Ashypso
Planet of the Unremembered
Ashypso is a mystery, even for its inhabitants. The farthest planet out in the Suskillon system, Ashypso has an oblong orbit, so its distance from the star it revolves around varies to a huge degree. When farther from the star, Ashypso freezes solid—its atmosphere included, and atmospheric gases that don’t freeze are trapped in the ice formations of those that do.
For most of its 553-year orbit, Ashypso has remained a dead world. Few living creatures could endure the void-enclosed wastes on the frozen surface of the atmosphere, and no expeditions have visited the planet long enough to penetrate this outer layer and discover what secrets lie underneath.
Ashypso has fascinated inhabitants of the Suskillon system ever since the Gap, which caused most data on Ashypso to be lost. Only the planet’s presence was evident, but no person or record recalled the world’s inhabitants or contents. Nobody could remember if Ashypso held anything of note, but everyone had the vague feeling that something lingered under the ice. Storytellers dreamed of an Ashypso that had a civilization not unlike that of Triaxus, adapted to wide variations in climate due to the planet’s orbit. Darkminded prophets promised that when Ashypso melted, doom would follow.
As Ashypso finally made its way closer to its star, in the same year that the Swarm invaded the Suskillon system, its long thaw began. Its atmosphere slowly returned to a gaseous state, and bizarre settlements emerged from under the retreating ice. Within these enclaves were chambers full of inactive creatures that awakened as air moved over them once again.
These hibernating people of Ashypso—a species of birdheaded, partially mechanized humanoids calling themselves trinirs—awoke to numerous mysteries. For them, the Gap ended as they woke. They found themselves in an unfamiliar galaxy with dreams of spaceflight but no memory of their past. Nothing that remains on Ashypso gave them context; they had no records, no memories, and few indications of their history. The hibernation chambers are little more than technological caves emerging from glacial cliffs. Like so many cultures at the end of the Gap, Ashypso’s society fell into chaos. Survival on such a world is always difficult, and doing so in the long term requires the work of a unified people—but Ashypso’s new civilization has found little unity.
The awakened trinirs divided into two groups. Less numerous are the Historians, who believe that Ashypso once had a glorious and harmonious culture, surviving on Ashypso’s summertime bounties. These trinirs formed delving societies, looking toward Ashypso’s depths for evidence of their ancient ways. More abundant are the Children of Triune, who believe the Historians to be delusional. The Children insist no trinirs existed before the most recent thaw, and so no great trinir civilization ever existed. The trinirs are instead, the Children claim, new among Triune’s creations, much like Drift technology. The All-Code shaped them from the ice of Ashypso to explore and populate the galaxy. They believe that Ashypso is a womb the trinirs must leave behind. To this end, the Children of Triune walk the void by mystical means and build machines they see in dreams, aiming to travel the wider system and abandon their home world for distant stars.
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