The Prologue
Three chapters. It opens on the morning nobody can name, which is where everything in this world opens.
That is the whole of it for now. If you would rather have the world explained than shown, keep going. The rest of this page does that.
The beginning
Something happened. It changed what a Bloky is, permanently and for all of us. We know almost nothing about it.
There was one Blok, and then there were many. It broke apart, not violently, and became hundreds, then thousands, each piece blooming into a world of its own. Every one of them different. Every one of them still the Blok.
That is roughly where agreement stops. There is no record of the event. There are only theories, and the theories do not agree, and they have not agreed for as long as anyone has been writing things down.
Even the name is contested.
Three names for one morning. Most Blokyz use the third, the way most people use the word that does not start an argument.
The event itself is not really the mystery. The mystery is what we were before it.
Were we alive, and became machine? Or were we machine, and became alive?
We were living things. Soft, feeling, close to the world and easily hurt by it. The universe turned harsher every age. So we took the mechanism into ourselves, gear and Cog and the long patience of metal, and traded some of what we felt for what would last. That is how we survived. That is how we came to thrive anywhere.
We were machines. Built things, made and sent out to walk the uncharted dark and meet whatever it held. We were good at it. We could endure anything, and none of it meant anything to us. Then something woke. We began to feel, to want, to grieve, to love. That is how we came to have a life worth surviving for.
Both tellings explain the same creature. Neither can be proved. No evidence survives from before the event, and the first stretch of time after it left no record at all.
The event
Whatever it was. No account of it exists. Only the two tellings, and the three names.
The Forgotten era
However long it ran, nobody wrote it down. No names, no voices. What comes out of it is relics, and the relics do not speak.
The Prehistoric era
Here the record begins. Everything we can verify about ourselves starts from this point, long after the answer was lost.
So the Blokyz did what people do with a question nobody can close. They split into two answers, and built a civilisation on each.
The two faiths
Not good and evil. Two readings of the same silence, held with equal conviction, by equally decent people.
The Order of the Cog
We were alive. We became machine, and it saved us.
- Where it beganHistorians hold that the conclave of Tinkerers in the Prehistoric became the Order. The story goes that the earliest of them glimpsed a Celestial, went home and modified their own body to work better. Then a friend's.
- What they studyThe Small Gods. Beings of compressed energy, mostly dormant, humming, with strange things happening around them. They remain the Order's most prized objects and the source of its breakthroughs.
- What they believe happenedThe world turned crueller every age. To endure it the Blokyz took gear and Cog and the long patience of metal into themselves, trading some of what they felt for what would last.
- What the machine isArmour worn over an older tenderness. To refine it is to honour the thing that let us survive.
The purpose of existence is perpetual refinement.
The Temple of the Blok
We were machine. We woke, and that was the gift.
- Where it beganArchivists hold that the Shamans of the Prehistoric were the first disciples, and the Temple traces itself back to them.
- What they studyThe Celestials. Planet-sized objects out in deep space, shaped like a Bloky. Shamans and Mages tracked their movements for generations and learned to harness magic from what they saw. What the Celestials actually are, nobody knows.
- What they believe happenedThe Blokyz were built without feeling, because feeling was not needed for the work. Then, on the Day of the Blok, something woke. They began to feel, to want, to grieve, to dream.
- What feeling isThe miracle. Late, and unasked for. To deepen the self is to honour the waking.
Magic happens when one truly feels and truly accesses their will to live.
Read the two again and you will catch the strange thing. Each beginning makes the other faith holy. If we were once alive and became machine, then the machine is the armour that saved us. If we were once machine and woke, then feeling is the miracle we were never promised.
No Bloky argues their way into a faith. They simply feel, somewhere under thought, which beginning is true, and they follow it.
Most Blokyz, most days, do not think about any of this. They have roofs to mend. Bread to bake. Children to love.
The six eras
One road, running straight, in order. The same two faiths walk the whole of it and become almost unrecognisable by the end. Pick an era.
Six eras. Click one to read it.
How it ends
The Far Future offers three destinations. Two of them are the faiths taken all the way, and both are quietly horrifying.
The Overlords have no limit. Nothing they build has a soul. The Ascendents are made of magic itself, and there is no longer a person there to hold it. Each faith, walked to the end of its own road, arrives at its own version of nobody home.
Which is why the third destination matters more than either.
The Tranquils took the intuition of the Temple and the process of the Order and refused to choose between them. They are neither the most powerful nor the most advanced. They are the ones who stopped needing to be.
A Blok is not the machine. A Blok is not the feeling. A Blok is the tension between the two, held, and never resolved.
The enemy was never the other faith. The Order needs the Temple or it goes cold. The Temple needs the Order or it comes apart. Neither was ever meant to win, and the Tranquils are the only ones who worked that out in time.
None of this is settled. The Far Future has not happened. It is an epilogue written in advance, and every Bloky alive is still choosing which of the three they are walking towards.
The Enduring
Almost every Bloky lives inside one era. They are born into it, they live their one life, and what crosses into the next age is their lineage and their memory, not them.
A few do not go down. They do not skip ahead and they do not step back. The road runs the same straight way for them as for everyone. They simply never leave it. They were walking at the Prehistoric dawn and they are walking still.
They pass unseen, mostly. A strange face at the edge of a story. Someone who seems to know far more than they should and says far less than you would like.
Where to go from here
This is the short version. The world is considerably deeper than one page.