In-game

The story of XETODUS

The door closed behind us. Something is knocking.

Three hundred years ago the last free ships of humanity fled a silence that was swallowing their worlds. They escaped through a ring built by someone else, into a cluster of stars nobody had named.

Season OneThe Open Door

Play free now Begin the story

Part one

The Exodus

Illustration: a settled planet at night seen from orbit, every city and station lit and nothing moving, a lone relief ship approaching

The Stilling

Over thirty years the worlds of the Old Reach went quiet, one after another. Not destroyed. Quiet. Relief ships found cities lit, engines warm, crews at their stations, and no voice on any band.

The survivors called it the Hush.

In-game: an Ancient Gate Ruin, a spiked ring of dark carved segments around a glowing throat, before a burning nebula

The far ring

At the edge of the Old Reach the survey tender Meridian played an old echo back at a ring nobody human had built. The ring answered. It opened a throat to stars on no chart.

The navigators marked the destination with a single letter: X.

In-game: a Colossus Fighter Tender and its escorts burn past a planet toward an orange nebula

The Crossing

For nine days the arks, the warships of the Picket and the shipwrights' floating yards poured through. Spacers called the voyage the exodus to X. The name stuck to the cluster, to its ore and in time to everything.

Xetodus.

Illustration: a cyan wormhole throat folds shut inside an ancient ring, tiny warships still deep inside it, a damaged survey ship in the foreground

The Door

On the ninth day the throat collapsed, with forty ships of the rearguard still inside. The history books call it an accident. The Vanta Dominion never believed them.

Carved over the Bastion wall: Something followed. Be ready.

Three hundred years

0 ACThe Crossing
12 ACThe Solari Accord's First Council meets at Fatal
38 ACFirst Lane: a jump gate copied from a ruin works, and nobody knows why
61 to 94 ACThe Charter Wars leave the Shatterdrifts
94 ACThe Treaty of Bagoia draws Secure, Contested and Lawless space
299 ACThe first knocks
300 ACNow. An old survey beacon calls on the exodus emergency band

Part two

The powers

Three powers hold the core under one Charter and agree on almost nothing. The Crown holds the dark.

Solari Accord

Seated at Fatal

The lawful republic. It keeps the Charter Rolls, the courts and the Accord Marshals, under the moored flagship ark Long Promise.

Wants: Order and the Charter's peace
Fears: Panic

Kheper Syndicate

Seated at Selnem

The industrial guild. Everything in the cluster was dug, built or hauled through Kheper, usually at a margin. Its gates are copies of alien rings.

Wants: Growth, and the secrets of the ruins
Fears: The day a copied gate sings the wrong note

Vanta Dominion

Seated at Bagoia IV

The militarist state, heirs of the Picket that held the throat. Forty of its ships were left inside the Door.

Wants: Readiness, and the rearguard's names cleared
Fears: Being right

Hollow Crown

The Lawless fringe

Pirate clans built from everyone the Charter left out. Their crown passed from captain to captain and never stayed, until a new king took it and kept it.

Wants: The Door open, and the Council in chains
Holds: The Crownless Verge and the Hollow Deep

And answerable to none of them: the Survey Directorate, keepers of the maps and the fleet archives; the Driftwatch, who count the war dead in the Shatterdrifts; the Bounty Offices, who pay head prices on the Crown.

Portrait: an Ilari pilot, gray-blue skin, a ridged crest and glowing cyan freckles along the cheeks

The Ilari

The cluster was not empty

Three years after the Crossing the fleet met the cluster's native people on an ocean world. Gray-skinned and crested, with freckles of light that brighten when they listen, the Ilari greeted the fleet with curiosity instead of guns, and with a warning nobody could translate for decades.

Do not sing to the rings.
The oldest law of the Ilari

Their Listeners hear a ruin's song and remember it. Some now fly for the three powers.

Part three

Before us, the Choir

The Ilari call them the ones who sang the lanes. Human scholars just say the elder builders. They were here first, and they left the cluster full of instruments.

Gate ruins

Rings that opened lanes between stars by resonance: a ring is sung to, not switched on. Every one in the frontier is broken. Hold close and a nav computer still hears the lanes it once ran.

In-game: a torn span of a Derelict Megastructure, its broken ring and the spokes to its shattered hub, against a burning nebula

Bellframes

Broken rings of plating tens of kilometers across. They once held a chord over whole regions of space. They are silent now.

In-game: ships approach a wandering singularity, its light bent into a bright ring

Knocks

Wandering singularities, the scars of lanes collapsed long ago. For three centuries they were curiosities. This year they started to drift in. Survey officers call them knocks.

Xetite, the pale violet-white crystal the Syndicate mines past the old ruins, is their song frozen in rock.

Whatever emptied the Old Reach is still out there.

Nobody who met the Hush came back to describe it.

The frontier

Where the story goes

The charted core is only the beginning. Past the conduits lie the ruins, the storms and the dark.

In-game: a ship skims a bright ocean under white clouds

Secure

Sunward Shelf

Bright young suns, ocean worlds and ancient gate ruins under Marshal patrols.

In-game: a ship flies through an ion storm of crackling light

Contested to Lawless

Stormglass Rift

A Syndicate trade rift where the ion storms never settle. Storm cells full of charged rock, and raids.

In-game: a Derelict Megastructure, a broken ring tens of kilometers across with spokes to a central hub, before a red nebula

Lawless

Ossuary Deep

A graveyard of derelict megastructures and relic wreck fields that the Crown picks clean.

Illustration: a small ship faces a vast tear of lightless black in space, its edges rimmed with pale light

Lawless · the Far Ring

The Hushfall

Deep dark past the Gloaming. Spacers named it for the way signals die there. Nobody thought about the old word until now.

Your role

Any licensed pilot may answer

The powers are too proud, too divided or too guilty to answer what is coming. The Charter says you may. The three powers have argued about that clause for three centuries. None has dared repeal it.

Any licensed pilot may fly anywhere, answer any beacon and carry any lawful cargo, under any flag or none.

The Exodus Charter · the Free Hull clause

300 AC. On the exodus fleet's emergency band, an old survey beacon has begun to call.

Seven-Petrel

The main story

Season OneThe Open Door

Nine chapters, from your first license to the edge of the Hushfall. Your choices are remembered.

PrologueUnder the CharterA new pilot answers a beacon on the first day.
Chapter IEchoes of the ExodusSeven-Petrel, the Meridian, and the truth about the wormhole.
Chapter IIThe Hollow ThroneWho is uniting the pirate captains, and whose face is behind the crown.
Chapter IIIDead ReckoningThe Meridian's survey frame wakes and asks to hear a ring.
Chapter IVThe ListenerAn Ilari Listener, an ocean world and an old law.
Chapter VThe BellframeThe King's Archivist strips an instrument older than humanity.
Chapter VIHorizonThrough a singularity, to hear who is knocking.
Chapter VIIChoir of AshSilence the Drowned Ark's engine before it finds the note.
Chapter VIIIThe Open DoorInto the Hushfall, where signals die.

Answer the beacon

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