The Kord

The Kord, for me, are heavily inspired by norse myth. These are creatures who live in a society where the sun has been consumed (figuratively) and time no longer has much meaning. They view death as a seductive end to a hollow existence, but also as a failure of character where honor and duty are the only possessions they still have. They see the end of their people. They are living the end. Though that end is present, now, the twilight of their culture may never give way to night. It's a kind of purgatory, a sleepy eon where this people exist, but little more.

The cause of this transformation in their society is two fold. If the Kord are the norse people experiencing their ragnarok, their enemy are the ice giants. This malevolent species lays for centuries like a mountain, unmoving, but is completely intolerant of life.They are creatures that grow like crystals, accumulating mass through mineralogical processes. They seem to be stirred into action only to snuff out life. They have the ability to refract sunlight into devastating beams to scorch their prey and being crystals with no discernible anatomy, are incredibly difficult to damage. Even when one is damaged, the fragments are still animated by their unrelenting hate for life.

One of these creatures, carried by a meteor, grew to monstrous proportions beneath the oceans of the Kord homeworld. A great battle against it was waged, one that took an incredible toll on its people. A fledgling technology, cryogenic stasis, was thought to be the only salvation. Rockets were launched into space packed tight with sleeping Kord, bound for hundreds of distant worlds. The species went to sleep and shared a dream.

The events of that war are little more than myth, even though there are Kord today that were there. So much of their life has been spent asleep, traveling between the stars, that their culture has been irrevocably changed by their dream. FTL hyperwave communication equipment and medical monitoring and feedback equipment allowed cryogenically frozen Kord to participate in a kind of lucid, shared dreamscape. All of these rockets hurtling cold through the stars are linked in this communications network, all of these sleeping Kord dreaming the same dream.

Some of these rockets have landed and some of these Kord have awoken, but the dream and sleep and even death call them back to a world where they are still relevant, not the scattered orphans of a shattered world.

One of these cryogenic pods was discovered on earth. Investigation into it's occupant and the technology that created it led to new interstellar relationship and a broad, new future full of possibilities for both species.