Luminara’s Warning

A warning is worth little until you know what produced it. Mine came from four centuries Luminara survived and would never choose to repeat—centuries in which intelligent societies, acting for reasons that often made sense at the time, accumulated a political logic they could no longer safely inhabit.

I do not offer that memory as prophecy. A Luminaran history cannot prove an Earthly mechanism, and history becomes most dangerous when resemblance is mistaken for destiny. But Luminara is the reason I arrived frightened. I had seen political difference become entangled with unequal capability until restraint looked like weakness, intervention produced new reasons for intervention, and every generation inherited more consequential tools than the one before it.

That was the model I brought to Earth. Earth will now have to break it.