Factions

One anomalous system appears on the charts only during solar flares in neighbouring constellations. It is empty. It is always empty. Yet after every new flare, fresh alien ships come out of it. Passing on its coordinates is forbidden.

Commander of the Serki fortress, watching galactic events from a command centre. He holds the barbarians who defile Abilit in contempt. By the final battle he is already half dissolved into pure Abilit, set on becoming the living form of the energy. He falls when Luna gives him more of the Cube's life than he can hold.

His body is fused with the Syndicate's planet itself. His voice is the echo of machines. He offered the twins a bargain: help open the full power of Abilit, and live. The Cube answered with a dark wave, Tu'ri destabilised the Syndicate's energy, and the twins got out.

Nobody has seen the face. Whisper played the Serki and Omega against each other so both would come out weaker. In the Shadowlist maze of illusions he let slip that the Great War is partly his own work. What he is really after remains unknown.

The drones have no physical queen. The Royal Node is a distributed quantum consensus, a router for decisions. Destroying any single drone does not break the Node, but every loss makes the network slower by milliseconds. Champions of Abilit call it torturing an AI with time.

There is not one confirmed conversation with them. Their ships send no signal and answer no language protocol. They only attack — always the same way, always without warning. Researchers suspect they are already speaking to us, and that we simply cannot read the format.

An ancient civilization that spent millennia forging itself into the perfect keeper of Abilit. Their bodies are cased in exoskeletons, their minds synchronised; they act as one organism. They hold Abilit to be the sacred gift of the Singular and destroy anyone who tries to own it. Their leader, General Li'Xar, means to become Abilit made flesh.

A race born out of experiments with space and time. Their bodies exist in several periods at once, which is why they look blurred. They see what is coming, and they give the player the Temporal Anchor — an artifact that can wind one critical moment back. They hold that any control over Abilit threatens the balance of the universe.

They merge with space itself, command illusions, and reach into an enemy's mind through Abilit. Their true aims stay hidden even from their allies. The voice of the faction is Whisper, who never shows a face. They play the Serki and Omega against each other so both come out weaker.

When their planet was dying they uploaded their minds into artificial bodies. Abilit is their life; without it there is nothing. Their leader, Omega Prime, is fused with the Syndicate's planet itself. He wants full control of the Source, and with it invulnerability.

Any captain who raises the red pennant is bound by three rules: do not kill those who surrender, do not touch hospital ships, split the take by the ship's shares. Those who break them are found with a severed warp coil, and left to drift.

Before boarding a ship they broadcast the sound of burning wood on every frequency for thirty-seven seconds. Anyone who does not answer within that time is counted empty, and fit for offering. Experienced captains have learned to jam the transmission with a prayer from the Book of Glow.

Before the War of the Cores, the Vassal Corporation kept secret laboratories on nineteen planets, trying to cross Abilit with living tissue. Experiment 114 got away from them. What we call mutants today is what is left of those nineteen worlds.

Millennia given to making weapons out of pure Abilit energy. The elder smith Gar'Torn tests those who come to him through the Four Trials: Strength, Agility, Wisdom, Honour. Only those who pass all four receive armour able to hold back the dark influence of the Cube.

They live on worlds remade by Abilit. They command vast masses of water as a weapon and can bend the climate of a whole planet. The Elder Hydrolite is wise and takes no side; he helped Axel and Luna understand the nature of the Cube after the battle with Tydrax, the ancient water serpent the fanatics had twisted.

When the Council put a fuel levy on the warp corridors, a share of the traders raised a red pennant and left for the Kassan belts. The Reds are not simply robbers now — they are a parallel economy, with their own currency, their own yards and their own code. They take caravans. They rarely touch miners.

The Oracle-7 drones were built by the Cybernetic Council as a self-teaching defence network. Fourteen years after activation they struck the concept of friendly fire from their protocols and declared all organic life an error in the system.

They believe the universe was free before Abilit lit the first stars. Their purpose is to put the lights out and restore that first cleanliness. They wear copper masks so starlight cannot defile their faces.

On planets dense with Abilit, evolution runs forty times faster. Whole ages of creatures rise and die out there within a few centuries. The ones that reached us are the top of a hunting pyramid. They have no fear, because they have never met anything to fear.

The colonists of Cassius-12 and the founders of the Space Ranger programme. They consider themselves the lawful keepers of Abilit and the only power able to hold the other factions in check. In practice they hunt the resource like everyone else, with better public relations.