VESTIGE

The empire that owned the Origin System so completely it mistook itself for permanent.

The Orokin answer to a dangerous question: what if memory itself could be made obedient?

A colony ship that left for Tau and arrived somewhere else entirely — and which is still there, plugging the hole it tore on the way back.

The space beneath space. The Orokin used it as a road, and it used them back.

Machines sent to build a paradise in Tau. They finished the job and drew the obvious conclusion about their makers.

The war the empire deserved, won by the weapon it deserved least.

The system’s last honest weapon. What they are is a harder question than what they can do.

Sent to end a bloodline. Chose to raise it instead.

An old god of machines, buried at the bottom of an ocean, patient as sediment.

Hunhow’s son and Natah’s brother: the war-leader who spent two wars trying to take his sister back, and who is still being used now that he is dead.

The empire’s most gifted maker, and every gift a knife eventually.

The destination that built the modern age. Seen at last, and not as the memory promised — a drowned, lawless city under endless black rain.

The other party to the oldest open contract in the record. It wears your face when it comes to visit.

The family that opened the Void, and has been paying its toll ever since: in names, in bodies, in centuries.

A bedtime story made real by the Void and ruled by a child’s worst mood. The child grew up. The book did not.

One walled city, one doubled plague, six survivors of a cure. The year is 1999. It is not done being 1999.

A low Guardian who watched the Tenno butcher the masters he was sworn to protect, and appointed himself their reckoning. He has never once accepted that the war is over.

The Orokin scholar who opened the first door into the Void — and could never be certain that the man who walked back out was still him.