On the far fringes of human space, the Eisengeist sector is a crucible of war and ambition, a place where empires clash, secrets fester, and the bold carve their names into the marrow of history. It was once a lawless backwater, a tight cluster of stars occupied by a hundred different species who crawled into the bones of the old worlds abandoned by the Skepnar and festered there for countless milennia. But now it groans beneath the yoke of the Heimveld, a vast and ruthless dominion expanding out of the old heartland of Humanity and has brought its iron boot down on this untamed expanse. The Lords of the Heimveld call it integration — a righteous reclamation of wayward human wolrds — but to the people of Eisengeist, it is conquest and tyranny. Old Noble Houses, Cartels, merchants, warlords, and freeholders all bend the knee or break beneath the weight of conscription, taxation, and the relentless bureaucratic grind of the Heimveld's Archive scribblers. Yet the sector does not bow easily. In the underbellies of stations and the wastes of forsaken worlds, rebellion festers and ancient feuds still burn.
Beyond the reach of the Heimveld’s bureaucracy, beyond the edge of the ancient human expansion lies the Usuka Collective, an explosive new empire of alien minds and fervent ideology, a bastion of unshackled thought and unified purpose. It's peoples are strange, their customs anathema to the Heimveld, but they fight with a conviction that shakes the stars. Along the warfront, Usuka warbands clash with Heimveld legions in brutal, ceaseless combat — planet by planet, corridor by corridor, until every trench is choked with the dead. Each side claims to be the future. Neither will yield.
And in the shadowed places of the sector, in the deep holds and old forgotten places, the Skepnar watch and wait. They are the last of the Architects, the deep-dwelling heirs to an age when humanity was not simply a conqueror, but a creator. Their habitats loom in the void, their vast forges burning with secrets long thought lost. Bound to each other and tied together by their bond with the all-father Hengest, they neither seek war nor flee from it. They endure, as they always have, working in secret to protect what remains of their long-lost empire and to guide these new young species to a better future. But even they are not beyond the tides of change.
For something ancient stirs in the Eisengeist sector. A secret left behind by the old empire, scattered in fragments across its worlds, hidden in vaults of steel and stone. A weapon? A god? A machine of impossible design? No one yet knows. But warlords, scholars, and fanatics alike will bleed the stars dry to find it. And when the last fragment falls into place, when the truth is unearthed, the sector will burn — and from its ashes, something new will rise.
