A/N: Okay, so this is the massive time skip that we have been waiting for or at least the first part of it.
I will cover every major faction/empire and major events that happened. This will also be a time where we see multiple conflicts developing at once.
I tried to make it as interesting as possible without it reading weird, but this is a massive time skip and I won't put every small thing that has happened in the chapter. Those things that are left out will be explained as they come up in the future chapters.
If you see anything that I may have forgotten, don't hesitate to put that in the comments so I know and can bring it up in a future chapter. There is a lot to keep up with all at once and I am not a computer, so I can't remember what happened each and every chapter.
Also as some of you may know (you know who I'm talking to) there will probably be some grammar issues like were vs we're. I am but one person, I can't catch everything so deal with it.
Any ways, enough of my rambling, enjoy Part I of the time skip with part II coming out tomorrow which will cover the rest of what has happened and the development of each faction.
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1000 years later
Year - 5,159 BBY
Imperial year - 1829
Daimon - Age: 1901
Total Veldari Imperium Population - 3.7 quintillion
1000 years of peace. At least for some areas of the galaxy.
In the Imperium, there was a massive celebration that occurred basically galaxy wide for the 1000th year since its founding. The celebration lasted 1 year and saw the Imperium flex its military, economy, and cultural diversity.
At the same time, it was during a time when the Imperium was considered the strongest power in the galaxy, due to overcoming the republic in both economy and military. The military was something that they saw coming, but the economy one was surprising to most.
Most of this was thanks to the aggressive cultural integration that was conducted in newly conquered regions, eliminating some species old cultures. At first this created problems, but after generations, these problems went away and these worlds were able to be integrated into the Imperium officially.
The economic dominance had come not through any single policy or decision but through the development of worlds over a thousand years.
The Dimensional Gates and Hyperspace Gates that connected Imperial space had transformed what had once been a logistical challenge into a strategic advantage. Goods moved faster through Imperial space than anywhere else in the known galaxy.
People also moved faster, and when things moved faster, they tended to accumulate wealth at insane rates. The Republic had recognized this roughly three centuries ago and had spent considerable effort attempting to build comparable infrastructure. They had succeeded partially in creating their own version of the hyperspace gate, which connected about 40% of republic space at this time. The Imperium had over 80% of all planets that had a dimensional gate.
But the Dimensional Gate that Daimon created was impossible for them to create without the hidden knowledge that the Imperium had. The Hyperspace Gates were somewhat easy to replicate, though still a challenge, nonetheless. It was enough to keep them competitive, but not enough to close the gap that kept getting larger.
The Imperium also expanded its orbital rings to dozens of other planets and completed 5 more Dyson Sphere's expanding the Imperium's energy production. This was in addition to planet being powered by other Force infused technology and Kyber crystals.
Planet wise, the Imperium had better quality planets thanks to Force terraforming abilities which created environments that were generally safe, resource rich, and beautiful.
Daimon himself spent the better part of these 1000 years stabilizing the territories acquired after the war, training with the Balance Keepers, spreading the Imperium's influence, and spending time with his family.
And speaking of family, Daimon actually became a grandfather due to Malrik marrying the princess of the Kingdom of Ryloth. Because of this, she was granted immortality.
However, just like any other person that has been granted immortality by Daimon, they were restricted in how many children they could have. For instance, they could only have a child every 200 years, which was not their choice, but something Daimon added to their body.
This stopped some from being too afraid to have sexual relations out of fear of producing an immortal child and then having them taken aways since they broke the rule. So, after having the first child, the body would become infertile until 200 years had passed.
This was to prevent an advent of Immortals from being created. And even then, the amount of people who were granted immortality was not a lot. Only people who he deemed worthy and those who were married to his sons or daughters would be granted that honor, unless they were a Gen'Dai.
Malrik and Princess Seraphine had 3 children in this timespan. Two boys whose names were Xerrin and Sorrin, and one daughter whose name was Isara.
Xerrin and Sorrin were twins and were 989 years old. Instead of taking the same path as their father, they remained in the Balance Keepers and became prominent members, able to rise through the ranks because of their lineage and abilities.
With some exceptions here and there, Balance Keepers were most other species except for Gen'Dai due to their lack of Force sensitivity.
Daimon was an exception because he was granted his abilities by the being who sent him here. His children and their children were self-explanatory, same as the Progenitors and the Force Scions. Besides this group, most Balance Keepers aged and died after an average of 200 years.
It was 200 years because of the Balance Keeper's understanding of the Force which allowed them to prolong their life for several decades.
Cortana had once asked why he didn't just make them immortal was a valid question for Cortana to ask. Daimon explained that if he did that, then it would disrupt the natural flow of the Force. The Gen'Dai understood this better than most species. They had a cultural relationship with mortality that other long-lived beings often lacked. They knew what it meant to watch a generation pass, to see children grow old while they remained, and that knowledge shaped the way they engaged with the galaxy.
A Gen'Dai who had lived for millennia carried that weight visibly, in the way they spoke about the past, in the particular patience they showed toward younger beings, in the small ceremonies they observed for the dead that outsiders rarely understood.
Immortality, given freely and broadly, would have erased that. It would have created a civilization of beings who had no reason to treat time as meaningful because they had been given an infinite supply of it. And civilizations that did not treat time as meaningful tended to stop treating much else as meaningful either.
The second reason was simpler. The galaxy was still full of things that could kill a person, and a galaxy full of immortals who could nonetheless be killed was a galaxy that would eventually develop an obsession with security that consumed everything else. Every resource, every political arrangement, every relationship would eventually be subordinated to the single question of how to avoid the one thing that could still end you.
Isara was the youngest of Malrik's children at 412 years old. She had taken after her grandmother Elara. She was not a warrior in the way her brothers were, or in the way her father had been at her age.
She had spent the past century working within the Imperial Diplomatic Corps, specifically in the division that handled relations with newly integrated worlds during the transitional period between conquest and full citizenship. It was unglamorous work. It required sitting in rooms with people who did not want to be in the same room as an Imperial representative and finding some basis for a conversation that was not entirely adversarial.
Luna and Vaelora had dated here and there, but ultimately never had kids. They had never found someone that they wanted to have kids with. Thus, they remained childless for now.
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The Republic had seen some significant development besides the invention of their own version of hyperspace gates. The recovery from the war took some time, but it was followed through with a series of great Chancellors.
The greatest of these was Chancellor Mira Solen herself, who served three terms before the constitutional amendments she had personally advocated for, forced her from office.
She had accepted the term limits without complaint, which was noted by historians as perhaps the most significant act of her term. Not the constitutional convention, not the economic rebuilding programs, not the diplomatic normalization with the Imperium. The fact that she left when the law said to leave, without attempting to carve out exceptions for herself, had demonstrated a return to normalcy and democratic values within the Republic.
Her successors had been, for the most part, adequate. A few had been genuinely capable. One, a Bothan named Chancellor Vrenn Kaas who served roughly four centuries after Solen, had been corrupt in ways that the new oversight mechanisms had caught within his second year of office. The tribunal that followed had been the first real test of whether the Republic's reformed institutions would hold against someone who had been popular and politically connected.
And they were proven to have worked as Kaas had spent his life in a detention facility and the Republic moved on.
The Jedi Order had taken considerably longer to find its footing than the political institutions had. This was not surprising as political institutions could be restructured through legislation. But the internal culture of an organization built around spiritual conviction could only be restructured through time and the slow replacement of one generation with another.
The first generation of Jedi trained under the reformed doctrine had been, by most assessments, confused. They had received philosophical frameworks that were more expansive than what their master's had grown up with, and their masters had not always known how to teach what they themselves were still learning. The results had been mixed.
Some of that generation had become genuinely remarkable force users. Others had retreated into the most conservative interpretations of the new doctrine available, which was itself a form of the old problem just wearing a different set of robes.
The third and fourth generations had been different. They had grown up with the expanded doctrine as the only doctrine they had ever known. The old arguments about emotion and attachment and the correct relationship between a Jedi and the living Force were not arguments they had to worry about.
They were questions they had actually been taught to think about, and thinking about them had produced a cohort of Force users who were, in Daimon's assessment, closer to what the Order had always claimed to be than any generation before them.
Grand Master Oren Daas had lived to see the second generation before dying at the age of two hundred and twelve, which was elderly even by Kel Dor standards. His final address to the Order had been brief and had contained one line that was still quoted in Jedi training halls a thousand years later. He had said: 'we spent generations teaching our students what to think about the Force, and we called it wisdom. The Emperor showed us that wisdom begins when you teach them how to think instead.' The Balance Keepers also helped them considerably during this time.
The relationship between the Balance Keepers and the reformed Jedi Order had evolved over the centuries from something that resembled supervised rehabilitation into something closer to genuine intellectual exchange.
The Balance Keepers did not consider themselves superior to the Jedi, and the Jedi, at least the current generation, had largely stopped considering the Balance Keepers as a threat to their traditions.
What had emerged instead was a working relationship built on the recognition that two institutions approaching the Force from different directions could sometimes illuminate things that neither could see on its own.
The Balance Keepers themselves had grown considerably in the past thousand years. The organization had now expanded to encompass millions of members drawn from dozens of species across Imperial space. Some may consider them like a small military force, but that wasn't exactly the case.
They were not a military force, precisely. This distinction was something that mattered to Daimon as they were founded for a different purpose than a purely military order. The Ascendants were the soldiers who were granted certain Force abilities, trained primarily for combat, but not Force Sensitive.
It was one of his greatest creations, being able to grant force abilities to people without making them force sensitive.
This was something that the Republic had learned but not put into actual practice as the Jedi did not have any one person powerful enough to do it.
The Republic military which was restricted because of the war had faced some failures and some success. During the 5th century, a small coalition of mid-rim planets led by the planet Kijimi had declared their independence from the Republic through the influence of the Sith.
The Republic called for its planetary fleets and formed several Fleets placed under the Republic High Command. These fleets then went on to attack the coalition but were defeated due to the involvement of force sensitives. These force sensitives were descendants of the Jedi who fled the order and abandoned it during the Order's fracturing.
They settled into these mid-rim planets once the war ended and continued training their children in the ways of the Force. After centuries, several Force Sensitives had created long lines of families that were separated from the Jedi Order.
And during the war, these families sided with their homeworlds and joined the coalition. The Jedi Order did not join the war despite the other side having Force sensitives because the situation was extremely volatile. The Coalition declared independence and had a strong justification to do so. The Senate argued and the decision to even go to war was split.
Yet they did, and in the end the coalition had outlasted the Republic's ability to keep the war popular. So, an agreement was made, giving the coalition a degree of autonomous governance within the Republic framework, which was essentially what they had asked for at the beginning.
The Jedi Order's decision not to participate had been controversial at the time. There were voices, both within the Order and outside it, who argued that the presence of Force-using combatants on one side of a conflict obligated the Order to balance that presence on the other. The Grand Master at the time had rejected this argument.
She had said that the Jedi Order was not a counterweight to be deployed whenever Force-sensitive individuals appeared on one side of a political dispute. That logic, carried to its conclusion, would transform the Order into an instrument of whoever happened to need Force users on their side, which was precisely the role the Order had been reformed to stop playing.
For the remaining centuries, the Republic spent it developing and expanding into the outer rim, this time not in competition with the Imperium, but to expand the Republic's freedoms to those not yet known to the galaxy.