This document serves as a lore primer and an illustrative example of an Incarnation’s Thread within a Tapestry. It details the potential narrative arc of the “Unspoken Seasons,” a scenario designed to explore the politics of the body, the conflict between fluid identity and imposed order, and the nature of resistance.

The Incarnation: Kai, of the Shifting Tides

Initial State: You awaken as Kai, a member of the Valen on their homeworld, a planet defined by its two extreme seasons. The Tapestry is one of natural, cyclical change. Your existence is governed by a fundamental, biological Fact, an undeniable rhythm that shapes your body, your mind, and your society:

Fact: “The Sun-Season’s strength builds the walls that shelter the Shade-Season’s dream. One cannot exist without the other; to be Valen is to be a creature of both tides.”

Act I: The Imposed Order

Your life is a balance. As a robust, communal “Builder” in the Sun-Season, you and your kin work tirelessly, your Subjective Interface highlighting goals of construction and resource gathering. As the world cools into the Shade-Season, you transform, becoming a slighter, more solitary “Dreamer,” your interface shifting to prioritize needs of Contemplation and Narrative Coherence.

This sacred cycle is shattered by the arrival of the Hegemony. They bring with them advanced technology and a powerful, off-world ideology: the Faith of “The Unbroken Form.” They see your people’s shift not as a natural cycle, but as a genetic instability, a “sickness” to be cured. Hegemonic doctors offer “stabilizer” treatments, and their missionaries preach that a single, permanent form is the hallmark of a civilized soul.

Gameplay Highlight: The Social Contagion

The conflict is not initially one of violence, but of insidious persuasion.

1. The Promise of Progress: The Hegemony doesn’t conquer with armies, but with opportunity. Trade rights, advanced medicine, and a place in the galactic community are offered to those who “choose a form and keep it.”
2. The First Converts: Some Valen, weary of the harshness of the cycle, embrace the stabilizer. Your Subjective Interface reflects this schism: a childhood friend who takes the treatment is now tagged not as [Valen], but as [Unbroken]. Their presence feels subtly alien, their dialogue options now framed by the cold logic of the Hegemony’s Faith.

Act II: The Fracturing of the Weave

The Hegemony’s influence grows, creating a deep rift in your society. The Unbroken are praised by the off-worlders as pragmatic and productive. Those who cling to the cycle, the “Shifters,” are increasingly marginalized as primitives, holding back progress.

Gameplay Highlight: A Community Divided

Your quests now revolve around this internal conflict.

• A Plea from the Unbroken: Your childhood friend, now a permanent Builder, asks for your help in persuading a community of Shifters to accept the treatment before the next Shade-Season isolates them, arguing it is for their own good. Their logical arguments clash with your lived Fact of the cycle’s necessity.
• A Warning from the Elders: An elder Dreamer, her own form weakening, begs you to find a way to disrupt the stabilizer supply lines, warning that the Valen are trading their soul for comfort.
• The Narrative Weapon: You discover that the Hegemony is creating its own Fiction about your people, circulating stories that frame the Shade-Season not as a time of contemplation, but of madness and animalistic regression, justifying their “benevolent” intervention.

Act III: The Ultimatum

You are a respected figure, one of the last influential Shifters. You are approaching your own transition from Builder to Dreamer, a deeply personal and spiritual time. The Hegemonic governor gives you, and by extension your people, a final choice: take the stabilizer and become a permanent, productive leader in the new order, or be peacefully relegated to a reservation with the other “unstable” traditionalists, cut off from the new economy.

Gameplay Highlight: The Choice of Self

Your decision is not just for you; it is a symbol for the future of your race.

1. Embrace the Unbroken Form: You accept the stabilizer. You remain a Builder forever—strong, praised, and rewarded by the Hegemony. But your soul is amputated. The Need for the Dreamer’s contemplation goes forever unanswered, manifesting in your Subjective Interface as a permanent, low-level psychological debuff: [Phantom Season].
2. Defy and Preserve: You refuse the treatment and lead your people into the reservation. You preserve your culture and the sacredness of the cycle, but condemn your followers to a life of poverty and isolation, watching the “Unbroken” world flourish without you.
3. Weave a New Season: You forge a third path. In your final days as a Builder, you use your strength to sabotage the stabilizer manufacturing plants. Then, as you transition into a Dreamer, you use your heightened narrative senses not to hide, but to fight. You weave a powerful counter-narrative—a new, resilient Fiction of the “Unconquered Cycle”—and broadcast it, hoping to re-ignite the spirit of your people before it is extinguished forever.

Is a body that forgets its own seasons still a home?

Your choice determines whether the Valen become a footnote in a Hegemonic text, a living museum of a lost way of life, or the seeds of a rebellion born from a story.

The Harvest: The Politics of Being

Your life as Kai was a profound exploration of identity under pressure. The Eidos you have gathered is not of simple good or evil, but of the very nature of the self.

Eidos Gained from this Thread:

• Fact: External chemical agents can suppress the Valen's natural metamorphic cycle, locking them into a single phenotype.
• Fiction: The Hegemonic myth of the "Unbroken Form" as a sign of progress and civilization.
• Faith: A society's core identity, even if biological, can be sacrificed for perceived security or prosperity.
• Symbol Tags: [fluidity], [resistance], [imposed_order], [the_politics_of_the_body], [cultural_amputation].

As an Eidolon, you can now use this hard-won understanding. You can weave Tapestries with unique biological rules, create Factions that struggle with the very definition of their own bodies, or design Incarnations who are masters of adaptation, having learned the bitter lesson that sometimes, the most important thing to survive is the self.