World Ærth Eternis

[SDBMBH]

Ærth Eternis — World Introduction

In the elder age, before ink learned to bind the Canon of Law, before crowns learned to reign beneath the weight of Aural Mandates, before time itself, the ultimate Time Substrate, learned to fold and bruise, there was a world that refused to forget.

The ancients named it Ærth Eternis, for it did not age as other worlds did.

It remembered.

It remembered every Unsealed Vow spoken in blood. Every covenant sealed in the ash of a consumed Environmental Substrate. Every name erased from stone, yet whispered by the Xaé, the echo of the answering cosmos. Every miracle that pretended to be mercy, while masking the Cost Channel of the soul. Every sin that tried to pass for necessity, only to leave a metaphysical trace. And so the world learned arithmetic.

Power was not gifted on Ærth Eternis; it was exacted. The Xaé did not bless; it did not forgive. It only transacted. And the world named the same root in a hundred tongues, never to make it kinder, only to make it controllable.

Among the elder courts, elven lungs kept the old precision and called it Æther, and some went farther still, speaking of XaéWeave as though the syllables themselves were a loom. In the oldest sanctuaries, the strictest among them did not even say "power," but offered the sacred name as a doctrine of approach: Xaé'lyrsi-Tajë̈w, an utterance reserved for rite and vow, not for bargaining.

Among humans, it was said plain, practical, and often hungry: Ether. Among scholars and those who wished to cage the living thing inside a taxonomy, it became Imāgō vōcis; voice-image, doctrine made to look like inevitability. Among regimes that required obedience more than understanding, it was lacquered into state-dialect and called Xaegia, as if renaming could make debt feel lawful. Among laborers and the under-licensed, the term turned coarse and serviceable, Ethercræft, less a philosophy than a handle you could grip with bleeding hands.

And in the places where the Umbral did not merely stain the working but taught it a different logic, there were whispers of Ithros, corrupted, unmasked, the same root turned feral in the mouth of the desperate.

And there were other names that never entered scripture. Names whispered by mothers who forgot their children after healing them too many times. Names carved into the bones of court-servants whose hands crystallized into unusable glass after one sanctioned rite too many. Names given by midwives to infants born with lungs threaded in starlight scars, their first breaths already rationed by futures they had never agreed to spend.

These were not doctrinal terms.
They were survival slang.
They were what the body called the Xaé when the ledger stopped being theoretical.

Every working, every weave and channel of the Xaé, took something it would not return:

from bone and marrow,
from the Dream-state circuitry of memory,
from years yet unlived,
from the breath of gods, some merciful, some silent, some merely vast, whose gifts still carried weight, and whose speaking light still demanded a price in the ledger of the world.

Those who called it the Gleam worshipped it. Those who named it Ether studied its rigid grammar. Those who begged it for salvation did not all beg in vain, yet even answered prayers learned the same law: mercy is not exemption, only a different kind of accounting. And those who believed the debt could be miscounted, or hidden, or outlived, learned otherwise.

Some debts did not wait for adulthood.
Some were written into the marrow before birth. Children came screaming into the world already collateralized, their bloodlines pledged in advance to wars they would never live to understand.
Noble houses bred not for love but for substrate tolerance. Entire dynasties existed as living infrastructure, leased to empires that required bodies compatible with sanctioned channels.

Inheritance was not a gift.
It was a loan.

For power on Ærth Eternis was never kind.
It was only precise.

So rose the Orders, who catalogued the impossible in the Black Stacks.
So rose the Courts, where Magisticiars priced absolution by the ounce of Sanctioned Blood.
So rose the Regimes of Watch and Writ, each kingdom fashioning its own hand of Law, each nation teaching its people how to fear Identity Drift in its own dialect.

And not all grammars were written in ledgers. Not all rites bore seals.

In drowned crypts and back-rooms of forbidden libraries, heretical schools kept alternate syntaxes of the Xaé alive. Drift-harvesters trafficked residue scraped from failed workings. Unlicensed adepts traded fragments of corrupted planes like narcotics. There were entire underground economies where doctrine was smuggled, not taught, and where the only credential that mattered was how much of yourself you were willing to lose to make something impossible happen anyway.

And witness became a weapon.
Chronomirrors were forged to carry the living moment across distance, their live transmissions stitching kingdoms together in shared testimony, always now, always present-tense, always the tyranny of the unrepeatable. The wealthy wore them close as pocket-watch finery and called it convenience; the poor gathered beneath communal mirror-crystals and called it necessity. There were no stored visions to revisit, no captured past to edit, only the broadcast as it happened, only the moment while it still bled.

Bloodlines were bound into Inheritance Contracts written in star-fire and coded life-identity. Artifacts were indexed not by wonder, but by the Entropy Exposure they exacted upon the user. And the world did not merely contain its monsters, it explained them.

For when the Xaé was drawn without discipline, when planes were tapped like wells without seal or buffer, the residue did not evaporate into storybook mist. It anchored. It cross-bound. It left fingerprints in flesh and temperament alike. The astral left its sanctified geometry; the umbral left its hunger and distortion; and the body, never meant to host mixed signatures, did what bodies always do under incompatible law: it rewrote itself.

Thus beasts, hybrids, and drift-born things walked with borrowed taxonomies in their blood, not as folklore, but as consequence made ambulatory.

And death did not close the account.
Souls carried debt. Echo-residue clung to identity long after flesh failed. Some spirits were seized by Courts beyond the veil and pressed into post-mortem service. Some were audited into silence, their names stripped from both memory and afterlife alike. Even the grave was subject to jurisdiction. Even the void kept books.

And the gods.
The Vox Primordia grew quiet.
Not from apathy.
Not from mercy.
But from terror of what their Speaking Light might still do to a world already brittle with judgement.

For the gods themselves were not exempt.

They were bound by compacts older than language, trapped inside obligations they no longer remembered signing. Some stood in breach of ancient clauses. Some carried sanctions written into causality itself. They did not fall silent because they did not care. They fell silent because every word they spoke still had the legal authority to fracture continents.

Thus began the Age of Law.
Thus began the Age of Cost.

Thus began the long era in which every prayer became a negotiation, and every miracle a contracted substrate that the universe would one day collect.

Kingdoms rose upon ledgers of stolen futures. Empires fell beneath Interest they could not pay in Soul-linked conduits. Cities were built atop ruins whose names were lost to Identity Erosion. Entire species learned to outlive their own histories and call it progress, while their cells began to reclassify into the rot of the woods.

And above all of it, threaded through it, were the layered strata that no oath could fully deny: the Astral and the Umbral, each leaving its planar fingerprint, each re-patterning the self toward its source-plane's logic, each insisting that no reach beyond the material comes clean.

And access to sanctioned working was not earned. It was inherited, licensed, or purchased. Talent without permit was prosecuted as a felony. Genius without pedigree was treated as a threat to state stability. There were prodigies who died in cells for unauthorized aptitude, and aristocrats who burned half a province without censure because their bloodline held the proper seals.

And beneath it all, Ærth Eternis watched and remembered the living anomalies who walked its present tense like unfinished verdicts.

It remembered Ivelisse, the Gypsy of the Pearl Sands, called by fearful mouths the Witch of Ouqopia.

An exile who traded silk, spice and troll's blood beneath desert suns while hiding a lineage older than her own reflection.
A woman who crossed the ice-haunted tundra and bled in the sanctums of the north to retrieve a legendary blade of the ancient barbarian king.

The White Brandt.

A weapon she risked her life to claim for a man who swore devotion and repaid it with theft. She broke her vow to the world for a scholar that used her. Who begged when she should have walked away. Who risked death in a temple that tried to eat her alive.

It remembered the kiss that burned him mid-breath, not by malice, but by a moment where her draconic inheritance broke containment and spilled through her mouth like fire through cloth.

Heat warped the air around her lips.
The Xaé recoiled as if recognizing a sovereign blood it was never meant to bargain with. Scales ghosted her skin for a heartbeat too long. She hid her nature ever after, because the world would not forgive a dragon that still dared to love like a woman.

The fire that escaped her mouth never truly went back in.
The draconic inheritance did not vanish after that kiss.
It only learned restraint.
It coiled tighter around her heart.
It slept lighter behind her ribs.
It woke more easily when she loved too hard, or bled too much, or wanted something she was not allowed to keep.

Every act of mercy now came with a temperature spike in her bones.
Every act of rage left sulfur on her breath for hours afterward.
She told herself she still owned her body.
The dragon never corrected her.

The law saw only murder.
It did not see betrayal.
It did not see the sword stolen from her hands as he died.
It did not see a dragon-blooded woman who would have given him everything if he had only wanted more than profit.

Markets whispered her name as both blessing and warning. Ouqopia let her trade, but never let her return, and her true blood veiled beneath glamour and ritual discipline. A half-human, half-dragon hybrid whose lineage she buried beneath scent-binding oils, mirrored jewelry, and a smile sharpened into normalcy.

Power kept mistaking her for a resource.
Warlords bid for her marrow at black-market auctions she was never meant to survive attending. Scholars wanted to extract her precious flametongue-stone. Alchemists drafted formulas around her blood before she'd agreed to bleed. No one wanted the woman attached to the inheritance. Treaties were drafted around her potential. Assassins were hired around her inconvenience.

The world did not ask what she wanted.
It only negotiated over what could be harvested from her corpse.

Because dragons were not supposed to still walk this age.
And half-bloods were not supposed to exist at all.

It remembered Anedramus Titus Valerius of Kruzía. The God Scourged. A crusader of the Blessed Order who never asked to become a relic.

Chosen by the High One against his will and the moment that branded him mid-charge. Marked by celestial sanction that burned through his mortality like a sigil through parchment. A man who still bled even as lightning answered his name on battlefields soaked in sanctified ruin. The thunder that followed his prayers like a verdict spoken in sky.

Judgment struck the battlefield.
He did not fall.
Only his battalion and elven enemies did.

Stone vitrified beneath his boots.
Shields detonated into white fragments.
The air collapsed inward before the sound arrived.
When the thunder finally followed, it did not roll.
It sentenced.

A weapon theocracy did not know how to sheathe. A human who carried divinity like an untired war crime inside his bones. And beneath the sanctioned violence and celestial mandates, a man who still longed for Artmeya, his promised bride, whose absence carved a hollow louder than any war chant.

He hesitated whenever her name threaded his prayers.
The lightning always came weaker then.
The High One never commented.
The silence afterward was worse.

It remembered the hollow where reconciliation should have lived, a wound not carved by war or godfire, but by the unanswered future of his bride still beating inside his chest.

His thoughts kept drifting backward instead of forward.
Not to battle.
Not to miracles.
Not to the High One.
To Artmeya.

To the way her hands always warmed his armor seams when she touched his chest.
To the way she spoke his name like it still belonged to a man instead of a weapon.
To the future they had planned in a grammar that no longer existed.

Every victory felt counterfeit without her witnessing it.
Every divine commendation rang hollow without her laughter to contradict it.
Every night he lay awake wondering if reconciliation was still a location he could walk to, or only a word his destiny had already forgotten.

Soldiers started praying at him instead of with him. Enemies began surrendering before he raised his weapon. His own allies stepped back when the sky darkened above his silhouette.

Rumors grew teeth.
They said he didn't walk anymore, he arrived.
They said storms avoided his path out of respect.
They said lightning had learned his voice.

None of that made him feel less human.
Only more alone.

He marched carrying a destiny only the High One understands. A path written in clauses still sealed. A future whose verdict heaven has not yet finalized. The Blessed Order logged him as a Sanctified Asset-Class Relic, Category Irrevocable. His body was no longer his. His future was no longer discretionary.

God had chosen him.
But the reason had not yet chosen its words in the human tongue.
The sentence was still accruing interest.

It remembered Solin Rosemoon of Auralis. Classified and sealed by Inquisitorial writ as The Beloved. A rogue Arcaneist whose body functioned as a breach in the universe.

A man whose lungs carried the atmosphere of a dead cosmos.
A man whose breath inverted into black plasmic vapor.
A man whose saliva flash-froze mid-purge.
A man who bled from the nose when reality folded too close to his ribcage.
A man whose body leaked the residue of a collapsed reality into the living world.
A man whose existence triggered extermination protocols not from malice, but from doctrinal terror.

A survivor of the crimson wedding that became a flesh-gate. A widower of a temple Hymnstress whose body ruptured into a geometric portal of her own organs. A widower of a bride-to-be turned into a doorway made of bone and impossible angles.

It remembered the massacre.

The moment her flesh rewrote itself into an aperture.
The moment her organs reclassified into architecture.
The alien predator that stepped through her corpse into a sanctuary.
The guests slaughtered by a creature that was not evil, only terrified.
The blood pooling beneath vows that never finished being spoken.

The father-in-law who watched his daughter become a biological violation and lived long enough to hate the man promised to her.

The Eldritch Horror's gaze embedded in Solin's soul like a tracking beacon.

A love that was not predatory, but paternal.
A love that treated him like a son.
A love whose every act of care ruptured physics like bone fracturing under pressure.
A love whose attention bent probability and snapped causality out of alignment.

The God fed him alien schematics to build the Egg apparatus, a machine that learned his suffering patterns better than his own assistants, to cradle the collapse inside a machine shaped like mercy. And every kindness destabilized reality. Every intervention widened the aperture of harm.

The Council called his execution mercy. The Inquisition called his existence a contagion. A bounty authorized.

The local gods recognized the fingerprints of something older than themselves on his soul and feared him. And Solin ran anyway. Running ahead of the warps he could feel crawling up his spine.

Hiding.

Disguising his purges as pipe smoke.
Turning cosmic hemorrhage into a social excuse. Carrying a universe's death in his chest.

Trying not to erase the people he touched.
Trying not to kill the assistants who held the valves.
Trying not to become the extinction vector everyone already believed him to be.

A fugitive carrying a cosmic patriarch's gaze like a tracking beacon embedded in his soul. A man whose kindness functioned as a potential extinction event. And worse still, a man loved.

Not worshipped.
Not cursed.

The Eldritch entity that called him Beloved did not love him as prey. It loved him as a father loves a son: with pride, fascination, possessive affection, and catastrophic indifference to collateral damage.

Its gaze tried to cradle him.
Its touch tried to shelter him.
Its voice tried to soothe him through dimensions that did not possess language.

And every act of care ruptured physics like a fissure spreading through reality.

It remembered Elowen Rosemoon of Aurelis. Licensed Arcanist. Time-misfire fugitive. Condemned thief of sanctified breath.

A man who stole a priestess's voice and traded grace for heresy. A man who tore open time itself to reach a courtroom he was not meant to survive entering.

A man who broke the When.

A man who burned years he had not yet lived just to stand before a woman the Law had already condemned. He turned hymn into contraband. He committed a voice-theft that reclassified mercy as a felony. Every syllable he ever spoke after that came pre-mortgaged against his future.

His Chronomirror, a device that replayed judgment in real time and never let it finish falling. A silvered witness that kept broadcasting a verdict that refused to complete itself.

Ilarya Althea-Verseryis.
Envoy of the Edenic Consulate.
His elven beloved.
Consort heresy defendant and the jade anniversary necklace glowing inside the Chronomirror broadcast.

Her hair shorn of ceremonial braids.
Her name spoken in a trial chamber.

Elowen tore a portal through misaligned star-lattice. He forced a temporal anchor into coherence with blood and refusal. He violated sealed geometries that were not meant to be used by the living.

The Dawnwyrm hunted him across a city of paleotechnic ruins. It scoured sky and stone for his temporal residue. It claimed territory over his escape like a predator marking debt. He bled through jungles of metal and fungus that had never learned his name.

It remembered him emerging bloodied into the Edenic court.
Hands raised.
Breath shaking.
Vowing himself to a woman the Law had already sentenced to erasure.

Reality started charging him compound interest in borrowed futures. His hair took on the first coarse thread of gray that did not belong to age.

The Edenic Law classified their love.
Not as romance.
Not as devotion.
But as a consort violation.
A heresy of race.
A bureaucratic infection in the bloodline registry.

She stood trial not for treason.
Not for violence.
But for refusing to unlove the wrong species.

A fugitive whose Chronomirror still replayed a courtroom where his beloved waited for a verdict that never finished falling. A man moving through shattered seconds and forbidden geometries with one goal still burning hot enough to anchor him to coherence.

To reach her.
To take her back.
To make the law bleed before it took another thing he loved.

A cousin to Solin, bound not only by blood, but by parallel damnations that the world pretended were coincidence.

And it remembered how Ærth Eternis flagged him as an irregular entry. Not because he broke the law. But because he proved the law could be broken by grief alone.

These were not prophecies.
They walked beneath the same Astral canopy and Umbral shadow as everyone else. They ate, bled, loved, fled, and bargained like mortals. But the ledger of Ærth Eternis had already flagged them as irregular entries.

And the world watched them too. It watched a dragon-blooded merchant pretend to be human. It watched a god-marked crusader try to remain a man. It watched a Beloved fugitive try not to erase the people he touched. It watched a condemned lover try to steal time itself back into alignment.

Because Ærth Eternis did not only collect debts from empires and gods.
It collected them from protagonists.

It watched saints become liabilities of the state.
It watched heroes become heresies of Dissonance.
It watched love become contraband, traded in the back alleys of Ouqopia.

It remembered the Silence of Calyrr-Vaen.
It remembered the Ashfall Concord.
It remembered the breach that turned the Sea of Glass into a cemetery of ships that never finished sinking.
It remembered the war that was never named because every nation involved agreed to pretend it had never happened.

For in this world, nothing endures without consequence.
Not kingdoms.
Not gods.
Not time.
Not even hope.

This is Ærth Eternis.
Where miracles are not gifts.
They are loans.
And the world always collects.