DOMINION LORE AND TRIVIA

THIS ARTICLE IS A STUMP | Last updated December 11th 2025

MINUTIA MIGHT GET CORRECTED AND BUILT UPON OVER TIME

As seen from the Sun, the Dominion is a bubble about 8° across centered around the Coalsack Nebula

WHEN?

Being the background world of Beyond the Final Frontier (my upcoming sci-fi series), the story takes place sometime in the mid 182th century, or roughly after 18 200 CE. Long after humans expanded beyond the solar system, now living fractured amongst aliens native to this region.

WHERE?

It is a (mostly fictional) region of space located behind the Coalsack Nebula as seen from Earth's perspective, between 700 and 900 light-years from Earth. Its center is roughly 830 light-years from Earth.

WHAT IS THE DOMINION
The Dominion, or by name, The Fundational Dominion, is a region in space defined by the Treaty of Forzai as a 'neutral and civilized territory' encompassing several signatary interstellar nations. An order that has since lasted about 3,600 years. The year of the Prime Foundation is 14 650 CE in our calendar.

DIMENSIONS

It encompasses mostly a spherical volume 200-300 light-years across, centered around the world of Argost, the Arrene homeworld.

The furthest civilized region within the Dominion is the hoku space around Voliloshoku, 174ly from Argost. And the inhabited planet closest to Earth is Hokushoku, at 710ly from the Sun and 119ly from Argost.

The Dominion's worlds plus the 10 brightest stars visible from Earth

View perpendicular to the Sun-Argost axis, arrene north is up

STELLAR POPULATION

When seen from the Earth, the Dominion is largely obscured by the Coalsack Nebula itself, yet, 21st century humans are able to see about ~1320 bright stars located about the visual edges of the nebula, 273 of them brighter than magnitude 10 shining through the nebula. It might be loosely associated to the lower Sco-Cen OB Association, as the region includes several bright young blue stars (~26%), such as CH Crucis and 251 G. Cen which are under 150 million years old.

Due its association with nearby stellar nurseries, the Dominion space is flooded with younger bright and giant stars - whereas the solar vicinity hosts between 15 and 20 bright stars (>50 Lsol) under 150ly from the Sun, the Dominion space is densely packed with 8~15x more stars. About 250 stars with abs. magnitudes brighter than -2.3 (>740 Lsol) - from which 15 are stars with abs. magnitude -3.0 ± 0.04 (~1400 Lsol), all under 150ly from its capital. About half of these stars are bright yellow-white giant/subgiant stars, the other half being split between red giants and blue giants.

Needless to say, traveling across this space is like going through a crystal chandelier. The brighter population of which serves rightfully so as reference 'lighthouse stars' for astronavigation by its inhabitants.

For its older main-sequence star population, it contains another 7 thousand stars distributed across an estimated 3,440 systems, from which 385 sun-like stars plus 46 multi-sun systems are known to contain at least one Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone.

Five of those are known to have spawned complex life, it is not yet known why and how this many life-bearing planets came to be so close to each other - as it implies through the Copernican Principle that the Milky Way must be teeming with Life and technological civilizations (between 4 and 30 million). But given its age and powers at play, the Dominion might be an isolated case.

This angle clearly frames all three zones of the Dominion's civilized systems, here UP is north from the capital Argost.

There are 19 'civilized' worlds/systems, 60 identified habitable planets, and over 200 potentially habitable worlds, of which less than 10 have been deeply explored or even decently scouted. One of the reasons many interstellar civilizations popped in this small volume of space is the strong presence of certain ancient artifacts, which influenced technological uplifting events.

THERE ARE HUMANS?
Let not the Dominion's age and scope fool you. This region has once long belonged to the extended human domain from around 10,000 CE, long before the Arrene dreamed of reaching the stars. The human societies and empires that existed long ago left countless ruins and old settlements across known and unknown space. However, the human domain at large has since gotten fragmented and isolated, the last known spacefaring human civilization, the Chelok Empire has long retracted to its homeworld of Dhéģhōm and associated nearby colonies, leaving the stars to the blossoming native civilizations to re-discover.

Nowadays, humans are sort of ubiquitous to this space, being found first by every other native races as a loose collection of hunter-gatherer or industrialized societies, having long forgotten about their pre-history or even where do they come from for that matter.

HOW AND WHO OWNS THE DOMINION?

The Dominion is less of a government and more of a collaborative framework between its signatary civilizations. One could technically refuse to join, but the prospect of doing so and its consequences are 'absurd', to put it lightly. Officially, the Dominion has a representative council, but in practice it has two steward races, the Arrene and the Qire, often found as governors of vast regions of space and at the highest chairs of administrative bodies. The Qire are almost never actually observed by the public, whereas the Arrene take pride in showing-off their domain and power, engaging in active control of conflicts and trade. Together with starlanes, clone armies, and automated fleets, the Qiro-Arrene axis dominates this corner of the galaxy.

soft x-rays and extreme UV are used as driver radiation because they carry 100x more energy than your typical visible-light photon, targeting both dust particles and gas

The starlanes are the pride of the Dominion's economy, here magnetic and radiation probes clean up vast tubes of the interstellar space, allowing for faster hyper-relativistic travel in between designated waypoints. Besides, these starlanes create choke-points that can be better managed by its administration.

Traveling at relativistic speeds off the starlanes isn't impossible, mainly for small starcraft, but for the frequent fleets of goods and freighters the risk of encountering a lost grain of sand can't be ignored, or worse, a drifting penetrator mine remnant from the Qire-Arrene wars.

A SHORT TIMELINE OF THE DOMINION

11 100 ~ 11 600 CE - The Arrene Begin Their Expansion

The Arrene achieved mastery of subluminal interstellar travel, starting a period of expansion across the known space, departing from Argost (arrene word for "Origin Point", taken as a misnomer of their homeworld), and arriving at planet Endreka.

11 800 CE - First Contact with Humanity

Arrenes meet with humans for the first time, living in hunter-gatherer societies across Endreka.

13 000 ~ 13 400 CE - The Nagiv Uplift

Discovery of the Nagiv race through weak techno-signatures, the Arrene jump in-system for a first contact and uplift them, ensuring the Nagiv develop as allies.

12 000 ~ 12 800 CE - The Qire Encounter Humanity (?)

The Qire arrive at Qire Prime*, a scouting mission to a nearby warm oceanic moon finds hunter-gatherer humans in their system.

13 800 ~ 14 800 CE - The Qiro-Arrene Wars & The Birth of the Dominion

Both Qire and Arrene meet at the Forzai system, and a Qire preemptive first-strike starts the Qiro-Arrene wars. The near extinction of the Arrene leads to the Treaty of Forzai, written between the Qire, the Arrene, and the Goll Unity (a defunct human civilization), both an armstice treaty and a guideline to ensure 'responsible and silent astrodevelopment'.

Those events are witnessed by the Hoku in their barely-interplanetary society from afar, too scared to join or even make contact, the Hoku then seek other stars to distance themselves from the Dominion.

15 914 ~ 16 157 CE - The Hoku Reveal Themselves (Accidentally)

Comet miners of the Hoku Expanse find a derelict Qire warship at the Muhori system, by reverse engineering it, the Hoku manage to better their interstellar travel while also alerting the Dominion of their existence by accident. Shortly after, being contacted and annexed by the Arrene, and by proxy, the Dominion.

18 154 ~ 18 200 CE - The Fall of Hokushoku & Dominion Unrest

An unknown conglomerate as powerful as the non-aligned Raydee invades the Hoku space with unknown motives, the Dominion is unable to send enough reinforcements in time to fend off the invaders, Hokushoku and its colonies fall within days of first contact. The Fall of Hokushoku represents the start of a period of political unrest since the Arrene have showed themselves unnable to care for their allies against outsiders.

[CHECK THE GENERAL ONE HERE!]

INHABITANT RACES