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“ | An advanced civilization hidden beneath the waves, boasting scientific and technological development far exceeding that of the countries on land. Affected by the stirring of the Seaborn, the entire country has sunken into silence. | ” |
—Loading screen tip in Mizuki & Caerula Arbor |
Aegir, stylized as Ægir[note 1], is a Terran country that encompasses the vast, uncharted ocean from the southern coastlines of Iberia, and it is the homeland of the Aegir race. A super-advanced technocracy, Aegir adopts unique political and social structures that are completely alien to the land-dwellers. Rather than having a unified head of state, each Aegirian city is ruled by a consul and their technocratic officers who assign their social roles to their citizens.
Aegir has always been a highly advanced society for millenia owing to their inheritance of the lost technologies from the "Predecessors". As a matter of fact, the Aegirians have surpassed all the known Terran civilizations in many areas to a point that they are even developing themselves to become an interstellar civilization, and this makes them strongly despise the land dwellers' "primitivism." But around two hundred years ago, an excavation mission accidentally awoke the Seaborn, forcing Aegir to postpone much of their projects to face the threat. To further deteriorate the situation, the cultic Church of the Deep has slowly infiltrated the government and persuaded them to "coexist" with the Seaborn. In the modern era, Aegir has continued to eradicate the Seaborn threat but refused to seek cooperation with the land-dwellers up until recent years.
Throughout most of history, many land-dwellers believed Aegir to be a fictional country. Academic documentation of Aegir only appeared during the 9th Terran century when Aegirian refugees settled around the southern coastlines of Iberia. Known as the "Islanders", their contribution paved the road for Iberia's Golden Age, but after the Profound Silence of 1038, nearly all traces of Aegir vanished, with communication to the country severed by a tsunami. Only a handful of academicians and scholars study Aegir through the few surviving records and manuscripts stored in old libraries.
Aegirian traditions narrate their ancestry originating from the land. As an Ancient race that "descended" upon Terra, the earliest Aegir possessed more animalistic traits such as appendages resembling fins and tentacles, and they mainly settled around rivers and lakes.[1] Legend says that their ancestors received a revelation to move into the ocean, so, a mass migration occurred among the Aegir tribes as they sailed along the rivers to reach the seas and dive below the waters. Upon reaching the abyss, they uncovered ruins of the Predecessors lying at the seabed. These early Aegirians began harnessing the technology hidden in these ruins, venerating them as a "gift from God".[2]
For the next few generations, the Aegir in the ocean evolved to their current humanoid form, experiencing a sudden boom in technological advances while the land-dwellers were still in their tribal and feudal eras. Aegir's superior technology and culture did not appear overnight; they were gradually formed from their earlier painful social experiments, dating back even earlier than the land-dwellers' civilizations. The Aegir have long experienced technological bottlenecks, cultural conflicts, and social transformation, leading to countless conflicts between city-states.[3] After generations of struggles, in the most recent millennia, a sage appeared among the Aegiran city-states to stop their civil wars and establish an alliance that put them under one nationality. The sage also proposed the usage of knowledge and philosophy as a tool of governance instead of violence. His proposal established a guideline for various city-states that molded its present-day technocratic structure.[4]
Since the end of their civil wars and the establishment of a nearly utopian institution, Aegir has experienced unprecedented social changes and acceleration in technological advancement. By the 8th Terran century, Aegir had fully explored most of the oceans and utilized its resources beneath the seabed.[5] Scholars of the Predecessors even uncovered ruins beneath the planet's mantle and brought back crucial relics that boost their technologies and records that enable them to decipher mysteries of the previous civilization.[6] Philosophy becomes prominent in Aegirian culture, and art is strongly encouraged to their citizens. With full preparation, Aegir even proposed plans to develop their civilization into an interstellar one before a sudden crisis forced the people to postpone them.
Around the 9th Terran century, an expedition team of the Predecessor ruins inside the mantle discovered an untouched interior part, the "heart" of the Aegrian civilization. The expedition turned dangerous and the leader of the team, Mártus, disappeared during the venture. The expedition was later deemed a failure in public records. However, Maritumus had actually survived and discovered a hibernating Leviathan, and he received revelations about the destruction of the Predecessors.[7] Since then, Mártus became the spiritual leader of the "Church of the Deep" who introduced his philosophy to his followers while quietly bringing the Seaborn into Aegrian cities in the name of "nourishing the kin."
In the beginning, Aegir did not pay attention to the Seaborn but treated them as mere invasive "kelp-farm pests." But within a few months, these early Seaborn evolved drastically and became a hazard to Aegirian defenses. The sudden appearance of the Seaborn forced the Aegirians to reevaluate their strategies by identifying them as a whole new marine species who are on par with humans.[8] There had been proposals to handle the Seaborn, including a radical one that suggested bio-engineering, but many of them were quickly rejected which they feared would usurp their long-praised humanistic values. As the situation deteriorated, the Aegirian Circitores Marinus suffered their first severe defeat since the last few centuries. In the meantime, the ever-increasing pressure due to the Seaborn crisis had caused the first suicide case since the last few millennia.[9] Some Aegirians eventually fled to the surface world to seek help and conduct research, including those following Breogan in the year 913 who later settled in Iberia as the first Islanders. Much of their insight and researches on land did prove crucial information in repelling the Seaborn, including a theory of the Feranmut origin of the Seaborn, but they did not receive full attention in resolving the crisis.
In the 1080s, after two centuries of debate, the Aegirian consuls finally gave the green light to produce bio-engineered weapons, one of which being the Abyssal Hunter project, a legion of Aegir-Seaborn hybrid supersoldiers.[6] The preparation lasted until the year 1095 when Aegir managed to identify a Leviathan named Ishar-mla and unleashed its entire Abyssal Hunters force to destroy It. However, Aegir underestimated the number of the Leviathans, and the battle resulted in the total annihilation of the Abyssal Hunters despite succeeding in killing Ishar-mla.[10][11] Given its severe casualties, Aegir quickly shut down the Abyssal Hunter project and shifted towards other methods in repelling the Seaborn.
The ever-accelerating adaptation rate of the Seaborn forced Aegir to take even more extreme measures. Nevertheless, Aegir did not give up hope to reestablish communication with the land even after the devastating Profound Silence of 1038. In 1100, the revived signal from the Eye of Iberia in Gran Faro prompted Aegir to initiate the "Waterway Program," a campaign to clear off the Seaborn nests infesting the coastline and end their harassment once and for all. With the "waterway" cleared, Aegir broadcasted a worldwide message to the entire planet about the upcoming threats. As a result, some of the nations' long-abandoned projects were revived, such as an expedition to the unexplored hemisphere of Terra.
A commander of the Ægirian Legion with a gladius
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