Species Codex Entry
Vyxians
Masters of shadow who traded truth for power—and are still counting the cost
All Eras · 85,000 BC – Present"We are not the darkness. We are what the darkness is afraid to become."
— Sss'thris the Whisperer, circa 39,500 BC
The Essential
The Vyxians are reptilian masters of espionage whose civilization treats secrets as currency, deception as statecraft, and patience measured in millennia as strategic advantage. Their scales ripple with chromatophores that can match any background—a gift engineered into their ancestors by the Elders 85,000 years ago on a world where triple suns cast overlapping shadows and only the hidden survived.
For 135,000 years, the Shadow Syndicate has governed from the darkness, its spymasters shaping galactic events through manipulation, infiltration, and the quiet redistribution of truth. Their creed whispers through every Cryptvault: "Knowledge veiled is power doubled." What goes unspoken is the cost.
There is a word in Old Vyxian—syx'vel'thaan—that means "the loneliness of those who can never be known." It is the price the Vyxians pay for their mastery.
That price came due during the Draken Occupation. For 17,000 years, the Vyxians endured conquest, their sacred Cryptvaults breached, their camouflage stripped away by a bioweapon called the Chromophage that killed 207 million and left survivors' scales frozen in place—visible, vulnerable, exposed. The species built on concealment learned what it meant to have nowhere left to hide.
Yet the shadows endured. When the Night of Unmasking came in 31,100 AD, 2.3 million operatives revealed themselves across seventeen worlds in a single hour—some who had been embedded in Draken households for centuries, their patience measured not in years but in generations. The children of shadow returned from the long dark, scarred but unbroken.