The Cradle of Life
Thousands of years in the future, in the name of complete galactic colonisation, man has started a small mining community on a distant desert planet called Rubi-Ka. It's a hostile planet, arid and red, scorched by the immense heat of the twin suns it circles, and torn from the gravitational pull of its large and mysterious moon.
Terraforming the planet to make it habitable was an enormous challenge, but funded by the world's most powerful hyper-corporation, Omni-Tek, humans are slowly turning the tides of time, and with the help of nanotechnology, they are transforming the planet into a lush and fertile environment.
Rubi-Ka proved different from other planets; blessed with enormous quantities of notum, the mysterious fuel for advanced nanotechnology, and the building blocks of scientific progress.
Omni-Tek cunningly acquired the mining rights to Rubi-Ka, and has greedily exploited the planet's supply of notum for over a thousand years. They rule the planet through a strict, corporate autocracy with limited allowance of personal freedom, and an affinity for swift and hard punishment for any resistance and dissent.
Humans, however, are rebellious by nature, and notoriously hard to control. Miners revolted, and established clans of freedom fighters to challenge Omni-Tek's right to govern the planet. Civil war, and years of open conflict are approaching a climax, and all-out revolution seems inevitable. Omni-Tek is rapidly losing ground, and is delving deeper and deeper into the secrets of Rubi-Ka in a frantic search for the origin of notum. They believe "The Source" will secure unlimited powers for the one who controls it, and they have just made a breakthrough...
In the floating city of Jobe, a team of Omni-Tek's most skilled scientists and powerful nano-technicians have opened a portal into a parallel world; a world more incredible and fantastic than even the wildest fantasies…or the darkest, most terrifying nightmares. It is the Shadowlands – a world of dense contrast, spiralling down through increasingly intense metaphysical worlds, separated from each other by portals guarded by the mysterious Guardians of Shadow – deformed and scalded by feral and horrendous beings ripping and tearing through it, in a timeless struggle for absolute domination.
There is intelligent life in the Shadowlands, unexpectedly mirroring the situation on the surface of Rubi-Ka. Beings who call themselves the Redeemed are aligned with the Clan and the Unredeemed are aligned with Omni-Tek, and an equally disturbing conflict is raging between them. There are wild creatures there as well, and they are more terrifying and powerful than the ones on the surface. They arbitrarily, seemingly mindlessly, tear at the edges of the Shadowlands, turning the very earth into dust, throwing it into the void.
And from the bowels of the Shadowlands the precious notum swirls and spirals into a gigantic vortex in the sky, sucking with it anything not solidly ground to the earth.
The Shadowlands bear evidence of an ancient civilisation of human-like creatures thriving there, clearly more advanced than mankind ever was. But the Shadowlands are scarred, and it seems something happened there, a terrible struggle of some kind, or some cataclysmic event, that ultimately constructed its demise. What happened? Who were those creatures? And why are the Shadowlands ever in our dreams?
As the journey through the Shadowlands progresses, it becomes clear to all who venture inside that more is at stake than the simple acquisition of wealth and power...
Life in the universe had to come from somewhere... and now it has come to a crossroads.