Kan-Dammleur

"The fools across the blackness think that gods can make mere men. Hail, the sun's embrace brings truth! 'Tis men that created God after all!"
—Amber Creed

It is known! Kan-Dammleur remains a testament of pure-hearted might throughout Zalanthium, defiant of the bastardly whims of the Benefactor. It is held as God for the peoples of Auleial, a god built by the hands of men which feasts upon the babe of a sun and its saffron flares, which distributes it in quantities unfathomable to the planets its endless meal holds in its ten-tempo grip. Kan-Dammleur's structure is that of four interlocking rings, rotating around an axle-wheel the size of a large planet. The inner side of the structure collects the sunlight and heats up to incredible temperature, converting it through thermal-inducting layers into powerful magnetic fields that are then converted into electric potential. Great beacons of light shine from it onto designated collectors on the worlds of Auleial.

Kan-Dammleur is the pride of the Auleial Interplanetary Union, the grandest structure they have created in their entire history, and one of Cosmoria's foremost manmade projects. Even through the little transit through the Auleial system that occurs, its image is well known through the Zalanthian nations. In all its time, it has been well beyond providing what is required of it, and sees only necessary maintenance instead of expansion.

Function

As a Dyson-type structure, Kan-Dammleur serves to collect a fraction of Auleial's sunlight for direct solar energy. It covers about three percent of the surface area of the star. The light it collects through its photothermic sunward layer gives an immense amount of usable energy to the worlds that orbit it, with such vast surpluses that it is largely unutilized and simply radiated out into interstellar space.

Kan-Dammleur's total energy collection is about 1.37 yottawatts of energy, easily more than enough to power an entire civilization. With this immense amount of power at the AIU's disposal, their single-star civilization is one of the most powerful by capabilities than some of even the interstellar nations of Cosmoria.

Laser emission is the method of energy transfer from Kan-Dammleur, spewed out in vast unseen beams to specialized collectors on each of the inhabited worlds' energy grids. Most settled bodies within the system have several of these collectors on their surfaces, allowing energy gathering perpetually without fear of the night shutting everything down. Vast storms that block the light are concerns, but each of these complexes has energy banks with months' worth of electricity stored within.

Relevance

Kan-Dammleur is the god that eats the sun to the people of Auleial. It is a god built by them, a divine feat achieved through the harmony of mortals in the time of extreme strife preceeding its creation. While religiosity fluctuates with time and region, the megastructure is at the center of almost all faiths endemic to the system. It is characterized as a cage on the fury of the sun, a hungering beast that can only be sustained by Auleial's flares, an order-keeper, a sorter of the souls of the dead, a judge of the living, and many other forms. Two themes are nigh-constant in the mysticism around Kan-Dammleur: its opposition and influence on Auleial, and the fact that it was made by mortals.

While sacred, there are those who must maintain the megastructure. It is an incredibly dangerous job, and one treated with much secrecy. The engineers of Kan-Dammleur occupy a sort of pseudo-priestly class, venerated by the peoples of Auleial as the stewards of God. This is not an official title nor privilege, but the spaceborne engineering industry has something of a numinous quality about it within the AIU.

History

The construction of Kan-Dammleur was the first and largest project undertaken by the Auleial Interplanetary Union, and its completion marked the beginning of a new golden age for Auleial's people. In the millennia since, its creation has been mythologized and its existence elevated to divine status.

Famine - The Proposal

The AIU formed in the late 6700s CE, following the discovery of and contact with the Qathrlt by the Lumeirri and Ao'kami of the inner planets. Economic progress was slow in that era, and prosperity waned as the vanity project to terraform the planet Ahsis drained resources immensely. Morale was lowering even as the new Union formed. Energy was becoming scarcer as the years went by. Auleial has little fissile fuel available, as its star is old and gentle. Fusion energy was a dream of a dream, the laughingstock of tech research. Fossil fuels and chemical energy of various kinds, while abundant, had been banned since the catastrophic Aum'el climate crisis of the 6200s. The primary sources of power were wind, water, and solar energy, which for various reasons were unreliable, and the fissile nuclear energy was waning.

An energy crisis for a multi-planetary civilization is a death knell. Overextension with little resources can lead to a total grounding of a planet's people, and in quick succession can spell that same fate for the other worlds, locking them away from one another in crucial ways. The AIU governance at the time feared this energy crisis developing into something that far, going past that point of no return. The best analysis put the system only two centuries before that point, with a conservative estimate. And so a proposal was made, no less fantastical than fusion energy but theoretically a lot more possible.

Solar energy was fickle on-world, but in space, in close orbit around Auleial? It would be limitless compared to the paltry arrays the peoples of Auleial had at that point. The material cost was the only major concern, immense in nature and requiring vast quantities of metals not found on the surfaces of planets in the system. There were only a sparse few collections of asteroids to mine. Prospects were grim, but if even a fraction of the light from their star could be captured, it would solve the crisis for perpetuity. With nothing to lose from trying and everything at stake for inaction, this imperfect proposal moved forward.

Destruction

Yttral, second planet from Auleial, once had a moon. Named Käëan (/kæ͡ø͡an/)by the Lumeirri—later pronounced as Kauan—was hot and metal-rich enough to be stripped down for resources. It was the size of a small planet, and barren of any atmosphere. This moon was selected for complete annihilation. The setup and survey of the moon's resources took a decade, during which the plans for Kan-Dammleur were finalized. Teams were scheduled for this time and the centuries it would take to completely tear down the major moon of a gas giant; many went knowing they would never return home.

The first strike of a drill into the ore-rich stones of Käëan signaled the beginning of its end. The extra resources pumped into the project caused famine and an economic crisis. Short-lived, they promised. Just a blip of depression before utopia could rise. Civil uprisings were admonished and protests struck down while people starved in the streets. Mutual aid was encoruaged by the AIU, but even that could not make up for the vast budget required for Kan-Dammleur's birth.

Creation

Sixty years into the project, the first ring was well under way. The system's population had taken a massive downturn, and trust in the government was low. Only the fanatical optimists remained, promising an uncertain life of decency on Käëan and a hope for a better future. But the malaise of the people was slowing production, and the resource strain was theorized to take centuries. In the worst case, the end of civilization could be brought on by the project proposed to save it.

And then, as the paltry sums of energy began to become usable, as Kan-Dammleur's first ring, seventy percent done, could actually begin producing surplus beyond its own suspension and upkeep, Auleial did something incredible. As if responding to the pain of the people, the suffering and death, the millions of souls perishing of starvation and poverty, of the lives lost to extract the metals of that damned ring, the sun unleashed an uncharacteristic flare. Its usually placid surface suddenly boiled over and heated the foremost part of the ring so much that it nearly melted. Trillions of petawatts of energy suddenly flared out, able to be repurposed however the world saw fit. In an instant, the power of industrialization was returned to the masses.

"Look, the sun answers the call! The joy stolen for decades is returned, if only you have the hands to grasp it!"

Efforts almost completely halted for the disassembly of Käëan, diverted to the construction of receptacles for the vast energy. In a mere century, the moon was destroyed and the lives of people returned. Two, three, four rings finished construction over the next decades, not even truly required but meant to fit the original plan. At last, Kan-Dammleur was created. It is no secret that returning life and livelihood to a distrustful and downtrodden population wins favor with them, though the examples of such an act from the one depriving them is oft seen through. The AIU, having promised this peace and freedom from scarcity since the beginning, somehow managed to join the few examples of this gambit working.

Energy was money, and with a practically unlimited supply of it, the government solved the connected economic crises by simply stating that they didn't exist. Automation and innovation in essential fields was subsidized immediately, and the cost of energy became free, a development that has never been reversed since. From the brink of collapse, the Auleial Interplanetary Union became one of the most powerful civilizations in history.

Veneration

Kan-Dammleur, over the centuries, began to take on a mythical sort of role. Most other energy generation was cut and repurposed for materials, as it was redundant and could never compare to a billionth of a billionth of the megastructure's output. It became the sole source of energy, life and livelihood. A people once savage had been recreated into a civilized Union by the crace of the god-machine they had built. And as it came to pass, the myth began.

Kan-Dammleur, the god built by roving savages in search of greed, who had nigh-irreversibly damaged a world before, who may yet falter in their feeble attempts to become people, the machine that knows only benevolence, which tamed the raging sun. As its rings were built, the impurities of the hands that constructed it were burned away by stellar flares, only the determination hammered into it remaining. That goal, singular and unwavering, of collecting light, of turning it into a tool for its builders. Kan-Dammleur had its mere machinery immolated by the hazy bestial light of Auleial, exalted by the greedy mortals who used it and the neutral vicious flame that licked it into an unlikely god. Benevolent, all-consuming, and filled with the hopes of a dying system full of half-living beings, it coaxed a burning beam of light from Auleial, taking the claws of the monstrous juvenile star into itself to commit an act of salvation.

Only when the first ring beamed its light out to Laihin, to Ahsis and Liako and Aum'el and all of their moons, did the peoples of Auleial become truly sapient, truly connected. It was only then that the decaying rocks they sprouted from became worlds, that the barren wastes became abundant. "I know from Light. Let the Light be shared," is the first commandment of Kan-Dammleur, said to echo across the worlds in a thousand languages as the beams of energy impacted the atmospheres. And it was so.