Aunic Ascendancy

The First Chosen

History

The Aunic peoples, like the Karrakin, can trace an unbroken line of history from Old Humanity to the narrative present. Like the Karrakin people, they too left Earth on one of The Ten, only their ship — one of a pair, the ​Armstrong​, and her twin, the ​Rihla​ — never made it to its intended target; instead, their ship went off course for a millenia, eventually making landfall on a distant and uncharted world.
The first of the people who would become the Aun, owing to the length of their journey, had developed a shipboard faith — that of The Path, and a promised land waiting for them at the end of it. “Navigators” ministered to the myriad peoples of the generation ship, teaching them that the sacrifice of generations would be made justified by the edenic paradise at the end of their journey. They traveled at a relativistic crawl, each year passing on the ship translating to tens of years back on Earth; without a way of communicating with their homeworld, the people aboard the generation ship were on their own. Over generations, they grew to think of themselves as the only people in the whole of reality. They began to call themselves the Ecumene, the All-One. Hundreds of years passed. A thousand. Their language changed, and they became the Aun.
During the long, lonely stretch of the Aunic peoples’ journey, the Earth healed, and the survivors there formed new societies. Union grew from the ashes and ice, pulled the world together, reactivated old facilities and discovered the buried secrets of Old Humanity — technologies that doomed them, and technologies that could have saved them if they only had the time. Nearlight bolting was one such technology: an early pre-blink slower-than-light drive that could “bolt” a ship to near lightspeed. Union outfitted its ships with these drives, and sent them out to recontact or colonize worlds Old Humanity had identified as habitable. The Aunic people’s New World — their promised land — was one such world.
The nearlighter ships reached the New World well before the ​Armstrong​ did, established a colony, and watched the ​Rihla​ break apart in the atmosphere of the New World. When the Armstrong​ arrived, the Union colonists attempted to manage the situation, and failed. Union lost the colony, and the Aunic peoples — then the Aun Ecumene — gained a world, and an enemy. Union had stolen their promised land from them, ruined their thousand-year cultural history; these people — Unionites — had stolen everything they claimed they owned. The Ecumene were the chosen people. Victory and history proved them correct.
Over time, the Ecumene came to control the New World and spread their influence out across neighboring terrestrial worlds. Their society was stable and growing; it took the sudden and miraculous appearance of an entity above their capital city — a planar monolith, polished to a black mirror shine — to send the Ecumene into a tumult of ideological and religious schisms.
The Aun came to call this entity Metat Aun, and worship it as a god, with good reason — Metat Aun performed miracles, gave the Aunic peoples visions and powers. In appearance, act, and aim, it was godlike.
And then it disappeared. In its wake, chaos followed. The Ecumene was weakened, its control threatened by a hardline theocracy, the Ascendancy. In a few hundred years, Metat Aun returned, bringing miracles. Its appearance whipped the Ascendancy and the Aunic people into a fervor, leading to the fall of the Ecumene. Under the Aunic Ascendancy, the many worlds and Aunic peoples were unified into a caste system, shaped into a single culture by the flattening effect of empire.
The Ascendancy, in time, decided once and for all to put an end to questions of its legitimacy: it launched a crusade to seek out and destroy the Ecumenical survivors, tracking down the exiled peoples to a Union world, Cornucopia. The Ascendancy, instead of pulling back, decided to launch an all-out attack against Cornucopia’s sector of space, Boundary Garden, destroying the local blink gate and invading the Union worlds there.

Demography and Population

Aunic society is stratified by caste; there is limited mobility between castes, but what is known indicates that it is much more common to move up than down. Caste promotion is achieved through deed, training, and education. Caste demotion is a formal process, the result of judgement by a mixed jury of those in the caste immediately above yours, of members of your own caste, and, occasionally, members of the immediate lower caste.
The castes are as follows:

• Celebrant: The spiritual leadership caste. Only caste allowed to interact with Os, aspects of Metat Aun. A subordinate caste during the Ecumene, Celebrants have deposed Navigators as the spiritual and civic leadership of the Aun peoples.
• Ecclesiastic: State apparatchiks, bureaucrats, governors, and district representatives. Members of this caste run the civic, municipal, and provincial systems that dictate daily civilian Ascendant life. A plurality of these caste members are Ecumenical, their ancestors having proved too useful to purge during the schism.
• First Chosen: Explicitly subordinate to the civic and religious leadership of the Ascendancy. Their original leaders were killed or exiled during the schism. The modern Ascendant High Command traces their lineage back to the first Ascendants, the First Chosen of Os, and work in harmony with the Celebrant Caste.
• Pregejo: The elite of the Aun Civila, a common transitional caste for Aun on an upward social trajectory. Minds are generally weighed at this level, though they are much more strict about admittance, and their unique abilities afford them more cultural leeway than most. Chosen of the Celebrant Guard and the Outremer, along with the middling priesthood of the Ascendancy are counted at this rank as well.
• Civila: A vast and varied class, encompassing the rank-and-file soldiery, skilled artisans, bureaucrats, agricultural divisions, and all stripe of the Ascendant Aun. The Civila is the broad base of the Aunic peoples, the majority of the population of the Ascendancy.
• Rabulo: Another vast and varied class cobbled together from the Aunic peoples who are not considered Ascendant. This includes Ecumenical Aun, the Apollonians, Demiaun, and any Aun who are viewed as profane, having turned from Metat’s light or chosen to worship one of its aspects.

Outside of the caste system is Union and the rest of Humanity. Ascendant Aunic dogma views Union and Humanity as the ​Kurr-Fah​, “Stewards”, or, “Those Who Crawl”.

Territories

The vast territory of the Ascendancy is unknown to Union.
The Ascendancy’s homeworld is Aun’ist, known to Union as Anthem, and roughly translated from Aunic to Bastion. Other Aunic worlds lie beyond Boundary Garden: based off of their crusade force strength Union assumes them to hold at least ten worlds of Core classification, double that as Colonies -- a population numbering in the hundreds of billions.
Boundary Garden represents an incursion point into Union space, a littoral zone where, before the Crusade, Ecumenical (later, Ascendant) Aun mingled with and lived among Diasporans on Dawn Throne, Calvary, Dodona, and Borea. There are no Diasporans or Cosmopolitans in Aunic core space.

Military

The Aunic military is split between regular troops and local levies, similar to the Union Navy. All enlisted soldiers of the Aunic military are called manquellers. Only some manquellers may become Chosen, fewer yet may become Minds, and fewest of all may be both.
The Aunic military bureaucracy is vast and bifurcated: the Celebrant Guard is the domestic standing army, and the Outremer are levies, militias, and reservists raised in the event of a crusade or necessary defense of the homeland.
The Celebrant Guard is the Ascendancy’s standing military force. It is the domestic garrison of Chosen, Minds, and professional manquellers maintained for the defense of the Aunic interior and colonies. It has its own command structure, naval organization, ground tactics, and institutional history. It reports directly to Os and their ecclesiastic priesthood. The Celebrant Guard is marked by standardized equipment, advanced training, access to personal hardlight weapons, and a combat doctrine that blends infantry with Ofanim support.
The Outremer is a cyclical military structure, largely dormant when not in use, though all Aunic peoples are subject to conscription into service in times of need. When active, the Outremer is a crusade force comprised of conscripts formed into temporary classes of manquellers, Chosen, and Minds, raised to fill the global quotas demanded by Ascendant leadership. Their equipment conforms to a standardized set of parameters, though is not standardized across the fighting force; likewise their personal and mechanized armor. Hardlight technology is not ubiquitous among the Outremer, who are more commonly armed with gaussian kinetics and other conventional weaponry.

Celebrant Guard Ranks

(Union equivalent in parenthesis)

• First Marshal (Ring Admiral)
• Host-Marshal (Section Admiral)
• Marshal (Admiral)
• Major (Commander)
• Host Captain (Line Commander)
• Captain (Captain)
• Minor (Lieutenant)
• Standard (Warrant Officer)
• Caporal (Sergeant)
• Demicapo (Corporal)
• Manqueller, First Order (Marine, 1st Class)
• Manqueller (Marine)

Technological Level

Aunic technology is marked by clean lines, seamless construction, and an emphasis towards the functional. Their technological lineage is that of Old Earth: elegance and functionality are to be considered equals, beauty is found both in form and perfect function.
While a number of technologies the Aun possess would be familiar to a Unionite, there are a few major diversions: Hardlight — coherent, stable photons that can be used for utility, weapons, or armor. Observation of the technology suggests it should be a stable particle beam that demands little energy to sustain, can transmit information, and can support orders of magnitude more weight than its power supply should allow. In the field, Union regulars and auxiliaries have observed hardlight used in both defensive and offensive roles, as beam weapons, personal shielding, and “blade” edges. Minds — small numbers of Aunic peoples who can access and manipulate an esoteric, powerful plane of reality called the Firmament, giving themselves seemingly supernatural powers. While the Firmament is often spoken of as a dreamspace, manifestations of supernatural abilities in the field demonstrate that this dreamspace is quite real and capable of impacting our physical space. It appears that the Ascendancy was introduced to this technology and went through a period of adoption, indicating the same might be possible for Union. Souls — living super-consciousnesses that claim to be long-dead Aunic individuals. Recently encountered by Union and Cornucopian coalition forces, Souls seem to operate in ways similar to NHPs, though the extent of their permissions is unknown. As indicated by first contact, it would appear that Souls are held in containment similar to NHPs, though after extensive testing by USB it appears that their containment systems themselves are quite different. Ofanim — mechanized cavalry, a relatively new tool in Aunic combat doctrine, developed following observation of and encounters with Cornucopian and Union Lancer corps in the Second Cornucopian Civil War, circa 4700. Despite the novelty of the platform, adoption of chassis/shell systems has moved quickly, as has the general skill and veterancy of their Ofanim pilot divisions. This is due in large part to existing structures of the Ecumenical military, namely the extant structure, training, and cultivation of the Chosen of Aun, a caste of military nobility well suited to prestige combat.

Religion

The Aunic faith has been tested twice: first when they arrived at the New World, and then again when Metat manifested itself. It was a shipboard faith, created to give purpose to the medial generations of colonists aboard the generation ship ​Armstrong​ as they crossed the void of space.
Arising from the desperate conditions and existential worry of the third and fourth generations aboard the ​Armstrong​, The Path laid out a story of exodus, redemption, and salvation; after multiple tests -- The Great Crises -- the prevailing Aunic dogma teaches that the modern era is once more an age of miracles, backed by the wonders worked by Metat Aun. The Book of the Ascendant Path is the new faith text, replacing the Ecumene’s Book of The Path after the schism.
The Aunic people’s first contact with early Union colonists on the world that would become Aun’Ist caused many to turn from the faith, and the rest to turn their faith inwards. Following the establishment of the Ecumene, the Aun named the Book of The Path as their holy text, but the fervent adherence their people held to the faith never really came back.
It took the arrival of Metat Aun to rekindle the widespread, fervent, and total adoption of the Path among the majority of the Aunic peoples. In the darkness of their people’s wander, a herald arrived above their capital city on their capital world; on the eleventh day after its arrival, it “spoke” to the Aunic people, manifesting a voiceless speech in the subjectivity of the Aunic people across all Aunic space.
Metat cast to the Aun a vision of their people in glory, once more upon the Path. When it fell silent, the Ecumene was reinvigorated, and work began on a massive undertaking: attain that glory, and walk the Path once more.

Founding Date

1998

Type

Geopolitical, Theocracy

Alternative Names

The Aun, Aunic Peoples, Aunic Ecumene

Demonym

Aunic

Head of State

MONIST-2

Head of Government

Os

Government System

Theocracy

Power Structure

Unitary state

Economic System

Command/Planned economy

Divines

• MONIST-2

Controlled Territories

• Aun'Ist

Neighboring Nations

• Union