The year was 2502 in an alternate reality, upon the dying soil of Planet Bharatvarsh—the final, desperate citadel of the Indus civilization. A middle-aged man lay prone upon the scorched earth, his crimson lifeblood seeping into the dust. All around him, the grotesque theater of annihilation played out in horrific detail: the fractured bodies of his kinsmen, women, and innocent children lay strewn across the landscape, spared by neither mercy nor malice. The ground beneath him trembled with a continuous, seismic agony as a cataclysmic rain of fire poured down from the upper atmosphere, unleashed by gargantuan starships hovering like predatory vultures in the blackened sky.
As the dying man forced his heavy eyelids open to look upon the heavens, he witnessed a bizarre and desperate spectacle. These massive vessels were not only raining death upon his defenseless people in a calculated bid for total extermination, but they were also locked in a ferocious, fratricidal conflict with one another. The ships belonged to the expansionist Caliphate Empire and the fanatical Holy Saxon Empire. Beholding this final betrayal of human reason, the man's mind reeled back through the tragedy of his people's history. He gasped out a final, agonizing question into the unheeding wind: "How did it ever come to this?"
His thoughts traveled across centuries of relentless persecution. He remembered the millions of souls systematically eradicated in the name of rigid dogmas and unyielding faiths. In the ancient cradle of humanity, war had always been a constant companion to empire and religion, but it achieved an apocalyptic scale once the secrets of Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel were unlocked. His people had historically chosen the path of peace, pluralism, and deep spiritual introspection, never seeking to conquer or convert others by the sword. Tragically, this profound pacifism and absolute tolerance became their ultimate vulnerability.
The cascade of sorrow had begun over a millennium prior on old Earth, initiated by the historic Islamic invasions under Bin Qasim, followed by the systematic devastations of successive sultanates and the Mughal Empire. Then came the cold, mercantile chains of the Dutch and British empires, who enslaved medieval Bharat for centuries. Though independence was achieved in the mid-20th century, a violent partition sowed the seeds of an enduring Islamic autocracy on their borders, leading to endless asymmetric warfare and religious terrorism that bled the subcontinent for another two hundred and fifty years.
When the 23rd century birthed FTL technology, humanity's tribal hatreds were merely exported to the stars. Unshackled from the fear of planetary nuclear fallout—since the species was no longer confined to a single world—the archaic impulses of crusades, jihads, and imperial enslavement returned with absolute, terrifying force. Over the subsequent two centuries, entire star systems were ethnically cleansed. The ultimate irony was realized when Earth itself was utterly annihilated in one of these merciless holy wars. Now, on this distant refuge of Bharatvarsh, the cycle was ending in absolute ashes.