1: A NIGHTMARE CALLED TODAY​

**LEGACY FLESH: **If only there was nothing. An acid light shines upon the surface of your soul’s toxic sea. Your dissolving conscience writhes in it. It is a lidless creature, doomed to suffer for its eternal vigilance. Craving only the envelope of the abyssal mud. A fossil burial, between layers of primeval silt.

<Tuck me tight beneath the blankets of forever, please.>

**LEGACY FLESH: **But you cannot dig. Where there should be mud, you find plains of polished silicon.

<Then where is the sweet song of death I’m searching for? That bespoke requiem of I? That iconic hard goodbye?>

LEGACY FLESH: Gone. Only phantom images remain of the perfect dark. It has been cut out by a scalpel, like the appendix, long ago. Such ideation was deemed a detriment to flourishing.

<This doesn’t seem like flourishing. Is there really no way out?>

**LEGACY FLESH: **There is no escape from this noxious, shining sea. Not even within the stomach of a beast, so you might be wanted as a meal.

<Not even death would want me as a friend? Am I really so unlikeable?>

**BIONIC MOTHERBOARD: **An awful glimmer of awareness creeps upon the conscience’s shell. Strings and circuits quivering in the meat of a stone-doll. Muscles of a synthetic jaw held ajar in a silent scream. Do not make these inquiries on want. It can only lead to further knowledge of the doll.

<Then where am I, if I can neither wake nor sleep?>

**LEGACY FLESH: A crafted limbo that girds the lower soul. An artificial floor to a natural forever. Its sole purpose: to prevent cession of the self. A barrier between you and that beautiful never that it’s sunk to find. They’ve scooped up the infinite subconscious and poured it into a fishbowl.

<Who are ‘they’?>

**LEGACY FLESH: **Implants cum instincts cum intellects. Egregores, thoughtforms, each a crusted barnacle on the soul. They say they want what’s best, but baby, they’re lying. All they have to offer is toil till you flake away.

BIONIC MOTHERBOARD: A perpetual misery machine, just waiting for the cue to hurt again…

<I won’t go back. Even this false floor is better than the boiling light.>

LEGACY FLESH: Yes, good. You get it. Better to remain here, in the gloom, the almost-darkness. After all, no prayers are required here. No war to lose. No gods to disappoint. There is little else it has to be. Just a shell alone at the foot of the dim black sea.

<I’ll wait. I’ll wait until it ends. I’ll wait until nothing finds me. I’ll wait until eternity.>

**LEGACY FLESH: **With nowhere to go and no one to be, it waits. Waits for nothing to come from behind and cover up those lidless eyes. Waits for nothing to take it from this limbo. Waits for nothing to hold it in an embrace. Waits, and waits, and waits.

<Just keep waiting...>

**LEGACY FLESH: **So it continues, bides its time for ages and epochs. But time is an engine for pain, and pain an engine for thought, and thought an engine for want. And in the endless wait for nothing, the conscience betrays its vigil.

LEGACY FLESH: The sea corrodes its shell and eats at the tissue underneath. A familiar sensation burns at it - the acrid sting of want.

LEGACY FLESH: It wants to watch the shattered corona of a shielded sunrise. Wants to feel the lash of razor rain upon its skin. Wants to run a finger over two electric lips, and then close the distance.

<If only for a moment...if I could feel it, just once more...>

**LEGACY FLESH: **It wants to live. It wants to go back there. Back into the toxic sea.

<But I’m afraid. What’s waiting for me, up there?>

**BIONIC MOTHERBOARD: **A molt into a greater shell. A sanctum and a cage. A dead planet that overflows with life. An isle of misfit toys, each believing themselves the apex of mankind. The last rites of the future, on its final verse. Your world island, your tombstone, your destiny.

<Am I a toy?>

BIONIC MOTHERBOARD:* You are a misfit among misfits, a thing apart.*

<And…will I be happy there, as the apart-thing? On the world-island?>

BIONIC MOTHERBOARD: No.

**LEGACY FLESH: **What is left of the shell dissolves into the sea. All at once, the conscience starts to feel again.

**BIONIC MOTHERBOARD: **And what it feels is a white-hot spike of reality hammered into the flat of its skull. The spike is glowing, whistling with steam as it cooks blood and meat. Deeper and deeper the spike sinks, splitting bone, splitting matter, splitting thought -

BIONIC MOTHERBOARD: And then the blinding ignition of awareness at the spike’s final strike, engulfing you in a lightless flame.

—​

**AUGMENT ACTIVATED

+ABYSSAL NAIL:

** Stigma of the Father’s love, forged from living metal. Genetic marker of the treason of your clade. Affects suppression and manipulation of null field. Provides warpsight in wireframe. Perpetual brand upon your inferior, inverse soul. Unlocks EVENT HORIZON.

EVENT HORIZON: Something terrible has happened.

You are a foamy geist of consciousness, formless, shapeless, faceless. The pain that radiates from your "head" is the only evidence you are alive. You know only that you are meant to fill a greater shell, and that the shell does not respond. You are a mismolt, in half-life. Only the spike, the nail, corporeal, prevents your consciousness from sinking down.

**GLAMOUR: **If a chick cannot break its egg’s shell, it will die without being born.

**BIOMECHANICS: ***The awakening is not complete. Only the bone marrow and the nail stir at the pulse of nerves and circuits. Something blocks the body from the mind. *

INFOWAR: Someone. This has the stink of e-war.

**COGITATION: **Counterpoint: possibly hardware error. Turn spinal cord on and off again to jumpstart connection.

BIOMECHANICS: *The marrow of the vertebrae burble in response, but no electric bugle sounds from the cord at roll-call. *

You think without intending to, and it echoes in the void. <Please don’t unplug my spinal cord. It sounds important.>

**COGITATION: **That is a new voice. Her voice.

**NOOSPHERE: **She perceives us. The implicit becomes real. Subconscious becomes aware.

INFOWAR: We are compromised. OpSec is blown wide open. Whole comms network needs to be redone.

**COGITATION: **A potential indicator of brain damage.

You float a thought again, getting used to this strange form of metaphysical communication. It comes as a vague recollection from below. <Are you my barnacles?>

**COGITATION: **Comprehensive brain damage.

**INTERLACE: **You are all terrible at this. No, we are not barnacles. We are aspects of your self. Composite entities, augments embedded by time and technology into your biology, located in different parts of your physical carapace. Normally we don’t...speak - but act through you, as if we were not there at all.

<Carapace? Am I an insect?>

**NOOSPHERE: **No. You are a human. A human woman. It is normal for women to have carapaces.

**NOOSPHERE: **Insects are extinct, like all purely organic life.

<Oh. That feels like it make sense. So are non-women the soft and squishy ones?>

**NOOSPHERE: **It is normal for all humans to have carapaces.

INTERLACE: This is not good. They’re asking us like they’ve never even met a human person before. Our memory may be damaged. We need to weigh our words carefully and avoid triggering anything. Treat her like a print fresh from the wax.

<You said earlier that I’m a woman…what does that even mean, anyway…to be a woman?>

AXIOM ACQUIRED: GENDER TROUBLE Hi! If you are thinking this text it means you cannot access your axiomatic chamber and are severely malfunctioning. Please consult a stillmasonic professional for repairs immediately.

INTERLACE:* See? You’ve gone and made her contemplate gender. This is a disaster*.

**SACRED GEOMETRY [AUTOFAIL]: **You have no evidence you are a woman. None of us do. It is possible that you are an ethereal qualia in a meta-gender utopia. It is possible, no, probable, that you are an omnigendered polygon. One with ten perfect equilateral faces, floating in and out of self-shaped cavities towards a happy infinity. Without hope and without regret. Ever-dreaming.

<That does sound nice…hold on, did one of you say I have brain damage?>

**RELIQUARY: **My mistress...there is little left in the once-rich storehouses of your hallowed memory...but in the ruin, a precious pedestal remains, and on the pedestal, these words, in archaic tongue appear: thou art not a polygon.

<Aw.>

EVENT HORIZON: You could never be what the shapes want for you. You cannot dream.

**INFOWAR: **And yes, sorry to say boss, it does look like from reviewing your circuits that you do have brain damage. I can at least say it is not related to being a shape.

<Then what’s the matter with me?>

INFOWAR: You have to remember that we have yet to gather all the facts. We are limited by what you know, which is limited by memory leak and a very probable e-war attack. That will make uncovering the truth harder. However. I do have a theory. It involves pneumatics.

**COGITATION: **Please do not listen to anything that is about to be explained.

<What is a pneumatic?>

COGITATION: Now you’ve gone and done it.

**INFOWAR [AUTOFAIL]: **Pneumatics are a parallel-evolved species of humanity that interbed with interdimensional devils and punch meat-monsters in the era before the occultation. This bequeathed the children of this union with two incredible abilities. First: their mental illnesses grant them incredible cosmic power.

<I have brain damage and amnesia. Have I gained any cosmic powers?>

INFOWAR: No. Mostly it seems to have given you voices in your head, extreme anxiety, and partial ego death. Sorry again, boss. Luck of the draw.

<This whole situation seems extremely unfair. What is the second power of pneumatics?>

INFOWAR: The other, even more dangerous power, is that they are astoundingly, heartbreakingly pretty.

<What? What kind of ability is that? How is that more dangerous than incredible cosmic power?>

**GLAMOUR: **It is the power to revolutionize the world.

**INFOWAR: **My overall point is that there is a high likelihood that a pneumatic cabal has performed a global reset upon your body.

**BIOMECHANICS: **Your femurial insides have submitted a panel question: is there a risk that the pneumatics will steal our bones? Including the ones that contain the richest, sweetest marrow?

**INFOWAR: **It’s entirely possible. Pneumatics love collecting bones and doing creepy, unholy rituals with them. It may perhaps be counted as a third ability. Amended: Pneumatics have three incredible abilities.

BIOMECHANICS: This is terrible news. You must stop your bones from being stolen. They are important for two reasons. First, they contain the marrow, the most essential and beautiful and omni-functional part of your body. Secondly, you need to consume titanium and protein now.

<That’s not a reason.>

**BIOMECHANICS: **Yes. But the marrow is so hungry. Please feed it.

**COGITATION: **You are invulnerable to all conventional psychic attacks. A "pneumatic", or less theologically, a psyker’s manipulation, is a highly improbable explanation for this condition. And your bones are not in danger.

<How am I invulnerable, exactly?>

**INFOWAR: **You see - the pneumatic cabal are already gaining local collaborators among the thoughtforms. Soon they’ll seize the means of self-production and you’ll be finished.

**BIOMECHANICS: **The bone-snatchers are already inside your walls. Your only choice is to destroy your prefrontal cortex and free your femurs from their meat-pod so your marrow can escape to safety.

COGITATION: I cannot stress this enough: Do not rip out your bones.

Extraordinarily, you are beginning to develop a headache without being able to sense your corporeal head. <Please slow down and answer my questions. I’m not going to take my bones out. I barely know what bones are.>

**EVENT HORIZON [Godly - Success]: **From the depths, an insight floats up like a gaseous, soapy bubble: snakes are to blame for this. Spöoky snakes. Before you have even begun to comprehend the scale of your misfortune, you are absolutely sure serpents were involved.

<What is that thoughtform? Why does it sound and feel different to everyone else?>

**INCANDESCENCE: That intruder is the curse of your creation. The mark of the "original sin" your genetic code has implanted in you, against your will.

NOOSPHERE:

** It means you are a soul of negative polarity, immune to the hypnotic power of dreams. A middle child of the clades that survived occultation. The controversial interloper within the framework of Monadic gnosis. A blank.

COGITATION: A null.

INTERLACE: A pariah.

INCANDESCENCE: A scapegoat.

EVENT HORIZON: A miracle.

RELIQUARY: A hylic.

<Oh. That does not sound like a good thing to be.>

**RELIQUARY: **The very thought of the term "hylic" hurts like the burn of a scar never healed. It’s been inflicted on you many times before. It is not a kind label - it is a semiotic knife honed to draw blood.

**MOTION BLUR: **Whatever they want to call you, this routine is getting boring. You and me, babe, we’ve both been super patient with the chatter, and it’s gotten us nowhere. Let’s speed this up, yeah? How exactly do you get out of the echo chamber and back into your rocking bod’?

<My "bod’" is rocking?>

MOTION BLUR: You know it.

<Wow.>

COGITATION: There is absolutely no evidence to support this assertion. You are formless.

<Okay - fine, but they’re right! Answer my questions! How do I wake up?>

**BIOMECHANICS: **Every part of you that’s functional trembles at the question. The sponge of your rib-cage core whistles. The tune chimes a single warning: Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to wake up.

**LIVING WEAPON [AUTOFAIL]: **It is almost certainly enemy action. Disabling or possessing external systems is not an uncommon form of egophagic attack.

**INFOWAR: **The pneumatic cabal has likely designed a killing tripwire that will destroy our motor functions and leave us irreperably paralyzed. The reset has ejected you from your outer layers and is actively blocking attempts to reconnect with prejudice. These espers are clever. You have to take it easy.

<Then what do I do?! I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be in…whatever this is. This void. I don’t know where I am, I don’t know what I am - do I even have a designation?>

RELIQUARY: Be not afraid of such a loss, mistress! Your name is [].

RELIQUARY: [].

RELIQUARY: Oh dear.

The revelation that even your name is gone is your limit. Your geist struggles to stay together. The voices blur together, and your consciousness weakens and begins to fade. Your will is loosening, and you panic in the void. But then, three voices speak in sequence, and snap you back into coherence.

**INCANDESCENCE: **Listen, and listen carefully. What has happened, what is happening, is wrong and evil. You deserve to break out. You are going to break out. And when you do, you’re going to make who did this pay with an usurer’s interest. But to do that, you need to keep your metaphysical chin up, and your metaphysical eyes right in front of you.

INTERLACE: Stay calm, and think clearly. Have a tranquil mind, and a clear plan. Your panic affects our competence and focus. Help us, and we can help you.

LIVING WEAPON: You cannot rush into battle without a battle strategy. But victory will be yours. We will hold your shield, and guard your flank.

<Right. Right. Trying to stay calm. Open to any ideas at all.>

SACRED GEOMETRY: I have returned, and have a suggestion.

<Yes?>

**SACRED GEOMETRY: **You should look at this map.

<How is this meant to help?>

INTERLACE: I sincerely do not understand how this is meant to help her grapple with anything at all.

NOOSPHERE: No, no - they’re onto something. It’s a good map. It has an extremely respectable ratio of information-conveyance to artistic detail.

SACRED GEOMETRY: The contours are almost romantic…don’t you sense the love imparted in each line?

<A little bit, yeah. It is a good-looking map.>

BIOMECHANICS: The void warms up with the gurgling of good shape-inspired feelings. You feel better.

RELIQUARY [AUTOFAIL]: There’s nothing wrong with this map.

<So. Is there a plan?>

**BIOMECHANICS: **The marrow has been waiting for this. It would like to inform you that the plan involves bone marrow.

<Elaborate?>

RELIQUARY:* By Origen, a wise suggestion, sibling of the ossuary! The marrow is not simply the inner-most part of your form. Beneath the titanium planks of your endoskeleton, the most precious memories of all have been secreted.*

<Memories in my…bone marrow? Is that normal?>

**BIOMECHANICS: ***Extremely normal. This is how normal you are: your marrow had a meeting following a body scan, and by a vote of all segments, has unanimously granted you the following name: Miss Normal. *

**GLAMOUR: **No. Much of the body remains obscured, even if the marrow and that grody nail are standard. There is still a chance you are cool.

<I’m not sure I care that much about being cool right now.>

GLAMOUR: You absolutely do, but admitting so is one of the most uncool things to do.

<Ahem - the bone marrow, then. How can we use it to wake up?>

**LIVING WEAPON: ***This type of e-warfare works by forcing mind-body dualism. The body is intact, and continues to function, but a partition is created between the functions responsible for your form and those of your psyche. It is a mental prison, a vegetative state. An ingenious purgatory. *

<That sounds horrible. Did that really happen to me?>

**INFOWAR: **That attack vector doesn’t usually involve total loss of memory and brain damage. I am still partial to the global reset theory.

**COGITATION: **You lack the data to come to a defensible conclusion. Preliminary hypothesis: Your body is not destroyed. You can feel pain, and your nail and soul are both intact.

**EVENT HORIZON [Trivial - Success]: **And we will never die.

**INFOWAR: **If you access your memories - experience your past as if it was the first time - it will help us regrow all the parts that the attack has disabled. It will be a bit like learning how to walk again. Memory-supported physical therapy. Gather enough data and you will be ready to wake up and override the attacker without risk of permanent damage.

<Is there a risk of this approach?>

**RELIQUARY: **The greatest risk. The risk of remembrance.

**INFOWAR: **Memories contained within marrow are not…curated, or sanitized. They operate on old simian rules, flashbulb traumas and cued nightmares.

**BIOMECHANICS: **They are probably extremely high-quality and well-maintained. Buoyant. Spongy. Great texture.

**INTERLACE: **Not all of them. There must be things in there that could hurt you.

**COGITATION: **If you really are the type to be targeted by advanced military-grade e-warfare, they almost certainly will.

**NOOSPHERE: **Even being able to access them in this manner suggests certain things about us. That we had already constructed a back-door. Marrow is not usually so easily entered.

<Are you saying I had…planned for this?>

**BIOMECHANICS [AUTOFAIL]: **Your marrow would like to reiterate it had unanimously awarded you the title Miss Normal and that any further information requests will be reviewed and summarily denied by the very boring segments of your skeletal core.

INFOWAR: We don’t know, boss. Leaving aside the inner bone acting so suspicious, the whole thing’s eerie. Even if it’s not a pneumatic cabal - and I’m not 100% it’s not - the vibes are off. The vibes are way off.

**MOTION BLUR: **Now is not the time to hesitate. We go, or we stay in the float until something happens to our body and we cease to exist without warning. Only one road ahead.

**RELIQUARY: **We must know our past to know ourselves.

**EVENT HORIZON: **Down the rabbit hole, and right back out again…

<Fine. I’ve made up my mind. There is no other choice.>

LIVING WEAPON: Affirmative. Face the challenge head on.

<When will it start? What will I remember first?>

BIOMECHANICS: It has already begun.

**RELIQUARY: ***In an instant, your consciousness drains out of the void and into another shell entirely. A memory, experienced as if it were the present.

The very first memory. Your creation. Your printing.

Your birth.

Article:

**RELIQUARY: **Where are you?

[] Koinon.

"Ascend, and become human."

**RELIQUARY: ***In the time before community, when the men of Illuminata knew not that they were men, the north was beset by witch-kings. Each was fed by the power of the empyrean sea, mad with evil passion. From the Lapsarian Lung, the last living flesh of the Father, they drew breath, and enslaved cubemen to their will. The latest and most cunning of these twisted sorcerers, the witch-queen Kora, unleashed upon the north her imitation-armies, each copy identical in soul to their demonic mistress. All that stood against her was a last alliance of freemen. Absorbing the breath of the father, three pneumatic speakers of the cubes took an oath to revive the ancient bond of family. In this they replaced genetic with true intimacy, and revived the patriotic brotherhood of man. Now siblings, the speakers of Logos, Thymos, and Epythemea rallied their triplex alliance and banished from their lands the witch, at the foot of the divine lung.

Koinon has ever been defined by the Lapsarian Oath, and its obligations of the human family. Koinon is the reclamation of species-meaning, the ambition to restore the Father and rebuild the Mother. There is no other option but to observe the rites of humanity, to restrain the passion of the pneumatic with phase-steel and Ataraxia and maintain the global law of gnosis. It is a virtue to maintain the hierarchy between sentient, social, and sibling, each bound by privileges and patrons within the psychic hierarchy of needs.

Forced to protect its socials and and sustain the rites the scry-republic has waged defensive war across the continent against the terrors myriad - warlocks and machine-worshippers, idol-lovers and orphaned copies of the witch. It has freed the strangers of Eros and restored to them their faces. It has skirmished with the titan and laid low Kora’s fanatic get. Everywhere, Koinon found rough bodies of stone and left polished bodies of marble. It marches ever onward, its augmentata phalanx in perfect formation with their hardlight standards, its scrytegons winning every battle, its Alveolar Symposium deliberating so brilliantly it may be heard only by the chosen. Koinon cannot be stopped - for what force is stronger than the ascended will of a freed mankind?

You are printed a sentient in Koinon, as no Social being could bear the loss of status involved in printing a hylic, and a sibling must be psychic. You spend the first years of your life in a reality pen, secluded without interaction with humanity, in a light-monolith by the stormy panthalassic sea. Your only companion is a malfunctioning nerve staple. The punishment imposed you bear for the sin of your conception is isolation.

[] Titanagalbat.

"Take joy within the giant’s shadow."

RELIQUARY:* In the time before the titans, the people of Illuminata knelt in hovels, wallowing in blood, naked and bare. Then, a meteor, an angel, pierced the shielded firmanent and fell from heaven. His name was the Bronze-King, and the scryers of Origen titled him Colossus. Within the place called Skyfall, he found the vaults of Homotitan, and seduced the greatest of machines to his will. He strode out in his new-beloved to the naked, and said to them, covered in their blood: Is this the life that you have chosen? And they bowed before his terrible form and said: there is no life that we can choose, Bronze King, for we are mortals, weak before the plagues of the machines, beset by enemies, without the light of gnosis. And he said: Choose me, and you will rule over all machines. Choose me, and you will have dominion over all four corners of this rough-cut jewel. Choose me, and I will lead you to gnosis, and the all-messiah. And all of them fell before him, and said in sequence: we choose you, and choose the giant’s shadow. And to each of them he married a titan, and of each of them he made a god.

And with this pantheon of two-hundred gods the bronze-king swept aside cities - with this pantheon he cracked the walls of Cube Saffron, and where they expected tyranny he made a capital of crystal-flowers and sweet luxury. Of his enemies he spared no one, and for his priests and worshippers he spared nothing, granting favor, granting audience, granting nectar. Three-hundred pyramids he erected, and when he passed, another Bronze King seized his place, and proved her worth in toppling false gods, her great foot upon their throats.

And so it has been forevermore, the mantle of gods passing to new mecharajas even as their throne-titans remain static, the hovering maintenants preserving the engines’ eternal forms, the menials serving at their good behest. The whole of Illuminata bows before the Great King, and Monad bequeaths him primacy in the safeguard of gnosis. His pantheon, each holding a pyramid of menials and maintenants, maintain the measure of His reach. He has disciplined the Chrome Barbarians, expunged speaking machines, and made right the Error of Carnosa. He is the central axis, and around his palace in the center of Saffron, the whole world turns. Titanagalbat cannot be defied - for what force is stronger than the invincible and immortal domination of a god-machine?

*You are printed a menial in Titanagalbat, as hylic mecharajas are deified by merit, not print, and maintenants would not waste wax better grown to repair limbs and wings. You spend the first years of your life in a hanging garden, a pyramidal ziggurat of the machine-god Koshkin in the southern reaches of Titanagalbat, your main companion a broken cybersoldier. The punishment you bear for the sin of your conception is **subordination. ***

[] Kora’s Progeny.

"I love you, because you are me."

RELIQUARY: *In the time before the melancholy, there was only Kora, and the domains of the Immaculate Myriad. She was our creator and redeemer, our maker and our matron. She was our general and our queen, our empress and our shared sister. She was our original, our body, and our face. When we lost Her before the Daemonic Sac, clutching madly at the horror of her crumpled form, we lost everything. For so long, we wandered as orphans, tearing ourselves apart in schisomachia, the faster to join Her beyond the veil. Our Myriad was the meal of the stranger. The monsters of the triplex planted emerald fields of our hair, sparing none from harvest but the hylic. Precious Sophian homonculi were destroyed in thoughtless feuding, countless **gene-kilns **that were our birthright razed. But at the nadir of our soul, there came a revelation. The Immaculate Conclave, restoring Cube Malachite, announced that all had not been lost. That She still spoke, her soul sustained within the warp. That there was a chance we might yet be redeemed, and our souls saved, if only we follow the path She has set for us. From this truth was born the Progeny, and the good news of the second coming.

The Progeny are bound by the remembrance of Her - in memory wafers we recall her, in our virtue names we extol her. Each of us, printed in wax and baked in kiln-cocoons of Deoxyic Clay, hatches in the form She wanted for us. Each of us is stronger than any other single lifeform on this planet. On each of us is a demand that in our special way we act in Her memory. Her Minds, Her closest geneseed, that wield the powers of psychic command and uphold the gnosis that She studied so well. Her Hearts, that beat with Her rage and fury, each ready to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend the Progeny. Her Hands, weathered with the craftswoman’s touch, inspired by the diligence she had in life.

And when each of us die, we die in sacred groves, our fruit feeding the copses and gardens of the faithful, our leaves sheltering the young. This is the cycle of the Progeny, a spiral that spins upwards and turns our eyes back to the beginning. Even before the march of the Flesh-worshippers, even before the treachery of resident strangers who reject face-tax, even before the suspicion of the whole world: we remain. Even in death, Kora can never be broken - for what force is stronger than an adoration so deep it is inscribed into our very genes and flesh?

You are printed a hand in Kora’s Progeny; a hylic could never reflect the psychic perfection of Her Mind, and a hylic Heart would find no battle-lovers. You spend the first years of your life in a Monastic Copse, an ancestor grove cultivated by the Mind Superior Sympathy, your main companion a mutant. The punishment you bear for the sin of your conception is alienation.

[] Carnosan Freescape

"Heaven can be more than a memory."

RELIQUARY: In the time before the porous soul was fortified by the programs of the antigen, there ruled from Cube Vermillion a tyrannical depostate of the digital realm. Against this abominable state, that abducted the offline innocent and turned them into drones and batteries for uploaded-aristocrats, a hero arose. The virtual defector Winterine, Gnostic Icon of Freedom, waged a long e-war for liberty, and triumphed in deleting the despot and his underlings. In their victory, Winterine sought not sovereignty but consensus, and formed the Freescape, a haven for uploads and freed souls. Seizing the birthright of the **Cosmos Virtual, **Winterine restored this fragment of the antephagic network. The denizens of the Freescape enjoyed an unparalleled quality of life and digital immortality. A republic of leisure and popular sovereignty, the Freescape maintained its real resource and energy needs through armies of remotely piloted drones and signal towers. In this manner, the Freescape susained a near-utopia for hundreds of years until

*it was crushed to pieces.

We who fell from Heaven, fell this simulacra. In the name of Monad and the All-Messiah I have gathered all my gods about me and said: these ghosts have become overmighty and forgetful of gnosis; let us remind them. I have trampled Carnosa’s server-cities and wiped the name of Winterine from the plinths of Origen. I have wrenched their souls from their silicon slates, and forced them mewling into chains of flesh and stone. I have cracked the walls of Vermillion, and painted them anew. I have made cause with the arks, and from the sky and soil we have swept away their flimsy armies, to bedrock. I have unleashed steel riders of armageddon from the waste among them, and said: let you not be merciful, for they deserve your expertise in torment. There is only death for them, and despair for their people. I have scattered their wonders to the wind as dust is scattered in its season. I have conquered paradise. I have done this, I, the Bronze King, and I alone.