Fifteen thousand years ago hundreds of worlds were made, each one populated with copies of the life on the world it was copied from, each one built around a tower. At the top of every tower sits a gateway to the next world in the sequence. Then the towers' own ancient protections engaged, sealed every gate behind an impenetrable barrier, and the chain went dark. A thousand years later, the barrier over Claret came down.
The newest world the network ever made, and it was made with dark blood magic. The Yëreldai kept it as a harvesting colony until a half-Yëreldai boy walked through the gates of a camp and started setting people free. Today five human nations share it and every one of them was built by survivors. The machines look like 1960s Earth. They run on aether.
Bastet Kandaka's seat, and home to thirty-six sentient peoples living on the same streets. Humans, elves, Amazons, demi-humans, giants, all of them ordinary to each other. Aether technology refined across millennia without interruption. It has been peaceful so long that most of its citizens have never seen a war, and it is about to find out what that cost.
The worlds link one to the next in order, like iron links. A tower opens the door to the world after it and no further. Until the world on the other side wakes its own tower, the traffic runs in one direction only. You can arrive. You cannot go back. Everything beyond the second link is still dark, and there are hundreds of links.
A coup, an explosion, and a barrier that came down between them before anyone could count the bodies. Every one of them spent a millennium certain that at least one of the others was dead. Every one of them was wrong.
Chief Protectorate of the Tower Gate Network, ordained to that duty by the Tower's own maker, as her father was before her. She rules from Meroë and carries a katana named Masamune. On one night a thousand years ago she lost a husband and a son who were never actually in the ground.
He was a high-ranking officer of the Yëreldai Royal Army and a childhood friend of the man who now sits on its throne. He broke with the Empire, brought his family and his most trusted with him to Amaterasu, and married its God-Queen. Together they made the antidote that frees a Yëreldai from the blood virus for good.
Eight years old the night the nursery burned. He woke on a world he had never heard of, and spent the next thousand years taking it back one harvesting camp at a time. Half Éreldai, half Yëreldai, which means the people he freed were enslaved by half of what he is. They followed him anyway, and they still do.
He found her in a holding cell at a Yëreldai harvesting facility, beaten almost to death by an overseer she would not stop crying in front of. The first words he ever said to her were that she was free. She is the strongest telepath Claret has produced and the reason its liberator is still standing.
Human, Éreldai and Yëreldai in one body. The scientists who examine her say she should not be possible. She is twenty-eight, she has been trained since she was six by one of the greatest warriors who has ever lived, and she has never seen a war. Her parents fought a thousand-year one so that she would not have to.
Two elven peoples, one letter apart in the saying and a very long way apart in everything else. One built a kingdom. One built an empire. Then a rebel from the empire married the queen of the kingdom, which is why the man at the centre of this story is both at once.
Light to the Yëreldai's dark, and their cousins by blood. Ruled from Meroë by a queen whose family was named protector of the gates by the Tower's own maker. Aether cities, standing armies, courts, schools, and a peace so long that most of the people defending it have never seen a war.
Disciplined, patient, and expanding along the chain one world at a time. Their throne was taken by force generations ago, and what sits on it now is not the empire their own laws describe. They keep humans in pens and drain them for blood, and they file the paperwork for it. For thousands of years before the coup, their own creed forbade all of this.
Kultherion's people. They rejected the emperor, took the antidote that ends the blood virus for good, and were granted citizenship and legal protection on Amaterasu after years of political fighting. They walk the streets of Meroë openly and nobody looks twice. To anyone raised on Claret, where every Yëreldai was an occupier and the survivors erased all trace of them, that is an almost unbearable thing to stand next to.
For centuries the war on Claret was mathematically unwinnable. Every human who fell stayed down. Every Yëreldai who fell came back. Then an immortal blacksmith named Vul'koro built something, and the arithmetic changed.
An artificial crystal, implanted near the heart of every human on Claret. It sits there doing nothing for your whole life. When you die it fires once, and your pattern goes somewhere else.
A crystal the size of a delivery truck, standing in a public plaza next to the hospital. It flares. Your body is rebuilt out of nothing, flesh and bone and clothing. You arrive on your knees, gasping, whole. Your corpse dissolves into light where it fell.
Three days off work for a clean fall. Weeks for a bad death. Months if you drowned, or were crushed, or felt yourself age to dust. The body comes back perfect. The mind remembers all of it, every time, and it stacks.
Die too often and too fast and the pattern degrades. Doctors watch for it. Soldiers hide it. One day the gem fires and nothing catches, and that is the end of the arrangement.
Some weapons are made specifically to get around all of it. Those are the ones people are afraid of.
Five human nations share Claret. They were strangers once, united only by the fact that the same people had them in cages. They fought the occupation together and they have kept the peace between themselves ever since, which on Claret is considered the harder of the two achievements. At the table they call themselves The Watchers.
Carved meeting halls under banana-leaf roofs, holographic displays set into the woodwork, taiaha racked beside rune-etched rifles. Hahona's home, and the seat of Te Rūnanga o Te Whenua Tū.
Domes and pagodas built into snow-covered rock. Scholars arguing aetheric flow coefficients in a courtyard between calls to prayer, and mountain troops who can fight at any altitude you name.
White stone, red tile, columns and arches, legions that drill in something very close to a phalanx. Nobody there can explain why the style feels correct to them. It simply always has.
A capital cut straight into canyon walls, monumental faces guarding the entrances, terraced gardens fed by aether pumps. Its empress governs by a single rule: we are gardeners, we cultivate civilization.
Thirty metres of aether-reinforced wall and a jungle pressed against it. From outside you hear a thriving city and see nothing. Its king is the only person who ever leaves, and he sits on the council.
Whatever comes next, they face it together. They said it out loud once, hands stacked in a circle on a beach, the evening everything changed. The word they used was forever.
One family trying to reach each other across a gate that only opens one way. Eleven hours and one ninety-minute finale. The clock in the corner of each card is in-world time, counted from the night everything went wrong. Premiering Fall 2029.
A coup, a burning nursery, and a mother who loses her whole family in one night. A thousand years later, on a world she has never heard of, her son watches two survivors of a very long war finally get married.
The night does not end the way anyone at the beach expected. By morning, a planet that has been at peace for centuries is preparing for a war it was certain was finished.
The first of three sealed strongholds, none of them opened in a thousand years. An army finds out what dying over and over actually does to a person.
Lani wakes somewhere else entirely, in a city where thirty-six peoples share the same street and some of them look exactly like the enemy she was raised on.
A flooded complex beneath a poisoned lake. Underwater, drowning turns out to be the least of the problem.
A temple older than recorded history, where the light itself has been broken, and something very small is extremely good at hunting in the dark.
A narcotic moving through Meroë's nightclubs leads Vice and HSRD somewhere considerably worse than a drug ring.
The three keys turn. What is waiting behind the door is nothing anyone was warned about, in any record, on either world.
Month twenty-four. The army that started this is a fraction of what it was, the way up is the only way left, and there is no reserve.
The investigation reaches the top of the chain of command. Amaterasu has hours, not weeks, to prepare for something it has not faced in millennia.
The attack is everywhere at once. Two generations of the same bloodline stand on the same ground and hold it.
Ninety minutes. A gate opens. Season finale.
Tower's Gate is a third-person aether-punk open world RPG set in the same universe, on the same worlds, built from the same material. The Founder's Alpha has launched and development is happening in the open.