Chronicles of The Etherium - Origins

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Hope Renewed


We waited, we waited, for so long. We had no choice, we could not go back. We must rebuild what we can, scavenging, scraping, as inferior beings do. The Etherium had long forgotten these hardships, our progress was slow. The invaders would not approach us, soon we could call this place our own. We built our weapons, our defences from the resource-rich fragments that had followed us. After an eternity of hardship, the Etherium had something to show for all their toil and woe. We had hope. We had the Eidolon.

It took a long time for the Etherium to accept the truth. Their home was gone, their physical past, their monuments of history, gone, obliterated in a heinous act of war. All that was left was the Revenant. The survivors struggled at first, with so few of the Etherium left. This fact alone would have crippled human communities, but the Etherium did not need to mix and diversify their genetic material as primitive carbon-based lifeforms do. Instead they could split themselves, as an amoeba does, with the result being that both sentient beings possessed all of the memories and personal traits of the other, and both could then become individuals through thier own new experiences. This genetic replication had been progressing for millenia, and all the knowledge of the Etherium had been passed down through the ages, giving the Etherium an immense knowledge collective.

This collective had been whittled down to the original 66 survivors. Over the next decade, those numbers swelled to almost 200. During this time the Revenant had been overhauled and everything that was deemed no longer needed was repurposed into something usable. The Etherium had mastered mass fabrication long ago and the numerous research facilities aboard the station made it possible to fabricate and alter redundant systems, and soon they were able to start building what was to be the first ray of hope for all of those aboard the restored station. They had built what would be a colony ship, exploration vessel and war machine all in one. They had built the Eidolon.

The Eidolon was built at a painstakingly slow rate by Etherium standards taking almost a full decade to construct. The Eidolon was the first of its kind, built to tackle the infinite possibilities of this new space. It did have a specific mission though, to confirm the presence of the traces of Iridium that had been picked up by the repaired exploration and analysis sensor array.

Many centuries ago the Etherium had refined the process of locating the scarce resource they needed to survive though faster-than-light long range molecular spectrum analysis. Iridium was never located outside of the borders of the Empire, but the hypergate reflux had spread patches of the nebula surrounding Etheria far across the stars and the Etherium had poured research into detecting this elusive element from afar. One of these drifts had been detected across the sector some 20 star systems away, but the Etherium were not convinced the readouts were accurate, or that a compound similar to Iridium without the life-sustaining properties could exist here and therefore be giving false data. The purpose of the Eidolon was simple - to confirm or disprove the presence and composition of that distant drift.

The Temple of the Revenant was truly an extremely advanced technological behemoth in comparison to most structures attempted by the lifeforms of Sirius. The immense station had many functions, and part of the Revenant's purpose was to act as a gateway node to other similar structures built throughout the empire, however without a receiving node to calibrate the jump the outcome would be unknown. This ability made it possible to transport specially prepared vessels over several star systems, but not across entire galaxies or on the scale of the Nomad hypergate incident.

The process of charging the Starjumper was a taxing result in its own right. The composition of the system was similar to home, the star's mass was close to that of the Etherium home system, and the nebula of Iridium was also present. When the crew of the Revenant ran the calculations, they came mixed with mixed news. Yes, the could confirm that Revenant would be able to absorb enough power to start the chain reaction, but the amount of interfering radiation was deteriorating the solar platlets on the exterior of the Temple. They had to tell the rest of the survivors that his may be the last Starjump. The was also worse news. The same radiation was also destroying their ability to reproduce, that is, of the 196 of the Etherium on the Temple as of 10 years after their arrival, dividing themselves would result in weakened molecular composition, and both Etherium would probably die.

This was a moment of great sadness. Those still alive on the station could see that their superiority, their greatness that had been built up over a period of 10000 years was declining, and the Etherium were doomed to fade. This led them to seal the majority of their personal technology, anything that could be perishable to this radiation in a special vault deep within the station. They would take this one last great risk, sending the Eidolon across the stars, in a hope that they could find a cure or a way to ensure the Etherium's legacy.

The crew charged the station, preparing the portal at the end of the centre coil of the station, of the Etherium needed to crew the ship, only 4 were able to utilize most of its functions. Among these 4 was Shard, and the other 3 were near-perfect copies of him, having been produced over the last decade before the sickness had sterilized them all.

The gate was charged, and a bright flash erupted at the arch of the station. The whine of the station diverting every possible electron to the event horizon caused some of the systems to shut down.

Then just as abruptly the noise and light died. The survivors grew sombre. The Eidolon was gone. All they could do now is wait, and hope.

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Shard - The Faceless One