Extract from the Chronicles, Book 7, Section 13:

Of the Assassinations on Erebos

AND THE INTERVENTION OF SYL HELLAIS.

It is recorded that the Second Civil War started with the destruction by the Diplomatic Corps of the vast Military base known as Melos Station, but in truth the killings began earlier that day, on the nearby moon of Erebos. It was there that the Archmage Syrene, public face of the Nairene Sisterhood, was due to wed the Military hero Lord Andrus. Under the guise of the celebrations, Syrene dispatched a group of Novices with psychic powers to murder all those who might have opposed the Corps’ seizure of power. This effort succeeded only in part, for the assassins were themselves destroyed at the last by the intervention of another Novice, the only child of Lord Andrus, the child known as Syl Hellais—Syl the Earthborn.

Syl the Destroyer.

But she was not alone in disrupting Syrene’s plans, for another force, led by the human Resistance fighter Paul Kerr, infiltrated Erebos in the hope of rescuing Syl from the Sisterhood. Using a captured Illyri vessel renamed the Nomad, and aided by the Illyri officer, Peris, as well as the biomechanical organisms known as Meia and Alis, Kerr’s human crew succeeded in freeing Syl, and fleeing Erebos.

The Nomad was pursued relentlessly, as those on board knew of the Corps’ dark secret: the Diplomats had allied themselves with the parasitic alien species known as the Others and had agreed to deliver entire worlds to them. The greatest of these sacrifices was to be Earth, the most advanced civilization yet encountered in the Illyri Conquest. Even Syl herself was not unaffected by the Others, for her own father had become a victim of the contagion.

The Corps, bound to the Others, set about transporting infectious spores from the harvesting facility at Archaeon to the planet Earth. They had become complicit in genocide, but at the time only the Nomad and its crew had the knowledge to stop what was to come. Under threat of capture or destruction, the Nomad vanished into the Derith wormhole, from which no ship had ever returned.

War raged. Friends no longer recognized one another. Families were ripped asunder: brother against brother; wife against husband; father against daughter.

And the Illyri Empire began to tear itself apart.