These Makeshift Idiotika

We have tried to put the story together best we can, but we know—we mourn—there are so many pieces missing.

May you, dear Reader, use your discernment in the pages to come. Keep your wits about you. Look for everything that doesn’t fit. Read, we beg you, between the lines.

History is not the story of the victor. It is the flawed memories of those who crawl from the wreckage.

We, the damned, will do our best to remember.

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As for the sequencing of our tales, we cannot exaggerate the arguments had over where to put what. And so we settled on a chronology, potentially arbitrary, following the events as close to the order they happened as we can. There are more exciting ways to tell the story, yes. Maybe even more true. But our job is to report. Is to take the poetry of the mind and print it on the page. It will always be arbitrary at best.

Where possible, we directly include primary sources from the characters mentioned herein. Other times, the sources, without context, are too confusing and must be paraphrased. The lines may blur between what we write and what was written. Still, truths persist.

They always do.

There has, of course, also been much argument as to where to start the story. There are no main characters. Everyone’s’ lives bleed into another, sometimes all too literally.

What, truly, is the beginning?

So instead, we’ve pulled from what records we have a place to start. A place tucked away in the great walls of the Halcyon, unaware of the forces shattering the ground itself…