Chapter 3.1 The Ancients

The Ancients

 

Where there has been life, there have always been cracks in reality. Life is demanding, complex. Humanity, even more so.

Hairline fractures too small for most to see, spreading slowly through the fabric of things, through memory, through feeling, through the rules that kept breath in lungs and gravity underfoot. If you knew where to look, you could find them: in the silence after a scream, in the way a forgotten photograph seemed too heavy in your hand, or in the quiet confusion that followed grief.

 

The cracks were old.

Older than sorrow, older than love.

And long before anyone named them, there were those who knew how to keep the fractures from swallowing everything.

 

They were called the Ancients.

 

They didn’t rule over humanity. They weren’t gods or monsters or spirits tucked into the roots of trees. They were regulators. Guardians, maybe, if you were feeling generous. But at the heart of it, they were something simpler and far more necessary — the ones who kept the edges from fraying.

 

There were five.

 

The Architects came first, though no one ever remembered them that way. They were the bones beneath the world’s skin, the ones who carved the scaffolding that time and matter clung to. They didn’t speak or warn or plead. They simply mended what broke: the tear in a gravitational pull, the thinning wall between past and future, the small places where reality buckled under the strain of being real.

 

It was said that if an Architect ever turned their back, even for a breath, the sky would forget how to hold itself together.

 

Beneath them, or rather beside them, were the Tethers.

The Tethers weren’t architects. They didn’t build or rebuild anything. They simply held.

They tied people to moments, places to their histories, memories to the bodies that lived them.

If the world was a stitched quilt, the Tethers were the hands pulling the thread taut.

Without them, nothing would stay. Love would evaporate. Names would unmake themselves. Grief wouldn’t linger — and neither would joy.

 

Then there were the Sages, who understood that the world broke not through violence alone, but through emotion left to rot.

A wound on the body could heal. A wound on the spirit could fester and tear through the seams of reality if left unattended.

The Sages threaded the music back into people. They found the jagged edges of loss and softened them, not by erasing what had been lost, but by teaching the broken parts how to hold themselves differently.

 

No one asked them to fix things.

They were compelled to.

 

The Watchers came next, though if you asked them, they had always been there, just outside the corners of your vision.

They didn’t interfere. That was the first rule. They watched. They bore witness when timelines began to stutter, when one life fell dangerously out of rhythm with the rest. They recorded everything, not to change it, but because sometimes the act of seeing was enough to steady a spinning coin before it toppled.

 

And when seeing wasn’t enough - when grief deepened into madness, when love bent into something monstrous - there were the Revisionists.

Born out of necessity, out of mercy, they came not to rewrite what had happened, but to ease its sting.

They softened the sharpest horrors, sanded down memories that would otherwise slice straight through the soul.

Not to lie. Never to lie.

Only to make survival possible.

 

Together, these five kept the world from unraveling.

 

When something cracked, the Watchers saw it first.

When it threatened to grow, the Tethers stepped in, lashing reality down like a ship battered by a sudden storm.

If the damage ran deeper, the Sages came, their hands gentle but relentless, tuning the broken frequencies back into something the world could bear.

When fractures split the bedrock itself, the Architects arrived, silent and terrible, to lay new foundations beneath the wounded earth.

And when the human heart, stubborn and fragile, could not endure the weight of it all, the Revisionists stitched what they could, knowing full well that even mercy left scars.

 

It wasn’t a perfect system.

It wasn’t meant to be.

It was meant to buy time.

It was meant to keep the worst thing from happening.

 

Because when the Ancients failed - when the fractures spread too far, too fast, when no amount of binding, mending, witnessing, or softening could hold reality together - there was only one left.

 

The Keeper.

 

The Keeper didn’t rebuild.

The Keeper didn’t heal.

The Keeper chose.

 

What to save.

What to let fall into the void.

 

And once the Keeper was called, nothing ever returned to how it had been before.

Not the world.

Not the people in it.

Not the way reality moved through itself.

 

That was the truth no one spoke aloud.

That was the thing the Commission feared most.

They didn’t exist to punish or reward.

They didn’t exist to control.

 

They existed to delay the moment when the Keeper would be forced to act.

 

And with each fracture, with each distortion, that moment drew a little closer.