Aeldrum

*For the empire centered on Aeldrum during the After Unification period, see Serene Duchy of Aeldrum.*

## Statistics

### Population

* 500 million (Imperial Peak)
* 250 million (Post Unification Peak)

## Society and Technology

### Government

* Theocracy/Technocracy (Imperium)
* Various (Pre-Unification)
* Noble Republic (Post Unification)

### Religions

* Cult of Baradun (Pantheon War)
* Church of Adalna (Imperium)
* Various (Post Unification)

### Dominant Races

* Automata (Pantheon War)
* Human (Imperial Period)
* Elves, Human (Pre-Unification)
* Elves (Post-Unification)

**Aeldrum** is the pocket dimension with the most Etheric Gates. It has variously been the seat of Baradun's empire during the Pantheon War, the Mage Imperium, and the Serene Duchy of Aeldrum, as well as hosting a variety of transient warlords and short-lived empires over its long history.

## Geography, Geology and Ecology

Aeldrum is a world of rock and sand, arid in the extreme except for the more temperate scrublands that have grown up around the great settlements by process of painstaking cultivation and importation.

### Spires and Aeldrum Basalt

The Aeldrum Spire is the largest of the seven megastructures that crown the world of Aeldrum. The spires are composed of a basalt-like material, which has no equivalent in the cosmos except for the Pin Jump and some apparently synthetic versions found around the Black Pyramids. It is generally believed that Baradun fashioned the spires before the Pantheon War, with his automaton hordes forming them by process of extrusion: if so, it is ambiguous whether Baradun chose to locate the spires at the sites of the seven etheric gates that dot the planet, or if the gates are in part a consequence of the spires themselves (some ancient testaments claim that Baradun made the gates of Aeldrum). However, this account of the spires' origins is disputed by the Church of the Spires and some fringe academics, who contend that the spires and the Pin Jump predate Baradun, having been formed during a much more primordial period by the Elder God Noloth to give structure and stability to the etheric lanes.

The spire material is remarkable for its extraordinary durability: though it can be cut or blasted, it rarely ever cracks or chips and must typically be drilled or sawn at enormous effort. Further, the “Aeldrum Basalt” has significant adaptive properties, harnessing ambient etheric energy to reorder its own internal structure for maximum interior and surface resilience whenever it is damaged: this “mineral scarring” is not immediate, but occurs sufficiently quickly that structures like the Aeldrum Spire have been tunneled for centuries with only very few cave-ins or collapses. No direct observation has been made of Aeldrum Basalt growing, but geological surveys from major digging projects over the centuries suggest that it does very slowly extend itself, on the order of a few millimeters per year.

Though each of the Aeldman megastructures is referred to as a “spire,” most actually consist of one or more spires (the term “Great Spire” is sometimes used to make the distinction between one of the seven megastructures and less significant spires). The Aeldrum Spire has a central spire, with an average radius of about 1km and a maximum height of 5km. The Aeldrum Spire also has three other classes of spire. There are seven “secondary” spires whose base is at the ground level of the Aeldrum sands, but which adjoin the central spire for a majority of their rise; thirteen “tertiary” spires, which grow from the central or secondary spires; and roughly two dozen “peripheral” spires, whose base is removed from the central spire. Most peripheral spires are uninhabited, being too narrow to support settlement: in the days before Aeldman unification, spire warlords often sealed these peripheral structures to prevent their use as smuggling depots.

The Aeldrum Spires are the most densely populated regions in the known cosmos, packing millions of inhabitants into areas with a footprint no greater than a large town elsewhere in the Serene Duchy. In addition to their logistical significance for shipping and commerce, each being the site (and most ethericists believe the anchor) of one of Aeldrum’s etheric gates, the spires provide a region of high etheric stability. Great storms can whip at lethal speed along Aeldrum’s “storm corridors,” and a major early field of etheric study in the history of the Serene Duchy was dedicated to mapping these corridors and developing a field of etheric meteorology. Though initially deployed by airship captains seeking the fastest and safest routes, the field was elevated to an actuarial level by Aeldrum’s first railroad companies, which demanded high confidence that their expensive infrastructure (and especially vulnerable structures such as warehouse and service stations) would occupy regions of low storm intensity. Indeed, some “safe zones” exist in the Aeldman wastes, where storms strike once in decades or centuries, and these are the sites of secondary cities such as the Crossroads rail hub. However, the regions of lowest storm incidence are the Aeldrum Spires themselves, and when storms do strike the Aeldrum Basalt is considered absolute proof against the flaming etheric wind. The result is that most who settle on Aeldrum live within the Spires or in the many neighborhoods that spread under their protective shadow.

The extremely high cost of shaping or cutting Aeldrum Basalt has meant that for centuries most Aeldmen adapted their architecture to the cuts that had already been made in the spires by previous inhabitants. A sure sign of an up-and-coming Aeldman neighborhood remains the presence of fresh cuts in the stone to accommodate the design vision of residents. In grand old neighborhoods, polished geometric stone faces (against the natural cylindrical structure of the mineral scarring) and intricate sculptures in the rock kept perfectly detailed through centuries are signs of lavish and perennial aesthetic effort.

The two previously known major inhabitants of Aeldrum were the Mage Imperium (which used Aeldrum as its capital from approximately 7000 to approximately 5000 years ago -- roughly 0 A.C. to 0 A.S.) and untold millennia prior, the Machine Hordes of Baradun (with a brief and violent occupation of the world at the end of the Pantheon War by the Kirvan Legions). Even the Mage Imperium, which possessed the etheric lore to carve Aeldrum Basalt for the sprawling palace chambers of its seers and princes, relied on the ancient handiwork of Baradun to provide the skeleton for its work, and the Imperial lower classes often lived entirely in the tunnels and chambers carved by the brass servants of Baradun. It is believed that at the height of Baradun’s power, billions of automata and drones (heavily mechanized biological servants) lived in the Aeldrum Spires, both soaring high above the planet’s surface and plunging to still unfathomed depths far below. The corridors and depots carved to house the Machine Father’s subjects and creations became the main pathways and public spaces of future settlements.

Throughout the days of the Mage Imperium, rogue automata were said to lurk in these hidden lower levels, having sealed themselves away for an eon to hide from the cleansing fire of Kirva. When the Imperium collapsed, the automaton hordes slowly returned to the surface, probing the decaying defenses of the last Mage Princes before picking the scraps of Imperial civilization from the rock of Aeldrum. Without the leadership of Baradun or his angels, these simplest of his autonomous machines could do little more than rove the wastes in search of usable materials and jealously guard their master’s world from free organic life. Swarms of automata were one of the significant hazards of the Interregnum era between the fall of the Mage Imperium and the unification of Aeldrum under the Serene Duchy.

### Ecology

Aeldrum has alternated throughout its history between a cosmic role as the logistic and usually political center of vast empires and a blighted and half-forgotten backwater. This historic cycle has also carried alternating ecological shocks: at its height, Aeldrum is flooded with invasive species from the far reaches of the cosmos, putting extreme pressure on any local populations. The great cataclysms that mark Aeldman history have driven brutal population bottlenecks and mass extinction, producing a hodgepodge recovery of indigenous and invasive life. Before the paleontological expeditions of the early 4th century A.U., no clear record existed of the timing of different species’ arrival on Aeldrum: even now, the record is confused, with species disappearing for thousands of years only to be apparently reintroduced by the next great empire (or, far more confusingly, disappearing and then reappearing with no archaeological evidence of major sentient resettlement).

## Notes

1. ↑ Aeldrum is often compared to the desert world of Telrion. However, Aeldrum differs from Telrion in that its wasted condition is the result of repeated cataclysm inflicted by divine and mortal powers, whereas Telrion is believed to be naturally arid and hostile due to the etheric storms generated by its quicksilver deposits (the quicksilver-rich world of Kamens poses another case, though its ecosystem was also heavily affected by the dampening effect of the elder-thing, known as the Spider God, that fed on the etheric energy trapped in its quicksilver deposits). It is believed that the god Baradun annihilated most indigenous life on Aeldrum when he first claimed it as his seat, with the surviving life ravaged by the firestorms of Kirvan conquest. A long recovery into the Mage Imperium era was reversed utterly by the events of the Sundering and subsequently the many Scourings of Aeldrum. In this regard, Aeldrum is much closer to the condition of planets such as A11 (New South Saldan), the Forgotten World or the Dust World, whose wastes of glass and sand are the result of violent and extensive etheric activity from Black Pyramids.
2. ↑ With the development of Null Bomb technology during the First Coalition War, Aeldman civil defense authorities designated and refitted many peripheral spires as refuges for residents of the neighborhoods that sprawled from the Great Spires. Some peripheral spires were even quarried to build bomb shelters in the planetary interior or on the Aeldrum core worlds, though the significant expense meant that such efforts remained mostly the province of personal paranoia projects rather than a concerted national effort.
3. ↑ The gutted upper third of the Seventh Great Spire of Aeldrum (result of a cataclysmic ritual at the end of the Mage Imperium), known today as the New Aeldrum Spire, became a stark example of unconstrained design in a spire context: yawning chasms within the outer shell of the spire became overbuilt with rings of shantytowns during the early days of settlement. With further development, however, the Seventh Spire became an architectural marvel in the “Interior Terrace” style, with rings of imported stone and etherically treated “Desert Glass” forming concentric galleries to maximize the penetration of light from the broken crown of the spire through to the bottom of the ritzy upper third.
4. ↑ Modern archaeological endeavors have uncovered intermediate eras of settlement, including two distinct periods of rule by the Thannasid "God Kings" during the Dynastic Era and the Warring Kings Era (the Thannasids appear to have abandoned Aeldrum before or during their legendary war with the Great Pantheon during the Defiance). Various temporary occupations of one or more Spires by etheric nomads and early merchant companies are also attested in the archaeological record, but the general poverty of the cosmos during the Interregnum made large-scale settlement of desolate Aeldrum uneconomical. By the time of the arrival of the exiled paradise-worlders who would become the Aeldman high elves, Aeldrum supported a meager population of scavengers and desert tribes, with the Spires themselves largely shunned as cursed and hence left to the rule of shamanistic witch-lords who augmented their own fearsome reputation with that of their lairs. As the Interregnum progressed, other settler groups reached Aeldrum and either assimilated or destroyed the indigenous population while struggling for planetary supremacy with the new elvish ruling caste: the so-called Republican Spires of Galthad and Estonne attest to the non-elvish polities that formed and were integrated into the nascent Serene Duchy.