It is well known that as the Almnetic Empire neared its end, the last of its much-privileged caste of bardic scientists, before succumbing to the general ennui that permeated the once-great civilization, commissioned the creation of the Final Emperor of the Almnet, designed to ensure the existence of the empire, albeit in a much reduced form, in perpetuity. The result was the Quiet Emperor, a vaguely sentient repository of the summed wisdom and might of the empire, slowly but inexorably expanding through the Empire’s core worlds. All of this would have been lost to galaxy but for the tireless work of the Almnetic and near-post-Almnetic monastic orders, who made their homes among the densest ganglia growths, cultivating and harvesting their monarch.

Mysteries remain, however. Skeptics argue that there is little evidence, save the existence of the entity itself, that Almnetic science was nearly advanced enough to create such a being. They point to the living cultivars of the emperor carried by fleeing Lanians, and the resulting ecstatic cults as evidence of a deeper agenda. But most of all, they point to the unmistakable archeological evidence that the Intoan expedition that would become the Empire departed from Viridia Segunda at a time of unparalleled Greenling flowering, contemporaneously with the disappearance of much of the foliage of the Ascacian Wastes. Thus, they ask: did the Emperor arise from the Empire, or the Empire from the Emperor?

—Heichner Kzolknov