This is a recreation of the original timeline from the Official WildStar website, as preserved on the Internet Archive. The table of contents on this page may serve as a quick-reference timeline. Each section contains a summary of the associated events, followed by three pieces of official, descriptive fiction.
107 BE: The Voyage of the Nomad
SYNOPSIS: The advanced research vessel Nomad was proudly launched by the newly united Commonwealth civilization of Cassus on a historic, publicly celebrated voyage of discovery. After encountering many strange forms of life throughout the unexplored reaches of the galaxy, the Nomad mysteriously disappeared and was never heard from again...
Journey Into the Unknown
From the glare filling his helmet, Captain Sonoda figured he had thirteen minutes before the exploding nebula over his shoulder baked him and the four hundred people on the other side of the meter-thick vibranium hull to a crisp. On the upside, the view wasn't bad.
"Cap?" First Officer Veska sounded as if she were right beside him, scaling the hull of the unpowered starship on the edge of space. "We need to hurry."
"Krint?" He looked down at the tech officer far below him. The kid had no business being out here. A hard-working Engy of farmer stock whose father had wept with pride at the Nomad's christening ceremony. But the repair-drone was on the fritz again and Schade was dead. Sonoda had promised to take care of the kid, to whatever extent such terms even applied in deep space. "Now."
He joined the cables strung between his fingers, while simultaneously far below him Krint flipped the switch, diverting the emergency power back where it belonged before it could fry their power core. Nomad shuddered. Tongues of blue flame chugged from the boosters, silhouetting Krint's spindly outline against the brightness as he began clambering upwards. Sonoda flicked the arc welder off. The panel slid shut. "Done," he said. "We're coming in." His luck had held. Again.
As the Cassian civilization's first space travelers, to have even survived this long was a victory. Miraculously, it had been a mere year since the launch of their mission. In that time they'd seen more wonders than they'd dreamt possible in a single lifetime. Plasma-based organisms awed that meat-like beings such as humans could exist, let alone master space travel. Volcanic eruptions severe enough to dent the ship's hull from orbit. Granite humanoids of consummate martial prowess. Massive dark matter worms that preyed on black holes. Machine intelligences that piloted worlds like dragsters. Jellyfish the size of whales that Nomad was thankfully too miniscule to entice. Entities that defied description. All fascinating. None sufficient.
Sonoda propelled himself along the rungs set into the hull towards the hatchway. "Captain, stand by," said Science Officer Thekford in his other ear. For the Nomad's new Science Officer, this was an unusually loquacious utterance. "We're picking up an energy sig. It's...curious. A cycling radiation bandwidth unlike anything we've run across. Ten degrees off your starboard."
Sonoda resisted the urge to look over his shoulder at the looming whorls of nebulae. "Show me in ten minutes." He bunched his shoulders in preparation to leap aboard into the decompression chamber yawning open beside him.
"It's cycling over a billion ergs a second."
Sonoda froze.
Noble Ambitions
The Nomad's launch had been preceded by weeks of the most frenzied celebration in the planet's history. Champagne parades, pastries of lissome angels, and parties galore.
After centuries of internecine strife, unification had come to Cassus. All now strived under a single banner. No longer would the lives of precious scions be frittered away in corrosive fortune redistributions. The planet's wealth had been carved out. A galaxy of greater riches awaited. The first step was to survey these distant realms and assess their potential.
Eager to enfold the myriad life-forms in its firm embrace of entrepreneurial spirit, the Cassians brooked no expense or technological bottlenecks in making space exploration their new priority. There had been the usual false starts and occasionally fatal growing pains of any expansion. More than a decade was spent debating whether to send a manned expedition at all but in the end it was decided that interstellar relations were too critical to entrust to machines.
Designing the Nomad itself took nearly a century. Selecting its crew took even longer. Those most curious about the wonders of the universe firsthand weren't necessarily graced with physiques conducive to prolonged existence in deep space, let alone conditions likely to be encountered on prospective planets. Personnel able to tolerate and function despite these rigors not only had to be trained but bred over generations, then enhanced for everything from metabolic bone density to diplomatic relations.
Sonoda had insisted to be granted final veto power over all crew members. With decades of training and self-discipline at his back, he had considered himself impervious to forming sentimental attachments.
Critical Condition
Sonoda switched to a private link. "A billion's not possible. That would be over..."
"The power of a trillion supernovas. Emitting every second. But the intervals are widening. If we wait, we'll lose it."
Sonoda extruded an antenna from his helmet, set its oscillation rate, and scanned the wedge of starlight that the Nomad's vast sweeping curve was slowly devouring off to his right. Numerals flickered steadily across his HUD as he reran them twice.
"Orders, sir?" Thekford said in his ear. Sonoda could tell from his tone that Thekford had done the calculations as well. "Far in excess of anything we've encountered."
"We can relocate it once we're clear," Veska said sharply.
"Too far," he said.
"Sir, engines are still priming. Regardless, it's so far we're talking a one-way trip. Assuming the G's don't tear us apart or it sizzles our instruments to a crisp." An imploring note had crept into her voice. "It's not worth it, Goren." He waited. She went on: "Our mission's to report back."
She was right. But a billion ergs.
He looked at the open hatchway. There was only room and time for a single decompression. He gazed down. Krint's hand groped for the rung inches beneath Sonoda's ankles. The kid was grinning up at him, gap-toothed and relieved.
The Mission, Sonoda thought. Nothing else matters.
As Krint's arm reached for the rung, Sonoda kicked down, his foot crunching into Krint's faceplate. He glimpsed Krint's stunned look of horror and amazement. Then air hissed out, the youthful freckled face turned blue, and his body spun away, off towards the nebula.
Sonoda glided into the hatchway and turned to watch it begin rolling shut. Even through his suit he felt Nomad throb with revving power. "Veska, I'm in. Punch it."
"On it," she said flatly. She didn't ask about Krint. She didn't need to.
Through the viewport he watched the tiny speck of Krint's body disappear amid glittering hurricanes of rocks the size of continents hurtling inexorably towards Nomad.
Then the engines screamed and Sonoda was flung against the wall. The stars through the viewport lengthened into comet-trails. Like arrows, he thought bitterly, charting his headlong descent. Then he blacked out and dreamed for the first of many, many times of Krint's terrified face.
1 AE: Rise of the Cassians
SYNOPSIS: Centuries after Nomad’s disappearance, a hyper-advanced alien armada descended on Cassus. Their leader, a robotic Mechari, claimed that the godlike Eldan had chosen the Cassians to rule the universe. All they required in return was the swordmaiden Tresayne Toria, their greatest warrior. The alternative was extinction. To save her people, Tresayne consented. Decades later the Eldan fleet returned. This time someone else emerged: Dominus the Half-Blood, a human-Eldan hybrid who carried the blood of Tresayne in his veins. And he carried a glorious message to the people of Cassus...
A Tempting Offer
Axis Pheydra emerged from her ship, inclining her head briefly to the droves of awestricken humans gathered before the columns of glossy, motionless Mechari, their chassis gleaming in the hot sun. She knew how much importance humanoids curiously attached to such innocuous gestures, even if only those viewing the ceremony televised would catch it. To impress the millions overflowing the immense public square, she would need to employ bolder means.
A squad of organic attendants trotted forward, bearing a corpulent man in golden robes on a thrumming electromagnetic cushion. When he spoke his voice was soft and courtly, though he was unable to conceal the trepidation behind his frozen smile. "As Supreme Chancellor of the Cassian Commonwealth, allow me to bid our first interstellar visitors a gracious and mutually profitable welc -- "
Pheydra's icy reply cut him off as her eyes raked the faces of the honor guard in shimmering ranks of red and gold. "Which is Tresayne Toria?"
The Chancellor's smile drooped a bit. He was a small but well fed man, his true age obscured beneath a cicatrix of cosmetics. "I'm sorry?"
"The Devastator of Sculptoris." Pheydra brushed past him, scanning and cross-referencing every genome in the crowded square. "Scourge of the Black Fleet. Slayer of Zeificus the Crazed. Champion of the Pits of Phardoum. Decisive victories commanding the Cassian Commonwealth: 8024. Victories in personal combat: 632. Defeats zero. Produce her now."
The Chancellor coughed into his frilled sleeve. "Commander Toria remains involved in pacification efforts in the colonies…However, I am uniquel -- "
Pheydra's voice boomed across the square and the planet, echoing like thunder from the clouds. "We are the Mechari, emissaries of the glorious and powerful Eldan. Tresayne Toria must accompany us back to our world. In return, your race will rule the universe."
The Chancellor stepped back.
"Should you decline this honor, you will be eradicated. Choose."
The silence stretched. Of the three million present, not a soul breathed.
Finally the Chancellor turned to his ashen-faced attendant and hissed, "Patch me to the colonial channel, once you can spare a thumb?"
The Golden Empire
Cassus had rebounded from the unsolved disappearance of the Nomad. Its existence had been willfully forgotten, deleted to obscure footnote status in encyclopedia overviews of the space age's infancy. Like many cultures before it, the Commonwealth was disinclined to publicize its missteps.
But although the ship itself was all but forgotten, Nomad's hard lesson was not: the universe was a strange and dangerous place. Its conquest was unlikely to be a cakewalk. But when it came to territorial expansion, the Cassians were patient. They would conquer the cosmos piecemeal, one planet at a time. Instead of single recon craft, they now dispatched squadrons of colonization ships, escorted by heavily armed frigates.
There were other reasons for militarizing space exploration. While dissent was virtually unknown on Cassus and always rapidly quelled, it was a different story in the colonies, where decades of hard toil in dreary backwaters had predictable results on the loyalties of even its most exalted denizens. Changes in command from deaths or defections mounted.
But such bleak conditions also produced exceptional warriors. The greatest among these was Tresayne Toria. Contemptuously disregarding her own ancient and illustrious antecedents to become the youngest and most famed swordmaiden in history, by age nineteen she and her mostly female disciples had brought dozen of bickering warlords throughout the far-flung colonies to heel, restoring dozens of worlds to the rapidly expanding Commonwealth.
Then came the day when the Mechari armada darkened the skies over Meridia to tender their proposal.
Ultimately, Tresayne accepted. Accompanied by several hundred of her sisters-in-arms who refused to be separated from her, she boarded the Mechari ship. A week later, the fleet departed.
Over the ensuing decades, these events were unceasingly dissected and mythologized, with even the authenticity of the recordings themselves subject to fierce debate. Even some who had been present that day began to doubt the veracity of their memories.
Then, thirty-one years to the day after their departure, the ships returned. This time, an organic emerged.
Favorite Son
Dominus the Half-Blood emerged from the Mechari flagship, a titan in red armor, his mother's sword scabbarded at his hip. This crowd was much bigger than the last. He'd viewed Pheydra's first visit many times. These will be your subjects someday, his mother had whispered. Note what compels them and be prepared to simulate it.
Not all those present looked compelled, he reflected as he scanned their ranks of troubled faces and averted glances. But he sensed the gazes of many beyond the periphery of his vision who could not stop staring at him. Despite his strange alien features and outsize bone structure, his mother's likeness had not been forgotten. They saw it in his penetrating golden eyes, sidling gait, the deceptively casual assurance of his sword-hand. And they glimpsed something far more.
"Kindred," his voice reverberated, "my mother was Tresayne Toria, the Commander of your fleet. The sacred blood of the Eldan also courses through my veins. I have come to lead us to greatness. As your Emperor."
"We have no need of emperors here," a nobleman said icily, limping forward. "And you'll have no more of our women."
"Do you doubt my claims?" Dominus said, softly but in a voice that carried. He stepped forward, hand on the pommel of his sword. "Do you call me liar?" His sword sang as he drew it, raised it above the man's unblinking face, and brought it down with a THOOM that echoed like thunder throughout the square, the resulting shock wave knocking dozens off their feet and radiating outward across the city in an expanding seismic ring. Skyscrapers groaned and settled.
Hundreds of eyes locked on Dominus and on the blade sunken hilt-deep in the steel boulevard at his feet. "This blade was forged from alloys that at your current state of progress you would not have discovered for a million years." As he spoke, his other hand hurled a scatter of silver marbles heavenward. They vanished into the cloudless blue sky. Moments later it began to rain. "Mastery of the elements is nothing to our patrons." Dominus kicked away the nobleman's cane, gestured at the man's bad leg as with a shocked gasp he fell forward. "They offer nanites, capable of reversing tissue damage of any severity." Catching himself, the man looked down wonderingly at his visibly regenerating foot.
"Together we will control the essence of creation. Do you accept?"
Within seconds, the erstwhile crippled nobleman was the only Cassian in the square who was still unbowed.
352 AE: Conquest of the Draken
SYNOPSIS: Under Dominus’ long reign, the Cassians evolved into a powerful interstellar empire, but the Mechari deemed warriors of a more savage aspect were required. After surveying thousands of worlds, they chanced upon the ideal species: the Draken of planet Mikros, ferocious, brutal warriors whose entire culture revolved around tests of strength and martial prowess. So it was that Azrion, son of Dominus, came to Mikros to challenge the Drakens’ Supreme Clanlord to trial by combat. And soon the two faced one another in a duel to the death...
An Unlikely Challenge
Emperor Azrion stood before the High Clanlord, his small honor guard dwarfed on all sides by the thousands of Draken curious to behold the shiny visitors from the stars.
Zhur sat, contemptuously regarding them. He had ceased listening to their empty genuflections long ago. He felt no respect for these soft hornless maggots in their bright hard shells and weapons that killed from afar.
Just as he was just opening his mouth to order the slaughter of these insolent trespassers, Azrion's voice rang out, echoing across the vast plain in the Drakens' age-old tongue: "By the sacred ways of Mikros, I, Azrion, son of Dominus the Half-Blood, challenge you, Clanlord Zhur, here and now for command of both our races, and all the lives they comprise."
Grunts of outrage and barks of laughter rippled throughout the throng, reaching Zhur's ears as a steady patter of barely suppressed bloodlust.
As judging from his fluency in the One Tongue, the invader was doubtless aware his challenge meant combat to the death. But Zhur sensed no fear, only tightly coiled certainty. His poise was as flawless as any foe that Zhur had ever faced, and he had slain many.
"By the old ways, let it be done," Zhur rumbled.
Zhur himself led the way to the Fields of Kazor. Each stripped to the waist and was given a blade forged in the fires of Mount Crucible. Their gazes locked. A hush fell over the massive arena. Zhur licked his lip, tasting the familiar coppery tang of glory to come.
Then he launched forward, swinging.
The Search for Perfect Killers
Despite their unbroken run of military victories in the three centuries since the Dominion's founding, the Mechari determined a need for new blood. While tactically ingenious, the Cassians lacked a certain zeal for carnage that the Mechari's most recent battle metrics unanimously agreed would efficiently bring upstart races to heel. Shock troops of a more savage aspect were required.
After meticulously studying thousands of species to analyze their combat effectiveness, the Mechari had advised Azrion, the reigning Luminai emperor and son of Dominus Half-Blood, that the savage Draken of the volcanic planet Mikros would be ideal. But the loyalty of these ferocious hunters could not be won through parley.
The Mechari disliked leaving critical matters to chance. Prior to landing on Mikros in 344 AE, they had extensively studied and simulated the most probable fighting styles of the High Clanlord. Exhaustively they analyzed his techniques: his tendency to go for the carotid, his signature hamstring, and his insatiable fondness for decapitations. Then they devoted their arts to probing them for weakness and designing countermeasures. They isolated his vulnerabilities: the decades old ankle injury that had never healed, his mortal dread of infection, and the brittle base of his left horn. Then they systematically devised methods of exploiting them.
Azrion had been bred and trained his whole life for this bout. Races with a culture based around honor, the Mechari had instructed them, were predictable prey, easy to manipulate. But the more Azrion studied Zhur, the more convinced he became that the Mechari were wrong. He improvised. He adapted. He used cunning when least expected and retaliated with reserves undreamed of. He was a perfect fighter, and the Mechari for all their own perfection were unable to see it. Without fail, Azrion told them what they wanted to hear. But inwardly he vowed that this would be a fair contest, free of persiflage. His only hope in defeating Draken honor was not to disdain it but adopt it. And become its master.
Within hours of the Cassians' arrival, the pair reached the sacred dueling ground just outside the Draken capital of Red River. There they would decide by blood the fate of two empires and thousands of worlds.
The Price of Defeat
The fight was terrible to behold. No duel fought before or since was fiercer or more brutal. Their blades wove a deadly dance too fast for the eye to follow. Soon the bodies of both combatants were streaming with blood.
Many times over did those who watched believe the contest done and were many times over proven wrong. As long as they lived, none forgot a moment.
By the close of the tenth hour, both combatants were bleeding from dozens of wounds and barely able to stand.
During the final exchange, a thunderous strike by Azrion shattered Zhur's blade. Azrion wrenched Zhur's horn from his skull with a deafening crack that was still reverberating across the caldera when he plunged it into the Clanlord's chest. Zhur crumpled to his knees. His expression remained astonished when Azrion hacked off his head, displayed it before the now silent throng, and flung it into their midst.
In expanding concentric rings, the Draken knelt. Azrion's voice rang out across the obsidian slopes: "Draken of Mikros! Welcome to the Dominion."
538 AE: Uplift of the Chua
SYNOPSIS: Emboldened by their resounding success on Mikros, the Mechari returned to investigating numerous worlds for other prospective allies in which to invest. With their remarkable aptitude for mechanical engineering and total absence of morality, the primitive but intelligent Chua of Bezgelor looked promising. Giving the Chua simple gifts of basic technology, the Dominion hoped it would give them a leg up. But when they returned a hundred years later, they could not believe what had taken place...
Titans of Industry
As her flyer dipped below the bruised cloudbanks, Axis Pheydra, who had taken orders from gods for centuries without batting an eye, found that she was capable of repulsion.
Her first suspicion was that a perceptor was malfunctioning. Surely this could not be the same world. Only an enormous asteroid or comet could account for such haze, the existence of which she would surely have noticed during her first circuit and dealt with.
But her probes confirmed what her sensoria resisted admitting. This was indeed Bezgelor. It seemed inconceivable that in the span of a mere century an entire planetary ecosystem could have become so degraded. Or, for that matter, that living organisms could survive in such toxic conditions for more than sixty-six seconds.
The lush forests that had carpeted over half the massive planet's surface had been completely denuded. Likewise its oceans, jungles, ice caps, and ozone layer. Its mountains had been mined hollow and paved over. The verdant groves had been replaced by factories and refineries that scabbed every horizon, churning noxious gases that made the sky seethe a cancerous ochre. The unceasing groans of machinery sounded like the planet itself begging for oblivion.
It seemed that her mission here had succeeded, to put it mildly. Judged sheerly by their capacity for industry alone, the Chua would make a promising addition to the Dominion. But were these creatures too unruly for even the Eldan to maintain control? It seemed but an eyeblink since her last visit here, on what at the time had seemed an unlikely gambit.
A Promising Devilry
Emboldened by the resounding success of their mission to Mikros, the Mechari returned to their scouting with renewed zeal, investigating numerous worlds considered statistically optimal for incubating powerful prospective allies.
Pheydra herself had chanced to be in an adjacent system when probes notified her of the primitive but intelligent Chua of Bezgelor. Her interval of covert study confirmed that in addition to their unbridled deviousness, the rather dubious-looking creatures displayed an uncanny talent for mechanical engineering. Concluding that a species unconstrained by moral considerations had obvious strategic possibilities (and fascinated by their inventively bizarre reproduction cycle), she transmitted her findings and announced intentions to open communications.
With what she deemed the optimal fanfare, she made her presence known to their most powerful tribe, requested an audience with what she estimated from his bone coronet to be the incumbent chieftain, and presented him with crude and simple tokens of Dominion technology. Nothing fusion-powered of course, merely items sufficient to teach them the fundamentals of physics and, presuming they survived said lessons, to nudge them slowly but inexorably towards metallurgy.
Appearing profoundly moved, the chieftain reciprocated by presenting the new benefactors with a gift-wrapped parcel of fronds, accompanied by repeated pleas that they delay fully savoring its contents until back aboard their ship.
Consequently, it was only after liftoff that the box's occupant, an especially tumescent Bezgeloran tar-beetle, promptly exploded upon exposure to light per its ancient defense mechanism, coating all Mechari present in corrosive black ooze that required months of corrective drilling and acid-baths to remove.
Overriding her enraged envoys' suggestions to exterminate the entire populace, Pheydra reluctantly ordered departure. The trip to Bezgelor had been a waste. Superior candidates awaited everywhere. Ones requiring surely less...maintenance.
Explosive Results
Now, Pheydra reflected as she toured the refinery, it appeared their efforts had propelled the Chua into a state of psychotic overdrive. As the ambassador with the strange smile showed her how they had created a weapons factory so efficient that its components were processed from prisoner protein to petroleum in seconds, Pheydra wondered if she was witnessing the most horrifying abomination in her long memory or the greatest achievement of her equally long career.
She understood their sudden eagerness to join the Dominion. They had scraped their planet dry. Now they faced a need for resources that their environment was no longer capable of producing. Some of her envoys were still in favor of nuking them. But the weapons prototypes they had shown her appeared remarkably efficient.
She turned to express these sentiments to the ambassador and saw that he was extending a small box to her. An offering, the translator explained, to cement their glorious alliance for ages to come.
She started to open it. Narrowed her gaze. Eyes glistening, the Chua expressed regrets on behalf of his mentally troubled ancestor who had misguidedly perpetuated that whole unfortunate tar-beetle business. He assured her that this parcel contained nothing of the sort. A brief pulse-scan confirmed the truth of this assertion. Taking the box, she expressed her wishes that it serve as a fitting testimonial to Mechari-Chua relations for all time to come.
She returned to her ship. Leaving the box in the care of her attendant, she withdrew to her chambers to reflect on her next stop. Just before the doors closed, she heard the explosion.
And discovered for the first time in two thousand years of sentience that her dentata could grind with irritation.