A B C D E F G H

F

Farthest Shore,
The Popular name for the gulf, NIS-W-090, between the human and unexplored galactic arms.

Father,
The Earliest encountered in League military files from 4589, the figure of the Father dominates all accounts of the Colony Wars period. Apparently without a history, the Father took a mere four years to catapult himself from obscurity to the single-handed leadership of entire League in their 'Spring Offensive' of 4593. After a remarkable victory at the Battle of Bennay, it is the Father and his most fanatical admiral, the similarly enigmatic Kron, who defeated the Old Empire in 4620. After that, the Father is implicated in the Red Sun testimonial of Alexander Valdemar, but ultimately disappears altogether after the Second Colony War. Yet commentators have seen his hand in events for another century. It was research into the Celeste Affair, and the origins of the Sha'Har, which threw up the most startling propositions about the origins of this singular individual. His powers of 'communication', his apparently immense lifespan and a thousand other quirks could not but suggest that the Father, saviour of humankind, was indeed Sha'Har, and fragments of fragments of data from the Dargothans were the catalyst for the realisation that the Father, known to his elite guard in Bureau 19 as The General, was indeed Sha'Har. Latterly, access to the Sha'Har archives served to confirm nearly two millenia of suspition.

Probably born, an Earth native, in the 4240s under the name John Daker, he and his family were transhipped to the secret system of Celeste in the early 4280s. There they were infected with the experimental J3-Alpha retrovirus as part of a program to activate specific hibernatory DNA elements in the interests of enhancing human lifespan. By 4289, it is estimated, John Daker and his twenty-year old son were Sha'Har. It is assumed that any remainder of the Daker family died in the experiments. Both surviving Dakers were aboard the Thanatos in 4299, and both were marooned on Dargotha Major in 4361. In all likelihood there had been profound, and quite possibly violent, disagreements between John Daker and the Sha'Har elders. Aware of the threat posed by Daker, yet apparently unwilling to kill him, he was left under the supervision - the 'Watch' of over three centuries - of his son, who remained loyal to the elders.

It is almost certain that the technology used by the Dargothans to terraform Dargotha Minor in 4444 was derived from the genetic engineering on John Daker himself. It is as a result of this that Daker became the Father. His son, in shame, pride, or anger - it will never be known - dropped whatever his given name had been, retaining Daker and adding Kron. By the time the League made contact with the Dargothans in 4588, the Father was poised to exploit his centuries of experience and learning, some of which may even have been gleaned from otherwise forbidden chronicles of the Ur-Dargothan civilisation. Commentators have, above all, struggled with the ambivalence in the Father's actions. Destroying the Old Empire was certainly a Sha'Har agenda, despite the Father's animosity towards the elders on the Thanatos, but destroying the Red Sun, then Kron, and launching the Gulf War could only be attacks on the Sha'Har. Even the most objective opinions (best summarised in Empires and Leagues, Volume III) concede that the Father's interests were not only for the good of the League. The most recent, and damning, analyses (such as Machiavelli's Ghosts: Politics, the Father, and the Sha'Har by Gravin Hellrad) see the Father as an arch-manipulator whose ultimate goal was the the furtherance of his personal power.

Frontier
Used to denote the 'grey area' where human expansion and colonisation was recent and still unstable - by the 4630s the so-called 'Sha'Har frontier' had stabilised at the Gulf of Tears, although it took another five centuries for the 'Unknown frontier' to reach the Core and subsequently the Farthest Shore.