Nyx ascendancy

Nyx Ascendancy
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Headquarters	Petra Tenebris
Methods of communication	Telepathy Verbal languages
Leaders
• Leader	Erebus
• Second-in-command	Darkstar
• Generals	Luminous Thunder Everliving
• Commanders	Several other Nyx commanders
Establishment
• Founding	946 BF
• Dissolution	86 BF

The Nyx ascendancy, commonly referred to as Nyx, was an extra-material militant faction created by Erebus to occupy and control the material plane, during the Age of Darkness.

Named after the artificial beings that comprised it, the Nyx ascendancy ruled for more than 860 years over the majority of the material world, reshaping it's societies according to the needs of it's new overlords. During these times, many species went extinct while others filled the vacuum, most notably humans and elementals. Due to constant internal conflicts and a growing human resistance, primarily from the Nations of Fire and the Alliance, the Ascendancy declined. Eventually, such conflicts led to it's rapid collapse, most notably after it's Pyrrhic victories during the Red crusades. After the death of Erebus, the Nyx lost all of their power and authority and slowly withered away.

History

The first extra-material army

As a species, the Nyx came years after the conception of the first so-called dark armies. With Erebus quickly gaining a greater understanding of the world as a whole, he experimented with several unrefined void-like entities on the material world, before designing the Nyx as his main project. The idea of creating a sizable, self-reliant, evolving, sentient mechanical race was only put into practice much later, following the assassination of most of Erebus rivals, the only wizards and shamans who had an extended knowledge of his machinations and possessed the means to defer his plans. With voidforms still being a rare species with their members weak and isolated from each other, Erebus had no competition and the informational template of the Nyx resided on the immaterial planes dormant and unharmed for decades.

The first contact with the material world occurred in 947 BF on the Embers, Erebus's homeworld. The first Nyx units to set foot on the material world proved worthy after assassinating any scholar left to oppose their plans and storming several towns with unspeakable inhumanity. Through these small-scale operations, the Nyx elected their leaders; Luminous, Thunder and Everliving and designed their own strategies against their material foes, while it's leaders evolved to specialize on different tasks. While all three governments at the Embers mounted a counter-offense and even informed other worlds of this newfound threat, nobody could stop the Nyx from conducting their shadow operations or seamlessly teleporting from the material to the immaterial.

Descent on Petra Tenebris

Devoid of life and color. Eternally obscured. Blackened by it's clouds, cursed with infertile ground. This world is the antithesis of everything living beings come to associate with reality. It is destined to be ours.

—Luminous

It's ground is extremely leveled. There is no extreme weather or hostile armies to bother us. No living being could even set foot here, much less attempt a siege. This is where we will settle and grow before striking at our enemies

—Thunder

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With the traces of Erebus's former life largerly removed, the Nyx were allowed to establish their own headquarters on a world of their choosing. Due to their limited power at that time, it was unanimously decided that inhabited worlds were out of the question. As such, the world that came to be their capital region was Petra Tenebris, a small and insignificant doom world with a very stable and sterile climate. Leading an army of a little less than a thousand, Thunder set up the first installations on the desired territory, while Luminous organized the more work-intensive units, which followed the initial colonists.

During that time, Thunder led his own skirmishes on more fertile worlds, training the troops while learning more about the worlds the Nyx would have to encounter in the future. With their headquarters positioned in a dead world, the Nyx could easily fall back from a failed operation at any time, while having practically unlimited time to develop. Luminous and Thunder used this territorial advantage to develop their respective sectors while Everliving hunted down any remaining shamans and wizards opposing Erebus before returning to Petra Tenebris to design his espionage network. These reckless operations cost them vital resources and made the them well-known to other worlds but only helped them learn more about their enemies and become more sophisticated in the long run.

Three years later, Luminous announced that the Nyx were at an optimal condition to invade the material world. The Nyx were stronger than ever and most governments, while knowing of the Nyx, were unprepared to face an enemy of that size and nature. With an army of 50.000 and the weapons and equipment to go with it, Erebus agreed to Luminous proposals and returned to the material world, this time with a permanent avatar to lead the offense. Erebus called this campaign the Night crusades, with it's goal being the capture of all material worlds of importance, the dissolution of all major opposing factions and the establishment of an Empire where immortal, magic beings of the void would eternally rule over mortal ones.

The Night Crusades

Main article: Night Crusades

Nyx soldiers during the Night crusades

The first part of the crusades had all four military commanders marching together on the Embers, which was one of the most well-known worlds to them, albeit the strongest militarily. The initial strikes caught the biggest government unprepared and gave the Nyx enough time to set up their forward bases. Without a proper defensive plan, the Embers governments didn't cooperate to repel the invaders and chose to fight independently instead. With a combined soldier count of 40.000 plus another 20.000 as militia spread across cities, they were barely outnumbering a much more organized foe. After full deployment, Thunder executed a risky offensive strike towards the world's de facto capital of Cindergrud, which resulted in victory and the removal of the biggest defensive point. Later battles were smaller and more chaotic in scale, resulting in defenders defecting, smaller cities surrendering and pledging allegiance to the Nyx and many people fleeing to the teleporters to avoid enslavement. The panic accelerated the world's demise, leading to a decisive victory for the aggressor. For the Nyx, the capture of the Embers opened the pathway to many other worlds through it's extended teleportation grid and gave the Nyx some room to move between worlds before constructing their own warp vessel armada.

The arid and barren plains of the Embers forced the Nyx to quickly move outwards. Thunder and Luminous split the army and invaded Reeds and Prodigiosen respectively. Thunder quickly deposed the rulers of Reeds and met with Luminous on Prodigiosen before departing again for Algor. In the meantime, Erebus and Everliving began reshaping the Embers and laying the foundations for future campaigns. The culmination of these offensive ended on Krag, after the battle of Lundox ended in a horrible defeat for the Nyx.

The second part of the crusades occurred shortly after the first offensives, with Everliving and Thunder leading their own armies respectively. With Erebus constructing Nyx much faster than any nation could replenish their numbers, the Nyx invaded Krag for the second time, annexing roughly half of it's land. Thunder decided to remain and find a way to crack it's defenses, leaving Everliving on the offensive. With both sides having equally fearsome militaries, Krag was split in half and remained in a relatively peaceful state until the end of the crusades. During that time, Everliving annexed dozens of worlds, most notably the ancient oceanic world of Fretum, the mighty strongholds of Oxcroft and the mage guilds of Izzen. The knowledge gained from these conquest was the tipping point for the crusades.

By the time free nations formed a proper coalition to repeal the Nyx, most worlds had either fallen to their hands of had been invaded and looted. With Erebus consolidating resources and pulling military power from the Embers to Petra Tenebris, the Nations of Fire managed to free the former with the help of it's enslaved population. This profound victory led to more nations joining under the same banner, forcing the Nyx to abandon their offensives and defend their territory. In a powerful counter-assault, the Nations of Fire retook the captured territory in Krag, after a cataclysmic battle which involved hundreds of different nations and groups uniting against the biggest Nyx army ever assembled. Despite these symbolic victories, the Nations of Fire were still unable to prevent Nyx expansion, as the latter had better transportation technology and superior military in almost every way. The exhausted fighters gave up on their counter-offensives and focused on defending the most important worlds to prevent a total Nyx takeover. The influx of refugees made the Alliance on Krag stronger, leading to it's reorganization as the Golden Empire, which became the protector of many smaller and weaker worlds during the late stage of the Night crusades.

Going against his initial plans, Erebus prematurely declared the end of the crusades in 902 BF, after capturing only a majority of primary worlds and eliminating every commander and political leader he considered important, except those truly out of reach. The final battle took place at Oxcroft, after the resistance forces reanimated the remaining Protectors of the Rock, ancient golems of unknown origin that could fight against entire armies. Despite their prowess, the Protectors were unable of containing the overwhelming numbers of Nyx and fell to their continuous attacks. Erebus believed that a victory against such beings meant that the Nyx had conquered both ancient and current and thus they were the rightful owners of the multiverse.

The Age of Darkness

Following the end of the crusades, the Nyx began rebuilding captured worlds in their own terms. Primary worlds with significant resources became slavery hubs while less populated worlds and doom worlds became testing grounds. With the help of Luminous, Erebus brought back relative stability across the multiverse by emphasizing order and sustainability above all else. Despite these plans, the Nyx kept eradicating many minor species that were deemed unfit to serve, making room for more useful ones, such as Humans and Elementals, which were considered the most useful. These purges caused already unstable societies to be broken up completely and ultimately forced the Nyx into expanding their rebuilding phase for several decades.

As an aftermath the massive military campaign, the Nyx had become proficient at war while all of their remaining skills had remained the same. This evolution path was emphasized even further when racial purges became commonplace, with newly constructed Nyx being derived from Nyx that had only learned how to wage war. The few counter-examples, such as Luminous and other designers or workers, were not enough to balance things out, and with commanders pushing for greater armies to replenish their losses, the Nyx began strafing away from Erebus original plans in an irreversible way. Erebus eventually retreated back into the void to plan his next moves.

While controlling most of the multiverse, the Nyx could still not conquer or stabilize all worlds. In more chaotic worlds, people abandoned their homes and moved through unguarded teleportation arrays to independent worlds, most notably Krag. To combat this constant influx of war refugees, the Golden Empire aggressively expanded operations, increased it's authoritarianism and forced worlds to receive and absorb them into the workforce. When the dust was settled, all worlds under the Golden Empire were significantly stronger, as the additional manpower managed to rebuild these worlds and fortify them against Nyx aggressors much quicker than expected. This made the Nyx unable of launching another campaign against the remaining free worlds. On the other hand, the Nations of Fire, which was still a standing coalition, could not handle the new arrivals and ended up with a huge social crisis and instability before eventually disabling it's arrays. Both the Nyx and the Golden Empire took advantage of the Nations of Fire to steal a world each, one through annexation and the other through the effort of preserving the coalition by relieving them from problematic worlds.

The Sabled

At 890 BF, Erebus returned to Petra Tenebris to announce the creation of a new race, which would allegedly complement the Nyx and complete the species. In reality, Erebus was planning to completely retire the Nyx in favor of a more refined and adaptable species that wouldn't fall into the same evolutionary trap as his first creation. A year later, the construction of the first batch of Sabled was finished on the sea of oblivion, under the supervision of Luminous. The first generations of living, thinking Sabled were too unstable or energy intensive to be able to survive for more than a few days. Through their efforts, Erebus plans and the unique properties of the lake, which was a conduit of black energy, Luminous created a brand new species of synthetic beings that were taller, stronger, smarter and with a much higher affinity to magic. These new units were much harder to create and essentially required an entire area teeming with black energies to speed up the process of construction. This made the sea of oblivion the only place where such beings could be created.

Twenty years after the creation of the first Sabled, Erebus announced to his now reformed empire that the Nyx were finally complete as a species. This announcement came with the reformation of the hierarchy and the promotion of Darkstar to the newly created position of second-in-command, which was previously occupied by the three Nyx commanders. Thunder, Luminous and Everliving became generals, under the command of Darkstar, while all previous generals became commanders. This change, along with the Sabled occupying almost exclusively important positions that protected them from conflict, was the first step towards future rebellions and schisms.

Defection of Luminous

The first schism within the Nyx military was caused by Luminous, who was the most affected by the Sabled takeover. Due to their initially low numbers, most of the Sabled that couldn't fit into the high positions came to be workers and guardsmen, outclassing in Nyx in both. Unable to control a species that considered him inferior, Luminous began planning his defection from the Nyx. Having on army of his own, he slowly gathered the support of other commanders who felt they were threatened by the Sabled as well. The whole process was meticulous and took years but was perfectly executed and was more effective than originally theorized.

Luminous declared independence during late 855 BF, a time period where Nyx forces were occupied by human rebellions and small scale assaults conducted by the Nations of Fire. Starting from Vexx, the only world directly under his command, Luminous slowly expanded to bordering worlds through the help of other defecting commanders, until establishing a cluster of 6 primary and 2 doom worlds he knew he could confidently defend and manage. With tens of thousands of soldiers participating in this rebellion, the underpowred Nyx militia were completely overwhelmed and mostly evacuated these worlds, without putting much of a fight. By the time Erebus was notified of this insurgency, Nyx defenders had already given up and were either joining the cause or retreating.

For the next 5 years, the Nyx dedicated most of their efforts into recapturing these worlds and bringing Luminous to justice.