In Angles Obscure

6. In elder days, the million eyes of God looked down on the world, and the people prospered. They gorged themselves on the world's bones and grew tall and mastered the seven profane mechanisms and grew proud. For an age, all was good, but then even the bones of the world were not enough. 7. The people built a tower to the sky, and they pierced the flesh of God, and drained the holy ichor from God's veins. And the people made machines of power fueled by heaven's ichor. And one by one, the million eyes of God grew dim and closed. 8. And then the final eye of God closed, and God died, and the cold darkness came to the world. —The Testament of the Blinded Angel. Rebirth 1:7–8 (Second Imperial Edition).

It is the Year of God’s Death 1352, and the four humanities have rebuilt following the Cold Darkness. Out of the ruins and rubble of the Preboreal Age, beneath the starless skies and the triple moon, they have made a new world. Today, celray colossi and cloudblood airships ply the trade routes to Dobrolchur and the Qua’asven Plateau, while senators and ichor-magnates and hierobishops play games of masks and politics. Religious pamphlets and sensationalist broadsheets fly off of crude printing presses, scientists uncover new ruins above and new secrets within, and markets overflow with weird inventions, exotic treasures, and ancient relics. It is the Luminant Age, a new era of hope and possibility, when the four humanities have ceased to creep and crawl and begun to stride and swagger, when anything might happen and something most certainly will.

The fulcrum of this new era is the Republic of Ourichor, sprawled across six Preboreal derricks in the middle of the Sea of Atala. Here lies the River, the impossibly tall erstmetal tower that screams into the sky, from atop which masked and muffled drillers harvest the skybled ichor that powers modern society. Here, the Hierobishop of the Blinded Angel struggles to cleanse the Church of the poisonous shards of the Cult of God’s Shadow. Here the State Inquisition dances and duels with egotects and changelings. Here the gangster-lords vie for dominance over blood and gold, here the autofabricant conspiracies and ichordrinker coteries brood in shadows, here the practitioners of the Seven Profane Mechanisms scurry and scheme, here the ancient monsters lurk, here the new horrors are born.

Here, someone can change the world.