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?
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