Myths

The Council archives hold a recording: one second before the Great Catastrophe of 714, every radar in the galaxy received the same sound. Not words — a sound. Duration, 1.7 seconds. Source, beyond the known universe. No translation exists.

Some researchers believe Abilit is not a substance but a creature — a very slow creature, living on a scale of billions of years. Its thoughts are the geological shifts of planets. Its sleep is the stable state of the material. When we mine it, we wake it.

The place Abilit came from after the Singular, the blast that made the universe. An endless emptiness strung with threads of pure energy that flicker like stars. Researchers believe Abilit is the mind of the universe and that the seven factions are its immune system — and that the Cube is a fragment of that mind which turned into a virus.

They say there is a man who lives in every system at once. He does not use warp — he simply steps. He has been seen at three opposite ends of the galaxy in the same hour. He never speaks. But where he has passed, Abilit grows by itself.

At the beginning of time the universe was empty space, until the Heart of the Singular caught fire in a far corner of it. That colossal blast gave rise to the energy of Abilit — a pure cosmic force able to alter what is real. Every world and every civilization was born out of it.

In the far sectors they tell of a captain whose hand the Zero Hand shook, as a mark of respect. The next day he forgot his wife's name. Then his own. Then how to breathe. They found him drifting, his eyes empty and his cargo of Abilit untouched.

There is a theory that humanity has already lost one galactic war, and does not remember it, because the victors wiped the memory of an entire civilization. The traces are the old ruins on the desert planets, the ones we credit to ourselves. But the stonework is not ours.

The oldest legend says Abilit is the blood of the first star, which died before God had thought of death. It spilled across the fabric of space and set hard. Everything we do is drinking it, one drop at a time.