Awakenings
The birth system, the first steps, the account's opening entry.
In 2020, the account starts in « The Arm of Eowall », « Euclid »: « Lovoan 🐣 », planet 2, 700 000 light-years from the core. Nothing marks it as a beginning, except that it becomes one.
« Trondheim » takes its name in late summer, the same season the sky first felt like his own. A yellow sun overhead, and « Suwajim I 🏷️ » holds the memory.
Beyond the Cradle
What waited past the birth system: the path to the core, a wreck beyond the Atlas's reach, a derelict signal, a base grown from nothing.
Atlas Path
The main quest leading to the core of Euclid: Atlas Interfaces found and answered, one by one.
Much had changed by then. The Atlas stands in « Oyimsv Band », a yellow star: 5 planets and 1 moon bearing witness.
The same line of thought, extended. The last Atlas Seed is crafted, and the path that started with a single interface finally closes.
A fleet accretes around the freighter: 12 ships in the hangar, 33 frigates in formation, and « Etheldred » over all of it.
Artemis Path
The search for Artemis and Apollo, recovered from the wreck of the story; Nada and Polo, keepers of the Nexus, guide what follows.
Then came the turn. He remembers standing amidst the stars with no horizon to hold on to, and Artemis's voice arriving anyway, closer than the void should allow.
The work continued. He arrives expecting the usual emptiness and finds a room instead: Nada near the front, Polo close behind, and travelers he has never met moving through the same shared task. He falls into step with them without deciding to.
Again, and for the same reasons. He uploads the soul of a Traveller into a Korvax simulation of a star system that does not exist anywhere real, so the voice on the Holo-Terminus has somewhere left to stand. He still does not know if that was a kindness or a sentence.
It carried on from there. The account is spare here, three short lines: a leap, a meeting, a pattern noticed. It does not try to explain what any of it means.
Purge
Sixteen glyphs entered, one fork reached, one ending chosen.
Another entry in the same column. The journey that carried him this far has been patient, willing to wander, willing to double back. This stretch is not. It runs straight through fire and counted glyphs toward a core that no longer feels theoretical, and he does not slow down to question it.
The pattern held. He cannot say, standing there, which journey he will take, only that the whole journey behind him, every system and name and silence, every glyph earned the hard way toward the core, has led to exactly this: a fork, worn ground on one side, blank ground on the other, and no one else to make the call for him.
The record repeats itself, and means it. The account is not usually sentimental about relics, but it makes an exception for this one, noting not just what Remembrance is but what it is said to hold: everything the traveler has ever known, kept safe from whatever the Purge burns away, and needing no further tending to keep it that way.
New Beginnings
What comes immediately after the fork: the journey that opens once the Purge is behind him.
He was not finished with this. An unmarked galaxy waits on the other side of the interface, clean, untouched, free of charge. He weighs it once and sets it down. What he has already crossed outweighs what he has not.
Some « flying proto-creature » took to following him that same day. Nothing about it was written down beyond that fact.
Time passed, more than a little. Years later he reaches the closest point: 3 300 light-years from the core of « Euclid ».
Another quarter of the same sky. « Hesperius » opens late summer. The one behind fades.
Settlements
A frontier outpost claimed, named, and left to run on its own.
A new stretch begins, on other terms. A colony stands in « Dattas Band 🏘️ »: « Delikh's Cove », 217 people under his care, the core 380 000 light-years behind them and nobody looking that way.
A Trace of Metal
The questline that turns a hostile sentinel drone into a companion.
The same instinct, acted on twice. He never planned to build a companion out of scrap. The crisis at « Delikh's Cove » made the choice for him, necessity overriding every other consideration.
Off the Main Journey
What the save account keeps outside any questline: names given, time passed, places returned to.
From that point the road bends. A purple star. The first, Tipton-Mety 💜, out in the Euclid galaxy. A color the early years never showed him, found late and far.
A season passes and he is at « Yomedenga- Iunt Co » again, autumn.
A name for the tool, « Pillar Of Titan ». Nothing more follows.
Journey's End
The final tally the save file keeps: systems, regions, galaxies, days.
Then the road stopped running straight. By the end, 222 systems, 143 regions, 12 galaxies logged, farther than seven in ten of every journey on account. 69 deaths along the way, more than nine in ten of every traveler on file.