The survival of Vandyrus after the Cataclysm was not an accident of fortune, but the consequence of neglect. Where other worlds in the Ran system had grown dependent on centralized power, layered infrastructure, and the brittle assurances of imperial logistics, Vandyrus remained functionally primitive by comparison. Its civilizations—kept deliberately stunted through oppression, misrule, or internal fracture—possessed no spacefaring capacity, little electrical infrastructure, and in many regions not even the reliable distribution of water. By the standards of Thanator’s throne, Vandyrus was a resource backwater: underdeveloped, ignored, and considered expendable. That very condition insulated it from total collapse.
When the Cataclysm tore the system apart, Vandyrus lost cities, coastlines, and entire continental spines, but it did not lose the habits of survival. Its folk were already adapted to scarcity, to migration, to rebuilding from ruin rather than maintaining fragile complexity. This endurance was compounded by withdrawal.
Long before the Cataclysm, Thanator abandoned Vandyrus for reasons that remain unrecorded. The retreat was not gradual and it was not benevolent. Imperial forces pulled back abruptly, scuttling installations, poisoning systems, and rendering their remaining technologies unusable. What they left behind were sealed ruins, broken engines, and inert monuments—structures that would haunt Vandyrus as puzzles rather than tools.
In the post-cataclysmic age, these sites became magnets for speculation and danger: places of research, superstition, and failed reclamation. Their meanings were never recovered, only layered over with myth and blood. Compounding this legacy, several starships—derelicts, refugees, or weapons without command—impacted the planet in the centuries following the Cataclysm, long before the first and second Thanatorian Wars. These crashes were not conquests. They were accidents of a system tearing itself apart, scattering debris and survivors across a world already struggling to stay intact.
The planet itself was broken nearly beyond recognition. Continents fractured, coastlines vanished, and populations were forced into long cycles of relocation as the ground continued to betray them. Yet large swaths of the population endured. They migrated, adapted, and fragmented into cultures defined less by origin than by the routes they survived.
For generations, history ceased to be written. What remains from the early post-cataclysmic era is largely oral: half-legends, distorted genealogies, and records so vague they function more as warnings than accounts. Precision did not survive; memory did.
Beyond Vandyrus, the rest of the Ran system descended into prolonged violence. Thanator itself fractured inward. Its nations, no longer restrained by imperial necessity or shared threat, turned on one another without limit. For centuries they expended stockpiles, shattered fleets, and annihilated resources that could have been preserved or repurposed. Old scores were settled at planetary scale.
This internecine collapse explains, in part, the absence of sustained conflict between Thanator and Vandyrus even in later ages. By the time order began to reassert itself, Thanator’s capacity for outward domination had been bled dry by its own wars. The slaver gates that still connect the worlds operate only intermittently, constrained by orbital mechanics and seasonal alignment, opening and closing like wounds that refuse to heal. They are not instruments of conquest so much as remnants of a violence both worlds no longer fully control.
The Vandyrian Collapse, then, was not a single fall but a prolonged refusal to vanish. Vandyrus did not rebuild what was lost; it learned to live without it. Its history after the Cataclysm is not one of recovery, but of persistence under continuous failure—a civilization shaped by abandonment, forced to survive amid the debris of greater powers that destroyed themselves trying to remember what they once were.
