Worlds of Empyrean

## The Primeworld Empyrean

> "Huh. Capture the mind of an Empyrean? You can't. They don't believe in boundaries. [pause for laughter from the audience] Capture Empyrean... Well, first of all, the awe-inspiring enormity of Empyrean is impossible to exaggerate. Living there, in the Shepherds, Empyrean isn't even round... it's this curtain pulled over half of everything you know; there when you look one direction, gone in the other. Living on a Shepherd, the sky is just the portion where Empyrean isn't, and when you're a kid, if you're anything at all like me, you spend all hours of the evening staring up at it, until slowly, this wild idea begins to dawn on you... that maybe *reality itself* is smaller than Empyrean. You certainly are. So, consider living on that! That - that is what you must do to understand how unimportant the rest of the universe really seems to an Empyrean."
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> - Professor Yosephi Berrekhet, The Arkbound Conferences of Qheist
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## The Shepherd Rings (Moons)

**Empyrean Shepherd Moons** are planet-sized, typically uninhabitable and/or terraformed, moons where humanity has carved out harsh and meager lives for themselves and their families for thousands of years. They are called Shepherds because their gravity keeps the multi-colored dust of the rings in perfectly concise rings around Empyrean.

Lunar stations litter Empyrean's near gravity and often function like city-states. Glacier-stations are lunar stations carved into asteroids or vast chunks of ice, especially on the borders of the Akython Sea. People who reside in lunar stations are called Lunars.

### Inner Circuits

Anatolia (Persian) :: Malkuth (Shemyaza) :: The Idylls

But the Circuits are famous for another type of moon: **Vedas**, complex libraries where the ghosts of ancient philosophers dwell inside long shelves of manuscript talismans. The sheer hundreds of defunct Vedas give a testament to the extent of recorded knowledge collected by the fallen civilizations, as the enduring few whose original libraries survive, are collectively the largest source of advanced science and history outside of the Arks. The education of what's inside is almost entirely controlled by the Sanghora. According to modern consensus, aeons ago, Xian engineers meticulously calculated the Vedas' weights, and placed them ingeniously along the rings like counterweights. This would explain the near perfectly coherent rings of the First Circuits.

### Wealden Rings; the Wealds

Ghint (disputed) :: Kartika (Persian) :: Kerazza (Kerazzan) :: Tykas :: Triumphant

Shepherd Moons of the Wealds are relatively less populated and technologically advanced than those in the First Circuits.

### The Akython Sea

Qheist and Qa'alsing :: The States of Heimat

Despite the name, this long stretch of void is no ocean, rather, it is the area where Empyrean's tidal gravity is fiercest. Heavenly bodies plunging through the Seas can expect swift evisceration, as the sheer power of the Primeworld's resonance currents draw a sharpened undertow of ravaged metal against them, while simultaneously driving them back whence they came. Only explorers of the Heimat Anomaly know how to precisely navigate this realm, and few others try. Over time, especially titanic megacraft have been constructed for the sole purpose of trade with the Heimat and the Huaje, but such expeditions are rare, momentous events.

Basic communication is maintained between the Convergence and the Huaje through powerful emitter arrays installed in the Glacier Fields. Qheist, the largest and longest surviving member of these Glacier stations, carefully monitors traffic in the region, and is the sole facilitator of large scale trade between the Heimat states and Empyrean. Many of these stations harbor Syndicate vice dens, and while this was once the central undertaking of the Warden Protectorate, such investigations have since fallen to the wayside in recent events.

## The Outworlds

All regions beyond the Empyrean rings are called Outworlds. Inhabitants of the Outworlds often live a savage and relentless existence of conquest out of sheer necessity. Those who come from the Outworlds are called the Beyonders. Those who live in the Arks of the Cradle Region are referred to as the Arkbound.

### Cradle Region

> "Empyreans, when contemplating the isolation of Arkbound savages, begin to feel... truly morbid. Between waves and waves of sinking dread, a particular nausea overcomes them, suffocating them. The distance between the two becomes a vast endlessness - it \*is\* suffocating, as though floodwaters rushing in from the ceilings of an impossible labyrinth were drowning them, forcing them down, and there is no light, the water coming over their eyes is inside their mouths, and their lungs are bursting, with screams and with drowning, and they are alone. Flinching awake, they immediately attempt to resist the horrifying silence of that isolation by looking away and changing the subject. Or by holding their lover, taking a drink, or immersing themselves in work. Anything, until their thundering heart steadily quiets to normal."
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> - transcription from Dr. Garthbon Zheygo, Coalition Psychotherapist and Amnesian.
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- Camassia, Arkbound Tribes

**Huaje Territories (Arks and fleets)**