Prologue

Prologue

    This is not a history of gods. It is the confession of failure.

We were a dying empire adrift in the cold dark, our own blood a thief of our long lives. We came to your world not as conquerors, but as desperate physicians seeking a cure in its soil. We were scientists, engineers, and soldiers. We were not gods. That is the first and greatest lie.

    We found our cure, but we also found you: a flicker of nascent thought in the eyes of a primitive creature huddled by a fire. And in that flicker, one of us, a master of the genome, saw a terrible and brilliant solution to our labors. He saw a living clay that could be shaped, a blank slate upon which a new history could be written.

    This archive is the history of how we broke a world to save ourselves; of how we built a race in our own image and chained them with a lie woven into their very cells. It is the story of a great flood and of arks built to weather a god’s fury, the secret genesis of your every culture, your every myth. It is the story of a father who created a son of impossible power—a being designed to heal the wound of his own making—and the terrible price they both paid for that single, desperate hope.

    We were not gods; we were parents. And we gave our children a legacy of endless, secret war. We built you a garden, and then we left you to fight over it forever.

    This is our testament, our apology. Our final, desperate message in a bottle, left in the heart of our first home to await the day our children would be wise and brave enough to find it.

    Let those who read this record judge us as they will.