Providence Union

Last and greatest of the empires of Florathel, the Providence Union is a name known across the universe. Until less than 3,000 years ago, they exerted great power over large swathes of Florathel, and were reviled across the universe until their fall in the War of the Last Alliance. After its birth from the bloodbath of the Peony Wars, the Union has changed form numerous times over its long history, from a short-lived egalitarian democracy to seven separate military dictatorships. It saw the rise of galaxy-spanning religions and the entire life cycle of some species, and is arguably one of the most important nations in all of history.

The Providence Union was the last of the ancient Florathelian empires, succeeding Yanaris after its dissolution into the Warring States Era. It is considered by most historians to have begun after the end of the Peony Wars over the Heart of Providence, at the time one of many squabbles over various strategic locations within Florathel. Its very long history is divided into several periods, the Unity of Peace (5,122 - 6,004 CE), the Revarean Dynasties (6,004 - 6,318 CE), the Nerax Dynasties (6,318 - 6,499 CE), and the Military Providence Union (6,499 - 7,300 CE).

The Providence Union began as an egalitarian democracy known as the Unity of Peace coming out of the long shadow of the Peony Wars, which was eventually over thrown by Narekai Vel Karnos and replaced with an increasingly corrupt system of autocratic rule. This system necessitated repeated military overthrowings of dynasties as each grew complacent with their power and stopped doing their job. Soon, the dynasties of Revarea were overthrown completely in a civil war following the complete ruin of Revarea itself and replaced with a seemingly identical set of dynasties ruling from Nerax, with several states using the chaos to attempt an ill-fated secession. Although the Nerax dynasties tended to be more progressive, they eventually fell as the mass secession of over 20 major states urged the military to conduct a coup and take control of the government in its final years before it was finally destroyed in the War of the Last Alliance.

The Union has contributed astounding achievements in the fields of technology, warfare, architecture, engineering, politics, and government. It was among the first to popularize the democratic system of government in the time of the Unity of Peace, although that was overthrown in the Coup of Vel Karnos. It achieved truly amazing levels of technology which have only just been reclaimed as of the present day, and artifacts from the earlier days of this nation are prized for their scientific and archaeological value.

History

Background

After the fall of Yanaris, the galaxy was thrown into chaos, and there were hundreds of factions scattered across the galaxy. At that time, the deep core was sparsely populated, and no one expected the factions there to become more than a footnote in history. At first, the five most powerful factions, specifically United Revarea, Alkonis, Kornerax, Ekasli, and Felakaa, after conquering the surrounding systems, went to war, like many factions of the time.

What followed was the Peony Wars, a centuries-long conflict mostly on and around the Heart of Providence resulting in the unification of United Revarea and Kornerax, the subjugation of Ekasli and Felakaa, and the complete destruction of Alkonis. Thus the Providence Union was born.

Aftermath of the Peony Wars & Expansion

Revarea and Kornerax's unification proved to be a fateful event, and with control of the most valuable place in the galaxy, the new Providence Union rapidly expanded, conquering many nearby nations and establishing control over the inner central spiral of Florathel. There were still many other nations in the core region, but the little known bounties of the Heart of Providence gave them a massive advantage in the form of many unique thaumic materials found there.

The Providence Union used the bounties of the Heart of Providence to great effect, doubling in size over the next century, and settled into a fairly peaceful state with control over the central spiral. This expansion was arrested when the Anemone Revolution ousted the military dictatorship and ushered in the Unity of Peace, a fairly egalitarian democratic state.

For the first time in its history, the Providence Union developed good relations with its surrounding nations and increased the rights of the conquered species, and in the future these species would mostly retain their rights and the core would maintain some semblance of prosperity even as the reaches devolved into poverty and chaos.

The Great Coup

Towards the end of the reign of the Unity of Peace, rebellions began to spring up from the cracks, with charismatic leaders leading their species on a charge for independence. This caused the brief secession of the Kajakali Nation, as well as other, smaller nations allied with it.

After the secession of the Kajakali Nation, citizens of the Providence Core were convinced by the charismatic Narekai Vel Karnos that the "sluggishness" of democracy was what was allowing the Providence Union to lose so much territory, and they mostly supported his military coup as it was happening. This transfer of power was swift and violent, and the previously elected government was ejected into space in a grisly spectacle cheered on by Vel Karnos' supporters. Any public supporters of them soon shared their horrible fate, and Vel Karnos claimed absolute control over the Providence Union.

By this time, the Kajakali Nation had been followed in its flight from tyranny by many other smaller states, cutting the area of the Union in half. The fall of the Unity of Peace heralded the creation and indiscriminate use of a much more powerful military, and the Kajakali Nation's short existence ended in bloody horror and a massive string of war crimes culminating in the destruction of Vecroxmer. The Kajakali species spent the rest of their history in a second-class status after this event, but the brief shining moment of independence would go on to inspire many future independence movements, eventually culminating in the fall of the Providence Union itself.

After the fall of the Kajakali nation, Narekai Vel Karnos retained power and began a dynasty of rulers, which rapidly became severely inbred after three generations straight of brother-sister marriages. The Vel Karnos Dynasty was soon overthrown and replaced with general Koroltai Vel Naire, who was much more politically savvy and managed to avoid contriving a massive war for an excuse to take power.

The Vel Naire dynasty outlasted any other family who had ever claimed to rule the Providence Union, and a tradition of political skills training among the heirs of that dynasty held them up through attempted rebellions and secession movements, artfully stopped through diplomacy. Due to these skills, the Vel Naire Dynasty was fairly prosperous, and most species had all their rights. The art of compromise was what let the Providence Union last as long as it did in this fractious era.

Among their great achievements was the conquering of the last scattered remnants of Yanaris, including the fortressworld of Yalai. Yalai's impregnability would prove to be utterly pointless, as it was diplomatically arm-twisted into unconditional surrender and annexation.

Sororbi Conflicts

In the 6300s CE, the Sororbi Confederation, which had arose near the edges of the expanding Providence Union, was attacked. This proved to be a horrible decision, as their apparently pathetic military was in fact supported by a huge number of civilian ships outfitted with heavy weaponry that could be called to war if necessary, causing the military's size in times of war to balloon by hundreds of times.

The once peaceful confederation, a union of several species after a period of thoroughly pointless war similar to the Providence Union itself, was thrown into the greatest war it had ever known, as its history was marked by peaceful relations with its neighbors. But with its neighbors towards the core gone, the Sororbi was on its own as the Providence Union sent wave after wave of attacks into its territory. The great battle at Palikari led to a loss of almost half the territory of the nation, but the Providence fleet stalled out less than five light-years before reaching Sororbus itself. Soon, however, the military managed to push back almost to the original borders under the command of Sekar Valakis, who drastically increased morale by fighting directly on the front lines alongside the soldiers.

This string of great victories was ended when !Oraika of Nerax intentionally drove his ship directly into Valakis' fleet, the detonation destroying all ships involved, killing Valakis, and earning !Oraika a spot in the history books for hundreds of thousands of years. After this, the Providence Union rapidly advanced across Sororbi territory, and Sororbus itself was reduced to a hellworld ruled by the runaway greenhouse effect after the war. The region was left completely uninhabited thereafter, with no one nearby able to send colonists and the surviving inhabitants becoming itinerant wanderers throughout Cosmoria.

The stunning victory against the Sororbi Confederation represented the first real challenge the Providence Union had had since the Peony Wars, and marked the high point of all their history. While they technically got bigger than this, the Providence Union was never so unified or powerful.

First Great Recession

The large territories claimed by the Erkamar, originally forming a stable power block in the Providence Union, elected to attempt to gain full independence from the Union. This probably only succeeded because the secession took with it large sections of Providence military infrastructure, alongside roughly 1/4 of the population of the entire nation. The newly reunified Akradax Collective became a formidable rival for the Providence Union itself, expanding across many as-yet unclaimed systems and almost reaching the Lareas sector. Occasionally, some pretext would be invented and small sections of the Providence military would speed across the Akradax border and conduct raids on habitat clusters, but the two nations spent most of their shared history in an uneasy peace, recognizing that neither could really overpower the other without crippling losses.

War and Peace and War

After the successful independence movement of the Erkamar, several other species attempted independence. This created a sort of frothing at the borders, with tiny independent states ranging from a single habitat to multiple entire star systems appearing on the edges of the Union only to be reconquered fairly rapidly with horrible consequences for the places involved. Often, the same nation resurfaced multiple times, leading to great confusion in record-keeping.

In general, this era of the Providence Union was marked by perpetual shrinking as small nations seceded, lost access to large-scale trade networks, and usually rapidly collapsed again. Very few large-scale wars happened, and usually the newly formed states put up very little fight when the Providence military marched in.

One exception to this was the People's Coalition of Ernar. After its initial secession movement failed, a brutal crackdown occurred in the Ernar System and surrounds, and anyone accused of "treason" were promptly carted off to prison for the rest of their lives. This increasing oppression led to a resistance movement culminating into the true independence of the region for all of five minutes before relativistic beads were launched through the system and triggered Kessler syndrome within it. With the nation's leadership completely beheaded and the surviving inhabitants of non-shredded habitats and planets trapped within the system, the surrounding interstellar habitats quietly capitulated. Ernar remains locked off to this day, with any ships jumping into the system being promptly shredded by orbiting hyperfine debris. This became a favorite tactic of the Providence Union to lock off particularly troublesome worlds.

Dynasty Wars

After the destruction of the People's Coalition of Ernar, two dynasties competed with each other for power over the Providence Union: The Vel Yena Dynasty of Revarea and the Kor!ai Dynasty of Nerax. The Vel Yena Dynasty, reigning from the high palace at Revarea, was widely expected to win this political battle, having at least a theoretical link to the first emperor Narekai Vel Karnos to exploit in propaganda, but the Kor!ai Dynasty was widely more popular. The Vel Yenas had descended into corruption, distributing major government positions and titles through bribery and funneling huge amounts of tax money towards the lavish lifestyle of the aristocratic class on Revarea.

The up-and-coming Kor!ai Dynasty generally had better living conditions in the areas they controlled as well as lower tax rates and less unnecessary lavish spending. The Kor!ai dynasty also controlled much of the border regions with the Akradax Collective, meaning they had control of over half of the total Providence military, putting them in a position to win a civil war if they could force the Vel Yenas to capitulate.

The first of the Dynasty Wars began after !Ekva Kor!ai's incursion into the Parvo-Aa System was met with fierce resistance from the legions led by Kremal Vel Yena. Although the Battle of Coros ended up being a draw, the First Dynasty War would continue for years of nonstop skirmishes and slow territory losses for the Vel Yenas under the deft command of General Elmaren of Kaslar, who joined the fight against them after the Vel Yena regime destroyed her home habitat station. The war finally ended at the gates of Revarea itself, when the Vel Yena family surrendered and promptly went into hiding rather than being taken prisoner.

With !Ekva Kor!ai now crowned emperor of the Providence Union at Nerax, the capital of the Union changed locations for the first time since the reign of Narekai Vel Karnos, and Nerax became the new political and cultural heart of the Union.

After years of peace, !Ekva Kor!ai was assassinated by a Vel Yena loyalist while delivering a speech on how taxes would be going down a little bit. This kicked off the second of the Dynasty Wars as Kremal Vel Yena came out of hiding and attacked the Kor!ai's fleet in dry dock over Nerax's moon. While this was a disastrous start, !Ekva's successor !Alakoi responded with great ferocity, turning the war into a long chase across the galaxy, with the Vel Yena fleet jumping from system to system rapidly followed by the entire Providence military. The fleet routinely lost hundreds of ships each engagement, and the war was finally ended when Vel Yena's ships appeared over Revarea and were destroyed outright.

In a truly brutal act, general Elmaren of Kaslar ordered the orbital bombardment of Revarea itself, resulting in its complete ruin. Although Elmaren was expelled from military service, Revarea's destruction resulted in the loss of trillions of lives and required extraordinarily careful political maneuvering to make sure the blame didn't land on !Alakoi himself. He instituted policies to help the survivors of Elmaren's bombing as well as a progressive system to reduce inequity in living conditions. Newly constructed habitats were allocated to the survivors instead of being sold on the market, earning him much good will. Elmaren was exiled from the Providence Union and banished to deep space, probably dying soon after.

The Kor!ai dynasty became the first of a long line of dynastic families known to historians as the Nerax Dynasties, which reigned from Nerax until the beginning of the War of the Last Alliance !Alakoi became one of the greatest emperors the Providence Union had ever seen, widely popular on all social classes and stimulating a thriving economy and society. His successors would continue this trend until the insane emperor !Ara!ala was so truly awful that his guards conspired to assassinate him and instate further dynasties.

Peace with Akradax

The Akradax Collective spent most of the period after the Sororbi Conflicts through the Dynasty Wars in a state of uneasy peace, always waiting to break out into full scale war, and accompanied by frequent border skirmishes and raids. After the dangerous Kessler Syndrome created near the resource-rich disputed rogue planet Ferrinai, the two nations agreed to a peace treaty to stop the pointless destruction.

Due to the Akradax Collective's complicated balance of factions and sects, large sections of the Collective had both the motive and means to flagrantly ignore this treaty, and in an effort to to stop it, the Taien Faction sent general Shogar on a lone mission to sabotage the summit, being held on the homeworld Erkamar. Shogar sent one of his underlings to the surface in an attempt to assassinate the Providence delegation, but he was caught by the quick thinking of a passerby who saw him enter a room above the conference hall carrying a bomb. This disastrous breach in security led the Providence Union to withdraw from negotiations entirely under the not entirely unfounded assumption that the Collective government wanted to assassinate them and was only coaxed back to the table after an agreement to hold the summit at a neutral location, a minor dwarf moon around Vadria.

Shogar's ship, the Talon, attempted to ambush the Providence Union delegation and its escorts on the way back to the border, decloaking from behind an asteroid near the fleet as they were cooling their fission drive. The attack lit up one of the ships in seconds, blasting it to pieces before the shields could charge. But with this lethal attack, the other ships were given a warning, and locked every weapon they had onto the Talon. The ship was surrounded by a blaze of lasers and torpedoes, and a quick-thinking crewmember released the Talon's onboard atom bombs just before the torpedoes hit to deliver the impression that the craft was destroyed. They used the resulting pulse as a chance to escape.

Vadria proved to be a poor location, being remote and far from any backup. When the Talon made it to Vadria and lined up for a bombing run, they were interrupted only by the Kervai, a passing science ship. An epic dogfight ensued, where the Kervai flew circles around the Talon's bulky, heavily armed hull and fired enough lasers to damage its torpedo bay until the negotiations could finish. The fight resulted in the destruction of the Kervai with all hands, but the Talon was disabled for long enough for the Vadria Accords to be drafted and signed. With the signing of the Vadria Accords, the Providence Union and Akradax Collective officially ended any and all hostilities. Although groups like Shogar's Taien faction would continue raids into the Union's territory, these ceased to be officially sanctioned by the Akradax government.

Genocide of Pecay-Po

With the Akradax Collective and Providence Union in an uneasy peace after the Vadria Accords of 6635 CE, the only major threat to the Union was the up-and-coming nation of Pecay-Po, found in the nearby extragalactic Nalachi Cluster. With its general remoteness, the nation used its seven stars very well, with every ounce of energy emanating from them used efficiently in some way. With Pecay-Po exploration craft being sighted at the borders of Florathel, the Providence Union felt threatened by this new power and invaded in 6844, not even bothering to see what the nation's intentions were.

Being a very efficiently run nation, Pecay-Po had a lot of power to bring to bear against its invaders, blasting fleet after fleet into cosmic ashes before they even entered the Nalachi Cluster. But when a fleet of Providence Union battleships finally entered the Poralor System, the end was near. Poralor's Ring was shattered and its inhabitants spun off into the void, along with them a decent fraction of Pecay-Po's military industrial complex. The fleets advanced under heavy fire towards the Talusi System and Devoro, one of the capitals of the nation, finally reaching it in late June and destroying the small moon completely with volleys of relativistic kill missiles.

With half the nation's government completely gone, Pecay-Po capitulated, only to suffer the orbital bombardment of Nalachi and the severe irradiation of the entire Valme system. Almost the entire population of the country were reduced to naught but shadows on scorched walls, with the few survivors escaping to extragalactic space. Many Elkeres great distances toward the Nocturne System, in particular the sun Dorok. The Providence Union followed them toward the system, causing it to butt heads with the Triumvirate Civilization. Although much of the Providence Union was willing to go to war with the Triumvirate, the great distances involved laid to rest that prospect. Instead, they offered a non-aggression and trade deal which the Triumvirate accepted. The Providence Union lost the Dorok system as the fleeing refugees set up a last stand there. Fearing how the Triumvirate would respond to mass military action on its borders, as well as the difficulty in controlling Dorok, the Providence Union allowed it to be independent.

Second Great Recession

In 7,059 CE, the Crisis of the 71st Century gripped the Triumvirate Civilization, then the Union's best trading partner. This caused a near-complete collapse of the prosperous trade routes between Florathel and Aylathiya. This decreased the supply of exotic goods from the distant stars of Aylathiya as well as the demand in those areas for similarly exotic goods from Florathel. Thus, a lot of things collapsed in prices, hurting major merchants and companies and triggering a knock-on effect to make everything generally poorer.

As tax revenue went down, the government debt increased and the government begun printing money. This caused inflation, making everyone's money worth less. Eventually, the government simply didn't pay its debts, destroying investor confidence and strangling its future ability to raise money, likely dooming the Providence Union in the future war.

This rising inequality created major rebellions all across the territory of the Union, and the emperor at Nerax's failing health led to a general sense of "no one is at the wheel". Although emperor Eknar was succeeded by the young Emperor !Aleka, her admittedly well-intentioned leadership failed to reverse this decline.

Beginning of the End

!Aleka Vekara's reign was short, and she was assassinated by a Marwanist extremist only seventeen years after taking the throne. She was succeeded by a string of incompetent hereditary emperors, barely capable of thinking about anything beyond their opulent palace on the peaks of Nerax, a far cry from !Alakoi the Great.

The executive government might as well have not existed at this point, and states like Corelnas, Kaurim, and Rezacrad were almost entirely self-run. This large block of nine stars took a large chunk out of the already dwindling Providence Union's size, and the military had to rebuild significantly after the three new states took control of the fleets there.

The military leadership, seeing the complete incompetence of the federal government, violently deposed the final emperors of the Vekara Dynasty and set a military government at Kaslar. They sent newly built ships into the secessional territories in an attempt to conquer them multiple times, each time being rebuffed with great fanfare.

All the while, Marakat, Saw-Yos, and Illuin's governments were secretly preparing to break away from the Providence Union once and for all. Marakat completed building an independent military to hold back an invasion and officially declared independence in 7006 CE. Saw-Yos followed suit in as did Mankala. After these secessions, the Providence Union had virtually no remaining territory save the core systems around the Heart of Providence.

War of the Last Alliance

Vengeance of Providence

Geography

The Providence Union was one of the largest empires in history, with contiguous territories from the Providence Spiral all the way to the borders of the Cosmoria Core and across to the tip of the Florathel Arm. Their ideology dictated that neither time nor space limited the scope of the Union, although this would prove to be very false after the War of the Last Alliance.

The Providence Union reached its largest extent in power under Vaikarai the Adequate, who added one rogue planet to his predecessor's claims. With this, the Providence Union controlled between 1/6 and 1/4 of the entire universe's population at the time, depending on the estimate you like, and made it the largest population of any unified political entity since the Lareas Alliance itself. Each of the three most populous systems within the Union, those housing Revarea, Nerax, and Erkamar, were almost twice that of any Florathelian star system until the end of the War of Saiheran Succession.

Vaikarai the Adequate, whose unfortunate title was given to him by his successors in an attempt to downplay his efforts to maintain the Union in a stable form, implemented a system to patrol the officially marked borders and frontiers against any invaders, the Vaikarai Security Array the key surviving monument of this ancient effort.

Society

The Providence Union was remarkably multicultural, with an impressive propaganda machine capable of weaving a fictional sense of shared identity among its disparate conquered species. The Union had a habit of creating public monuments and communal spaces, and this mingling helped blur the lines between possible political units.

Society in the Providence Union had an annoyingly complicated set of overlapping social hierarchies. The Peony Wars left society within Revarea, Nerax and Ekasli in utter shambles. Personal relationships continued to influence the workings of politics and government as they had in the preceding years before the war. By the time of the Unity of Peace however, it was not uncommon to see a merchant who exercised greater power than a senator, for example.

The diffusion of the more rigid hierarchies of Ekasli, Kornerax, and United Revarea led to drastically increased social mobility under the newly formed Providence Union at first. Although this declined after the rise of the Vel Karnos and Vel Naire Dynasties with a completely different set of rigid hierarchies based on a concept called "species seniority", individuals did retain a measure of social mobility.

Legal Status

The essential distinction between individual status in Providence Union law was that a family's starting social status depends on their species, but that with enough work one can rise above one's station and attain great respect among the people. The aforementioned ranking of species was generally ordered by when a given nation joined the Union and how much of a fight they put up, with Revareans, Nerae, Ekasnai, and Felakans above the Kardan, Kajakali, Corvelmar, and later Carleans, Salakela, Poreltids, etc.

Later progressive rulers elevated the status of certain lower classes and gave them actual rights, particularly after !Alakoi extended full citizenship to all but those living in non-integrated territories and gave some states a level of autonomy to implement laws from their own cultural traditions. These were later rolled back in favor of a more conservative system, but once one tastes freedom...

Unequal justice

As the principle of equal justice under the law established by the Unity of Peace faded after Narekai Vel Karnos I took power, the social privileges of the upper class of species was gradually cemented into law, and many judges unilaterally ruled in favor of individuals of a higher class species against those from a lower class regardless of the actual situation.

Sentencing often depended on the judgment of the official as to the relative "worth" of the defendant: a Revarean could pay a small fine when convicted of a crime for which a Kajakali would be subjected to mind-torture, for example.

Execution could be quick and relatively painless for the citizen deemed more valuable, while those considered inferior could suffer mind-torture and insanity after their minds finally broke in the pain, only dying on their own after their brain simply forgot that it needed food and water.

Government

Over its astoundingly long history, the Providence Union has been through many forms of government, ranging from the egalitarian democracy of the Unity of Peace to an extreme fascist theocracy under Narekai Vel Karnos to a corrupt monarchy under the Vel Naire and successor dynasties to a brief period of absolute anarchy after the end of the line of !Alakoi.

Despite this immense variability, there are some general trends to be seen across the history of the nation. For instance, the central government was often corrupt, funneling resources into the core of the nation, with the sole exception of the Unity of Peace, and it often tended towards more extreme political ideologies, with people who wanted to take power appealing to more and more extreme and violent subsets of the population. The coup of Vel Karnos was a key example of this, although Koroltai Vel Naire's overthrowing of the Vel Karnos dynasty notably reset this extremism ratcheting.

For most of its history, there was functionally no legislative or judicial branch, as the absolutist monarchs simply decided things and made them law, ignoring any official court or legislative chamber, and the monarch had the full capability to intervene in provincial affairs if they so desired.

Provincial government

Provinces in the Providence Union tended to be governed by collaborating native governors atop already existing regional power structures, so how a given province was governed would vary drastically from place to place under the earlier dynasties and the Unity of Peace. Towards the end of the Vel Naire Dynasty, there was a push to standardize things to that it was easier to govern them at the federal level, but it never actually went anywhere, and new civilizations that arose on planets under Union control were simply assimilated into the traditional system of provincial governance. By the time of the War of the Last Alliance, the ancient states had mostly petered out.

The most common system of provincial governance in its later eras consisted of a native governor sympathetic to the Providence regime, who then appointed other collaborators to fill the other positions in government in the case of an already existing interstellar government scheme.

In cases like the annexation of the Cnara and Frealee systems, there was no pre-existing interstellar government system, and as such they were organized into a mostly copy-pasted government system involving a governor, a simple legislative branch that the governor has a lot of power over, and a judicial branch that the federally appointed governor appoints.

The state system in the Providence Union was created towards the end of the Unity of Peace by Lord Relaia of Kaslar to require less micromanaging within the expanding nation and allow delegation away from the federal government. After the fall of the fairly well-run Unity of Peace, the state system begun to cause a significant amount of corruption, with aristocrats bribing the Emperor with mixed success rates to be appointed as governor and then taking advantage of this station to gain power or wealth. Eventually, Koroltai Vel Naire imposed laws allowing the emperor to depose a state governor at will, which curbed this somewhat, but particularly corrupt emperors still allowed this to happen. By the time of the Sororbi Conflicts, there were 57 states within the Providence Union, ranging from a particularly densely populated planet to several systems.

Major Worlds


	Revarea	Nerax	Kaslar

Location	Varona System	Varona System	Heart of Providence


Population	TBA	TBA	TBA


Unique Attributes: