Before Year Zero

A Promise of Plenty

The Firstbound believed advanced science could solve nearly any problem. One of their experiments attempted to create a living system that could provide food, fuel, fiber, building material, and biological renewal. It was meant to make resources plentiful. Instead, their reckless attempt to control living systems spiralled into the crisis that nearly ended the world. That story became known as The Great Weathering.

The Scattering

As the old world failed, survival grew more important than preserving a single city or way of life. Rather than concentrate everyone in one refuge, groups were sent in different directions carrying what they could: technical knowledge, seeds, tools, records, and specialized machines. One settlement could disappear while another survived. Knowledge lost in one place could still exist somewhere else. 

Finding Refuge

Halidom was one of the scattered settlements. Its founders built upward from an old seabed, raising the towers and eventually the Cloudline above them. They carried enough knowledge from the old world to create a place where people could survive and rebuild.

What They Became

Generations went by. Distance became isolation, and isolation hardened into tradition. Eventually, those traditions became part of who people believed they were. Communities adapted to where they landed. Eventually, the descendants of one people no longer remembered themselves that way.

The Machines

Some of the clearest links to the earlier world are the machines that survived it. NX units are one example. Built by the Firstbound engineers, NX-class bio units were programmed with education, maintenance procedures, communication protocols, environmental systems, and emergency knowledge.

A Larger Plan

The surviving glyphs hint that Halidom was never intended to be the only refuge. Many of the oldest marks can carry meaning across generations, even when the people who created them were gone. Knowledge of other survivors appears to have persisted the same way. Some went outward. Some went upward. Others may have traveled much farther.

Halidom was one part of a larger attempt at self-preservation, and somewhere inside that plan was a hope that separation would not last forever.

Someday, the scattered people might find one another again.