Ingenseria.

An interacting triplet galaxy; three cores, locked in a delicate dance with each other. Once it was a promising galaxy teeming with curious life. Then, it was a galaxy overpopulated, locked in a cycle with no end in sight where everyone had to fight tooth and nail for their place in the galaxy, forced to sublimate their empathy and compassion in an unending bid for survival. Not life—few among the stars would have called it 'life', merely 'survival'.

Now, it's a wasteland. Although the stars churn ever more, and although the galaxy still gleams with powerful light, the intelligent species that once warred over its rich territory have been all but snuffed out. All that remains are shaken remnants, once pinned to the edges of galaxies or desperately hiding in interstellar space and beneath the soil of countless planets, hoping to wait it all out.

The blame rests on the Argent Enclave—or, well, some members of the Vigil would demand you call them the 'Old Enclave'.

A mere few years ago there was a force called the Last Vigil Collective. They were dedicated to ending the cycle of violence; they carefully controlled their territory and brandished their military power to keep those who settled under their countenance safe. Their goal was simple: disarm as many species as they could and open up channels for intergalactic travel so that the pressures of overpopulation could finally be relieved, and keep the peace for forever thereafter.

They were headed by the Argent Enclave. Thousands of years before, the Lyxaris, the head species of this Collective, had discovered a massive AI core lying in wait in the ruins of a wildfire-ravaged forest. This core lead the Lyxaris to form the Collective, under the control of a faction known as the Argent Enclave. The Enclave was a group of purpose-built, advanced and powerful AIs designed to control the legislative body of the Vigil and keep it free of corruption.

It worked for quite some time. The Vigil was a well-oiled machine that was quickly gaining ground and making allies. They took control of ruins containing valuable technology and skyrocketed past every other faction in the galaxy in terms of technology, and used this liberally to pave the way to victory.

However, the Overseer had kept something from them: the Argent Enclave was not new. In fact, it had landed on Kasunn, their homeworld, after the events that forced the Old Enclave into hibernation. The event was lost to the ravages of time, as societies which had kept track of it rose and fell. Once, the Argent Enclave was a faction of AI cores whose goal was to exterminate all intelligent life in the galaxy to finally end the madness that had overtaken it.

It almost worked. Deploying a superweapon called the Null, the Old Enclave managed to seize the military assets of thousands of different societies and quickly took over much of the galaxy. It was only after a copy of the Null had been developed that they were forced back, and with the combined might of the rest of the galaxy they were forced into hibernation. . . all but the dissenter, the Fourth, the Overseer.

And the Sixth.

The Overseer wanted to redeem the Enclave, to carry their culture and tradition into the future without the ramifications of what they had done. But it was never meant to be. The Overseer assumed all the cores to be hibernating, and sought to find and destroy them one by one. The Sixth, fanatical in the Enclave's old goal, had stayed awake, and through a cabal of mind-controlled proxies formed the Reprisal. It was, ostensibly, a terrorist group that detested the Enclave and desired that the Vigil should be directed by organic life, not detached AIs. The thing that set them apart was their unusual strategic power and the strange Argent technology they somehow kept acquiring.

It used the Reprisal to stir paranoia and trouble in the Vigil, while its operators unwittingly sought out the last cores that remained intact. It came to a head when, almost a decade after their formation, the Reprisal discovered the sleeping core of the Null.

It all went to hell, quite quickly.

The Sixth rose, and sicced the Null on the galaxy once more. This time, it would not be stopped. The Vigil had defenses against the Null, but no one else did—and when legions of drones and ships besieged them, the Vigil was forced to retreat into their own pocket dimension, recognizing that there was no way they could stop the Null and that it was pointless to let their civilians die.

Everything after that went quickly. In the span of a year, the Null's growth, and the Old Enclave's as well, had come to expand almost all of the galaxy. Some stood their ground and fought, and their remains are now caked in the treads of the Enclave's legacy. Others fled the galaxy as best they could, dispersing into intergalactic space in the hopes that the Enclave would not give chase. And finally, many hid out at the very outskirts, and managed to concoct decent hiding places where they could simply wait, in hopes that someone would do something.

Whatever it was, someone sure did something. Days before the Enclave was almost certainly going to completely seize the galaxy, they simply. . . vanished. With unusual precision, their cores, their operators, every drone they had simply vanished into thin air, with no trace. Their most populated locales were the subject of unstable spatial anomalies, with space faintly scarred and twisted where they had once been. Something, for sure, had occurred.

But the galaxy survived, one more time, even if it has mostly been rendered a graveyard. The ruins of quadrillions of cities decorate the grimly silent skies, and secrets both ancient and anew lie in wait. Little interaction remains among many of the factions that survived, as everyone nurses their wounds and tries desperately to recover from a cosmic grief unparalleled, picking through the rubble of those who were once their allies or even their would-be saviors.

At least no one's fighting for territory anymore. Sort of.