The Fall of the Gith-Tarr
His memories of the incident are scattered.
Alarms blaring, people screaming. Tentacles. An outstretched hand just out of reach, a cry for his sister - chaos, and then cold as the escape pod placed him into stasis. For many rotations, he drifted, unconscious and unaware, before a scouting vessel found him, and only him.
When he awoke, the scouts had brought him to Alfheim, home of the resistance. Almost immediately, he asked of survivors, only to be met with apologies. He asked of his sister, and they had not found her. He came to a natural conclusion, the only logical one - the Flayers had taken the rest. The boy’s rage burned within him, and fueled his recovery until he was well enough to fight.
He asked to enlist in the resistance, and they accepted him with open arms. In his training he was fierce, and his skill attracted the attention of Aventus, the Grand Commander. Aventus took the boy under his wing, and helped him blossom into a ferocious warrior. With his training complete, the boy took an oath of vengeance against the Flayers, and chose the title of Ki the Butcher. He would fight in memory of the colony ship Gith-Tarr, and avenge the death of his sister by wiping every last Il'ith from the sky.
Her memories of the incident are unclear.
There was a crowd, and they were all running.
There was a crowd, and they were afraid of Something. Something that had taken their home.
She was lost in the crowd. Her brother had been dragged away from her grasping hand, and she was alone. Alone, and being pushed through the halls of her home by a flood of people. She remembers crying, and then.... cold.
Hours later, she stumbles out of a cryosleep pod, small and alone on a world she does not know. The sky above is full of stars, and some of them are falling. She doubts that it’s a meteor shower.
Over the next few rotations, she does her best to survive. She learns how vicious the local beasts are, as well as how to avoid them. A few more rotations, and she learns how to hunt them. She makes the planet and its resources her own, and eventually she finds her way to one of the fallen stars. In its charred crater, she finds a cryosleep pod, much like her own. This one, however, is still closed. Hopeful to find another survivor, she pries it open to find.... a charred corpse.
For orbits, she travels the surface of the planet, looking for others. Each time, she finds the same thing. The heat shielding on the cryo pods was never meant to withstand re-entry in an atmosphere this thick - she had been lucky that hers had held. She makes the most of what she finds, cannibalizing the components of the pods to form armor and weapons. As she travels, she begins to think of herself as a Quaggoth Storyteller, surviving as the lone memory of her home. She will survive. Someone has to.
By the time she is found, she has forgotten the name that she arrived with. She is known to her rescuers as Elegie of the Gith-Tarr, in the brief moments before she commandeers their vessel for herself and leaves them behind.