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Aether. Ether?. The New Frontier. The true zeitgeist of the Lost 500 that, as much as Victoria Regina, captured the hearts and minds of the time, due in no small part to the greatest (and last) Ether's Regent.

I will not dwell on the biographic particulars of Geoffrey Sainsbury Sinclair; anyone interested enough (and permitted) to read this text should already be aware of the numerous tomes detailing the life of the High Admiral of the Chancels Legion (not to mention the series of regrettable "boy's adventure" novels, penned by a colleague, in which both Vortex Blasters and the word zestful appear with disturbing frequency).

Rather (and, some would say, with predictable macabre obsession), I will focus on the man's death and the consequences of that death.

First, I must make it very clear that the Estate of Ether? was not Excruciated (as many believe) when Sinclair was killed. Certainly, the events surrounding his betrayal (and betrayal it must certainly have been) popularly imply that the two events occurred simultaneously with the Rollback, but that is a falsehood encouraged by current powerful factions within the Society of Flowers (and 'supported' by officially-sanctioned but entirely spurious claims). The victor writes history, after all.

The specific events as they occurred are far more telling:

• Sinclair was attacked and killed by Excrucians tipped off to his whereabouts outside the gravity wells of Rigel.
• This event left Sinclair's Familia temporarily weakened.
• In turn, this weakening allowed servants of the Dark to assassinate Victoria, his Familial step-sister ^1^.
• Bereft of its living embodiment, the Concordat Magna dissolved almost instantaneously.
• Lord Entropy capitalizes on the confusion, stepping in to convert his leadership from de jure to de facto, using the failure of the Concordat Magna to claim that Earth's defenses were far overextended across outer space.
• Entropy pushes orders for the Rollback past the halfhearted resistance of Earth's Imperators, erasing the memories of Aether from the minds of all mankind.

After that, a child could have destroyed the Estate.

So clement, miraculous Aether was replaced in both concept and execution by the cold, terrifying, deadly Void, and mankind lost the stars... all of which was precipitated from an event arranged by an anonymous ^2^ Lord of the Dark who hated humanity so thoroughly that the treacherous (in fact, treasonous) sacrifice of a fellow noble was a fair price to pay in exchange for the destruction of Einstein's General Absolutivity theory (and the correlating, demonstrable influence of Love?), the stoic heroism of Mary Roberts? and the Zulus?, and countless other? advances.

How typical. How petty.

• ^1^ -- And alleged lover (hardly a noteworthy footnote in Victoria's storied reign, but of key importance here).
• ^2^ -- Of course there are many theories? about that, as well; see Chapter 17.

See also:

• Aetheric Domain
• Chancels Legion
• Concordat Magna
• Einstein's General Absolutivity Theory
• Fili Fiber
• Yistolf?
• Zograscope

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This is a G entry in the Lexicon of the Lost 500 Years.