The Age of Freedom—The Age of Technology—The Age of the Water Bearer

Little can be told of these ages yet to come, though most look forward to this as the age of ultimate peace on Urthe, and goodwill shared among all the races. If this comes to pass, sages foresee a likely sharing and development of knowledge and lore as yet unimagined. Some sages suggest that by the end of this age, the oceans will rise again as the ice caps will have melted completely, and some lands will sink under the sea.

2150 CE: The Rise of Hyperion

The S.T.O.R.M. core, perfected in the final decade of the age prior, does not remain a curiosity for long. Within a single generation, Hyperion grows from one competent engineering house among many into a guild whose name will, by this age’s end, be spoken across every settled world of the Solus system. Where earlier ages harnessed the elements piecemeal, a forge here, a ward there, Hyperion’s true innovation is standardization: a single hardened core, drawing its lifeblood from compressed liquid Corazonium, wrapped in whatever shell a task requires.

2200 CE: The S.T.O.R.M. Principle

Sages of the age come to call this the S.T.O.R.M. principle, one heart beating beneath a hundred different skins, and it is this principle, more than any single invention, that finally lifts Urthe’s peoples off their own world in numbers, rather than in the ones and twos of ancient legend.

The core itself owes its endurance to Refractinium linings at the hull’s leading edges, the same element long known to lend its strength to lesser things while decaying within moments of its own refining, a cost Hyperion’s forges have learned to absorb at scale rather than solve outright, and Adamantine-veined trusses on the war-craft that need never fear a lesser blade or lesser flame. Vibranium plating, hardening precisely where a blow lands hardest, arms the tactical Hoppers, while the swift civilian craft, the Sparrow, the Starling, the Skylark, owe their impossible lightness to Mythrilium framing, dense enough to hold a shape against the pressures of high atmosphere, light enough that the whole craft outweighs little more than the air it displaces. At the heart of every deck, unseen by passenger or soldier alike, a sliver of Generium hums, the old philosopher’s semiconductor now doing a wizard’s thinking work in silicon and crystal rather than flesh, guiding every Hopper’s flight without a hand upon the stick.

2280 CE: Counterfeit Cores

Not every core proves equal by this point in the age. Sages and merchants alike whisper of a cheaper alloy creeping into the black market’s counterfeit parts, soft, golden, and treacherous, prone to shattering or worse without warning under stress no honest Hyperion casting would ever fail beneath. Buyers of secondhand Hoppers are warned, in every port from here to the asteroid ring, to test their craft’s bones before ever trusting them to open sky.

2500 CE: The Reach Toward Ferrus

The old speculation of the alchemists at last bears fruit. Turbinium, long known to sages as a substance that might, if properly deconstructed, yield a breathable atmosphere and a wealth of pure lanthanum besides, is finally broken open at the scale a world requires. Ferrus, the iron-red neighbor of Urthe’s own sky, begins its slow transformation from bare rock to breathable frontier.

2650 CE: The First Colonies

The first true colonies rise upon Ferrus within this century, ferried across the gulf by fleets of Hyperion’s own Swift-class haulers, the first peoples of Urthe ever to call another world home.

2900 CE: The Asteroid Concerns

With Ferrus secured and Hopper traffic now routine between the inner worlds, smaller Hyperion-chartered concerns begin working the asteroid ring itself, drawn by the same Turbinium veins, and the rarer, stranger Exotic elements, that had until now only been theorized to exist there in useful quantity.

3200 CE: The Long Peace Tested

Not every world takes to Hyperion’s new order gracefully. Rivalries once confined to Urthe’s own continents begin, for the first time, to play out between competing colonies and shipping concerns across open space, though the age’s promised goodwill largely holds, no full war yet breaking out among the peoples of the Solus system.

3800 CE: The Unsolved Question of the Stars

Whether this age will see travel beyond Solus’s own light remains, even now, the great unanswered question of the sages. The void between the worlds is one thing, already crossed a thousand times by ship and by spell. The void between the stars is another matter entirely: it is Phlogiston that fills that deeper dark, inert to every ordinary force, and utterly unforgiving of even a single open flame. No vessel yet forged, not even Hyperion’s own hardened core, has been proven fit to cross it and return. Some artificers speak of Eludium, that stranger, never-quite-seen substance already trusted to bend space within a bag or a hole, as the likelier key, if it is a key at all, to a door no one now living has ever opened.

Some see in all this the promise of a great technological leap, the Power of the entire Urthe finally harnessed rather than merely inherited from what it has already given rise to on the surface. Whether that promise is fulfilled by this age’s end, or left, like so much else, to the age still to come, no sage now living claims to know.

A•OM looked on…