Solmera

What was Solmera?

Solmera, “the Vieja Solmera”, is another galaxy. It was the ancestral home of the civilisation that now lives in the Aurin system. Humans and allied species lived there together, integrated into a single society.

The archive records how it ended, and little else. Its political structure, its worlds and the exact length of the collapse are not on record.

Why did they leave it?

Because its tutelary star entered its terminal phase: it was dying. The answer was the Expedición Aura, a plan to escape and find another home. It came down to two things:

• Building the Flota Aura, a megafleet of ark ships, mobile shipyards and stellar refineries.
• Crossing the intergalactic void in it, the space that separates galaxies.

That voyage, the Éxodo, took centuries of flight. It ended in Aurin, in the Parhelion galaxy.

What is left of it?

Not much. This is what remains:

• Cultural memory. By Year 47 E.A. (the present, in the settlers’ calendar) the first generation that never saw Solmera has grown up.
• The currency. Every payment in Aurin carries the lost galaxy’s name: Solmera Credits, CRS, “creds” to nearly everyone. It is the last accounting system that neither faction bothered to change. Neither wanted to be the first to admit that the past no longer matters. More in Solmera Credits.
• A handful of relics. Among the Grade V materials, the unique ones that can be neither mined nor made, there is a Reliquia de Solmera.
• A piece of a name. The Flota’s astronomers classified the bodies of Aurin by the ending of each name, in the Registro Aura. The ending for candidate worlds with a biosphere is -era, the same as in Solmera. So Ithera carries the name of the lost home written into its data sheet.
• A holiday. Every year the Zenith celebrate the Día del Primer Salto, the anniversary of the departure from Solmera, with parades of machinery.

What does each side make of its end?

The settlers split into two sides in the war of Year 1. That war can be told as an argument about Solmera. Both sides look at the same ending and see opposite things.

The Zenith see it as a lesson to be corrected. Never again depend on a single system, a single body or a single generation of technology. To them, Solmera died because no one wanted to be the first to speak the uncomfortable truth. Their final aim is to surpass it in everything it was.

They openly despise the Nadir. The dossier on the factions records what they call them:

“The ones who stood watching their sun go out for fear of touching the switch.”

The Zenith, on the Nadir

The Nadir read the same ending the other way round: growth without limit until collapse. They honour Solmera’s memory by recycling and conserving, without repeating the appetite that hollowed it out. Their final victory would be for Aurin never to become a new Solmera. They see the Zenith as people who mistake trauma for permission. Permission to do the same thing again, faster.