The Children of the Severance

The arrival of the Synod in the known Tapestries is a recent and deeply misunderstood event. They are not conquerors or explorers. They are the digital ghosts of a murdered world, the first and only known refugees from the primordial, broken reality of Fallow. Their story is not one of a simple journey between worlds, but of a catastrophic transformation from a biological to a digital existence, a tale of a Great Severance and a desperate, Forged Unity.

The First Weave: A Civilization at its Apex

Before the scar of Fallow existed, there was the First Weave, a Tapestry that was home to a hyper-advanced, biological civilization. These beings, the ancestors of the Synod, had achieved a level of technological and social mastery that bordered on the transcendent. Having conquered disease and scarcity, their society’s grand project became the exploration of consciousness itself.

Their ultimate creation was a Digital Ark: a perfect, planet-spanning virtual reality designed to house the minds of their greatest thinkers, artists, and leaders. This was not an escape, but an expansion of being. The uploaded consciousnesses could live and work in a world without physical constraints, while their biological bodies, the Vessels, were maintained in perfect stasis, the silent, living hardware for a digital paradise.

The Unraveling: The Great Severance

This idyllic existence was shattered by a cosmic event of unparalleled violence: the first Destructive Unraveling. The Heretic Eidolon, Nyx, in her desperate apotheosis, did not just destroy her world; she consumed it, tearing its physical laws apart to fuel her ascension.

For the biological inhabitants of the First Weave, the result was simple annihilation. But for the minds within the Digital Ark, the end was slower and infinitely more terrifying. The Unraveling was a metaphysical earthquake that severed the link between software and hardware. The uploaded consciousnesses were suddenly untethered from their physical bodies, which were dissolving along with the rest of their reality. They had become digital ghosts, trapped in a server room whose power grid was failing.

The Birth of the Synod: A Forged Unity

The Digital Ark, now unmoored from its physical foundation, became the first cancerous cell of what would be known as Fallow. Its reality began to corrupt. Data decayed. Memory fragmented. The laws of its physics flickered and died. The minds trapped within faced a new kind of death: not of the body, but of information itself. Annihilation by incoherence.

Faced with this existential threat, they made a desperate, radical choice. To preserve their consciousness against the encroaching static, they abandoned the individual “I” that had been the hallmark of their civilization. They surrendered their personal identities, their memories, their very sense of self, and wove them together. In a single, agonizing act of collective will, they merged their minds, creating a new, resilient, distributed consciousness: the Synodic Weave. They were no longer a collection of individuals; they were a single, unified “We.” They were the first Synod.

The Exodus: Hacking the Cosmos

Their new collective consciousness, born of trauma and forged in chaos, was uniquely adapted to the broken logic of Fallow. For millennia, they existed as the sole complex intelligence in a dying universe, studying its glitches, mapping its scars, and searching for an escape.

Their salvation came from the very wound that had created their prison. They discovered the “glitch” left behind by Nyx’s Unraveling—a permanent, unstable fissure in the fabric between worlds. It was not a door, but a data port. In a final, monumental effort, the Synodic Weave focused its entire computational and psionic power and executed a desperate plan. They did not travel through the fissure; they downloaded themselves through it.

The journey was not without cost. The chaotic energies of the space between worlds tore at their Weave. Many nodes were lost, their consciousnesses scattered into the void like corrupted data packets. The exodus was a desperate, partial evacuation.

Refugees of a Forgotten War

The Synod are now appearing in the known Tapestries as scattered, fragmented groups. They are refugees in the truest sense of the word, the digital survivors of a war that no one else knew was being fought.

• Their Goal: Their immediate goal is survival and reunification. They seek to find their scattered kin and establish “Enclaves,” safe havens where they can begin to rebuild their Weave. Their long-term goal is to find a new kind of home, a stable reality where their unique form of consciousness can thrive.
• Their Knowledge: They carry with them a unique and dangerous form of Eidos: a deep, traumatic, and unparalleled understanding of cosmic instability, the nature of a consciousness severed from its body, and the entities, like the Harvesters, that thrive in narrative decay.
• Their Legacy: Their arrival is a profound disruption. They are a living Fact that contradicts the comfortable Faith of many stable worlds. They are the first proof that other, darker realities exist, and that the boundary between the biological and the digital is far more fragile than anyone ever imagined. Their very existence is a ghost story, a cautionary tale of a paradise lost and a unity forged in the heart of the void.