The Incarnation: Alina, the Archivist

Initial State: You awaken as Alina, the head librarian-monk of a secluded monastery on the world of Sun-Sheathed Vale. Your Tapestry is one of breathtaking beauty, intellectual curiosity, and fragile peace. The monastery guards a vast, ancient archive of forgotten histories. You are driven not by personal ambition, but by a deep and abiding piece of Eidos:

Faith: “Every story, every life, is a unique thread in the grand pattern. To lose even one is to diminish the whole. All knowledge is sacred because all experience is sacred.”

Act I: The Sickness in the Archive

Your life is a quiet devotion to the preservation of stories. You are a curator of Eidos. But you discover a corruption in the deepest, most secure vault of your archive—a data-core bleeding a chaotic, nihilistic energy. It is, of course, The Gnostic Fragments.

Gameplay Highlight: The Responsible Choice

Unlike Rian, who sought out the unknown for personal escape, you encounter this knowledge as a threat to the thing you hold most dear: the integrity of your archive.

1. The Diagnosis: Your initial interaction is as a scholar and a healer. You attempt to “cleanse” the corrupted data, but in doing so, you become infected by it. The horrifying Facts of the Fragments—the Gardener, the Harvest—seep into your consciousness.
2. The Despair and the Defiance: You experience the same existential dread as Rian. Your beautiful Vale is just a crop. Your sacred stories are just flavorings for a cosmic meal. Your Subjective Interface flickers with the cold calculus of “Eidic Yield,” showing you the potential harvest value of a child’s laughter or a lover’s grief. But where Rian’s conclusion was “burn the field,” your foundational Faith in the sacredness of experience leads you to a different, defiant conclusion:

   “Even if this garden is not for me, its flowers are still beautiful. A single season of genuine life is worth protecting, even from the one who owns the field.”

Act II: The Hidden Shepherd

Your motivation shifts from preservation to active stewardship. You cannot un-learn the truth, so you decide to use it. You become the secret, benevolent gardener of your own Tapestry, working against the indifferent one you now know exists.

Gameplay Highlight: The Lonely God

You live a double life. To the world, you are still Alina, the quiet archivist. In secret, you are the world’s hidden shepherd, manipulating events for the long-term “narrative health” of the Vale.

• Narrative Weaving: You use your knowledge of Eidos to guide the Tapestry. You might subtly introduce a forgotten Fact from your archives into a political debate to avert a war—not just because war is destructive, but because it produces a monoculture of “despair Eidos” that would make the Tapestry brittle.
• Fostering Complexity: You anonymously commission works of art, seeding new, uplifting Fictions to counteract the low-level despair that might attract Harvesters. You protect and foster a variety of Faiths, even conflicting ones, because you understand that narrative biodiversity makes the entire ecosystem stronger and less predictable to the cosmic Gardener.
• The Burden of Omniscience: This is your central struggle. You see a plague coming. You know that letting it run its course through a small village will create a powerful Eidos of survival and resilience that will strengthen the entire Tapestry for centuries. But it means letting people die. Your Subjective Interface becomes a torment, showing you both the human cost (a crying child) and the abstract narrative benefit (a glowing +10 Narrative Coherence modifier). Every choice is a small, agonizing trolley problem.

Act III: The Last Reinvestment

Alina lives a long, lonely, and impactful life. On her deathbed, she is faced with the ultimate choice. The path to becoming an Eidolon is open to her. She has amassed an incredible wealth of diverse, healthy Eidos. She could “Unravel the Tapestry” and use it to build a new world, a perfect world free from the shadow of the Harvester.

Gameplay Highlight: The Ultimate Sacrifice

She refuses. To unravel the Tapestry would be to destroy the very garden she swore to protect.

• The Rejection of Ascension: She rejects the Eidolon’s workshop. Instead, she turns her power inward. In a final, climactic act, she performs a ritual of her own design. She doesn’t distill her Eidos; she reinvests it.
• The Weaving: She pulls her entire life’s Thread—every memory, every Fact, every Fiction she fostered—and weaves it directly into the foundational code of the Sun-Sheathed Vale. She is not creating a new Tapestry; she is turning herself into the living loom of her current one.
• The Transformation: Her physical body dissolves. The Incarnation of Alina is gone. But her consciousness expands, merging with the world itself.

She did not ascend to a throne in the heavens. She became the roots of the mountain, the whisper in the wind, the memory in the soil. She became the guardian.

The Harvest: The Gardener

You do not go to a menu. You do not start a new game. Your victory is to continue. You have become The Gardener, a new and unique form of post-mortal existence.

This unlocks a new mode of play:

• A New Perspective: You no longer inhabit a single Incarnation. Your perspective is now that of a disembodied, benevolent “Director AI” for the Sun-Sheathed Vale. You can observe any part of it, at any time.
• A New Set of Tools: Your player verbs change. You cannot Walk or Talk. You can Nurture, Inspire, Warn, Obscure. You can spend your vast pool of Eidos to subtly influence reality:
  • Make a rare healing herb bloom in the path of a wounded hero.
  • Send a prophetic dream to a queen on the eve of a disastrous decision.
  • Cause a sudden, localized rockslide to block the path of an invading army.
• The Eternal Struggle: Your conflict is now permanent. You have the power to protect your people, but you must do so without revealing your hand, lest you replace their free will with your own. You must constantly weigh the small tragedies against the health of the whole. You are locked in a silent, eternal chess match against the indifference of the cosmos and the frailty of mortal life.

You sought to save your world from the gods, and in so doing, became its lonely, captive god. You are no longer playing the game; you are the game.