The Enemy

The Cheldrun that live on Karia are a remnant. Though they are an overwhelming invasion from the perspective of the Karians, they are really just a band of desperate survivors, huddled on this distant rock, hiding from their past. In the dark recesses of that past there lives something too horrible to contemplate. Something which destroyed their civilization, and nearly drove them extinct in the universe. Unable even to give it a name, they refer to it as 'the Enemy'.

The passage of time and the loss of the historical record, coupled with an irrational social repression related to this topic has served to make it extremely difficult to guess precisely who or what 'the Enemy' is. However, far from muting the racial phobia of this foe it has amplified the apprehension, transmuting a presumably specific historical entity into a metaphor for all that is evil, an omnipresent personification of utter dread. The Cheldrun don't tell their children stories to scare them into good behavior, they merely whisper, with sincere terror "the Enemy will find you." and the child knows instantly that this is the worst possible thing which could happen to a person.

No one alive, for many generations, has seen a single sign of the Enemy. The official refrain of Cheldrun society is that the Flight was successful; that they have truly escaped their past, and so long as they keep their vow not to return to space, they shall be safe here on Karia. However, there will probably never be a time when the Cheldrun stop looking for signs that their past has caught up with them. Their social consciousness as a remnant of a once great star-faring empire is too intimately tied up with the demise of that empire at the hands of the Enemy. As a people they are doomed, perhaps forever, to live with a shudder of terror always at the back of their mind, and the eyes of the Enemy burning in their dreams.

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