Shadows on the Horizon - Prologue

Prologue

The time before times...
Roughly 1,000,000 Years BCE

We called ourselves the Great Pact, a coalition of over ten thousand inhabited worlds banded together for the purpose of furthering knowledge and maintaining peace.
At the position of leadership, was the ancient world of Aerrosis IV, which lay on the outer rim of the Great Spiral Galaxy.
For millennia, we existed in perfect, peaceful balance; then the Great Schism wrought havoc and destruction amongst us all.

It began in a simple enough fashion, a dispute over uninhabited worlds that were rich in resources. The world of Ah'Raezhaar, which had long been desirous of control of the Pact, had placed as many resource rich planets under its control as it could. The Ah'Raezh were without qualm or conscience in their acts of conquest. They had become enamored of the idea of turning the Pact into a Galactic Empire, with Ah'Raezhaar at its center. We, the Caeliar, stood in direct opposition to them. We were determined to see them vanquished at all costs.

Then came the Great War.

Every year that the Great War raged, whole worlds were consumed in fury and fire. After almost a thousand years of the War, the worlds of the Great Pact were almost completely gone. 
As a last effort to protect ourselves and the Galaxy from the threat of the Ah'Raezh, we, the Caeliar determined to collectively ascend to a higher level of consciousness and from that new plane of existence, eradicate the Ah'Raezh completely.
As a collective species, we withdrew to our homeworld of Erigol and set about preparing ourselves for ascension. Mere days from achieving our final goal, we received a message from one of the former slave worlds of the Ah'Raezh.
The Ah'Raezh Empire was fracturing utterly. Ah'Raezhaar had become enclosed in some type of energy barrier that prohibited communication and transport of any form from reaching the planet. When the field had gone up, all but three units of the immense Ah'Raezharyn fleet had been recalled to the massive planet, rendering the Empire powerless.
As the remaining worlds of the Pact freed themselves of the Ah'Raezh who remained on their respective surfaces, we Caeliar withdrew completely from interaction with our former allies. As a species, we had entered a new era, poised on the edge of enlightenment committing ourselves to study and research, with no interaction or intrusion from outside of Erigol.

Yet time and fate have a way of changing plans, no matter how noble they may be. Thus it was that the starship Columbia fell into our lives many centuries later. It was our interaction with the Columbia and her crew that led to our current state of disarray.
During the final stages of our newest study, our Great Work, action from the downed Starfleet vessal disrupted our studies and destroyed the world that was our home.
Therefore we abandoned Erigol, with its fiery destruction and launched ourselves with the humans into the pureness and vastness of Space.

After journeying through the stars for many, many years, we came at last to the world which would become New Erigol, our next home.
From that point, we began to fade. There was much that we no longer remembered. So much of our history, became to us mere myth...and we forgot who we were.

Then there were new humans who came to us, bringing with them those who were Other: Kree, Vulcan, Klingon, Trill, Betazoid and a host of other species who were the far flung descendants of our long ago Pact. Whether they had existed on planets that we had once known or not was immaterial. What they carried was the same sense of unity and singularity of purpose within a wholly diverse form.
Though we were bound by our long-held oath of secrecy and separation, for this new Great Pact, we chose to break with tradition. We 'interfered' with species other than our own, and brought healing and peace to those who had been Borg.
Then we returned to our seclusion, taking some of those former Borg within our collective Whole, as a penance, believing the Borg had been our creation. Yet, in much of what we had forgotten, there were great secrets hidden, even from us...