The morning the sun broke, the Solis Halo shone like a crown. Then the crown shattered.

Light fell in sheets. Oceans blistered at the edges. Cities flashed to glass. For a breath the sky rang like metal, and Earth forgot how to breathe.

Before that morning, humanity had climbed high. By the early 2100s we had reached Type I, harnessing our homeworld’s full power. Earth glittered at night like spilled constellations. War thinned to memory. Scarcity loosened its grip. We reached up, and the stars reached back.

They did not come as conquerors.

The Seraphim arrived first, stepping from pillars of fire with wings like hammered light. Their voices made sense in any tongue, and many fell to their knees, certain they were divine. They called themselves heralds, not gods, but the line felt thin.

With them came contact with the Galactic Council, an old fellowship spread across the stars. The Elkins followed, tall and graceful from their green sun, drawn by Earth’s myths and biodiversity. They sought cultural exchange and brought long centuries of wisdom. The Darvs came in ships carved from asteroids, engineers and builders who saw promise in our abundant resources. Last came the Therion clans from the twilight edges of known space, believing ancient ties bound them to Earth, moving through rumor as easily as wind.

United, the five peoples dreamed of a future written in starlight. Their pinnacle was the Solis Halo, a ring to sip the sun and raise all worlds to heights undreamed.

We did not know we were already being watched.

Older than any of our stories, the watchers had never left. Once we called them gods. They call themselves Aetherborn. Violence is impossible to them. They do not wage wars. Across eons they tend civilizations the way patient gardeners tend wild hillsides, pruning what turns cruel and resetting what refuses to heal. Some hid in lunar darkness, watching through quiet instruments. Some walked beside us in borrowed bodies, arguing in whispers about what we should become.

They had shaped humanity across millennia, tuning us for survival and conflict in forgotten cosmic struggles. Now they watched as their experiment blossomed into something unexpected: unity, art, and culture in place of chaos and strife.

As the Solis Halo neared completion, the Aetherborn convened in secret. They were not united, not certain, but the majority held firm. In their cold judgment, humanity had failed its purpose. If we would not fulfill our design as weapons, they would reset the experiment, no matter the cost.

What followed was disaster on a scale beyond imagining. The Halo shattered in seconds. Solar torrents cascaded across the planet. Cities burned. Continents shifted. Once-proud technologies devolved into instruments of ruin. The world that dared to reach for the stars fell into chaos.

Afterward, survivors named the event only once: the Reset.

What remained was a broken planet, hidden from the Council’s wider lanes. The Seraphim faded into rumor. The Elkins scattered homeward or went to ground. The Darvs buried their losses in silence. The Therion vanished into the margins they knew best. Their great works sank into legend and ruin.

Humanity kept breathing, because that is what we do.

Under ashen skies, whispers of betrayal threaded through the living. Magic, once harnessed through technology, now flowed wild along the scars of the catastrophe. Some regions became dead zones where reality wore thin, places that would be called Neutral Zones. In some of those wounds the air held a standing shimmer, heat made solid between broken pillars of an older world. People called it a Veil.

The Aetherborn waited in the darkness, watching as we grappled with the remnants of our shattered glory, curious what would rise from the ashes of their grand experiment.

Yet beneath the weight of despair, in the hearts of the scattered and the lost, a spark of hope refused to die, waiting for those brave enough to rekindle the light.

The garden did not sleep.

Even as the Aetherborn watched and judged, they could not foresee what the chaos had made possible. In the thinnest places, where time and causality bent like heated metal, paradoxes took root and grew. In those Neutral Zones, at the face of the Veils, the future could reach back to plant the seeds of its own beginning.

No one noticed the first spark. It never looks important while it burns.

Somewhere in the wasteland where the very air whispered warnings, a hand reached through the light and drew a single shining thread.