The Sollan Empire

By the dawn of the seventeenth millennium ISD, the Sollan Empire stretched across much of four of the galaxy’s spiral arms, half a billion habitable worlds, and billions of airless moons and station outposts. Comprising innumerable ethnic groups, countless religions, hundreds of thousands of nobile families—palatine and patrician—and tens of millions of soldiers, its total population cannot be counted, but the best estimates put the number at more than one quintillion human souls.

Founded approximately two thousand years after the development of space travel, the Sollan Empire began when William, King of Avalon, defeated the last bastion of the Mericanii Empire at Earth. Crowning himself Emperor of Man on the Aventine Hill in Rome, William Windsor launched the greatest dynasty in human history. The renamed Aventine House has ruled for sixteen thousand years in line unbroken, maintaining its control of the lesser nobility through a careful breeding program that has wrested reproductive control from the nobile houses and placed it in the hands of the Imperial Office. His line and Empire have endured several threats throughout its long history, none greater than the invasion of the Cielcin.