The Shattering of Antrom

For three hundred years the Kingdom of Antrom ran on aether crystal. Miners pulled it from the veins beneath the Crown Mountains, refineries burned it into plasma, and the kingdom grew rich enough to stop asking where the crystal came from. The deeper the drills went, the stranger the veins became — warmer, brighter, arranged in patterns no mineral should hold.

Then a deep bore broke through the last stretch of rock, and Antrom learned the truth: the veins were never ore. They were the Aethyr — an elder race entombed in crystal beneath the mountains, dreaming for ten thousand years. Their waking split the Crown Mountains apart and broke the kingdom with them. Where the Crown stood there is now a scarred grey plateau; the lowlands drowned under a risen ocean, leaving green islands where hilltops used to be.

Three Banners Over the Ruins

The Vanguard are what remains of Antrom's army — the engineers and soldiers who dug the kingdom's mines and now fight to win its ruins back. They know they caused the Shattering. They intend to out-build it. Warmaster Kael leads from the front, and his crews can weld a firebase together faster than anyone can burn one down.

The Aethyr are the ones the drills woke. To them, every crystal vein is a tomb still holding their sleeping kin, and every harvester on it is grave robbery. Their gilded war-machines assemble themselves from light, and Riftlord Auren has one demand: the veins returned, or the diggers erased.

The Myriad are the Shattering's accident. Raw crystal energy bled into the cracks of the broken world and fused everything living down there into a single will with endless bodies. Broodmother Szel does not negotiate, build, or stop. The swarm spawns, the swarm feeds, and every battlefield it touches becomes a nest.