A Brief Introduction

Welcome to Silicon, Sorcery, and Scales. While it would be impossible to sum up everything about the setting in one article, this should serve as an adequate primer if you're feeling a little lost.

In the Beginning

Magic exists. It is a fundamental force of the universe, just like electromagnetism or gravity. Unlike those, which work solely on mathematical physical rules, magic works on symbolism: like creates like. Symbolize fire in a sufficiently rigorous manner, provide creative force, and you get fire. This process is not perfectly efficient: reality does not enjoy paracausal effects, and will typically rebound in a process called backlash.

Symbolism exists outside of animal perception; the universe represents itself. Similar to how math is discovered rather than invented, certain kinds of naturally-occurring magic exist without having to be created by intelligent life. The cast-off energy of life itself seeps into the ground, pooling into channels called ley lines. Spare thoughts and ideas from sophonts agglomerate into creatures, dreams, oddities, and nightmares. Something with a not-quite-human shape stalks campers in the woods. A jersey devil appears in sulfurous smoke and steals someone's cell phone. A fae barters for a name.

Some millions of years ago, a small evolutionary branch of pseudo-reptiles evolved innate magic. This common ancestor would eventually evolve into the myriad species of dragons that exist today. The proto-simians that would eventually become humans never develop innate magic, but instead develop intelligence sufficient to manipulate it on their own.

Fifty Thousand Years Ago

Two nameless precursor civilizations have a war, many thousands of lightyears away from Earth. One side has forgone biology for synthetic form and seeks to forcibly remake the universe in their image. The other uses magic to make its dreams of galactic empire come true. These two empires collide, and the latter loses. In their defeat, they construct and deploy a superweapon, a drop of pure magical intent. All civilization within the galaxy, and perhaps beyond, instantaneously vanishes without a trace. There are no ruins, no fossils, nothing. An unknown number of species are simply deleted from history and time. Polluted oceans are wiped clean, orbital habitats no longer twinkle in the night sky, mines are filled in, and the closest evolutionary relatives of annihilated civilizations slowly start to fill the void.

Magic does not particularly enjoy being used for universal omnicide. The backlash from this abuse of reality is so extreme that it triggers a vacuum collapse in magic itself. This is not a second omnicide, but it fundamentally changes magic forever. On the inside of the expanding bubble, magic doesn't flow quite as easily or as intuitively. This monstrosity will never occur again, but neither will the great magical wonders of the ancients. The collapse does not annihilate existing magical constructs— just prevents their recreation. Bits and pieces of old magic remain, created after the omnicide by young civilizations before being hit by the vacuum collapse. These are largely considered curiosities rather than assets, since exploiting them is difficult, unpredictable, and extraordinarily dangerous.

The collapse wavefront passes through Sol in 912 AD.

On Earth

Human civilization proceeds more or less normally up until approximately 720 AD. Magic is not well-understood, but wizards, shamans, witches, druids, sorcerers, and priests ply the trade regardless. Around 720 AD, the Maya people of Mesoamerica make a quantum leap in their understanding of magic, radiating outwards from Teotihuacan. The city becomes a city-state, then an imperial power: the Mayan Empire. In a hundred years, the Empire conquers most of the Americas, who are mostly powerless to resist high sorcery fueled by the sacrifice of conquered populations.

But the candle that burns bright burns quickly. Revolts and uprisings begin to threaten the stability of the Empire. Slaves are no longer able to be procured; the magical constructs that keep society running stutter and die as the blood stops flowing. In a last-ditch attempt to regain control, the Mayan Empire deploys thaumonuclear devices on rebel strongholds. Rebels retaliate with their own. In a day, three hundred million people die in nuclear fire. In the following years, radioactive and magical fallout along with the collapse of society will kill a hundred million more.

The rest of the world has a particularly cold winter due to the ash in the air.

The American continents are not safe for human habitation: the shades of human cruelty prey upon anything they can get their claws into. Just when it seems like society might recover, the vacuum collapse hits. Overnight, the spellcraft and thaumaturgy that society had been constructed around ceases to function. By 950 AD, barely a million people survive in North America. The fate of South America remains unknown for centuries.

Medieval History

The rest of the world keeps chugging along, blissfully unaware of the apocalypse that happened one continent over. By luck, or lack thereof, nobody else figures out the same "miracle" that was discovered in Teotihuacan; society remains mostly mundane. And when the vacuum collapse passes through Sol in 912 AD, the entire world remains none the wiser, save for a few dozen thaumaturges surviving in the Americas.

Things begin to change in 1041 AD. Hakon Gunnarson, son of a Norse slavewoman, befriends an injured dragon, splinting and healing its broken wing, an otherwise fatal injury for a dragon. In the process, he realizes that the dragon is an intelligent being like himself, capable of understanding his own speech and expressing its own thoughts in turn, even through a massive language barrier. This culminates in the two of them accidentally discovering bonding, a process by which a seed of a dragon's natural magic is shared with the human body.

Bonding changes the world. Dragons who bond suddenly become capable of advanced cognition, tool use, and fine motor control like any human, far beyond their natural capabilities. Humans gain a dragon's senses and magical protection from heat and cold, along with the ability to actually perceive the speech of their scaly friends. More importantly, both gain the ability to shapeshift. A bonded dragon can shift into human form at will, and vice-versa for bonded humans. And bonding can be repeated, and inherited— a child, human or dragon, with one bonded parent will be born as a draconic, a member of a merged human/dragon species capable of shapeshifting between the two from birth.

Within the decade, the North Sea Empire unifies the British Isles and Scandinavia. The new empire has funny thoughts about consent of the governed, and about the role of the old class system. The new king, Hakon I, has built his political power base off of ending serfdom and slavery, and off of granting those people wings and fire. His partner, the wildborn dragon Nattskala Karleiker, does much the same for wild dragons. The two species are joined, and flourish.

Early explorers are carried by their wings to North America, where they encounter a haunted landscape scorched by massive, glassy craters. Survivors of the nuclear apocalypse still persist, and happily take on wings and scales of their own, eventually joining with the North Sea Empire. While much of the native culture has been annihilated, either intentionally by the dead Mayan Empire, a nuclear holocaust, or two hundred years of desperate survival in a wasteland, various fragments remain, and their integration into the early North Sea Empire remains a cultural touchstone for hundreds of years.

The rest of Europe, particularly the Church, is quite upset about this development. The existence of a pagan-led state that consorted with dragons leads to a crusade to put a stop to all that, which fails miserably when a crusader army has the world's first experience with airmobile draconic infantry outside of Calais. The North Sea Empire enters a golden age of prosperity, while mainland European powers squabble with themselves, aided by draconic mercenaries that can be hired for the right price.

Dragons Elsewhere

Other cultures have different opinions on dragons and bonding. Mainland Europe's oppositional stance renders them a backwater, and mostly irrelevant in global ongoings for centuries besides their uncanny ability to start wars. By and large, most of the non-Abrahamic world embraces bonding, or at least allows some degree of it, within a few decades of its discovery. Of particular note are Southeast Asia and Polynesia, which already had some cooperative relationships with wild dragons but failed to chance upon bonding; these areas become fully draconic within years.

By the time of the industrial revolution, about a fifth of the global population is draconic. This fraction will only continue to increase over time.

Modernity, Magic, and Gods

By the time the space age rolls around in the late 1600's and early 1700's, the North Sea Empire has been the Northern Union for two hundred years, and the world can be largely divided into three parts. The first is the left-aligned, draconic nations of the Pacific Defense Treaty, or PDT. The second is the capitalist, humanity-first nations of the Essentialist Bloc, or E-Bloc. The third is everyone else— vaguely social-democrat nations with mixed populations, led by the African Federation.

North America has been rendered habitable. The last of the ancient Mayan weapons, obelisks hundreds of meters tall and set to kill anything in their range, was felled in 1635 by titanic railway guns. Industry reigns supreme over old magic, and dragonfire and the rifle defeat eldritch monstrosities in the woods with ease. South America remains uninhabited, but the safe border is slowly pushed south, meter by painstaking meter.

While technology progresses on similar paths to what you might expect, magic does not. The space race of the 1690s and 1700's coincides with the discovery of the Unified Theory of Thaumaturgy, a mathematical method of expressing the underlying structures that make magic function. The shift from wise elders in traditional robes to middle-aged scientists with labcoats is already underway at this point, but the Unified Theory puts the nail in the coffin. Magic is no longer just an art, but also a science. Great advances are developed: aetheric resonators to convert electrical current to magical potential, counter-control patterns to ensure the inviolability of the mind, interplanetary teleportation to transfer astronauts to far-flung outposts, regenerative medicine to cure any physical trauma, and more.

This orientation of geopolitics is not to last, though. The E-Bloc collapses for economic reasons shortly after winning the race to the moon, and the largest member, China, seals itself off from the outside world with a massive magical construct: the Blurry Wall. The rest of the world continues on. African-style social democracy and international cooperation seems like the future; idiot newspaper columnists declare the End Of History.

History does not end, of course. Scientists working on high-energy thaumaturgy discover the nature of divinity: a god is not a being with independent will, nor did they create anything. A god is simply what happens when enough sapient beings believe in one. A method of creating a synthetic deity is developed, and used to prove the theory, to as much celebration as hatred.

Post-Cairo

In 1720, an apocalyptic sect of Christianity called the Church of Christ Ascendant sacrifices several hundred of its members to create a synthetic deity in downtown Cairo to carry out their prophesied apocalypse. The entity kills twenty thousand people, survives three nukes, and is only killed by an experimental magic-annihilating weapon after a days-long rampage.

The international community understandably panics, and coalesces around the United Nations. Under the auspices of the United Nations Special Operations Command (UNSOC), international task forces suppress synthetic deity cults. Another Cairo Incident doesn't happen. Idiot columnists declare the End Of History another time: international cooperation and democratization will continue forever.

For a time, international cooperation holds. The Northern Union builds a space launch rail; the African Federation constructs a lunar station. Nearly fifty countries turn their spare plutonium into fuel for a nuclear pulse rocket to Proxima Centauri. A half-dozen permanent outposts spring up around the Solar System. Extraterrestrial life is found on Ganymede, and shortly afterwards almost anywhere with liquid water. Simple life, no more than bacteria. Europa is an exception: it has microscopic crabs.

In 1750, the Blurry Wall collapses, and China is thrust out of its long isolation. It is the first in a series of dominoes that will lead to the Transhuman War.

Transhumanism and Essentialism

Ernest Hodgson, working at the university of New Trondheim, discovers the mathematical underpinnings of shapeshifting magic in 1755. For the first time, thaumaturgy can be used to manipulate shapeshifting. Magically-enabled bioengineering becomes widespread among draconic populations, and is rapidly adopted by PDT militaries, who realize that they can use these techniques to give their personnel multiple alternate forms, instead of just a single human and single dragon form. Ordinary people begin to significantly modify the bodies they were born with, for both aesthetic and functional reasons.

The reaction to this is extreme. Prior to Hodgson's discovery, essentialism (that is, opposition to shapeshifting, bioconservatism, human-first ideologies, etc.) was largely considered a fading ideology that would fall to demographic shifts, given enough time. Conversion only goes in one direction, after all, and regret rates are effectively zero. Rather than dying out, essentialism surges with reactionary sentiment: the shapeshifters are abandoning what little humanity they have left.

Within three years, fascist and essentialist governments form the Organization for Defense and Integrity, or ODI, to oppose the Pacific Defense Treaty nations. The largest players are India, Russia, and China; Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Mongolia participate but will rapidly find themselves having little say in matters.

The Transhuman War

The Transhuman War begins in 1760 when the Sons of the Atom, a transhuman-supremacist terrorist group, detonates a small nuclear device in Saigon. Vietnam, a member of ODI, immediately blames the PDT and the Northern Union specifically. ODI invades the Visayas, a PDT member, within a week.

The war lasts for eight years. Forty million people die. Practically any border that PDT and ODI share is devastated by war. New technologies and magics are developed and used: engineered combat dragons, powered exoskeletons, living hypersonic aircraft, amalgam shapeshifters, drone swarms, orbital bombardment, supercavitating hydrofoils, and many more. The African Federation cannot keep itself uninvolved after ODI commits atrocities in Southeast Asia in 1766, and adds its own substantial military force to the PDT's side of the war.

The war ends in 1768. The victor is transhumanism and socialism, not the live-and-let-live social-democrat attitudes of the African Federation. The wake of the war sees the most stalwart opponents of the future killed in combat, assassinated by partisans, or imprisoned for crimes against sapients in post-war trials.

The Long Peace and Digital Immortality

The Transhuman War is the last industrial armed conflict fought on Earth. The peace that follows lasts for just over two hundred years. Transhumanity develops uploading, based on their knowledge of mind transfer granted by their understanding of shapeshifting. Minds can be digitized losslessly, at the cost of destroying the organic brain. At first, uploading is a tough bargain to make for immortality. Good simulations do not exist, and uploads are limited to mechanical forms.

In time, this changes. The development of spinglass, a spintronic computing substrate, miniaturizes minds, allowing them to fit inside of a normal skull instead of bulky dedicated optical servers. Bioreplicas allow uploads to to return to their original bodies, or at least near-perfect facsimiles thereof. Improvements to thaumic processing allow them to perform magic and shapeshift despite their inorganic minds. Mechanical forms improve; synthmuscle replaces servos. Uploading becomes quicker, safer, and easier. Posthumans begin to outnumber transhumans. Pure baseline humans are all but forgotten, a historical relic on the journey to posthumanity.

And during all this, life continues to improve. Automation is increasingly directed at reducing the hours people work rather than increasing profit. More nations slowly transition to left-wing economies. Scarcity slowly ebbs away— not quite gone, but its sun is setting. Together, the species that was once human, and also was once dragon, explores Sol. Life flourishes; orbital habitats sparkle in the night sky of eight different planets. A half-dozen exoplanetary colonies become nations in their own right under the auspices of the United Nations.

In time, thaumaturgy is coerced into more exotic violations of physical laws: warp-field generators sacrifice high-temperature plasma to twist spacetime, resulting in swathes of new technology. Reactionless drives, shields, artificial gravity, and eventually, faster-than-light travel.

Life from Sol breaches the lightspeed barrier for the first time in 1915, and the people of Earth reach for the stars. Dozens of planets are explored and colonized in decades, and the Interstellar Union, or IU, forms to establish a shared system of governance between systems. It rapidly grows to become the new shared interstellar government of posthumanity.

First Contact

The Rimward Agreement makes first contact with posthumans in Gamma Leonis in 1969. Unfortunately, the Agreement is a roving nation of spacefaring pirate clans, and they make first contact to extort the tiny colony of Misthaven for free labor and supplies. Misthaven refuses; ships in the outer system immediately flee to Sol.

The Interstellar Union's response is panic. There is no spacefaring military; the most heavily-armed FTL-capable vessel in all of Union space is a mining ship with a cargo hold full of rock-cracker nukes. Practically all of the Union's core industrial systems of Sol, Tau Ceti, Lalande, and Ran are converted to manufacture war materiel.

The war goes poorly for the Union. Even a single Agreement vessel is found to be quite capable of annihilating hundreds of Union warships, but Union warships are not crewed by biological life. Uploads do not die when their bodies are destroyed; backups and last-second mind transfers mean that while the Union suffers incredible materiel losses, they suffer no casualties.

Eventually, the Agreement makes a mistake. They attempt to board a Union vessel, and discover that in close-quarters combat where the high-energy weapons of a starship cannot be brought to bear, they are hopelessly outmatched by mechanical warforms worn by uploads. The Union captures its first examples of alien technology, and rapidly incorporates the improvements into its own designs.

Once Union warships stand toe-to-toe with Agreement ships, the war ends in short order. The might of post-scarcity industry crushes the offending pirate clans, and a negotiated peace is established with the Agreement.

Second Contacts

While the Union's introduction to the galaxy is tense, their other neighbors are much less violent. In short order, they establish contact and friendly relations with the Seddu and Ivu'alek, their closest interstellar neighbors. Post-scarcity trade in luxuries becomes the new interstellar commerce. Neither of the Union's new friends are particularly interested in uploading on a societal level, but they are certainly not hostile to it.

The Union's fourth contact is with the Cacren, who are in their own information era, riddled with capitalism and crippling structural issues. The Union's attempt to intervene in Cacren politics goes awry, and their society fragments. Several billion integrate with the Union and leave their homeworld; the remainder reject post-scarcity, developing a new religion and severing contact with alien life entirely.

Council and Confederacy

The Orion Council is discovered to be the IU's largest and most distant neighbor. A massive, multi-species polity, it immediately severs contact when it learns that the IU consists primarily of uploads. This causes substantial amounts of confusion until a Union exploration vessel makes contact with expats from the Interspecies Confederacy. The Confederacy is the largest known interstellar power in the galaxy, and takes offense to machine intelligence, uploads in particular. Fortunately, they are quite distant from Sol, but unfortunately, they are currently in a border dispute with the Orion Council. The Council refuses further contact with the Union to avoid providing a cassus belli for the Confederacy to broaden the border conflict into a full-scale war.

But the Council's position is untenable in the long run: they are losing their border conflict, and the expansionist Confederacy will eventually go for their core worlds. Going to a full war footing is untenable, as doing so would provoke more attention from the Confederacy, and would be difficult to pull off domestically— the Council is only losing mostly-unpopulated border systems, and there's no will to fling more lives into the fire. As such, the Council reestablishes contact, and asks the Union for military aid.

The Union is confused. The Council is over a thousand times their size— what could they possibly offer? But the Council needs personnel. The border war can be won, but not without a cost of lives, and uploads can pay that without blinking. Eventually, the Union accepts. While the Council is not post-scarcity, the Confederacy is worse, and there is substantial domestic pressure in the Union to do something about the imperialist Confederacy. By 2260, fleets of Interstellar Union Space Corps warships begin making the long trip to the conflict, and the Union's participation in the Orion Conflict begins.