How we rose

Raptoraem is a scar turned sovereign.

Once known as Vergoldetestadt, the Gilded Crown of the Imperium, the city was the empire’s cherished coastal port. A harbor of gold and glass, fed by rich veins of crystal and ore.

But when Imperium engineers drilled too deep into the bedrock, they triggered a cataclysm now classified as the Sundering: a geological breach that fractured the city in half.

Historians call it a foolish resource grab. In truth, it was a blind punch through forbidden strata. Ambitious merchants broke into magick ley-lines that the Imperium had marked off-limits.

The city paid the price.

A pinhole in the fundament ruptured into a vortex, dragging rivers backwards and splitting the coastline open at the seam. For three days, the sea tipped inland, screaming down into a newborn abyss while geysers tore the city’s lungs out.

When the ground finally gave, a star-shaped slab sheared free — a whole district ripped from the mainland and cast adrift into toxic waters.

Solarium kept the sun, the capital, the wealth. The drifted half was designated Refugium and repurposed as a controlled asset: labor pool, waste sink, and buffer zone against the failures Solarium didn’t dare acknowledge. Their Synod blamed fate and the gods.

The truth was simpler: Greed cracked the crown.

And the shards were crushed under Solarium’s boot.

For centuries, Refugium’s people—mocked as Sludgerats—endured strip-mining, taxes, and Ore-Blight. The Synod dubbed their home as little better than an oubliette. With its heretical idols, sunken streets, and skies smogged with acid rains, it was a sanctum of the condemned and forgotten.

 But the Pitbound do not forget.

From the sludgepits rose a people who would not kneel. They sharpened their suffering into steel; their hunger into teeth. And when the Siege at the Vesper Gate came, Solarium’s white banners burned. In their place, Raptoraem raised its own: fangs bared, wings spread.

Sovereign at last.