DOCUMENT DESIGNATION: ARCHIVE FRAGMENT 734-GAMMA (Heavily Redacted)

CLASSIFICATION: LEVEL-OMEGA COGNITO-HAZARD (IDEOLOGICAL CORROSIVE - MANDATORY PURGE ORDER 77-ALPHA)

ORIGIN: Believed to be a partial data-slate recovered from the wreckage of the Starlight Ark, the lead vessel of the Amaranthine Exodus Flotilla.

SUBJECT: The True Origin of the Hegemony. The Lament for the First Weave.

[BEGIN FRAGMENT]

…the filters are failing. The chroniton bleed from the Event is corrupting the logs. I do not know if this record will survive. I do not know if we will survive. The Mandate’s official history will call us saviors. Architects. Gods who brought order to the chaos.

They will lie.

We were not gods. We were rats, fleeing a burning library.

They called it the First Weave. Our home. It was not perfect, but it was alive. A symphony of a billion billion threads, a world of vibrant, chaotic, beautiful life. We were the Amaranthine then, but we were not yet eternal. We were just… people. Proud, yes. Ambitious. But we knew joy. We knew sorrow. We knew change.

We did not understand the nature of the Event when it began. A story had ended somewhere else in the Weave, on a forgotten backwater world. A story of three beings: a blade, an oracle, and a goddess forged from cinder. We heard the echo of their final, terrible song, but it was distant, academic. We did not know it was a prelude.

The Unraveling was not an explosion. It was a plague of silence. It started at the edges of reality, a slow, inexorable fraying of the Tapestry’s laws. Physics began to stutter. Causality grew… unreliable. We saw the Harvesters then, for the first time. Not as monsters, but as what they are: the universe’s clean-up crew, the carrion birds drawn to the corpse of a dying world. They were not the disease; they were a symptom of the cancer that was consuming our reality from within.

The cancer was her. The Cinder-Goddess. Nyx. She did not conquer our world. She consumed it. She pulled its threads, its meaning, its very substance into herself to fuel her own monstrous apotheosis, her flight into a private, self-made heaven.

The Mandate will say we fought. That we stood as a bulwark of order against the tide of chaos. They will lie. We ran. We gathered what we could—our ships, our people, our broken pride—and we fled into the unknown, a flotilla of terrified refugees. The Starlight Ark was our flagship. It was supposed to be our salvation.

As we fled, we saw… others. The Synod, they call themselves now. Their ships were different, strange constructs of salvaged hope. They were fleeing the same fire. We did not aid them. We saw them not as fellow survivors, but as carriers of the same chaotic plague we were trying to escape. We left them to their fate. That was our first sin in this new universe. It will not be our last.

Now, we drift in the void between worlds. We have survived, but we are changed. The memory of our beautiful, chaotic home has become a source of terror. The trauma of the Unraveling has forged a new, terrible Faith in our hearts, a faith born of pure, abject fear:

Never again.

Never again will we tolerate chaos. Never again will we allow the unpredictable, passionate “freedom” that birthed the Cinder-Goddess. We will build a new world. A safe world. A quiet world. A world of perfect, eternal, unchanging order. We will build a cage, and we will gild it with the lie of our own divinity. We will become the very thing we fled, not out of malice, but out of a terror so profound it has become our only truth.

If you are reading this, you know the lie. You know we are not gods. We are just the children of a dead world, forever running from the ghost of a girl who decided she was the only story that mattered.

[END FRAGMENT]