The Sea of Stars

Age Written by: Claire Redfield
Age Theme: Ancient Mysteries Illumined by Starlight
Aspects:
Covered in Centuries Old Ruins
Ethereal Dancing Lights
Ghosts of Worlds Past

This Age exists as a world of sparse foliage and perpetual night. It constantly fluctuates between dusk on one half of the planet and deepening midnight on the other. Unlike most Ages, it has no real atmosphere, at least not as many understand it. The air, if it can be called such, is deathly still and quiet with the repose of the grave. The Sea of Stars is very much a graveyard planet, where millions of stars shine down on a planet that knows no daylight. Shadows dance and sometimes move of their own accord. The only artificial lights on the planet exist in the form of ghostly torches like St. Elmo’s Fire that cast a bluish-white pall over ancient tombs and ziggurats. These worn structures mystify explorers, for they defy easy classification. Thousands of them dot the planet, and a few even float on strange machine-islands above the planet in slow orbit. No living caretakers have ever been found, and many of the ruins belong to identifiably different cultures. None of the symbols or markings match anything known to human history, though gahro-hevtee commonly mark walls, headstones, and monuments. Those explorers brave enough to plumb the depths of these places return with tales of labyrinthine ruins scrawled with hieroglyphs, elaborate tombs, and strange machines or statues that stand as silent sentinels over the abode of the dead.

Perhaps stranger still are the whispers and the signs of relatively recent habitation. The most recent pyramid-like tombs are perhaps a few decades old, and show signs of previous exploration—or maybe tomb-robbing. Yet few, if any of the Age’s explorers have dared steal from the tombs. The whispers that often echo in the lonely valleys and moldering ruins make many think that something still lurks there, just out of sight. Sometimes these whispers are accompanied by a fleeting glimpse of something just beyond sight, or colorful dancing lights like those that illuminate the ruins themselves. These lights are said to roam, and do not always appear in the same place twice—most often when a traveler is alone.

The Age is a resting place for dozens of cultures spanning perhaps thousands of years, yet no one has discovered why it exists. It seems to serve as a sort of graveyard for many different types of exploring cultures, and in many cases it’s obvious that secrets and artifacts were buried with the departed. What significance these secrets hold, why this Age draws so many cultures to it, and whether or not the restless spirits of the dead still watch over the benighted world, these are all questions even the DRC was not able to answer. It is an Age of buried secrets and dust-covered knowledge, but one thing is clear: a great many Linking Books lead to specific ruins and even specific funerary chambers. Who built them? Who watches over them still?