Aureate

*[**Editor's Note (November 26, 2021):** This page is currently undergoing a pretty significant overhaul! Much of the previous iteration of this page was written before several games both further fleshed out Aureate's history and advanced the timeline about 15 in-setting years; please be patient with the mess! -Thursday]*

*[**Editor's Note (December 12, 2022):** Since this page last got some love, a major campaign took place in the Promise System, and the setting has arguably taken a century-long timeskip after that. Work on updating this is slow going - but going nonetheless! -Thursday]*

**Aureate** is a world of hypersaline seas and golden desert, and is the second planet in the Promise System. In the time of the Coalition, Aureate was the capital of the entire Pearlescent Expanse; today, it's the domain of an independent sovereign state, the People's Republic of Aureate, following a revolution in 800-801. The planet had two moons, Samara and Severyn, both of which are revered in most Satellist denominations; Samara remains, but Severyn was destroyed in 817 during the Zeta Crisis, existing today as the Deep-resonant Ring of Severyn around Aureate.

## History

### The Age of Silver Expansion

The Coalition was founded by seven member cultures, who believed their best path to mutual prosperity was in cooperation, their varied outlooks, skillsets, and resources put to greater use together in the name of progress. Its greatest success was the discovery of the Singing Deep, whose applications for faster-than-light travel drastically expanded the Coalition's potential reach; an exploration and settlement boom began in earnest, spreading humanity across much of the galaxy. Aureate was noted as potentially habitable in the initial survey of the region that would eventually become the Pearlescent Expanse, but was passed over in the earliest waves of expansion.

Far from the core of Coalition power, the region enjoyed nominal independence, and came to be known as the Silver Frontier. Many colonists came to regard themselves as separate from the cultures of the Coalition - as evidenced most dramatically in armed clashes with the Banner Post and the reforging of the Jovian Flotilla into the Church of the People's Spirit - prompting calls from central authorities to bring the fringe territories to heel. With official proclamation and no small amount of gunboat diplomacy, the Silver Frontier became the Pearlescent Expanse, a Coalition province, with Aureate as its capital; the planet was chosen in part *because* it was largely uninhabited (along with the world's relatively central location within the region and neighboring Fugue superposition), allowing for a blank slate from which the Coalition could build a culture to serve as the Expanse's guiding template. Local timekeeping marks this as the year 0 of the Pearlescent Age, the calendar used throughout the Expanse.

### The Era of the People's Crown

Converting an Expanse of unruly planets into an obedient territory proved more difficult than many in the Coalition expected, troubled by suspiciously-coordinated resistance movements and a lack of political buy-in; many in the Pearlescent Expanse saw little reason to bend the knee to distant masters, refusing to take part in a government they felt did not hear their voices. The government on Aureate announced a new office aimed at rectifying this: the People's Monarch, a symbolic ruler chosen from the peoples of the Expanse and bedecked in regalia (the People's Crown) created collaboratively by each of the seven member cultures. While individual Monarchs enjoyed waxing and waning popularity among the populace, their almost-entirely ceremonial function made them a transparent figurehead, and ultimately served to make the Coalition leadership look disinterested in true representation. Critics pointed to the fact that the People's Monarch did not even live on Aureate, forever far from the halls of actual power.

Centuries passed, and Aureate grew in prestige, enriched by the Coalition's spread across the stars; member states were allowed a great deal of autonomy over their own territories, so long as the flow of taxes, trade, and defense contributions continued. Art and media presented Aureate as a place of stark natural beauty and heartfelt cooperation, a cultural push best exemplified by the founding of the famed Academy - though primarily funded by the Dodonan Tribunal, the Academy hosted the brightest minds of the Expanse, idealistic scholars pooling the shared wisdom of a united Coalition.

Despite considerable prosperity for the Pearlescent Expanse's elites, tensions between member states - who increasingly tested the limits of peace with border skirmishes and espionage - drove fractures deep into the foundation of the Coalition. None could've predicted all-out war between member states, and so the Tyranon bombardment of the Nadezhdan homeworld in 531 caught Aureate completely off-guard; the Coalition was slow to react, shocked by the audacity of the unprompted attack and mired in bureaucracy. The Coalition's Nadezhdan population, long driven to poverty and the political margins, saw this as complicity in an act of war on their people. Peaceful demonstrations were met with disproportionate repression, prompting riots in the capital city of Vow. This rising anti-Coalition sentiment fed a militant insurrection under a woman who called herself Tir Cobalt, whose Cobalt Revolt attracted many non-Nadezhdans to its cause.

The Revolt lasted for eighteen months, with the Coalition campaign hamstrung by sabotage and considerable public sympathy. A cutting-edge battleship, the songship Unity, was recalled from an inaugural tour of the Expanse to supplement their efforts; a daring rebel suicide mission destroyed the Unity in Aureate's low orbit, killing the Tyranon, Dodonan, Banner Post, and Peacock Representatives aboard, but not before the vessel's guns destroyed the primarily-Nadezhdan city of Pesok below. Tir Cobalt's forces would eventually seize both moons, producing materiel with Samara's forges and turning fortified Severyn into their final sanctuary. A Coalition fleet eventually devastated the former, while the latter was subject to a brutal siege that rendered Severyn uninhabitable.

Though the conflict was a military victory for the Coalition, the loss of public confidence was devastating, and Aureate's people grew increasingly wary of the government who ruled them. Satellists throughout the Expanse embraced the twin moons in the years after the Cobalt Revolt for their part in a rebellion many saw as just - something the leaders of the Thousand Moons' Creed encouraged with the construction of Luna City on Aureate as a destination for satellist pilgrims, much to the chagrin of Coalition authorities.

### The Choral Era

The union of the Church of the People's Spirit and the 7th Mantra Foundation (a relatively obscure group dedicated to the study of the Singing Deep) into the Universal Choir came as another surprise to a Coalition whose grip on power was increasingly uncertain. While entitled to a Representative seat, their admission sparked a massive backlash from the Dodonan Tribunal, so alarmed by the UC's embrace of the Deep that Tribunal authorities instituted a blanket ban on 'superstition' within their territory. This effectively outlawed religion across large swathes of the Expanse - including their terraformed holdings on Aureate, where the sizable Taimu minority saw a major component of their culture become illegal overnight. The chorists, for their part, carried on much as they had since the days of the Silver Frontier, and cemented their holdings elsewhere.

Though the Promise System remained firmly within their grasp, the Coalition's influence would crumble throughout this era, undermined by deep unpopularity and an unwillingness to confront member states over violations of conduct. Border skirmishes went unpunished and were allowed to flare into regional wars; the Coalition gradually ceased to exist wherever their influence wasn't firmly projected by combat mechs and battleships.

Aureate itself did not escape this period of decline unscathed. Many of the planet's Nadezhdans turned to banditry or organized crime, seeing the Coalition as utterly lacking legitimacy. Those Taimu with the means to flee Dodonan repression did so, and pleaded with the government in Vow to address their plight on the world they shared. Unknown actors (commonly believed to be Tribunal agents, though no evidence has ever surfaced) detonated a 'dirty' atomic weapon in Luna City, irradiating it severely and prompting mass outcry from the Thousand Moons' Creed. Countless abuses from security forces only prompted further unrest in the populace they were meant to pacify.

### Fall of the Coalition & Tyranon Blockade

The fatal blow to the Coalition came in 700 when the Tyranon VII Fleet - acting under the command of a Fleet Regent acting with the Beryl Emperor's authority - arrived unannounced at the edge of the Promise System. The watch station Lighthouse was crushed before a warning could get out to the Coalition capital, and the defenses on Sapir's moons fell with minimal resistance. A path was swiftly carved through the system to Aureate itself, decimating any Coalition ships foolish enough not to run, and the fleet settled in above the golden world, effectively ending any illusion of Coalition rule of the Pearlescent Expanse.

An orbital strike devastated the Academy, with the Fleet Regent decrying it as a 'tool of Dodonan hegemony' on a broadcast to the entire system. The forces of the VII Fleet then launched a blistering assault on Aureate itself, landing forces to secure the northern highlands on the primary continent. The Tyranon advance drove to the equatorial desert and seized a significant portion of Vow before coming to a sudden halt; apparently content with their gains, the VII Fleet pushed no further, but declared an orbital blockade of Aureate, banning all travel to and from Aureate's surface not authorized by the Fleet Regent.

Aureate was not ruled by the Dynasty, however, and the Regent had almost no communications with the surface. Missives bearing the Beryl Emperor's seal made their way to the Great Houses of the Expanse, inviting the Tyranon nobles to send their unwanted scions to Aureate - the VII Fleet led these black sheep, exiles, and cast-offs to the surface, and forbade them from returning. The planet was to be a crucible, the Fleet Regent declared, with any who could conquer Aureate guaranteed their honor restored and a place in the court of the Beryl Emperor. Those banished to Aureate only received whatever resources their House sent with them, ensuring constant petty warfare among their ranks and incessant belligerence along the Tyranon border. From orbit, the VII would only watch their strife.

While a number of independent (primarily Nadezhdan) enclaves persisted on Aureate after the Tyranon invasion, only the Dodonan Tribunal could claim to be any kind of true state, their holdings in the south self-sufficient and well-defended thanks to Dodonan engineering. Cut off from any hope of reinforcements, fear drove Aureate's Tribunal steadily towards militarization and oppressive rule. The Iris, a security force dedicating to enforcing the ban on superstition, increasingly became the vanguard of a viciously conformist Dodonan ideology, with citizens routinely kidnapped, tortured, and experimented on. A mandatory draft pressed many into the armed forces in the hopes of blunting further Tyranon aggression. These changes cut across their society, but the Taimu minority felt them most keenly, targeted for their traditional culture and prior autonomy.

Those beyond Tyranon or Dodonan control lived hard lives, mostly surviving through salvage work or smuggling. Vow, once the glittering capital, became a sprawling, desperate slum for those left behind by the Coalition's demise, while countless smaller communities simply died out without infrastructure to support them. Pesok Station, built below the site of the destroyed city with the same name, provided a subterranean haven for Nadezhdans who answered to no one but themselves, run by a shaky alliance of crime lords and labor bosses linked by a mutual desire for survival. In a generation, Aureate fell from the seat of power for the entire Pearlescent Expanse to a scarred battlefield where desperate foes fought over the scraps of empire.

### The Zeta Crisis

While the Centennial War was seen as a major PRA victory, its results were inconclusive; most of Aureate's Tribunal leadership was able to flee with a core of hardliner loyalists, becoming the dispersed conspiracy-cells of New Dodona across the sunward half of Promise, while the VII Fleet (reinforced with Tyranon exiles from the planet's surface, brought back into the fold) remained unrepentant and had uncontsted control of everything beyond the Ushakov Belt. Fifteen years of shaky peace came to an end with the shocking assassination in 817 of General Iskra Garomedon, commander of the PRA's armed forces and a revolutionary hero, at the hands of a Tyranon killer employed by Bergamot Uladiv, acting without the knowledge or sanction of the Fleet Regent.

The PRA responded with sabotage in VII Fleet territories, followed swiftly by an alliance with the ex-Tyranon pirates of the Scarsong Pack and a major outer-system offensive known as "the Punch." Scarsong naval assets proved vital, as the PRA still largely relied on salvage to produce its space forces, allowing the VII to be held at the Ushakov Belt. Agents of the PRA's intelligence and military forces aided rebel movements on the VII-held moons of the gas giant Sapir, engaging in widespread sabotage against their colonial masters. Both sides suffered massive losses in the fighting.

Unrest broke out on Aureate proper, driven by discontent at the *de facto* military rule of their world, the toll in cost and lives of the war, and by foreign agitators, with bloody riots on the streets of Vow. The killing of Ankara Agathocles by a car bomb (allegedly planted by New Dodonan agents) shocked Aureate's citizens, as did the unmasking of armed Tyranon loyalists on the planet, allowing the fraying nation to pull itself together - but the cracks were showing within the People's Republic.

Faced with dire odds, the PRA's leadership considered a plan to excavate in Luna City, having correctly identified Coalition-era vaults beneath the ruin as the origin point of the fearsome Zeta Weapon and hoping similar lost technologies might prove decisive to the war effort. Public outcry was nearly instant, with many Satellists objecting to the plundering of their holy city, and an early falsified report suggesting the site's radioactivity could spread to reach millions. Springfield Autumns, now Director of the PRA's Military Security Section, pushed the excavation through using Section agents, bypassing both civilian and military authorities entirely to recover an ancient glasstech weapon known as the Eye of Avarice. Many soldiers rejoiced at having a new weapon on their side, but the public was outraged at a functional coup by their intelligence agency, further worsening trust. The Scarsong Pack likewise made their distaste known, with Gerea Scarsong voicing a desire to abandon the system and war entirely, before a defecting PRA pilot helps the pirates steal it for themselves - their reasoning being that it is owed to them, as those marked by its glasstech 'sister,' the Zeta Weapon.

Occupied by the fighting in the outer system, the PRA lacked the forces to intercept New Dodona as they maneuvered the Zeta Weapon into firing range of Aureate; the first shot, impossibly, hit the moon of Severyn rather than the golden world, an event many on the planet refer to as "Severyn's Sacrifice" and consider a satellist miracle. The Fleet Regent of the VII took this opportunity to offer an alliance with the PRA, revealing that their Fleet's entire assignment - the bombardment of Aureate, the hundred years of orbital blockade, their colonization and occupation of Sapir's moons, the current war - was motivated by a desire to seize the Hand of Glass at the heart of the Zeta Weapon. Predictably, this offer was emphatically rejected by the PRA.

A desperate plan followed: all of Aureate's rearguard forces were to be thrown at the Zeta Weapon, acting as cover to bring *Avarice* into range before it could fire again. This effort proved successful, with the Eye's hacking abilities allowing the PRA to re-orient the Dodonan weapon, destroying the sunward planet of Graze (home to most New Dodonan bases) with its beam. Moments later, the rearguard flagship *Prayer for Aureate* rammed the Weapon, destroying it utterly. Their prize lost, the VII Fleet's resolve shattered, and most attempted to flee Promise; the last remnants of the PRA's armada hunted down and destroyed most of these, including the Fleet Regent themself - though Bergamot Uladiv, responsible for the entire conflict, escaped with her life and a handful of sycophants.

With both New Dodona and the Tyranon VII Fleet defeated, Aureate stood tall as the leader of a free Promise System for the first time in nearly 120 years. The People's Republic of Aureate, however, was in tatters; many accused it of being being run by the military (not without merit) and acting in opposition to the demands of the citizens it claimed to represent, while the military itself was essentially spent. Discussions, hearings, and trials take years to resolve, but in 820, the Promise Constellation is founded - a looser federation of the system's polities, replacing the centralized state the People's Republic of Aureate had built, with governance of Aureate's regions and the various other Promise territories given to local powers instead.

The tehomic energies unleashed by multiple firings of the Zeta Weapon, including those infused into the remaining lunar debris (which quickly settled into a ring around Aureate, known as the Ring of Severyn) has led to conditions on Aureate unknown in the wider Expanse; unique tehomic life forms, colloquially referred to as simply "ghosts," have become widespread, their behaviors altered by 'seasons' of the Ring's movement. Scholars of the Singing Deep have been been drawn to the planet to study such creatures, but Aureate's people largely remain wary of outsiders to their system; local approaches range from the scientific to the spiritual, with the latter proving surprisingly effective, the ghosts reacting to emotional resonance as much as more quantifiable stimuli.

## Notable Locations

***Major settlements***

* Vow
* Qaibo
* Vedro
* Kleidos
* Korummerung
* Pesok

***Other settlements***

* Luna City
* Breakstone
* Bydos

***Regions and areas***

* The Belt
* The Boneyard
* The Maengse River
* The Mirror Sea
* The Osskil Highlands
* The Plains of Artopoios
* The Valley of Whispers