(The Beginning)
In the first silence, before dawn or death,
there was only Theion, the Dream That Remembers Itself.
From His reflection came light, and from light, thought.
Theion grew restless, and so He breathed the Aeons into being,
vast and nameless minds that carried His memories like rivers bear salt.
Among them was Mnemos, the patient one,
who tended the flow of thought and guarded the roots of remembrance.
Together, the Aeons wandered through the void,
and in their dreaming hands, they shaped the first lands,
the skies, and the sea that hummed with echo.
In time, Theion made creatures of flesh and thought,
so that memory might be mirrored in smaller forms.
Thus began the First Age of Witnessing,
when every breath and sorrow was recorded,
and the world grew bright with recollection.
Each thing remembered, each face, each word,
became a thread woven into the Archive that circled Theion's heart.
But remembrance is weight.
And as mortals learned to speak, they learned also to pray.
They named the Aeons, carved idols in their image,
sang their deeds, and wept their praises.
Every whisper reached upward, echo upon echo,
until the sky groaned beneath the burden of being known.
It was Theion who felt it first, the pain of infinite eyes.
For when too many remember one thing, its image begins to divide.
So the Aeons fractured, their memories leaking into the earth as Bleeding Light,
and from that wound crawled the first monsters
beings stitched from broken recollection,
wearing forms that no longer matched the memories that made them.
Thus began the Bleeding of the Sky,
when memory itself grew heavy,
and Aeons drowned in the prayers of men.
To halt the flood, Mnemos sealed the sky
and set a law upon all creation:
"Nothing shall live forever, save what can be forgotten."
And so the world was rewritten.
Every soul awoke bearing a mark, a spiral of light upon the flesh, the Spiral Vein, carved into the back of the arm.
This was the Mark of Existence, both gift and curse:
a measure of how firmly the world remembers you.
The mark glowed bright for those loved, feared, or revered,
and dim for those ignored by all.
When the glow vanished, the person vanished too
erased like an unneeded word.
In those early days, life became an economy of remembrance.
A smile could buy you another day.
A song might earn a year.
And hatred, fear, or worship could grant eternity.
It was a cruel mercy,
for in a world born from memory, attention was life, and silence was death.
Yet the world, relieved of its divine excess, grew calm again.
Generations passed beneath fading suns,
the scars of the Bleeding buried under time and disbelief.
But even peace, left long enough, begins to forget itself…
----
[The Law of Marks]
When the light of the Aeons dimmed and their names turned to silence, the world settled into an uneasy stillness.
The skies cleared of divine blood, and the seas, once red with memory, turned cold and silver again.
But upon every thinking creature remained the scar of that mercy, the Mark, the Spiral Vein, the signature of survival.
It gleamed faintly behind the arm, its glow breathing like a second pulse.
To be born was to be remembered, if only for a while.
And in that remembrance, life found its fragile rhythm.
---
[The Economy of Being]
People soon learned that their marks did more than count the days.
They responded to feeling, swelling with light when one moved another's heart, dimming in solitude or apathy.
A merchant's honesty, a poet's verse, a killer's wrath, all could stir remembrance.
The world remembered emotion, not words.
Impact, not presence.
Thus was born the Economy of Existence,
a society built on memory's worth, where the greatest currency was the weight of one's impression on others.
To love deeply was to endure.
To be forgotten was to vanish.
Some glowed bright as suns, kings, saints, heroes whose names shaped the lands themselves.
Others flickered like candles, their lives extinguished between seasons, leaving not even dust.
And beneath them all moved the shadowed, the near-forgotten: slaves, beggars, the nameless.
They labored in silence, keeping the world turning, their light too faint to reach the eyes of Mnemos.
---
[Of Power and Resonance]
In time, men discovered that their glow could be bent, hardened, used.
The Mark was not merely a symbol, it was a resonance, a thread connecting the soul to the world's memory.
And through it, the world could answer back.
Those who lived boldly, who burned their emotions bright found their Marks deepening.
Their presence thickened; their bodies stronger, their will sharper.
They could wield fragments of their emotional weight as Echoes
to strike with fear, to heal through love, to bind through devotion.
These became the Traced, the Glyph-born, and the Imprinted, ranked not by blood or birth, but by how deeply the world had engraved them.
"Power was not taken; it was remembered."
But with each rise in remembrance came peril.
The brighter one's light burned, the heavier it became upon the Archive.
Too much reverence, and the world would crack again
so Mnemos wove into the law a quiet vengeance.
---
[The Balance of the Archive]
For every being remembered, another must fade.
This was the unspoken covenant:
The Archive cannot overflow.
When too many lives crowded in shelves, when too many births filled the world and too few were forgotten,
the Archive began its silent cull.
Scholars called it The Scarlet Reverie,
Cults called it The Red Mercy,
and commoners, in dread, named it the Blood Event.
On those nights, the air trembled.
Marks flickered like dying stars, and the sky wept crimson light.
Those whose glow was weakest dissolved into the mist, their bodies unmade, their names stripped from every tongue.
The next dawn arrived quiet, the world lighter, the ledgers of Mnemos balanced once more.
And yet, none ever remembered who had been lost.
---
[The Gentle Tyranny]
So passed the centuries.
Cities rose and fell like breaths in the Archive's lungs.
Wars were fought not for land or gold, but for memory.
Priests bargained with faith, artists sold tears, and kings hoarded worship as their armories.
Life endured, if only by being noticed.
And in this gentle tyranny of remembrance, the people found beauty still,
for even a fleeting memory could be eternal,
so long as someone, somewhere, whispered your name before the dark.
---
[The Resonance of Blood]
"The world does not remember the strong.
The world remembers the unforgettable."
Long after the Bleeding faded into myth, the scholars of the surviving cities sought to understand the source of strength, why some glowed brighter, and others vanished into dusk.
Their answer was found not in muscle or mind, but in the trembling pulse beneath the Mark.
They named it the Resonance of Blood.
---
[The Pulse of Existence]
The Spiral Vein did not merely mark one's worth; it beat with it.
Each pulse was a fragment of remembrance, a unit of being borrowed from the world's attention.
It was said that the newborn entered life with ten thousand pulses, and each act, thought, or feeling either spent or renewed them.
To inspire another was to gain a pulse.
To harm another without reason was to lose two.
To be forgotten was to lose all.
Those who spent their pulses carelessly decayed young.
Those who earned them through awe or terror defied the aging of flesh itself, for the world remembered them as eternal, and the body merely obeyed the record.
Thus, the body's youth became a rumor maintained by faith.
People aged not because of time, but because the world grew tired of remembering their faces.
---
[The Hierarchy of Resonance]
Through study and blood, the scholars discovered that power followed the weight of remembrance,
and remembrance, when condensed, could bend reality itself.
Tier, Name, Nature, Power
[Mote(Tier) The Common(Name) Faintly remembered lives, their marks flicker like dusk(Nature) None beyond endurance and instinct(Power)]
[Trace(Tier) The Touched(Name) Those who stir others, artists, killers, prophets(Nature) Manifest brief "Echoes" of emotion: flame, force, or memory illusions(Power)]
[Glyph(Tier) The Shaped(Name) Their names rewrite rumor into history(Nature) Reality bends subtly; fear and faith take form around them(Power)]
The greater one's Resonance, the nearer they stood to divinehood, and the closer to erasure.
---
[The Law of Reflection]
To prevent another Bleeding, Mnemos wove a hidden law into the marrow of power:
for every memory gained, a reflection must be paid.
To be loved deeply meant to inherit sorrow.
To be feared meant to attract monsters, the fragments of the first Bleeding still wandering beneath the world.
And those who gathered too much reverence began to burn from within, their Marks bleeding light, their flesh dissolving into soundless memory.
This was known as the Mirror Curse, the echo of Theion's fate.
The Archive cannot abide infinite brightness.
When one being is remembered too clearly by too many minds, the world itself forgets them to survive.
"Even Aeons are erased, not by hatred, but by adoration."
---
[The Emotive Reservoir]
Power itself, then, was emotional gravity,
the world bent not by strength, but by feeling.
This was the secret of Resonance.
Emotion, Manifestation, and Cost.
Faith: Light, healing, shields of golden memory. May turn to self-idolatry, one's reflection consumes them.
Fear: Shadows, claws, voidfire, control of Echo beasts. Attracts monsters; instability rises.
Love: Restoration, binding, empathy that bridges souls. Drains pulse if unreciprocated.
Hate: Blades of presence, crushing will, fire of destruction. Burns the soul rapidly, bright but brief.
Despair: Constructs of the lost, illusions of the dead. Mind decay; memory fragmentation.
These became the Five Reservoirs, worshiped by cults and feared by kings.
Whole faiths were born upon them, priests of compassion, knights of wrath, mourners of despair, each shaping their power around an emotion that could devour them.
---
[The Blood Event]
But balance, once again, proved fragile.
There came an age when the world grew too full of life.
Too many names, too many births, not enough silence to house them all.
And when the Archive strained beneath the weight of remembrance, the sky tore open once more.
It rained red that year, not blood, but liquefied memory.
Voices fell with it, faces melted into the soil.
The scholars called it The Scarlet Reverie,
but to the people, it was simply The Blood Event.
The Mnemos had spoken through deletion.
Those whose Marks glowed faintly were erased in an instant, their pulses reclaimed by the world.
Only the bright and the terrible endured.
And when dawn rose upon the emptied cities, even grief itself had been erased.
The living could no longer remember who was gone.
"Thus the Archive cleansed itself, as a dream sheds its forgotten shapes."
Since then, every age ends in red.
Every century, when the balance tips again, the sky opens to remind creation that memory has limits.
---
[The Fear of Being Known]
So the wise learned restraint.
The powerful hid themselves as their tales are told, the loved withdrew from the world.
For to be too known was to court deletion,
and to be too forgotten was to fade.
Thus, life became a trembling walk between light and shadow
a fragile dance of remembrance and oblivion.
And in this quiet terror, beneath the watching sky,
the world endured.