Firefly was hatched on a dwarf planet in the outer belt in the waning centuries of the age of decadence. His sires and dams were active with the missionaries. Although none of them had been selected to go on a mission, they assisted in other ways like mission control and wayfinding (searching for potentially habitable planets to send future missions to.) It was their greatest hope that one of their pups would be selected to go on a mission someday.

By all accounts Firefly’s puppyhood was a happy one. He was beloved by his parents and litter mates, and was especially known for his piety. He was seldom seen without a prayer ring, and attended liturgies daily, sometimes more than once a day during important feasts.

In addition to his strong spiritual life, Firefly demonstrated strong leadership skills, even at an early age. He could frequently be seen leading the other pups in his lighthouse in meditative prayers, and he helped run retreats for his fellow youth as he grew older. Even adults were inspired by the fire in his soul.

Surrounded as he was by fervent Wayfarers, he was shielded from both the less exemplary side of the clergy as well as the growing secular antagonism elsewhere in the outer belt. This all changed as he was approaching adulthood.

One peculiar custom seen in some parts of Moonlitter and the Outer Belt, even to this day, is a requirement that pups reaching adulthood must take a public-facing job for some time in order to instill empathy for those working in customer service. Firefly found himself working at the repair desk of an electronics shop. It was here where he was exposed to the “real” world. One thing he noticed right away was how rude the customers could be. He particularly noticed that his fellow Wayfarers, who he had grown up to regard as kinder and more understanding, were just as rude as the secular yinrih who visited the store.

This planted a seed of doubt in his mind. What good was the Bright Way if Wayfarers acted no different than their secular peers? This seed was further nourished by Firefly’s first exposure to the rest of the Bright Way, those corrupt clergy whose only interest was maintaining their monopolistic grip over the system.

One day, while seeking absolution, he confessed his doubts to the hearthkeeper of his childhood lighthouse. A patient and gentle confessor, she encouraged him to see these difficulties as an opportunity for growth. “Faith is not a feeling,” she said. “You were a very faithful pup, but much of that was your sires’ and dams’ teaching you how to live. Now’s your chance to own that faith as an adult.” Yet his doubt lingered even as he continued his outward devotion.

Around this time, the wayfinders discovered perhaps the most promising exoplanet in the history of the missionaries. It was not only overflowing with biosignatures, there were even rumors that long range imaging had picked up city lights on the planet’s surface.

Every now and then, the wider clergy liked to parade the missionaries around in order to reinforce their rule by reminding everyone of their divine mandate to find other sophonts. This was one of those times. News of the promising new exoplanet was spread far and wide, to the point that it was almost a foregone conclusion that they would finally make First Contact. Cloudbearer the Heresiarch had made his famous repudiation of the Great Commandment not too long before, and the ruling clergy found their grip on power slipping, but the news that the yinrih might not be alone in the universe after all was the perfect opportunity to remind the public that the clergy were still relevant.

Firefly’s confessor encouraged him to apply to be a missionary to this new world, hoping that it would help him get over his doubts. Prospective missionaries are subjected to a battery of physical and mental health tests to make sure they’re fit for the rigors of long-term suspension. The sensory input generated by the amnion as the nervous system is plugged into the ship’s network can be addictive, and some people can be psychologically harmed to the point of madness by the alteration of time perception required by centuries of suspension. Firefly did pass these tests, but only just. The mission directors were all set to turn him down, as they were extra keen to ensure this all-but-guaranteed First Contact went smoothly. Firefly’s confessor urged them to approve him, saying he was a man of great faith who was unlikely to succumb to addiction or madness.

And so Firefly was selected to go on the mission along with two others. His sires and dams were overjoyed that their dream of having one of their litter go on a mission was finally becoming reality. This joy was tempered by the sadness of knowing they would never see their little pup again, as they would be gone before the mission even arrived at this distant world.

As was the ancient custom, a living funeral was held for Firefly and the other missionaries so that their sires, dams, and litter mates could say goodbye to them one last time. A tiny sliver of bone was taken from each missionary and put in a reliquary, which was given a place of honor in the local lighthouse, as it was assumed they would spend the remainder of their lives on an alien planet, and it would be even longer before other Wayfarers would arrive and give their bones proper respect.

So with mingled joy and grief, Firefly’s family and friends bade their last goodbye to him as he climbed into the amnion aboard their little womb ship.

To Firefly and the other two missionaries, the next several centuries passed in a few days. In that time, their sires, dams, and even their litter mates reached the end of their lives, and mission control passed from one set of paws to another as crew grew old and retired.

What happened next is a matter of considerable historical debate, and accounts differ depending if you’re talking to partisan propagandists, Wayfarers, or Allied Worlds historians, but this much is agreed upon. The missionaries arrived in orbit around the planet and were pulled out of suspension, expecting a verdant garden of life, only to be met with yet another barren rock. It was even discovered that the little tidbit about city lights being detected was a crock of cloaca butter churned out by the clergy in a desperate attempt to hold onto power by making the prospect of finding other sophonts seem more likely. The missionaries had given up absolutely everything, and it turned out they were just chasing the end of the ring, just like every mission that had gone before them. On top of everything else, they had been used by a corrupt hierarchy to maintain their stranglehold on Focus.

While all three missionaries were sad at the absence of sophonts to befriend and angry at the clergy for using them, this was the final straw for poor little Firefly. Ever since his miserable experience in that shop as an adolescent, he had been staring into an abyss of nihilism. For years he fought tooth and claw not to fall in. He prayed, he fasted, he meditated, he sought spiritual council, but nothing could remove that doubt gnawing at his gut. He willingly gave up ever seeing his beloved family and friends again, and was all but promised that his difficulties would be put to rest by finally making First Contact. It was a lie.

No, not just the thing about city lights, the whole Bright Way. Those secular agitators were right. It was all a ruse, a deceit concocted by the clergy to gull superstitious masses into submission. That confessor of his was probably in on the whole thing, too, putting on a mask of compassion to manipulate him and the rest of her congregation. Damn her greasy fur! There was no Light, no soul, no free will. From the day you hatched you were just rotting away a little each day until your insane fluke of an existence was snuffed out. The universe would go on reeling forward, shoved inexorably toward heat death by the blind force of entropy as though you never were.

It was in this state of existential turmoil that Firefly had to re-enter suspension for the journey back home.

During the centuries that the missionaries were making their way to the exoplanet, the Outer Belt saw a period of quiet, with the Bright Way regaining control over much of the region. The clergy’s little PR stunt painting First Contact as an inevitability seemed to work. The secular insurgents were holding their collective breath. Perhaps Cloudbearer was wrong after all. The traditionalists within the Bright Way were hoping that First Contact would reorient the wider clergy back toward their original goal of finding and befriending other intelligent species, abandoning their monopoly over the system’s infrastructure that had distracted them for nearly sixty millennia.

But you know what they say, no, not “All toasters toast toast”. “Nobody gets in trouble for lying. They get in trouble for getting caught.” When the missionaries arrived at what turned out to be another lifeless lump of rock, and the news made its way back to Focus through the ansible network that the hierarchy had lied, all hell broke loose in the Outer Belt. The hierarchy lost in mere days what they had spent centuries building back up. Not just the territory in the Outer Belt, but what little good will they had left, even from the traditionalists among the missionaries and on Hearthside. The clergy were expelled from the Outer Belt, and the region balkanized into a patchwork of warlord states consisting of competing secularist factions. The missionaries, hitherto tolerated by the secularists thanks to their shared enmity with the corporate arm of the Bright Way, now found themselves the targets of harassment and violence. The secularists blamed them for being complicit in the hierarchy’s deception, knowingly or not. The missionaries are what gave the hierarchy legitimacy, and their servile obeisance to the hierarchy could only stop with their eradication.

The mission control team managing the now disgraced mission found themselves especially targeted. Protests escalated to death threats, some of which were followed through on. For the next several centuries, the team had to move from safe house to safe house, relocating when their new base of operations was discovered and attacked. Their fellow traditionalists on Hearthside made several offers to give them a place free from persecution where they could monitor the returning womb ship in peace, but Firefly and the others would eventually have to cross the Outer Belt once they entered Focus, and the control team thought it best that they had a safe place to dock upon their return.

This decision would be their undoing. After centuries of dodging bullets both metaphorical and actual, the control team’s latest safe house was raided by a cell of secular insurgents. While the team itself survived the encounter, their management computers and the ansible connecting them to the ship had been stolen. Worst of all, the tailstone monocrystal connected to the womb ship’s own ansible, the single most precious object to the entire mission, was also found and taken. They could lose their management computers, they could lose the ansible itself, but as long as they had more of the tailstone connected to the womb ship they could rebuild. Now they didn’t even have that. The little craft was flying blind.

Here’s where the history slips into speculation, with urban legends, propaganda, and guesswork being the only guideposts. This is the version of events that most historians think is most plausible. With no warm bodies monitoring the logs coming back from the amnions aboard the womb ship, and with years passing in mere seconds for the travelers themselves, system errors and hardware failures slowly built up over the years until two of the three amnions failed, allowing the occupants to slip into unconsciousness, causing brain death. Firefly was the only survivor. Folk history among Wayfarers says that, given system control would have reverted to Firefly on the event that comms with mission control were severed, and knowing he wasn’t in the best headspace going into suspension, he killed the other two missionaries in a nihilistic rage. Partisan propaganda says that he struggled mightily to save his crewmates, making a final plea to The Light to allow them to survive. A plea that went unanswered, convincing Firefly once and for all that religion was a poisonous lie.

Meanwhile, the hierarchy had their paws full trying to hold on to the rest of Focus. The outskirts of the Outer Belt had collapsed completely, with the territory of Moonlitter forming a stagnant battle front between the disorganized secular forces and the considerable might of the Knights of the Sun. This remained the status quo until a few years before Firefly was due to return home.

Firefly found his subjective time perception pulled back into sync with the outside world years before he was supposed to reenter Focus. He was reborn. The fire in his soul was no longer fueled by faith, but by a burning hatred for those that had wronged him. His sires and dams were dead, his littermates were dead. The world he was returning to was utterly unlike the one he left. And all of it was for nothing, for worse than nothing. For some time after his time perception normalized, Firefly had only the monotonous diagnostic data pouring into his mind from the ship’s systems to keep him company, but soon that was joined by the voices of other yinrih. It seems the womb ship’s ansible had regained contact with its twin at Focus. The messages flooding the ansible were not from mission control. The secularists who had stolen the tailstone had used it to manufacture another ansible and reconnect with the ship.

At first the messages were cruel, mocking Firefly for his blind faith, but soon the insurgents discovered that the erstwhile pious missionary had become sympathetic to their cause. For the insurgents, this was a boon of colossal proportions. A former champion of the Bright Way was now one of them. At first they planned to use him as a figurehead, a symbol of everything false and deceptive that was the Bright Way. Firefly was to be a standard bearer around which the fractured secularists could rally to finally push beyond the orbit of Moonlitter. But Firefly proved more than just a figurehead. He used his charisma to climb the ranks of this particular group of insurgents, using his extensive knowledge of the missionaries and the larger Bright Way to strike where they were most vulnerable. He became a trusted leader, first to the little cell that had secured the ansible, and then as those insurgents proved frightfully successful at targeting the Bright Way, other groups of secularists gathered around him until he found himself at the top of an entire movement, and all before crossing into the Outer Belt, indeed without leaving suspension.

By the time he re-entered Focus Firefly had single handedly rallied the previously disorganized secular warlord states behind a single terrifying banner. They were the partisans, and he was their great leader.

It’s said that converts are the most zealous, and Firefly was certainly no exception. When he returned to Focus, he began a campaign of extermination against, not only Wayfarers, but anyone not sufficiently godless. Of particular note was his treatment of the Misotheists, whom he pursued with as much hatred as his former coreligionists. To despise The Light was to acknowledge its existence, and Firefly would brook no compromise in that regard.

So ruthless was his persecution that many of his own advisors entreated him to stop. Some were genuinely disgusted by his actions, while others simply realized that the Traditionalists could be a valuable ally against the ruling hierarchy and knew that slaughtering their fellow Wayfarers was unlikely to convince them to render aid. Reluctantly, Firefly took their advice, but not without quietly noting which of these advisors was the quickest to gainsay him.

Meanwhile, the disparate traditionalist movements on Hearthside were beginning to gain momentum, helped considerably by the new influx of refugees on Hearthside fleeing the secular warlord states in the Outer Belt. Two individuals are credited with finally bringing these disorganized movements together, both of whom were moved to act by the scandal of Firefly’s apostasy and subsequent rise to power among the secularists.

Iris the Hearthsider was a traditionalist hearthkeeper known for her fiery sermons condemning the hierarchy’s acedia and greed. She was the first cleric to call the faithful to take up arms to overthrow the ruling clergy. Many heeded her call, but the war had yet to begin in earnest.

The other figure responsible for lighting this powder keg was Greenleaf the steadtree hermit. Steadtree hermits were mystics who dwelt in the trees along the banks of The River on Yih. Some hermits would gain enough fame to collect a few disciples, who would sit at the base of their tree to hear their wisdom, but most kept to themselves. Greenleaf, moved by righteous anger, descended from his steadtree and confronted the High Hearthkeeper in person, going so far as to call her a heretic, accusing her of abandoning the Great Commandment in the pursuit of worldly power. His show of defiance was the crack that finally caused the dam to burst.

Iris, buoyed by Greenleaf’s actions, was able to convince nearly half of the Knights of the Sun to join the Traditionalists against their former brothers in arms defending the Bright Way’s worldly possessions. Thus were born the Pious Dissolutionists, who formed a second battle front at Hearthside working outwards, just as the secularists pushed inwards from the Outer Belt. The knights, considerably weakened thanks to the internal schism, were unable to hold the line against the secularists, who were finally able to break through the border of Moonlitter. The War of Dissolution had begun.

Firefly remained in suspension, with his capsule, now called the Eternal Womb, modified to extend his lifespan practically indefinitely, but ultimately at the cost of his sanity. He remained involved in affairs of state for some time after the conclusion of the war, but began to withdraw more and more into the simulacrum as time passed. The government began simply doing things “according to the great Leader’s will” whether or not he would have approved.

Eventually even the physical location of the Eternal Womb was lost, as it was deliberately secreted away in some unremarkable corner of the dwarf-planet-spanning capital complex rather than put on display in a lavish throne room, all in order to deter would-be assassins. It worked a little too well.

As such dictatorships are wont to do, a cult of personality developed around Firefly, and he became a sort of Big Brother figure. Over time, this cult of personality developed into a literal cult. The Partisan government constantly flip-flops on whether to promote the cult as a means of control, or to persecute its members as “dulls”, a derogatory term that encompasses Wayfarers and other people who profess a religion, including the above-mentioned misotheists.

Suspension is not brain uploading. The suspended person’s consciousness is still in their physical body, and the vulpithecine brain isn’t equipped to store memories for 33 millennia. Firefly fades in and out of lucidity, and almost never engages with the outside world even when he is sane. Even he doesn’t know where his body is anymore.

Firefly’s detractors refer to him as the Lichlord. There are many conspiracy theories surrounding him. Some say he actually died on the way back from his mission. When the insurgents reconnected with his womb ship they were hoping to recruit disaffected missionaries, but found out they were all dead. So they pulled a Weekend at Bernie’s and propped up this charismatic leader’s corpse in this so-called “Eternal Womb” and acted like he was their leader in order to have a unifying symbol to rally around.

A slightly more believable theory is that he simply died in the intervening millennia since the war, and the government has been lying about him still being alive. Suspension prolongs lifespan but even it has limits. Entropy catches up eventually, and many claim that these supposed modifications to his amnion are lies, and that the government pretends he’s alive to maintain continuity.

Especially since First Contact, more and more are saying he has repented of his apostasy and wishes to bring and end to his unnaturally prolonged earthly life. But all of these are just rumors.