..............when the Blue Ship from beyond was captured there was much confusion, and a secret hope. At last! Another source of the Spice! The last surviving crew member spoke of a place, a far away galaxy, where the Spice could be found on many worlds, where the source seemed to be a kin of the Great Worms, but smaller, and intelligent! With great secrecy an expedition was mounted, led by an unknown Son of the Imperial Line, who had taken the little worms and become a God King en route.  He possessed the abilities of the navigators only more, the powers of the mentats only stronger, the ability to see far beyond the future that the greatest of the Seers could only guess at.  As the Navigators struggled to reverse the accident that had brought the Blue Ship to our own galaxy, they learned the paths and the secrets of the New Space.......

.....now we are here, and the New Worms, the Amorphous Worms we have found on our new home, though only a shadow of the Great Makers, nevertheless respond to us as the brothers the Universe has made us to be. The Blue Man was right! It is Spice, though here it is called "Lerchin Spice"! The spice will be ours, and woe betide any man or Empire that tries to hinder us in controlling all of its sources! The Spice IS life!  The Spice is the connection to the Great Maker, through it all things can be realized!...

....the Living God said "...all that I encounter are either of me or seek my destruction.  To this end I shall send forth my inquisitors to discern the will of those that have not yet been judged.  All who are found lacking will have the Jihad upon them......

......when the time arrives that this corporeal body has reached the end of it's usefulness, I shall leave the bonds of this existence and go to join the Great Maker.  Some of  this that is me shall remain such that I may retain the link to the Little Brothers who strive to be more.  Those who are in my council shall be the keepers of these links and shall continue the judgment of those who have not yet been judged, and shall use all the powers at their command to defeat those that would see me destroyed, and so it shall be until you have reached your potential.  Only then will you, my children, be grown enough to go forth on your own and thrive....."  And so it will be........................

And so it has been.

Once arrived in the Echo Cluster the former son of a once powerful Lord of the Realm, now long dead to the hands of  unscrupulous members of a great conspiracy, has become a living God, and King of a great and powerful people.  Over the thousands of years spent in transit through the deepest and darkest regions of non-space he has sheparded his children.  Drawing on the power of  The Spice and the simbiotic relationship between his own body and those of the semidormant children of the Great Maker himself, the Godking has lived each and every one of those millennia now long passed to the point of legend.  Although he believed very old by those of mere mortal lifesapn, none now living understand that the King is in fact The God, though none recall his birth, and none estimate his impending death.  He is that he is, The King, The Living God, The One, He who has the power of  The Maker.

Now, with the new technologies discovered and incorporated into their very own, the people - his children - have grown into a fearsome force.  Despite the complete rejection of all electronic computing abilities after the Great Butlerian Revolt, which occurred long ago when the people of the then already ancient Empire revolted against the sentient computers that had become their masters, the children of The God have again adopted electronic and mechanical computational devices.  They learned that computers could be built that did not possess the ability to be self aware yet still possess adequate computational abilities to allow the fleets to do battle with the enemies of HIS Divine Protectorate.  The mentats that replaced the computers of old still hold their place as the modern computers are not allowed to be given the necessary intuitive abilities needed as these would surely lead again to sentience and the eventual re-enslavement of the people.  This cultural, almost biological,  fear of sentient machines has lead to a near blind hatred of those races of sentient mechanoids or biomechanical symbiots that have been encountered in this new universe.  To these races, no quarter is given, and the inquisitors will instantly call in the forces of a Jihad against them when encountered. The fleet of The God is strong yet slow by local standards, the reliance on the Guild of Transport Navigators to move their mighty transports through the fearsome non-space carrying the fleets across the reaches of space and time still reigns supreme and nothing else has seemed needed. 

There are those individuals among the Protectorate who have, through complete and utter devotion (albeit divinely inspired), the trust and the council of  The God himself.  These few are known as The Council of Templars.  The Templars know that all that is shall soon be no more.  These Templars have been given the knowledge that the God shall soon leave this corporeal state and move to his true home astride the back of The Great Maker himself riding across and beneath the sands of the eternal home of his people.  They have been instructed to place a piece of the God's mortal remains into specially prepared places and from these places, these compounds, to assume the rule and guidance of the people.  The Templars have been seeded with knowledge that will only awaken at the time of death of the Godking, and with this knowledge they will go forth and guide the people into a new age.  They have been given insights into what can be done and what should be done.  In short they have been prepared to assume the mantle of  leadership at the time of the Godking's mortal death.