Sethaal

A worn-down investigator is sent to a dying mining world to look into a small accident, and stumbles onto something enormous. An ancient power is waking beneath the worlds. The twist is that it was never a monster to be killed. It was something badly misunderstood a long time ago, and now a small crew has to figure out what to actually do about it.

Beneath the shaft, a corporation believes it has found a power source. It has not. The relics are dimensional locks, and when one fractures, something colossal steps through. Kael Orison survives, escapes aboard a ship called the Lantern Wake, and begins tracing a pattern of ruptures across the mining worlds. The pattern turns out to be deliberate. Someone has been wearing the company for centuries, prying the locks open to weaken the prison beneath everything.

The corporations thought they were mining resources.
They were excavating locks.
They were not discovering the past. They were opening the prison.Sethaal · The core truth

The world

I wrote it in the register of the space-fantasy I love: epigraph-headed chapters, an invented language with its own grammar, and a convergence in the final act where every thread pulls tight at once. Underneath the adventure it is really about stewardship against extraction, restraint against power, and what happens to a civilization that mistakes taking for progress. Aether is the force that binds worlds, souls, and memory. Sethaal is the old word for the binding itself. The Unkeeping is that binding coming undone.

It is illustrated throughout as a codex: the investigator’s own field register, drawn by hand in silverpoint and ink on aged parchment and annotated in the margins in his own script. Persons of note, relics, places: each one studied and labelled the way Kael would have logged it. A seven-member crew of Starwardens against a shapeshifter who wears a corporation like a coat, and a final choice: seal the Drift, bind it through sacrifice, or transform the Aether itself. The relics were never treasures. They were locks.