r/HFY • u/lazy_yellow_lizard • 10d ago

OC-FirstOfSeries [Let them eat cake] Prologue

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Let Them Eat Cake

A prequel to Shepherd's Call — How the galaxy became what it is

Prologue

It belongs to the professional hazards of the chronicler that one can never quite agree on when a story truly begins. Some insist you have to start with the great speeches, the battles, the changes of throne, the moments when it was obvious to everyone that history was happening. Others, usually the more interesting chroniclers, know better: the truly decisive beginnings, at the moment they occur, generally look like nothing at all.

This story does not begin with a throne. It begins with a planet that, statistically speaking, should not have existed.

The beginning is unspectacular, as most beginnings are, and it lies very, very far back. On a single, slightly too perfect planet, around a single, slightly too ordinary star, where a species grew up that lacked nothing except, as it would turn out, the ability to handle that fact.

They called themselves the Merak.

One might have taken them, from a distance, for an upright-walking lizard with ambitions — which, considering their later history, would not even have been entirely inaccurate. Broad-shouldered, with a heavy, muscular tail that seemed to develop a life of its own under excitement or anger, beneath scales that ranged, depending on the clutch, from dark grey-green to a rare, deep purple — a chance of coloring that the Merak aristocracy had, over the millennia, declared a status symbol, as though the color of one's own skin were an achievement. Vertical pupils that narrowed to slits in anger, a word that in Merak meant eye and temperament in the same breath. No ears in the outer sense, only flat, membrane-covered openings at the sides of the skull. A face that knew no smile the way other species understood it, approval or goodwill showed instead in the raising of a narrow row of neck scales, which lay flat at rest.

Let it be said here, with the respect due to all parties concerned: there could hardly have been a less favorable setup for a civilization. A planet on which nothing ever seriously went wrong is, for evolution, roughly what a child who is never contradicted is for character. One grows large, strong, resourceful. And thoroughly convinced that the world belongs to oneself, because so far no one has proven otherwise.

The Merak suffered, in their early days, from exactly one problem: they were alone. Not figuratively — literally. The neighboring planets were dead, the neighboring stars silent, and a people who considered themselves the only meaningful answer to the question of intelligent life bore that silence remarkably badly. So they did what one might expect of an impatient, highly gifted, and slightly arrogant young species: they built ships before they properly knew how to bring them back safely, sent out generations who would never live to see their destination, and searched with a doggedness that later chroniclers liked to call a thirst for discovery, and which was in truth closer to a fear of loss.

They found what they were looking for. Other worlds, other peoples. Smaller, slower, less armed than themselves, which would prove an unfortunate coincidence, for the Merak did not draw from it the conclusion one might have hoped for (something along the lines of how exciting, we are not alone), but a different, far more pragmatic one: if there was no one there to contradict you, why bother asking?

So a lonely people, who only wanted to know whether they were alone in the dark, became within a few centuries an empire that enforced the answer itself, wherever it went.

The gap the Merak found, in the process, was almost impossible to grasp. Where they themselves had long since been computing with thinking machines, with quantum processors that solved in an instant problems other civilizations would have needed millennia for, with drives that seemed to fold space itself, they found worlds where people had only just learned to smelt ore, or worlds whose greatest achievement was the plow, sometimes barely more than the wheel. It was not a gap that diligence or cleverness could have closed, not in one lifetime, not in ten. It was the gap of a people whose own development no one had ever interrupted, set against peoples who had never had that luck. And the Merak, who never understood this difference as chance but as proof of their own superiority, would carry that error a long way.

To the peoples they encountered, the Merak were not simply further advanced. They were something for which their own language had no category. A farmer who had spent his whole life learning that the road from one village to the next took three days could not grasp what it meant that a Merak ship crossed a distance which his own people, had they tried to walk it, would have needed longer for than their entire recorded history reached back. What their own priests and scholars had taught as the fixed order of the world, that nothing could move faster than sight, that distance cost time no one could shorten, shattered the moment a Merak ship appeared out of nothing, where an hour before there had been only empty sky. It was not technology that the conquered peoples understood first. It was the suspicion that the laws of nature they had believed in only applied to those who were not Merak.

They did not call it slavery, at first. They called it integration. Later, in politer circles, simply "order". The Merak had, one must grant them, a remarkable talent for dressing unpleasant things in more pleasant words. A talent that, as it would turn out, outlived the empire that had produced it by quite some margin.

Other peoples reacted differently to their appearance. Some submitted quickly, in the quiet hope of buying mercy that rarely came. Some fought to the last man. Most learned the quietest and cleverest of all lessons: that in a galaxy belonging to a people like the Merak, it was best not to be noticed at all. They fell silent, hid in gas clouds and beneath planetary surfaces, sent nothing more out into a darkness that, as they now knew, could very well listen back.

Far from the homeworld of the Merak, in an unremarkable corner of the galaxy, around an ordinary yellow star, there was a people the Merak catalogs recorded merely as Solari. Primitive they were, by every standard the Merak knew. Without writing, without metal, without so much as the beginning of an idea that beyond their own sky there was anything they should have feared. A people who had only just learned to scratch images into stone and cave walls, as though they had just grasped for the first time that a moment could be held onto, long before they could suspect how much of it they would one day have to hold onto. Naked but for what they draped over themselves, unarmed but for sharpened wood and stone, they lived in small, wandering groups scattered across a planet the Merak expedition reports noted with the same indifference one uses to write an unimportant footnote.

One might have laughed at them, had anyone in the capital bothered to think of them at all. Some did, briefly, at feasts, when a specimen was put on display, a curiosity for entertainment, proof of how far down the ladder of life reached beneath the Merak themselves. No Merak who ever laughed at this naked, helpless, unarmed creature would have dreamed that one day it would help bring about their own downfall.

It helped, in all of this, that the Merak had never known a god above themselves. Other peoples prayed to beings they could not see, thanked forces greater than themselves, feared a judgment waiting for them beyond their own lives. The Merak had abandoned that idea early — not out of skepticism, but out of a lack of need: where there was no being standing above them, the place a god would otherwise have occupied did not stay empty for long. They filled it themselves, gradually, without ever naming it as such, without a festival, without a ceremony marking the transition. It was not an act of faith. It was merely the logical continuation of a people who had never learned to question themselves.

It is a curious feature of rising empires, whatever world they arise on: sooner or later they all reach the same point, where the abundance that once drove them tips into indifference toward those who create that abundance for them. Among the Merak it took a single emperor who, in a fit of modesty, took for himself the title Son of the One Sun His People Had Ever Known. People called him, behind cupped hands, simply the Sun-Ruler, and the title stuck, inherited like a particularly impractical family heirloom, across generations of emperors, most of whom were neither especially sun-like nor especially ruler-like, but made a decent effort to at least fake the former.

A title like that suits an empire well, as long as it shines.

What an empire with a title like that notoriously fails to consider is the question of what happens when the sun it claims to be begins to set — and how little patience those still standing in its shadow have left, once it does.

But that, as they say, comes later.

For now, everything seemed fine. The empire of the Merak was large, rich, feared, and thoroughly convinced it would stay that way forever A conviction that, historically speaking, every empire has shared, shortly before it stopped being one.

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