On the Measurement of Worth and the Quiet Emergence of Disparity
The Imperium did not divide its people through the crude instruments of hatred or the volatile fires of prejudice. Such passions were deemed unpredictable, and in the early centuries of the throne, unpredictability was the only true sin. Instead, the division was achieved through a process the state described as a necessary act of clarification. By its third phase of consolidation, the continent had finally achieved a stillness; the borders were no longer restless, and doctrine had successfully paved over the cracks of old loyalties. What remained unresolved was the problem of allocation.
The state required a method to decide who should stand in the light of protection and who could be left to absorb the impact of the world's friction. The language of this era was strictly, almost pathologically logistical. Imperial administrators ceased referring to the populace as subjects or citizens, adopting instead the chillingly abstract terminology of distributions. People were redefined as labor pools, defense strata, or resource bodies. This was not a theatrical attempt at dehumanization, but a profound act of mathematical abstraction; dignity was not stripped away—it was simply rendered irrelevant to the calculation of the whole.
The first comprehensive censuses, known in the restricted archives as the Great Index of Capacity, were compiled during this period. These were not mere lists of names and lineages. They mapped the very limits of human utility. Archivists logged physical endurance, metabolic recovery rates under caloric deficit, and response to environmental toxins. Most crucially, they mapped resonance potential. Ether-capable individuals were identified and indexed with a precision that bordered on the obsessive, their threshold failures documented as if they were faulty machinery.
Non-ether populations were cataloged differently, grouped into aggregates rather than individuals. Their worth was expressed through the merciless language of statistics: average output per hectare, projected lifespan under high-stress labor, and replacement availability. Where an ether-user was mapped as a strategic asset, a non-ether subject was mapped as volume. No decree ever announced this distinction; it emerged naturally from the very tools the Imperium used to perceive its world.
In the military planning documents of the era, the divergence in value is articulated through concrete ratios that would define the next thousand years of social hierarchy. Strategic value was no longer a matter of rank, but of irreplaceability.
1. Strategic Valuation Ratio: The High Command established a baseline where the tactical preservation of one High-Resonance Ether-user was weighted against the lives of 285 non-ether infantry.
2. Acceptable Attrition Margins: In "High-Friction" border campaigns, the projected casualty rate for Resonant Units was capped at 4.2%, while non-ether logistical and support formations operated under a "Sustainable Dissolution" threshold of 52%.
3. Resource Allocation Density: In contested frontiers, 82% of available medical supplies and ether-stabilizers were directed toward the Resonant spearheads, leaving the remaining 18% to be distributed among the volume-corps.
This was not an act of cruelty, but one of optimization. Imperial doctrine had established stability as the highest good, and from that premise followed a logical, if heartless, corollary: that which stabilizes reality faster is worth more. Ether-users could break a siege in an hour; non-ether units took months of attrition to achieve the same. The numbers supported the method, and the administrators took immense pride in these efficiencies. They did not celebrate the dead; they celebrated the ratios.
Within the bureaucracy, the phrase acceptable loss shifted from a grim observation to a mathematical variable. Loss was an inevitable entropy, but it only mattered if it compromised the Continuity of Function. The death of an ether-user was a structural failure; the death of thirty non-ether carriers was merely a schedule adjustment.
This calculus seeped quietly into the civil administration of the city-states. During the Great Famine of the Fourth Decade, the relief prioritization followed the resonance maps with clinical accuracy. Resonant hubs received 90% of the emergency grain stores within the first week of the crisis. The non-ether districts were provided for only to the degree necessary to prevent a collapse of the labor force. The Imperium did not deny care; it simply rationed attention.
Over time, these policies reshaped the very nature of lived experience. Ether-users grew accustomed to a world that bent over backward to ensure their safety, viewing this insulation not as favoritism, but as a heavy, necessary burden of their utility. Conversely, the non-ether communities developed a baseline condition of precarity. Danger became their normal. Loss was not a tragedy; it was an expectation.
Imperial education reinforced this hierarchy with subtle, pervasive grace. The curricula emphasized duty and resilience. Heroic narratives depicted ether-users not as idols, but as the Instruments of Order who sacrificed their privacy for the state. The non-ether were praised for their Endurance—their willingness to act as the foundation upon which the monolith stood. They were thanked often, but they were protected rarely.
Resentment did not form immediately, for the Imperium was undeniably stable. Life was, by almost every metric, better than the chaotic slaughter of the pre-imperial fragmentation. Many non-ether subjects accepted their expendability as the reasonable tax of peace. But acceptance is not the same as healing.
In the private, unregistered testimonies preserved by the Asterion vaults, a different story emerges—a story of growing invisibility. One letter from a frontier logistics overseer remains particularly haunting in its clarity: "When the ether-bearer fell, the camp halted as if the world had stopped breathing. When thirty of my carriers died in the mud, the overseer merely checked his watch and adjusted the morning schedule. We are not being killed; we are being forgotten."
The system was working exactly as it was designed. What the Imperium failed to account for was accumulation. A single acceptable loss is a statistic; a thousand such losses over three generations is a slow-poisoning of the social contract. Families began to thin. Communities grew hollow. Oral histories, whispered in the dark where the Luminaris light could not reach, filled the gaps left by the official silence.
By the end of the third imperial generation, the Cartography of Value was complete. The continent was mapped not just in miles and mountains, but in the relative worth of the blood that walked upon it. Some lives were meant to bend the course of history; others were meant to absorb its weight. No doctrine ever had to proclaim this division, for the arithmetic spoke for itself. And arithmetic, unlike the men who wield it, never feels the need to apologize for its own cruelty.