Prologue

“Wherever there is light, there will always be darkness.”

It happened more than a thousand years ago. I was only a boy then, so my memories of that time are fuzzy. But what I do remember was the fear. The fear of those times was unmistakable. It was not the same kind of fear elicited by war or by plague, for the truth was that we were dealing with an adversary that seemed to be somewhere in between. Though the carnage took place very far from my homeworld, and I never saw any direct consequences of the conflict, as more outskirt planets fell, there was always this nagging thought in the back of my mind that it might happen on my world ... that they might take my family as they did to many others.

We called them the Parasites, for there was no better word to describe them. They were not a race so much as they were a disease. A tumor on the universe. Originating from a system on the edge of the Forbidden Galaxies known only as Black Star Prime, these creatures seemed to have a very simple purpose. To infect, devour, and spread to other worlds. Entire species were wiped out by the pestilence and later revived as mindless, ravenous slaves to serve their new masters. The Parasites were unlike any enemy that the Tarrus Empire had faced at that point. They were not motivated by logical things that most sentient lifeforms crave. Power. Control. Belief. Words were meaningless to these creatures which understood only one thing. The primal need to survive, and to consume.