The War for Earth

**The** **War for Earth**, known in Rikutsaren as the *Urélnear* and in Lithon as the *Naer Urtelen*, was the longest and deadliest single military conflict in Earth's known history. Billions of Lithon soldiers faced off in battlefields across the planet, though the war was concentrated primarily in northern Eurasia. The war lasted for 349 years, and almost every human family tree on Earth today has an ancestor who was affected by the war. The human death toll isn't known, but Smenaer estimates it to have been more than 10 million, almost 25% of humanity at the time. Meanwhile, billions of Lithoi were created with the sole purpose of fighting and dying in the war.

The Lithoi are a colonial species, taking every planet in their path and warping it to their benefit. Earth was merely their next target. But many had endured enough oppression and rebelled. Though these rebellions had been ongoing for centuries already, the war itself began sometime around the year 3,200 BCE. This is when a rebel faction called the *Knights of Anthos* attacked and successfully overtook multiple Lithon bases on the planet. The faction was extremely successful in causing enemy soldiers to betray their side, mostly due to the high resentment that most lower-caste Lithoi had towards the Theongorai. Therefore, the rebels had a huge advantage from the start. When Lithon forces attacked the rebels, they were able to meet with equal or greater power. Special spies called *Valuec* ("changers"; singuar *Valuth*) were dispatched to dispel propaganda to enemy soldiers. The Mae component of Óasmae was a Valuth.

The ensuing war was successful in driving off the invading Lithoi, but at a great cost: nearly every Lithon on Earth was obliterated by a powerful and coordinated attack by the Theongorai. Only a handful of soldiers survived, including Smenaer and Óasmae, who were now close friends from the war. Meanwhile, Anthos and her closest confidants **Apános** and **Kenaphos** also survived and disappeared into obscurity for the next 5600 years.

## Song of the Theon

The **Theoncas** ("Song of the Theon") was the infamous single attack that ended the War for Earth. The Theon took advantage of a power only their planet had: the production and projection of high-energy gamma radiation.

High-energy gamma radiation is the only known weakness to Lithoi. The substance inside their nanoparticles undergoes a poorly understood chemical reaction in the presence of gamma radiation, expanding over 100-fold and converting into an inert and useless chemical byproduct. Unsurprisingly, this kills the Lithon very quickly, on the order of 2-5 seconds.

Smenaer gave a firsthand account of the Theoncas in her 1815 autobiography **Nøréc** **Beogøn** ("Dreams of the Past").

> *"Just a day before the attack, Vios, seeing across time, warned us of a great dying. She said the Theon were planning a major attack, but the details were hidden from her sight. When it came, it began with singing,* *a* *cacophonous and ominous* *chorus which echoed over the whole Earth.* *Then a bright light appeared in the south. I couldn't see it directly, but Vios could. She described it as "if the sun had split* *radially into 6 parts, with the brightest* *at* *the center".*
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> *She realized too late the significance, and as she ran towards the cave, she became engulfed in flames that burned her to soot.*
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> *The singing had been overtaken by a shrill, high-pitched squeal, like a pressurized vessel had sprung a leak or a pig had been stuck. We later realized it was the agonized screams of millions of Lithoi all at once. We were close enough to the entrance of the cave that our bodies started to burn, so we retreated. We lost a bit of mass, but not much.*
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> *Sometime later the light and the squealing faded. The smell of burning lingered as if it came from the ground itself, the humans later told us, and it lasted so long they couldn't smell it anymore."*
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