The AetherWar
Retrieved from the Journal of Primacy Agent Rake, Orator, Detroit Origin Source
For millennia, the AetherWar has waged amongst the stars…
Known as “The Silent War” by The Primacy and The Faction, The AetherWar is a battle for power.
How each organization utilizes its means to win the war, however, varies significantly.
The Players
“Each organization has its reasons for rule…we’ve found none of those reasons, however, benefit the common people.”
From the testimony of Vellkarn: Faction Grand Syndicus.
Retrieved from the Grand Trial transcriptions: Egypt, 1902
The Primacy
Perhaps the most advanced civilization in the Aether. The Primacy home world–known as Origin One to Primacy agents–has touted its evolutionary prowess to its proximity to the original Big Bang.
The planet’s surface, nearly mined to the point of being barren, is hostile to life. To survive, the denizens of the world took to the sky, high above the toxic atmosphere of their planet. They sent a small contingent of their people to the next habitable sphere in their system to carve out a place for future expansion.
The new planet–known as Origin Two–would prove to be hostile to the denizens that arrived there, both in terms of planetary conditions and survivability amongst the flora and fauna of the sphere. What the people of this new world discovered was both of profound import to the Origin One, as well as future expansion of their own world…
Primacy ambassadors from Origin One speak only to High Clerics and above. Orators such as myself aren’t granted the privilege of their presence, but I would give my left testicle to see them interact with Anvil.”
The Faction
“The Faction, original denizens of Origin One, catapulted themselves into the Aether in the hope of creating a better life for future generations. Their landing on Origin Two proved to not only be environmentally hostile, with a temperature higher than that of Origin One, it also proved to house a Petree dish of flora and fauna intent on killing the new invaders to their world. Thousands died as they carved out a home on a new, inhospitable world.
Within one generation, bioforming efforts proved successful, and the people of Origin Two were able to walk about the planet with minimal risk to their health. They had tamed the planet and its hazardous ecosystem by changing the structure of their own DNA.
Within three generations, they had mastered the flora and fauna, cultivating both beasts and plant life to sustain themselves. Over time, they began to demonstrate the same aggression and will to dominate as the planet’s fauna. They took inspiration from the ophidons; the planet’s apex predator and nightmare to behold.
Photo recovered from the files of Key, The Primacy Master Archivist. Rumored to be the only surviving photo of an Ophidon queen, discovered on Ion; a planet in the Pleiades system.
~Photo and excerpt discovered in Rake’s Journal
Within five generations, Origin Two rebelled against Origin One, whose sanctions and limitations to their plans bolstered an entire planet’s ire.
The next generation would crumble to ash, as the Primacy used its impressive resources to knock an entire planet from its orbit.
Now outside the goldilocks zone, closer to the planet’s red giant, Origin Two burned. Those who survived the initial strike fled expeditiously toward the poles, where life could continue to survive… barely.
The Faction swore blood oaths; no member of their retinue would forgive, nor would they forget, the barbarism exacted on their people by the Primacy. They would work to wipe their treacherous brethren from the expanse of the Aether and would take their rightful place of supremacy amongst the stars.
And so, the AetherWar began…”
The Game (In Our Era)
The AetherWar has evolved over time, each organization expanding further out into the Aether with the discovery of new planets. What started as two parties crawling through the cosmos over the next hundred thousand years slowly shifted to a rapid acceleration of breakthroughs and innovation. These breakthroughs led to technological advancement, both organizations incorporating elements of each newly discovered culture and species into the war. In the Pleiades, the Primacy discovered a new fuel source–Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms in liquid form–that could serve as propellent for their ships. In the Arkash, a galaxy beyond our observable universe, the faction discovered the means of travel that would change the course of the war forever- the first Origin Source.
With the capacity to jump millions of light years in a matter of seconds, the Faction maintained a lead in the war for decades. Then, through meticulous planning and preparation, Primacy Elites managed to steal the proprietary information and use it to their advantage. No more were they behind; they would scale the war to accommodate the new shift in knowledge…
It had only cost them the entire planet… and the three billion souls that inhabited it.
