Welcome to Astashica: The Rise of Tlandar, a science fantasy epic chronicling the fall of empires, the awakening of ancient powers, and the rise of a reluctant protector. This is the beginning of Astashica’s saga — a world born from exile and forged in rebellion.
The Prologue begins below.
Before the jungles of Astashica breathed their names into legend, before any temple bore the name Tlandar, there was only one dominant force in the known cosmos: the Xothek Empire.
For eons, the Xothek ruled their home galaxy with unmatched precision, binding trillions across countless worlds through genetics, memory, and mind. They built cities inside moons, constructed weaponized stars, and forged sentient machines from conscious alloy. Their civilization was powered by a celestial engine—the very heart of their galaxy, Dysoned into a massive structure that harvested energy from its central star. That energy pulsed outward to power entire fleets, planets, and thought-driven networks of governance and war.
Their greatest creations were not ships or missiles—but ideas.
Among them stood two titans.
The first was Emperor Mekbaal III, ruler of the Xothek Galaxy. Ambitious and highly militarized, Mekbaal commanded his entire domain with a single thought. His mind was fused with the Xothek’s deepest neural grid. With but a flicker of intent, he could unleash every Azurevat missile across his empire—planet-killing warheads formed from sentient Kuprix, capable of disintegrating continents, defying gravity, and altering weather systems. Under his rule, all beings bowed in extreme fear, for he was not merely a sovereign—he was a god of command.
But Mekbaal was not content with one galaxy.
He sought to conquer the billions of galaxies beyond, to absorb them into his dominion, and to rewrite the cosmos in his name.
The second titan was King Xil’rath—a master assassin and tactician. Where Mekbaal commanded armies from a throne, Xil’rath worked in shadow, mastering cloak-and-dagger warfare. He too had fused his mind to the Xothek command grid, allowing him to control his armadas by thought alone. But unlike Mekbaal, his ambition was personal: he desired Mekbaal’s throne, power, and empire.
Their clash shattered the heavens.
The Xothek Civil War raged across thousands of systems. Armadas clashed with living dreadnoughts. Artificial stars were torn apart. Betrayal and sabotage consumed even the deepest vaults. The skies filled with the glow of Kuprix detonations and Azurevat fire. One by one, planets fell into ruin, data libraries burned, and ancestral worlds were annihilated.
In time, the galaxy itself collapsed—its core overdrawn, its order devoured by entropy. What remained spiraled into a retrograde black hole.
But not all perished.
In the last hours of the war, six rebel chieftains—Cosmus, Val’katl, Salgar, Gorak, Uxnall, and Meiannia—seized the Defiance Vanguard, a Xothek war cruiser ten miles long. They filled its vast holds with the final remnants of their civilization: 200 million beings, thousands of auxiliary ships and robots, food, seeds, live animals, birds, insects, and tools of survival.
They brought with them civilization’s memory:
As the Vanguard rose from the surface of Planet Asemeri, Mekbaal’s loyalists gave chase. Under assault, the rebel chieftains detonated a reprogrammed Azurevat warhead—ripping open a wormhole through spacetime. Wrapped in electromagnetic barriers and gravity buffers, the ship plunged into the breach.
Three days later, the Defiance Vanguard emerged in an uncharted galaxy.
There, orbiting a storm-veiled world, they found refuge.
The planet was dense with wild rainforests, wracked by violent weather, and scattered with enormous monoliths of unknown origin. Ancient forces stirred beneath its oceans. It was perfect—untamed, uncolonized, and strong enough to survive.
It was named Astashica.
They scorched a twenty-five-mile crater into its surface and built New Asemeri atop the ash. From there, they spread outward—each chieftain carving dominions across the land, imposing Xothek structure upon native chaos.
The XENOVIS grid was embedded deep beneath the surface—anchored not in orbit, but underground, in vaults, pyramids, and crystal cores hidden beneath mountains and seas. No satellites orbited this new world. Instead, a buried nervous system of data nodes connected the entire planet through light and memory.
Yet Astashica was not empty.
It remembered.
It remembered the civilizations that came before—the architects of the weather-controlling Xhalaks, the builders of pyramids beneath the Siluran Sea, the ones who whispered through Kuprix long before the Asemeri arrived.
The world watched. It waited. And in time, it chose again.
Not a warlord.
Not a tyrant.
A cattle herder.
A dreamer.
A protector.
His name was Tlandar.
Born of soil and sky, descended from a rebel line, and bearing the rare genetic frequency that resonated with Astashica’s hidden systems, Tlandar would become the only force strong enough to rise against tyranny—not through domination, but through remembrance.
And thus begins the saga.
The rise of a world that remembers.
The return of a spirit long buried.
The awakening of Astashica.