Prologue | ???

I live in fear of what we have created.

Hybridia and the Earth were a rare case; as two planets sharing the same orbit, it was inevitable that life would flourish on both. However, with life came a need to survive, a need so desperate that people on both sides would kill relentlessly to savour just a moment more.

The Magna Carta was the group I and eight others formed in response to the endless carnage, and with our emergence came a treatise. In this ancient tome, it was decreed by the Mother of Worlds that every thousand years, nine worthy humans would be gifted power and immortality in the leagues of their celestial overseers.

For every thousand years that passed, we were given the choice to continue with our duties or live the rest of our lives out in peace. I stayed, but over the years, my allies found themselves unwilling, exhausted, tired. And so here I stand today, the only immortal human having seen the world grow from its true infancy to adulthood. With the turn of the Magna Carta’s ninth millennium comes the Ceremony of Passage, the inauguration of the nine who will maintain peace and unity after their predecessors.

But something has changed. Something sinister lurks within the shadows, and we are ill-prepared to face it. I fear that history will once again repeat itself, and that we will be leaving a world of ruin to the ninth Magna Carta.

My friend Celine sketched this image from memory of an Occuli man she’d found on the border of Cyclera back in ‘21. She remarked that each torus lacked their characteristic shine. As of today, Celine is still reported as missing by the IHA.