Sen’Haillar recorded history goes back more than 250,000 years, well before the date the Dominion was formed, and no other races from that age are still around to confirm or deny Lore’s version of events.
It is certain that Sen’Haillar originated in the system they used to call Ka Loren, “the Fountain of Life”, located some 3,000 light years galaxy core-ward and slightly north of the galactic plane compared to the Sun. It is also certain that they developed their ability to manipulate the fabric of the universe, called eka, well before travelling to other stars.
Sen’Haillar history as a star faring race began some 130,000 years ago. The road to the stars was most definitely forced upon them. At that time the core-ward section of the Orion arm was dominated by an Elder race called the samun, a word that according to Sen’Haillar chronicles, simply translates as “the masters.” The samun came across the Sen’Haillar home world Oedir, conquered it without difficulty and raised the locals to the stars, as servants of the master race. The Elders were also quick to realise that the unusual skills their new subjects possessed could well be used to further their expansion and keep in line a multitude of other servant races.
For the next approximately 50,000 years, the Sen’Haillar were present on the samun ships as enforcers of their exalted masters. This role did nothing to endear them to their fellow subjects and, as far as Sen’Haillar themselves were concerned, changed dramatically their initially peaceful demeanour. To their credit, they were not shy to faithfully record this unhappy period. Their Lore abounds with atrocities committed on behalf of the samun, though never instigated by Sen’Haillar themselves. The Sen’Haillar were granted the right to build their own spaceships some time towards the end of this era, being only one of the four samun subject races honoured so. Such an act was likely less a matter of generosity as a matter of expedience, considering the increasing number of interventions required to pacify the ever expanding samun sphere of dominance.
It seems that eka manipulation skills were not organised by class and affinity at that time as they are today. Instead, each adept was versed in a variety of skills, employing them as needed. The violent way they were forced to use their abilities resulted occasionally in severe imbalances, to the point of the affected Sen’Haillar becoming suicidal or needing to be put down by their fellow enforcers.
It is believed this history of pain and failure later led to the system of Great Houses, organised around Dichotomies: i.e. opposing sets of skills balancing each other. We will return to the topic of these dual skill Houses later. This system is believed to have occurred much more recently at the time the Dominion was created.
The period of Sen’Haillar servitude ended suddenly, and again the change was driven by the samun. Some 80,000 years ago, a certain faction within the master race became unhappy having servants with superior aptitudes. They initiated a genetic programme aiming to develop eka skills for the samun themselves. This was not an effort sanctioned by the entire race, not even by their majority at that time. While entirely comfortable to alter subject races to fit their purposes, most samun regarded their own genome manipulation as an anathema.
The project was carried out in secrecy on the Sen’Haillar’s home planet Oedir, and initially was deemed to be successful. To the dismay of the rest of their race, the conspiring faction managed to create samun with eka abilities matching, if not exceeding, those of their servants.
The central government reacted harshly to the emergence of an enhanced samun race and attempted to end it with a single strike, by destroying Oedir. Somehow the conspirators found out about this and managed to flee the planet. The local population though was left to pay the price, as the planet was completely obliterated, together with millions of Sen’Haillar. Such were the ways of the samun.
The only surviving Sen’Haillar were the ones deployed in other systems, carrying out various enforcement actions. Even those became subject to a kill on sight order, as the samun were determined to wipe out the eka heresy altogether. It is unknown how many Sen’Haillar fleets perished betrayed by their own masters. Nevertheless, some of them managed to escape and gather in a system called Yaros, on the fringe of the samun space. The Sen’Haillar survivors moved out from there and settled on a world well outside their former masters’ influence. This world would eventually become Tao Bellona, the Mirror World and the seat of the Dominion Council.
Over the next millennia the exiled Sen’Haillar relentlessly prepared for the day the samun would discover their new home and the time of reckoning would come. Their current Defender mentality and militaristic set up originated in this period, not to mention that this diaspora was a collection of military fleets to begin with.
As the Sen’Haillar prepared for the worst, the samun were in no shape to expand. What initially was the conspiracy of a fringe group would soon become a full civil war, with the entire society taking sides pro or against genetic enhancement. What was not immediately obvious was that the enhanced samun were subject to the same imbalances that affected the Sen’Haillar abusing the eka. Unlike their former servants, the samun had neither the mindset protections nor the society set up to deal with aberrant behaviour and ultimately madness.
The samun society gradually disintegrated during the next 6-7 millennia. It was a time of horrendous crimes, when entire subject races were completely wiped out while others were mutated into genetically engineered monsters to fight the wars of their mad masters. The samun did not spare themselves either, and slowly but surely broke their once strong society into a collection of pocket kingdoms ruled by local overlords mad with their own power.
It was one of such samun off shots that eventually discovered the Sen’Haillar diaspora, in what will mark the beginning of the Annihilation Wars.
From the start, Sen’Haillar enjoyed the upper hand. As the samun were descending into madness, Sen’Haillar focussed on melding fleet technology with eka manipulation. This resulted in massive performance increases, provided experienced adepts were available to power the eka component. These advances affected all fleet systems, starting with propulsion and communication. Directional space folding replaced hyperspace jump technologies and produced shielding and weapons, where virtually any eka affinity could be employed with deadly effect.
Determined not to lose their second home, Sen’Haillar had no compunction to fight fire with fire and madness with madness. Entire samun fleets were obliterated in moments by destroying their very atomic bonds, worlds populated of mutated monsters were rendered inhabitable, solar flares were triggered to wipe out defensive stations. It is believed the Avatars emerged during this period, as all Queens claim memories dating back as far as the samun Annihilation Wars.
Even against a weak and divided enemy and even employing the most destructive tactics, the samun wars lasted close to two millennia. In the end, samun and most of their servant races had been completely destroyed or chased towards the far end of the Orion arm, never to be heard of again. Only Sen’Haillar and two other races the avian driang and the sloth-like kaverra, were left at the end of the wars.
The Haillar Dominion was originally a pact formed 70,000 years ago between these three surviving races. According to the three copies of this document maintained by each signatory, the former servant races divided equally the habitable words in the old samun space. As neither the driang nor the kaverra had any military fleet or ambitions to build one, by the same agreement Sen’Haillar undertook the role of Defenders of the Dominion. This became a very significant part of their culture, even to this day.
At this time the twelve great Sen’Haillar houses were created, grouped in six dichotomies. These dichotomies were pairs of opposing affinities offsetting each other. It is believed that several other groups existed during the war, but unable to find balance were either destroyed or chose to dissolve and reform around one of the balanced pairs.
Each of the twelve houses is led by an Avatar, the current embodiment of the respective Queen. Though not limited to a
single set of skills, the Avatar / Queen is the highest-ranking practitioner of her house, her power being several orders of magnitude higher than the next level of mastery.
The emergence of the Avatars in the Sen’Haillar society remains a mystery, not even the Lore being clear on this. The Queens themselves claim no remembrance of how this came to be, except the fact that their oldest memories and their personal names pre-date the Avatars. Thus, as part of their highly codified culture, any Queen/Avatar has three names: current avatar name which is unique, personal name of the Queen always remaining the same, and house name.
The Great Peace (minus 70,000 - 20,000 Sol years)
The end of the wars found the Dominion as the undisputed power in the former samun space. Over the next 50,000 years, the founding races consolidated their holdings, rebuilding initially the war-torn worlds adjudicated in accordance to the founding accord.
Early in this period the Haillar split in two: Sen’Haillar, following tradition and primarily focussed on cultivating the eka, fleet operation and mutual defence, and the more freewheeling Haillar (sometimes dismissively referred as lower Haillar), focussed on more pedestrian tasks, such as expanding the colonies, trading and civil exploration.
Even before the Great Peace a certain proportion of the Sen’Haillar society had negligible eka abilities or no interest in following the eka path. As the civilian economy grew and military demands were few and far between, an increasingly larger percentage of the population followed the Haillar path as opposed to the more intensive Sen’Haillar instruction under the traditional Houses. In the end, the Haillar grew to outnumber the Houses by a factor of ten, as it is the case nowadays. As a significant proportion of the Sen’Haillar is stationed quasi-permanently in space, the ratio on the ground is even more skewed against them, up to 10,000:1 on some rural colonies.
While planetary defence and military fleet operation remained exclusively the responsibility of the Sen’Haillar, the eka practitioners developed successfully in non-military enterprises as well. Medicine and research for example continued to be areas covered by both Haillar and Sen’Haillar.
Sen’Haillar also miniaturised directional space folding, originally employed in spaceship propulsion. This became the basis for portal technology, widely successful in transporting people and goods at low cost between any two known points in space. Portal technology, entirely operated by Sen’Haillar, replaced completely transport of people and goods by star ship, while vessels continue to be employed mainly for mining or military purposes. Interestingly, while the houses benefitted enormously of their portal operations, they have never shown any intention of taking commercial advantage of this. Transport charges in the Dominion remained practically the same since the advent of the space portals.
Centuries of peace and prosperity allowed Sen’Haillar to engage in spectacular projects. Chief amongst these was the conversion of the remains of their home system Ka Lorien into a Dyson sphere, completely surrounding this sun. Ka Lorien power is shared via Chapter Houses to all adepts and the Origin itself is an integral part of the rite of awakening for each new Avatar.
Both the daug and kaverra expanded beyond their original worlds, but none shown any interest in developing a presence in space. Both species show a strong reticence in dealing with any unknown external factors, legacy of the long samun servitude and the madness period that ended it. Typically, these species prefer to buy settlement rights on worlds already explored by Sen’Haillar and move in via portal technology.
During the Great Peace several new star faring races joined the Haillar Dominion. Though some maintained mining and exploration fleets, none felt the need to duplicate the Sen’Haillar military or compete against the portal technology.
By the end of this prosperous middle age, the Haillar Dominion had grown to roughly 7,000 light years in diameter, more than 2,000 colonised planets and some 15 trillion sentient beings.
The Scourge Wars (minus 20,000 Sol years to date)
The Dominion met its first challenge some 20,000 years ago and this came from a migrant race called the Scourge. Like the samun, the Scourge regarded themselves as masters of any race having the misfortune to be in their path. Unlike the samun, the Scourge were a lot more insidious, in the end completely subjugating the free will of their servant races.
The Scourge rarely attacked directly a race newly encountered. Their preferred method was to start by mentally controlling key individuals, gradually subverting the power structure of the target race. The next stage was eventually expanding their control to the entire population, to be converted to drones working or fighting for their masters. Some races were vulnerable to Scourge control, some completely immune to it, making the game all the more interesting from Scourge perspective.
In the aftermath of the initial contact, the Scourge managed to subvert sixteen Dominion colonies without a single engagement against the Sen’Haillar defence fleet. All these were relatively new colonies, local Sen’Haillar chapters numbering less than a score adepts each. As the Scourge discovered early on that they can’t control the Haillar, be they eka practitioners or not, the solution was eliminating them with targeted drone assassinations.
The Sen’Haillar eventually recognised the danger and the Council fleet chased out the Scourge invaders. However, they could do nothing about the millions of drones taken on the Scourge mobile bases. Though initially happy to recover the colonies, depopulated and looted as they were, Dominion forces realised the population left behind was reduced to mindless drones, unable to sustain themselves without orders from their Scourge masters. In the end all sixteen colonies were abandoned.
The pattern of hit-and-run raids repeated intermittently over the next 20,000 years, the Dominion emerging generally worse off. The Scourge only attacked under-strength colonies or subverted words with minimal Haillar presence. In some cases Dominion forces anticipated the raids. However, as all their fighting was done by drones, none of the setbacks meant significant losses for the Scourge themselves.
Over millennia the Sen’Haillar attempted to find the Scourge home worlds or at least the main Scourge force, to no avail. It is not clear to date if there is such a thing as a central force, or Scourge leadership is entirely distributed between mobile fleets.
Attempts to find a cure for the drones were equally unsuccessful. To date the Dominion employs a team dedicated to this task, directly subordinated to the Queen of Life. All tests seem to suggest the mind control method used irremediably destroys subject’s mind early in the process. The team learned to anticipate and to a certain extent prevent Scourge mind attacks, but not to revert the effects of a successful attack.
The Dominion settled for upgrading the defence of a series of vulnerable colonies. They also stationed high ranking Adepts or even Queens in support of the local Sen’Haillar chapters. This string of frontier words came to be called “the Wall”, and wall service became a tradition amongst Sen’Haillar of any affiliation.
It was on such a Wall World, called Aldeea, located in the system known to human astronomers as Kepler 452, where humans and Sen’Haillar will meet for the first time.
At first, the crew of the exoplanet surveyor UNSA Endeavour were completely unaware that they had come across a star-faring alien race. Indeed, should Captain Thomas Holt had realised the true nature of the Haillar, he would have definitely turned back to Earth as required by his standing orders. The first contact would have been delayed for years, or likely the humans would have become the latest in a long line of species enslaved and eventually destroyed by the Scourge.
But Fate had other plans for the Endeavour’s crew, and as a result humanity’s history took an entirely different turn.
The explorers landed on Aldeea and had a perfect first contact with what they thought to be a primitive race. The Chaos Queen issued her fateful missive, effectively turning Endeavour’s landing party into her personal guests. The human ship became an improvised defence platform during the subsequent Aldeean sie
ge, the place where Ellandra Sen’Dorien fought and eventually died while vanquishing the invaders, only to reincarnate as the first Human Queen.
Elizabeth Hamilton’s role during these events remains shrouded in mystery. According to the crew’s roster, she was UNSS Endeavour’s medic and also rated as a xeno-biologist, an unusual secondary speciality at that time. The mission log states clearly that she had met and befriended the Chaos Queen sometimes during the brief period between humans’ landing on Aldeea and the arrival of the Scourge.
Dr Hamilton’s death during the siege of Aldeea is also a recorded historical fact, but the subsequent rumours about her role later-on, on Tao Bellona and during the Battle of Earth are nothing more than baseless speculation. Yet, during her human life the Sen’Dorien queen had always remained close to Elizabeth Hamilton’s friends, and went as far as adopting Liz Hamilton’s humanitarian crusade as her own.
HAILLAR QUEENS – CURRENT AVATARS
Elizabeth Ashar Sen’ Dorien: Queen of Chaos, defender of Aldeea and newly resurrected Human Queen.
Astrid Reith Sen’Dorien: Queen of Order, co-ruler of the House Dorien and sister queen to Ellandra. Currently managing the Chaos/Order dichotomy and House Dorien’s affairs.
Allisa Asturien Sen’Vollar: Queen of Light, one of the three current serving members of the Sen’Haillar Council.
Eniad Lorien Sen’Vollar: Queen of Darkness, suzerain of Nadellonia, The Lost World.
Aerdig Tourin Sen’Galahad: Queen of Fire, managing House Galahad’s holdings, in a sector remote from Aldeea.
Eurid Favriel Sen’Galahad: Queen of Frost, Elizabeth’s close ally and another serving member of the Sen’Haillar Council.
Human Page 25