The Null has passed, and so too has the Enclave.

Perhaps the fault of one Overseer's hubris, or perhaps simply the way fate was meant to flow, things have all gone south in the span of a mere few years. Where once the mighty Vigil looked down upon all those who squabbled and warred outside of its carefully curated territory, resolved to free the galaxy of its obsession with violence and relieve the pressure of overpopulation through the establishment of intergalactic channels, there is now. . . simply a vacuum.

Once, there was the Last Vigil Collective, a collective of species and their allies who, with the aid of the Argent Enclave, devoted themselves to the mission of liberating a galaxy from an eons-old cycle of brutal conflict and violence caused, primarily, by overpopulation. They devised a plan by which they would carefully overtake and disarm each warlike species, reforming their governments or absorbing their populations and expanding their influence slowly, such that they could eventually squeeze all conflict out of the galaxy.

But, it was not to be. The Overseer had kept a secret from them; that the Argent Enclave which it lead was tens of millennia older than it appeared. Their history had mostly been lost to the annals of time, but those who did remember them regarded them only with terror. To the Vigil, the Enclave formed their legislative body and consisted primarily of purpose-built androids and AI cores, lead by a specific core named the Overseer which the Lyxaris had centuries back found on their homeworld, lying dormant and awaiting contact.

The Overseer built the Enclave as if it were new, as if it were an invention of its own, but in fact had desperately attempted to redeem itself and the traditions of the Enclave's last iteration. Scattered around this area of space were the 40-some primary AI cores which had been forced into dormancy after their last brutal incursion, left behind by the Overseer who had refused to hibernate with them. The Overseer, determined to keep things quiet, slowly sought them out one by one and had each one destroyed while they slumbered.

However, one other remained awake; referred to as The Sixth, it managed to manipulate members of the Vigil populace through mind-controlled proxies and the stirring of paranoia, dormant fears and cultural tension. Through its cabal of rarely-seen thralls, it founded the Reprisal, an ostensibly anti-Enclave terrorist organization it surreptitiously armed with extremely advanced Argent technology and set out to both sow strife throughout the Vigil and, worse. . . track down the other cores.

It took almost a decade before the plans of the Reprisal came to fruition; its specially chosen operators had found its quarry. Through twisting halls and a sable gate lied a weapon the Enclave had once before used to great effect—called only the Null, it seized every network it touched and, using robotic operators, physically broke into every network that it could not. The last time it was deployed, it spread so quickly as to wipe out nearly 60% of the galaxy in the span of but a year.

It was no different this time.

The Null struck hard and fast. The Vigil had defenses against it, but no one else did. Within weeks, the Null had enthralled the military assets of the Vigil's highest allies and turned on them, launching incursions into Vigil territory and slaughtering civilians en masse. Within a year of the beginning of this war, the Vigil conceded defeat and fled the galaxy, disappearing into the depths of the Redspace they had long used for travel and sanctuary.

The Enclave resurged as the remaining cores connected and this time, they would not repeat the mistakes they made last time. They churned out legions of robotic agents which swept over star systems, trampling all opposition. Many had given up, and many others frantically devised means of escape; there was no fighting the tide, only acceptance or forfeit.

Until, one day, they simply vanished. The tide ended, and not a peep came from inside the Argent territory. By this point, sapient life had been all but extinguished, forced into tiny pockets inside Argent territory and cut off from the outside or squeezed at the boundaries of the galaxy, hiding out in its most distant stars. Tentatively, explorers journeyed back into once-Argent territory, finding absolutely no sign of them.

Their buildings remained, but not a trace of the creators thereof. Where the massive AI cores had once been were simply holes and empty chambers, with no sign of a struggle or a fight, as if they'd simply vanished.

Ingenseria was a graveyard. The death it experienced was only a fraction of what had occurred over the millions of years its inhabitants had spent battling for space and the right to survive, but the calculated brutality left even the most hardened warlords somber treading its ruins. The Enclave were precise, and it is for that reason that Ingenseria is blanketed with the remains of its civilizations, ranging from glorious cities hanging in the skies over planets to little dilapidated villages deep in marshes, wiped of any trace of their former inhabitants.

The galaxy has been quiet for a long time. There is a stunned, solemn silence as recovery from this cataclysm has been a difficult journey dealt with in different ways. Some cling to the 'vulture-esque' behavior they had developed before the Enclave, knowing only war, enslavement and the claiming of territory; others forge a new path towards peace, now that the problem of overpopulation has come to a swift and bloody end; but most choose to heal with silence and distance, isolating themselves to far off worlds in the hopes that they can rebuild the lives they once had in peace, still wrestling with ingrained xenophobia and paranoia and yet unable to bring themselves to mount hostility against any of their so thoroughly bereaved neighbors.

You, and your compatriots, though, have perhaps chosen a different path.

Welcome to Sorrow's Rest.