Part 14: INTERLUDE: FIRST SON OF DARKNESS

For all his connections and all his psionic powers, for all his influence and knowledge, the First Son of Darkness was just a tool, another game piece in a cosmic game. Despite his blindness caused by a sense of unequaled self-importance, he was quite intelligent and was aware of this, but he had plans to elevate him above being just a game piece. The key to his quest for Godhood was knowledge. Here on Netlor, a planet in Free-space he planned to gain more.

Long before the rise of the Union, almost 12,000 years ago, before the first appearance of the Y’All. When the Ult were still the most aggressive and savage civilization in this part of the Galaxy. Before the Saran started their civil war that led to them to be split into the Saran and Pan Saran empires, a Saresii ship landed on this planet to refuel and discovered on a desert valley of the only continent, the 500 meter tall statue of a stylized humanoid figure. The figure was bare of any details, it had two stretched out arms and stood on straight legs spread apart. The head of the figure was a perfect circle with five equal sized segments, dividing the circle like a pie. Each segment colored differently. There was red, blue, white, green and yellow. All made of a transparent material.

The statue stood in a hexagonal frame upon a raised platform. The material it all was made of appeared to be metal but it defied all scanning and all analysis methods. It apparently was indestructible, all efforts to take a sample were unsuccessful.

The planet itself was unremarkable at first, but after closer examination it turned out that this world had no orbital tilt and circled around a yellow sun at a perfectly spherical orbit. Even the sun, at first observation just another common as dust yellow Main Sequence star, turned out to be an enigma, it was among the oldest stars and should have burned out long ago, turned into a brown dwarf perhaps, it had not even turned into a Red giant. Yellow Stars were young stars; this sun defied all commonly accepted solar physics. No Solar flares, no sun spots. It was a perfect stable star.

This fact was of another significance associated to the statue. Eight thousand meters behind the statue was a mountain range and one of the rugged mountains had a hole in it. Twice a day the sun would perfectly align with that hole and send a beam of sunlight aimed exactly at the color segmented circle. A circle of colored light appeared on the smooth metal surface before the statue.

There was nothing else, no inscriptions. The Ruins found after an excavation around the alien monument turned out to be of a much less advanced civilization that set up a city around that statue a few million years ago and vanished or died out.

The Y’All came and the planet and the discovery was more or less forgotten in the galaxy wide turmoil, but it was not forgotten completely. A religious sect formed with member of all spacefaring civilizations back then and the Church of the Golden whispering Spirit of the Universe exists even today. It was much more prominent than the First Sons Church of Darkness, but still far below the numbers or significance of the 2000 major religious movements.

Union Scholars claimed to have been able to analyze the material and the Kermac were certain it was of Uni Origin. The planet was in Free -space and by Treaty none of the Big Four could claim the planet as theirs. It was declared a site of worship and accessible to all.

Each of the Big Four maintained small permanent research sites on the planet, but big digs were by the same treaty only allowed if all four participated and agreed something that would never happen.

A town had sprung up not far from the Alien Monument and near the crumbled ruins. It was home mostly to souvenir dealers, small hotels and temples of a several sects and churches, most prominent of course the Church of the Golden Whispering Spirit.