The Houses have only fought a war on one prior occasion, at the very beginning of recordable history. The damage it did to the structure of the Spiral Politic is still in evidence, and although the Houses have spent the intervening aeons in a state of near-total stasis there's always been a buried fear that a new enemy might one day emerge. It's a measure of the Houses' complacency, then, that when an enemy finally did arrive - revealing itself mere decades before the start of the current War the Houses were shockingly unprepared, unable to accept that this time around the opposition might have a far more devastating impact on the face of history. And perhaps it was partly due to their lack of understanding, a failure to grasp an opponent which isn't so much a species or a faction as it is a kind of all-consuming process. — The Book of the War¹⁾

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