Planeswalker's Guide to Edge of Eternities

In Edge of Eternities, you'll take your first steps into the cosmic wonders of the Sothera system, where the infinite possibilities of space unfurl before you. Here, you'll meet familiar and strange faces, battle alongside interstellar factions, and discover what lies at the heart of Sothera, the supervoid.

We recently showed a glimpse of Edge of Eternities, and you can fully immerse yourself in the story right now! Read "Episode 1" and the rest of the Edge of Eternities stories on MTGStory.com or listen to The Magic Story Podcast, where we'll be releasing audio narrations of this far-out fiction. To prepare for your trip, you can read this Planeswalker's Guide to Edge of Eternities to learn everything there is to know about the Edge.

Ready to take to the stars? Edge of Eternities releases worldwide on August 1, 2025, and the Magic Multiverse will never be the same. You can preorder the set now from your local game store, online retailers like Amazon, and elsewhere Magic products are sold.

The Universe and You
A Pinnacle First-Contact Primer

The Edge: The Annular Universe

All Pinnacle socientsA person belonging to a Pinnacle member state. share the same fundamental assumptions about the universe. These truths are a matter of Pinnacle education, popular science, and core assumptions made for starship engineering and navigation. Therefore, it is critical that there is a shared understanding of reality. Pinnacle calls this shared understanding of the universe and its truths the Common Agreement.

The Common Agreement assumes that all socients agree that the basic matter of reality is a concert of particles and substrates—aether, mana, photons, quarks, and so on. Most all sentient spacefaring species live on terrestrial worlds of various compositions, with some notable exceptions (the Illvoi, for instance) who evolved on or in non-terrestrial cosmic environments. These worlds (terrestrial, gaseous, and so on) tend to orbit stars of concentrated mana, aether, hydrogen, helium, and other trace gases, whose gravity and heat form and give character to solar systems. Some of these constructions are perfect enough to sustain life.

Space is vast. The gulfs between two given solar systems are best measured by time rather than units of measurement (though kilometers, stellar units, and so on are all useful at certain scales). Sub-lightspeed interstellar travel is possible but impractical, and so most interstellar travel takes place at different lamellae, actuated by Pinnacle's eternity columns system. Intrasystem sub-light travel, commerce, exploration, and conflict are all quite common among Pinnacle species and those at our periphery. In fact, intrasystem conflict and commerce are founding concerns of Pinnacle; namely, the cessation of the former and the encouragement of the latter.

Among Pinnacle member species, known space has several common names. More popular—beyond the colloquial "space"—in recent history is "the Edge" or "the Edge of Eternity." This colloquialism follows revelations of the shape of the universe, a relatively recent development in Pinnacle history and a consequence of popular understandings of cutting-edge Pinnacle science.

The entire known universe is not yet mapped, but its shape can be hypothesized via observation. Pinnacle, using the full capabilities of its member states, has determined with some confidence that the shape of the global universe—all creation outside of what is immediately able to be observed—is ring-like and toroid. In a word, annular. Along one arc of observable space, there is a subtle blueshift. Observation toward the departure point of all matter, space, and time eventually ends in a chaotic, scrambled "barrier" of howling, recombinant particles, impossible to observe beyond. This is, colloquially, the "Chaos Wall."

Opposite the Chaos Wall, all celestial bodies in the observable arc appear to subtly redshift—that is, appear to move away from the observer—indicating expansion. Pinnacle lacks the observational capacity to fully explore this edge of space and has accepted that it is so vast as to be functionally infinite; in contrast to the hard border of the Chaos Wall, this edge of space defies knowledge by outpacing observation. The border where observation crumbles—perhaps to provide a sense of structure to laypersons—is colloquially called the "Quiet Wall." The Edge exists between these two extremes: the raw, destructive power of creation and the slow, quiet death of entropy.

The properties of known faster-than-light (FTL) travel in Pinnacle space, coupled with recent, disturbing phenomena across the Chaos Wall, have led to discussion among learned species of the possibility that the universe encompasses a second "pocket" universe inside of the borders of the Chaos Wall. FTL travel necessitates piercing the Chaos Wall, suggesting on its own that there must be some form of "space" or other lamellae of creation behind that otherwise hard-reality barrier.

There is some further evidence of contents within and behind the borders of the Chaos Wall: chaotic ejecta is the most common. Pinnacle has captured recordings of a handful of these colossal energy bursts and meaningfully distinct readings of aetheric waste and other strange (fast-decaying) particles. In conjunction with hard science, Pinnacle understanding of the Chaos Wall and any potential space behind it is informed by Drix myth: that lamellae beyond the Chaos Wall are typically treated as hellish places, homes of ancient beasts and devils that once raged across the Edge in millennia past.

How to Get to There: Sub-Light Interstellar Travel

To traverse the Edge, unless one is blessed to be born with a body capable of withstanding the ravages of exposure to naked vacuum, raw aether, radiation, and raw mana, one must be shielded. Typically, this shielding takes the form of a powered vessel—a "ship"—that is outfitted for long-distance, long-term (on the order of days, weeks, months, years, or, in exceptional cases, decades) travel, typically pressurized to a nominal atmosphere for the occupant species, sealed, and hardened against external chemical, biological, and radioactive threats.

Most ships also have some degree of kinetic shielding to protect against physical danger, although in the space between systems, the odds of collision between stellar bodies are astronomically small. These vessels are propelled by an engine of some kind (generally nuclear moxiteA rare fuel source that powers interstellar flight. reactors, though there are other forms of propellant) that provides sufficient thrust to push it along through the vacuum of space. Some ships are built to fly in atmosphere, but most are only designed and equipped to fly in vacuum. Ships range in size from single-occupant vehicles to mighty vessels with crews numbering in the thousands.

The most valuable and precious ships in the Edge are eternity ships, a broad classification of ship that encompasses any vessel that has a mounted eternity drive (typically in addition to its normal drive systems). Eternity drives allow ships to escape the rules of physics and time that govern the annular universe and travel faster than light via slipping into and out of the Weft. Most vessels in the Edge are not equipped with eternity drives, so they must travel to an eternity column and dock aboard larger, Pinnacle-flagged ferryships that run regular point-to-point routes via the Weft.

How to Get to There Now: Faster-Than-Light Travel

How Does Faster-Than-Light Travel Work?

Faster-than-light travel requires three components:

1. A vessel equipped with an eternity drive.
2. Proximity to an eternity column so that the column can transmit sufficient power to the ship (and diffuse whatever feedback might spike as a result) and propel them into the Weft.
3. A Pinnacle codebook to correctly align one's starting point and finishing point

With these three conditions met, a ship has the technical ability to travel faster than light. Among Pinnacle socients, faster-than-light travel is colloquially called warp or "Weft" travel. When a vessel travels in this method it plunges into the parallel lamellae behind the Chaos Wall—"the Eternities" or "Weft" (the latter is a term borrowed from Drix culture)—and then reemerges at its destination point.

Eternity Drives and Eternity Ships

An eternity drive is a secondary propulsion system for ships that, when activated, emulates the function of a Drix seam-ripper, allowing the vessel and all beings inside the field that the eternity drive projects to slip out of real-space and into the Weft.

An incredibly important note about eternity drives: single-purpose and dual-purpose eternity drives do not propel a ship through the Weft. They merely open and close the door. To go somewhere via the Eternities, one must be catapulted between points in space via eternity columns.

Eternity Columns

An eternity column is a Pinnacle-constructed, free-floating, kilometers-long installation that is superpositional, meaning that regardless of your occupied layer of reality, columns are always in the same place; the coordinate position of any column is constant. These anchored columns allow for ships with eternity drives to be slung from column to column at faster-than-light speeds, like cable cars on a track.

Eternity columns are all built and managed by Pinnacle, but the stations that spring up around them can be managed by local governments. This leads to a wide variety of quality and diversity among the station-side habitats, though Pinnacle does enforce minimum standards of life, diplomatic protection, and anti-corruption measures on stations that we do not directly manage. In any case, the ultimate authority on any eternity column is Pinnacle.

States and Entities of the Edge

Pinnacle

Pinnacle was founded by an alliance of spacefaring species from the same system who were made aware of each other's existence prior to their mutual space age via inter-system radio transmissions. Their first forays into space were stumbling but heroic; the early decades of their mutual expansion throughout their solar system and beyond doubly so. This alliance encountered the Drix in their second century of expansion and integrated them into Pinnacle administration; the Drix shared the secrets of faster-than-light travel with Pinnacle, allowing Pinnacle to develop the earliest versions of eternity columns and drives—technologies that replicated the Drix beam worlds and seam-rippers. This opened the whole universe to all member species of Pinnacle via ship-scale intergalactic FTL travel. Pinnacle has grown and undergone many dramatic changes since its foundation, but its core principle remains intact: to organize the universe under a single body, whose mandate is peace, cooperation, and mutual prosperity.

All species and civilizations who are signatories and members of Pinnacle eschew currency; instead, they operate on mallowmass, an economic system that prioritizes reputation, exchange, the duties of host and guest, and other virtuous acts registered in public.

Pinnacle: Day to Day

The most common point of contact where the myriad peoples of the Edge encounter Pinnacle coalition constituents and officers is at an eternity column, which are Pinnacle-administered interstellar transit hubs. Ships looking to transit between the stars must depart from their nearest eternity column. If they are not equipped with an eternity drive, they dock with a Pinnacle ferry at the nearest eternity column, which ferries non-FTL ships between the stars.

Pinnacle is a collective administrative entity. While it has a core system and capital world, its day-to-day management is distributed across known space; the members of Pinnacle Strategic Corps are decision-making individuals and persons of tremendous political power. These administrators, directors, emissaries, ambassadors, and other ranking personnel can all be encountered on eternity columns in member systems or prospective member systems and attend to diplomatic, administrative, trade, and other soft-power missions.

High-ranking agents of Pinnacle Strategic Corps are rarely encountered alone or without going through many layers of lower- and middle-level functionaries first: the personnel of Pinnacle Tactical Corps. Pinnacle Tactical Corps is vast and composed of many thousands of types of specialists, officers, technicians, captains, and other agents who make up the rank and file of the intergalactic administration. PTC personnel, as their corps title indicates, handle Pinnacle's tactical presence: they fly ships, patrol stations, process documents, haul supplies, repair stations, run medical clinics, cook food, and handle any other profession or task Pinnacle considers "tactics," i.e. the day-to-day work necessary to keep the lights on.

The Illvoi Bloom
And the Uthros Combine

The Illvoi are a species of large, gelatinous medusaform beings: humans often refer to them as jellyfish. Illvoi evolved on a distant gas giant, growing and flourishing deep in the volatile, crushing depths of its core. There, they developed their fantastic "cloudsculpting" practice: an esoteric suite of technology and natural ability that blends psychokinetic manifestation with technologic prowess to shape the very matter of their world—the gasses that compose it—into solid structures of determinable mass and shape.

The Illvoi used this power to construct vessels capable of ferrying them first to the higher atmospheres of their homeworld, then above their world, then out to distant stars. Here, they encountered Pinnacle, whose agents had been drawn to the Illvoi homeworld by characteristic radio transmissions, radiation signatures, emissions, and other markers of near-interstellar civilizations. The Illvoi joined Pinnacle, drawn to its long histories and vast libraries of pan-species knowledge, where they have become a promising member among Pinnacle's scientific consensus arm. The Illvoi commonly interface with humanoid species using emote screens, small, face-sized bots that automatically interpret the Illvoi wearer's speech, bearing, and other nonverbal cues to accurately and immediately display the wearer's intended emotional state.

Illvoi in the Sothera system are typically associated with the Uthros Combine, a private research group headquartered on Uthros. The Combine divides its personnel into three branches: Administration, Research and Development, and Security.

Illvoi of the Administration branch occupy administrative and logistical roles in the Sothera system for the Uthros Combine. It is their job to ensure the smooth functioning of the secret installation on Uthros, the day-to-day functioning of other public, upper-atmosphere installations on the world, and maintain the connections between the Illvoi population in Sothera and the larger body of the culture outside of the system. Administration branch Illvoi can be encountered throughout the Sothera system, but the highest-ranking personnel operate in the deep-atmosphere Uthros installation.

Illvoi of the Research and Development branch are localized to the Uthros Combine installation at the planet's core studying [REDACTED]. R&D branch personnel range from basic research assistants and sanitation technicians to esoteric-field specialists and gnostic engineers. The R&D branch has the largest amount of personnel engaged in the most broad portfolio of work, though encounters with R&D personnel outside of the Uthros installation are exceedingly rare.

Illvoi of the Security branch can be found throughout the Sothera system with varying degrees of clearance, equipment, and mandates. In the Uthros installation, Security personnel are equipped to keep infiltrators out, root out spies within, and respond to known-unknown threats. Outside of the Uthros installation, Security personnel can be encountered in Illvoi-aligned stations, patrolling the system near Uthros, and proactively chasing down leads relevant to the work of R&D and Administration on the Uthros installation.

Monoism and the Monasteriat
And the Susur Secundi Mission and INEVITA

Monoism is an ancient unitary faith commanded by an insular and esoteric governing body, the Monasteriat. Though the faith is uniform and its commanding congress is centralized, Monoism is not a single-species faith: Monoism competes with Summism—the faith of the Sum—to be the most widespread faith in Pinnacle space, featuring at any given moment a fair claim on the greatest number of practitioners, physical sites, and client worlds. The faith represents a pan-stellar, pan-temporal certainty that is grounding in the myriad of the Edge.

The Monasteriat is a congress of hundreds of elector monks who administer Monoist doctrine and north star civic direction from the faith's capital at the Lip of Susur, the photon collar that rings Point Prime, the first and most holy supervoid of the Monoist faith. The Lip of Susur is what remains of the star that birthed Point Prime; Susurians, the species that divined the first tenets of Monoism and founded the faith, emerged from the Lip of Susur from the gravitationally torn carcass of that star. They are individually massive beings who lens light around themselves and are born with an inherent command over the trembling gravitational threads of the annular universe.

Most modern-day Monoists are human. The core practice of the faith is centered around the communal recitation of their messianic figure's ongoing transmissions, typically in the form of ecstatic polyvocal choirs. The Immortal Faller (a figure of many names, though this is the most popular) can be observed approaching the center of every supervoid, known as the Zero Point, beyond which INEVITA, the promised future, awaits.

• The Immortal Faller is the name of the savior and first prophet of the Monoist faith. He is represented in Monoist texts as the subscript pronouns _He/Him, always capitalized.
• The Seeker and the Well is the name of the book reportedly written by the Immortal Faller himself. Unlike The Theorem Unending and Final, it is written in the first person. This book is the first volume of The Plummet Record.
• The Theorem Unending and Final is both the name of the Faller's song that Monoists work to interpret and the ever-expanding second volume of their books of faith. The theorem is assumed to be finite and can be heard issuing from every supervoid yet discovered. This is the second volume of The Plummet Record.
• The Plummet Record is the name of the collected, two-volume holy text of Monoism.
• The Zero Point is the destination of the Faller: the center of Point Prime, which is reflected in every supervoid yet encountered.
• INEVITA is the perfect future that lies beyond the Zero Point. Monoist doctrine teaches that INEVITA has already occurred, and that the work of the faith is to accelerate its arrival. Also known colloquially as the Next Eternity.

Monoists justify their actions through self-evidence. Their prophet exists in every supervoid. INEVITA is already resolved, merely awaiting the advance of local time. Thus, Monoists conclude, so, too, should they exist in every land of the void. If the annular universe did not want Monoism to propagate across its stars, then supervoids would not hold at their core the immortal form of the Faller. Thus, for Monoists, they are, and they shall do as they shall.

The Celestial Palatinate
And the Sunstar Free Company

The Celestial Palatinate is a mighty state comprised of many species, systems, and worlds, with humans being the most numerous of its subjects. The Palatinate is an opulent, dynastic, absolute monarchy under the command of divine emperor, the Regent Maximum Taman IV. The Regent Maximum is the head of the divine state, which is considered superior to the mere imperial state of the Palatinate.

Summism is the state religion of the Celestial Palatinate. It is a syncretic faith with a living leader, the Regent Maximum of the Palatinate, and many holy sites distributed across the worlds and stars in its territory. At its core is the worship of the Grand Cosmocordance, articulated through a living prophetic compass called the Bright Sum. The Bright Sum is a doctrine embodied in axiomatic behavior and comport: it is the figure that remains at the end of the Celestial Palatinate's faithful tabulating and calculation of the data of the universe. By following the guidance provided to you by the Sum, one can follow the righteous path toward increasing and refining the Sum. The Sum is self-constructing, but it is necessary for the faithful to compile and advance it.

Founded before Pinnacle and the introduction of faster-than-light travel, the Palatinate is ancient among interstellar states. The holy empire's own history is rich with eon-spanning epics, unification wars, schisms, and dynastic clashes. Its divine investiture is a relatively recent development in the Palatinate's history, a consequence merely centuries old at the conclusion of a series of unification wars. Power is now held by the Regent Maximum, but the Regent's will is enacted by the many Cosmogrands, the nobility of the Celestial Palatinate.

The Cosmogrands are near-absolute monarchs subordinate only to the Regent Maximum, each ruling at least one world. The realms of the Cosmogrands provide the economic and military strength of the Palatinate. The power an individual Cosmogrand has in the affairs of the empire is tied directly to their command: the size of their holdings, the development levels of the worlds under their rule, the strength of their navies and number of knights, and so on. Consequently, Cosmogrands are not only determined to expand their holdings but develop them. It is better to be rich in one developed world than be bereft with a vast claim of empty space.

Cosmogrands, like the Regent Maximum, are unitary figures that are invested with divinely granted state power. Below the Cosmogrands, there is a vast structure of nobility, divided into parallel civic and church stations and obligations. There are far too many titles to note, but of notable fame—or notoriety—are the knights and lords of the free companies, the Palatinate's cause-mercenary military forces. There are numberless free companies, ranging from a single ship and its crew to organizations that are effectively state armies for mighty Cosmogrands. Of these larger free companies, the Sunstar Free Company is the current favored regiment of the Regent Maximum, considered in the Palatinate to be a blessed regiment and the de facto state army.

The Sunstar Free Company operates across multiple parochial campaign fronts, fielding hundreds of thousands of full-title knights and millions of foot soldiers drawn from the Palatinate worlds. Sunstar is a conventionally structured free company and the model upon which most others are constructed: peasants, laypersons, artisans, and citizens of Cosmogrand holdings from which Sunstar recruits join at the lowest tier of enlisted soldier, serving as aptitude and favor dictate. Some find their way into the Free Company's naval forces, most remain in the ground forces, and vanishingly few join the noble children of lords and other peers in the ranks of the squires. Squires serve knights, acting as their attendants, foot servants, and personal guards, as they are trained by their knights to possibly, one day, earn the title for themselves. Knights are mighty individual combatants, invested with divine nobility by their title's grace, each in command of a small complement of soldiers, a mentor to a squire, and an honored voice in the hierarchy of the Sunstar Free Company.

The Sunstar Free Company is an insular and dogmatic cause-mercenary group. Distinct from mercenary groups who work on gift debt (among other Pinnacle states) or for money (when dealing with stellar nations outside the purview of Pinnacle), the Sunstar Free Company lend their strengths to causes that align with directives of the Regent Maximum, the tenets of their faith, Summism, or the aims of one or more Cosmogrands of the Celestial Palatinate.

The Entropy War
On the War Ripping Through Pinnacle Space

The Celestial Palatinate and the Monasteriat are at war. The Sothera system is another front in an interstellar religious conflict between their opposed faiths. Currently, the possibility of reconciliation appears non-existent: Summist doctrine is incompatible with Monoist theory. Their tenets are diametrically opposed, two immovable objects standing as violent roadblocks across the paths of either faith. The Monoists seek to expand their supervoid holdings to accelerate the approach of INEVITA. The Summists see INEVITA as anathema and aim to reignite the recently collapsed supervoids via the use of colossal star-reviving weapons called horizon javelins.

The Sothera system is a pivotal front in this battle, where the Monasteriat plans to collapse and create their one-thousandth supervoid. To counter them, the Palatinate has dispatched a force of Sunstar Free Company knights to drive the Monoists out and deploy one of their javelins to prevent Sothera's total collapse. Both sides see Sothera as a critical battleground, not just for the actual strategic objectives they wish to accomplish but for spreading propaganda as well.

The Drix Concordance
And the Wefthunters

The Drix are a species that can travel faster than light via weftwalking: they can move through the Weft while remaining anchored to reality, collapsing all of space and time to a distance no greater than a single step forward or back. Drix society predates Pinnacle by millennia.

Drix are highly solitary people despite their ability to connect across seemingly infinite space—or, rather, because of their ability to connect whenever, wherever: they value their privacy. The largest concentration of any Drix typically encountered are groups of no more than a dozen who tend to be related by kin, culture, or profession. They maintain their culture across space and time by holding congresses on beam worlds—planets that, by fate or some other cosmic engine—act as dimensional anchors.

• Weftwalking is a Drix practice that, actuated by a suite of technology, ritual utterances, practices, and rites, allows them to travel faster than light without need of a ship, eternity drive, or eternity column.
• Beam worlds are "anchor" locations in space: superpositional worlds that remain constant regardless of the state of a given reality. The Drix congregate on them and keep their locations as closely guarded secrets.

The Drix ability to weftwalk is drawn out and magnified by various augmentations, genetic manipulations, rituals, or rites, which they learned from an ancient artifact that predates the Fomori-Eldrazi conflict era: the Fabric of All Being. It is kept on the Drix beam world hidden from other species, contains the fates of all things, and was instrumental in unlocking the knowledge of weftwalking for the Drix, some of which they shared with Pinnacle to guide that alliance in the development of eternity columns and drives.

They use seam-rippers to amplify, direct, and actuate weftwalking. Drix seam-rippers are magnifying anchors: they enhance the innate Drix ability to weftwalk while anchoring them to their home lamella—the reality of their homeworld. If a Drix ignores or is separated from their seam-ripper for too long while they are weftwalking, they will tumble into the manifold substrate of weftspace and—barring miraculous luck—be lost forever.

In exchange for the secrets of FTL travel, the Drix were given unilateral authority to address extraversal ejecta, most commonly residual Eldrazi contamination from the Fomori-Eldrazi war, of which the Drix had allied with the Fomori before their disappearance millennia ago. Since the end of that age and the remission of the Eldrazi tide, the Drix have remained consummate Eldrazi hunters, using the Fabric of All Being to identify and assassinate critical Eldrazi potential beings to slow—and hopefully prevent—the return of the great devourers.

Mechans
On Drones and Androids

Mechans can be split, roughly, into two categories: drones, which are unconscious machines, and androids, which are conscious machines. Nearly every spacefaring civilization creates drones and uses them across civilian and military applications. Some spacefaring civilizations have prohibitions against the creation of androids.

Drones are not afforded the rights of personhood. Regardless of the complexity of the tasks they perform, they are "simple" machines in that they have no sentience or sapience. Drones operate on programmable code and cannot think of themselves as individual persons; they are regarded as tools, vehicles, computers, and so on. Drones can be controlled by a remote operator or computer or directed by an advanced on-board computer.

Androids, in sharp contrast to drones, are whole persons; they are sapient, sentient beings who conceive of themselves with a unique subjectivity. For the most part, in civilizations that have developed androids, androids are afforded the same rights as organic beings.

The process of becoming an android varies and is generally subject to some form of state-specific law (even if that law is "do as thou wilt"). It is possible for an organic person to make themselves into an android, either through surgical implantation and augmentation or through digital consciousness transfer. It is perfectly possible for androids to be created and propagate without an organic origin: some civilizations can create digital consciousnesses from scratch. From there, it is as simple as uploading that consciousness to a storage unit. Most artificial intelligences are referred to colloquially as "viys" and are used to tackle the many-variable, constantly changing problems that drive most socients to howling frustration.

Welcome to Sothera
An Infinite Guideline Station Handbook

The Sothera System

Sothera

Sothera is the name of the supervoid that sits at the heart of the Sothera system. As is Pinnacle custom, star systems are named after their gravitational locus, the object around which all other objects comprising the system orbit.

Sothera is billions of years old. As stars go, it is young and its death was sudden (for a star). A cascade of cataclysms different than the nominal cataclysms; Sothera and her child worlds strayed through a mighty cloud of interstellar aether. Sothera, young and hungry, ate more than she could stomach—too much cake. She began to rupture her bounds and collapse, her corona flashing out in terrible, beautiful smears of nuclear fire millions of kilometers long.

These spasms scoured her closest children, dissolving one to atoms. The other merely withered to its core. Centuries prior to the present day, the Kav—the only species native to Sothera—developed the technological capability to allow themselves to register the scope and scale of the catastrophe that Sothera's collapse threatened. Horrified at their telegraphed end, the Kav embarked on a species-wide project to emigrate from their world.

This furious activity drew the attention of Pinnacle. We came to Sothera, constructed an FTL outpost—an eternity column designated Infinite Guideline—and opened the system to the rest of the connected Edge.

Of the groups rushing into Sothera, the Monoists of the Monasteriat have had the most immediate and apparent effect on the system. Sothera, prior to their arrival, was slated to collapse into a supernova within two hundred Pinnacle standard years. The Monoists captured and diverted Sothera's collapse, brought it sekharA bead that causes singularity induction. Used by Monoists to create a supervoid or to accelerate their journey to the Next Eternity., turning it inward to collapse in on itself, becoming a supervoid instead. They have been scouring the Edge for a sign from their messianic figure, the Immortal Faller, that points them toward the thousandth supervoid of their faith; Sothera is that thousandth supervoid.

Supervoids are ringed in a photon collar, the body of the star that they were born from, stretched and warped by tremendous gravitational forces. A photon collar is dim when compared to a main sequence star but still bright enough to emit enough light, heat, and radiation to sustain life in their system. Collapse into a supervoid—engineered by Monoists or as a natural phenomenon—forestalls nova death. Sothera's photon collar is strong and emits enough life-giving energy to keep Susur Secundi, Kavaron, Adagia, and Evendo habitable but is too weak to sustain carbon life on Uthros.

Susur Secundi
First Planet from Sothera
Once Called Anuki

Susur Secundi is the terrestrial world closest to Sothera. It is a dark, eerie world crisscrossed by labyrinths and monumental rock formations that appear shaped by some long-dead civilization; too many straight lines to be natural. The world is bare, dark stone, with a thin atmosphere that leaves its surface largely open to the ravages of the Edge.

The Kav knew the world as Anuki and had previously targeted it for exploration during their first forays into the Edge centuries ago; they found it thick with common minerals and not worth exploiting. After Pinnacle opened the Sothera system to the rest of the Edge, the Monoists came to Anuki, drawn at first by its proximity to Sothera. Upon surveying the world and discovering its labyrinths, monumental columns, and gravitational tides that conformed to existing hymn and scripture, they were elated and moved to claim the planet for themselves. The Kav did not contest their claim.

It has been decades since the Monoists settled Anuki and renamed it Susur Secundi after the capital of their order, the great monastery at the Lip of Susur. This is intended to be a great honor and signify the import of the potential Sothera supervoid; upon the completion of their project, Sothera will become the thousandth supervoid claimed by the Monoists since the founding of their order. It is only fitting then that the world nearest the dying star carry a diminutive honorific, have a monastery constructed throughout its great subterranean chambers, and become the main staging ground for Monoists in the Sothera system to advance their project.

Susur Secundi's surface is barren but for craters, ejecta, ruined labyrinths, and veins of high-albedo minerals. Monitoring stations, observation blisters, and flight-command towers dot the surface of Susur Secundi, with dozens present in each hemisphere to give the Monoists a clear and redundant view of the surface of the world and Sothera above. The main strength of the Monoist population in Sothera lives underground, throughout newly excavated subterranean tunnels and in converted and expanded tunnels dug by the first Kav missions to the world. Though there are vast underground labyrinths and structures below Susur Secundi's surface, the Monoists do not live in them: these cavities are instead regarded as holy sites, evidence of the Immortal Faller's designs, and are reserved for study and used as places of worship and contemplation. Few non-Monoists are allowed to land on Susur Secundi, though many neutral-ground stations orbit the world (water-ice dealerships, various neutral-party monitoring and comms stations, quarantine stations, and so on).

Kavaron
Twin Second Planet from Sothera
Kavaron That Is and Kavaron Before

The Kav homeworld is Kavaron. Once a verdant and resource-rich terrestrial world, it's now a ruined husk decaying away into space, picked over by scavengers, wildcatAn independent ship and crew not affiliated with a larger organization. Most act as freelancers, smugglers, and small-time miners. miners, imperial memorial teams, and treasure hunters. Kavaron crumbled after centuries of Kav industrial strip mining of the world for its rich moxite veins weakened its integrity so much that it began to fall away into space, prompting the imperial Kav to rapidly expand their space program to ensure the survival of their species. Eventually, the Kav were able to mitigate the crumbling of the world, buying them enough time to continue their spaceward migration and attempts to collect and preserve as much of their terrestrial history and culture as possible.

The Kav regard Kavaron as split into two hemispheres: Kavaron Before and Kavaron That Is. Kavaron Before is a tectonically mitigated wedge of Kavaron, the last stable terrestrial remains of the planet that the Kav managed to stabilize with a ring of massive tectonic anchors, great pillars plunged dozens of kilometers into Kavaron's crust. Outside of this anchor wall, Kavaron crumbles away into space, trembling and heaving as gravity tears the world apart. Inside the wall, the Kavaronic Empire collects the world's monuments, architectural wonders, great works of art, and eons worth of cultural treasures. There remains a large planetary population in Kavaron Before; the catastrophe that doomed Kavaron began its cascading collapse in living memory, and the work of evacuating a global population off world and into free-floating space stations is ongoing. The inner wall then has the appearance of an open-air, nation-size museum, a memorial megalopolis where open space is a premium and a population of millions work to build and launch new stations, catalog and pack artifacts, and maintain the tectonic mitigation wall against the steady advance of catastrophe outside the barrier.

Outside the wall, Kavaron is a tumult, a cataclysmic landscape called Kavaron That Is. This land is less of a landscape and more of a churning gravitational storm of debris ranging from micrometeorite clouds to continental chunks. Rumors swirl of memorial vaults: hardened, self-contained storage facilities built in the earliest days of the catastrophe to store artifacts, treasures, monuments, and even culturally important locations that could not otherwise be brought to Kavaron Before.

True or not, these rumors pull scavengers and hunters in from across the system. Countering these scavengers are Kav memorial teams, who race to rescue their ancient treasures. Kavaron That Is is also a popular destination for wildcat teams to hunt deposits of moxite that might be too small for the large mining concerns. Though there are no mother lodes left, these leftovers can still be life-changing for smaller teams. Additionally, these teams often raid damaged or opened artifact bunkers where memorial teams have already evacuated the monuments to see if they can find anything worth salvaging. The more cutthroat scavengers even risk attacking memorial teams that they know are transporting goods.

Kavaron, ultimately, is doomed. The outermost ring of the tectonic mitigation wall, called Duranuw or the Mordraine Ring by the Kav, has already lost pylons to the crumbling world. Though the wall does slow the brutal effects of gravitational warping and still the shaking earth under Kavaron Before, it does not stop it. One way or another, this generation of Kav and all that follow will be exiled to the Edge until a suitable replacement world can be found.

Evendo
Twin Second Planet from Sothera

Evendo is an icebound terrestrial world that co-orbits Sothera almost exactly opposite Kavaron. Long regarded, to the great disappointment of early Kav explorers, to be a cold, dead world, Evendo in truth held a deep-seeded secret: a long-dormant, terrasymbiotic Eumidian vanguard, waiting for the perfect conditions to begin their great work of terraformation.

The previous century's cataclysmic deformation of Kavaron had collateral effects on Evendo, as chunks of the Kav homeworld rained down on Evendo's glacial surface, churning and melting great swathes of its ancient ice. The world warmed and began to form a thin but stable atmosphere, spurring it to warm faster. Thin sections of the ice melted totally, becoming new lakes, rivers, and oceans. This warming triggered the first wave of Eumidians to awaken from hibernation and emerge onto Evendo's surface to begin their work of preparing the world to fit their idyll.

Evendo has since undergone decades of Eumidian-directed terraformation. Directed by Eumidian hive architects, Evendo is a world of vibrant life and harsh contrast, where Eumidians have carved out and live in hard-fought zones of terrasymbiosis—pockets of lush, Eumidian-habitable enclaves surrounded by a steadily melting perimeter of glacial ice. Outside of terrasymbiotic enclaves, the ice—and titanic beings that live within it—still rules Evendo. The largest swath of habitable land is Evendo's equatorial band, which has bloomed into a purely terrasymbiotic biome of titanic, atmosphere-piercing forests interlaced with Eumidian hive cities. This band shows what the rest of the world will become; it is a terrasymbiotic paradise for Eumidians and a strange but wonderous environment for all other visitors.

This successful terrasymbiosis has not gone unnoticed by the Kavaronic Empire, who are already designing invasion plans to take the world for their own once the Eumidians have finished remaking it. The Kav believe strongly that this could be their Kavaron Tomorrow. Despite some inkling among Evendo-brood spacers of the Kav's designs, the terrestrial population is content in their work and not aware of the looming threat the Kav pose to their gentle world.

Adagia
Third Planet from Sothera
Once Called Adawa

Adagia is a terrestrial world in the Sothera system and the main location for the Sunstar Free Company's operations. It is a world that is defined by its powerful and steady winds, which scour the surface of the world and sculpt its geography. The world's flora and fauna have evolved alongside this steady wind, shaping to graceful aerodynamic forms to use the wind to their own benefit. Off-world colonists have settled the calmer (but still windy) regions of the world, where they have built low-lying, wind-powered, aerodynamically sculpted buildings designed to integrate with Adagia's natural environment.

Most notably, the Sunstar Free Company has settled on Adagia, where they quickly declared themselves the administrators of the world, acting as the expeditionary arm of the Celestial Palatinate. The local population who settled on the world prior to the arrival of the Sunstar Free Company was affiliated with the Palatinate already—the order's arrival merely formalized the existing relationships.

The atmosphere on Adagia is thin and cold. An air-breathing human can survive without a rebreather or oxygen supply if they were to leave the safety of an environmentally sealed habitat but would risk death from hypoxia, embolisms, and other consequences of oxygen deprivation. Nevertheless, efforts to establish settlements around Adagia continue: the world is rich with fantastic natural life and, as such, is a prime target for various Palatinate pharmaceutical and agricultural companies.

Adagia's native creatures have evolved to accept this windy environment, favoring aerodynamic shapes, broad, solar-friendly surfaces, and tolerances for the mighty storms that often sweep the world. Sail-like windskippers, Adagian arrows, sky minnows, and dart raptors are common sights around the colonial buildings on the surface, while larger creatures drift in the upper atmosphere.

Uthros
Fourth Planet from Sothera

Uthros is a titanic gas giant ringed by dozens of moons. Uthros is the first planet to be encountered by vessels departing the system and the last stop for those heading into the interior. Owing to its gatehouse position in the Sothera system, its upper atmosphere is crowded with moxite refineries, supply stations, and vast ship-breaking salvage yards; Uthros is a common stopover for ships to refuel, resupply, and trade. In these airy heights, Uthros's environment is an azure cloudscape home to stratowhales, living anvil rays, troporeefs, and other huge creatures that drift on sacs of gas and flagella, suspended above and swimming through the different layers of Uthros's atmosphere.

The depths of Uthros are a sharp contrast to the gas giant's sapphire-blue upper atmosphere. Below the paradise of sun, clouds, and mighty storms lurks a caustic and brutal high-pressure environment, where diamonds fall like rain over continents of super-compressed gas and hyperdense horrors stalk the remains of discarded space hulks. Rivers of liquid metallic hydrogen and helium carve valleys through glittering methane and ammonia ice, revealing howling cannula bored by great wurms and other beasts. Here, in this deep blue hell, the Uthros Combine has built a research complex into new atmospheric engineering techniques.

Infinite Guideline Station

Infinite Guideline is Pinnacle's main transit hub in the Sothera system. The station is an eternity column: a port for interstellar ships to arrive and depart and the hub of a Pinnacle administrative district. The station is a high-traffic enclave where the people of the galaxy mingle on their way to and from the rest of the Eternities, all watched over and administered by Pinnacle.

The Wurmwall

The Wurmwall is the name of an asteroid belt that rings the Sothera system, marking all things outside as deep space and all things inside as Sotheran. The Wurmwall is a treacherous zone of jagged space debris, living geodes, space derelicts, wandering comets, asteroids of all sizes, and greatwurms—titanic creatures of great age and wisdom whose presence gives the Wurmwall its name. The difficulty of safely navigating this region means rescue is unlikely. Pinnacle security recommends all craft keep a safe distance.

The Garden of Apeiron

The Garden of Apeiron is a vast uncharted region in the Sothera system and is regarded as a highly dangerous zone of space riddled with anomalies and strange phenomena. Ghostly signals emanate from the Garden, speaking seemingly random words that some captains claim to hear personal messages buried within. Ships enter and never exit, likewise probes and other drones. Deep, powerful scanning systems return nothing but static. The Garden is popularly known among captains and space-faring persons as a ship graveyard—a region that sub-light and FTL ships enter but never leave. Currently, it is localized to the wide region of empty space between the Wurmwall and Uthros's orbital path, but worryingly, the Garden appears to be moving. This movement is slow but directional, crawling in from deep space toward Sothera at a rate faster than normal gravitic drift; whether this indicates purpose or intelligence is unknown. All that is understood is that the Garden is moving.

Sothera-Native Species

Kavaronic Federal Empire
And the Kav Memorial Navy

The Kav are an old empire new to the wider universe, forced to make a home among the stars due to climate collapse and apocalyptic tectonic destabilization. Driven by the impending Sotheran supernova, the Kav accelerated their extensive yet destabilizing mining projects as mounting cataclysms all but tore the planet apart. They had to deal their own world a coup de grace of extractive mining and industrial production to lift not only their own species but enough of their biome off world to escape the crumbling one. The tragic irony of the Monoist's collapse of Sothera into a supervoid is not lost on the Kav—their solar system is saved, but their world is still lost.

• Kavaron is the name of the Kav homeworld. This planet suffered tremendous mounting catastrophes that destabilized its gravity and tore itself apart. Now, it is riven in two, with one half of the world shattered into a vast debris cloud that follows close behind its remaining whole side as it orbits Sothera.
• Kavaron Before is the name of the remaining whole side of the world, where the Kav imperial capital remains. Daily, the edges of Kavaron Before crumble away into dust and rock, mitigated by a ring of titanic tectonic anchors.
• Kavaron That Is is what the Kav call the ruined half of Kavaron. Eventually, all Kavaron Before will become Kavaron That Is.
• The Kavaronic Federal Empire is the only Kav government. It administers the affairs of Kavaron Before and the Kav Memorial Navy and seeks new worlds for the Kav to settle.

Decades have passed since Exodus Day, when the first Kav shuttle lifted the first flight of refugees off Kavaron's unstable surface. Since then, the Kavaronic Empire has worked to manage and grow their vast orbital population, search for a new home, and stabilize sections of their old homeworld to continue harvesting resources and salvage what could not be carried away. In the meantime, the Kav live in constellations of orbital diadems (massive stations in orbit above Kavaron) and among nomadic mining fleets that frequent the asteroid belt dividing the inner Sothera system from the outer Sothera system. A dwindling population still lives on Kavaron Before—the tectonically stabilized, whole half of Kavaron—waiting to be evacuated and tending to the artifacts, monuments, arts, and other cultural treasures of the Kav collected in the last imperial city, the ancient capital Vu.

• Vu is the name of the ancient capital of the Kavaronic Empire. It is still largely intact on Kavaron Before, though it is now crowded with refugees and the cultural wealth of the whole of Kav history on Kavaron. Shuttles land and depart around the clock, ferrying people and artifacts off world as soon as there is space for them.
• Memorial vaults are seeded throughout Kavaron Before and Kavaron That Is. These installations range in size from simple bunkers to massive, citadel-like complexes. They are hardened against tectonic activity and intended to be self-sustaining, preserving the artifacts and people within until they can be found and extracted.

The majority of surviving Kav live on titanic mining stations above and around the remains of Kavaron. Most Kav are miners, moxite hunters, or serve on memorial teams and are the backbone of the Kav Memorial Navy (KMN). Whether miners or sailors, Kav are handy in a fight, inclined toward martial and physical solutions, and passionate in their missions. Some sell their services as mercenaries to non-Kav mining crews, acting as guides and muscle to lead non-local teams on successful mining or salvage missions in the ruins of their homeworld.

• The Kav Memorial Navy (KMN) is the interstellar navy of the Kavaronic Empire. Its ships are primarily made up of converted mining vessels, making them extremely hardy but less maneuverable than comparable fleets.
• Memorial teams are KMN ground teams that operate on and above Kavaron. They police the city of Vu, manage the evacuation of Kavaron Before, and range out into Kavaron That Is to extract intact vaults to be returned to the Kav people.

Evendo-Strain Eumidians

The Eumidians are a brood of an ancient terrasymbiotic species whose homeworld is in a distant, forgotten system and may not even exist anymore; their species propagates via vast seedships, living incubation vessels that burn across the stars, launching whole broods of Eumidian seed pods toward worlds they cross. Notably, while they are communal beings, they are not a hive mind controlled by a queen: Eumidians are horizontally organized and manage their affairs by brood consensus. This tight-knit relationship comes at a cost, however, as Eumidians of different broods might as well be aliens to each other.

Once landed on a world, seed broods burrow into the ground and wait for the minimum optimal conditions to begin autogenesis: the creation of Eumidian life from the microbial slurry secured inside each pod. This process begins with the generation and hatching of Eumidian vanguards, hardy and adaptable lifeforms who strike out from their steaming pods to seek each other and form terraformation bands, who begin the long, long process of terraforming their seeded world by gathering the necessary building blocks of life to feed back into their pods.

From these vanguard teams' efforts, the first enclaves are established: small settlements of intensely Eumidian terrasymbiotic land, where vanguards work to build structures and bring more seed pods that they uncover in their ranging. More Eumidians are hatched, their broodmates tuning these neophytes to grow better adapted to the current conditions than they were. This terrasymbiotic process exponentially advances the brood's terraforming effort, bringing both the brood and the world closer to each other. In time, the growth of this process will convert the seeded world from whatever its prior state was into a primordial, verdant Eumidian planet—though not wholly devoid of its original characteristics.

Through collective labor, the Eumidians build worlds; an individual will not live to see the project through, but the species will survive and persist due to the collective actions of individuals. Eumidians are intelligent, careful, hardy, and dedicated beings. Though an ultimate expression of their terrasymbiotic effort is the eventual creation and launching of one or more seedships, spreading their life is not the sole goal of their people: they create art and industry, practice faiths and curious scientific exploration, fight amongst themselves and fail, or never manage to build their first seedships. The Eumidians are not perfect machines, and despite their intensely instinctual species-wide project, they are not a hive mind. Though they all feel a pull toward propagation among the stars, they are their own people, just as full of promise and potential as any other.

Eumidians on Evendo are engaged in a great work of terrasymbiosis and, as such, outfit themselves accordingly. They carry ice-carvers to hew away at the mighty glaciers, straps and packs and lengths of rope to assist them in scaling the ice when necessary. They also carry weapons to fight what monsters appear from the permafrost. Some Eumidians engage in the frontline work of terrasymbiosis, acting as rangers for their labor camps and settlements. While other Eumidians support this work through biomatter processing, reweaving the bodies of their fallen broodmates into fresh potential matter for their structures and fellows. They engage in this work with reverence, as witnesses to and agents of the cycle that ensures their brood persists and thrives and that not one life is wasted.

The Astelli

The Astelli are the living remains of stars consumed by supervoids. They are the concentrated tears of mana that slipped away from photon collars and coalesced into living beings. The first Astelli appeared after the Monoist expansion from Point Prime began, fleeing the advancing wave of collapsing stars to find refuge in distant corners of the Edge. This flight was long and winnowing. The Monoists consumed many refuge stars, collapsing them into supervoids as they chased the Astelli and grew their dominion. In their inexorable advance, the Monoists overwhelmed many less-advanced civilizations, either wiping them out utterly or integrating them into their crusading, evangelical faith. The Astelli, always ahead of the Monoists, at first only ran. When they looked back at their trail of ruin, though, they realized that running would never be enough: they needed to stand and fight.

Their first attempt to fight back saw hundreds of Astelli standing alone against the advancing Monoists—and dying, overwhelmed without even fighting against Susurians themselves. Facing down their enemies on the front lines was never going to work, the Astelli realized. The Astelli adapted. Once again fleeing before the Monoists, the Astelli learned from their enemies, finding refuge stars that fed civilizations. They settled amongst these civilizations to preach their doctrine, impart their dire warnings of the advancing Monoists, and prepare them for war. These teachings became the foundations of the current Summist faith of the Celestial Palatinate, although it is a closely guarded secret in the Palatinate. The Astelli have, for the time being, found a strong ally in the Sunstar Free Company of the Palatinate, who see in the Astelli the holy figures of their own faith.

The Astelli hold the shared memories of their parent star, forming tight-knit communities of siblings all descended from the same swallowed star in the hope of carrying on its fire. Astelli can only be born from the ruin of a star consumed by a supervoid.

Glossary

Anstruth: Blasphemy. To be, do, speak, or think "anstruth" is to act against the Grand Cosmocordance of Summism; anstruth is anti-epistemic, anti-doctrinal, and profane; anstruth posits that which cannot be posited, assumes that which cannot be assumed.

Alabile: A metal used by Monoists in the construction of their gravkill suits. It is resistant to the effects of a singularity.

Bladiator: A Sunstar Free Company hardlight blade, capable of emitting blasts of solar energy.

Cherazad: A tactical event horizon. Creates a distortion bubble that delays the momentum from high impact, allowing Monoist ships to crash into enemy ships and engage in combat before the bubble collapses and the lost momentum is immediately restored.

Incaglas: Both a power source and a conduit used by the Sunstar Free Company. It is embedded into all of their machinery.

INEVITA: The promised and inevitable end of the universe as articulated by Monoist thought.

Moxite: A rare fuel source that powers interstellar flight.

Sekhar: A bead that causes singularity induction. Used by Monoists to create a supervoid or to accelerate their journey to the Next Eternity.

Socient: A person belonging to a Pinnacle member state.

Supervoid: A singularity with unusual properties, distinct from a true black hole in that it has a photon collar that continues to emit light.

Wildcat: An independent ship and crew not affiliated with a larger organization. Most act as freelancers, smugglers, and small-time miners.

The story of Edge of Eternities has already begun, and you can check out the first episode right here. Every story will be available at MTGStory.com, or you can listen along with The Magic Story Podcast. You can preorder the set now from your local game store, online retailers like Amazon, and elsewhere Magic products are sold.