Prologue

Lightyears before sound or heartache, the reckless gods flung the planet Tarnan to the farthest extremities of the Adinfinus galaxy. Skeptical of trade and uninterested in war, the Tarnanites lived in an isolated nirvana for centuries.

They were a beautiful race. Broad faces, thick nostrils. Their recalcitrant features covered in veiny purple skin. Coarse hair that fell to their waists in reams of great silver and seemed to arabesque and pirouette in the wind. Their bodies were given to builds of muscular whimsy, their eyes as pale as earthly moonlight. They prowled their own lands like possessive panthers, hunting only to survive, making voracious love, and worshipping at the shrine of their gods.

It was only when neighboring planets began to grow envious that bloodshed ignited. Hammond, who had been their king for many winters, was young and strong then, but even he had been powerless to quell the slaughtering of his people. The war was ended by the makeshift bow and arrow of a dead farmer's son. An orphan who had crept into the king's army at only 14 winters of age and henceforth came to be known as Jora, The Champion of His People. He was, with little room for doubt, the most fearsome warrior throughout the galaxy, among all races, across all constellations.

Four winters of blessed, bountiful peace time had followed, and lulled once again by wine and love, many believed this serenity would last forever. Now they are beginning to see they were wrong. Now there is a new darkness approaching. Humans.

Fleeing their own planet, a mess of rubble and despair, swallowed up in the jaws of their own insatiable greed, the humans scour the cosmos in search of a new home. In their hulking spaceships that breathe fire like intergalactic dragons they touch down planet to planet colonizing where they can, destroying where they cannot. Wiping out entire civilizations, eradicating entire peoples. Without thought or soul they streak across the universe, a blackened devil's comet, smearing the stars with blood.