Valun orbits the star Axion, a Class A white star whose roiling hydrogen core has burned for some few billion years. It's a planet not too unlike a thorny flower. Beautiful to look at but painful if you get close enough to touch. Rolling jungles of green cover its large continents, separated and split apart by thirteen oceans. Under Axions gaze, life has flourished on Valun, from the colorful four eyed Regal minnows that tread it's water to beasts of epic proportions that limber over its surface. Life flourishes on Valun, but that life made it one of the most dangerous worlds in the galaxy. From the smallest flower to the most gargantuan creature, everything on the planet had grown to survive in its hostile jungles, and evolution had guided them down a very harsh path. Wasps big enough to tear a man in two and small fanged mammals with enough poison to kill a man in a single bite were every day dangers. No sapient life could take foothold on such a planet.
Yet the Valarians still came into existence at some unknown point in Valuns venerable history. A noble race of pointy eared humanoids who clung to existence despite the odds. They were strong and resilient, but not nearly enough to match worlds dangerous denizens. What saved them was their cunning and adaptability, and most of all their undying will to fight for existence. They found ways to survive, clung to natural havens that drove away predators. Their species spread into these scattered refuges, little more than tribals. They advanced and united, developed more and more cutting edge technology under an invisible guiding hand. But as they turned their gaze to the stars they wiped themselves out, and reverted back to ignorance and primitivism. Now they're nothing more than dispersed pockets of civilization, clinging to life and the remnants of their past in a jungle world full of danger.
