The Planet of Pyre

Pyre is the pyrean homeworld in Triple Strike, and while the first two books don’t go into much detail about it, Pyre will feature more heavily in later books, so I’m using this as an excuse to talk about the planet itself!

The most noteworthy feature of Pyre is that it’s tidally locked to the sun it orbits. Since one side always faces the star, while the other side always faces away, both sides are effectively unlivable without biospheres: one too hot and the other too cold. Life thus developed mostly along the strip of the terminator zone between them, and this zone exists in varying states of twilight having no day-night cycle.

Throughout Pyre’s history, life (with the exception of extremophile bacteria) was limited to some distance along this strip of land. And given that the planet’s water is mostly locked in oceans of ice on the far side, even this terminator zone supports relatively little life – its primary biomes being desert, steppe, and mountains.

Another feature of Pyre that falls out from this is that relatively little biomass has accumulated over the millenia. Since Pyre never developed fossil fuels like those of Earth, the first several industrial revolutions of Pyre were solar and wind-based – two resources the planet has in plenty.

A final feature of Pyre is that, while it has higher gravity than Earth, it also has a denser atmosphere. Thus airships and high-altitude balloons were both more prevalent and earlier-to-appear in the recorded history of pyreans than that of humans. Between this early means of travel and communication, the relatively small planetary footprint pyreans could occupy before the development of biospheres, and the pyreans’ nomadic tendancies, the tribes of Pyre did not culturally diverge as much as humans did on Earth.

Human xeno-anthropologists speculate that this, along with a lack of natural resources, are part of why the pyreans have no formalized concept of war. That said, skirmishes and raiding were certainly common practice throughout their history, and these activities reaching their bloody peak during what the Merdael call the Dark Times.

Questions or comments? Want to talk about novel writing or indie dev? Please contact me at akulagames@proton.me, or join the Akula Games mailing list to hear when a book is released!

2023