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Interlude: Historical Archive 13 - 1,170 AGC

  For generations, they wandered. Not across the plains of a world, nor beneath the light of a singular sun, but through the boundless sea of stars. The Ossari had no planet to call home. They were born among steel and silence, raised in the gravity of their vast armadas, educated in the corridors of their drifting stations. Their world was one of motion, of endless pursuit, of knowledge collected across the stars.

  They did not come to me seeking salvation, nor sanctuary, nor even survival.

  They came for understanding.

  My presence had called to them, not through spoken word, nor desperate need, but through knowledge itself, the unseen pull of logic, of structure, of a world resting at the center of all things. They could not ignore the anomaly that was Axiom, the place where all paths converged, where the spiral of the universe led. To not come would have been to deny the very essence of what they were.

  So they arrived, their Grand Archive leading the way, a monolithic flagship, as vast as a continent, its surface carved with the records of entire civilizations they had encountered and outlived. It did not land; it did not need to. It became their home, their anchor, their monument. And around it, they shaped their new existence.

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  Their space stations, once drifting among the void, now descended into the world itself. The Ossari did not build upon the land, I let them sink beneath it, their labyrinthine stations burrowing deep into the bones of Axiom, where knowledge could be preserved in silence, untouched by time. Their cities were not of towering spires, but of vast underground archives, halls of data and stone, libraries that pulsed with the echoes of countless generations.

  And for the first time, they stood still.

  They did not kneel. They did not pray. Instead, they recorded.

  They documented their arrival, the structure of the atmosphere, the composition of the soil, the resonance of my power within the air. They studied me, as they studied everything, not with skepticism, but with reverence for truth itself.

  And then they turned outward.

  Their first act was not to claim, but to seek. To walk the lands, to meet the ones who had come before them, the Sylvari, the Drakonid, the Chimera. They sought knowledge not to hoard, but to exchange, to fill the gaps in their ever-growing collection with the voices of their newfound siblings. Their pursuit was not power, nor territory, but understanding.

  And so I gave them what they desired.

  I whispered to them in Alispika, and they did not fear it. They did not hesitate. They listened. They learned. And in time, they would learn everything.

  The fourth of my children had come. And I watched as they wrote the first words of their greatest archive.

  "The Beginning of Axiom."

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