The Starward Exiles Entry 3

The First Nordic War

I, Hieromonk Nicholas Petrov, have endeavored to recount Earth’s history from the beginning of the aliens’ reconnaissance to the present year 2723 before going on to describe my own journey, which will hopefully end with me putting these journals inside a wormhole so that they might be read in the past and used to avoid an unfortunate future.

Previously, I described the infamous Day of Introduction, how the Nordics had promised to give everyone perfect bodies so that they might roam the Earth naked, invulnerable, and unashamed. They’d also promised the people enlightened brains to go along with their new bodies. The Nordics, alongside the Reptilians and Grays, had promised Earth a new Eden and the knowledge of good and evil. Both were lies.

The bodies were perfect, the men and women beautiful, but their brains had been poisoned with a slow but steady chemical that essentially lobotomized anyone who took a new body, making them susceptible to any order given by the head Nordic, Acalas [Ah-Cah-lah-s]. He and the other Nordics only gave their new subjects one command. They sent a global message telling their slaves to kill their loved ones.

This attack, while certainly devastating and inventive, wasn’t the kill shot the Nordics had imagined. The monotheistic religions of the world, particularly the Christians, refused to believe that the Nordics were the true Annunaki, that they were the ones who’d altered our ancestors’ DNA. The Christians also saw the tanks as an abomination. Though the men and women were beautiful, possibly almost as beautiful as Adam and Eve themselves, the tanks were an attempt to escape the due punishment given to men by God. I’m not sure if I would’ve held the view at that time, but this was the belief of the Christian community in the 2200s. And this hostility toward the Nordics is important to understand because it created enough resistance to prevent many people from taking the new bodies. It was later learned that the Nordics and Reptilians had expected two-thirds of the human population to accept these bodies—this had been the normal outcome when the same tactic was done on other planets—but only a quarter of humanity agreed to take them, and when Acalas sent out his fateful order, only a fraction of that quarter heard it. So, when the surprise attack was launched, only an eighth to a fifth of humanity turned on its brothers and sisters. This wasn’t enough, and once the humans who’d refused the bodies heard the message, they quickly found the altered souls who’d missed Acalas’s words and hid them. This gave humanity a chance to further study what the Nordics had done and begin to reverse the process. The majority of those souls could not be saved, but some were, and they did receive a benefit. Though their brains were restored, they still retained their perfect bodies, and even to this day, it’s quite easy to tell if someone has a man or woman who took a body in their lineage.

As for the Nordics’ plan, usually the two-thirds who took the bodies were enough to wipe out the third that resisted. What they were essentially doing was creating super soldiers and telling the public that these soldiers were the perfect form of their respective races. These soldiers were to act as Manchurian candidates, set to activate at the proper time. I do not believe the Nordics are truly capable of telepathy, so I can’t say exactly how they spread their message, but what I do know is that the most crucial part of this plan was planting the idea that the Nordics were the creators of a respective race long before they landed on the planet and made the claim themselves. So, the lore that I spoke of in the previous entry was in part created by the Nordics in preparation for their invasion. But what I find most alarming about their plot personally is what happened to these races of super soldiers after the invasion was completed. The few surviving members of a race were either enslaved or slowly “de-evolved.” This was a rather lengthy process, where the captured members of a race were banned from wearing clothes or whatever served as garments for that race. (This process varied a great deal because, although most races are bipedal, some are not, so the exact manifestation of this process changed depending on the race in question. The important thing was to remove or destroy anything that gave the race a sense of identity, be it clothing, education, institutions, traditions, or anything else imaginable that might make the primary race on a planet feel superior to its surrounding wildlife.) But as for the super soldiers, well, it turned out the Nordics were lying about making the Grays from scratch. Prior to The First Nordic War, one might’ve wondered why the Grays came in such a wide variety. The answer was quite simple. These Grays were really the former super soldiers of the various conquered races. After three generations, the beautiful bodies began to break down unless the perfected individuals bred with an unaltered member of their race. If they stayed with each other, as they tended to do, the bodies would become smaller and misshapen until they resembled the little gray or green men that were shuffling around the stage during the Day of Introduction. The process was much like what happens during inbreeding. The similar genes created mutations: only in the Grays’ case, the mutations were directed. These directed mutations continued until the perfected but conquered races had turned into withered and petite versions of their former selves. They were now broken in both body and spirit.

This was quite a shock for the humans alive during that time, but looking back from this vantage point in history, the Nordics’ tactics make a great deal of sense. They were attempting to build an empire, but the environments of the planets varied. The Nordics would thrive in some of these environments and struggle in others. And an interplanetary invasion is far more complicated than one might imagine. It would be prudent to think of a planet like a raisin with infinite nooks and crannies that a Nordic would be unfamiliar with. Therefore, it only made sense to turn a portion of a planet’s population against the other, and not only that, but to make certain that the portion aligned with the invader was stronger than the portion that resisted. This way not only would the surprise attack be devastating, but the super soldiers would remember enough of their former lives to know where to look for their loved ones. They could scour the land while the Nordics mostly remained in their ships.

But once the invasion was complete, it would be foolish to keep an advanced version of a conquered race. Those individuals might remember their roots and eventually turn on their masters. So, the Nordics had concocted a scheme where the home race did the fighting for them and then eventually withered into a passive slave class that could be used indefinitely. This scheme of theirs had worked several times, and some speculate that there is no original race of Grays at all.

But Earth, thanks to its obstinate Christian populations, was able to beat the trend, and this is why I’m writing to you from the cargo hold of a ship. My mission trips must be done in secret because the Nordics have returned to prominence in most of the galaxy, and they’ve banned Christianity throughout the regions where they hold power. They can’t risk the religion that ruined their winning streak infecting the galaxy with the truth. They can’t have the planets of the Milky Way believing the Nordics are anything but gods. Of course, most of the planets have already acknowledged this fact, but the Nordics refuse to admit this, and their hatred for Christianity has permeated their culture.

Most human empires have hated Christianity for the same reason. If there is a God who made the universe, then the emperor or dictator in question can’t be the sole source of authority. This revelation tends to create a culture with a conscience, and those cultures can be very difficult to persuade. If human empires hated Christianity for this reason, then it only makes sense for alien empires with the same objectives to hate my religion as well.

At any rate, Earth didn’t fall during this initial surprise attack. In fact, they were able to defeat the wave of super soldiers who had once been their loved ones. This created two major problems for the Nordics. Number one: they were forced to enter the fray directly, which was something they hadn’t done since their initial attempts at galactic empire building. Their technology was far superior to ours, which was to be expected, but they were surprisingly unfamiliar with it at the start of The First Nordic War. It had been nearly three hundred years since they’d been forced to rely heavily on their weaponry, and much of it was in a state of disrepair. This gave humanity a vital advantage, which allowed them to survive long enough for the other alien races to smell blood in the water.

Number Two: it turns out that the rules of economy apply, even to aliens, and an interplanetary war is expensive. The Nordics were already stretching themselves too thin. Their bills were beginning to pile up. If one were to ask who they owed money to, well, I’m not an economist, but the simplest way to describe the situation is this. No matter how large an empire, the groups within that empire—in this case, the various subjugated planets—still maintain a degree of independence. So, if Temmer owed a great degree of money to Erra, and Erra felt that they were paying an undue amount to Temmer to keep the invasion going, then Erra might eventually stop supplying the ships and soldiers and challenge Temmer to do something about it. Erra might even make a bid for its own independence if it felt Temmer was unable to keep it bound to the empire. If five or six planets developed such tensions, the entire empire might collapse. Each planet had to feel like it was getting a return on the invasion.

So, with such tensions in mind, the Nordics leaned heavily on abductions. Abductions have always been a part of interplanetary war, but never at the scale of what was done on Earth. Somewhere between 1 and 2 billion humans—a population that dwarfed some of the races the Nordics had already conquered—were abducted. This was where the Reptilians came in.

The Reptilians had carved out their own nefarious niche in the galaxy. One might think of them as the Milky Way’s mad scientists. In a sense, they were also traffickers. While the Grays were the ones who actually conducted the abductions and then carried out the transportation of the prisoners to their various destinations, the Reptilians served as middlemen between the Grays and the other races. The reason for this was because the Reptilians were using the humans for various experiments and knew how their subjects would best benefit the races willing to buy them. Most of these experiments centered around breeding. There was—and in many cases, still is—a question regarding which planetary species can interbreed. The Reptilians spent much of their time trying to alter human DNA so as to guarantee a successful hybrid. So, some humans were sent to zoos, others to populate recently terraformed planets, others were sent to breed a slave class for different alien races. The Reptilians told the Grays to target mostly women and what they perceived to be passive men. And these Adams and Eves were sent to various locations to start either a full-blood or hybrid slave population, or a hybrid population to dwell on a terraformed planet, the idea being to later harvest this population for more slaves. In some cases, the hybrid populations were used for hunting, but, from what I understand, this was rare.

However, this convoluted plot later proved to be one of the chief reasons the Nordics remained defeated for so long. 1 to 2 billion Adams and Eves are enough to infect any galaxy. There are now thousands, if not millions, of not just hybrid but full-blood human populations spread throughout the Milky Way, and this has created a deep sense of empathy for the people of Earth. This empathy is one of the chief reasons Earth remained the predominant empire for so long after the fall of the Nordics, but more on that later.

The abductions proved to be the Nordics’ undoing for another reason. It divided their resources. As Earth continued to resist the Nordics, the aliens’ hatred for the humans only grew, and they continued to insist on conducting abductions. Eventually, their plan changed from simply creating human and hybrid slave populations to full hybridization in the hopes of eradicating the human species for good. It wasn’t enough to simply kill them; they had to turn the humans into something else. They saw this as a deeper sort of victory. Really, it was just an act of petulance. The experiments conducted on the abductees were painful and humiliating, and the Nordics took great pleasure in the suffering. But their indulgence cost them men and ships, resources they could’ve used to resist the other alien nations that came to humanity’s aid; however, they dug in their heels, continuing the abductions out of spite. This ultimately cost them the war.

I’m not a tactician, and technology is something that wholly escapes my comprehension, but I will try to summarize the beginning stage of the war as best I can. The major cities fell quickly. Capitals like Paris, London, and Washington DC—including the monument, which I mentioned earlier—were destroyed. The Nordics ruled the air. As most had already assumed, they had force fields around their ships, and explosive projectiles were useless against them. However, the point of any planetary invasion is to capture the planet’s resources. They couldn’t just bomb the continents to ash. They couldn’t just salt the Earth and move on. There were bills to be paid. So, inevitably, the Nordics had to leave their ships to capture the land and collect its bounty. This is when the humans struck, and they were clever. They didn’t waste their ammunition shooting at ships they didn’t understand. They waited until they had a target that they could actually kill, and once they’d killed, they scattered. The Nordics couldn’t find them fast enough to do any substantial harm. This back-and-forth—the Nordics landing, the humans attacking, the Nordics attempting to retaliate in vain—went on for years. The Nordics slowly drained their resources, and during those years a couple of things happened.

As I mentioned before, the other races began to smell blood. The Nordics were weakening. The time for a grand counterattack was nearing. Alliances and Councils were formed. Meanwhile, some of those poor human slaves became ambassadors for their people. Like modern Josephs slowly gaining the Pharaoh’s favor, these decent souls—all Christians, I suspect—gained the favor of their masters and climbed the ranks of their societies until they held the ears of multiple planetary governments. They plead the case of their people, and those alien races joined humanity’s cause. Then a host of nations rose up against the Nordics and appeared in Earth’s sky like an army of angels. I hope the Nordics of that time thought of divine wrath. I’ll discuss the second phase of The First Nordic War in my next entry, Lord willing.

May God grant you peace.

Hieromonk Nicholas Petrov.

Read the Previous Two Entries Here:

“If you’d like to read more of my work, The Familiar (a dark urban fantasy) comes out February 3^rd, 2026, and now available for preorder on Amazon and Draft 2 Digital. Gerome is a Familiar who gave his blood to a vampire. But now the vampire wants his wife. This book is the first of a larger series called Annals of S.O.L.M. If you’d like to support my work, The Familiar will be found on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and more. I hope you enjoyed this entry of The Starward Exiles.”