A Brief History of Aethereal Earth

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.