Aetherium Wars
The Aetherium Wars were a defining chapter in Orpheus's history, a decades-long struggle that nearly severed the Eternal Empire's grip on the moon. Beginning shortly after Orpheus’s colonization, the conflict erupted when Indents rose up against their imperial overseers, seizing control of vital Aetherium deposits and refineries.
Origins of the Conflict
As the Empire expanded onto Orpheus, Aetherium quickly became the backbone of its Magitech infrastructure. With its unparalleled ability to store and amplify raw magical energy, Aetherium was an invaluable resource, fueling Spelljamming Ships, war engines, and the Empire’s ever-growing dominion. However, the process of extracting Aetherium was hazardous. The crystals were volatile, requiring skilled handling, and exposure to raw Aetherium energy often left miners with severe mutations, arcane sickness, or death.
Indents, who were little more than expendable laborers, suffered immensely. Entire workforces perished in collapsed mines or explosions caused by unstable crystal formations. Those who survived were worked to exhaustion, their lives spent in service of the Empire’s endless hunger for resources. Resentment simmered, and when an explosion in the Sable Expanse annihilated an entire colony of workers—caused by an imperial officer’s reckless harvesting order—the unrest boiled over into open rebellion.
Beginning of the War
The uprising began in isolated skirmishes as Indents refused to work, sabotaging mining equipment and clashing with imperial enforcers. Armed only with stolen tools and raw desperation, the rebels initially fought with guerrilla tactics, striking at supply lines and escaping into Orpheus’s Wildlands. But when word spread of the uprising, scattered indent groups across the colonies united, forming a resistance led by hardened miners, defected soldiers, and rogue sorcerers.
Using the very Aetherium they mined as weapons, rebels devised unstable energy bombs, sabotaged imperial magitech, and even harnessed the crystals’ power to bolster their own abilities. Some mutated survivors of Aetherium exposure, now bearing arcane-infused bodies, became living weapons against the Empire. The rebels took control of key mines and refineries, choking the Empire’s Aetherium supply and forcing Avalon to send in legions of magitech-enforced troops to quell the resistance.
The Long Struggle
What was expected to be a swift Imperial crackdown became a war of attrition. The Empire underestimated the resolve of the Indents and the strategic importance of Orpheus’s hazardous terrain. Storm-wracked deserts, labyrinthine cavern networks, and the moon’s fluctuating ley lines provided natural defenses that allowed rebels to hold out against superior imperial forces.
For decades, the conflict raged. The Empire deployed increasingly brutal methods—mass bombardments, arcane plagues, and even experimental warforged enforcers—but each victory came at a steep cost. Rebel groups became deeply entrenched, evolving into coordinated cells capable of crippling entire mining operations overnight. However, internal divisions among the rebels—between those who sought negotiation and those who desired total war—began to take root.
The Empires Triumph and Addition of Shackles
After decades of fighting, the Eternal Empire launched its final gambit: Divide and Subjugate. They infiltrated rebel ranks, sowing distrust among leaders, and manipulated warlords into turning on each other. With the resistance fragmented, the Empire unleashed a final purge, reclaiming Aetherium mines one by one, slaughtering entire strongholds, and capturing the remaining leaders.
To ensure such a rebellion would never happen again, the Empire implemented Shackles—magical bindings that displayed each worker’s debt and kept them permanently tracked. Those who once fought for freedom found themselves enslaved once more, now bound not only by chains of oppression but by unbreakable arcane law.
Ongoing Legacy
Though the Aetherium Wars ended in an Imperial victory, the resistance never fully died. The surviving rebels—those who escaped into the Wildlands—formed various rebel factions, many of which conglomerated into The Voidfang Corsairs, who continue to oppose the Empire actively to this day. The resistance is a scattered but persistent force, smuggling freed Indents, sabotaging imperial operations, and waiting for the next great uprising. While history remembers the Aetherium Wars as a failed rebellion, to those who still resist, it was the first battle in a war that has never truly ended.
Even in the present day, the scars of the Aetherium Wars remain. The Empire keeps a firm stranglehold on Orpheus’s resources, and every Indent bears the weight of the past in the form of their shackle. But in the depths of the Wildlands are the whispers of another war to come—one that will finally break the chains forged so long ago.