The surface
Biomes, rival settlements, wildlife no one has named yet, and districts that keep living while you're away.
// 02 WORLD LORE FILE · CLEARANCE: PUBLIC
Before every universe, there was the first.
Beyond all the worlds you know lies a universe with no magic in it at all: only technology. History forgot it. It's where every other universe was made.
The First Universe
Its strongest beings were the Archotechs: a wholly synthetic race, parasitic and endlessly hungry, that destroyed every people who grew strong. When they saw the edges of their own universe, they built new ones: pocket universes that grow by themselves, seeded to be harvested later. Every world of magic you have ever heard of began as one of them.
Then the first humans were born, under the Archotechs' noses. By the time they were noticed, it was almost too late, for one side or the other.
The only thing that exists here is technology. And this is where everything else was made.
// RECORD
How it came to this
The Archotech war
The machines nearly wiped humanity out, until humans learned to turn the Archotechs' own technology against them and starve their endless need for energy. Both sides were all but destroyed. The survivors scattered across the stars and began the hunt for what was left of their makers.
The White Tree
On a lonely planet called Archon grew a synthetic tree the Archotechs had made, and in it the secret of immortality. Nothing could copy it. Only a rare few who died on Archon came back, deathless. The wars fought for that chance were so savage that the people on Archon fell back almost to the stone age, and when the wars ended, every White Tree was gone.
The Void
Centuries later, a fugitive came to a small colony on Archon's ruins: Isaias Daimos, one of the last techno-vampires and the illegitimate son of the last empress. With stolen technology and a hunger for revenge he built the darkest empire in human history: the Void.
Clone 0
Under Archon, the Void found a wrecked colony ship, three cryo-caskets, and the last White Tree growing through them. One of the clones died in an uprising and opened his eyes again. Isaias kept him, tortured him, and made from his blood the first Deathless. The clone's name was Nihilus.
The Neuroquake
Enslaved, Nihilus found his humanity again in another slave, Elara. To free her he built the most dangerous psychic weapon there is: the Neuroquake, a wave of madness that strikes every thinking mind, organic or synthetic, except those he cares for. Isaias seized it, used it, and was left alone face to face with Nihilus. The Void fell in a day.
Lyridia
Nihilus bound the First Universe to all the others and, lost in time, built a hidden world at the centre of everything: Lyridia, a planet made of layers like an onion, each with its own gravity, air and heat, both magical and technological. Every universe meets there.
The second Neuroquake
Long after, Isaias's shattered skull fell into the hands of Deathless who didn't know what they held. They made the Neuroquake again. On Lyridia, it reached every universe at once.
Two hundred years later
The story begins in a mining company.
// THE PLANET
A world in layers
You start on the surface of a geodesic planet. Each hexagon is a district: a voxel map you can live on, dig into and fight over. Dig deep enough and you hit the mantle, flat and impenetrable, and a little too engineered to be natural.
The underground
Caves, lava districts, nests, and things buried long before the colony came.
Below the mantle
What's past it is a story for later. [REDACTED]
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