The Everdying

About the Forge

The Forge is a globular cluster, 1,700 light-years above the plane of the milky way and the last refuge of humanity as they escaped the Gene Wars, where genetically engineered soldiers battled it out for control of systems and resources. The Forge is not always a nice place and while much of humanity lives around the Terminus at the base of the cluster, some brave souls forge out into the depths, through the Outlands, the Expanse and even the Void to explore, discover and settle.

Travel throughout the cluster requires short hops between systems, where gravity wells provide an anchor in space for the ship to target. Some ancient civilisation scattered huge impenetrable spheres throughout the cluster in areas of deep space, providing convenient waypoints across the otherwise impassible expanses. Humans refer to these as Iron Anchors and they have passed into everyday usage as small iron spheres many carry around with them and swear vows upon as an anchor to their oath.

Humanity did once have considerably more advanced technology, including the experimental FTL drives that got them to the Forge, but soon after they came into use, they started to detect vast fissures in the fabric of reality travelling throughout the areas they travelled. These came to be known as Blightstorms and while the technology has been long since banned, these storms still rage throughout the cluster and can often render once well-travelled passages between systems completely obsolete.

The fragmented nature of the settling of the Forge, with systems and communities often cut off for years or even decades as Blightstorms cut off all known routes, means centralised governance is all but impossible. While a number of powerful factions vie for control of important systems in a near-constant state of shifting alliances and warfare, in the outer reaches most communities are left to their own devices and local authority takes many forms.

Maven Khosla’s Background

Genetic modification has been outlawed since the Gene Wars, but that’s not to say it is not still done illegally and often those with such modifications often reveal unusual powers once thought only the realms of magic. Indeed, our hero, Maven, is one of these. His parents had him modified in the womb for reasons unknown to him. Once this was discovered, his parents were arrested and he was “invited” to join the Reliquary, one of the few trans-system, nominally apolitical, organisations in the Forge.

While on a mission for them he contracted some form of alien nanovirus, it’s nature unknown to the limited medical science available to him. While it would have torn apart a normal human, his genetic engineered heritage gave him some advantage, and while his body is at constant war with the disease that threatens to consume him, he can still press on seeking to find answers and a cure. He has in his possession a damaged data core from where he got infected and hopes that if he can only unlock its secrets he can find some answers to what is happening to him.

Narratives

Prologue in which he discovers a new ship and starts a new journey.

Path to Lament where nothing goes according to plan.

The Raid where in some raiders receive their punishment.

More adventures coming soon…