“They say that from the wind's first sigh
Achelia glistered in the sky,
But as greed grew and business flourished
Its natural riches were malnourished.
The brutal planet went to battle
For promises of wealth and chattel,
But foes held strong and mined its core
Until Achelia was no more.”

• Achelia consisted of a solar system with one settled planet and an assortment of surrounding planetoids, asteroids and other celestial bodies not fit for long-term habitation.
• Before the war, Achelia was a corporate hellhole filled with sweatshops and greedy businesses.
• Just as the people were beginning to gain a little hope, war broke out, and Achelia's corporations piggybacked on other planets' invasions to fuel their own greed.
• These planets turned on them, and Achelia was reduced to little more than a hollowed-out husk of a planet.
• Now its people are nomads, drifting through space on small colonies inside the mining tunnels of nearby asteroids.

It often comes as a surprise that Achelia didn't begin as a simple business venture; most people assume that the planet famed for its mineral wealth has always been a production base for the raw materials that power the Seven Systems. Originally, however, people settled for the planet's natural beauty and the captivating manner in which surface crystals shone in the darkness, making Achelia appear as a giant gemstone in the sky. It was only later, when the first settlements grew into a phase of heavy industry, that Achelia gained its reputation as a harsh, greedy planet. Once people realised that their planet's mineral wealth could be traded away for a profit, all bets were off - in a cutthroat dash to pick the world clean, corporations sprang up practically overnight. The successful stayed in power for centuries, whilst those who failed were destined to become Achelia's lower classes, toiling away in sweatshops for their former competitors.

By the time the Ananke Conference was held, Achelia was under the control of its moguls. A nominal government had been put in place; the so-called 'Regulators' acted as a diplomatic organisation and a trade watchdog, supposedly ensuring that Achelia's businesses would be protected whilst also giving its working class a tolerable living standard. To no-one's surprise, the group was corrupted. People soon stopped asking if government officials were on a corporate payroll, and instead started wondering which corporate payroll they were on. With vast wealth disparity now the planetary norm, the downtrodden needed someone to turn to - and that salvation came in the form of the Tungsten Roses. Initially a grassroots artistic movement, young sculptors, architects and metalworkers banded together to try and bring creativity back to Achelia, by combining the brutalist style of the planet's mass accommodations with the vibrant colours of idealised planets like Kybele. For the Roses, the Ananke Conference was an opportunity to show to the Seven Systems that Achelia was no longer merely one vast factory.

This progress came to a halt when war was declared. The Ananke's destruction saw the deaths of many of the planet's biggest players, and those who remained swept in with little idea of what they were really doing. Klaycorp, a mining company who already had something of a monopoly amongst the Regulators, saw the opportunity to turn a profit from Kedalion's invasion of Cheimeros, and convinced the government to enter the war on Kedalion's side. Whilst Achelia's standing army was unimpressive, they were able to churn out both advanced weaponry and a cheap fighting force, and soon found themselves in constant skirmishes. Had their alliance with Kedalion lasted, perhaps Achelia would still stand to this day - but two crucial diplomatic mishaps changed their history forever. The first, a rogue Achelian mining ship mistakenly strip-mined Eirene, the sacred asteroid of Eunomia. The second, an incident of friendly fire in which Achelian ships fired on Kedalian troops. Within months, both Eunomia and Kedalion had declared war on Achelia…

The end of the war came swiftly for Achelia. In a matter of months, they went from a direct assault on Cheimeros to a war on two fronts, struggling to fend off the onslaught of two of the Seven Systems' greatest superpowers in Kedalion and Eunomia. One by one, the small mining outposts that skirted the outer ring of Achelian territory began to fall to the invading armies, whilst on Achelia itself the populace rebelled, outraged at being forced into a losing position by the greed and corruption of the ruling plutarchy. Small sweatshop skirmishes grew out of control into a larger movement headed by the remnants of the Tungsten Roses, and the system's armies ultimately collapsed under the pressure.

The one saving grace for the Achelian people was the foresight to see that their home planet would not last long. As both Kedalian and Eunomian ships drew near, people of all classes fled to Achelia's nearby exoplanets. What had once been a field of barren asteroids hollowed out and stripped of all their minerals became the escape pods for Achelian refugees, who burrowed into the surface and scattered themselves to the solar winds. Soon after, Achelia's end came when the Eunomians brought forth a new and terrible weapon; a devastating machine capable of strip-mining an entire planet in a matter of minutes. With no inhabitants left to defend it, Achelia went the same way as so many planets in its system; it was destroyed for its mineral wealth.

To this day, the people who formerly called themselves Achelians are comprised of several nomadic colonies, tiny asteroids containing no more than a hundred people each that drift aimlessly through space, stopping only to trade with those whom they have the good fortune to encounter. Even the few CEOs who survived the war and ensuing riots have been reduced to little more than scavengers, clinging frantically to whatever riches they were able to salvage.

To some, it would seem a miracle that the Achelians have not yet died out entirely. They would be correct, but it is not a miracle without a cause. The surviving Tungsten Roses, formerly just a cultural curiosity, began to turn their good standing with downtrodden Achelians into organisation, and potential salvation. Whilst they are currently little more than the de facto leaders of small clusters of escapees, the Tungsten Roses are beginning to offer to the Achelian people something they've lacked for the past two decades of war. Hope; hope that the brutality and horror of the war may yet be bent and wrought into something beautiful.