Nanosuns
This may or may not be incorporated into a future story, but nonetheless I think it's a good bit of worldbuilding. "Nanosun" is a placeholder. I'm looking for something more Anglish.
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Pilgrims' Rest was known as the oasis of the Outer Belt, the last dwarf planet with a working nanosun, a tiny artificial star orbiting the planet, providing not only enough light and heat to give us a perpetual spring, but a protective magnetosphere to keep our atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind from our distant natural sun.
It stood as a monument to ancient Claravian engineering, as well as ancient Claravian greed. There were once dozens of these colossal orbital fusion reactors dotted across the Outer Belt, making the dwarf planets on the frontier of interstellar space far more hospitable than they are today. The Sunwrights, the ancient clerics of the Bright Way that built and maintained these nanosuns, imposed onerous tithes on their client worlds. They were quick to deprive them of heat and light when they couldn't pay.
The other nanosuns were destroyed during the War of Dissolution, most by the Partisans, militant secularists who wanted to extirpate the Bright Way entirely, the rest by the Preservationists, the ones fighting to maintain the Bright Way's economic grip on the entire star system, and who, when defeat was all but certain, set about destroying as much of their infrastructure as possible in a petty dying tantrum.
This sun alone survived the war, defended against both sides by the Pious Dissolutionists, a small but determined group of religious traditionalists fighting to return the soul the Bright Way after thirty three millennia squandered in the name of greed.
The sun continued protecting our little planet for nearly thirty three millennia more, maintained by a succession of clerics who upheld this greatest expression of a hearthkeeper's duity to provide physical and spiritual light and warmth to all around her.
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Pilgrims' Rest was known as the oasis of the Outer Belt, the last dwarf planet with a working nanosun, a tiny artificial star orbiting the planet, providing not only enough light and heat to give us a perpetual spring, but a protective magnetosphere to keep our atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind from our distant natural sun.
It stood as a monument to ancient Claravian engineering, as well as ancient Claravian greed. There were once dozens of these colossal orbital fusion reactors dotted across the Outer Belt, making the dwarf planets on the frontier of interstellar space far more hospitable than they are today. The Sunwrights, the ancient clerics of the Bright Way that built and maintained these nanosuns, imposed onerous tithes on their client worlds. They were quick to deprive them of heat and light when they couldn't pay.
The other nanosuns were destroyed during the War of Dissolution, most by the Partisans, militant secularists who wanted to extirpate the Bright Way entirely, the rest by the Preservationists, the ones fighting to maintain the Bright Way's economic grip on the entire star system, and who, when defeat was all but certain, set about destroying as much of their infrastructure as possible in a petty dying tantrum.
This sun alone survived the war, defended against both sides by the Pious Dissolutionists, a small but determined group of religious traditionalists fighting to return the soul the Bright Way after thirty three millennia squandered in the name of greed.
The sun continued protecting our little planet for nearly thirty three millennia more, maintained by a succession of clerics who upheld this greatest expression of a hearthkeeper's duity to provide physical and spiritual light and warmth to all around her.