The Silent War
The Silent War is the name of the perpetual conflict between humanity, the Alliance and the abyssal entities known as the Vexro. There are no fixed front lines, no formal declarations, no chance of negotiation. Only the certainty that wherever the shadows flow, the Vexro can appear and erase everything.
Why “Silent”
The overwhelming majority of humans and other allied species have never witnessed a Vexro attack. The Starfall Alliance operates at the farthest edges, well beyond the densely populated galaxies, where space already silences any call for help. For billions of living beings, the Vexro remain legends, “forbidden tales” or a mythology of fear.
The Council deliberately keeps that silence. After the panic of First Contact, it became clear that the raw truth could destroy the social order. Ignorance, in this context, is a tactic: as long as only pilots and high command face the true nature of the enemy, civilization can go on — at least for one more cycle.
“When a Vexro touches a system, not even the echo of the screams makes it back. The war is silent because the dead don’t speak.” — Anonymous, fragment recovered from the Vita Datacore.
[Image suggestion: Deep space seen from a cockpit, sensors detecting only an absolute purple void.]
Hidden Numbers
Civilian records will never know the real cost of this war, but internal estimates and Vita Datacore leaks reveal the scale of the disaster:
- 2,400+ bonded pilots and their Vytar never returned from the abyss since the Alliance was founded;
- 78,400+ humans (pilots and crews) lost aboard capital, incursion and battle ships on the stellar fronts;
- 3,078,400+ human lives (civilian and military) lost defending systems, or victims of mass orbital attacks;
- 140+ Sellularian capital ships (Ark class) — immense stationary space cities — completely destroyed or corrupted (many never found);
- 3,900+ Viatorunian cruisers (nomadic human ships) missing, disintegrated or converted;
- 298 star systems evacuated and lost to the Dead Zone — now marked as “tombs of civilizations”, with estimated losses of tens of billions of lives;
- 78+ habitable planets, colonies and human megastations already obliterated, vanished or declared Forbidden Zones;
- 35 Vytar incubator planets corrupted or sealed to avoid the risk of “galactic-scale contagion”;
- An estimated average of at least 25 Vexro incursions intercepted per galactic cycle (smaller attacks don’t even make the statistics anymore, being “numerically irrelevant”);
- 14 Vexro Heralds confirmed with direct appearances in the last five cycles — each capable of converting entire realities, on top of the material destruction.
[Image suggestion: A galactic map with purple/black stains radiating from the Abyss, crossed-out systems, icons of lost ships and sealed worlds.]
“The numbers aren’t just cold. They vibrate under the skin of those who survive. Every point isn’t only a loss — it’s an undying echo of a collective pain that humanity (and its allies) pretend not to feel so they don’t go mad.”
The Vytar Factor
In recent decades, never-before-seen patterns have been observed among the Vytar: some waking from hibernation without command, others talking on frequencies undecipherable even to the Alliance. Many fear the Vytar collective consciousness is being contaminated by the expansion of the Dead Zone, or even picking up echoes of the Vexro before they attack.
Are they guardians of the threshold — or a sign that the next phase of this war is approaching?
An Uncertain Future
The Silent War cannot last forever. The Dead Zone grows, the Vexro grow bolder, and each cycle the resistance wears thinner. Pilots and their living ships are rarer and rarer. The elders whisper that another “First Contact” is coming — and this time, there may be no coming back.
If surviving is already a form of heroism, soon the very meaning of victory will have to be reinvented.
[Image suggestion: A lone pilot staring at the Dead Zone through a window, only the reflection of their eyes lit by the purple glow of the abyss.]