A Brief History of Aethereal Earth

A Fractured Beginning

Magic has always existed. The aether has always been there, hanging just out of reach.

For thousands of years, only a few tasted of its might. Many were called witches, warlocks, sorcerers, and dark magicians, feared for their connection to the mysterious power. Hunted. Butchered. Others were revered as enlightened souls anointed by higher powers from beyond our world. Loved. Sacrificed. A rare few were held up as gods among mankind. Deified. Worshipped.

Then came the Fracturing.

In 1752, a scientist and statesman of the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin, discovered a rift, a crack in the fabric of reality left in the echo of a lightning strike where the aether from a distant realm leaked into our world. Further experimentation over the next two decades revealed similar fissures opened as a result of nearly thirteen percent of electrical storms globally. This otherworldly element left its mark in unpredictable ways. Biomes changed and shifted, seemingly overnight; Franklin cataloged a patch of Saharan desert transformed into a life-giving oasis full of wondrous flora, the rolling green hills surrounding a community in Pennsylvania giving way to an encroaching plane of volcanic glass, and a jungle rainforest springing up under the protection of a dome of arctic ice, among other strangeness.

In 1774, with the American Revolution on the horizon, a farmer in the Kentucky Territory named Obediah Plank was found guilty of witchcraft. The evidence against him remained circumstantial – he grew healthy, strong crops while those of his neighbors wilted and died – and he hung by the neck for his crime. History, however, was not done with him. In the back room of a doctor’s office serving as both mortuary and morgue to the dead of Lexington, Dr. Irwin Hale made an odd discovery. In a dimly-lit room Plank’s blood emitted a faint glow. A forward thinker, Dr. Hale seized this opportunity and traveled, blood samples in hand, to the Pennsylvania home of scientist James Priestly. After a few brief weeks of research, they'd packaged up the entire study and carried it off to Philadelphia, where they entreated Franklin to look over their conclusions. The trio – Hale, Priestly, and Franklin – together presented their work to the members of the First Continental Congress. The congealed sanguine plasma was infused with pure aether, which Plank had inadvertently manipulated to improve his crop growth, simultaneously leeching the life from crops across surrounding farms.

Though magic played only a minor role in the Revolution.

From Revolution to Revelation

After the trio of researchers published some of their more innocuous findings in the scientific journals of certain American universities (and in the resurgence of Franklin's own Poor Richard’s Almanack, published from 1775 to 1790), the race was on to find more individuals who shared Plank's affinity to aether. Sensationalist newspapermen labeled the phenom the God Gene, and charlatans of all stripes made a fortune selling everything from philters, elixirs, and incantations to supposed slivers of Jesus' cross and plots of sacred land, each with the guarantee of aether infusion. Actual subjects, those who could channel aether, proved rare, with fewer than one in ten thousand showing promise. (This number would later increase as more efficacious testing methods were developed.) Despite this, by the turn of the century most major scientific foundations had one or two such channelers in-house. Neither race nor gender affected the count, with a roughly even ratio of aether sensitive individuals found in any given people group.

After Franklin’s death in 1790, an enigmatic benefactor known only as The Old Man began funding further research by Hale and Priestly. Building on important work by Henry Cavendish, Jean-Baptiste Biot, Joseph Louis Legrange, and Sophie Germain, the pair formed a theory, postulating the existence of an aethereal plane, the sphere from which this miraculous power leeched into theirs. It took nearly thirty years of experimentation, including bringing a brilliant aethereal physicist and specialist in magnetism, Michael Faraday, on board, to prove their theory correct. Calling themselves the Franklin Foundation, the small coalition of scientists opened the first gate to the aetheric realm on March 20, 1826.

This would be remembered as the date the world changed forever.

Within six months, with further funding from The Old Man, the Franklin Foundation organized the first expedition into the aethereal realm. Major Stephen H. Long, an American army civil engineer, led a research team consisting of scientists and explorers accompanied by Restoration movement evangelist Alexander Campbell and journalist Josephine Wyler embarked on a two-year journey of discovery. What they would find would change the path of Earth’s future.

The gateway opened into the ruins of a city utterly devoid of life. Tablets and carvings scattered around the city written in a language oddly similar to Aramaic named the city Ezriel. The architecture of Ezriel bore similarities to some human designs, with inspiration from a dozen varied human cultures across the Middle East and Southern Asia, with improved structural integrity and features the peoples of ancient Earth would have imagined. Of intriguing note was a system of glass tubes leading to every building across the city leading to strange outlets in many rooms. Dr. Priestly, who led the expedition, hypothesized the tubes could carry pure aether as a source of power to individual homes, providing light and other advanced technological features.

After establishing a small base camp on the edge of Ezriel, the majority of the Foundation’s team trekked out into this strange new world, cataloging mysterious flora and fauna, many of which had been found in the odd biomes manifesting on Earth since Franklin’s discovery of aether. It wasn’t until nearly four months into the planned journey when the expedition group made first contact with a tribe of elves.

Of Angels and Demons

First contact with the Emberblood Tribe faired poorly for both sides. The elvish hunting party outnumbered humans three to one, but the people of Earth brought with them defensive tools ranging from muskets and pepperboxes to newly popular longrifles and revolvers. What kept them alive, however, was an eight-barreled rotating repeater able to fire fifteen hundred rounds each minute. Eleven members of the expedition were slain; nearly fifty elves, however, lost their lives before they surrendered.