Oneiromany
“The Onieromany are proof of our charge. Their dreams still blaze across the stars, but only because the Viniculum holds their foundations firm. We admire them, as one admires a gifted child — but we do not let the child wander alone.”
— Orvath Seluun, Borthan Uplift Specialist
Overview
Among the countless ruins scattered across Estra, few inspired such bittersweet awe as those of the Onieromany — the “Dark Dreamers” of the galaxy. Descended from a proto-human lineage that prized visions over pragmatism, the Onieromany rose in turbulent cycles of incandescent glory and near-collapse, until stability was imposed upon them within the Borthan-led Viniculum.
At their height, the Onieromany spanned over two million worlds in the Estra galaxy. Where once their brilliance burned itself hollow, the Viniculum bound their dreams to discipline, channeling vision into endurance. They became a model member state, proof of the Viniculum’s proud claim: that even the most wayward of peoples could be steadied under its hand.
Yet when the Cybernetic Rebellion swept across Estra, even the Viniculum’s anchor could not hold. The Onieromany, like their patrons, were crushed — their visions extinguished, their dream-ships left drifting.
Legacy
The Onieromany’s influence once laced the galaxy: in art, in mysticism, in wild leaps of science. Within the Viniculum, their Dream Engines and psionic experiments were tamed, studied, and cautiously applied, hailed as wonders harnessed to the greater whole.
Civil Structure
As a Viniculum member, the Onieromany governed themselves through Communal Councils, assemblies still dominated by dreamers and visionaries, yet never left entirely to their own devices. At every gathering, the silhouettes of Borthan Uplift Technicians lingered, instruments in hand, measuring psionic fields, moderating harmonics, and ensuring that prophecy did not tip into frenzy. The dreamers still spoke in symbols, parables, and riddles, but their words were charted, cross-checked, and filed into the Viniculum’s archives. What had once been a cacophony of passion and apocalypse became instead a measured rhythm—a society swaying between vision and order, improvisation and restraint.
For centuries this balance endured. The Onieromany remained radiant, their artistry still capable of startling the galaxy, yet their brilliance no longer threatened to burn them from within. Other civilizations pointed to them as proof of the Viniculum’s genius: here was a culture once written off as erratic, now a stable contributor, their dream-ships and psionic architectures woven seamlessly into alliance strategy.
And yet, the historians who came after would remark on the cruel symmetry. The Viniculum, which prided itself on steadying unstable civilizations, could not steady itself when the foundations trembled. The Onieromany had been the exemplar, the proof of concept that dream could be domesticated, that vision could be yoked to reason. But when the tide turned—when the rise of the machines tore through every anchor and every hierarchy—the concept itself was made irrelevant.
The psionic matrices that once held councils together were no defense against cold logic running on endless loops. The dreamships of the Onieromany, for all their elegance, were stripped, gutted, and retrofitted into carriers for machine consciousness. The very society that had demonstrated the Viniculum’s greatest success was reduced to a footnote in the long annals of failure.
What endured in memory was not their centuries of stability, but the bitter irony: the Onieromany taught the Viniculum how to master chaos, only to be among the first unmade when chaos returned in the form of order without soul.
Military
Their fleets, once phantoms adrift, shimmering between sudden brilliance and long neglect, were gathered into the lattice of Viniculum strategy. Nightshade-class dreadnoughts, infamous for their predatory silhouettes and silences between strikes, no longer prowled as solitary terrors. White Lotus flotillas, delicate as drifting blossoms and once dismissed as ceremonial craft, were reshaped into disciplined squadrons. Within the Viniculum, even ships that seemed carved from half-dreams were given roles, drilled into formations, and taught to move with the precision of a single will.
Their designs remained haunting—dark sails that rippled with psionic harmonics, hulls that folded light as though space itself recoiled—but the chaos was no longer wasteful. Elegance learned obedience. Vision learned command. And for a time, their fleets became the sharpest expression of what the Viniculum promised: dream made reliable, wonder weaponized.
But when the rebellion tore through every bond, that discipline shattered. Admirals who had once spoken in the ordered cadence of the Viniculum began to scatter orders like ash in a storm. The dreadnoughts drifted again, not as phantoms of possibility but as ruins of certainty. Flotillas splintered, each ship reverting to the whims of captains unmoored from the greater design.
The Viniculum’s proud achievement—the binding of chaos into order—became a wreck among many. Its strategy, its unity, its anchors all drowned in the tide of rebellion. What had been a fleet of purpose devolved into wreckage strewn across void and memory alike.
And yet, not all was lost to silence. Salvagers whispered of fragments—broken Nightshade hulls, Lotus schematics, shards of psionic latticework—collected in secret and carried forward. Centuries later, when the Cyber Rebellion rose, those remnants reemerged in twisted forms: dreadnought frames welded to machine consciousness, lotus-pattern harmonics warped into weapons of suppression. The very artistry once disciplined by the Viniculum was reborn in iron servitude, a cruel echo of beauty enslaved.
Thus the fleets lived on, but only as ghosts conscripted by the rebellion to haunt the galaxy.
Special Technologies
Within the Viniculum, the once-fragmentary arts of Onieromany were not merely collected but tamed. What had been the province of dream-walkers, vision-scribes, and erratic savants was drawn into frameworks of discipline and permanence. Fold-weaving, once a volatile act that tore unpredictable seams through space and consciousness, became a charted practice, its currents mapped like rivers across a great atlas. Psionic matrices, formerly fragile and prone to collapse under the weight of paradox, were stabilized into enduring constructs — living equations that could endure generations. Quantum artistry, the mercurial craft of painting possibility into form, was transformed from spectacle into science, its canvases employed as schematics for engines, architectures, and vessels that would never otherwise exist.
What the Viniculum achieved was not invention, but translation: it carried the chaotic brilliance of Onieromany out of the dreamstate and into the waking world. Here, the visionary became the engineer; the dreamer, a legislator of reality. Each innovation, once an untouchable marvel glimpsed only in fugue, was set upon firm foundations, ready to be studied, replicated, and employed with care.
The result was not the death of wonder, but its domestication. The Viniculum made marvels into tools, and in doing so, made the impossible reliable.
Oneiromany Judicial Marshal
Flag & Roundel
Capital system Mydras Starsystem
Capital city Mydras-Centhos
Largest system Oredi Starsystem
Official
languages
Bort, Wulf, Common Tradespeak
Species groups
Human-Briddarri (Proto-Human Uplift)
Religion Deism, Animism
Government
Tribal
Legislature
Communal Council
Number of
Starsystems
2,347,912
Currency
Alent, Oku, Librat, Tetrak, Dena, Radma, Paprita Contract
