The Great War, it spread like a plague from colony to colony, the will to challenge the authority of a great empire.
It raged, uncontrolled for years, and reached the once inviting shores of the homeworld, where it raged on for years more, devastating whole cities.
I remember the tales my grandmother told me, back home, growing up.
How she and her brother would cower under their iron bed, believing it would keep them safe from the a-bombs falling, just beside the capital's walls, just a few kilometers away.
How they would block teir windows at night, and how the fires just beside the wall would light up the night sky.
How the fear and paranoia tore families apart, and doomed hundreds of people to fall into the hands of the secret police.
She had it easy for her, relatively safe inside the walls, away from the nukes, and the plagues, and the toxins.
Half of a world, billions of years in the making, just burned away in fifty years.