CHAPTER 01 / THE WORLDA village at the edge of knowing
You come from the Emberkin village, tucked against the western base of a mountain. Harvests are thin. Hunters do not always return. When winter cuts off the paths, the village survives on stored food, stone tools and the watchfire you must defend.
Your people know the nearby river, the forest and a handful of trading paths. They know almost nothing of Aethra: a vast life-supporting planet larger than Earth, with oceans and continents beyond any villager’s imagination.
The impossible planet
Across Aethra, gravity changes between zones, weather behaves unlike anything on Earth, and unfamiliar organisms share the world with civilizations your village has never encountered. Dense mineral foundations create regions of heavy gravity. Charged seas lift into enormous arches beneath suspended islands. Ice and sulfur-tinted waters reshape distant coasts. The Emberkin know these places only through scattered stories.
In the rain valleys, carbon-based peoples raise children beside rivers. Beneath the basalt, the silicon-based Lithari grow living crystal in furnaces. Pelagic civilizations inhabit the inland oceans. None possesses the whole world; each possesses a fragment of its inheritance.
“We were taught that the stars were fires our ancestors could not reach. Then something fell from one.”— Ilyra, keeper of the first ember
CHAPTER 02 / THE WARThe inheritance wars
The war has outlived its name. Generations of conquest have broken roads, erased libraries, and turned borders into sacred truths. The powerful guard old archives and deny their enemies the ores, tools, and energy needed to rebuild.
Technology is uneven because knowledge and supply chains are controlled. A valley may live by flint beneath a fleet of orbital warships. A people capable of computation may be unable to forge steel. No civilization is born superior; each has survived with what it could preserve.
CHAPTER 03 / YOUR PEOPLEKeep the ember alive
You defend the Emberkin, a struggling village of displaced valley families. Its people own no ancient machines, no standing army, and no place on the great powers’ maps. For now, survival means keeping the beasts away and bringing enough food home. You have stone, timber, and people who refuse to disappear.
Beyond the valley, factions fight a war older than living memory. Some survive with stone while others command machines, airships or orbital fleets. Your first seven defenses begin at the wolf den north of home and continue through the river valley. In time, an archive fragment will pull the village into the greater struggle: Aethra’s ancient lattice is failing, and its inheritance may yet become something shared.
THE WILDREACH