History

Humanity fled a lost cradle world and crossed the dark to reach what is now the Ethereal Expanse. No record survives to name that cradle or explain its fall — only that it fell, and that the manifests carried across the void still disagree about why. The disagreement is not a mystery waiting on an answer. It is the oldest fact in the Expanse, and every ship that made the crossing still carries it unresolved.

The convoy that survived the Crossing reached the Ethereal Expanse and found that arrival did not mean safety: the raiders who could not be outrun had crossed with it, not arrived after it. What began as a region-wide hunt across all nine systems failed to hold them. What worked instead was narrower — and it is the moment the Nexus Protectorate and the Crimson Corsairs became two organized, named powers, rather than one convoy carrying an argument.