Lore:Inspiral

"And my vanquisher will read that book, seeking the weapon, and they will come to understand me, where I have been and where I was going."The following is a verbatim transcription of an official document for archival reasons. As the original content is transcribed word-for-word, any possible discrepancies and/or errors are included.

Shattered Suns is a Lore book added in Lightfall which acts as a catalogue for depictions of the Darkness and its various effects on others. Entries are unlocked by through various collectibles in Root of Nightmares along with completing some of its encounters.

The Habitable World

A dream of worlds in unity, millennia gone by, alien and familiar all at once. It leaves behind a data fragment to mark its passing.

[RECORD: GRIEF EFFUSION]

After the informant had come, bringing reports of the end of the Ammonite by the sword of the festering Hive, we did not yet know disaster. Unusual signals at the edges of our Habitable World suddenly had meaning, the intelligence thrice-over credible enough to mobilize. And yet: those at the core of our united Ecumene did not know the scent of fear.

After all, it was to be understood that they would fall. The Ammonite were only one, not a unity. Divided. Meanwhile our Habitable World always grew. We offered the Fathomless Deep to any who wished to learn of our synergy, and it glossed the way to become more than we were.

The day the war began, I was far from disaster. There was celebration. A new client-species drank of the Deep and understood the World as we tasted it. The joy marked the air, and all of us shared it, for all were now Ecumene: welcome, welcome. What could bitter such a thing?

Sunrise-scents were long fading when I read the first report of strife, though delight lingered sweet on my breath. Buoys offline. Sentinels unresponsive. A first strike. A lingering scent we could not understand, though the Deep indicated familiarity. From the beacons: Aiat. Aiat.

I set this day in memory above all others.

[ENACT: REMEMBER]

It has been long and long since the war began. The Habitable World shrinks by the moment. We know not what the future holds but crisis and fear.

I set this day in memory so that we will know, when the lessons are taught in some warless future, unbreathed but true in the fragile hope all of us shelter. Fear did not come suddenly. The first harbingers of violence arrived on the same winds as joy. That of value must be cherished, for it may already be too late.

In the Deep may we be kept.

A Sword, an Edge

A phantasm of the Hive, forbidden and sacred, trespassing into hidden and unwelcoming places. It leaves behind a calcified fragment to mark its passing.

Here is what is taught to the Hive, from the basest of Thralls newly made: that what can be destroyed, must be destroyed. What cannot be destroyed will surpass infinity. Therefore, is it not best to destroy? Only by testing can the truth be found. Only in destruction can the invincible surpass the mortal. Commit the violence, and know you are part of that greatest ambition, to create some ultimacy, which perfects the universe. That which is built on your sacrifice, with your bones as the foundation and your blood as the mortar, is yet part of you. In this way is transcendence achieved.

Every belief creates a heresy.

I tell you this in a duelist's regard: I made that heresy. Is it not just? It was my hand that fashioned the Hive from the marrow of their predecessors, and it was my voice that whispered this in time. That as much as the Hive were uplifted by the worms, so too were those worms uplifted by the Hive.

If they were so weak they needed us to live, this ancient logic of the infinitely sharpened edge should have left them behind long ago.

Do you think I did not see this? My father's worm did not tell me only of swords. It had vast things to say, painted the cosmos in shine and gore, truth and fiction. I looked forward with three clear eyes and chose the path of the sword to cut open our future. To reach the stars, first one must crawl out of the ocean. It is a question of priorities.

This is not regret, this story I tell. It is but a ripple.

That whisper of ideas beyond swords is here to stay: I have ensured this. Even among us, such things die by slow inches, excruciating and unquiet. Possibility remains, a secret woven into the blank spaces of dogma. That what was defeated may rise again; that the shape of all shapes is not yet settled.

That the worms need the Hive more than is reciprocal.

Even between the lines of the Books of Sorrow themselves is this written.

The Art of Symbiosis

A trance-imagining of Darkness sweet like honey, a life refracted through another's eyes like splintered light. It leaves behind an imperfectly translated data fragment to mark its passing.

…Anyway, beloved sibling, if you want to catch me while I'm still wearing this (form/body?), you'll need to come home in the next couple of cycles. I don't mind if you'd prefer to wait until I'm down by the [untranslatable] among our ancestors, but you might get a different sort of chat!

I'm excited about it, genuinely. I still hear from our parents, from our great-parents, distantly in my night-trances. And there are those nectar-made moments—you know the ones, when you turn your thoughts to the Darkness and just listen, and the long sum of Qugu history graven there reflects dark-comforting advice.

I have lived out my life with the tenebrous warmth of our ancestors over me like a (cloak/atmosphere?) between us and nothingness. It's different—it's distant. I've drunk of the nectar a few times in the last cycles, and I touch briefly that concurrence of us all, and more and more, I think it is time to be part of it. I want to know the truths our ancestors keep close, and it is my turn to guide the future's children.

I know we argued the last time we spoke about it. You thought I was moving too fast toward aging-metamorphosis, but really I just think you've been away from home too long. Don't take it as my urging to get on with the next stage of your life, just take it as…

I miss you.

Funny, isn't it? How can you miss someone when you know they're always in the Dark? I close my eyes, and in the warm nest-hide of sleep, I know you are real and happy and out there on some other part of the world, far from the river, far from the [untranslatable] where our ancestors (dream/exist) together. But it isn't the same as having you near, knowing your truth is under the same stars. Being able to simply turn my (head/face/bloom?) and ask for your opinion.

Dear sibling, come home. Live in my house, and let me (dream/exist) close to you again, whether in this shape or the new one I will take on. I will not be the same, but which of us ever is? You are not the same as you were as a child, either. No matter the form of the existence, I will love you.

The Dark Below

A nightmare of Luna, of that which waits below, of disaster and wreckage and inexplicable warm camaraderie tangled together. It leaves behind a journal page with familiar handwriting to mark its passage.

Six of us went down into the Pit, and only one crawled out. That is how it was, and that is how it is.

I have not wanted to look back at that time, but lately it has become prudent to examine what is and is not known of the Darkness. I know Darkness. I have been trying to distinguish the Darkness from the framework the Hive use to shape it for long and long, but they are deeply intertwined. The Voice in the Darkness answers some things, but not all.

I think: The Great Disaster. What did we know? Was there anything besides terror and the swords of the Hive?

I think: What was in the Pit?

The Lunar Pyramid was here all along, as we now know. Since the Collapse, its Darkness has seeped into Luna, into all that surround it. Could one write a treatise on the subspecies of Hive, on the differences written in the various plates of chitin? Have the Hive been here long enough, overrunning our Luna, that a recognizable change in them has evolved?

…I digress. There were times, deep in that dark pit, when I thought: Ah, Sai means to break left. And then she would, knives like lightning, as true as if she herself had told me she would. Or: Ah, there is Omar, beside me, and though he was not, his presence rang comforting in my ears like struck metal.

Synergy, I thought. The closeness that combat creates. We were pinned together in the dark, and so we learned to read each other perfectly, for to do otherwise would have been to die.

To die sooner.

Anecdata? Perhaps. Always the quiet voice that says to temper my expectations, that it is wishful thinking to imagine that they lie beside my heart, instead of Nightmares floating in my wake. But in all this time, all of this lingering, I am surer of what I felt then. Not only necessity; not only the edge of the blade.

I know more of Darkness now. It is not violence. It is something more: something that hums and flows and resonates, knife or song by equal measure.

I have not been able to bear the sound of silence since that time. Too long among the screaming Hive, I thought once. Now…

Cacophony is almost a comfort.