Prologue & 400 Years Before

Lilly—

My darling, I’m sorry I’ve been away so long. The New World Military has me posted in what’s left of Giza this quarter, and what they’ve uncovered here has upended everything we thought we knew.

Last month, the LIDAR 8400 picked up anomalous readings about forty-two feet beneath where the Great Sphinx once stood before the Anthropocene wars. They’d already excavated a few chambers by the time I arrived, but only this week did the scientists manage to open the hermetically sealed jars and the strange metal boxes. Inside were clay tablets, scrolls, mechanical fragments, and objects unlike anything in our records, texts written in a cuneiform no one recognizes, and devices that defy our engineers’ first guesses.

There is, however, a sliver of hope. One document appears to be a cipher, a key that lets us begin translating the rest. We’ve only just started the work; it will be long and painstaking. But from the fragments we’ve unlocked so far, this archive may hold not only a chronicle of origins but clues that could help save what remains of Earth.

Start with the first item in the package I’m sending: the one I’ve labeled “400 Years Before.” It’s the oldest piece, and it reads as if it was written before everything we call history.  An account of a single instant measured against an age so remote that no familiar landmarks survive. I’ve included the partial key we’ve developed; it should get you farther than we have here.

Lilly, to you these pages will feel immediate and new, but they speak from a time older than any story we were taught. Keep faith with the backward thread. Only by unraveling it will the path forward come into focus. Work carefully, work quietly, and keep yourself safe. I’ll come home as soon as I can get leave.

Love, Dad

400 Years Before 

Lilly and the team spent months coaxing meaning from the strange script. The oldest scroll, written in a tongue that seemed to predate language itself, traced the desperate exodus of a people fleeing a catastrophe that tore across half the universe.

What we call today, the Big Bang, they actually lived through and called it, the Primogeniture Wars: a rupture that toppled the Creator, plunged whole worlds into darkness, and forced survivors into a thousand years of hiding and hunger.

As the translations deepened, the dry ledger of events gave way to something far more intimate. The scroll did not only record flight and engineering; it kept the small, human things: the bargains struck in panic, the betrayals that saved one life at the cost of another, the quiet courage of those who stayed behind to bury a secret. It told of a planet that did not simply shelter refugees but guarded a truth beneath its skin, an artifact, a mechanism, a story so dangerous that memory itself had been ordered to forget.

What emerged from the fragments was a double story: the outward scramble to outrun waves of raw, unformed energy, and a quieter, older design threaded through their escape, a doctrine, a device, a name given to something that could be worshiped.

The more Lilly read, the less the past looked like myth and the more it looked like a plan: a manufactured origin, a deliberate beginning meant to be taught and then believed. The scroll ended not with answers but with a warning. Whoever had written it had expected readers at a later age, readers who might unspool the backward thread of time and, by doing so, set the world on a new course.