The h’Tath and the e’Arae were both designations given by a later civilization; in their tongue, h’Tath roughly means men of battle while e’Arae is women of death. It’s thought that one was a patriarchy, the other a matriarchy, both struggling for hegemony over a divided world in the face of limited and dwindling resources.

The traditional narrative is that the h’Tath were great warriors but undisciplined and backwards, while the e’Arae were less martially skilled but had superior organization and subtlety. The conflict between them played out over millennia, with other smaller factions as pawns, from their mutual origin on 0660-2112 to their eventual expansion to local galactic powers to their collapse and ultimate extinction. Indicative of this disunity is the fact that the denizens of 0660-2112 were never able to agree on an appellation for their own planet or species, nor was the gu’Tath’le or gu’Arae’le tongue ever able to establish supremacy. If a name is needed beyond the Sector Survey number, they are occasionally referred to as the Araetath of Tatharae (or vice versa).

It was the species’ reliance on their home planet for reproduction that doomed them to extinction, ultimately; they were never able to replicate the precise environmental conditions off-world, so the empire was limited by the need to return to Tatharae periodically, which was time-consuming even at trans-relativistic speeds. The exact cause is unknown, but it appears that a final war between the h’Tath and the e’Arae broke out during one such gathering, when the better part of the species had returned to their homeworld for reproduction. The conflict that followed was so violent that it cracked the crust of the planet, exposing the molten mantle and rapidly rendering it uninhabitable.

The later observers made some efforts to assist offworld survivors, but colonists from the h’Tath and the e’Arae refused to work together, and in the end little progress was made beyond a few genome sequences.

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