The Great Retrograde was a catastrophic event that crippled the Tanausan Imperium, eventually leading to its dissolution.
History[]
The entity Elysia was once a contemporary of Eirene, and was near her own Artesia Gateway located within what eventually became Imperium space. During the course of the first war with the Dark, by means and for reasons that have since been lost to time the gate and station were destroyed and Elysia was locked away in a prison that the Imperium called Oblivion’s Trophy.
The likelihood of the Tanausan Imperium at any point in their history possessing the means to destroy an Artesia gateway is low; indeed, there is doubt that even the Dark’s Elder races could have done so. The Dark herself becomes the most likely culprit, to which one can only speculate what could have enraged her to the point of such a drastic measure of galaxy-altering consequence.
-From “The Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Tanausan Imperium” by Clarista Vant-Larris
Two million years later, Admiral Aubrosia Wen of the Second Imperial Defensive Fleet unearthed and built an Imperial station around the Trophy. Driven mad by both grief from her lost gate and the length of time she had spent in isolation, Elysia was manipulated by Admiral Wen into using her remaining connection with Artesia to close any incoming transit from the Milky Way, effectively isolating the Starfleet presence in the Large Magellanic Cloud just before declaring what would become known as the Dawnbreaker War.
Elysia kept the way closed for almost two years until strike teams made up of officers from the USS Pilgrim and liberated Imperial subjects boarded the station. The attack took place during a visit by Emperor Gallias Pyr, who claimed to have been visited by the Goddess in a dream and told to make the pilgrimage there. When the strike team encountered Elysia at last, they were able to show her that the Imperium had deceived her. In her rage, she killed the Emperor and disassembled the prison and station around her, reconfiguring it into a weapon. Before she could fire it the officers convinced her not to eradicate the Tanausans and their subjects, but she concluded that the Imperium still had to be made to pay. She reconfigured her weapon and sent out a massive pulse across Imperium space, disintegrating all of the tech and equipment that the Tanausans had acquired or developed from technology they had stolen from other species.
In a single moment, a two million year old multi-planetary empire was regressed to the early space age, if even that.
Immediate Aftermath[]
The Tanausan Imperium was infamous for their shameless theft of technology, be it from the species they conquered, warred with, or even the ones they were supposed to be allied with. Over the course of their empire’s lifespan they had integrated so much from other species that practically nothing purely Tanausan had been invented since before the wars of conquest that had seen the rise of the Imperium. Therefore, Elysia’s punishment was nothing short of devastating. Worlds were cut off from one another and ships drifted without power in the vacuum of space. Failed environmental controls and infrastructure resulted in ecological and societal devastation.
Though the Imperium still had a partial fleet that had not been within their territory at the time of the Retrograte, it had been badly beaten down during the Battle of Beryxia and was now needed to help with the disaster relief efforts. To their surprise Starfleet came to aid these efforts, and in so doing swayed most of the Imperium’s former subjects, and even many Tanausans, in their favor.
The Imperium had effectively withdrawn from the Dawnbreaker War. It would not be long before the Coln Confederacy and Chantry of Delphia officially withdrew as well, ending the conflict.
The End of an Empire[]
By the time that any of the Tanausan worlds had recovered enough to begin interacting with one another again, it was clear to most that the Imperium would never exist in its former state again. Multiple worlds declared independence, some formed unions with each other, and only the world of Duhelen under the rule of self-proclaimed Emperor Janos Pyr still claimed to be the Tanausan Imperium.
Elysia had been convinced to help guide the Tanausan people as they recovered from the devastation she had wrought. To this end she chose Captain Clarus Son to act as Lord-Protector of what would become the New Tanausan States and has been acting as both a guide and a very effective deterrent for them ever since.