Ironbirds

"They say man was never meant to fly. Given what’s become of Ironbirds, maybe they were right."

The Dream That Fell From the Sky:
The Ironbird was not born of magick, nor did it owe its conception to the will of gods or sorcerers. It was the triumph of industry, a defiant rejection of the belief that flight belonged solely to creatures and mages. Sir Wilbur Orville, a human artificer with the mind of a dreamer and the hands of a blacksmith, proved it was possible when he first took to the skies nearly forty years before the Schism. A lone decade later, Ironbirds were everywhere—trade, travel, war, every nation of worth perfecting their own variations, refining them until the sky itself became a battlefield, a road, a market. And then, just as suddenly as they had risen, they fell. The Fall and the Schism didn’t simply break the world; they shattered its future. The Ironbird, a machine poised to shape the centuries to come, was robbed of its potential overnight. What once soared in great flocks was torn from the sky, not by innovation or obsolescence, but by sheer, unrelenting destruction. Factories turned to rubble, engineers lost to war, the infrastructure to maintain such wonders crumbled until only fragments of their legacy remained. The very craft that had reshaped war itself had now become a relic, reduced to a whisper of what could have been.

An Artifact of a Future Stolen:
What few Ironbirds remain are hoarded, preserved with an almost religious devotion. Everwealth, ever clinging to the past, holds its surviving models under lock and key, treating them less as weapons of war and more as sacred artifacts of a lost age. The artisans who maintain them are not builders, only keepers—tending to machines they cannot replicate, replacing what few components they can manage while knowing that one failure too many will ground them forever. They are not symbols of power, not anymore. Their once-mighty presence has dwindled to a pitiful handful, each launch a gamble, each skirmish a possible last flight. They are the last ghosts of a future that never came, coddled like fragile museum pieces, yet still sent screaming into the heavens when the kingdom has no other choice—against dragons, against rogue warlocks, against foes too great for anything else.

The Flight That Was Promised:
Ironbirds were meant to be more than weapons, much more. They were meant to be bridges between lands, to turn weeks of travel into hours, to weave the world together in ways no ship or horse ever could. Trade routes once reliant on winding roads could have been straight lines across the sky. Entire cities could have been built with the assumption that distance was no longer an obstacle. But that vision was stolen, left to rot in abandoned factories and buried beneath war-ravaged lands. There are those who dream of restoring them, of rekindling that lost ambition, but the road is long and costly. The precision instruments required to craft their intricate parts are lost, the technical documents that once guided their construction scattered or burned. What remains is a puzzle with too many missing pieces, a dream that may never be whole again. And yet, Everwealth holds onto them, as if refusing to let go of what could have been. They may be dwindling, they may be brittle, but as long as they remain, they remind the world that man did once fly. That man could fly. And perhaps, one day, against all odds, he will again.