The Aurelians

Species/Type

Humanoid Species

First Appearance

Prologue

TL;DR

A long-lived humanoid people from the planet Aurelia Prime, the Aurelians built crystal machines that saved their dying world, then watched their government turn the same machines on how much they were allowed to feel.

Aurelians — Before the Correction

Vast vertical cities rose over poisoned rivers, and the sky was crowded with orbital machinery. The Aurelians had reached extraordinary technological heights, and their world was quietly failing underneath them.

Aurelians — After the Correction

Smaller towns sat among restored forests, farms and clean water, with tall dark spires and violet crystal light where the great cities used to be. Life was safer, fairer and calmer, with crystal systems running quietly underneath that could dampen a person's strongest feelings.

Aurelians — At War

Districts burned, water and power failed, and launch complexes fired sealed loads of crystal into space. The calm broke, and the machines holding the planet together broke with it.

Details

Aurelians are humanoid. They move and react in ways a human would recognize. Their skin is a medium to dark stone gray. They have long pointed ears, angular faces and luminous green eyes. Some have dark hair, while others keep their heads bald or closely shaved. The pink and violet crystals on their clothing and armor are technology they wear. Take the armor off and the crystals come off with it. Aurelians have no telepathy, no shared mind and no built-in powers.

Left to nature, an Aurelian lives about 105 years on average, though, as with humans, plenty live much shorter or longer lives. Crystals refined through their Keth Engines can stretch a life far beyond that. Nothing stretches it forever. Even with the best treatment, Aurelians still age, get sick, get hurt and die.

They feel everything humans do. They love, grieve, compete, hold grudges, make art and make terrible choices. Individuals differ as much as people anywhere. The calm, orderly Aurelians of later history were made that way on purpose.

Long before the war, their own industry nearly killed their planet. Air, water and soil were failing faster than anyone could repair them. A scientist named Dr. Vaelor Keth found a way to process a strange crystal called Cognis so that it behaved predictably. The first Keth Engines used it to clean the air, recover the water, restore the soil and calm dangerous weather. The long rescue that followed is called the Great Correction, and it saved Aurelia Prime.

It also kept growing. The same technology moved into medicine, then schools and public systems, then government policy. Treatment meant to curb violence slowly widened to ambition, defiance, risky art and relationships judged unstable. Their government gained the power to decide how much feeling was acceptable, then enforce that limit through the water, power and medicine everyone needed to live. Aurelians still loved, laughed and grieved under it, more quietly each generation. Some leaders went further and called it preparation for ascension, a higher state the species might one day reach. Nobody has ever proved that ascension is real.

A respected official named Thalrax fought that control from inside the system until the government attacked the refuge sheltering his family and killed all five of them: his parents, his wife and his two children. He and his younger sister, Lyraeth, learned of it while connected to a major Keth Engine. The machine failed around them and changed them both. Thalrax came out of it with a disruptive power, Lyraeth with a stabilizing one. His movement, the Oblivion Sect, began tearing down the machines that kept the planet alive.

A third group, the Wardens, decided that neither the government nor Thalrax could be allowed to keep the crystals. They pulled the most dangerous crystal cores out of the machines and launched them away from Aurelia Prime in separate loads. The Prologue opens in a burning launch control room, where two Wardens, Selan and Orvek, give their lives to get the last load of crystals off the ground.

That load crossed more time than anyone has measured and came down on Earth, in a winter mountain valley, long before recorded history. Ages later, the humans who dug those crystals out of a Wyoming mountain had never heard of Aurelia Prime.