The Severed Stars
Cosmology
The shape of the dark — how the great roads fell silent, and what crossing it costs now.
Cosmology — overview
Two galaxies, one sealed door between them, and a precursor race that seeded humanity everywhere — then vanished.
Two galaxies
The setting spans two galaxies severed from one another.
The Burn is humanity's cradle — the galaxy that holds Earth and its billions. To the wider universe it looks like a dead, empty zone: a curiosity with nothing worth taking in it. That is exactly how it has stayed hidden, and exactly why it must stay that way.
The Far Side is the elder galaxy — ancient, populated, fought-over, and full of long-settled powers. It was once knit together by a network of instantaneous gates; that network fell an age ago, and today its ships crawl between stars on jump drives. This is where the story lives.
The Celestar
Long before recorded history, a human-form precursor race called the Celestar rose in the elder galaxy and seeded human-shaped life across countless worlds — which is why so much of the galaxy looks like us, and can be reasoned with like us. Then they vanished, leaving behind ruins, derelict stations, and coveted "pretech" relics. What became of them is one of the setting's central mysteries.
A sealed door
Only one gate still works, and it is the single thread linking the two galaxies — sealed shut. The way home is closed, and the seal is slowly failing. That one degrading door drives the whole saga: it is humanity's only road back, the secret their enemies must never find, and a clock counting steadily down.
Time runs differently
Crossing between the galaxies is not free. Time on the Far Side runs far faster than on Earth — so a colonist can live a decades-long epic on the far side of the door while their homeworld ages only a few short years.