For over 9 million years, the stars were ours.

The challenges were great, and we would prevail over every difficulty placed before us.

Nature. Enemies. Scarcity. The numerous terrible dangers of space as we explored and expanded. A myriad of planets and stars. Mastering life, we confronted death itself and bound it to our will. Our birth Galaxy, holding no more challenges nor secrets, is now simply another irrelevant and forgotten mote of light in a once endless sea, not so endless anymore as our ships explored the edges of the very universe itself.

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Like all born of this universe, we were bound to it. Unable to pass where the expanding forces of space and time had yet to penetrate. Our focus returned inward. The secrets of the fundamental forces of the universe became ours. The adjacent, parallel universes opened up to us, different, yet still familiar. Still, there were no surprises, no new discoveries to be made or secrets to be divined, save for one.

In one of these adjacent universes we first encountered what we would later call the Incursion. Recognizing its danger, we quickly discovered its presence in all parallels. Many of them were already too far gone to be saved, so we abandoned them to their own slow, terrible unraveling. It was resolved that we would defend our own universe from such a fate, at any cost.