GENESIS RUIN: PROLOGUE

You wake to the weight of time pressing gently on your chest—not pain, but the heavy memory of gravity reasserting itself after too long adrift. Sleep held you like stone. Now, with a soft hiss, the stasis cradle opens. Air rushes in—not sterile, but alive: bark soaked in stormwater, crushed pollen, ozone rising from cracked stone. A skyline unspools through the fractured viewport—jagged, unknowable, utterly unfamiliar. This is not Earth. It is what Earth became when extinction outpaced memory. Decades—perhaps centuries—have passed. You were sent to reclaim, but landed too late for reclamation. The Genesis Protocol fractured—or fulfilled its arc in ways no mind could model. Terraforming vaults, orbital salvation rings, encoded ecologies: they succeeded and failed. Earth did not restore. It changed, drastically. Around you, vines spiral like memory-wires. Vaultmetal-rooted trees claw into the wreckage of weather towers. Hybrid beasts roam freely across steppe and jungle. Singing fungi pulse with bioluminescence. Vault AIs, left untethered, twisted ecosystems into patchwork wilderness. Vault systems decayed. Root-pulse replaced signal. Stone remembers rhythm. Beneath your feet, the soil vibrates—faintly. Microbial circuits whisper across shattered vault nodes, telling stories in rootlogic and spore-code. Above, something vast and ancient glides on thermal columns—a pterosaur, silent but watching. The lake exhales behind you, coated in bio-coded microplankton synced to vault cycles that no longer run. And somewhere nearby, a Trunkin drums softly on stone—not in alarm, but in welcome.

You might be Vaultborn, awakened with fractured data bleeding in your veins.
Or Trunkin, heartbeat-trained, bearing the songs of stone.
Maybe you’re Felvarish, spectral and sharp-edged, half-memory, half-animal.
Or Raptor-Folk, storm-inked and bone-marked, raised by echo rather than lineage.
Or perhaps you hail from the Oasis, untouched and aching with ancestral clarity.

But titles don’t matter here—not yet.

The world listens.

And now—it watches.

Your first breath tastes of lightning.
The ground below your boots trembles, not in warning, but recognition.
This world does not remember cities. But it remembers footfall, heat rhythms, the slow tremor of being watched. You are not here to conquer. You are here to witness. To endure. To survive. Perhaps even—to belong.

What do you do now that you have arrived?