Two beginnings, and no way to choose
There are two accounts of how the Blokyz began. Both are believed. Neither can be proven. We will never confirm one.
The first. The Blokyz were once wholly alive. Soft, feeling things, close to the world and easily hurt by it. The world turned cruel and changeable, harder each age than the last, and to survive it they took the mechanism into themselves. Gear, cog, and the long patience of metal. They traded away some of what they felt for what would last. By this telling, the machine is armour worn over an older tenderness.
The second. The Blokyz were once wholly machine. Built things, made and sent out to walk the uncharted dark. They were made without feeling, because feeling was not needed for the task. Then something woke in them. They began to feel, to want, to grieve, to dream. By this telling, feeling is the miracle. The late and unasked for gift.
Read them again and the strangeness shows. Each beginning makes the other faith holy.
A Blok does not choose a faith by argument. They simply feel, in the deep place beneath thought, which beginning is true, and follow it. That is all faith has ever been among them. Not a proof. A beginning remembered that cannot be shown to anyone else.
The Forgotten Years
Before the record there is silence.
No name survives from that time. No voice. Whatever happened that made the Blokyz happened here, unwitnessed, or witnessed and unremembered, which in the end is the same thing.
What remains is relics. They are beautiful and they are mute. Clearly made, clearly meant, clearly the work of intention, and not one of them will say by whom or to what end. Every age since has dug at them. Every age has come back with wonder and no answer.
The Forgotten Years will never be explained. That is a design decision, not a delay.
The six eras
The road runs in one direction, in order, with no skipping and no return.
The Forgotten Years. The silence at the start. Relics only.
The Prehistoric. Memory begins. Two Blokyz turn toward the silent relics in two different hungers. The Shamans listen to them as to a voice. The Tinkerers take them apart to see what turns inside. The Temple of the Blok and the Order of the Cog are born in the same age, from the same silence, asked different questions.
The Medieval. The Shamans become Mages and Wizards, who shape feeling into power. The Tinkerers become Alchemists, who bend matter and make the mechanism cleverer than its maker intended. Both lineages come into real strength. They spend the age at each other's throats and leaning on each other to survive things neither could face alone.
The Modern. The Mages pass into Superheroes, whose feeling is vast enough to bend the world in the open. The Alchemists pass into Scientists, who no longer guess at matter but command it. For the first time the two paths can be told apart at a glance.
The Future. Superheroes pass into Metaphysical Beings of Power, presences more than persons. Scientists pass into Bot-smiths, makers of makers. The common Blok grows quieter, smoother, more given over to the machine in the ordinary business of living.
The Far Future. The record thins. At the end of the Temple's road waits the primordial Blok, pure feeling, no machine left in it. At the end of the Order's road waits the wholly mechanical Blok, perfect function, no feeling left in it. Whether these ever stand in the same world is not known.
The two faiths
Temple of the Blok
The Blokyz were once wholly machine, and something woke in them. Feeling is the miracle.
What matters is the whole living self. The feeling, the being, the Blok entire. Not the part but the one who is made of the parts.
Shamans, then Mages, then Superheroes, then Metaphysical Beings of Power.
Order of the Cog
The Blokyz were once wholly alive, and took the mechanism in to survive. The machine is armour over an older tenderness.
What matters is the working. The function, the cog that turns true. Not the dreaming but the doing, the part that holds so the whole can move.
Tinkerers, then Alchemists, then Scientists, then Bot-smiths.
Neither faith is correct. Neither is the villain. There is no protagonist faction and there will never be one.
The two ends
Sit with what waits at the end of each road.
The wholly mechanical Blok works perfectly. It meets every task. It does not fail. It feels nothing, wants nothing, and there is no one inside it.
The wholly elemental Blok feels everything, the whole storm of being at once. It has no form to hold the feeling, no will, no hand, no self that could be called by a name. There is no one to be found in it either.
Each faith, walked all the way to its end, arrives at its own quiet horror. The Order taken too far builds a thing with no soul. The Temple taken too far dissolves into a feeling with no self.
The enemy was never the other faith. The enemy was always your own faith, taken too far.
The oldest truth
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 Order needs the Temple or it goes cold and empty. The Temple needs the Order or it comes apart into nothing. Neither was ever meant to win. The day either one of them wins, the Blokyz end.
The Enduring
Almost every Blok lives inside their age. Born into one era, they live its single life, and what crosses the eras after them is their lineage, not themselves.
A few do not go down. They do not leap ahead and they do not step back. The road runs the same straight way for them as for everyone, age after age, and they simply never leave it. They were walking at the Prehistoric dawn and they are walking still.
It is whispered that the Enduring are the last living thread back to the Forgotten Years. That if any answer to the beginning survives anywhere, it survives behind their eyes. They do not give it. Perhaps they cannot.
Why it is built this way
Two layers, on purpose.
The episodic layer is where the entanglement lives. Protagonists, open loops, unfinished business, reasons to come back. Comics and stories run here and they are allowed to be as gripping and as messy as they need to be.
The permanent layer never moves. The two beginnings stay unconfirmed. The faiths stay symmetrical. The eras stay in order. No episode can break it because no episode is allowed to touch it.
This is what lets hundreds of independent creators work in the Blokyverse without any one of them being able to break it for everyone else. The world is a cast, not a plot.
The Long Record
The foundational document of the Blokyverse is written in a single voice. A chronicler who gathered what could be gathered, marked plainly what cannot be known, and left the rest.
Their closing line is the closest thing we have to a mission statement.
If you have read this far, then you are now a keeper of the question, and that is the only inheritance I have to give.