Hawiki

The Hawiki were a spacefaring race who existed in the radioactive dead cosmos of the dying universe. In search of a means to escape the end times, they entered a sustained state of tunneling which brought them through the rebirth of the universe.

Ending
The home planet of the Hawiki was a small world in orbit around a supermassive black hole. The Hawiki were able to escape the black hole's gravity after developing tunneling technology and explored the remaining universe, finding it was collapsing on itself. The only other life forms they encountered at the time were the degenerative descendants of the Third living on radioactive asteroids. When it was clear that their race had nowhere else to go, the Hawiki activated their advanced technology to enter a prolonged state of tunneling, which allowed them to bypass millions of years as the original universe died.

Beginning
After successive generations wherein memory of the world had been eliminated from the general population, it eventually came to light that the officer caste aboard the ark were involved in a conspiracy to maintain the status quo. The secret police had kept things quiet for centuries, but finally a coup by the enforcers and civilians exposed the government and forced the ship's onboard AI to reveal that there was a massive change in the situation outside the vessel. The seizure of the government's secrets provoked a lengthy discussion which culminated in the Hawiki choosing to exit the tunneling state.

Upon returning to base reality, the Hawiki found that the universe had collapsed and been reborn. Enough millennia had passed for stars to form and planets to coalesce, so the Hawiki chose one to terraform and settle upon. Their arrival provoked an argument between The Other and The One, with the One allowing the Hawiki to live provided that he remove from them their technologies.

Succession
Even stripped of their technology, the oral tradition of the Hawiki allowed for propagation of medicine and engineering and math. Their terraformed world provided the perfect environment for their society to grow and flourish. The Hawiki were soon once again a technologically advanced race long before life had naturally begun to develop anywhere else in the galaxy. Thus the Hawiki entered that long period of early history from which there are no records. Most agree that the advanced descendants of the Hawiki became the magnificent Formers, the most ancient and powerful race to have ever existed. However, the fate of the Formers is unknown and mysterious, all that can be said is that they vanished quickly at a very early period and left behind only a few scant artifacts. It is possible that their neglected offspring became the Tog'Ratha people, but as the Tog'Ratha lack the cohesive oral tradition of their ancestors it may be impossible to ever know for sure.