Every thread the archive holds
The records, arranged as a mind holds them rather than as a list would. Every name here is a record; every thread between two names is a claim the archive is prepared to defend. Rest on a name to light what it touches, and follow any thread to the record that argues it.
How to read it
A timeline tells you when a thing happened. It cannot tell you that the empire's cure and the empire's killer were the same decision, taken twice. The Weave exists for that second kind of knowing: it draws the archive not as a sequence but as a set of relations, because this particular history is one where almost nothing stands alone and almost nothing ends where it began.
Each diamond is a record. Each line is a relationship the archive has entered in that record and can point to a source for — created, destroyed by, made of,hunted by. On a mouse, resting on a name lights every thread it touches and names each relation. On a touchscreen, the first tap traces a name's threads and opens a panel naming them; a second tap opens the record itself. Keyboard readers can move between names with Tab, trace with Enter, open with a second Enter, and clear with Escape.
What the threads mean
The relations are directional and deliberately blunt. When the Orokin Empire is shown as havingcreated the Sentients, that is not an aesthetic association; it is a claim resting on attested text, and the record at the other end of the thread carries the citation. Where the archive is uncertain, it does not draw a thread. An absent line is as much a statement as a present one.
The four knots
Read loosely, the constellation gathers into four regions, and following any one of them end to end is a coherent way through the whole history.
The golden age and its makers. The Orokin Empire, the civilization that owned the system and mistook itself for permanent; Executor Ballas, its finest hand and its most consequential traitor; the Cephalons, minds rendered into glass and bound to precepts they cannot want to break; andAlbrecht Entrati, the scholar who opened the first door into the Void and could never be certain the man who walked back out was still him.
The war that ended it. The Old War, which the empire commissioned against itself; the Sentients, sent to make Tau habitable and returned to collect; Hunhow, the father beneath the seabed; Erra, the brother who never forgave what his sister became; andTau, the promised system at the end of it all, now finally in sight.
The Void and its children. The Void, the dimension that does not obey the ordinary rules of matter or memory; the Zariman Ten Zero, the colony ship that left for Tau and arrived somewhere else entirely; the Tenno, the children who came back changed; and the Indifference, the thing that has been standing at the edge of every reflection since the first door opened.
What came after. The Lotus, an infiltrator who chose to mother what she was sent to end; the Stalker, the witness who could not forgive being left alive; the Entrati, the family that kept its vigil on Deimos past all reason; Duviri, the kingdom made of one child's feelings; and the Hex, six people in a city in 1999 who are not quite what they appear to be.
If none of this is familiar yet, the Threshold is the gentler way in, andThe Story So Far tells the whole of it in order. The Weave is for the return visit, when the names are known and only the shape between them is still missing.