By 60 AL the Aurelian Ring was closed: a single band of habitat, forge and cathedral wrapped all the way around a star. It was the greatest thing humanity had ever built, and for over a century the Solar Empire ruled from it with the serene confidence of a people who believed they had outrun their extinction.
The Empire built well, and it built the institutions that would later destroy it. The Vanguard Legions were raised to garrison the Rim, the dark edge of settled space, in case the thing that took the Cradle ever followed. They became the Iron Vanguard. The Imperial Academies were founded to solve the Ring's endless engineering problems, and trained a caste of scholars who came to trust equations over emperors. They became the Technocrat Union. The Church of the Undying Light taught that Aurelia was a god in its dying, and that the Throne ruled by its grace. Its most devout became the Celestial Order. And the Quiet Office, the Throne's intelligence service, learned everything about everyone. It became the Shadow Brokerage.
Out in the belts, the miners who fed all of this were still waiting for their temporary posting to end. Their quotas rose every year. Their rations did not.
“Light Eternal.”
— Motto of the Solar Throne