THE CULL
☠ BIOHAZARD PROTOCOL IN EFFECT – REMOVAL OF NETHERKIN BLOOD MATTER IS MANDATORY
✖ COMPENSATION IS ISSUED UPON PROOF OF KILL – NO EXCEPTIONS
⸸ DO NOT APPROACH RESIDUAL HUMMING IN SEALED TUNNELS
☠ BIOHAZARD PROTOCOL IN EFFECT – REMOVAL OF NETHERKIN BLOOD MATTER IS MANDATORY ✖ COMPENSATION IS ISSUED UPON PROOF OF KILL – NO EXCEPTIONS ⸸ DO NOT APPROACH RESIDUAL HUMMING IN SEALED TUNNELS
Mostly consistent, but there are three lore problems:
“Sovereign extraction” is wrong because Refugium was not sovereign. Use Solarian extraction or colonial extraction.
Mercenaries did not merely become “Strutlord militias.” The mercenary companies and private militias enriched by the Cull later rebranded themselves as Strutlords.
Children were not restricted to aftermath work. They retrieved proof of kill, sorted corpses, served as bait, carried explosives, and imitated Netherkin songlines to lure survivors out.
Corrected version:
I. What the Cull Actually Was
The Synod calls the Cull a “defensive action.”
It wasn’t.
The Cull was industrial clearance, plain and simple.
When Solarian mining expansion violated the old tunnel treaties, resistant Netherkin communities were reclassified as vermin populations. From there, the arithmetic was simple: whichever mercenary company or private militia “cleansed” a tunnel could claim its riches.
Ore rights. Water rights. Throughput control.
An infestation designation gave the Synod legal pretext to seize a tunnel, lock it down, void its existing treaties, and introduce bonded labor under containment authority. It allowed Solarium to accelerate colonial extraction while bypassing negotiation with the Netherkin and Refugium’s local powers.
The old guard signed off because they received their cut: resources, leverage, and deniable force.
At street level, mercenary companies and private militias were contracted to clear the lower Pit. The survivors emerged armed, wealthy, and entrenched. Within a generation, many had rebranded themselves as something more respectable than butchers:
Strutlords.
Some of the same names ruling the Straits today still trace their legitimacy to what Solarian histories call “Cull Heroism.”
The Cull did not merely destroy the Netherkin.
It built a class structure.
It laid the foundations of the Strutlords and fed the smuggling, salvage, and contraband networks that became Refugium’s black-market economy.
II. How the Cull Was Run
Armed adults conducted the main assaults: breaching breeding halls, torching settlements, driving Netherkin from the principal caverns, and setting charges beneath occupied tunnels.
But the spaces below were too narrow, unstable, or contaminated for armored soldiers.
So the Synod sent children.
Small bodies could enter bleed tunnels, vent slits, cracked brood chambers, and half-collapsed seams. Children retrieved Netherkin bones as proof of kill. They sifted carcasses from ore, stripped the dead for usable parts, and crawled through slag thick with toxic vapors.
Others were used more directly.
The youngest served as bait. Older children carried satchels of powder into the Drill-and-Blast tunnels. Those with the necessary voices were trained as Echo Lures, taught to imitate Netherkin songlines and call survivors out of hiding.
Children like Leopold Lang and Erik Mordiger were conscripted into this work. On paper, they were “youth auxiliaries” performing civic duty.
In practice, they were bait, disposal labor, and expendable weapons.
Most of them died.
After the Cull ended, the Synod quietly buried records on the state-sanctioned use of children from official history. But the Pitbound who lived it still remember the pay-chits, the smell of burning bones, and the way the tunnels trembled when the Netherkin sang.
III. Political Legacy
The Cull left behind three lasting scars:
1.Solarium Wealth
Legal cover for seizure of vast subsurface territory.
Formalized extraction monopolies.
Locked Raptoream into economic dependence.
2. Birth of Strutlord Power
Cull-era mercenary outfits professionalized and later branded themselves as protectors, then “stability brokers,” then Strutlords.
Theirs is a legitimacy built on mass killing and child labor. Shame they don’t advertise that part.
3. Ongoing Black-Market Economy
Netherkin relics (bioluminescent cartilage, ore-veined teeth, crystallized blood) are still sold in Raptoream as charms, poisons, luxury art, and magickal fetishes.
The demand never stopped. It just moved underground with the Half-Deep.
☠ GUILD NOTICE: CHILD LOSS IS NOT BILLABLE
✖ PROPERTY RIGHTS FOLLOW PURGE RIGHTS
⸸ UNLICENSED RELIC TRADE IS AN ACT OF SEDITION
☠ GUILD NOTICE: CHILD LOSS IS NOT BILLABLE ✖ PROPERTY RIGHTS FOLLOW PURGE RIGHTS ⸸ UNLICENSED RELIC TRADE IS AN ACT OF SEDITION
Child Labor Roles in the Cull
Compiled from bounty ledgers, tunnel reports, and post-action testimony.
Accuracy not guaranteed.
