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Five lives expose the older dangers behind Sothera's bright frontiers

Sothera Side Routes

Five journeys expose Sothera’s deeper wounds: a soldier’s guilt, a life chosen on Evendo, Kavaron’s fatal hunger, the horror inside Uthros and an Eldrazi device cutting backward through time.

Why this story matters

The route in brief

The Sothera system is too large to understand from the Seriema alone. Its wars pass through soldiers, workers, scientists, fugitives and beings whose lives may never intersect with Sami's crew. These routes treat the setting's distant worlds and stations as parts of the same history rather than decorative stops beyond the central chase.

Each journey begins with an institution assigning value. The Monasteriat turns trauma into pilgrimage, an Eumidian brood assigns a life function, the Kav Memorial Navy protects every fragment of home, Solidbodies Research prices favours and the Drix define containment as a hunter's duty. The protagonists become visible where those systems stop explaining what survival should mean.

Together the stories trace the aftermath of the Edge's ancient war. Alien code hides in a mechan, impossible architecture consumes a Kav squad, a world-shaping corpse waits inside Uthros and an Eldrazi device wounds the Weft. The largest threat is not always the ancient power itself; often it is the familiar desire that gives that power a usable hand.

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Story Chapters

  1. Pilgrim to Point Prime

    Elsewhere in Sothera, Reen's pilgrimage exposes the human cost hidden beneath the Monoist-Summist war.

    Squad Captain Reen boards Too Much Happiness at Infinite Guideline under a temporary peace, carrying the inked ledger of everyone lost or killed through her service. She is meant to seek stillness at Point Prime after the atrocity on Joska. The pilgrimage resembles care until it becomes clear that the Monasteriat expects to return her to combat afterward.

    The mechan captain has visited the Wurmwall and carries an alien change inside its memory. Reen investigates, fearing a Palatinate weapon. Sunstar passengers discover her identity at the same moment that news from Joska ends the truce. Her armour replaces uncertainty with battle chemistry, and three more deaths join the account she has been trying to understand.

    Too Much Happiness asks whether the marks count victims or enemies. Reen answers that they are both. As Point Prime fills the viewport, she imagines the separate lines becoming one field of darkness. The stillness she finds is not innocence; it is the terrible calm of knowing the ledger will continue unless the institutions around her change.

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  2. The Pod on Evendo

    Kadrik's rescue of a human stranger turns an assigned failure into the first step toward a self-chosen Eumidian life.

    On Evendo, Kadrik searches for dormant Eumidian pods and fails to care about the task they were hatched to perform. Believing the brood plans to recycle them, they flee into the half-thawed wilderness. A Kav stasis pod interrupts the escape. Inside is Noz, a Pinnacle programmer captured years earlier and forgotten while political promises replaced the conflict that trapped him.

    A huge predator claims the pod. Kadrik initially leaves, then returns because the stranger has become a person rather than salvage. Improvised combat costs another fungal foot but saves Noz long enough for the enclave to restore him. The rescue also brings warning of Kav military preparations that may threaten Evendo's terrasymbiosis.

    Noz wants to return to his family and to the drawing he pursued outside his profession. He tells Kadrik that loving a task one was not made for is possible. After his departure, the Eumidian uses the remaining pencil to draw. Against a system full of imposed destinies, the small mark is a declaration that adaptation can belong to an individual too.

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  3. The Node in the Dark

    Farakatolar's memorial recovery mission enters an ancient trap that makes devotion to Kavaron indistinguishable from extraction.

    A fragment of Kavaron drifts toward the Wurmwall with a possible memorial vault inside it. Sergeant Farakatolar leads the mission because the Kav cannot afford to lose more of their broken world. Drilling reveals a white structure too curved for Kav construction and too resistant to instruments to classify. At its centre waits a blue orb that seems valuable enough to justify the voyage.

    Rooms seal, the artifact moves and each member of the squad meets a different impossible death. Farakatolar keeps leading forward because retreat would make the sacrifices meaningless. That logic is the structure's sharpest weapon. It turns the need to honour the dead into permission to risk whoever remains.

    She reaches into the node and discovers that its surface does not separate outside from inside. Injury, blood loss and crushing pressure only intensify her determination to claim it for Kavaron. When her fist finally closes, nothing is left. The mission repeats the homeworld's history on a smaller scale: preservation destroyed by the extraction meant to secure it.

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  4. The Doors of Uthros

    Geldan descends into Uthros to clear a debt and finds an ancient presence that converts her hunger for freedom into surrender.

    Solidbodies Research sends Geldan and Rezint into a hidden Illvoi installation near Uthros's core. Reaching a sealed door is supposed to transmit enough information to clear the latest layer of favour-debt. Pressure suits, storm currents and corporate secrecy make the route dangerous, but Geldan has spent a life turning beauty and risk into objects somebody else can sell.

    The deeper corridors awaken a pull. Rezint deciphers warnings about a deity or world-eater and urges retreat. Geldan instead decides that the mission's modest reward can never make her free. She disconnects the instruments so the discovery beyond the door will belong to her, not the people who purchased her labour.

    The chamber contains a titan's corpse or surviving influence, reality-bending and intimate enough to wear the shape of her fears. Geldan interprets horror as unique value and kneels, willing to become material for its design. The prize ends her debt by erasing the distinction between owner and owned.

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  5. Scar in the Weft

    Ghan follows an Eldrazi-tainted artifact through a damaged timeline and chooses to save its many victims instead of restoring the partner he lost.

    Drix wefthunter Ghan traces a wound from abandoned Cail Station to Kesori Umberlin. She uses an alien device to reach backward toward her sister Errit, who died when an evacuation favoured expensive machinery over ordinary residents. Each jump drains Kesori, harms bystanders and cuts the Weft wider. Grief has found a tool designed to make restraint feel like betrayal.

    Inside the Weft, Ghan can steer the artifact toward the past. He sees chances to warn Kesori, save Cail and even approach the recent moment when his own partner Sorothir still lived. That final possibility is the device's most precise temptation. Ghan refuses it because one restored love would consume the power needed to prevent many deaths.

    He reaches Kesori weeks earlier, gives her access to Jadnis and changes the present enough for Cail's injustice to be investigated before catastrophe. The artifact is severed and the scar sealed. The next warning concerns an emerging Kav protobeing named Tannuk, linking the private hunt to the Seriema's route and showing that Sothera's ancient war has not finished producing consequences.

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