Britannia

FLUMINA CEILI! Rivers in the sky blessed by Aropa and Brittania has been given the permission to use them with their etherium powered skyships.

Britannian cities are tall because Etherium made flight and transport cheap and the sky currents made height useful. Rank shows the ordinary way. Your address, your floor, who you know on the floor above. The old houses that won the civil wars hold the top floors. The ministries sit in the middle. Frysian conscripts sleep in the basement barracks and take the service lift, and nobody in the building finds that strange.

Britannia has not sent its own sons to a front in a generation. It sends Frysians working off a debt, Olympians whose land it took three years ago, and Arcadians who believe the war is holy. The unit leader is always Britannian. The recruits shout the empire's word before every mission. We elevate, Flumina Ceili!

The intelligence service holds more power than the fleet, and its files run deeper than any minister's memory. The service once took a nation apart without firing the first shot.

Three things Britannia does not explain. Where the Etherium comes from. What burned for three days at a facility thirty years ago. And why an empire that already controls everything keeps drilling at the edges of the world, like it is looking for a way out.