The Orbit Scrolls: Book One

In Ancient Times, as the Red Sun Disaster redefined human history, the thriving but war-weary Pelanjian people asked this of themselves. "What might we become if our honor was no longer tainted by constant warfare? What if our nation's energy was unleashed to create rather than destroy?"

This was asked by citizens of the most successful trading empire in human history. Folk who excelled in education, science, medicine, and whose cultural soul had been anchored by the Orbit Scrolls for millennia. Folk who despised the word "war" yet were forced to excel in that too. Hope for an answer tested Pelanjia's determination. They gambled their very existence by shattering the limits of naval exploration of their era to seek Wraithaven-humankind's most terrifying and elusive legend!

If the mythical terror actually existed, it should be uninhabited and ripe for settlement. After four centuries of fighting for national survival, the Pelanjians could disappear while their sworn enemies tore each other apart amid the planet's greatest cataclysm. Unequaled in recorded history, the Red Sun Disaster annihilated the societal fabric of every established nation on the two known continents at the time, Embrica and Mascarene. For a century past the Year of the Red Sun, the Starvation Wars, famines, and plagues destroyed 70% of the populations on both continents, while uncountable warlords and conquerors rose and fell.

The Great Recovery took centuries to crawl out of the devastation, for humankind to matter once again, but much had been lost. Re-inventions of what had once defined "civilizations" littered the wounded landscape alongside voids of things long forgotten. Ancient truths faded into legend. Legends emerged as truths. Even after a thousand years, truth versus legend remained inconclusive. Yet, for the Pelanjians who now call themselves "Wraithians," the millennia allowing them sanctuary and isolated peace from relentless invasion attempts, has given them the answer to their original question, "What might we become?"

This is their story.