THE BOOK OF FYDOR: PART IV

The following is a fanfic based on Solar Winds, the 1993 DOS game by James Schmalz. This book represents the imagined contents of the legendary "Book of Fydor," which even the protagonist Jake Stone wass unable to read. Now, for the first time, the contents of the book can be known to the human beings of Earth...

In a galaxy millions of light years from earth's own Milkyway, there exists a solar system inhabited by humans. These humans are very distant relatives of those from earth, but neither know of the distant connection between them. In fact, neither know of the others existence.

Part IV: The Testament of Fydor

Chapter Nineteen: The Final Words

I stand at the edge of my years, looking upon the land that has been my home for what feels like an eternity. The sun sets over the hills, casting its golden light across the fields we have carved from this world. The warmth upon my skin carries echoes of another time, a time when I walked beneath a different sky. That world is gone, its name lost even to me, but its memory lingers like the last embers of a dying fire.

The winds whisper of change, not of endings, but of continuance. The world moves forward, never stagnant, and I have seen its course shift as the generations have come and gone. The divisions that once tore through us have settled with time, not into unity, but into distance. Some among us wandered beyond the horizon, seeking their own way. Others vanished entirely, taking their names and their memories with them. I remained here, in the first settlement, not because I feared the unknown, but because I understood the burden of remembrance.

I have built more than shelter. I have built a record, a tether to the past that time has not yet severed. The youth who sit at my feet and listen to my words do not understand the full weight of what I teach them, but they listen. I have taught them to read and to write, to set words to vellum—vellum we now craft ourselves, from the skins of beasts we have tamed. It is crude, yet it endures, and with it, I etch what knowledge remains before it, too, is lost.

I have spent my years watching the seasons turn, watching new generations rise, watching the past slip further from the grasp of those who inherit this world. The youngest among us do not look to the sky as I once did. They do not wonder what lies beyond, nor do they ask what came before. The stars are simply lights above them, unnamed and indifferent. The heavens hold no promise for them, only the land beneath their feet.

I have tried to keep the past alive, to teach what little I still know, but I do not deceive myself. The old world is beyond their comprehension. The machines, the towers, the vessels that sailed between the stars—these are stories to them, no different from the myths of gods and heroes. They believe because I tell them to believe, but they do not see. They do not feel what I feel when I recall the hum of an engine, the glow of a city at night, the sound of voices echoing in great halls built by hands far more skilled than our own.

What I cannot forget is the Architects. They remain the greatest enigma of my years. We once saw them as gods, as captors, as distant, unknowable forces that bent the course of our history to their will. Even now, I do not know whether we were ever more than pieces in a game too vast for us to comprehend. Did they see our war, our fall, and our struggles as we saw the shifting of the wind and the growth of the trees—inevitable and unremarkable? Did they shape us for some purpose beyond our reach, or were we simply the dust left to settle after their work was done?

These questions have lingered within me for years, unanswered. I do not know if they still watch us, nor do I know if they will return. I only know that they were here, and that they made us what we are. Perhaps they still shape us, unseen.

Despite this, I press on.

This book is my final labor. I write not for myself, for my time is nearly spent, nor for my people, for they have turned away from these truths. I write for the ones yet to come, the ones who may one day ask the questions that those around me have forgotten to ask. I do not know if these pages will endure the long passage of time. I do not know if any will read them when I am gone. But I write them all the same, because I must.

I do not know if we will ever reclaim what was lost. I do not know if we will ever return to the stars, or if we will remain bound to this world, forever looking upward without recognition. Perhaps one day, someone will look beyond this horizon and wonder. Perhaps they will seek, and in seeking, they will remember.

The future is not written. It belongs to those who have yet to claim it. If they are wise, if they are strong, they will find the truth buried in these words. If they have the courage to rise again, they will reclaim what was stolen from us.

If nothing else, let them know this: We were more than what we became.

Chapter Twenty: The Last Light of Memory

I have lived long enough to watch the world change in ways I cannot begin to describe. The land has grown familiar, yet alien, with the passing of each year. What was once foreign is now home, and what was once sharp and painful in its novelty has softened into the contours of everyday life. But there are moments, rare and fleeting, when the veil of time lifts, and I remember—remember a world that no longer exists, a civilization that has all but crumbled into dust.

I walk now, not as a man with many years to give, but as one who knows that his steps are counted. My body is frail, my hands tremble when I hold this book, and my eyes grow dim in the fading light of the setting sun. Yet my mind is clear, clearer than it has been in a long time. There is no fog of age, no cloud of forgetfulness. In these final days, the memories come unbidden, flowing freely, like a river that has finally broken through the dam of time.

I remember the sky of my youth. It was vast and unbroken, a canvas of brilliant hues that stretched endlessly above our heads. There was always something to look toward, some new frontier to explore, some mystery to unravel. We lived under the shadow of that sky, reaching for the stars, believing that we would one day conquer them all. It was a time of great hope, a time when our people were the masters of their destiny.

But that was before the end of the war.

Before the sky turned black, before the stars themselves seemed to withdraw from us, hiding their light as we tore our world apart.

I think now of those who fought in that war, those whose names I will never know, whose faces have long since been forgotten. They were the last of our people who stood for something greater than themselves, who believed in the cause, in the idea of a united world, even as it crumbled beneath their feet. They died in the ashes of our civilization, not knowing that they were the last sparks of a dying flame.

And yet, they fought. They fought with everything they had, even when the world around them seemed to be falling apart, even when it seemed as though there was no hope left. It is a strange thing, this idea of fighting for something that cannot be saved. But perhaps, in the end, that was the greatest lesson they taught me: that even in the face of inevitable destruction, there is something worth fighting for. There is something worth holding onto, even when all seems lost.

I see the children now, running through the fields, their laughter echoing through the air. They do not understand the weight of history, the burden of the past. They do not know what we have lost. But they will. One day, they will understand. Perhaps not today, or tomorrow, but one day, they will learn what came before, and they will see the same sky that I saw. They will reach for the stars, as we once did, and they will carry the flame of our people, however faintly it burns.

I do not know what will become of them, of us. Perhaps the future holds nothing but more struggle, more suffering. Perhaps they, too, will fall into the same traps that we did, blinded by their own arrogance, their own pride. But perhaps, just perhaps, they will learn. They will remember what we forgot.

I wonder sometimes if the Architects still watch us, if they still see the fragile thread of our existence hanging by a thread. Do they look down upon us from beyond the Outer Rim, from their distant, alien world? Or have they long since forgotten us, as we have forgotten so much?

I will never know. None of us will.

But what I do know is this: the sky is still there. The stars still shine, even if we can no longer reach them. And though we have fallen, though we have been scattered to the winds like dust, there is still something in us, something that cannot be extinguished.

In the end, perhaps that is all that matters. The light of memory, the spark of something greater, something that endures.

And so I leave these final words, my last gift to the world I once knew, to the world I still hold in my heart.

I am fading now, my time drawing to a close. But I am not afraid. I do not fear what comes next. For I know that in some distant future, the story of our people will be remembered. The story of what we were, and of what we became. It is a story that will live on, long after I am gone.

Farewell, my world. Farewell, my people.

And may you find the light again.

— Fydor, Elder of the New World

Translator’s Note

The text before you, which I have painstakingly translated, is a record of events from a time that seems as distant to us as the stars themselves. Yet the person who authored this work—Fydor—was a man of great wisdom and insight, and through his words, I have attempted to preserve his vision of a world that no longer exists, of a civilization that once flourished but now lies forgotten beneath the weight of time.

As I copied these pages, I found myself struck by certain terms and ideas that defy the understanding of my own age. The language of Fydor is rich with concepts that, to my knowledge, have no direct place in the world I live in. There are references to technologies and practices that are far beyond the scope of what we know today. The idea of "the Architects" is particularly perplexing, and it is impossible for me to fully grasp the implications of what Fydor speaks of. I have tried to stay true to his words as much as possible, though some meanings have proven too elusive to translate fully.

In some places, the text refers to things that seem to belong to another realm entirely—whether literal or metaphorical, I cannot say. "The Outer Rim," and other phrases suggest a reality that is at once familiar and utterly alien. I have preserved these terms, even though I have no true understanding of them. Perhaps the world of Fydor was one of grand and extraordinary scale, but it is clear that my own understanding is limited by the society in which I live.

Despite these confounding concepts, it is clear to me that Fydor’s message is one of enduring truth. It is a call to remember, to look beyond the surface of our existence, and to seek the light that once guided his people. Whether this message is meant to inspire or to warn, I cannot say for certain. But it is a message worth hearing.

I have often wondered about the nature of Fydor’s people, about the great heights they reached before their fall. Their world, as he describes it, was unlike anything I can comprehend—a place where great towers touched the sky, where machines carried them across vast distances in moments, where knowledge itself seemed limitless. What kind of people were they, these ancestors of ours, who walked among such wonders?

Fydor wrote of their destruction, of war and fire and the breaking of their home. He recorded their final moments, yet I cannot even say where that world once was, nor what became of it after they were taken. Did its ruins drift in the sky, lifeless and cold? Did its name vanish from the tongues of those who once spoke it? Was it truly lost, or has it merely been forgotten?

As I conclude this translation, I am left with more questions than answers. The knowledge Fydor and his people once held is beyond my grasp, but I marvel at its traces.

The beings Fydor called the Architects remain the greatest mystery of his writings. His descriptions of them are unlike anything I have ever known, neither men nor beasts, yet possessing both cunning and purpose. He wrote of their great ships that moved without sails, of their eyes that gleamed with unreadable thoughts, of their silence, more dreadful than any spoken command. They took our ancestors from the ruin of their world and placed them here, not as an act of mercy, but for reasons Fydor himself struggled to understand.

I cannot say what manner of beings they truly were. Were they gods, as some claim? If so, they were cold ones, untouched by pity or wrath. Fydor did not write of them as deities, but as masters, as distant and inscrutable as the stars. He feared them, but he did not worship them. He marveled at their power, but he did not mistake it for wisdom. They came, they watched, and when their purpose was done, they left, vanishing into the heavens from which they came. If they ever return, will we know them? Or has time so dulled our memory that we would call them by new names and mistake them for something else entirely?

May the memory of what came before never fade.

---

Epilogue: The Vanishing of Fydor’s Testament

The words of Fydor did not vanish into the void with his passing. For generations, his disciples carried the weight of his knowledge, transcribing the Testament onto new vellum, whispering its truths in hushed voices beneath the flickering light of oil lamps. They held onto the belief that one day, the scattered remnants of their people would remember, that the wisdom of the past could rebuild what had been lost.

But time is an enemy greater than war, more patient than the Architects.

The disciples of Fydor dwindled as the ages passed. The strength of their conviction was not enough to hold back the tides of history. Wars came and went, kingdoms rose and fell, and with each generation, fewer hands took up the task of preserving the words. What was once a growing tradition became a secretive one, then an outlawed one, and finally, a forgotten one.

The last true transcription of The Book of Fydor was made in a time already ancient to the events of Jake Stone's life—more than two millennia before his birth. By then, the language of Fydor had already withered, its meaning slipping from common tongues like sand through fingers. The last scribes could no longer fully understand the words they copied, and so they wrote them as they were, preserving alien syllables in sacred ink. Certain words from Fydor’s age remained untouched in the text, their meaning forever obscured, artifacts of a past so distant that no mind could recall their purpose.

And then, as if fate had conspired against them, the final keepers of Fydor’s knowledge were swept away. Feudal lords, backed by institutions that masqueraded as divine but were, in truth, covert extensions of the Architects, crushed what remained of the old ways. The last known copies of The Book of Fydor were gathered and hidden, locked away in the deepest vaults of what became the Grand Archive, a towering repository of knowledge meant not for preservation, but for control. Like the Vatican’s forbidden texts on Earth, these books were buried so deeply that they became mere rumors, whispers on the lips of scholars who dared to wonder what lay beyond their reach.

For centuries, the Testament remained buried, its words unseen, its meaning lost. It was assumed destroyed, erased from history like so many inconvenient truths before it.

But history is not so easily tamed.

High in the remote reaches of an mountainous region, where the wind howled through jagged cliffs and winter held the land in its grasp for most of the year, the cave system lay hidden beneath the ruins of a forgotten structure. The cold, dry air that funneled through the mountains had kept the caverns within stable for millennia, untouched by the creeping decay of time.

Deep within, past winding tunnels and chambers long abandoned to darkness, stood a weathered stone statue—its form eerily humanoid, yet subtly wrong, as if shaped by hands that had never seen the subject they sought to recreate. Its elongated head bore the suggestion of a ridge, its features too smooth, its proportions slightly off, as though a vague memory had been given form in stone.

At its base, concealed within a hollowed compartment, The Book of Fydor had rested, wrapped in layers of aged fabric, undisturbed in its cold tomb. Sheltered from moisture, shielded from insects, it remained intact long after the language of its last translation had died, its words waiting in silent defiance of time—only to be found by men who would twist them for their own ends.

Somewhere in the underbelly of Magelus' ancient world, in the vast subterranean networks beneath a forgotten cellar, a single copy survived—hidden, waiting. A few centuries before Jake Stone’s time, it was uncovered by a nameless wanderer, sold for a pittance to the first wealthy collector who saw value in antiquity. From there, it passed from hand to hand, traded not for its wisdom, but for its rarity. It became an artifact, a curiosity to adorn the libraries of the powerful.

The world of Magelus, where Stone would one day walk, had its own hidden rulers—men who whispered to the Architects, who served their masters in the shadows. They could not destroy The Book of Fydor without drawing attention to it. And so, instead, they did something far more insidious.

They mistranslated it.

Only the passages concerning the Outer Rim and the Key were translated into the vernacular of Stone’s time, but they were twisted, their meaning intentionally blurred. The truth of the Architects, of their grand design, was deliberately obscured, buried under layers of vagueness and error. The servants of the Architects ensured that even those who read The Book of Fydor would never truly understand it.

And so, by the time Jake Stone would come to hear of it, the book was nothing more than an enigma—an incomplete puzzle, a whisper of a lost truth. The words remained, but their meaning had been severed from history, their purpose reduced to little more than legend.

Fydor’s testament had survived the millennia, but not intact.

It was not destroyed by time, nor by war, nor even by the Architects.

It was undone by deception.

THE BOOK OF FYDOR: PART III

The following is a fanfic based on Solar Winds, the 1993 DOS game by James Schmalz. This book represents the imagined contents of the legendary "Book of Fydor," which even the protagonist Jake Stone wass unable to read. Now, for the first time, the contents of the book can be known to the human beings of Earth...

In a galaxy millions of light years from earth's own Milkyway, there exists a solar system inhabited by humans. These humans are very distant relatives of those from earth, but neither know of the distant connection between them. In fact, neither know of the others existence.

Part III: The Forsaken World

Chapter Thirteen: The Landing

The great vessel shuddered as it descended, its vast engines shifting as they prepared to bring us down to the surface of our new world. The air within the ship grew heavy, thick with the unspoken fears of those who had survived the journey. For so long, we had been carried through the void, held in the unyielding grip of the Architects. Now, the moment had come.

The landing itself was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The force of it pressed us downward, a slow but undeniable weight as the ship met solid ground. The deep, resonant hum of the engines faded, replaced by something even more unsettling—silence.

For the first time since we had been taken, the ship had stopped.

The doors opened.

Beyond them lay Magelus.

The light outside was harsh at first, blinding in contrast to the dim, sterile glow of the ship’s corridors. The air, rich and thick, carried unfamiliar scents—moist soil, distant vegetation, the unmistakable presence of a world that had never known our kind. It was strange, alien, yet undeniably real.

And we were not alone.

As we stepped forward, emerging from the cold prison of the Architects’ ship, I saw them—thousands of them. They were human, like us, yet their faces were unfamiliar. They moved sluggishly, eyes clouded with confusion, as if waking from a deep and dreamless sleep. The stasis chambers.

The realization struck me with the force of a physical blow.

There had been others aboard the ship, sealed away in sleep, unaware of the long passage through the void. Now, they had been awakened.

We, the ones who had lived through the journey, the ones who had wandered the corridors and seen glimpses of our fate, were the only ones who understood what had happened.

It fell to us to explain.

Before we could begin, a shadow passed over us.

Above, the ships of the Architects loomed, their vast, motionless forms hanging in the sky. They did not leave. They watched. They observed. Their presence was silent but oppressive, a constant reminder that, though we stood upon solid ground, we were not beyond their reach.

No words were spoken. No commands were given. Yet it was clear—we were expected to act.

We were expected to organize ourselves.

The Architects, though physically present, remained distant. They did not guide us, nor did they assist. Their expectations were unspoken, but undeniable. There would be no chaos. There would be no hesitation. We were to create order, to establish something resembling structure, and to do so quickly.

The tools they left for us were few and crude. Stone axes, flint knives, woven baskets, fishing lines. Nothing of our old world remained. The great towers of our cities, the machines that once carried us across the skies, the knowledge that had once allowed us to shape the world to our will—all of it was gone.

We were left with nothing but our own hands.

At first, there was only stillness. No one dared to move beyond the perimeter of the ship. We stood in the shadow of its towering hull, beneath the silent watch of the Architects' vessels, struggling to grasp the enormity of what had been done to us.

Then, slowly, the first steps were taken.

Those of us who had been awake during the journey took the lead, speaking with those who had only just emerged from stasis. There were questions, many of them—questions we could barely answer ourselves. Some we told the truth. Others we softened, though we knew it would not shield them for long.

There were no dissenters. No one rebelled.

What choice did we have?

The Architects had made it clear. We were not to return to the ship. The doors had closed behind us, their finality unmistakable. There would be no second chance, no return to the cold sterility of the vessel that had carried us through the void.

Whatever awaited us, whatever struggles lay ahead, we would face them here.

Beneath the shadow of the Architects’ silent vigil, on the surface of this alien world, our new life had begun.

Chapter Fourteen: Bronze Age Dawn

The first weeks on Magelus passed in a blur of confusion and trial. The land, vast and untamed, offered no mercy to the unprepared. We were survivors of a great and terrible civilization, but here, on this unfamiliar soil, we were no different from any other creature that had stumbled into the wilderness. Our hands, once accustomed to the precision of technology and the elegance of artificial worlds, were now roughened by the cold, unforgiving truth of raw survival. The tools we had brought with us, fragile relics of a lost age, were no match for the harshness of Enigma’s wild terrain.

We had no maps, no records, and no knowledge to guide us. The knowledge of our people—the vast network of research, science, and culture—had been lost when our world fell into ruin. Our ancestors had spent millennia building their civilization, creating marvels beyond the comprehension of those who had come before them, but here, we were left with nothing but the basics. The tools we had once used to bend the laws of nature to our will were now beyond our reach.

I remember the first fire we made.

It was a small thing, a pit dug hastily into the earth, surrounded by stones to keep the flames contained. I was with a group of others, a handful of survivors from the ship, and we were gathered around the pit, our faces lit by the dancing glow of the flame. Our hands, trembling and uncertain, fumbled with the sticks and stones we had gathered in an attempt to create fire from nothing. It felt primitive, crude, and yet, as the first spark caught, as the dry twigs caught alight and the flame began to grow, there was something in that moment that felt… right.

We were starting over, yes, but it was not the end of us. The fire was a symbol of something deeper, something more profound. It was the first step of a journey that would take us back to the beginning, to a place where we would have to rediscover the fundamentals of life—of survival, of creation, and of community. In the firelight, we became something new, not just survivors of a lost world but the seed of something that could one day grow again.

We would have to build from the ground up. There was no choice. The wreckage of our past lay behind us, and the future was uncertain. But there was one thing we knew for certain: we would not allow ourselves to be forgotten. The fire we had kindled was a reminder that we still had the power to create, to shape the world around us with our own hands.

But fire alone would not be enough.

The land was harsh. The earth, while rich in potential, was stubborn and unforgiving. The great trees that surrounded us were beautiful, but their wood was dense and difficult to work. The grasslands, though wide and sweeping, offered no shelter from the scorching sun by day or the freezing cold by night. We were learning how to use our surroundings, how to adapt to the environment in which we now found ourselves, but it was slow going. Every day brought new challenges, new obstacles to overcome.

We had no knowledge of the plants, the animals, or the geography of Enigma. What was edible? What was poisonous? What could we use for shelter? The question of food was paramount—without it, we would starve. And so, we hunted and foraged, relying on trial and error to guide us. Some of us fell ill from the unfamiliar plants we consumed. Others had their hands burned by the acid-spitting creatures that lurked in the underbrush. But we learned. We adapted.

The first shelter we built was a crude structure, made of branches and leaves. It offered little protection against the elements, but it was enough to keep us from sleeping on the ground. We had no tools, no saws or hammers to help us shape the wood, so we used our hands and our teeth. The process was slow, but as the days wore on, we learned how to sharpen stones, how to weave vines into rudimentary ropes, how to create shelters that would stand against the wind and rain.

Each small victory was a triumph, a step forward in our struggle to reclaim something of the world we had lost. But there was no time to linger in the comfort of these small successes. We had to move forward, had to build something more lasting, something that could endure.

And so we began to search for other resources, for something that might help us move beyond this primitive, fragile existence. Yet always, above us, the Architects remained. Their ships hung in the sky, vast and motionless, like silent sentinels. The colony ship where we had first set foot on this world remained grounded, its dark shape a constant reminder of the forces that had placed us here. They did not interfere, nor did they guide us, yet their presence was impossible to ignore. We did not speak of them often, for to do so was to invite fear. Instead, we forced ourselves to focus on the tasks before us, moving carefully, ensuring that nothing we did would draw unwanted attention.

We had no elders to guide us, no teachers to pass on the wisdom of the old world. The knowledge of our ancestors, the great stores of learning, had been lost in the chaos of the war and the destruction of our home. But there were fragments—scattered remnants of a time when we had known more, had been more. We held onto those fragments as best we could, teaching ourselves, teaching each other. Even as we struggled to understand the land we now inhabited, to learn its dangers and its gifts, we always remained aware of the watchful eyes above. Whether the Architects saw us as subjects, as prisoners, or as something else entirely, we could not say. We only knew that they were waiting.

The land seemed to reject us at every turn. There were days when the hunger gnawed at our bellies, when the cold seeped into our bones and we questioned whether we would ever find a way to live here, to thrive in this new world. But there were other days, too—the days when the sun shone just right, when the wind carried the scent of the earth’s promise, when the sound of the animals in the trees was a reminder that life, in all its complexity, was still moving forward. These were the days when hope flickered in our hearts, when we could almost see the future laid out before us, clear and bright.

It was on one of these days, as I stood outside our shelter, looking out over the vast expanse of Magelus, that I realized something crucial. We were not merely surviving. We were not just holding on to the past, clinging to the remnants of a dying civilization. We were becoming something new—something that would, in time, be greater than what we had been. This world, though unfamiliar and unyielding, had the power to shape us, to transform us into something we had never been before. It was not a return to the old ways, not a mere continuation of what had been lost.

It was a beginning. And for the first time since we had arrived, I felt a deep, quiet certainty in my chest. It was the certainty that we could rebuild, that we could rise from the ashes of our past and forge something worthy of the name of our people.

Chapter Fifteen: The Accounting

Survival was not assured.

In the days after our arrival, we moved as if in a dream, unwilling or perhaps unable to grasp the full weight of what had happened to us. The Architects had given us nothing but the land itself and a handful of primitive tools, barely adequate for even the simplest tasks. Their great vessels remained overhead, unmoving and silent. They watched us without offering guidance or assistance, their expectation unmistakable. We were to sustain ourselves.

The world was vast, wild, and unfamiliar. The soil appeared fertile, the rivers teemed with fish, and the forests held an abundance of game. None among us possessed the knowledge to cultivate these resources effectively. We had come from a world built upon machinery and towering cities, where vast networks had sustained our every need without effort. Now, there was no infrastructure, no direction, and no authority to organize our efforts. The presence of the Architects remained the only certainty.

Action was the only path forward.

We divided ourselves according to necessity. Wood had to be chopped for fires and shelter. Clay had to be shaped and baked into bricks. The fields needed to be tilled and planted with the seeds provided by the Architects, though we did not know if they would grow in this new soil. Groups formed to hunt, fish, and gather what wild plants seemed edible. Others searched for stone and metal, though only tin was found in workable quantities. Its softness limited its use, yet it was more than we had before.

Our attempts at order proved clumsy and inefficient. The knowledge required to shape a civilization had not been given to us. The selection of our people had not been based on skill or expertise. Among us were clerks, minor functionaries, low-level technicians, and unskilled laborers—people who had once performed small tasks within a vast and complex system. None had been builders, farmers, or scholars of the old sciences. The foundation of our lost world had rested in the hands of others who were not among us.

The result was inevitable.

We did not rise to rebuild what had been lost. Our knowledge was too fragmented, our skills too narrow, and the distance between us and the great minds of our civilization too vast. Instead, we built from the most rudimentary level, shaping a society defined by necessity rather than progress. The collapse of our previous existence had left us with nothing, forcing us into an age of rough stone and soft metal.

Records of our time on Magelus were crude, carved into wood blocks and stretched hides. I took responsibility for keeping them, inscribing what little we understood of the land, the seasons, and the struggles of our meager beginnings. Every effort to shape tools, fire bricks, and cultivate crops was recorded. The taming of animals and the lessons learned from the harshness of our new existence were preserved in the only way we could manage.

The Architects remained in the skies above. Their presence was constant, their expectations unspoken. They neither guided nor assisted, yet the weight of their gaze could not be ignored. We did not know what failure would bring, but we knew it would not be tolerated.

The only choice was to press forward. Driven by necessity and by fear, we began.

Chapter Sixteen: The Vanishing Guardians

A day came when the sky above us changed. The shift was subtle, barely noticeable at first, yet it carried with it a sense of finality. The Architects were leaving.

For a time that stretched beyond reckoning, their ships had remained above us, suspended like immovable sentinels. They cast their long shadows over our fragile settlements, their presence as constant as the sky itself. We had come to live beneath them, not knowing if they were a threat, a safeguard, or something far worse—an indifferent observer. Their departure did not come with ceremony or spectacle. No warnings were given, no explanations offered. Their vast ships rose in silence, retreating into the endless expanse above, shrinking until they were nothing but points of vanishing light.

The sky became empty.

Only then did I understand what had been gnawing at the edges of my thoughts. The Architects had not left because their purpose had been fulfilled. They had left because we no longer mattered.

Many had thought of them as guardians. Their presence, though oppressive, had been constant. They had taken us from ruin, placed us here, and given us the barest means to survive. Some had called it mercy. Others had called it an experiment. None among us had ever called it what it truly was.

We were pawns in a design beyond our understanding. They had watched us, studied us, measured our struggles, and when there was nothing left for them to learn, they simply withdrew.

A strange sense of loss settled over me, one that I could not name. For so long, we had lived beneath their gaze, shaping our lives in the shadow of their presence. The silence they left behind was unfamiliar, as though something essential had been taken from us. Without them, we were exposed, no longer subjects under watch, but something more unsettling—something abandoned.

In the first days after their departure, the survivors moved with hesitation, as if expecting the Architects to return, to intervene, to correct some unseen transgression. None among us could recall a time when our fates had been our own. The fear of punishment lingered, even when there was no longer anyone to deliver it.

Then, something changed.

As I walked among the others, I saw the first stirrings of defiance, though at the time, I did not recognize them for what they were. The hold the Architects had over us had been invisible, deeper than mere chains or confinement. It had been the slow erosion of our will, the reshaping of our very thoughts to accommodate their presence. With them gone, the weight of that unspoken submission began to lift.

The knowledge that no one remained to judge us settled in, first as fear, then as realization. We were no longer prisoners. We were no longer being watched. We were free.

Some fell into despair, unable to imagine survival without the silent authority that had loomed over us for so long. Others, however, began to act. They gathered wood and stone, mended shelters, hunted with renewed focus. The fear that had kept them hesitant, waiting for an unseen force to dictate their actions, began to fade. Their hands, once idle under the watch of the Architects, now moved with determination.

In the days that followed, I saw the first signs of something new—a sense of purpose, fragile but growing. The land was harsh, and our means were primitive, but we were learning. The weight that had pressed down upon us was gone, and with its absence came the first whispers of true resolve.

The Architects had taken us from our world, broken us, and left us to fend for ourselves. In their leaving, they had given us nothing more than uncertainty.

That uncertainty belonged to us now.

As I stood beneath the empty sky, I felt the weight of our new reality settle upon me. The choice of what we would become was now our own. Whether we would rebuild, fall to ruin, or rise into something altogether different, I did not know.

For the first time since our captivity began, our fate was truly our own.

Chapter Seventeen: The Unraveling

Time does not move as one expects. It does not pass in an orderly march, nor does it yield to the desires of those who seek to master it. It twists and coils, quickening when one longs for stillness and dragging when one pleads for haste. In the years following the Architects' departure, time became something else entirely—a slow, inexorable decay.

At first, we clung to the illusion that we remained a people united. The settlement we had built stood firm, and our shared struggles had given us purpose. We had survived. We had endured. But survival is not civilization, and endurance is not progress. The land we toiled upon remained harsh and indifferent, and the world we had come from drifted ever further from living memory. We were no longer the people we had once been.

Without the Architects, there was no guiding force to command obedience, and no common enemy to keep us bound together. Old disputes resurfaced. The cohesion that had been forged in suffering began to weaken. There had been no true leaders among us—only those who had stepped forward to offer direction in the chaos of our arrival. Now, those voices faded, drowned out by uncertainty, by ambition, by the slow erosion of trust.

The first fractures were subtle. Arguments over food stores, disputes over hunting grounds, questions of who should lead and who should follow. These conflicts did not seem dire at first, yet they deepened over time, widening into gulfs that could not be bridged. The voices of dissent grew louder, and soon, words alone no longer satisfied them. Lines were drawn. Alliances were formed.

The settlement became a place of division rather than unity. Language itself, once the thread that bound us together, became a wedge that drove us apart. Some among us held fast to the dialects of the homeworld, preserving what little remained of the old tongue. Others abandoned it, adapting to new words, new ways of speaking, forming new identities that no longer tied them to the past. Those who could no longer understand one another ceased to see each other as kin.

Familiar names began to fade. The Kay, once our closest allies, withdrew, speaking among themselves in hushed voices, their manner guarded, their loyalty shifting toward their own. The Siak, a group hardened by necessity, abandoned the settlement altogether, vanishing into the forests and hills, choosing self-reliance over fractured unity. We had come to this world as a single people, but now we were strangers once more.

As we drifted further apart, something greater than our unity was lost. The knowledge we had gathered, the remnants of our past, the fragments of understanding we had struggled to preserve—all of it began to fade. The stories of our homeworld, once sacred, now seemed distant, irrelevant to the lives we fought to sustain. The skills we had scraped together upon our arrival, the crude efforts to rebuild what had been stolen from us, were abandoned in favor of more immediate concerns. Survival eclipsed memory. The records I had kept, the inscriptions carved into wood and stone, became little more than relics—objects of curiosity, not guidance.

There was a night when I stood alone on the ridge overlooking the settlement. Fires burned below, their glow casting long shadows over the crude shelters we had built. Voices echoed through the darkness, no longer raised in common purpose, but in argument, in anger, in the certainty that their words would change nothing. I looked upon what we had built and saw not the beginning of a new civilization, but the remnants of one unraveling into something far smaller, something lesser.

I wondered then if our kind would ever rise again.

The Architects had taken us from the ruin of our world, had set us upon this land, and had watched as we struggled beneath their gaze. What had they expected of us? Had they seen this coming? Did they know that we would fracture, that we would stumble and fall into the depths of ignorance and division?

We had once waged war against the Enemy, a war so great that it had consumed our world. We had fought with all our strength, believing that we were to be the victors, believing that our kind would triumph. But where did that war stand now? Our enemy was gone, our home was lost, and we, the last of our kind, stood broken upon this distant world, made powerless not by conquest, but by time and the exigency of survival.

The question haunted me in the silence of the night. Would we ever leave this world? Would we ever again touch the stars? Would we ever be more than scattered tribes on an alien land, whispering of things we no longer understood?

The answer did not come to me, though I feared that I already knew it. A people who forget their past have no future. Although those who were in stasis had not been broken by the Architects, none of us could remain what we once were.

Chapter Eighteen: The Lost Name of the Stars

The stars, once our compass, had become nothing more than distant embers in the void. They burned as they always had, but their meaning had faded from our minds. Long ago, we had looked upon them as waypoints, as guides that carried us across the vast ocean of the cosmos. Now, they were nameless, indifferent lights in the night sky, unrecognized and unheeded by those who struggled beneath them.

The constellations of our ancestors, the celestial maps we had once traced with precision, no longer existed for us. Even if they had, it would not have mattered. This was not the sky of our home. We had been taken beyond the reach of familiar stars, cast so far across the heavens that none of us could say where we had come from. Some still tried, pointing at one star or another in the hopes that it was the one they had known in their youth, but their voices held no certainty. The sky was a stranger to us now.

Two stars, brighter than the rest, gleamed in close proximity to one another. One shone larger, the other fainter, like an eternal companion to the first. I knew these were the stars I had seen from the void as the Architects brought us here. They were part of the same barrier that enclosed our sun, locked within the same unseen walls. Even the heavens themselves had been bound.

The elders, those few who had carried the memories of our former world, had perished. With them went the last whispers of the past, the final echoes of a civilization that had once reached beyond the stars. The children of this land had never known such things. They had never heard the names of the places we once called home, had never learned the stories of how we once lived. They had never known that we had once ruled over our own fate.

Their world was the soil beneath their feet, the rivers that fed them, the beasts they hunted. To them, the sky was no different than the mountains on the horizon—distant, unchanging, and beyond their grasp. No one looked upward with wonder anymore.

I alone remembered.

In my youth, I had known the stars as my ancestors had known them. I had seen them measured, charted, understood. I had watched as they were used to navigate the great void, had known them as the markers of destiny. The names that had once held meaning had become myths, spoken of only in hushed tones, as if to utter them aloud would be to disturb the fragile life we had built here.

A change had taken place within us, deeper than forgetting. It was not that the knowledge had slipped away, but that we had ceased to see why it mattered. We no longer knew how to read the stars, nor did we care to. The universe was no longer a vast network of wonders waiting to be explored—it was simply vast. The heavens had lost their purpose, and in doing so, so had we.

One evening, I stood upon a hill, watching as the sky darkened, revealing its endless expanse. I saw a group of children playing in the dirt below, their laughter rising into the air. They did not look up. They had no reason to. To them, the stars were nothing more than the backdrop of their lives, distant and silent.

For the first time, I understood the depth of our loss. It was not simply knowledge that had faded, nor was it only the memory of our world that had slipped away. We had lost the will to wonder.

I wondered if there would come a time when we would rise again, when our descendants would look to the sky and ask the questions we had long since abandoned. Would they seek the lost names of the stars? Would they find them? Or had the universe closed itself to us forever?

THE BOOK OF FYDOR: PART II

The following is a fanfic based on Solar Winds, the 1993 DOS game by James Schmalz. This book represents the imagined contents of the legendary "Book of Fydor," which even the protagonist Jake Stone was unable to read. Now, for the first time, the contents of the book can be known to the human beings of Earth...

In a galaxy millions of light years from earth's own Milkyway, there exists a solar system inhabited by humans. These humans are very distant relatives of those from earth, but neither know of the distant connection between them. In fact, neither know of the others existence.

Part II: The Journey Beyond the Outer Rim

Chapter Seven: The Enigma System

There was a time when my people did not know the sky, when we did not mark the passage of time by the movement of the stars. The world we now call home was not the world of our ancestors, nor was it the world of our birth. There was a time before the fields we till, before the rivers that sustain us, before the sky under which we now live. That time is gone, yet I remember.

I remember the journey that brought us here.

The Architects carried us through the great void between the stars, through a darkness deeper than any night, across distances beyond the reach of any thought. There were no days, no nights, no rising or setting of a sun to mark the passage of time. The ship moved without stopping, its purpose known only to our captors. It carried us away from what little remained of our past, toward something unknown, and for as long as we traveled, I could do nothing but listen and learn.

I searched for understanding where none was given.

The Architects never spoke to us, but they spoke among themselves. Their voices were strange, layered sounds that carried meanings I could not fully grasp. Yet I listened. I studied the symbols inscribed upon the walls of their great vessel, the markings that pulsed with an alien glow. In time, I recognized patterns. Certain words repeated often, always in reference to our course. One word appeared again and again, etched into their instruments and spoken with certainty.

Enigma.

At first, I did not understand its meaning, but as I listened, I recognized that it was more than a word. It was a place.

Enigma was the name of a star, one of three that existed within a sealed region of space known as the Outer Rim. This place, though unseen and unknowable to my people, was set apart from the rest of the stars, enclosed by a force that none could pass through at will. There was only one way to enter or leave, and the Architects called it the Key.

I did not know what the Key was. Was it a passage, a gateway, or something else entirely? The Architects spoke of it rarely, and when they did, I could not grasp the full meaning of their words. Whatever its nature, it was the only means by which we would reach our destination.

I committed this knowledge to memory. There was no way to record what I had learned, no surface upon which I could inscribe the truth without risk of discovery. I had no choice but to hold it within my mind, constructing it in ways that could not be forgotten. I repeated each detail silently, shaping the knowledge into patterns, linking words and images in a way that would not fade.

Each time I recalled what I had learned, I feared that the Architects already knew. Their gaze was always watchful, their movements precise. I could not escape the feeling that they saw more than actions, that they could perceive thought itself. I did not know if this was true, but I dared not assume otherwise.

Then, after a time beyond measure, something changed.

A deep vibration passed through the walls. The distant hum of the ship's engines shifted, a sound so subtle that few among my people noticed. The Architects moved with newfound purpose, adjusting the instruments that guided our course.

I followed them and saw what they saw.

The name Enigma pulsed upon their displays, and beneath it, I read another name:

Magelus.

It was not the name of a star, but of a world. A place of rivers and forests, of valleys and mountains. I saw its shape upon the glowing surface of the Architects' instruments, a world vast and untouched, its lands wrapped in green, its waters stretching across its surface.

This was where they were taking us.

For the first time, I allowed myself to wonder what awaited us there. Would we be left to live as we once had? Would we build homes, raise families, shape the land as our ancestors had done on the world we lost? Or would we remain captives, watched always by the Architects, forever bound to a purpose we could not yet understand?

I had no answers. I had only the image of the world that would soon become our own, a place unknown and yet inescapable.

As I turned from the glowing display, I saw something that filled me with deeper unease.

Two of the Architects stood together in one of the corridors, facing one another. One raised its hands, forming gestures I had never seen before, its posture rigid, its movements deliberate. I watched in silence, expecting the second Architect to respond.

It did not.

For several moments, it remained unmoving. Then, as if nothing had occurred, it spoke aloud in the strange, layered voice of its kind.

In that moment, I understood something that I had never suspected before.

Not all of them could speak without sound.

For all their power, the Architects were not the same. Some relied on speech and gesture, as we did. Others, perhaps only a few, could communicate without words, reaching into the thoughts of their own kind.

If this was true, then they were not all-knowing. Their awareness, though vast, was not absolute. They could be deceived.

I did not react. I did not dwell on what I had witnessed. I continued walking, keeping the revelation locked within my mind.

As the ship moved ever onward, I reinforced every detail within my memory—the name of the star, the name of the world, the image of the Key as it appeared upon the displays, and the moment I saw an Architect fail to be heard without speech.

This knowledge would not be lost.

Even if the names of the stars faded from the tongues of my people, even if we became nothing more than wanderers upon an unfamiliar land, even if the truth became buried beneath the weight of ages, someone must know what was done to us.

Someone must remember.

Chapter Eight: The Hunger for Knowledge

I had spent so long creeping through the corridors of this ship, believing I was unseen, believing I was clever. I had gathered fragments of knowledge, piecing together meaning from symbols I could not fully decipher, listening to the layered voices of our captors, memorizing their patterns. I had believed—perhaps foolishly—that I was making progress, that I had stolen something from them.

But the Architects were never blind.

The announcement came without warning.

We had gathered in one of the vast, open halls where we assembled for food, for restless conversation, for any brief reprieve from the suffocating monotony of our captivity. I was among them, speaking in hushed tones to those who had begun to trust me, those who had listened when I whispered of the Outer Rim, of Enigma, of the Key.

Then, the walls themselves seemed to hum, and a voice—their voice—filled the space.

"There is one among you who has sought knowledge."

The voice was soft, but it was layered, reaching into every corner of the chamber, impossible to ignore. The air felt colder. Conversations died.

"One among you who has wandered beyond the places where you were meant to remain. Who has listened. Who has watched."

The captives turned, one by one, their eyes settling on me. Some with curiosity. Some with confusion. Some with fear.

I did not move.

From the far side of the chamber, an Architect stepped forward.

Even now, I cannot say whether this one was different from the others, or if I only imagined that it was. Its face was the same—smooth, symmetrical, unreadable. The same ridge bisected its forehead. The same green, slit-pupiled eyes took me in, reflecting nothing back. But there was something in the way it carried itself. A deliberate precision. A quiet satisfaction, as though it already knew what would unfold and had merely come to watch.

"You will listen."

The hum of machinery shifted. Above us, one of the walls darkened, the smooth surface becoming something else. A display.

And there, before all of them, was everything I had stolen.

The maps I had glimpsed. The symbols I had traced. The distant star of Enigma, cold and uncaring, waiting for us beyond the Outer Rim.

"This is what you wished to know," the Architect said.

I opened my mouth to speak—to demand why they were doing this, to demand if they meant to punish me—but then I saw the faces of the others.

They were staring, not at the display, but at me.

For a long time, we had been able to pretend.

We had whispered of rebellion, of escape. We had convinced ourselves that our captivity was temporary, that we were waiting for the right moment. That we could seize control of this vessel if we were clever, if we were strong.

But now, there was no pretending.

The Architects had known all along. They had seen everything. They had allowed it. And worse—they had allowed it because it did not matter.

"You were never hidden," the Architect said. Not to me. Not to us.

I felt the air shift as the weight of that truth settled over the room.

"Your knowledge does not alter the outcome. Your actions do not alter the outcome. You will go where you are taken. You will do as you are made to do."

The silence that followed was different from any we had ever known. It was the silence of realization, of something breaking that could never be put back together.

The Architect regarded us for a moment longer, then turned without another word. It had made its point.

I do not know if it was acting on some higher directive, if this display had been ordered by the will of its kind, or if it had chosen to do this on its own—a test, an experiment, a moment of cold amusement.

But I knew, as I looked at the hollow expressions of those around me, that something had changed.

We had lost our world. We had lost our past.

And now, we had lost the illusion that we had ever held power over our own fate.

Chapter Nine: A Broken People

The destruction of a people does not always occur through fire and war. It does not always come through chains, or violence, or the sudden and terrible end of a world. Sometimes, it happens quietly. It happens over time. It happens without an enemy raising a hand.

We did not understand this when we were taken. Even after our captors revealed that we had no power over our own fates, we believed we could endure. We had already survived the annihilation of our world; we had clung to our identities through catastrophe. If we had lost everything else, we still had ourselves. But we were mistaken. The Architects did not need to take that from us. They only needed to wait.

At first, there was defiance. There were those among us who whispered plans of rebellion, who spoke of escape, who vowed that we would not submit. But the Architects did not respond to our murmurs of resistance. They did not station guards. They did not impose rules. There was nothing against which to struggle.

Instead, there was silence.

The ship did not change. The corridors remained smooth, sterile, seamless. The artificial lights did not dim or brighten. Time ceased to exist in any meaningful way. We could no longer measure the days, nor did we know how many had passed since we first awoke aboard the vessel. At first, we tried to count—by the arrival of food, by the distant mechanical hum that pulsed through the walls, by the rare movements of the Architects themselves. But in the absence of markers, the mind begins to betray itself. Numbers blurred. Sequences collapsed. Eventually, we abandoned the effort altogether.

And as time faded, so did we.

It was a slow process, imperceptible at first. Conversations became shorter, then infrequent, then nonexistent. The habit of speech, once broken, was not easily restored. We sat in silence, together and yet utterly alone, each of us withdrawing into the confines of our own minds. There was nothing to say.

Some tried to resist. Not through rebellion, but through preservation. I watched as a man spent hours tracing the same patterns on the walls, running his fingers over smooth surfaces as if he could carve meaning into them through sheer repetition. Another recited the same phrase under his breath, again and again, as though he feared that if he stopped, he would lose the ability to speak at all. Some clung to personal rituals—gestures, small routines—things that made them feel as if they still had control over their own actions.

But such efforts could not hold forever.

The first to succumb simply stopped responding. At first, we thought they had fallen ill, but there was no illness to speak of—only stillness. They sat against the walls, eyes open, bodies upright, unresponsive. They ate when food was placed into their hands, drank when prompted, but otherwise, they might as well have been statues.

Then, there were those who ceased to recognize each other. One by one, the bonds that had once held us together began to disintegrate. Names were forgotten—not all at once, but gradually, until one day, someone pointed to a man they had once known and asked what he was called, and no one could remember.

But what happened next was worse.

It was not the loss of our past that broke us. It was the loss of our selves.

I do not know when I first realized that I could no longer recall the name of our homeworld.

It had been with me always. Even when I had spoken it less, even when I had accepted that we would never return, it had remained a certainty. A word that meant more than itself. A word that meant home.

But one day, I whispered it to myself, and nothing came.

I tried again. The shape of the word was there, somewhere beyond my reach, but the sound, the letters, the meaning—it had slipped into darkness.

Panic took hold of me. I turned to the man beside me, someone I had known all my life, someone who had fought beside me in the war.

"Do you remember?" I asked him.

He looked at me, his expression dull, distant.

"Remember what?"

And then I understood.

The Architects had not forced this upon us. They had not taken the name of our world, nor had they ordered us to forget.

We had let it go.

Bit by bit, piece by piece, we had allowed ourselves to be erased.

This was not captivity. It was not imprisonment.

It was the destruction of the self—not by violence, not by pain, but by time, by stillness, by the slow and inexorable erosion of identity.

And yet, even as I sat among the hollowed remnants of my people, I felt something deeper stirring beneath my realization.

This was not an accident.

It was not a cruelty inflicted without purpose.

This was a process. A cycle. One whose steps had been measured and set long before we ever drew breath.

The Architects had seen this before. They had done this before.

And that meant they would do it again.

I had thought our war had been the great tragedy of our existence. That the horror of our annihilation had been the worst fate imaginable. But now I saw the truth.

We had never been at war. We had never even been participants.

We had only ever been materials—shaped, refined, and discarded as needed.

And as I looked around at the broken figures that had once been my people, I understood something else.

We were already gone.

Even if we lived, even if we walked upon the soil of some new world, it would not be us who stepped onto its surface. What the Architects had taken could never be restored.

We had not merely been brought here to die.

We had been brought here to be forgotten.

And as the ship drifted silently toward the unseen barrier ahead, I knew that whatever lay beyond it was not salvation. It was not even damnation.

It was something far greater.

And we had never had a choice.

Chapter Ten: The Outer Rim

I do not know if those who come after me will understand these words.

By the time they are read, the world will be different. The sky will not hold the same meanings it once did, and the knowledge that once gave men power over the stars will be gone. But I must record what I saw, though the words themselves may fade, though the meaning may slip through the fingers of those who will one day inherit this world. I must write it so that someone, somewhere, might one day understand.

We had been moving through the void for longer than I could count. No sunrise, no sunset, no measure of time beyond the distant pulse of the ship’s engines and the silent movements of the Architects. We drifted through endless night, away from the home we had lost, toward something I could not yet comprehend.

And then, I understood something that I had not before.

There had been a barrier around our own home.

It was invisible, undetectable to any of my senses, yet I realized it had been there all along. Not around the ship, but around the entire system—a force field of unimaginable scale, enclosing the sun that had once given us light, the planets that had once held our cities, the ruins and ash that remained. It had been there when we fought, when we died, when the Architects came to gather the survivors.

I saw no evidence of it when I looked out the viewport. There was no shimmer, no distortion in the stars. Yet I knew it was real.

I had seen it in the way the Architects moved through the ship, in the way their instruments displayed not only our trajectory, but the edges of something vast, something surrounding the system we had once called home. And I knew, then, that we had never been free. We had never been part of the greater void, never explorers of the universe as we once believed. We had been confined.

We had been in a cage. And the Architects had simply opened the door.

For the first time since I had awakened aboard the colony ship, I felt something beyond grief, beyond helplessness. I felt small.

Whatever had enclosed our home was beyond my understanding, beyond any knowledge my people had ever possessed. It had been placed there long before the war, long before the first of our kind had ever looked up at the sky and wondered what lay beyond it.

And we had never known.

The ship slowed.

The movement was almost imperceptible at first, a change in the deep, constant hum of the vessel, but soon it became clear that we were no longer moving forward. The fleet had stopped.

I went to one of the observation halls where I knew I would find a viewport, and as I looked into the void, I saw it:

A vortex in space.

It was not like the blackness of the void, nor was it like the brilliance of the stars. It was a wound in reality itself, a place where space twisted and devoured its own shape, where the edges of light and shadow collapsed into one another and became something neither could define.

And then I saw the others.

A ship broke away from the fleet—not one of ours, but something larger, heavier, built in shapes I did not recognize. Accompanying it were smaller vessels, shaped like spearheads, moving in perfect formation.

I watched as they approached the vortex. There was no pause, no hesitation. And then, without a sound, they vanished.

The void swallowed them whole.

I remained at the viewport for a long time after that, staring into the churning abyss where the ships had disappeared, knowing that soon, we would follow.

I write this now, in the years long after, knowing that those who read these words will never see such things for themselves. That they will live beneath a sky of sun and cloud, knowing nothing of the great void, of the machines that carried us here, of the knowledge that was lost in the great undoing of our people.

But I write it because I must.

Because even if our past is forgotten, even if the meaning of these words fades into dust, someone must remember that this was done to us.

Someone must remember what the Architects truly are.

Chapter Eleven: Through the Vortex

The Architects moved without urgency, yet I knew that the moment had arrived. The deep hum of the ship had shifted, subtle yet undeniable. Something vast lay before us, unseen yet imminent. For the first time in our long journey, the vessel would cross a threshold beyond the reach of its own propulsion.

I positioned myself where I could observe them. As always, the Architects showed no interest in my presence, though I noticed that more of them had gathered than usual. The process that was about to take place required great care. It was only then that I began to understand why.

A mechanism was revealed—an insert panel unlike any I had seen before, smooth and gleaming, its edges lined with alien symbols. One of the Architects approached, carrying something I would never forget.

It was a flat, ovoid object, no larger than a man’s open hand, shimmering as if cast from gold. At its center rested a jewel, deep in color, its facets reflecting the cold light of the chamber. Though I could not name the material, I recognized its significance immediately. This was the Key.

I had heard the Architects speak of the Key many times, always in reference to the vortex. Only now did I understand its purpose. The Key was not merely a concept, nor an energy field. It was an artifact, one of clear importance, held under great security. If passage through the vortex was possible only with the Key, then its power was undeniable.

The Architect placed the object into the mechanism. A moment later, the chamber lights dimmed, and a display flickered to life. The viewscreen revealed what I could not yet see with my own eyes—a great swirling vortex, shifting with an unnatural light, its depths folding in upon themselves. The colors were fluid, yet defined. A luminous blue churned at its edges, spiraling inward, pulling at the very fabric of space.

The fleet did not hesitate.

The first of the vessels moved forward, drawn into the vortex’s embrace. The moment it reached the event horizon, the ship elongated, distorting as if stretched into infinity. Then, in an instant, it was gone. One by one, the other ships followed, each vanishing into the depths of the swirling passageway.

Then, it was our turn.

The colony ship surged forward, though I felt no movement. The vortex widened before us, its depths impossibly vast, and then we were inside.

A tremor passed through the vessel—not violent, but profound. The hum of the ship wavered, turning into something higher, sharper, as if reality itself resisted our passage. The stars outside vanished, consumed by the swirling chaos. Time faltered.

I could not describe what I saw. Light and darkness ceased to have meaning. We were within something that should not exist, a passageway carved through the fabric of existence. My breath caught in my throat as the ship’s structure groaned under the pressure. The air itself seemed charged, alive with the force that carried us forward.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

The vortex behind us collapsed into a distant shimmer, and the ship stabilized. Before I could fully process what had happened, I saw something new on the viewscreen.

A vast field of vortices lay ahead, each twisting and undulating in the void. Architect vessels drifted between them, their movements deliberate, purposeful. Among them was something greater still—a massive structure, its geometry beyond my understanding. Though I did not know its function, I knew it to be a place of importance, a station of the Architects, perhaps even a place of governance.

The colony ship halted. I could see no external sign of communication, yet something transpired between our vessel, the other ships, and the station. A silent exchange took place, a decision made.

Then, we moved again.

A second vortex lay ahead, smaller yet no less imposing than the first. Another Key was produced, nearly identical in shape, but this time set with a different jewel. The process repeated. The Architects, unshaken, inserted the Key into its mechanism. The vortex responded, opening before us like a living thing.

I braced myself.

Once again, the ship plunged forward, and once again, the fabric of space twisted around us. The tremor returned, the air turned electric, and all sense of place vanished. It felt as though the ship had been unmade, as though we had ceased to exist and were now being reassembled in another reality.

And then, we emerged.

The stars had returned, yet they were not as they had been before.

Two great lights burned in the distance, their glow unmistakable even through the distortions of the ship’s viewports. A third light, dim and withdrawn, lurked between them—a dwarf star, distant yet present. I did not know their names, nor their distances, but I understood this: we had arrived within the Outer Rim.

I turned to a nearby display panel. The ship’s position was marked against an unseen boundary. A massive enclosure surrounded us, stretching beyond the limits of my perception. The Architects had brought us to a place sealed from the rest of existence, a prison or a sanctuary, enclosed by a power beyond comprehension.

Before I could fully grasp the significance of what I saw, a presence approached.

One of the Architects gestured toward me in a manner that could only be described as dismissive. There was no hostility, no aggression—only an indifferent insistence that I leave. I hesitated for a moment, but I did not resist.

I had seen what I needed to see.

As I walked away, I asked myself why they had allowed me to witness this at all. The Architects had always ignored my presence, yet there were limits to what they permitted. They had secrets they guarded, punishments they enacted upon those who tested them. Though I did not wish to recall those horrors, I knew they existed. And yet, they had let me watch.

Perhaps it was indifference. Perhaps it was something else.

I could not know their reasons, nor did I believe I ever would.

But I would remember.

And as long as I lived, I would ensure that my people would remember too.

Chapter Twelve: A New Sky

The Architects had cast us into the void, moving us as they saw fit, dictating the course of our fates without word or explanation. The journey had been long and without reckoning, but now, for the first time, I knew we had arrived.

I did not know the manner by which they chose our destination, nor the calculations behind their decisions. What I did know was that our long exile had led us here, to this distant system, enclosed within the barrier of the Outer Rim. I had seen the three stars, their light unwavering in the distance, and now, we approached a world of blue and green—a world unlike the broken ruin we had left behind.

The Architects had no need to tell us that this was to be our home. It was enough that we saw it, luminous and silent in the void, growing ever closer.

I had lingered where I was not meant to be, staring at the displays that revealed our descent. The Architects had, as ever, paid me little mind, though one eventually acknowledged my presence, gesturing me away with no more than an absent flick of the hand. I did not test their patience. There were things I had seen aboard this ship—punishments rendered in silence, those who had transgressed never returning. I did not speak of these things. I did not wish to remember them.

I returned to the holding chamber where my people remained. In the long silence of our captivity, they had sunk into themselves, their voices mere whispers, their bodies worn thin by grief. Yet now, there was something new in their eyes. I told them what I had seen. We were nearing the surface of our new home. This planet—Magelus—was where we would soon set foot.

For a long time, they did not respond. Then, as if shaking off the weight of their sorrow, they began to speak—to me, to each other. First in hushed voices, then in tones that carried the faintest echoes of hope. Some still doubted, unable to believe that our fate could be anything but ruin. Others held onto the possibility that, whatever awaited us below, it was better than the endless drift in the Architects’ cold prison.

I watched as they stirred, as they straightened their backs, as their words gained weight once more. They were still broken, still lost, but the knowledge that we were approaching solid ground had begun to pull them back from the abyss.

When I was certain the Architects had ceased to concern themselves with my wandering, I stole away once more, moving through the empty corridors, following paths I had committed to memory. I did not know if the Architects allowed me to do this, or if I had merely remained beneath their notice. It did not matter.

I reached an observation chamber, and this time, no figures stood within. I stepped forward, my breath shallow, my heart steady. Before me, through the seamless viewport, I saw it.

The world had been distant before, no more than a pale blue dot, but now, it was vast before my eyes. Its oceans gleamed beneath the light of its sun, its landmasses stretching in shades of green and gold, its clouds curling in slow, shifting spirals. The patterns of rivers carved their paths across the surface, veins of silver threading through the terrain.

Magelus.

The name had been etched upon the Architects’ displays, and now it was etched into my mind. This was where they would leave us. This was where we would begin again.

I did not know what manner of life already dwelled upon its surface. I did not know what dangers awaited us. But as I gazed upon that world, something stirred within me.

It was not joy, nor was it relief. Those things had been burned away long ago.

It was certainty.

We would walk upon that land. We would breathe its air. Whatever awaited us, we would endure.

A shadow passed over the viewport. A reflection, not of my own form, but of one of the Architects standing in the entrance behind me. It did not speak. It did not need to.

The meaning was clear.

I left without protest, stepping once more into the interior of the vessel, moving through the corridors that had held me for so long. I returned to my people, to the space where we had lingered in silence for too many days to count.

Then, a tremor ran through the floor beneath us. The walls vibrated with the shifting of forces beyond our understanding. The hum of the ship’s engines changed.

We were descending.

The moment had come.

THE BOOK OF FYDOR, PART I

The following is a fanfic based on Solar Winds, the 1993 DOS game by James Schmalz. This book represents the imagined contents of the legendary "Book of Fydor," which even the protagonist Jake Stone was unable to read. Now, for the first time, the contents of the book can be known to the human beings of Earth...

In a galaxy millions of light years from earth's own Milkyway, there exists a solar system inhabited by humans. These humans are very distant relatives of those from earth, but neither know of the distant connection between them. In fact, neither know of the others existence.

THE BOOK OF FYDOR

A Testament for Those Who Remain

Part I: The Fall of Home

Chapter One: The Last Days of the Old World

I write these words as one who has seen the end of a world. Not in the way of poets who speak of ages lost to time, nor in the manner of rulers who lament fallen empires. No, I saw my home reduced to cinders. I watched the sky split apart, the oceans seethe into mist, and the very bones of the earth fracture and crumble. I have lived to tell of it, but no part of me believes I was meant to.

The final days began not with a whisper, nor with an omen from the heavens. They came in fire, in steel, in the unrelenting light of a thousand bombardments. We had always known of the Enemy, for they lived beneath the same sun as we did, circling the great blue star on a world not unlike our own. We had known them in war, in uneasy peace, and in war again. They were much like us, though shaped by a harsher gravity, their forms heavier, their skin thick against the cold. For centuries, we had battled them in skirmishes among the moons, in the drifting stations of the asteroid belt, and, in the end, upon the very surfaces of our planets. And yet, for all the fury we unleashed upon one another, we never knew the truth. We never understood that we had not been fighting for our own survival, nor for our own ambitions. We were pieces upon a board, moved by hands we could not see.

The war’s final days were unlike anything that had come before. The fleets that once clashed in silent duels beyond the atmosphere abandoned all pretense of strategy. No more did our ships maneuver in the careful dances of void warfare. They simply descended, raining death upon the land with no regard for victory, only annihilation.

I remember the sky turning to liquid gold as orbital strikes shattered the upper atmosphere. The air itself became fire. Cities burned without smoke, their towers dissolving into molten slag before a single stone could fall. I remember the sea retreating, fleeing the land before boiling away in great clouds that never became rain. The ground, the very foundation of the world, buckled and cracked, vomiting plumes of light and ash high into the burning heavens.

There was no order to the collapse. The rulers of my people, the commanders, the sages—none of them had answers. I saw them die in palaces of glass and steel, crushed beneath the weight of their own monuments. I saw the great halls of learning crumble, the endless archives turn to drifting embers in the winds of the apocalypse. I heard the cries of my people, voices lifted in horror, in prayer, in rage. And I knew, even then, that none of it mattered.

It is a strange thing to watch a world die. Time itself seemed to distort in those final hours. The destruction was relentless, and yet there were moments of unbearable slowness. I recall standing amidst the ruins of my home, staring up at the distant arcs of light where the last remnants of our fleet tried, in futility, to flee. Their trails burned bright against the dark, their engines blazing like false stars—until they were snuffed out, one by one, by weapons unseen.

I did not try to run. There was nowhere left to go. I wandered through the shattered streets, past the ruins of temples and markets, past bodies I did not recognize and those I did. The air was thick with heat and silence, the kind of silence that follows only when the world itself has been torn open and left hollow.

Then, through the smoke and ruin, something strange occurred.

The light changed. The fire of the sky dimmed, not from the settling of ash, but as though something vast had drawn a curtain over the heavens. The very air seemed to hum, an eerie resonance vibrating through the wreckage. It was then that I saw the ships. Not the cruel and angular vessels of our Enemy, nor the broken wrecks of my own people, but great dark shapes that moved without sound, casting long shadows over the dying land.

I did not see them descend. I did not see doors open, nor figures emerge. I only remember the light shifting once more, and then the world was gone. The pain, the heat, the very ground beneath me—all of it vanished in an instant.

I remember weightlessness. A vast darkness that was not the void of the upper sky, nor the abyss of the sea, but something deeper, something endless.

And then, nothing.

I do not know how long I remained in that place, that absence of all things. When next I awoke, I was not upon my world. I was not beneath the burning sky, nor among the ruins of my people. I was somewhere else—somewhere cold, somewhere vast. And I was not alone.

There were others. My kind, though I did not recognize their faces. We stood together, dazed, silent, beneath a great metal vault that stretched high above us, gleaming with a light that had no source. Walls curved in ways that defied reason, smooth and seamless, untouched by time or tool. And in the air, unseen yet undeniable, was the presence of something beyond us.

I did not know them then. I did not know the hands that had taken us, nor the purpose they held. But in that moment, as I stood upon the threshold of a new existence, I understood one thing with absolute certainty.

We had not been saved. We had been claimed.

Chapter Two: Taken from the Ashes

The shock of awakening was enough to still the heart of any man, and I was no exception. The moment I opened my eyes, I was assaulted by a disorienting flood of sensations: the unfamiliar chill in the air, the cold gleam of metallic surfaces stretching out in all directions, and the sound—though muted—of machinery running smoothly beneath my feet. I had not expected to find myself in such a place, nor could I have imagined what awaited us once the veil of unconsciousness lifted.

The space around us was enormous. Far larger than any hangar or vault I had seen in the vast cities of my homeworld. The walls and ceilings seemed to curve into infinity, crafted from dark metal that absorbed all light, leaving the room bathed in an eerie half-light. It was clean—sterile, even—and the air had a strange quality to it, as if it were too pure, too thin. The silence was deafening. There was no hum of engines, no whisper of wind, no sound of life. It was the silence of a tomb. A tomb made of metal and shadow.

I had no concept of time in that place. I did not know if minutes or hours had passed since I had been taken, nor did I know where I was. But there were others around me, some stirring and others still as death. My people. Survivors of the war. I recognized the faces of my brothers and sisters, though they, too, were uncertain of what had transpired. We all shared the same look—bewilderment, fear, and above all, the hollow feeling of having lost everything.

One of us stirred first. His name was Jadran, a childhood friend, though I could scarcely recall the last time I had seen him alive. He looked as disoriented as I felt, his eyes wide and searching as he pushed himself up from the floor. He reached out, hands trembling, and gripped the metal walls around us as if expecting them to collapse at any moment. "Where are we?" His voice cracked, raw from disuse. "What happened?"

Another voice, this one from the far corner, joined in. "I don't know... this is... this isn't home." It was Darya, a woman from my village, her voice soft yet steady despite the fear in her eyes. She, too, stood shakily, taking in the surroundings with a confusion that mirrored my own.

And still, none of us spoke of the inevitable: what had happened to our world? What had happened to the firestorm, the endless bombardments that we had all witnessed in our final moments? I feared even the thought of it, but there was no time to mourn. There was no time for questions or regrets. We were here now. Somewhere far from the hell we had known.

At first, we attempted to communicate with each other, to piece together what little we could remember. But the walls, they seemed to stifle our efforts, closing in around us. The more we spoke, the less it seemed to matter. Our words sounded hollow, meaningless in this place that was neither of this world nor of any world we knew. The echoes of our voices bounced off the curved metal, swallowed by the silence.

Then, I felt it—a subtle shift in the air, a pressure like something unseen brushing against my skin. And with it, an overwhelming sense of being watched. I was not alone in this sterile space. We were not alone.

A soft hum, almost imperceptible, filled the chamber. A subtle vibration in the air that only grew stronger, deeper. It came from every direction at once, resonating in my very bones. We all felt it, and we all froze. There was no understanding of it, no words to explain it. But in that moment, we knew without a doubt that something else was here—something beyond us, something unseen.

The others reacted with a mix of confusion and unease, their eyes darting about, scanning the shadows. It was as if the walls themselves were alive. Perhaps they were. Perhaps the walls were not mere walls but the instruments of whatever force had brought us here. I had no answers.

And then we saw them.

I will never forget the first time I laid eyes upon them. It happened without warning. As we stood there, trembling, the walls before us parted, though we had seen no doors, no hinges, no movement at all. They simply opened, as though the very metal had dissolved in the presence of something far greater than our comprehension.

And through those darkened passages, they came.

The beings—if indeed they could be called beings—stepped into view. They were unlike anything I had ever seen in all my life, and they carried with them an aura of alien majesty that I still cannot describe in any manner that would do them justice.

They moved with an unnerving precision, their elongated forms neither stiff nor fluid, but poised with an effortless control that felt deliberate in a way no human movement ever could be. Their pink-bronze skin, smooth as polished stone, absorbed the dim light rather than reflecting it, giving them an almost sculpted appearance—too perfect, too seamless, as if nature had not shaped them but refined them. Their faces, symmetrical to an unnatural degree, held no visible ears, their large, green eyes betraying nothing. Their slit pupils, narrow and keen, did not flicker with emotion, yet their gaze carried a weight that pressed against my mind, making me feel observed in a way that was deeper than sight.

Most striking of all was the ridge that ran from the center of their brow to the crown of their skull—a vertical crest, subtle yet unmistakable, dividing their features as though it marked some unseen boundary. There was an undeniable sense that it meant something, that it was more than mere anatomy. It gave the impression of a division not only of flesh but of mind, as if the being before me was split between two aspects of itself, bound together in perfect balance.

They moved without sound, their footsteps absorbed into the very air, and they regarded us as one might regard an insect—something beneath notice, but not entirely without interest. Their large, green slit-pupiled eyes locked onto me, reflecting nothing. They did not blink, nor did their features shift in any discernible way, yet I could feel something behind their gaze—a quiet, precise calculation. It was not curiosity, nor was it cruelty, but something colder, something unknowable.

We stood frozen, not daring to speak, not knowing what we should do. Some of us—those who had once been leaders, commanders, those who had held positions of power in the old world—attempted to approach, to ask questions. But no words came. There was nothing but a suffocating silence, an oppressive atmosphere that held us in place like insects caught in a web.

Then, one of them spoke.

It was not a voice that I heard, not in any conventional sense. Rather, the words came to my mind, a flood of meaning that bypassed my ears and struck directly at my consciousness. The language they spoke was not one of sound, nor one of symbols. It was something far more complex, a language of thought. A language that I could not comprehend in its entirety, but a language that made one thing abundantly clear:

"You are not free."

The words were not spoken with malice, nor with sympathy. They were spoken with the certainty of a truth that was both terrifying and inevitable. And in that moment, I understood that we were not in a place of refuge. We were not in a sanctuary. We were captives.

And this—this vast, dark vessel—was our prison.

Chapter Three: Awakening in the Void

I remember the first time I dared to test the limits of my confinement. The ship—or whatever it was, for it defied all categorization—was a labyrinth of sterile, metallic corridors and chambers, its design unlike anything I had ever encountered in the cities of my world. The walls seemed to shift subtly, as if they were alive, or at least responsive to something beyond my understanding. The air was always cold, perpetually still, and the faint hum of the vessel’s unseen machinery never ceased.

When I first awoke, I had been unsure whether I was still dreaming or whether I had somehow crossed into a new reality entirely. The disorienting sensations of being suspended in stasis were still vivid in my mind, a memory that seemed to warp and twist with every passing hour. I could still feel the vague discomfort of being trapped in that strange sleep, where thoughts and time became one unbroken haze. But now, here in this chamber—this room, which was both too large and too small at once—I knew something had shifted.

My mind was sluggish at first. I could not seem to focus on anything other than the glaring truth that we were alive, yes, but we were not free. How many of us? How many survived the destruction of our world? These questions crowded my mind, but each time I tried to answer, the thoughts dissolved, like sand through my fingers.

I was not alone.

All around me, the faces of the survivors stared at the walls, as confused and lost as I was. Some spoke in hushed tones, but their words were meaningless—questions with no answers. Others sat silently, their eyes glazed with the same emptiness I had seen in their expressions the day we were first taken. What had become of us? Where were we? Was our world still burning, still falling into ruin?

I could not answer them. I could not even understand the depth of the silence that hung over us like a shadow. The ship—or prison, as I had begun to think of it—held us in place, like birds trapped in a net, unable to move freely, unable to speak without the thick air around us choking our words before they could escape.

For the first few days, I did not venture far from the chamber where I had awoken. Fear kept me rooted in place, as it did with the others. What could we do in a place like this? What could we possibly accomplish when every effort we made seemed futile?

But as the hours stretched into days, and the days stretched into weeks, something within me began to stir. A gnawing hunger for understanding. A need to break free of the strange prison we were in, to find some shred of purpose or meaning in this strange new world we now inhabited.

One day, driven by that insatiable hunger, I made my way deeper into the bowels of the vessel. The others—those who could still walk and think—watched me with wide, fearful eyes, as if they were unsure whether I was brave or foolish. But I did not care. What was fear to me now? I had already seen the end of my world. I had already seen my people crumble under the weight of war and destruction. What was left for me to fear?

The hallways stretched out endlessly, as if the ship itself had no boundaries. Each turn revealed more of the same: dark, curved walls, smooth as glass, glowing faintly under the cold, harsh light that hung from above. And always, that incessant hum, like the heartbeat of some great, monstrous creature lurking just beyond my reach.

I moved with purpose, though I had no clear destination. The walls of this place seemed to respond to my every step, as if they were aware of my presence, of my intentions. I would touch a panel at random, pressing it with the palm of my hand, and the wall would open before me, revealing another space within the vessel. But nothing was familiar. Nothing was comforting.

After what felt like an eternity of wandering, I found myself in a room that was not like the others. It was smaller, more confined, and the walls here were not smooth but instead covered in strange markings—symbols that I did not recognize. They glowed faintly, their edges sharp and angular, pulsing with a rhythm that seemed to match my own heartbeat.

At first, I could not make sense of them. The symbols appeared meaningless, a jumble of shapes that mocked my inability to understand. But as I stared at them longer, a strange sensation washed over me. It was as if something in my mind clicked—something deep inside, something buried beneath the surface of my thoughts.

I could almost understand them. They were not decorations. They were not random. They had a purpose.

I traced my fingers over the glowing symbols, trying to grasp something, anything, from them. At first, they were nothing more than strange shapes, their structure taunting my inability to comprehend. Yet, the longer I studied them, the more I felt something stir within me—not understanding, not yet, but recognition.

There was a pattern.

The symbols were not beyond my grasp. Somewhere in their arrangement, there was logic, an order waiting to be unraveled. The Architects—though I did not yet know to call them that—were beings beyond our knowledge, but that did not mean they were beyond comprehension.

A chill crawled over my skin and I turned my head sharply. I had the distinct feeling of being watched. Then, an image flashed through my mind. It was like a memory, but was not my own.

A vision of something vast, ancient—structures that defied scale, rising beneath skies that had never known the touch of a human world. I saw them, our captors, their slit-pupiled eyes gleaming, their forms motionless as they watched something unseen. They were observing. They were always observing.

I stumbled back from the wall, my breath unsteady. The vision had come without warning, without sound, without explanation. Had the symbols triggered something in me, or had I been noticed?

Then, as if in answer to my question, the ship spoke.

Not in a voice, not with sound—but with a presence. A force that filled the room, the space, and my very mind. I could feel it, cold and sterile, like a breath across the back of my neck.

"You are no longer what you were."

The words filled my mind, their meaning clear yet impossible to grasp. And before I could even respond, before I could react in any way, the sensation faded. The presence was gone, leaving behind only the oppressive silence once more.

I stumbled back to the chamber where the others waited, my mind whirling. What had just happened? What was it trying to tell me?

But I could not find the answers. Not yet. The truth seemed too far away, buried under layers of secrecy and mystery. All I knew was that we were no longer in control of our fate. We had been taken from our world, stripped of everything we knew, and now we were lost in a vast, unfathomable void.

I did not know who had taken us or for what purpose. I did not yet understand that the Architects had come for us, that they had stolen us from the ruin of our world. When they departed, they did so without sound, without explanation, and without a single glance back.

Chapter Four: The First Glimpses of the Architects

It had been days since I first encountered the strange symbols etched into the walls, and still, they haunted me—like fragments of a dream that linger long after waking. I had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that I would find some explanation for the haunting images, some reason to justify the eerie presence I had felt within the ship. But nothing prepared me for what was to come next.

I had returned to the sterile room I shared with the other survivors, my mind full of questions and doubts. The cold, steady hum of the vessel enveloped us all like an impenetrable fog, and the walls, like silent sentinels, watched us with an alien patience. It was then that I saw them.

At first, I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me, perhaps another side effect of the long, disorienting stasis. But when the figures appeared—tall, thin, and utterly unlike any beings I had ever seen—my heart skipped a beat.

They emerged from the shadows of the corridor, their forms gliding effortlessly, without a sound. The light from the vessel's overhead fixtures caught their skin, which gleamed a soft, unnatural pink, like polished stone. Their faces were long and angular, as if sculpted by an alien hand, and their eyes—those eyes—were the most unsettling feature of all.

Slit-pupiled and green, they gleamed with an intelligence so sharp, it felt as if they could see directly into my soul. And atop their heads, running from the forehead down to the nape of the neck, was a strange fin-like ridge, bisecting their skulls in a way that seemed almost… unnatural. I could not fathom its purpose, but it was impossible to ignore.

I froze. My mind screamed for me to look away, to retreat into the shadows where I might be safe. But I did not move. I could not. My eyes were locked on their forms, unable to look away from the terrifying majesty of these beings.

They spoke, though their words made no sense to me. Their speech was harsh, like the scraping of metal against stone, and their vocalizations seemed alien—utterly beyond my comprehension. It was not just their words that bewildered me, but the rhythm and cadence of their voices, which seemed to echo in the air as though they were not speaking aloud at all. The language felt wrong, as though it existed in a frequency outside the bounds of what we, as humans, could truly understand.

They moved with purpose, their bodies fluid and precise, gliding effortlessly across the floor of the chamber without the slightest indication of effort. Their movements were both graceful and terrifying—like hunters, poised and ready to strike.

I watched in silence, every muscle in my body frozen with a mix of awe and fear. There was no sense of kindness in their gaze, no warmth in their approach. They regarded us as a biologist might regard an unfamiliar species—without malice, without sympathy, only a distant, detached observation. We were variables in an equation they had already solved, nothing more.

As I stood there, rooted to the spot, one of them approached. It was tall—taller than any human I had ever encountered—and its movements were hypnotic. I could feel its eyes on me, searching, analyzing, assessing. I could not help but flinch, as if the intensity of its gaze might pierce through the very fabric of my being.

It stopped just in front of me, and for a moment, all I could hear was the pounding of my own heart. The being did not touch me, but I could feel the weight of its presence pressing down on me. And then, without warning, it reached up with a long, slender hand and extended one of its fingers toward me.

I recoiled instinctively, but the being was too quick. It grazed the tip of my skin, its touch cold, like the surface of metal. There was no warmth, no softness—only the sharp, alien chill of its finger. It held my gaze for a long moment, as if reading something I could not perceive.

And then it stepped back, its piercing eyes never leaving mine. Without a word, the creature turned away and joined its companions. Together, they moved to the center of the room, speaking in that harsh, incomprehensible tongue. They were discussing something—I could sense that much—but the meaning was lost on me.

In the midst of their conversation, one of the beings turned back toward me, and for a brief instant, I thought I saw something shift in its expression. A flicker, a moment of recognition, perhaps? But it was gone in an instant, swallowed up by the cold detachment that seemed to define them.

As quickly as they had appeared, they left. The door to the chamber slid open silently, and the strange beings glided away, disappearing into the vast, uncharted expanse of the ship.

I stood there, alone once more, my body trembling with the weight of what had just occurred. What were they? What did they want with us?

But most importantly—what had they seen in me?

I could not answer. The memory of their presence haunted me still, like a shadow that followed me even when the room was empty. The touch of their cold fingers, the gleam of their eyes—it was all too much to comprehend in the moment.

What were we to them? Were we simply another experiment, like the war-torn world they had plucked us from? Or were we something more—something they had planned for all along?

The questions swirled in my mind, but there were no answers, only the cold, indifferent hum of the ship and the silence of the void. I could not shake the feeling that we were being watched—always watched—by beings whose intentions were as inscrutable as the stars themselves.

And as I stood there, pondering the enormity of what I had just witnessed, I realized one thing with terrifying clarity: our fate was not our own. We were no longer masters of our destiny. We were prisoners. We were pawns in a game far greater than anything we had ever known.

The Architects had come, and we were nothing more than their playthings.

Chapter Five: The Seeded War

I had known war in the world we left behind. I had seen it in its most savage, unforgiving form—the kind of conflict where cities fell, people vanished in the blink of an eye, and the very land seemed to writhe in agony as it was torn apart by the forces of destruction. But what I had learned in the days that followed our capture, what the Architects revealed to me through observation and quiet, stolen knowledge, shattered everything I had believed about war, about fate, and even about the world we had lost.

It was not a random disaster. It was not the inevitable collapse of civilization that had brought our people to the brink of extinction. No. Our destruction had been orchestrated, cultivated, seeded long before the first bomb ever fell. Our planet, our home, had been nothing more than a garden—a garden cultivated with the blood and sweat of our species, nurtured for the sole purpose of a grand experiment.

The war that had consumed our world—our people’s war—was not an accident. It was a plan, designed and set into motion by the Architects. We were mere pawns in a game that none of us had ever understood.

In the hours and days after the encounter with the Architects, I began to piece together fragments of information. The ship’s data streams, though largely incomprehensible, held glimpses of the terrible truth. As I spent more time alone, I discovered hidden compartments, data caches buried deep within the vessel's systems. The more I accessed, the more I understood. The Architects had not only observed us—they had created the conditions for our war, manipulating the forces that shaped our world as easily as a gardener prunes a plant.

Our homeworld, with its sprawling cities, its vibrant cultures, had been carefully engineered to breed division, to foster conflict. They had seeded our planet with the promise of resources, with the allure of power, and had watched as we tore each other apart in a desperate scramble for dominance. Every nation, every ideology, every belief system—we had been set against each other, unwittingly pitted in a struggle that was far older than any of us had realized.

The Architects had done the same with our enemies—the species we had fought to extinction. I had known of them, of course, the others who had once inhabited the same world, their civilization thriving alongside our own. But what I hadn’t known—what I had never understood—was that our war had not been an act of necessity, nor had it been born of hatred. It was engineered. Both our species had been cultivated for this purpose. The Architects had planted the seeds of our destruction long before either side ever fired the first shot.

The enemy we had fought—those we had deemed our greatest threat—had been just as much a part of the experiment as we were. In their own way, they had been manipulated, driven by forces they could not control. The Architects had set us on a collision course, knowing full well that we would destroy one another. It had been inevitable, scripted, a drama that played out over generations.

And now, as I stood aboard the cold, metallic ship, surrounded by the remnants of my people, I could see the aftermath of that experiment laid bare. We were the last survivors, gathered together like cattle in a pen, awaiting whatever fate the Architects had in store for us.

But as I pondered the enormity of what had transpired, a gnawing question rose in my mind: Why? Why had they done this? What was the purpose behind it all?

The answer, I realized, was still just beyond my reach.

But I had glimpsed something more—the Architects’ true nature. They were not mere observers, detached from the consequences of their actions. No, they were active participants, manipulators, engineers of destruction. They had bred war, nurtured it, and watched as it consumed everything we had known. Their cold, indifferent gaze had seen our world burn, and they had done nothing to stop it. Perhaps they had not even cared.

The knowledge was maddening. We had been lied to, from the very beginning. The war had not been about resources, or ideology, or even survival. It had been a grand experiment, a twisted game of chess played across the stars. And we—both our species—had been nothing more than pieces on the board.

In the silence of the ship, with nothing but the hum of the engines to keep me company, I began to wonder if any of us had ever truly understood the nature of our own existence. Were we, too, a part of the Architects’ design? Were we nothing more than another experiment, another group of creatures to be observed, to be controlled?

The question lingered in my mind like an infection, spreading through my thoughts, tainting everything I had ever known. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the war we had fought, the extinction we had narrowly avoided—these were just the beginning. There was more to this, so much more.

And now, as the vessel carried us toward a new world, a world we could not yet understand, I could not shake the feeling that the Architects were watching us still. That our fate was not in our own hands, but in theirs. That the game was far from over.

It was then that I began to understand the true weight of what had happened. We had not just been destroyed. We had been tested, shaped, molded—seized from the ashes of our world to serve some greater purpose. The question now, as we traveled through the void toward the Enigma system, was what that purpose would be.

We were not merely survivors. We were the survivors of an experiment. And the Architects, those distant, cold beings, were the ones who had designed it all. What they wanted from us—what they intended to do with us—remained to be seen. But one thing was certain: our struggle had not ended. It had only just begun.

Chapter Six: The Others

For a long time, I believed we were the only ones.

The Architects had taken us from the ashes of our world, gathered us like artifacts, and placed us aboard their vast, silent vessel. Though their purpose remained unknowable, it had seemed, at least, that our fate was singular. We were the last remnants of a doomed species, adrift in the void, with no one left to remember the war that had destroyed us.

But I was wrong.

I had made a habit of observing the Architects, watching their silent movements, their unspoken interactions. They rarely acknowledged us, and when they did, it was with the detached precision of a scientist handling specimens—never curiosity, never cruelty, just the cold weight of analysis.

And so it was by watching them that I first learned the truth.

It began when I wandered too far into the corridors that we were not meant to enter, the ones that led away from the sections of the ship where the survivors were confined. There were no guards, no barriers beyond the silent scrutiny of the Architects, but something about these corridors always felt different.

That was when I saw it—one of them, two of them, moving together in the dim glow of a viewscreen embedded into the wall. I pressed myself into the shadows, watching, waiting.

The screen flickered with strange symbols, their alien script pulsing with an unreadable rhythm. And then the image shifted.

At first, I did not understand what I was looking at. It was another chamber, much like the one where I had first awakened, with smooth, seamless walls and a sterile, lifeless atmosphere. But within that chamber was something I had not expected to see.

They moved in the cold glow of the chamber, their figures small on the viewscreen, distant enough that the details blurred despite the screen’s unnatural clarity. I had always known what they were—had been told of their heavier forms, their thicker skin, the weight that shaped their every motion. But knowing was one thing. Seeing it was another. Their movements were slow, deliberate, not with hesitation, but with the sheer presence of bodies meant for a world unlike mine.

The dim light caught uneven textures across their skin—whether scars, markings, or something else, I could not tell. What struck me most was their stillness, the way they carried themselves—not defeated, not fearful, but aware. As though even here, even now, they understood the weight of being watched.

The Enemy.

I could not breathe.

They were alive.

Not just one or two, but dozens of them, gathered in that distant place, confined just as we were, held in another of the great vessels that drifted through the void. Their faces were unreadable, but I knew, with a certainty that burned in my chest, that they had fought as we had fought. That they had believed, as we had believed, that annihilation was the only outcome.

But the Architects had taken them, too.

The two Architects watching the screen made no indication that they knew I was there, but I did not dare to move. Their eyes, green and slit-pupiled, flickered with something I could not understand. A decision? A calculation?

And then, for the first time, I heard one of them speak.

A layered voice, cold and distant, without inflection or warmth.

"They will persist."

The other paused.

"For now."

The screen dimmed. The Architects moved away.

I remained there long after they had gone, staring at the place where the image had been, at the space where I had seen the Enemy—not as conquerors, not as the monsters we had painted them to be, but as prisoners, the same as us.

The war had ended, but we had not been its victors, nor had we been its victims.

We had been its subjects.

And whatever experiment had begun with our destruction was far from over.