Countless millennia in the distant past, long before the Herculean Veru’nas race left the confines of Cassus Prime and began to lay the foundations of what would ultimately become the greatest multigalactic empire in history, an unfathomably ancient and enigmatic order of Acaeans known as the Grell sought to create a race of telekinetic slave labourers, engineered for the specific purpose of erecting the colossal pyramids and towering monoliths embraced in the architecture of their inscrutable culture. The Grell experimented on a number of species with unsatisfactory results, before finally settling on the physically and mentally formidable Veru’nas as what they believed to be their ideal test subjects.
The results of this genetic manipulation were the spectral and terrifying Veru’nas referred to in whispers throughout the Novus Æterno universe as “Strangers”. Although the Strangers commanded substantial telekinetic abilities fueled by their consumption of a mysterious cosmic energy known only to the Grell, they proved to be unstable and impossible to control, and eventually the Grell abandoned the Strangers and evacuated the world on which they had created the phantasmic slave species.Undaunted by failure, even on such an epic scale, the Grell soon began to develop a new species, one with a unique physiology precisely engineered for the purpose of absorbing and channelling the same eldritch energy that powered the Strangers.
The being they created, the Azendi, possessed a biological structure unlike that of any other sapient organic race, with cellular construction resembling that of plants, and even the orderly, repeating patterns of inorganic crystalline solids, to a much higher degree than it resembled any type of animal tissue known to exist. Having failed to learn the lessons of the Strangers, the Grell eventually faced an uprising among the Azendi, as the new race had quickly grown far too powerful for the Acaeans to control to any significant degree, just as their Veru’nas predecessors had done.
The Azendi began to wage a campaign of genocide against their creators, eventually purging the universe of their existence entirely and reducing the once dominant Grell to little more than a fading memory lost in the miasmic fog of time. Free from the shackles of their Acaean masters, the Azendi rapidly began to establish one of the most impressive civilizations in history, although there is much about it that still remains unexplained to this day, as the Azendi are by far the rarest and most elusive of the five principal races in the Novus Æterno universe. To the members of any other race, the science wielded by the Azsendi in their efforts at imperial expansion is as thoroughly baffling and incomprehensibly alien as the Azendi themselves.
The majority of their technology is almost completely devoid of mechanical components, and seems to function as an extension of their inherent abilities to harness and redirect cosmic energy, allowing them to assimilate and amplify vast amounts of this energy and use it in a variety of ways that far transcend mere telekinesis. Shrouded in an aura of quasi-mysticism thanks to their considerable psychic abilities and secretive, largely unfathomable behaviour, the Azendi race is perceived by many to possess preternatural powers that defy the laws of conventional science and perhaps even veer into territory once thought to be occupied only by sorcery.
We will be expanding on the lore in the near future.