The Beginning is the End. 

The sky of Beshtal was burning.

From orbit, the Grays watched in silence, their fleet a cold and precise specter against the dying glow of the planet below. Fires stretched across the jungles and oceans, turning green and gold into charred black. The Felivar home-world, the cradle of their people, was breaking beneath their feet.

The Grays did not speak as they advanced. They did not gloat or rage. Their war was mathematical. Merciless. A siege that had stretched across generations, grinding the Felivar down with cruel precision. They struck during breeding cycles, poisoning nurseries with fear, suffocating hope before it could be born. When their strategy was complete, when Beshtal’s people could do nothing but claw and bleed for every inch of ground, they escalated.

This was extermination.

The Felivar fought until their claws were stripped to the bone. Until their spears shattered, their cities fell, and their warriors, once proud and untamed, collapsed under the weight of it all. Their allies; Nordics, Vedics, and others lost to time, had died beside them, fighting the inevitable. Even their greatest enemies, the Reptilians, had burned in the struggle.

Or so they had thought.

As the Grays closed in for the final culling, the sky was torn apart. A rip in the void, coiled in emerald light and ancient power, a wormhole. The last there would ever be.

From it came a voice, hissing through the storm of destruction.

“The moons will rise!”

The Felivar turned their ears skyward, disbelief flickering like embers in their chests. The words were sacred. Their ancestors had cried them out before the hunt, before battle, before death itself. And yet, here they were spoken by an old enemy, by Sobek the Fifth, High Commander of the Reptilian fleet.

He stood upon the bridge of his ship, bloodied but unbowed, gripping a Felivar’s spear in his clawed hand. Beside him, battered Reptilian warriors locked weapons into place, opening the last path their technology could forge. It was not surrender. It was not mercy. It was defiance.

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Below, among the ruins, one Felivar still stood tall. Protector Oorow Bobtail, leader of the last resistance, cradled their infant child against their chest. The child did not weep. They did not know they were watching the death of their home.

In their free hand, Oorow raised a blade, Sobek the First’s scimitar, taken in battle centuries ago. By Bobtail the Great after he cut off his own tail to defeat the Reptilian. A symbol of their people’s endless war, now repurposed for salvation.

With fire raining down and the ground shaking beneath their feet, Oorow roared their reply:

“The Suns shall shine!”

Their roar was echoed by Reptilians who were willing to die not just for their people but for those they once called ‘enemy.’

“Oorow!” The Reptilian captain called out, “You showed us the way, let us take it from here!”

Oorow felt a lump in their throat and a warmth in their heart. They took their child and joined other members of their kind as the Reptilian’s held off the apocalypse for just a little longer.

Pods, like the moons of their homeworld, ascended into the rift, breaking through the planet’s gravity well in a desperate rush. The last of their kind. The last of their history. The last of their war.

Behind them, Beshtal collapsed, its four moons wreathed in fire as they fell into ruin.

But not all who fled were warriors.

Within one of the largest escape pods, a chamber of stone and gold stood unshaken amidst the chaos—a temple carried into the stars. Inside, High Priest Niikri Softpaw knelt before an ancient altar, their robes flowing like liquid shadow, fur dusted with the ashes of their world. Their voice was steady as they pressed their forehead to the cold metal beneath them, whispering the last rites of a dying planet.

“O Moons, we are your children. We rise from your ruins, we carry your light. O Two Suns, you are our guardians. Shine upon our path, though we know not where it leads. O stars of Beshtal, remember us.”

They paused, ears flicking at the wails of cubs in the distance, at the heavy breathing of the wounded. Then, a prayer for the ones they had never called allies.

“And to the scaled ones, our rivals, our blood-stained brothers. Let them be remembered, too. For their claws held the gate when ours had no strength. Their fangs tore into death when ours had dulled. May the Moons remember them. May the Suns bear witness.”

A deep rumble shuddered through the pod as it passed through the wormhole, the final tear in space closing behind them.

And the moons fell again—this time, toward a new world.

A shower of light in the night sky, mistaken for a cosmic event, a passing storm of forgotten gods.

But the Felivar knew.

Their home was gone  

Their war was not over