now and forever

Over the thousands of years they ruled, the Dnyarri eventually became lax in the mental domination of their slaves. A green Ur-Quan scientist named Kzer-Za used this to initiate their downfall. Kzer-Za noted that the Dnyarri 'detached' their psychic control from a Ur-Quan suffering near-lethal pain. Armed with this knowledge, and using one of the few moments of mental freedom the Dnyarri were giving their slaves, he injected his body with a lethal and painful poison, and used the mental freedom to broadcast the news across the Dnyarri empire. Ur-Quan and other Dnyarri slaves everywhere began burning themselves, hacking their own bodies, anything necessary to give them the freedom needed to kill the nearest Dnyarri. Eventually, this was refined into a device known as an Excruciator, which, when implanted into a living Ur-Quan brain, could cause enough pain to force the Dnyarri to detach, but leave the Ur-Quan's body whole and functional. The slave empire had fallen.

With their hard-won freedom, the Ur-Quan contemplated the fate of the few terrified Dnyarri left alive. The Ur-Quan decided that the crime of the Dnyarri was so great, that even extinction was too good for them. Instead it was decided that the Dnyarri would be genetically modified into dumb animals, retaining their psychic powers only to allow translation and communication with alien species, something the Ur-Quan now considered demeaning. They were now referred to as 'Talking Pets'.

The Ur-Quan were now free, and determined to never again be slaves, the two sub-species of the Ur-Quan each developed doctrines to ensure this. The green Ur-Quan, renamed the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za in honor of the Ur-Quan scientist who freed them all, devised the 'Path of Now and Forever', a doctrine that ironically stated that all non-Ur-Quan sentient life be slaves to the Ur-Quan either as battle thralls, or forever be imprisoned on their homeworlds under impenetrable force-fields. This doctrine was at odds with the Black Ur-Quan (renamed the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah after their new leader and author of the doctrine), who felt that only their 'Eternal Doctrine'; the utter annihilation of non-Ur-Quan life, would keep them safe from slavery. Both races immediately set out to follow their doctrine, sadly turning against the very races that helped them secure their freedom. After the imprisonment of the Faz by the Kzer-Za and the 'cleansing' of the Yuptar by the Kohr-Ah, both races met in orbit over the homeworld of the Mael-Num, and began to argue over the superiority of their doctrine over the other. This quickly escalated into a war between the Kohr-Ah and the Kzer-Za, which the Mael-Num used to make their escape. This war came to be known as The Doctrinal Conflict, and devastated both sides. The Kzer-Za eventually triumphed through the discovery of an enormous Precursor Battleship, named the Sa-Matra.

Defeated, the Kohr-Ah were sent in the opposite direction of the galaxy as the Kzer-Za, with the understanding that when the two species met again, they would fight The Doctrinal Conflict once more, with the victor claiming the prize, the Sa-Matra.