Aetherforged

Overview

Aetherforged are beings of living metal carrying souls drawn out of the aether itself. They were made deliberately, by hands that are no longer around to explain themselves, and they were made for war. Every aetherforged knows what they were built to be. None of them are bound by it.

The species is collectively the Aetherforged. Beyond that each carries their own name. They have no homeworld and never did, so they live scattered across as many places as there are aetherforged to live in them.

The forging

The process channelled an enormous amount of energy through a system of rings, directing both magic and the raw power of a lightning strike into ordinary air — restructuring the bonds between its molecules and synthesising them into an entirely new element. The same working then reached into the aether and drew spiritual energy out of it, forging that into a soul. The soul was infused into the metal along with instructions written in runic script, and it is from that step that the species takes its name.

The aetherforged do not fully understand those instructions even now.

They broke free of the original programming and have lived since as a wholly separate, sentient race. Their creators went into hiding the moment that happened, and their identity remains unknown. The great ringed chambers still stand, and the aetherforged still use them to make things — but not to make life. Whatever unlocked that final step either left with the creators or was never understood in the first place, and no new aetherforged have been forged since. The secret went with them.

Only the aetherforged themselves, and their own understanding of the script they carry, can change what those instructions now do.

Physical traits

The material is constant: a dark living alloy, blue-black and unlike any metal that occurs naturally, smooth across some regions and segmented across others. Plates overlap and shift with precision, moving without the stiffness the construction implies. Every segment flows into the next, and the body reads as grown rather than assembled. There is something undeniably alive about it.

The form itself is not constant at all. The process produced blends of humanoid structure with almost anything — dragon, wolf, fox, lion, tiger, a range of insects, and a great deal else besides. Ferravyn’s draconic-human blend is one outcome among many rather than the shape of the species, and if a combination can be imagined it probably exists in an aetherforged somewhere.

Every aetherforged carries energy channels running beneath the surface like rivers of restrained lightning, most visible around joints and beneath thinner plating. Every one of them bears runic script somewhere on their form, formed as part of the metal rather than carved into it.

They do not age. An aetherforged accumulates experience the way any living thing does, but never grows weaker and never wears down.

The arms

Aetherforged carry two sets of arms, and which configuration they present is a decision they can make at any time. Twisted together, the two sets become a single pair — more humanlike, and more dextrous for it. Untwisted, they separate into the four-armed structure described on Ferravyn’s page. Neither state is the default and neither is permanent; it is a choice, remade as often as it needs to be.

Cutting between realities

Every aetherforged can cut through the boundary between realities and travel between worlds. What differs is the implement. It is always some physical part of the body that does the cutting — Ferravyn’s bladed wings, another’s claws, another’s sword — but the wings in particular belong to him rather than to the species.

Magic

The runic script the aetherforged were written with was once the mechanism by which they were commanded. They have since turned it around entirely and use it to channel magic rather than being channelled by it.

Beyond that, the script fixes nothing. What an aetherforged does with it, and what else they are tied to magically, is theirs alone.

Shared instincts

What the aetherforged share is their making: the alloy, the soul drawn from the aether, the channels, the script, the two sets of arms, the means of cutting between worlds, and the fact of having been built as weapons. Many of them feel ancient, because they are.

They do not share a disposition. Some are protectors. Some could do a great deal of harm. Some want nothing more complicated than a quiet life. The race is not driven by any single purpose, and an aetherforged remembering what they were built to be is not the same as an aetherforged being it.

Field notes

Individual alloy colouring, blend, runic patterning and the implement used for cutting between realities all belong on each member’s own page.