Prologue
At the edge of the Joining, once shrouded by a physical near impossibility to reach via magnetic and ionic anomalies, and a psychic barrier courtesy the Eyes of Za'ar, a legendary Kiri weapon, spun a world one million years wrapped in peace. Za'arain. A world home to those of the fourth evolution, humans known as the Kiri who not only experienced life through linear time, but lived within time itself. A million years protected by isolation and exile. Exile promoted isolation and isolation required exile for a tabu also existed among the Kiri. The Kiri a race multi-fingered beings where fours and sixes formed communities but fives lived only to dream, awaiting their time to either take up their duty to the Eyes or die into timeshadows of the then and now. But all things end and so did the time of Kiri isolation. Lias'tri. A calling between souls to find one another or go mad in loneliness from the now through the now and into the infinite other. Lias'tri joins the heart and the mind of the souls belonging to one another and what the heart requires would not be denied.
A new Kiriy's choice to serve their people left her refusing her forbidden half. Refual brought madness to a new Dustman and begat a psionic plague known as the winnowing as answer to his own exile for the sacrifice of his other half, his beloved to the Eyes, his Lias'tri; his hunger, her completion. Eyes whose only answer to lias'tri between fives resulted in division of life, a refined torture to mind and body. And the winnowing spread, consuming the lives of any being with even the slightest of psionic gifts, spiraling from the wastes and followed by the Dustman SaDyneen ZaDarien/Kiri, it's creator, back to Za'arain as the Kiriy, his denied lost soul fell to the winnowing into the infinite other. Za'arain fell without a Kiriy to take up the Eyes and Kiri atavism reduced the once calm civilization to roaming packs of psi-hunters bent on consuming not only their own, but also all of the Joining.
The Kiriy's final act to call two other candidates, each Darien and five, Sharia ZaDarien/Kiri and Kanaen ZaDarien/Kiri, to the Eyes, both tabu. Both candidates Lias'tri denied as well, and combined a wildfire psi capable of consuming both psi-active and psi-null minds. In the end the Dustman failed to hold and be accepted by the Eyes, nor did the Eyes accept either of the candidates. Fourth evolution salvation came not at the hands of weaponry, not by wildfire, and not by disease. It came through a willingness to receive the inevitable, to yield to lias'tri and break tabu between fives amidst the raving psi-hunters. Yet consummation of lias'tri gave way to dreaming and dreaming led to awakening within the hunters' minds and that collaboration of dreams suggesting hope for the future of Za'arain and the Joining.
And many millennia passed, Za'arain once again in peace. And the Joininng continued to receive the Kiri from time to time, though none of them in exile. And eventually Sharia and Kane returned again, coming together without fear or harm, giving of this last union a daughter, possessed of a singular wildfire mind among the Kiri. And thus, a new discovery and evolution of the Kiri began.