Though the Battle of Gododdin guaranteed mankind’s victory over the Cielcin and signaled an end to more than a thousand years of war, the hypernova event left the Imperial Navy a shadow of its former self. More than half the firepower of the Sollan Empire was in Gododdin system that fateful day, massed there by the careful planning of the late Emperor William the Great. By all accounts, Lord Marlowe told no one of his intentions that day, relying instead upon the tenacity of the Sollan forces to occupy the attention of the Cielcin forces long enough for him to trigger core collapse in the system’s star. It was for this betrayal—that and the subsequent murder of more than a billion soldiers and sailors—that the Imperial government saw Lord Marlowe hanged.

It is likewise the loss of those men and that material which has had the greater impact on the decades and centuries since. Make no mistake, the annilhation—utterly—of the Cielcin war machine has allowed the children of Mother Earth to reassert her supremacy over the galaxy, but the destruction of the greater part of the Imperial war machine has left the political landscape of that galaxy forever changed. The Lothrians, formerly a client state of the Cielcin Ascendancy, stepped up their efforts to conquer the galactic west, intensifying their existing struggle with the Principalities of Jadd and the Imperial Exarchate in Perseus. Similar brushfire rebellions have come to dominate Norman space, with the rise of various confederations hoping to carve out a piece of that shattered Imperial territory.

But the greatest change to the balance of power comes from within the Imperium itself. Before Gododdin, the greater part of military might within the Imperial lay concentrated in the Imperial Legions, in the Emperor’s levies and in the soldiers of the Martian Guard. After Gododdin, that power is gone. The Martian Legions were all but annihilated by Lord Marlowe’s firestorm, and with the destruction of a great part of the general legions beside…the Aventine House is no longer the monolith it was under William the Great and his forebears.

The Aventine Dynasty remains in power, but that power is broken, its greater part devolved to the princely houses and feudal lords. This, then, is Marlowe’s lasting legacy. More than the annihilation of the Cielcin menace, he shattered the Imperial hegemony, broke the unipolar galactic order…possibly forever.