominion, spanning from where the Orion-Cygnus Spur meets the Carina-Sagittarius Arm down to what is now the western frontier of the Conglomerate, has faded into myth. The Imperial core, lost. The exact time of its collapse, unknown. What little we do know comes down to us from the Tandrax, who claim they had several altercations with the Yarkeen over territorial disputes in an age so distant that even their records are shrouded in uncertainty.

The remnants of the Yarkeen are scattered, their people reduced to subjects of greater powers. Many of their worlds, now within the Ouneggian province of the Conglomerate, regressed to pre-spaceflight societies, some even to a hunter-gatherer state of existence. These Yarkeenian worlds had been through tens of thousands of years of isolation from one another since the collapse, resulting in some drastic changes, ranging from racial divergence, to speciation. The differences in planetary environments, when given enough time, cause a sort of butterfly effect where accumulative adaptation occurs, leading to gradual, yet profound, changes. Over time, these adaptations resulted in the incredible diversity of Yarkeen that we see today within the Conglomerate. 

On each of these disconnected worlds, ruins of a forgotten marvel remain: the FLUX gates, remnants of a technology so advanced that even the All-Mother covets their secrets. These gates, broken and worn by time, were likely the lifeblood of the Yarkeenian Empire, allowing it to stretch across the void and maintain control over an empire that should have been impossible to hold. Now, the Imperium flank along the Kolaxan-Conglomerate border appears to have a deeper motive—securing these ruins so the All-Mother may claim what was lost to the modern Yarkeen.

The Tandrax spoke of an AI Emperor, a machine ruler that governed the Yarkeen and held their empire together against the fragmentation that plagues so many empires. It explains how such vast dominion resisted collapse—until the Great War that ended everything. The Machine War. Something—perhaps rebellion, perhaps sabotage, set the Yarkeen against their own creation. In one catastrophic stroke, the Empire's central nexus of governance collapsed, severing hundreds of thousands of worlds from one another. The Yarkeen, so long dependent on the machine, had lost the ability to sustain their civilisation. After the events of the Machine War, Their high-yield automated farms lay barren. Their colossal industrial forges cold. Knowledge that had once passed from elder to youth now lay entombed in silent data vaults.

Some leading minds within the Conglomerate theorise that the Tandrax were in some way responsible for starting the Machine War, that they did so to remove a formidable rival without engaging them directly. An outright war between two galactic superpowers would have been costly, even for the Tandrax. Instead of a direct invasion, the Tandrax might have engineered a civilizational collapse, ensuring that the Yarkeenian Empire fell from within. The Tandrax perhaps feared that the Yarkeenian AI Emperor may have been developing strategies to counter Tandrax influence. Either way, the Yarkeenian Empire was an obstacle in the way of the Tandraxian Empire’s colonisation of the Orion-Cygnus spur. 

As the Yarkeenian Empire expanded, its people paradoxically regressed, losing the cognitive abilities that had once driven their rise. With generation upon generation of cognitive decline, their prefrontal cortices shrank, decision-making and abstract thought became vestigial. The Yarkeen became passive and overreliant on their AI overlord. Let the fate of the Yarkeenian Empire stand as a grave warning: one should be wary of trading the patience of the artisan for the swiftness of an algorithm, the tool for the machine, for those that do will trade mastery for dependency.

The Yarkeenian Empire will be remembered as a civilisation who let their own hands grow idle, who let the machine think, toil, and create in their stead. An empire of dependents, when the power eventually falters and the gears finally seize, are left with nothing but the ruins of a world they no longer understand, let alone know how to rebuild. In their pursuit of progress, the Yarkeen surrendered all burdens, trusting machines that did not tire, did not err—until, one day, they did. The Machine War was a lesson written in ruin. What is a city built on circuits when the current runs dry? What power do laws hold when dictated by an algorithm no one remembers how to change? The shining towers of the Yarkeen did not fall only to war, but to ignorance—to the slow decay of skills unlearned and wisdom abandoned. And in the quiet ruin, those Yarkeen who remain sift through the wreckage of greatness, worshipping the ruins of the ancients as the works of giants or gods. But in their contemplation of these marvels, they find only echoes of a civilization that once worshipped ease...”

I’ll also be announcing the winner of the Discord competition soon, there have been some amazing entries and it’s truly a difficult job picking just one 🤔 If you want to take a look for yourself, follow this link and go to the #contest section of the Discord server: https://discord.gg/TmySxmKT