Fusion

Fusion power is the fervent spark of stars, the origin of light and life under the sun. At the roots of the Technolodendron of the Heliopolis lies a heart beating through the power of fusion, granting the entirety of civilization the energy to persist.

At its very core, the mastery of fusion allowed humanity to siphon energy from the most common elements of the known universe. A source of cheap power at any place and time.

Starfire
At the core of the Solar System lies the greatest persisting fusion fire since four and a half billion years. The Sun's starfire burns bright and plentiful, destined to become the heart of civilization encapsulated in a Dyson swarm far into the future. When that time comes, humanity will have returned to the order of the elder times, when the sun alone provided all.

In the final century, only a faint fraction of this starfire is siphoned by a great number of inhabited isles and vessels, providing energy to many billion souls. Even as civilization merely takes the earliest steps to embrace the sun's light and fire whole, they already fuel the greatest machines known to the humankind.

Sun machines, worthy of gods, are called the siphoning endpoints of bridges spanning between stars. The greatest structures above the sun channel light itself into a contained storm, a current of photons bombarding solar sails of the Anemoi, sending them to the closest stars.

Mastery and Revolution
In the grand murals of civilization, the mastery of fusion power may be depicted alongside the hand ax, settlements, and the written word. Such is the fundamental importance of this force of power to the modern humankind. Its discovery in times of strife enabled the civilization of the cradle Earth to persist through the hardships and catastrophe imposed during the Centuries of Respite and Demise.

Fusion power was the condition and catalyst to branches of the Technolodendron now shaping all worlds and inhabited isles of the Heliopolis. Its spark provides light to the towering agriculture of arcologies and power to the desalination of seawater cities. Fusion fires burn in forges of both the micro- and the macrocosm, fueling the development of automatons and nanites, printers and orbital assembly. Not least are fusion fires burning within the engines of torch ships, propelling these vessels between all of humanity's worlds.

A tall price was paid for this wondrous power wielded now by the humankind. Millennia of development and hardship, countless crises and wars endured for a technology which threw over the balance of power in a world at the brink of self-destruction. When the mastery of fusion power rose, the nations of the cradle Earth were ready to end all just for this chance. Old powers fell, new powers rose, humanity's very perspective on the cosmos was changed once the light of stars was placed in its hands.

Now, centuries later, the potential of this fire has not even been scratched on the surface. But it is revered and worshipped by humanity nonetheless, the plethora of a million suns, burning at the hearts of civilization.