> Recorded in the Last Codex Archive, Spire City: Year 4,172 — Fragment recovered.
In the era before empires, there was Earth — a dying hearthstone drifting in cold light.
We fled it with broken ships and hopeful bones, carrying rusted dreams into the void.
From dust, we sowed steel; from ruin, we built Spires that clawed the corpse-light of distant suns.
It was never enough.
In the black between stars, we found a codex.
It was not written. It was not designed. It was — a whisper woven into the fabric of reality.
Those who listened found their souls reshaped, their bodies rethreaded with unseen circuits.
Some called it cultivation. Others said evolution. But we called it war.
The Federation rose not from wisdom, but from fear.
Nations collapsed into fleets. Cities hardened into fortresses. Souls became weapons sharpened by nano-arrays and iron laws.
Beneath the Spires, the ground remembered what the stars forgot.
But steel corrodes.
Blood remembers.
And there are no fractures alloys can't mend.
Now, in the lower sectors where ash chokes the breath and the young trade dreams for rations,
the Redshift stirs — slow and unseen, it drifts toward collapse.
Some say it is entropy.
Others call it prophecy.
We name it by the color it leaves in the sky: the bleeding red of dying light.
When steel weeps, the stars shall bleed. And from the dust, a new Codex shall be written — not with circuits, but with blood.