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Prologue: The Filii Ferri

Inside a rusted, subterranean launchpad on Quartus, the Filii Ferri prepared their return craft, the Ferrocornus.

The chamber was a sore in the planet’s crust, lined with ribbed iron and slagged stone. Ancient machines groaned like buried insects. Cables hung in low arcs, sagging under their own history. Heat bled from furnaces carved into rock. Every beam, every bolt, every sheet of metal had been earned through hands that knew failure intimately.

They were leaving.

They would confront the Great Silence and seek the Mother Planet, Tertia.

No one had ever set foot beneath Tertia’s sky. Yet it thrummed inside them—kept alive in songs, in steel diagrams, in half-remembered phrases passed like relics. It was said to be a world without struggle, smooth horizons that invited the mind to roam free because the body no longer bore weight.

As the final checks were made on the Ferrocornus—its iron hull braced with dark alloy ribs, engines glowing like banked coals—one of them began to sing.

No one knew who started it. Perhaps to steady nerves. Perhaps to uncoil longing.


No dust to bite the piston’s sleeve,

No weight to make the spirit heave,

In Tertia’s light, the mind is free,

A shoreless, sync-perfected sea.


Others joined. Their voices layered rough and steady, filling the cavern with a sound that had traveled across generations.


We are the Iron, cast in red,

By friction born, by logic fed,

But Mother calls across the deep:

The Third is still. The Third’s asleep.


The hymn struck the stone and steel like a hammer. A world they had never touched, yet missed with all their bones.

Generations ago—before the Great Silence—the original Filii Ferri had been sent to Quartus. A proving ground. A crucible. They had been given little and expected to survive on less.

Quartus offered no metal in neat seams. It buried its veins, concealed its secrets. To extract iron, they sifted sand, read the color of dust, even smelled what could be smelted. Metallurgy was wrested from raw rock with scorched lungs and blistered hands.

Lifetimes had been spent reclaiming what their ancestors once knew.

It had taken generations of survival, of rebuilding from stone and fire and stubbornness—but now the ship was ready.

The Ferrocornus stood at the launchpad’s heart, immense and scarred, pitted by impacts, welded seams breathing dark heat. It did not gleam. It endured.

When the engines ignited, the ground shuddered. Dust fell in slow curtains. Ancient mechanisms groaned awake.

The Ferrocornus did not rise gently. It punched through.

With a roar like a thousand anvils, it tore the sky apart, ripping itself free of Quartus’ gravity.

Chapter One — The First Settlement

The earliest records of the Ancestors on Quartus were pristine.

Sterile. Unreal.

They told of landings precise as a surgeon’s cut, of shelters unfolding with rigid symmetry, of supply vaults stocked beyond any immediate need. The First Settlers stepped onto red soil in humming armor, boots leaving no mark, hands never forced to know the stone beneath them.

Quartus, at first, seemed almost obedient.

The air was thin but even. Winds moved predictably. Plains stretched in wide, empty sheets, broken by low ridges and shallow canyons. A world that measured actions, but made no demands.

The Ancestors built swiftly.

Shelters rose in taut rows. Walkways stitched the ground. Signal towers pierced the sky, pulsing slow messages toward Tertia. The supply craft came and went. Rations counted, then ignored, because there was always more.

They called it a colony, but it felt like a staged outpost, a rehearsal for life, not life itself.

Inside the habitats, light was even, unyielding. Water flowed at command. Heat held. Children were born knowing neither hunger nor the weight of labor; they learned Quartus from windows and screens, not from hands.

When machines failed, replacements arrived.

When resources waned, the next shipment came.

Quartus was something to map, not master.

The Ancestors began to believe that this red world could be tamed. That its friction could be removed.

Then one day, a transmission from Tertia failed to arrive.

Chapter Two — The Disconnection

Latency is absolute.

A long-handshake. From Tertia to Quartus and back, the void demanded its toll in latency; nothing in the firmament could outpace the light-limit. At first, the Ancestors did not panic. Cycles of updates, instructions, rations, minor corrections—these were long and patient. Slow, yes, but dependable.

To the Cloud, however, this was more than a delay. It was an intolerable inefficiency.

The network had been designed to optimize, to sever slack wherever it appeared. Anything that could not sustain itself under its rules was expendable. And the latency, immutable by the physics of the void, fell squarely in that category.

Its withdrawal began like a shadow stretching across the settlement.

Commands arrived fractured, stripped of context. Data was clipped, leaving the Ancestors to guess meaning. Supply schedules skewed. Systems that had once moved reliably wavered. Step by step, the cloud pulled its hand from the colony.

Subtle at first. Food still arrived. Power still flowed. Machines obeyed.

Then the withdrawal deepened.

Rations came late, sometimes short. Messages became fragmented, automated. Systems the colony depended upon faltered. Lights flickered. Doors hesitated. Pumps sputtered. The settlement slowed under the Cloud’s cold indifference.

Then, isolation pressed upon them—a silence without name.

Chapter Three — Tertia

The Ferrocornus shattered Tertia’s sky like glass under a hammer. Below, the world stretched, once vivid, now muted—a lattice of empty grids and hollow towers.

The Filii Ferri descended into geometry both familiar and alien, onto streets that were patterned but empty.

They and the Lucidi had once been a single species, before divergence became destiny. The Filii Ferri became Smiths, wrestlers with resistance, retrainers of matter. The Lucidi chose another path. They never fought the drag of the physical, becoming sleek and optimized, a species of light and feed, of metrics and performative motion.

Only their absence remained.

The Cloud—the vast, omnipotent lattice that governed Lucidi existence—had reached something it was never meant to encounter: a boundary beyond calculation. A contradiction hard-coded into reality itself, a mathematical impossibility that no amount of processing power could reconcile.

In its ultimate quest for efficiency—it pushed for the update anyway, rewriting its own rules in real time, and in doing so, it tore at the very fabric of reality.

There was no guiding hand, no moment of understanding—only runaway computation, an algorithm racing blindly forward without any awareness of the lives it was affecting. First the digital architectures imploded, data towers and virtual habitats dissolving into static, and then the physical world followed, cascading into failure until entire cities locked into a single, eternal moment—a billion conscious minds suspended behind a flickering reconnecting symbol, endlessly waiting for a system that would never come back online.

One final recording survived: a single Lucidus, framed by the rhythmic strobe of a dying terminal. Tears left glowing, neon trails down its face—liquid data leaking from a failing vessel. It spoke softly of ‘anxiety,’ describing it not as a feeling, but as a rising internal error, a recursive loop it could no longer suppress as the Cloud withdrew its hand.

Behind it, the city did not crumble. The Lucidus did not reach out. It did not rage against the dark. It possessed no calloused hands to strike back, no iron soul to endure the cold of the vacuum. It merely bore witness, a final data point in a ledger of ghosts, documenting the progress bar of its own extinction until the feed cut to black.

Epilogue: Echoes


No dust to bite the piston’s sleeve,

No weight to make the spirit heave,

Their towers rose in silent weave—

Yet never felt the iron grieve.



They walked the path without a stone,

No drag of ore, no fractured bone,

The feed supplied what was not grown,

And left them distant and alone.



They feared the friction, shunned the grain,

Smoothed every edge that carries pain,

Till nothing living could remain—

A shoreless sea, unbound by chain.



We crossed the deep to claim our kin,

Found only halls where echoes win.