Every story creates a surface narrative: events, characters, conflicts. Beneath it, often unseen, forms a second structure—the canon. This is not merely background material or extended lore. It is the logic that governs what can exist, what can persist, and what must eventually break.
Artifacts in this canon are never neutral objects. They are condensations of belief. A ledger, a sigil, a protocol, a relic—each artifact carries the moral assumptions of the system that produced it. They endure because they solve a problem once deemed unsolvable. They become dangerous when later generations forget why they were created and inherit only their authority.
Factions arise not from ideology alone, but from selective memory. Each group preserves a fragment of the truth and builds an identity around it. One faction may safeguard records, believing preservation is salvation. Another rejects technology, believing purity lies in absence. Another seeks transcendence, believing evolution demands abandonment of the old form. None are entirely wrong. None are complete.
Mythology emerges where explanation fails.
As systems collapse and reform, stories replace blueprints. Symbols outlast instructions. What was once a technical safeguard becomes a sacred sign. What was once a pragmatic compromise becomes a taboo. Over time, history compresses into myth—not because facts are lost, but because meaning becomes more important than accuracy.
Canon is the negotiation between memory and forgetting.
It exists to prevent chaos, but also to justify power. It sanctifies origins and disguises contingency. It tells future generations: “this was inevitable.” In truth, most foundations are improvised, and most covenants are written in fear. Canon smooths these edges so societies can function without confronting the fragility of their beginnings.
Within the work, canon notes serve as apertures rather than explanations. They point toward a larger structure without fully revealing it. Artifacts hint at prior cycles. Factions echo unresolved philosophical debates. Mythology records not what happened, but what was understood to have happened by those who survived.
This is deliberate.
A complete canon would be a closed system—and closed systems do not endure. By leaving gaps, contradictions, and overlapping interpretations, the mythology remains alive. It invites the reader not to consume a finished world, but to inhabit an unfinished one.
In the end, canon is not about control. It is about continuity.
Not the preservation of truth in its entirety—but the preservation of enough meaning for the
next cycle to begin again.