Excerpt from The Student Guide to the Glorious Triumph of the Terran Empire Over the Craven Tribes of Vulcan

Do you remember, my dear ones, when the stars were just stars?

Do you remember them before they burned with war, before their molten blood burned away our weakness and left us strong?

You do not, my dear ones, for you are so young.

But I shall teach you. I shall tell you your truth.

When Terra was Earth and humanity was young, we knew that the skies were filled by gods and by monsters. By some instinct we saw the dragons, the scorpions, the lions , and we feared it.

But then we forgot. We looked to the skies and we saw the planets dance and we came to imagine the stars as distant, spinning orbs. We saw clockwork, we saw ice and vast distances, and we forgot the dragons, the lions, the scorpions.

We forgot the eyes.

When they came for us, they came disguised.

They sent their priests first, their senators. Placid fools that preached diversity and ponderous, pacifistic infinities. Droning voices and white robes.

We were not fooled, my dear ones.

We were wise.

And, we were more than wise.

We were victorious.

We conquered them.

And we sniffed out their trap. Their hidden warrior clans. They hid them on a new planet; they gave them a new name.

But we were not fooled.

Vulcan is Romulan is Vulcan.

And so we burnt these warrior clans, my dear ones. They died howling at the sky.

Their buildings, their armour, their clothes, their skin. Each was burned from them in turn.

The priests keened and cowered, and yet still lied, and lied again.

"We did not know of them," they said in mewling unison. "The knowledge was lost."

Were it not for this treachery toward their own lost warriors, we might have punished them only with death.

But the brave and the cowardly must not share the same fate.

It is blasphemy.