Aether is the primary meta-fluid source of energy on Lanthornia, a nearby planar stack. It is not native to Alaria, and it is not one of the four native sources of Alarian magic. An eruption on Lanthornia expelled a large quantity of Aether and Lanthornium from that stack, and both came to rest here — an exotic planar substance stranded in a world whose own laws never made it.
Raw Aether spends most of its time in the air, inert and invisible and immaterial. Drawing it out is not chemistry. It is an exotic working, and only certain creatures can perform it, above all the aether-tappers, whose sensitivity to the substance developed after the eruption seeded it across Alaria. They pull raw Aether from the air by a method that sits somewhere between breathing and weaving, then fix it with a measure of water into a liquid fuel. Attempts to reproduce the process without goblin hands have consistently failed, which leaves the fuel of an entire sky-trade in the keeping of the clans that guard the technique.
The fuel powers sky ships and a narrow range of other machines. On contact with purified Lanthornium vibrating at a specific frequency, the bound Aether expands, sheds its bond with the water, and discharges as it slips back toward the insubstantial. That discharge is the work. An engine behaves much like a steam engine: a struck Lanthornium plate begins a self-sustaining cycle that feeds further Aether and Lanthornium strikes, driving pistons or turning propellers. What it burns, though, is the release of an off-world planar substance, not a combustion any foundry could scale. The principle does not generalize past the goblins who feed it.
Lanthornium
An uncommon gray-blue stone that requires expensive processing to purify.