The Progenitors¶
The ancient makers — terraformers of Nandana and seeders of life across the sector. Whether they have anything to do with humanity is the question the whole game circles; they never appear in person to answer it.
[!quote] "Every road here was built by hands we've never seen, for children they never met. Love or ledger — which builds a world like this?" — Idris Vale
Status: exiled from the sector, ages ago · Legacy: Nandana, the Custodians, the Seed-Heart, the Mara · Presence in play: off-screen — ruins, archives, machines, and one another race's testimony
What is known¶
- They practiced the Seeding: engineering worlds and the life that fills them, including sapient races.
- They made the Mara — their firstborn — who remember being made.
- They built Nandana as a home for some intended inheritor and left the Custodians to keep it.
- The Mara rose against them and drove them from the sector. Where they went, or whether they still exist, is unknown.
What is disputed¶
The Progenitors are never shown clearly enough to judge — by design. Two questions the game keeps alive:
- Benefactors: loving gardeners who prepared a paradise for heirs they would never meet, asking nothing. Nandana is the evidence: a gift with no visible price.
- Slavers: breeders of servant-races who built and used peoples like tools. The Mara are the evidence — the firstborn, who knew the makers intimately and chose war over one more day of their care.
Perhaps their newest creation. Perhaps a people they carried here long ago. Perhaps nothing at all — strangers who found a door someone else left open. Nobody in the story knows, and (see The Seeding) neither do this bible's writers. Keep it that way.
Never resolve this
The Progenitors must stay unknowable, and humanity's link to them most of all. The moment the game confirms an answer, the ending stops being a question and becomes a lecture. Keep the makers off-screen; let the ruins and the Mara argue; let the player decide at the Seed-Heart.
The recall¶
The Seed-Heart may be able to signal the exiled Progenitors home. Whether that is rescue or catastrophe is the gamble at the heart of Act 3 — and whether it has anything to do with humanity's fate at all depends on questions no one can answer.