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Vanir

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The Vanir were an enigmatic and cantankerous species that became extinct approximately 45 000 years ago.

Species 5146_ADAM: UNCATALOGUED

Kingdom – Animalia

Phylum - Chordata

Superclass – Nisenecta

Class – Superuacanea

Order – Atlasidae

Family – Ymiriae

Genus – Ullerus

Species – Vaniria

Vanir bow to no adversary. With the clamour of anvils and the thunder of guns, we rip each day from life's teeth. Our strength will shake the foundations of the world.

Appearance

Weighing in at roughly one ton with armour, a Vanir would typically grow to stand approximately eight to ten feet tall with a proportionally large build and have mottled, pale green-grey or blue-grey skin, with rusty red and brown skin seen abnormally. The Vanir had flat, thick, layered-looking faces. Tentacle like appendages sprouted from their skulls and much of their body. Similar in texture as the rest of their skin, the tendrils may be darker coloured than the rest of the body. It was not uncommon to see Vanir with ritual scarring, tattoos or woad paint.

Biology

Natural-selection played an important part in the evolution of the Vanir. Exaggerated predatory features were prominent - including forward facing small but alert eyes equipped with tapeta lucida, causing them to appear to shine in the dark and allowing low-light visibility. During the day however a protective layer of film would cover the eyes to protect from snow blindness, making their eyes appear grey and foggy in well-lit areas, limiting their ability to see during the day. As dedicated carnivores, the teeth were pronounced and sharp, with several additional sets of canines to better allow the consumption of meat. The Vanir endoskeletal bones were composed heavily of carbon and don’t seem to be affected by calcification, making the bones 5-6 times denser and 10-12 times heavier than human bones, and rendering them much darker in colour. Likewise, Vanir blood is black in colour due to very high iron and bile concentrations. Thick leathery skin insulated them from the cold, and multiple instances of major organs contribute to their above-average physical hardiness. For example, a Vanir has two hearts, four lungs, and two livers. The combination of prismatic muscle fibers and an exaggerated percentage of muscle tissue per kg of body weight made the Vanir exceptionally strong, even for creatures of their size.

The Vanir’s respiratory system was specifically adapted to warm air before it enters the body, with cold air being absorbed through spiracles on the nose. Normally hidden behind layers of muscle on the face, the spiracles appear pink and raw and can be revealed if the nasal muscles are flared, making the face appear striped with dark, exposed flesh. The fleshy growths colloquially called “dreadlocks” are an evolutionary holdover that may have once served to aid the respiratory and circulatory system with temperature regulation, but serve no modern biological purpose.

Vanir reproductive organs are almost identical between the two sexes. Twin aedeagus-like organs are present at the base of the spine inside the body, above the cloaca. During copulation the male and female Vanir remain back-to-back, the aedeagi emerging and wrapping around each other, and the male’s transfer spermatophores containing genetic material and nutrients to the female’s. This process is not pleasurable for either party, a trait adapted alongside back-to-back mating to allow reproduction to be completed quickly and safely. Female Vanir typically birth 2-3 pups at a time, after a gestation period of approximately nine years. They nurse by suckling, and females had four breasts. The “milk” was at least twice as nutrient rich as a human’s, and was so fatty it had the consistency of toothpaste. This was necessary as a source of fuel for Vanir pups, which are already highly developed upon being born and need to grow at an excessive pace. They are able to walk and run only hours after birth, and after barely five months can feed themselves and are developmental equivalent of a human four year old. They continue to age rapidly for another six to eight years until their growth dramatically slows, remaining a late teenager until they reach sexual maturity at approximately one hundred and fifty years of age.

Vanir, like all other Nisenectae, had unique cellular makeup to combat the inbound solar radiation, which had interesting biological effects; like the hydra of Earth, Vanir had no post-mitotic cells in their bodies, and could maintain telomere lengths indefinitely. The fact that all cells continually divide allowed for toxins and radiation to be diluted and purged. Combined, these factors caused Vanir to not undergo senescence. Instead, a Vanir’s lifespan could be directly attributed to how much radiation he/she was exposed to during their life, and any Vanir living in a radiation rich environment (such as space) could expect to live for several centuries to over a thousand years. In an environment with little radiation exposure, a Vanir’s natural life may not be measurable, essentially making them biologically immortal. Unfortunately, cellular diseases like cancer or sickle cell had a significantly increased risk of developing over other sapient life forms at the time. Also, brain cells divided much more slowly, and mental degradation would set in for Vanir as they became older. Brain cell degradation effectively put a soft-cap on the Vanir lifetime, becoming noticeable around two thousand years of age, then rapidly accelerating and rendering a Vanir’s mind animalistic within the next hundred. Most, however, do not reach this age due to the rigors of their lifestyle.

Homeworld

The Vanir came from a planet called Vanahrûk within the Tengri’s Cradle star cluster, an inaccessible region locked behind the Aldeigju gate and identifiable from afar by the nearby brown and gold nebula of the same name. Orbiting the star Jggdrotdil along with seven other worlds, the planet is cold; blanketed by jagged mountains, alpine and arctic tundra, and misty forests of huge, spidery, lichen-like vegetation. Vanahrûk has a metal-poor core and thus generates a weak magnetic field letting in more solar radiation. While far away enough from the star that the planet is on average quite frigid, this means that background radiation on the planet is much higher than on garden worlds more attractive to colonization, and long-term exposure has forced the native fauna to evolve methods of countering the heightened background radiation.

A significant portion of the native wildlife exhibits predatory behaviour to compensate for scarce resources, and many grow to be larger than most space faring species. This deadly combination of temperature, radiation and overabundance of vicious fauna makes Vanahrûk exceptionally difficult to explore with a significant degree of detail. Still, the Vanir not only managed to survive this unforgiving home, but thrived in it.

The Vanir packs shared the planet with several other species with varying levels of sapience related closely to their own: such as the Jotr (Gigantes Rimthurse, G. Collisi), Tror (Troglodytes Antruma, T. Siluastis), and Gobr (Cobalus Vetennes). Vanahrûk possesses several large complexes of progenitor ruins, most of them now preserved underground or buried under kilometers of ice. With cavernous open expanses, these compounds seem to have once served as shipyards or dry docks.

Culture and Government

Contact with true Vanir culture occurred very rarely if not never, the only contact usually made being from raiding parties. No vessels have ever returned from the spacegate leading to Tengri’s Cradle. They were very well known as the most dangerous threat to beings for some distance beyond it. Even after their complete defeat, exploration of Tengri’s Cradle was never possible.

Living in exceptionally large starships, the nomadic Vanir Packs would travel for years searching for raw materials and wealth, usually obtained through raids and plundering. A wandering pack was entirely independent, the construction and harvesting capabilities of their ships allowing them to live almost completely self sufficient lives in space. While the packs would usually remain independent from one another, it was not unheard of for one or more to form a larger force in order to attack targets too well defended for a single one to manage. While large and populous in their own right, the majority of Vanir resided within the systems locked inside the Cradle aboard space stations or the hundreds of thousands of ships amassed within their sanctum. With Tengri’s Cradle locked away in the already isolated Fringe, these nomadic warriors were rarely encountered in heavily civilized areas until other cultures began to expand in their direction and sparked the Vanir Wars.

A semi-nomadic and tribal race since before their recorded history, The Vanir lived in tightly-knit packs, these packs may have once been small groups consisting of a few families, but by the space age the smallest consisted of hundreds of thousands of individuals. These packs together formed a greater, fission-fusion pack, called the “Gurhrûk” which translates roughly to “Universal” or “One” Pack. The governing structures of these packs were tribal and stratocratic, with the state and military being effectively the same entity, with little to no importance placed on birthplace or citizenship. These packs were mainly independent from each other, but historically would – if called upon – recognize a global commander named and titled Ûrduarr. The ownership of such an important position was determined unceremoniously, largely being determined by popular support and positive leadership experience. The Ûrduarr and it’s position would be challenged often, but individuals capable of obtaining the rank were few and far in between. The colloquial, all-encompassing term for rank-and-file Vanir themselves was Ulfsark, with those who have earned distinction being defined as Orlok, and were tasked with small scale leadership within a pack. Above them were the Uar, the smartest and strongest among a pack leading via consensus. Beyond those few, societal rank was unofficially determined by merit and experience.

The Vanir’s frequent incursions into sovereign space and raids on colonies were often misinterpreted as a method of quenching an innate sense of bloodlust. Truthfully, sources of building materials and rich mineral wealth were few and far between in the spaces the Vanir inhabited, so they needed to look elsewhere to fuel their needs, meaning Packs were primarily out to plunder worlds for resources and materials, to build and repair ships and feed themselves. This is not to say that Vanir raids were not violent or damaging however – those that defended themselves were statistically met with overwhelming force - though the Vanir were averse to leaving orphans, adopting them into their system of living, becoming part of the extended family of the pack. Beings taken in this fashion were usually referred to as tharks, though were considered Vanir in their own right and received the same equal respect as any other member of a pack. The longer a thark was part of the pack, the more Vanir-like their demeanor would become. Before the First Vanir War most tharks were taken while still very young, allowing them adapt and accept their new way of life smoothly and without complications.

After the wars began however, the number of tharks exploded to outnumber the Vanir themselves by millions, as entire colonies were indoctrinated into the Vanir’s growing horde. While those previously in poor positions were more accepting of this change because of the equality that tharks experience alongside biological Vanir, there was always an unavoidable degree of animosity towards the invaders. Efficiently, albeit cruelly, new tharks that refused to accept or defied their new situation were made to fight in the frontlines. The chaos of war alongside the hysteria of being treated as an irredeemable foe by their former allies forced the traumatic bonding of the tharks to the Vanir, the shell-shocked victims eventually breaking down and becoming supportive of their captors.

In direct opposition to their infamy as a ruthless enemy, Vanir cherished family and by extension their pack adamantly. The definition of offspring or parent is more determined by relationship than birth. This became more and more important as the Vanir wars grew longer, as the number of Vanir swelled with other species well outnumbering their own. The probable earliest example of other species being assimilated into the pack was with the vargr, an animal species native to Vanahrûk. Bulky, bear-like and cunningly intelligent, vargr were also pack animals, and have been a part of Vanir society since long before it was being recorded. Importantly, the relationship between the two species is not akin to domestication – instead being symbiotic in the extreme, with both being intrinsically tied to each other after thousands of years of cooperation. Vanir and vargr young were raised communally by both members of the species, and even the Vanir’s most common languages could be rudimentarily understood by vargr, and to an extent even spoken as most dialects evolved around the inclusion of the species.

The Vanir held little to no distinction between female or male members of their society. With traditionally little resources to utilize – including lives - alongside a familial pack-mentality meant that Vanir shared between themselves more. When both sexes have to contribute in equal amounts for the social order to survive there tends to be less patriarchal or matriarchal dominance. This is especially true to the Vanir, for which this is such an extreme that they view each other almost androgynously. Most dialects even forego the presence of a true pronoun, instead being applied by context.

Similarly, civilian and military personnel are not mutually exclusive in Vanir society, and neither term should be used to describe them. All members of a pack were taught how to fight early in life, both through tutoring and naturally by living aboard raiding ships. Even traditionally non-combat personnel like engineering crews, cooks, teachers and doctors were capable of contributing to combat situations.

The Vanir were extremely talented shipbuilders. Their military technology was overdeveloped to the point that their economic technology was severely lacking, contributing to their need to steal their requirements from others. Progressively minded, it would be much more common to find Vanir scientists focusing the majority of their time researching exploration and starship technologies or weapon construction than more frivolous pursuits which could just be ransacked on a raid.

A unique aspect of the Vanir’s culture was their music; in that lyric was never a true proponent to a song. Instead, singers would improvise according to the melody of a song with shouts, grunts or other sounds, using the voice as another instrument to compliment a tune rather than be used a storytelling component. Multiple singers would result in a strange and boisterous chorus, completely uncoordinated with each other but still carried by a song’s melody to create a turbulent but recognizable flow.

Vanir that chose to take up living outside the hordes or in the cradle were rare, but were not considered deserters by the rest of their kind as there was no obligation to stay. Most of these Vanir find work as engineers or mercenaries of one kind or another, though rarely welcomed as productive members of society due to the infamy of the Packs, if they could get near it at all. After the first Vanir War, Vanir outside a Pack or the cradle became much more common, although still an unusual sight as the total population of true, biological Vanir never peaked beyond 2 billion, most of the technical Vanir number consisted of tharks.

War Doctrine

With survival and raiding being concepts so closely intertwined in Vanir culture, the Vanir Packs fought like they lived. While large and strong, the Vanir were not particularly gifted of either compared to the other fauna of Vanahrûk. Thus, the Vanir are uncharacteristically crafty for beings of their demeanor; traditional Vanir tactics favoured ambushes, flanking and traps whenever possible. When it wasn’t, shock-and-awe warfare that exploited their advantages and powerful formations were a default, designed to destroy foes with single blows of overwhelming strength. Vanir Ulfsarks were not spit-and-polish by any means, but being well equipped and prepared for unpredictable dangerous combat situations was a norm, with extra ammunition, weapons and tools carried, and more to replace them.

On the ground, an Ulfsark was a match for a dozen regular soldiers. They were brutal and callous, but methodical enough to not allow formations to break. Vanir equipment was rugged, and while there was no standardized combat uniform, peripheral weapons were often incorporated into suits. The largest fission-powered combat exoskeletons often possessed shoulder-mounted mortars or grenade launchers, and single-use shotguns firing oversized flechettes mounted on forearms were common for use in emergencies. Like on their starships, Mass Drivers took the form of most firearms for troops, often miniaturized for tharks, while the Vanir could utilize larger permutations. The vast majority of the Vanir’s forces consisted of tharks, either used as auxiliary units to reinforce or support armor and shock troops, or more commonly as a vanguard force alongside other Vanir. These forces were almost never alone and even more often blessed with vehicular assistance. The Packs possessed an array of different gunships, skiffs, tanks and FAVs for ground support, almost always utilizing gravlifts for greater speed, manoeuvrability and terrain control.

While Vanir ground forces were effective enough to combat their most common foes in the Amswyyd Imperium and Tarban Second Empire, their greatest strength and truest advantage was their navy. Vanir technology had a haphazard design philosophy and many ships appeared ramshackle and crude. Yet, these asymmetrical ships were primarily focused on versatility, and depending on its outfitting, a Vanir ship could outperform any other of the same class in manoeuvrability, durability, or firepower, though not all of them at once. This unpredictability meant engaging a Vanir ship was a virtual guessing game as to how to combat it, and when fighting multiple enemies - as a pack would often force a foe to do – an opponent would become completely overwhelmed. While the bulk of the Vanir’s naval power came from their own ships, their forces put more effort than most in the capture of opposing hardware, and the refitting of captured civilian vessels into combat-capable craft. Engineers adept at salvaging could refit or repair captured vessels for a fraction of the cost of constructing one of their own, granting large buffer fleets of heterogeneous craft to compliment and add manoeuvring power to fleets of bulkier ships-of-the-line.

A key strategic element that contributed to the Vanir’s success in war was extensive use of technologies that allowed them to control the movement of battles much more directly than their opponents. These technologies took the form of interdiction fields and – uniquely to them – grappling torpedoes. Interdictive technology was by no means new, especially for the Vanir, having used both deployable and ship-mounted gravity well generators to create interdiction bubbles to trap and ambush passing ships. The use of these generators in pitched engagements however was long believed to be of questionable benefit as they ran the risk of preventing one’s own retreat, especially when a spacegate blockade could also fulfill the role of trapping an enemy force in a single location. The Vanir bypassed these concerns though by learning to utilize interdiction bubbles more indirectly. By using support craft to deploy bubbles around and engagement zone during combat along trajectories that would likely be traveled by reinforcing ships the Vanir could significantly delay the arrival of anything on it’s way to provide support, being forced to navigate through or around an interdictive field at sublight speed before reaching their target – often allowing marauding Vanir hours of extra time to capture or destroy important enemy assets. Far more unique to them though were grappling torpedoes – a technology of their own design, colloquially known as harpoons. An otherwise simplistic missile system designed to lodge itself in a target’s hull, grappling torpedoes were further connected to their launchers via a gravitational tethering beam, contained within an electromagnetic field and derived from the same technology that produced gravity wells for the purpose of interdiction. With a torpedo buried in the hull of a ship, it could be effectively pulled, dragged or even thrown around by the launching ship using it’s own mass. With enough inertia, the tether could even cause structural damage and kill crew with the extreme g forces. these weapons were most commonly used however to control the combat ranges and flight paths of enemy ships, and six of every ten Vanir ships the size of a cruiser or larger were equipped with one or more harpoons.

Most importantly, unlike the other extant races at the time – who made almost exclusive use of directed energy weapons -The Vanir by contrast made heavy use of projectile weapons, a factor that caught their opponents off guard on the onset of their wars. The powers that were had been developing and focusing on energy-based weapons for an exceptionally long time, and had long ago surpassing the level of effectiveness their ballistics technology could achieve. Likewise, when designing defensive technologies, it was largely assumed that an opponent would be attacking with similar weapons, and thus became specialized to counter directed-energy emissions. The Vanir’s projectile weaponry was more advanced than their foes’, and often equipped with EMP slugs to punch through strong shields, making the Vanir’s arsenal devastatingly effective against the overspecialized technology of their enemies until they began to adapt. Multifaceted Mass Drivers were a mainstay on the majority of their ships, capable of fielding a variety of different ammunitions, often complimented by various ballistic missiles and torpedoes. As their wars progressed, Vanir technologies became focused on countering opponents reliant on energy projection and minimizing their own weaknesses to such tactics; fission reactors, expulsive plasma engines, tungsten carbide composite armour plating and LADAR sensors chief among these, becoming practically standardized in their ships later in the war.

Religion

Vanir religious beliefs were largely varied in their pre-history due to the fragmentation and separation of different packs, fueling the birth of wildly different myths and legends.

By the time the Vanir were first utilizing telescopes, The most widespread creation story was that of the Ûlgkrom (Sky-King) Jmir, who is said to have come down to the land (Arldeim) from the night sky after being wounded in a battle, it was found by a she-vargr and nursed back to health. The Ûlgkrom subsequently impregnated the vargr, which gave birth to the first Vanir. Jmir’s wounds were too great to allow it to return to the sky however and it stayed there for the remainder of it’s life, battling with mythic beasts and eating the greatest boulders. It also impregnated a Hraudr, which gave birth to the Jotr. When the Jotr terrorized the Vanir, the Vanir lashed out and killed the Ûlgkrom. The giant corpse of Jmir decayed, and from it’s rot came the great maggots that grew into the small and ghoulish the Gobir, who retreated into the foulest depths below the mountains. Meanwhile, the huge stones Jmir ate broke apart in it’s gut, becoming the very first Tror, ponderous and slow, who hid in the deepest woods where nobody could find them.

Despite the veritable plethora of myths and legends each pack contributed to their society, this tale seems to have had the most impact. Seemingly influencing the willingness of the Vanir to accept anthropomorphic gods, the Vanir have avoided deifying their environment, instead treating it with a cautious suspicion. While this myth and many others are still known of by the Vanir thousands of years later, an innate mistrust of the supernatural and elements otherwise not fully understood has rendered the Vanir as an exceptionally superstitious people. These reservations are more likely intrinsically related to a heightened survival instinct rather than a religious stigma, as much of their innate superstition is directed towards their homeworld, a place which few Vanir resided once stellar operations became commonplace. The Ûlgkrom myth however has managed to live on in that “Jmir” will be occasionally used as a cuss or as an analogue to “oh my god”.

Rather than a more clear-cut dogma or code, the Vanir religious philosophy promotes personal excellence over that of another, and brings with it an almost intimate tie to their familial Pack unit. Far more common than the use of “Jmir” is reverential reference to the pack, spoken like it was an entity that all it’s members were a part of.

While respect for the pack is paramount to the Vanir philosophy, their other beliefs are more akin to ancestor worship. Vanir who lead a strong, productive and noble life are said to strengthen the pack when they die, those who act ignoble would weaken the pack and are therefore disgraced and rejected by it entirely. These beliefs took off mostly during and after the beginning of the Vanir industrial revolution, and exploded with the discovery of space travel.

Vanir packs did have analogues to shamans. More akin to a witch doctor in practice, Vanir shamans served as a preserver of a Pack’s traditions, rites and culture. Everything the Vanir were at their core was what the shaman was supposed represent, a proverbial safeguard to prevent them from ever losing their way. Shamans were among the most respected members of a pack, the difficulty of becoming one being no small part of that reverence. In addition to learning under another shaman, one must survive alone in the wilderness for a full year, a task begun with no tools, weapons or clothes. Those who returned did so with a newfound primal instinct and cunning, a defining characteristic of Vanir shamans. During the First Vanir War, they acted as advisors to Ûrduarr.

One of the few permanent structures the Vanir constructed on their homeworld were barrows, large, underground complexes of tunnels and burial chambers. Before the advent of industrial technology, each pack built and managed their own barrow for the disposal of the dead, and every member of the pack - once killed - would be placed in the same barrow. Above ground, Vanir barrows appeared humble in scale, usually little more than an entrance or pit constructed with gathered stone. Beneath the surface was a different story, stretching for kilometers deep beneath, with hundreds of chambers for housing corpses or traps for discouraging invaders.

The responsibility of maintaining the barrow usually fell upon a shaman, who may even stay behind to manage the barrow when the pack moves off to another area. The nomadic packs would traditionally not venture more than a week’s distance from their associated barrow for ease of disposing of the dead. If a pack member died while away from it, the body would be transported back along with a sizable escort.

As more advanced technologies became available to the Vanir, the tradition of maintaining a barrow became more and more obscure until most were abandoned entirely. Incidentally the Vanir also became progressively more superstitious, and the old barrows began to be regarded as haunted. Filled with traps whose knowledge of was lost, the dead were usually burned as barrows were considered too dangerous to enter.

History

Details of Vanir history are sketchy at best, and it is unsure of when recorded history comes into place. It is known that up to a medieval level of technology they lived as segregated, semi-nomadic packs, wandering the woods and mountains of their home to survive. Packs would raid each other for plunder and access to resources.

Deep in Vanahruk’s ancient history, the various cultures of Vanir packs were not the only civilization of their kind to inhabit the planet. The Aenir, whether a separate subspecies, ethnicity or culture in it’s entirety, it cannot be said. The Aenir were the cultural antithesis to the wandering steppe packs of the Vanir. Aenir as a whole regarded their Vanir cousins with contempt, looking down on them as a race of paranoid savages. In addition, as the Jotr grew more intelligent, confident and therefore aggressive, their expansion deeper into the warmer areas where the Vanir originated threatened their smaller relative’s survival as a species. Late in this period a Vanir named Vodn emerged; exiled from his own pack and a progressive thinker, he became a reluctant warlord and united many Packs under a promise to crush the Jotr and send them back to the wastelands. Normally unaccustomed to working together, the Vanir had engaged in on-and-off internecine warfare for ages. Vodn’s army had started with the Nokkors, the steppe-based pack that took him in after his exile, and renowned vargr-riders. Already a fearsome pack of infamous warriors, the dozen or so packs that would gather together to fight the Jotr would include the shipbuilding crab people, the blackfaces who were at the forefront of developing and weaponizing gunpowder, and the Mat Matnar berserkers of the forest. Combined, this force not only managed to repel Jotr living on the planet’s temperate band, but almost exterminated the population that had moved out of the frozen wastes. Those Jotr that survived were forced back to the frigid margins and inhospitable mountains. Here the Jotr would remain for thousands of years until the Vanir left the planet, their growing intelligence becoming stunted, what ability they had to craft stone tools degraded into the simple use of branches and logs. For the Vanir of Vodn’s great pack the world was now theirs and lost it’s old name, being given the moniker Vanahrûk, the realm of the Vanir Packs.

The great pack’s alliance did not end with the threat of the Jotr however. Recognizing the strength they possessed when working together, Vodn and his packs agreed that the Vanir needed and deserved greatness, and that segregation and war amongst themselves could never be allowed to bring their kind so close to destruction again. In the following decades, the great Gurhrûk fission-fusion pack would advance to bring as many Vanir packs into their fold as they could. Thousands of packs were incorporated, and many destroyed as they success inspired others to work together and challenge them, but Vodn’s skill as a commander carried the Gurhrûk further than all the others, Himself abandoning his birthname to become known as Ûrduarr, the one master. The Gurhrûk grew from a warband into an army, then a nation and finally a planet-wide authority. But there was still the Aenir, who harassed and terrorized the nomads before bastioning inside their great walled cities. Their arrogance would bring about their doom, as the Gurhrûk in full came crashing against them. When winter came with cold unseen for centuries, the sea froze over, and the Gurhrûk crossed over the pack ice into the islands homes of the Aenir shipbuilder clans where they were slaughtered and assimilated. Combining the engineering skill of the absorbed shipbuilders and their own growing mastery of gunpowder, the might of the Gurhrûk came crashing down on the Aenir in the form of mighty machines of war; ironclad ships to blockade their ports and rifled guns to topple their walls. City by sacked city, the Aenir were all but annihilated, the surivivors absorbed into the horde like their islander cousins.With the power of his people behind him, Ûrduarr commanded the excavation and clearing of the great progenitor shipyard in the mountains, it’s vast halls below the cliffs rid of monsters. Built like a fortress, this new city of Jalverk was named the capital of all Vanir, the first and largest permanent Vanir settlement on Vanahrûk of all time. While the nomadic way of life for the Packs would go relatively unchanged, they now lived in an era of unprecedented peace between the most powerful packs on the planet and had access to a multicultural center of prosperity. Only outliers remained to resist the power of the Gurhrûk. Even upon the death of the Ûrduarr, the name became a title and the Gurhrûk pack remained united and strong under generations of Ûrduarr after the first, chosen from the greatest strategic minds and arms among them.

The industrial revolution of the Vanir followed not soon after. Already experienced with the use of gunpowder, the invention of the internal combustion engine and the construction of the first motorized vehicles allowed nomads to live much more easily. Production of metal skyrocketed to create massive mobile fortresses and homes carried across the tundra on gigantic treaded wheels. Massive technological advancement finally gave the Vanir an edge over the huge, aggressive fauna they were surrounded by. The leading cause of death among them was no longer being killed by predators, instead death by gunshot.

Vanir cities and towns never developed to a grand scale like many other cultures, as they remained wanderers up until their achieving of spaceflight. As their homes’ treads became gravlifts and weapons went from rifles to mass drivers, a hunger for new spaces forced the Vanir off their homeworld for the first time. As if the entire species felt the need to expand, and as their space habitation technology became more advanced, more and more packs made the jump into space until few Gurhrûk packs were left on Vanahrûk, instead living in some of the largest space stations ever constructed, which in turn built ships to carry the Vanir further and further away from their beginnings.

The Vanir’s avaricious exploration drove them to completely explore and colonize their home system in little more than a decade, and upon developing FLT technology and discovering the functions of spacegates established a presence in two more systems within the next hundred. Upon reaching the Aldeigju gate at the edge of Tengri’s Cradle, the Vanir perhaps had overextended their reach and put strain on the few resourcing operations they commanded, or perhaps became fearful of possible alien encounters and wished to maintain a strong defensive position; Regardless of the truth, the Vanir’s rapid expansion and occupation of Tengri’s Cradle did not extend to the systems outside of it. Instead, rapacious packs began to probe the space outside their designated home, seemingly at random in search of riches and natural resources.

First contact with the Vanir took the form of a skirmish between a Pack and a Tarban patrol fleet out of a staging area, responding to an increase in distress calls. While this was the first time an encounter with the Vanir was recorded, it is unlikely that it was simultaneously the first time that the Vanir had encountered someone else. Immediately upon detecting the Vanir, the Tarban were set upon before they could even send a transmission. Few Tarban vessels managed to escape the attack, with those that did managing to limp back to their staging area. When the Tarban commanders realized what had happened, every available ship was gathered to launch a counterattack against the unknown alien force. It was several days before the fleet found the Vanir pack, having obviously been in several more fights, and were instantly attacked by the much larger Tarban fleet. While the Pack in question managed to flee back through the Aldeigju gate, the Tarban fleet broke off pursuit and returned home, where the Emperor of the Tarbani Second Empire promised and end to the Vanir, and commissioned a force of twelve fleets to invade the Fringe and wipe them out. Upon deployment this fleet never returned and was never heard from again. The shame of this defeat forced the Tarban to pull focus away from the Vanir, an act that in turn allowed the Vanir to re-emerge and pillage almost uncontested across the outskirts of empire space.

The Vanir’s raids slowly escalated over many years, causing strain on colonization efforts in the null regions for powers that refused to acknowledge they existed. Meanwhile, for the stranded colonists and independent settlements, Vanir attacks became a constant part of life and omnipresent threat to travellers. The further away from the borders of civilization, the more real the danger became. Vanir raids brought the hardship of colony life to new extremes for all within their range, but none more so than perhaps the Aen Cí. These Cí - who had been living relatively peacefully in the Null Regions before the arrival of the Vanir – lived simplistically in small communities of other Aen Cí spread all across these sectors of space, with the long-term goal of preserving their ancient culture, which they feared would become diluted especially so long after their own empire had disappeared, and surrounded by aliens.

To the Vanir, the Aen Cí were easy targets, simplistic living making them poorly defended and rewarding thanks to stockpiled ancient Cí relics, which could be traded for valuable materials. Aen Ci colonies became regular targets for raids, the Aen Cí practically trapped in their settlements, unable to flee the null regions for risk of being hit even harder by the Vanir in space. As Vanir marauders became more bold, the Aen Cí were forced to live under the constant threat of attack, that on any day their homes may burn and them be taken to become tharks like thousands of other Cí.

The political situation of the major powers at the time could not have been more perfect for the Vanir. The Amswyyd Imperium and Tarban Second Empire that had tolerated each other for millennia were losing patience with each other, and the Andarim’s uneasy ceasefire with the latter was tested by their recent losses. The Provig meanwhile were attempting to capitalize on the uneasy situation. All were much too distracted with legitimately more immediate matters to afford dealing with the Vanir raiders that were marauding their own colonies beyond their borders. Ultimately, this turmoil would be the beginning of a series of long and terrible wars that end in tragedy for every party involved.

But as years of Vanir depredation turned into decades, and then centuries with little to stop them, the Packs had become practically unchallenged warlords of the null regions and beyond. Perhaps the Vanir learned of the unrest plaguing the galaxy beyond them, or maybe the Ûrduarr had been gifted with visions of conquest, we may never know. After decades of stockpiling ships, weapons and other assets, the Vanir Packs surged forth from the Fringe, hundreds of thousands of ships in an invasion force to dwarf their taking of Tengri’s Cradle. Before long the Packs attacked and occupied the inhabited systems nearest them, assimilating the populations of entire worlds into tharks. The hundreds of Aen Cí cities disappeared practically overnight, the first to be hit by the Vanir incursion.

Almost before the rest of the galaxy had heard of this, massive Vanir Packs were pushing into the core regions, striking first into Second Empire in Ethereal Ring. The defenders there were barely a match for the sheer number of Vanir ships, let alone their individual combat capability. Most of the fleets capable of properly defending against such an incursion were at the time patrolling the borders of demilitarized zones between the Second Empire and the Imperium and Provig, much too far to be able to respond in time. The Second Empire was not the only nation struck, Vanir Packs pressing against the Imperium in Lemuria and sacking Cor Ansum before they were properly defended against. This first rush was called the First Vanir War, but it was mostly a one-sided bloodbath, with the Vanir advancing far into Amswydd and Tarban within the decade.

The end of the First Vanir War was not so much an end but a lull in pace, the great Vanir hordes had surged forth like a hurricane through the Null regions and were allowed to rampage and cause extreme infrastructural damage throughout the Turan and Etheria Ring, and managed to gain a foothold in the edges of the Silent Expanse before their forces began to be spread too thinly and were properly defended against by a coalition force of Amswydd and Tarban, economically and militarily supported by the Provig in the Great Cascade. It was a dark time for the galaxy, with many nations being forced to unite against the common enemy. Counter offensives went poorly while defensive efforts met with relative success and slowed the Vanir advance to a complete standstill.

For centuries a war of attrition waged along the borders of now controlled Vanir space before the Second Vanir War began. The Vanir had established resourcing operations in Marathon and Savannah, and using wartime assets from plundered worlds and with millions of new tharks the Vanir had bolstered their numbers to staggering degrees. Seemingly without warning, the lines that had held for generations were swiftly broken and the madness began all over again. Before long the Imperuim was pushed out of it’s capital system, and Annwyn was sacked. The Tarban Second Empire had all but fallen, almost the entirety of their holdings destroyed or occupied, their remaining government and military fled their homelands to establish the Tarban Remnant Nation. The Andarim disappeared so quickly after that that it was barely noticed. Soon even the distant Provig would come under fire.

With no visible alternative, the Amswydd Imperium commissioned a project to end the war permanently. While it took some time, time during which the Imperium’s existence became critically threatened, this project bore fruit, a generic virus that exclusively targeted the Vanir, sterilizing them as a species that would cause all births to result in stillborn children. Despite the threat the Vanir posed, the Imperium was not convinced it would be able to end the war and held off deployment of the virus. The Tarban however, jumped at the chance to eradicate their most hated enemy. The Tarban Remnant Nation stole the sterility plague from Imperium labs and worked posthaste to spread it among the Vanir. Already low birth rates meant that it took the Packs some time to realize what was happening, and by the time they did it was already far too late. The plague had spread among the packs and by then permanently altered their genetic code, effectively dooming the species to a slow extinction. The Amswyyd publicly condemned the release of the plague, meanwhile the Tarban were overjoyed at what they believed to be a success that would end the war.

The Vanir race had effectively been killed. Soon there would be no biological Vanir left to continue their invasion. The Gurhrûk, for the first time in thousands of years, fell apart as the Vanir lost sight of their goal. Ûrduarr was no longer an authority over the packs as they began to break apart. Many biological Vanir retreated beyond known space or back into the Fringe, where they likely died off.

However, despite the fact that the Vanir as a species was doomed and their massive campaign effectively lost without a center of command, the invasions were only slowed, not stopped. The indoctrinated tharks of a hundred conquered worlds, now effectively Vanir in their own right, were unaffected by the plague and already outnumbered biological Vanir by billions. What the Amswyyd had foreseen in their refusal to utilize the plague was now coming to pass. The crippled empires of the time came under attack from the great armies of tharks that had joined the Vanir, enraged at the loss of their masters and brothers. These tharks however would never manage to repair the damage done to the Vanir command structure, and were unorganized and erratic. While the war was effectively over, roving packs of vengeful tharks would plague the galaxy for centuries to come. These packs were not bereft of biological Vanir either, but as they became more rare, thark-led packs became more and more common, and Vanir were more often utilized as shock-troopers, built like tanks. As time passed and the Vanir disappeared completely, the thark’s ties to their old culture vanished as well. They stopped travelling to Tengri’s Cradle, and eventually any trace of Vanir traditions were disintegrated and evolved into an entirely new society.

Currently, like the ancient Earth city of Troy, they are only vaguely known of through second-hand sources, their nomadic nature and adaptability directly responsible for this. Because they never established permanent settlements outside the cradle, and how they assimilated tharks as they raided, they left next to no enduring signs of their existence. Scattered references of the Vanir have been recovered at archeological digs across the galaxy, but they number few. The greatest hint of their existence is the accounts of the ages in the Ancestral Library on Belisartha, but with it incomplete and damaged, the Vanir are not even known by name, just as an opposing force behind a series of wars that violently affected galactic society at the time and the first among - and possible catalyst of - a series of cataclysmic events of the largest and long lived empires in history to dust.

Despite the disappearance of the Vanir, Tengri’s Cradle remains inaccessible. While many ships over millennia have tried to pass through the Aldeigju gate and enter the Cradle, none have ever returned. The Aldeigju gate today is surrounded by warning buoys and hazard beacons, advising travelers to stay well away.

Theories abound as to why this is the case, some predict that the recipient gate was sabotaged or tampered with, and some others believe that there is a black hole close to the recipient gate in Aldeigju. Yet more (mostly the impoverished inhabitants of New Makkah) believe that there is an unimaginable paradise on the other side, and those that pass through simply do not wish to return.

On occasion expeditions are organized to plot routes to the cradle using conventional ftl drives. These expeditions have never made it past the planning stages however, as the distance and danger is considerable. It could take several decades to get there, and the journey would pass through many unexplored systems. Until access to Tengri’s Cradle is made possible, the secrets of the Vanir and their presence in history will remain hidden.

Jggdrotdil

0.904 solar masses

KV-Class main sequence

Surface Temp: 5,100K

Maspûl

Orbital distance: 0.41 AU

Orbital Period 0.7 Earth Years

Keplerian Ratio: 0.84

Radius: 72,513 km

Day Length: 19.2 Earth Hours

Surface Temp: 1,300 C

Maspûl is close orbiting brown dwarf of approximately 36 Jupiter-masses. It is young enough that some nuclear fusion still occurs within its depths. It is luminous and radiates more heat than it receives from the star, Yggdrautdil, with an atmospheric temperature in excess of 1,800 degrees Kelvin (1,500 degrees Celsius).

Alfgarmag

Orbital Distance: 0.774 AU

Orbital Period: 2.1 Earth Years

Keplerian Ratio: 1.056

Radius: 6,172 km

Day Length: 53.5 Earth Hours

Surface Temp: 510.1882 C

Surface Gravity: 1.0 g

Mass: 0.929

Alfgarmag has a pressure-cooker atmosphere composed of carbon dioxide and ethane. Its scorching hot surface is mainly composed of sulfur with deposits of gold. Surface gravity is however comfortable at 1.0 standard g's.

Vanahrûk

Orbital Distance: 1.49 AU

Orbital Period: 3.84 Earth Years

Keplerian Ratio: 0.534

Radius: 8,893 km

Day Length: 31.4 Earth Hours

Surface Temp: -6.0291 C

Surface Gravity: 1.24 g

Mass: 2.228 Earth Masses

Hundreds of ancient satellites perpetually circle Vanahruk in low orbit, log ago bereft of power. Hundreds more stations, shipyards and structures of enormous proportion choke the planet’s gravity well. An abnormally large progenitor ruin is presen deep within a mountain range near the equator and appears to have been some form of ancient shipyard. The landscape itself resembles the Pleistocene of Earth with cold dry steppe, mountains, and forests of lichen-like vegetation.

Âs

Orbital Distance: 1.89 AU

Orbital Period: 6.331 Earth years

Keplerian Ratio: 0.7

Radius: 14,502 km

Day Length: 67.7 Earth Hours

Surface Temp: 65.4 C (Day) -72.581 C (Night)

Surface Gravity: 2.5465 g

Mass: 8.3146 Earth Masses

Âs is a Post-Garden world that appears to have once enjoyed an uncannily earth-like oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Exactly what happened to Âs is a mystery, but some form of global extinction wiped out all native life more advanced than zooplankton. During the day the oceans begin to boil, then snap freeze overnight. Violent storm cells blanket the planet, becoming apocalyptic wherever the sun is rising or setting due to the massive temperature differential. Thick rings of minerals orbit the planet, comparatively large, the remnants of a shattered moon.

Jothraug

Orbital Distance: 3.881 AU

Orbital Period: 11.482 Earth Years

Keplerian Ratio: 0.4

Radius: 16,322 km

Day Length: 17.4 Earth Hours

Surface Temp: 67 C

Surface Gravity: 2.1 g

Mass:9.55 Earth Masses

Copper and aluminum deposits dominate the surface of the planet. Ancient mining sites and equipment belonging to the system’s previous inhabitants dot the surface, albeit damaged and non-functional. Meteors impact Jothraug regularly, bringing even more riches to the planet’s surface.

Svarjaldûr

Orbital Distance: 5.329 AU

Orbital Period: 23.6 Earth years

Keplerian Ratio: 0.7

Radius: 5,304 km

Day Length: 8.7 Earth Hours

Surface Temp: -177 C

Surface Gravity: 0.89 g

Mass: 0.989 Earth Masses

Svarjaldûr has a thin atmosphere composed of neon and chlorine. Its frozen surface is mainly composed of silica with deposits of copper. During the long, cold night, the chlorine in the atmosphere falls to the ground in the form of frost. The terrain is extremely rough – a patchwork of craggy, overlapping craters dating back to the formation of the solar system.

Hol

Orbital Distance: 6.831 AU

Orbital Period: 76.6 Earth years

Keplerian Ratio: 0.5

Radius: 6,648 km

Day Length: 41.7 Earth Hours

Surface Temp: -227 C

Surface Gravity: 0.5 g

Mass: 0.612 Earth Masses

Beneath it’s surface of rock and thick nitrogen glaciers, Hol contains small, isolated seas of either liquid or frozen water. They are likely inhospitable for life however, as the surrounding subsurface rock is rich with deposits of Polonium, leaving the water hellishly irradiated and toxic.

Nifnutag

Orbital Distance: 9.58 AU

Orbital Period: 175.3 Earth years

Keplerian Ratio: 0.9

Radius: 59,670 km

Day Length: 370 Earth Days

Surface Temp: -340 C

Mass: 96 Earth Masses

Nifnutag’s inviting icy white and blue colour disguises the lethality of its 2,800 kmph wind speeds, which batter anything that penetrates it’s atmosphere into oblivion. It’s deposits of helium 3, hydrogen and other valuable gasses goes unexploited because of the extreme cost and danger in retrieving them.

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