An open science-fantasy setting
Aetheria
A civilization with every tool it could want and no reliable way to tell itself no.
Aetheria follows capability outrunning collective judgment: corporate powers, engineered peoples, uploaded minds, habitats, fleets, and movements becoming indispensable to one another while disagreeing about who counts as a person and who must pay for progress.
Gameplay preview · Cockpit action, industrial scale, and the old machinery of power.
The fracture
Old civilization arrives in altered physics
Humanity's first working faster-than-light experiment triggers a quarantine response and shunts an entangled civilization into Elysium. The displacement carries institutions as well as bodies: debts, maintenance systems, legal claims, labor conflicts, military habits, memory, and every compromise that was already holding somebody alive.
Pre-Elysium stories stay close to hard science fiction, industrial horror, corporate logistics, and noir. Post-Elysium stories add esper cognition, cultivation traditions, necrotech, impossible weather, and giant humanoid spacecraft. The physics changes. Material consequences do not.
Choose a route
Find your way into Aetheria
The vault is open. Start with history, lived experience, or the machinery built to make the setting playable.
Stories The Setting Can Hold
Aetheria supports radically different modes whose causes remain visible:
- Pre-Elysium hard science fiction and black magic: heat, habitat engineering, cognition markets, labor control, and the dangerous research lineage that leads to the FTL Trigger.
- Noir and institutional mystery: custody disputes, insurer and port gates, contradictory records, media pressure, and crimes produced by systems whose authority is divided across several respectable offices.
- Post-Elysium mecha and cultivation drama: Daedal Houses turn embodied piloting into ship-scale Figures, while Wavecrafters preserve operating knowledge through forms, guild discipline, and guarded lineages.
- First contact: species such as the Ratfolk arrive with their own internal plurality, accessibility needs, political disputes, and reasons to distrust any outsider asking for one representative.
- Corporate, domestic, or workplace stories: food, cooling, credentials, medicine, repair, transport, and shelter remain political even when nobody fires a weapon.
Two complete novels · Free to read
Two distant corners of one history
Each novel stands alone. Read either online or download the EPUB.
Pirate workplace space opera · warm black comedy
The Burden of Proof
Luce Orsino wants to rescue people so badly that he keeps building institutions capable of owning them. Four ships, repeated tactical catastrophe, and one machine person who needs the right to stop being needed.
Political mecha-academy thriller · adult/YA crossover
The Body That Asks
Five cadets are selected to become the ideal family for a giant war machine. A damaged machine person makes six—and the body they form will work only if every part can still say no.
Pressures That Generate Stories
- A capability works before anyone agrees whether it should exist.
- A person is recognized in one transaction and treated as property in the next.
- Transformation expands what a body can do while narrowing who may maintain it.
- Two credible records disagree, but a port, crew, or court must act anyway.
- The kindest available choice preserves part of the institution causing the harm.
- Rescue requires temporary authority, and temporary authority develops reasons not to expire.
- A sanctuary must decide how to keep accepting people without consuming those already inside.
- Maintenance workers know the system is failing before its official dashboard admits it.
The counter-pressure is material care: food, cooling, truthful records, disability access, refuge, repair, transport, and enough shared authority to refuse the help meant to save.
Writers do not need custody of the whole universe. A story may own its cast, place, and depicted events while respecting shared setting constraints. Narrative Themes names recurring tensions; the writing process and repository remain open for inspection and contribution.