''The sun shines. I feel it in my leaves. It is a pleasure day, but I have to focus. The invasion from the sky stopped only a few hundred cycles ago. They can always return. But we will not fall. We have never fallen. Never, from the first visit of The Starborn. They gave us power and knowledge, and ''Dust''. Then, we were born. Our mind was born. The Unificator was born. A single being that is a main keystone in the web of minds. And they gave us a mission-to guard what they have built.

However, soon they waged a war and perished. And we left alone with our mission. Then, They came, invading us from the distant worlds. Many of us were burned to roots, and we felt their agony. But we survived. And now, we have to face what left after this time. We have to growth once more, maybe uproot in the other worlds. Some of us will probably be content of this. Trookhan has just come back from his journey. His mind is full of images of strange, semi-intelligent animals, other worlds and their plants and ruins of The Starborn. Some of us are thinking about rejecting our lifestyle, and using our power to spread our guard to the foreign ruins. For now, such thoughts are minority. Most of us share the view that war is only a blind and brutal force, destroying everything on its way. Even though, I cannot underestimate their influence. However, now we have different priorities. As the Unificator, I have to take care about all of us, not the particullar group. And our main target is now recovering after that war. This will make us stronger. Even now I can sense the zeal of my people. The zeal of growth, of recreating our power.

I feel that my thoughts worried Trookhan. After the contact with “Dust” he became… ambitious. He maintains that conquering the “aliens” will help us in our mission. But we were never be conquerors. The guardians serve to defend, not to attack, since the first invader came to our world, burning everything around him. We exist to preserve, not to destroy. And Trookhan must not forget about it. Never.  

But it is irrelevant, what will happen. The only sure thing is that we will not give up our mission. We are the Unfallen, the children of nature.''

In my submission I wanted to show a large part of the Unfallen history. Their home planet held the biggest Endless archive, created in their golden age. The Unfallen were uplifted from semi-sentient plant species with a usage of Dust, and they become guardians of the Endless' legacy. Later, they seen the nightmare of Dust Wars and the invasion of aggressive aliens. That's why they hate wars. However, they have an army. Every military unit of the Unfallen is called  ''the guardian'', but to be precise, the Guardian (from capital letter) refers only to their infantry forces. Their heavy soldiers are called ''The Caretakers'' and their aerial forces are composed by ''The Protectors''. Every soldier and every spaceship is prepared through a long time, and when it's ready, some elder saplings merge their minds to bring the construction to life. 

The Unfallen have shared consciousness, but it doesn't work like a hivemind, rather like Khala from Starcraft universe-makes it possible to co-feel emotions, memories and physical experience. The Unfallen's leader is able to look through all their consciousnesses' web and unifies it; that's why he (she? it?) is called The Unificating One or The Unificator. The Unificator is helped by a planetary councils, composed of the oldest and most honored Unfallen. 

Their main quest idea is focused on rebuilding after the invasion (first step) and growing popularity of militaristic tendencies. Somewhere about half of the quest chain player has to decide if he will support pacifists and stand back for the Unfallen's tradition, or to support militarists and have to fight for the Endless ruins to guard them.

The Unfallen are for me a Drakken-like race: ancient and sophisticated, proud of their history, traditions and their mission-protecting the Endless' legacy

Edit: I've slightly extended the dillema about the Trookhan's plans to create an introduction of main quest idea. Firstly, recover after the past wars. Secondly, deal with the Trookhan's oposition or agree with it and conquer some other empire.

The Unfallen are for me a Drakken-like race: ancient and sophisticated, proud of their history, traditions and their mission-protecting the Endless' legacy

I feel like that's a reason as to why I suspect that I got so many votes last round, I seen a lot of people hungering for the Drakken and after I spotted that trend, I seen that certain characteristics I tried to portray - namely noble and ancient - kind of fell into line with the Drakken. Which strangely I never even looked at during the entire design phase because clearly my mind was "they are lizards not plants".

Its cool you decided to go with a "Khala" style shared consciousness as your design, there seems to be a few hivemind-types, telepathy-ish stuff floating around in the narrative stories, it quite popular! And I kind of expected a few people to run with it once Xeno-Trees got through way back after Devildog won the first phase with the mention of manipulating plantslife and connecting with them.

With such long life cycles it isn't unbelievable that long-ranging outlooks would be a normal status, with years passing some by in a relatively fast time to their perspective. And perhaps the fast pace of where we kick off in Endless Space 2 with the changing of priorities and times would appear a bit crazy to some of the older trees - getting with the times, damn oldwoods.

The last thing I will mention is that you still have 200 words left to use if you so choose, which you probably already know; but there is no pressure really to use such a thing if you are already relatively happy with your story.