The Legacy of the Titans
The first civilisation on Aiaos was Titanis, the great, skyborne culture of the Titans. Vast, and powerful beyond the comprehension of mortals, the Titans created wonders, of which the great sky cities were but minor examples. For all this power, however, and all the favour of the Old Gods, the Titans had the misfortune to lie between the surface of Aiaos and the descending might of the Colossi and their followers. They fought, but they were overcome, and slain almost in their entirety.
The bulk of the Titanic legacy came into the hands of the Giants of the Orden. They, having been created to serve as the caretakers of the sky cities, were well-placed to assert their right as inheritors. Many of the cities and their mansions had already fallen, however, and the legacy of Titanis scattered across the dome in the form of ruins and fragments of technology.
The ruins are often fearful sites, guarded by ancient automata or colonised by outerfolk, drawn to the relicts of their ancient enemy or Colossal fragments. For all the peril, arcanists, artificers and sages alike seek for these ruins and the lost treasures they might still contain.
The simplest of these treasures are raw materials: bouyant stone, titan iron and reserves of the arcane explosive known as smokepowder. This last is a wickedly powerful blasting compound, well beyond the power of alchemical black powder, the formula for which would be worth a fortune to many artificers. To date, only stocks of powder have been recovered.
More complex mechanisms are mostly known from fragments and from long failed examples held by the giants, who were not entrusted with the science to maintain them. Despite extensive study by artificers of many lineages, very few of these mechanisms, and almost none of the science behind them, have been successfully recreated.
The most successful recreations are the automata known as the forgeborn, and the arcane mills which generate various materials by rotating a programmed core in an intense magical field. The original titanic mills are believed to have generated a vast range of materials, potentially supplying all of the basic needs of the sky cities. Modern recreations are mostly limited to flour, salt and sand.
A recent variation on the concept of the arcane mill reverses the basic operation. Instead of using mechanical energy to transform the arcane to the material, these mills instead convert mechanical energy into arcane flux, which can be stored in fluid form or converted to artificial arcanite.
There is one more legacy of the titans: The last of the titans themselves. While modern depictions typically assume an eladrinate form for the titans, only a small proportion of the population were that shape, and none of those survive. A very small number of other titans did outlast both the Colossus war and the cataclysm, however.
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