The Cataclysm To Come

By the 31st century humanity had been revelling in a post-Singularity Golden Age, dominated by the transhuman empire of the Ascendants. Even in the most inhospitable parts of the solar system there was colonies and as a species humankind had split into numerous human, parahuman and transhuman cultures. The Ascendants had overcome many of the inherent problems of life beyond Earth and achieved a post-scarcity society where all wants were catered for.

Therein lay the problem. For the Ascendants had reached a point where there were no more problems to overcome save for the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of achieving faster than light travel. The Ascendant nobility began to overindulge in every vice, or conduct brutal wargames between one another using armies of clones. A craze of body modification erupted, seeing many Ascendants transforming their bodies in excessively wild ways in an ever desperate game of one upmanship. And others began to dabble in esoteric arts, creating cults in worship of long forgotten or often completely made up Gods.

As their grip on power began to slacken, the other cultures of the Sol System began to take notice. Long suppressed rivalries returned and many took the opportunity to expand their territories leading to numerous border skirmishes. And still, the Ascendants paid no heed.

But, not all the Ascendants were ignorant. One minor House, Leonaris, took notice. Under the rulership of Baron Gabriel Leonaris this otherwise insignificant House had long stood apart from their kin and had began to prepare for what they saw as the inevitable collapse of the Ascendant Empire and a long and terrible Dark Age. The Baron Leonaris consulted with their House AI's who ran billions of simulations based on existing data and predictions and always the answer was the same. That within the next fifty years the Ascendant Empire was going to tear itself apart, that a terrible war would ensue that would see billions of lives lost, centuries of knowledge and progress destroyed and the very likely end of baseline humanity as a species.

They called this the Cataclysm.

The Baron Leonaris and his House took advantage of their kin looking down upon them and kept their plans secret. Slowly the entire House left their holdings within the inner system and relocated to a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt called Nibiru. This would provide them a sanctuary that was ideally placed to avoid the chaos to come as well as providing the resources they would need. A colony was created beneath the surface of the dwarf planet to house the ten thousand of loyal Leonaris' serfs, soldiers and the noble family itself.

Their plan was simple. House Leonaris would go into stasis for a minimum of five centuries, the time according to the predictive engines that would see a new status quo descend after centuries of chaos. Whilst they did not know what they would face, their technology and knowledge would be intact and that should give them an edge against what they would discover. They were overseen by numerous Robots who would maintain the colony and monitor events across the system. If they deemed it necessary they would awaken the Baron and his Council in event of problems or the extension of their stasis. Once the solar system was deemed relatively stable and conditions were ideal House Leonaris would awaken fully to rebuild, using the technology they possessed that would likely be far more advanced to what was available to others.

And so it was on the eve of the 32nd century House Leonaris went into stasis, sealed within the cryo-chambers deep within Nibiru with the Robots serving as ageless sentinels, watching over their wards and monitoring the Sol System.

It would be nearly seven centuries before conditions were considered suitable for the full reawakening of House Leonaris, and in truth even the most wild predictions did come to close to the chaos that had ensued during their slumber. Technology had regressed centuries, their Ascendant kin were gone or become so alien they were unrecognisable, baseline humans were an endangered species and countless parahuman and transhuman polities were vying for dominion over a broken and battered solar system.

Faced with this, Baron Leonaris declared they would build a new empire from the ruins of the old. House Leonaris would bring light to the darkness and forge a brighter future for all.

So began the Unification Crusade.