Species Codex Entry
The Elders
The last gardeners of a burned orchard, planting new forests from ash
Primordial Genesis to Present · 1,250,000 BC – 165,000+ AD"We do not intervene. We adjust the angle of light falling on a seed and wait three thousand years to see which direction it grows."
— Orrery of Sages, Custodial Doctrine
The Essential
They stand barely four feet tall. Their skin shifts between moonlit silver and deep iridescent blue—a membrane that remembers starlight. Fan-like appendages extend from their skulls, delicate as moth wings, functioning as organic receivers for frequencies most species cannot imagine. They look fragile. They have buried eight sibling civilizations, two galactic apocalypses, and the gods who made them.
The Elders—formally the Elyrians Praetorian—are the sole survivors of the Original Nine, species created by the primordial Creators over a million years ago. When the First Unraveling shattered reality in 1,112,345 BC, the Elders phased through the apocalypse. Their bodies can negotiate with gravity itself, becoming lighter than air or denser than stone. Their eyes perceive multiple timelines simultaneously. Their specialized organ—the Eternity-Core—lets them taste the shape of time the way humans taste salt.
Every major sapient species in the known galaxies—Lumens, Draken, Aetherians, and more—traces its genetic architecture back to Elder design. They are not merely ancient. They are ancestral.
Their philosophy is patience weaponized. The Elder Covenant demands non-interference—not from weakness, but from the understanding that a civilization guided too closely never learns to walk. They strike at causality flows rather than enemies. They plant ideas in fertile minds and wait centuries for harvest. They have been fighting a shadow war against the Nexum—shapeshifting infiltrators descended from another of the Original Nine—for over a million years. Neither side has won. Neither side has lost.
From their crystalline homeworld of Elyria in the Pleiades Subcluster, they watch. They wait. They tend the garden they planted in the ashes of the universe that came before.