The Divine Sedition [Complete]

Chapter 53 Xenora, Xenos and Rangda’s backstory

For millions of years, the Xenos existed like primitive beasts on the Xeno home planet, Xenora.  Xenora had unique features for life that set it apart from most other inhabited worlds in the Milky Way. The most unique feature was Xenora’s close orbit to a blue giant star, and its very slow rotational speed where one Xenora day was 3 months long. These circumstances led to days with a maximum temperature over 300 degrees and nights that could reach a minimum of -150 degrees. Despite these extreme circumstances, Xenora had life forms that could survive extreme conditions. This happened the following way:

All larger life forms continuously followed Xenora’s orbital rotation to always be on the side that had liveable conditions, the morning side of the planet. This forced all animals to be continually moving around the orbit, as a place would be too hot and kill them if they stayed long enough for the scorching midday sun to arrive and scorch them. Depending on the species of animal, they preferred different locations in the Xenora morning. The early morning was freezing as the ice from the night had not melted yet, and this suited animals that liked ice. The late morning was very hot, albeit still bearable, and suited animals that loved the heat.

Animals were able to keep up with Xenora’s rotation as the planet’s movement was very slow. As animals were forced to be continually moving on Xenora, life and survival instinct evolved differently, with different strategies implemented than on Earth. To survive on Xenora, an animal species could only rely on speed, pure strength, and pure ruthlessness, as there was no time for prey animals to be hiding or for predators to utilise stealth.

All the plants that existed were different types of fast-growing grass and other weeds, which had extremely short life cycles. These plants had entire lifecycles of only a few weeks between the time when the icicles and permafrost of the night had defrosted in the early morning, until the heat of the midday arrived which would cause widespread fires that killed all plant life in an instant. Having adapted to this way of how the planet revolved, plants on Xenora had fireproof seeds.

All the water on Xenora came down as snow and ice during the night and evaporated to steam during the day. Xenora had no tilt to its star and as such had no seasons. The lack of angle led to Xenora’s North and South Pole to always exist in twilight, and it was in the Polar Regions that life had originated as they were more survivable than the rest of the planet.

All animals on Xenora had very thick and sturdy skin to be able to cope with the tremendous amounts of UV radiation the planet received from its nearby blue star.

The Xenos had lived in the equatorial regions of Xenora, which were the most inhospitable regions of the planets. They had been very fearsome predators to survive under these circumstances. When the Zetans altered the Xeno’s DNA, the Xenos started spreading over the planet until they reached the Polar Regions. Once they arrived at the Polar Regions, they eventually came to start building permanent settlements, as the North and South Pole, with its eternal twilight, were the only places where it was safe to erect buildings without the need to worry for extreme heat, or extreme cold.

The dwellers of the only two Xeno cities had to be wary and continuously on alert though as the only two known sites suitable for permanent settlement were highly sought after by all the roaming hordes of Xeno tribes that roamed the planet. Every time a tribe thought they would be strong enough to conquer the city, they would try and fight to the last individual to do so, as was the custom in the Xeno culture for civil wars. Because of their constant warring and lack of advanced technology, the Xeno tribes remained on a Stone Age technology level for over 50,000 years. The lack of technological progress had convinced the Zetan researchers that sporadically would go on interplanetary study trips to examine Xenora that the Xenos was inferior to them. The Zetans wrote the Xenos off as a primitive race that would never pose a threat to the highly intelligent Zetan civilisation.  On the last Zetan research trips to Xenora, something happened that would forever alter the fate of both the Xenos and the Zetans. A female Zetan scientist, Kalianka, was left behind on Xenora. This scientist was in fact Rangda’s mother, and this is how she became one.

Kalianka fell victim to a cruel and unfortunate ploy. One of her fellow colleagues, a mean-spirited Zetan researcher, had tried to win her heart in courtship, but she rejected him. Feeling hurt, he secretly beat her up and left her to die on Xenora as he felt rejected and decided that if he could not have her, no one else would have her either. The cruel irony of fate was that, she had at times considered her assailant's proposal; however, his outrageously low self-esteem and short temper were the reasons she rejected him, which she later regretted as it had caused him to attack and almost kill her. He lied to the other Zetan researchers on the mission and told them that Kalianka was attacked and eaten by an animal. The other researchers did not go back to look for her as they believed him, and because their location was getting hotter and hotter as the sun rose over the sky, and they needed to move on.

When Kalianka woke up, she felt weak and what was even worse, the surface temperature had risen to 80 degrees Celsius and she had no water and no means to get to a colder location. This was lethal conditions to a Zetan, as her home planet Zetani had a similar climate as Earth, and the Zetans were not adapted to the extreme heat on Xenora.  She looked up and save a Xeno scout in front of her. Unable to fight in her condition she closed her eyes and prepared herself to meet the True Maker, but the attack never came. Instead, the Xeno scout lifted her up over his shoulder and started running towards cooler conditions and a water source to keep Kalianka alive.

Kalianka woke up many hours later by someone pouring icy water over her. It turned out that the scout had managed to outrun the planets rotation speed and they were now earlier in the Xenora day cycle when it was cooler. The air was still warm around 30 degrees, but the water was ice cold as the water had kept a lot of coldness from the long night. Kalianka later understood that the Xeno tribe that had taken her in, saw her as a goddess and worshipped her. Eventually, she learned their language and could learn and understand their culture. This was the best time in her life as a scientist as she finally could genuinely appreciate the Xenos from their own words and not just from observing them via a miniature drone that she had been doing previously during her career. Her biggest regret was that she couldn’t share her revelations and discoveries with her fellow Zetans. Her telepathic abilities didn’t work as there was no other Zetan in the star system to communicate with as the rest of the expedition had returned to Zetani.

Kalianka got a unique insight into the harsh life the Xenos were living, and she understood them better than any Zetan had ever done. The tribe she was part of was living at the equator and had to move the furthest distance every day to remain in a liveable time of the day on Xenora. As Xenora was the size of Earth, that meant that they had to move over 200 kilometres a day to the west, to avoid getting scorched by the sun. This put a lot of pressure and forced a non-empathic approach to the members of the tribe. If someone for instance, got sick or injured, the tribe had to leave him or her to die or kill him as they couldn’t travel fast enough with weak fully-grown members of the tribe. The only exception to this rule was for Kalianka. Being a Zetan, she was not physically fit enough to move 200 kilometres a day on foot. As her Xeno tribe considered her a goddess, they did not mind sharing the burden of carrying her around. Eventually, her tribe decided that her presence with them was a sign, a sign that it was time to move from the bottom of the Xeno hierarchy to the top. To do this, they needed to invade the Xeno city on Xenora’s North Pole. They managed to pass all the other tribes’ territories on the way to the North Pole without any confrontation. The Xeno culture was very direct, and as the tribe had declared that they were after taking over the North Pole, the other tribes did not see them as a threat and let them pass through their territories on their way there.

Once they reached the North Pole, Kalianka’s tribe did not stand a chance. This was because the defenders had both the numerical advantage as well as fortified city walls. As the Xeno culture required that they fought to the last individual, they all died, except for Kalianka who was taken prisoner by the North Pole inhabitants. Being a prisoner of the North Pole city was the end of Kalianka’s luck, as the city dwellers had experienced contact with Zetans in the past and understood that Kalianka was not a goddess. They realised Kalianka was a Zetan, a species they had previous disagreements and altercations with. They tortured and r***d her continually, for revenge and to extract scientific knowledge from her. This ended abruptly when Kalianka very surprisingly fell pregnant. This shouldn’t have been possible as they were completely different species, but it happened due to an extremely unlikely mutation taking place in Kalianka’s body. To the Xenos, this was an act of the True Maker and Kalianka’s misfortune turned topsy-turvy again and she was now the wife of the Xeno high priest and the mother of their future queen, Rangda. Unfortunately for Kalianka, the amount of UV radiation her skin had soaked up during her years with equator tribe caught up with her a few years later, and she contracted lethal skin cancer and sadly died at the age of 220 years, a very young age to die for a Zetan, as they usually reached a lifespan of longer than 1000 years.

Losing her mother at a young age caused a permanent psychological scar within Rangda, and she blamed the Zetans for her mother’s suffering and unfair treatment. Growing up, Rangda swore to get revenge for her mother with the destruction of the Zetan galactic civilisation. As it turned out, she had plenty of time to get her revenge. Her unlikely DNA that was a combination of Zetan and Xeno DNA stopped her from aging once she reached adulthood and granted her immortality. As she was a hybrid species, she was also completely infertile, and she looked morbidly insane.

Rangda began the long journey to make the Xeno species, a species that could contest with the Zetan for dominance of the galaxy. Her first step was to make the North Pole city an impregnable fortress so that her tribe would remain in power. This was the natural step as her late mother had provided her tribe with a lot of Zetan technological knowledge that could be used to make superior weaponry, more than capable of repelling anything the other tribes could throw at them with considerable ease. The next step was to build tunnels across the planet for underground settlements, where the extreme variations in temperature did not exist. Xenora was ideal for building underground societies as the planet had limited geological activity cycle which meant that the heat didn’t increase as they dug deeper, and they didn’t need to worry about earthquakes. They kept digging for thousands of years until the tunnels spanned across Xenora, with a multitude of large settlements all controlled by Rangda.

The basis for Rangda’s control was that she had found out that there were Zeto crystals underground on Xenora, the reason why the Zetan researches arrived millennia ago. The unaltered Zeto crystals did not affect the minds of the Xeno species as the Zeto crystals promoted values such as the pursuit of knowledge, unity, passiveness, and the love for all life. Rangda, however, managed to find a way to corrupt the gemstones to promote values such as lust, greed, violence, and domination. These values were more aligned to the Xeno minds, and by controlling the crystals, Rangda could control her ever-increasing number of subjects.

The Xeno underground settlements were fed in two ways. Most of the nutrition came from mould-based artificial meats. The Xenos were carnivores, but they were able to eat plant or algae-based proteins if they had to. The second way to feed her settlements was to catch the animals on the surface by climbing up tunnels through to the surface. By utilising tunnels to the surface, her tribe didn’t need to continually move to avoid getting burnt and instead they just surfaced when outside temperatures were suitable and then dragged all of their catch back to the deep tunnels where they were protected against the extreme outside temperatures.    

Once Rangda’s tribe controlled all Xenora, they quickly eradicated all the other tribes and set sight on their next goal, to start the war of conquest against the Zetans. The Xenos conquered their first planets easily. These planets were scarcely populated, and the Zetans living there didn’t expect any threats and were mostly unarmed. The Xenos moved in, and due to their short life cycle and quick reproduction rate, they quickly got a foothold on the conquered planets. As the conquered planets were better for Xeno settlements than Xenora, they promptly spread and created an economic base on the planets, aided by the confiscated Zetan infrastructure. After a century, the Xenos had consolidated their hold and set out to capture more worlds. This time the Zetan were better prepared, but the planets were still too far away from their homeworld to be adequately defended, and even these planets fell.