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| Art by Mohammed Mukhtar |
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Kasara Warder
Kasara Warder came from a disgraced line of nobility on the human homeworld of Akasaat. The Warder family could trace its lineage back over a thousand years to the age of Luthias the Uniter and the exodus of humanity from the wastelands to the the lost Progenitor arcologies. The Warders were once held in high esteem, a powerful noble family with strong influence in the military of Akasaat. But when the Century War broke out after generations of relative peace, the Warders participated in a number of increasingly disastrous military campaigns that ultimately lowered their family's status within the Hierarchy. When Kasara's grandfather, Ederes Warder, failed to hold the line at the Battle of Prima in 3934 resulting in the loss of seven thousand lives, the Warder name had suffered too much damage to their reputation. The Warders were stripped of their nobility and cast down from the Heights in Central.
Kasara Warder was born into this disgrace in deep space aboard an Akasaati warship, the Siren's Song, where both her mother and father served as soldiers during the height of the Century War. Kasara grew up both aboard this aetheric warship and amid asteroid colonies dotting the Amrita asteroid belt. Kasara never knew what her homeworld looked like, never set foot on its surface until after the Century War had concluded. From the time she was able to hold a sword, Kasara was trained to follow in her family's footsteps and become a soldier, to aspire to die in battle to serve the glory of Akasaat and the Hierarchy. An honorable death in defense of the homeland would restore some of the prestige once afforded to her family, with enough blood and enough sacrifice anyone family line could find elevation to nobility, even those once disgraced. This fate, born to die in military service, was one shared by many during the last years of the Century War. It had become an accepted part of everyday life. The war had dragged on so long that even the oldest human alive had been born during a time of constant warfare. Peace was a memory that belonged to the ghosts of their ancestors.
Kasara aspired to more than mere redemptive death in service to the Hierarchy. She aspired to seeing her family restored in her own lifetime. More than that, Kasara dreamt that one day her own children would know a life that was not framed by an age of unending war, that peace was more than a word. To those ends Kasara learned the craft of a soldier, studied techniques to better utilize aether-powered armor, she studied the tactics used in past engagements in the Century War to better understand warfare in the void. But, she also became a student of art, of poetry, of philosophy, and all the matters of thought and contemplation pushed aside to make room for the never-ending war machine that her society had become. Kasara eagerly obtained books and scrolls wherever she could, from merchants on asteroid colonies, traders running supply lines between Akasaat and the front, even from other soldiers. She studied the greats of her time and their ancestors, teachings of bard-philosophers from the early Reconstruction era, the pacifistic philosophical teachings of poets like Adan Goldpage, Mithara Hallows, and Styvanus Forgewright. Kasara believed—needed to believe—that there was more to resolving the conflict between the humans and erahthi than just military might.
While Kasara pursued her education in a mobile Akasaati military academy aboard the Siren's Song, both her parents died within a year of one-another in separate conflicts across the Gulf between the Amrita asteroid belt and the erahthi homeworld of Kir-Sharaat. The loss of her parents crushed Kasara. She would become the sole survivor of the Warder bloodline that had stretched back a millennia, and feared her family line would be snuffed out like so many others during the Century War. When her training was completed, Kasara was assigned to the aetheric battleship the Dream of Twilight as a private. The Dream of Twilight was soon to join a vanguard force of newly crafted phalanx automatons in a battle around the Kir-Sharaat moon of Orthaun in a conflict that would be historically remembered as the Battle of Thorns.
Aetheric Warships like the Dream of Twilight were too large and well-armed for the erahthi to defeat in head-to-head combat with their comparatively fragile and lightly-armed organic ships. Instead, the erahthi developed an unconventional means to combat human battleships, developing organic boarding pods that could lie in wait like mines in the Gulf between worlds and moons, then attach to approaching vessels like burrs in so much tall grass. These boarding pods—highly evolved symbiont plant creatures capable of both living in the airless vacuum of the void and harboring a single erahthi pilot—could secrete a highly corrosive acid on command that would dissolve large portions of a battleship's hull. The pods would then detach and cause a forced decompression of the compromised compartments, ejecting unprotected crew into the void. The boarding vessels could then would reattach and send their erahthi pilots out in environmentally-sealed symbiont suits to clean up the survivors and commandeer the ship for research. En-route to join the phalanx at Orthaun the erahthi landed boarding pods on the hull of the Dream of Twilight, and so on her first tour of duty Kasara was forced to face one of these harrowing attacks.
During the initial explosive decompression, the ship's captain was jettisoned into the void and the morale of the surviving crew collapsed almost immediately. Kasara saw opportunity in spite of the tragedy around her and rose to the challenge faced by her crew. Kasara rallied the remaining soldiers aboard the Dream of Twilight and enacted a last stand in the center of the ship in a broadcast hub. On Akasaati battleships, a broadcast hub allows a single bard to transmit music across nearby aetherships to increase fighting capability and morale. For Kasara, the broadcast hub became a beacon in the dark. Kasara and the handful of survivors held that broadcast room, with its farcasters engaged and their cries mixed with the sound of their last stand transmitted out into the emptiness of the void for anyone who would listen.
Kasara and the other survivors held that broadcast station for six hours against the boarders before they could fight no more and were finally overwhelmed by the erahthi forces. The survivors, Kasara included, were rounded up to be transported back to Kir-Sharaat as prisoners. But, little did the erahthi know, in spite of their apparent victory it was Kasara that had won the battle. The losses suffered by the erahthi had left the erahthi crippled. When a small team of phalanx soldiers who had heard Kasara's broadcast broke away from the vanguard and arrived to check on the Dream of Twilight the erahthi were in no condition to fight them off. The arrival of the phalanx sent panic through the erahthi force, and served as distraction enough for Kasara to slip out of the bonds of her erahthi captors and fight anew to save her comrades' lives. Unarmed and outnumbered, Kasara fought with whatever she could get her hands on until the phalanx team arrived, joining Kasara in the fight to finish off the remaining erahthi.
For her actions at the Battle of Thorns, Kasara Warder was awarded the Hierarchy Commendation of Heroism, reinstating her family line as nobility on Akasaat. Kasara additionally received promotion to the position of First Officer of the Dream of Twilight, where she served for seven more years. Kasara, aboard the Dream of Twilight, was present for the final hours of the Century War and was directly involved in the peace talks that would come, forming the tenuous truce between the erahthi and humans that holds to present day.
But that tale is one for another day.
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