Sothera Side Routes

Read in order or choose a turning point

Story Chapters

1. 01

   Pilgrim to Point Prime

   Elsewhere in Sothera, Reen's pilgrimage exposes the human cost hidden beneath the Monoist-Summist war.

   Squad Captain Reen, a Monoist gravkill paladin, boards Too Much Happiness at Infinite Guideline under a temporary peace, carrying the inked ledger of everyone lost or killed through her service. She is meant to seek stillness at Point Prime after the atrocity on Joska. The pilgrimage resembles care until it becomes clear that the Monasteriat expects to return her to combat afterward.

   The mechan captain describes a Wurmwall encounter followed by compulsion and gaps in memory. Reen suspects hostile interference, not a verified culprit. Sunstar passengers discover her identity at the same moment that news from Joska ends the truce. Her armour replaces uncertainty with battle chemistry, and three more deaths join the account she has been trying to understand.

   Too Much Happiness asks whether the marks count victims or enemies. Reen answers that they are both. As Point Prime fills the viewport, she imagines the separate lines becoming one field of darkness. The stillness she finds is not innocence; it is the terrible calm of knowing the ledger will continue unless the institutions around her change. Reen's ink marks victims and opponents together because the same campaigns made her responsible for deaths that were also personal losses. The captain of Too Much Happiness reports compulsion and gaps in memory after the Wurmwall; Reen suspects interference but does not discover or prove the identity of any hidden controller. The pilgrimage ends with her moral ledger still growing, not with a pardon from the Monasteriat.

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2. 02

   The Pod on Evendo

   Kadrik's rescue of a human stranger turns an assigned failure into the first step toward a self-chosen Eumidian life.

   On Evendo, second-generation vanguard Kadrik searches for dormant Eumidian pods and fails to care about the task they were hatched to perform. Believing the brood plans to recycle them, they flee into the half-thawed wilderness. A Kav stasis pod interrupts the escape. Inside is Noz, a Pinnacle programmer captured years earlier and forgotten while political promises replaced the conflict that trapped him.

   The predator Kadrik calls Gobbler claims the pod. Kadrik initially leaves, then returns because the stranger has become a person rather than salvage. Improvised combat costs another fungal foot but saves Noz long enough for the enclave to restore him. The rescue also brings warning of Kav military preparations that may threaten Evendo's terrasymbiosis.

   Noz wants to return to his family and to the drawing he pursued outside his profession. He tells Kadrik that loving a task one was not made for is possible. After his departure, the Eumidian draws in the dirt with the twig Noz hands over. Against a system full of imposed destinies, the small mark is a declaration that adaptation can belong to an individual too. Kadrik's first assessment of Noz as edible salvage gives way to the decision to return when the Gobbler attacks. The Kav's warning about future military operations matters for Evendo, but his twig and example of drawing for pleasure are the immediate change in Kadrik's life. Leaving assigned work behind is an opening to self-chosen meaning, not a confirmation that the brood's wider dangers have ended.

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3. 03

   The Node in the Dark

   Farakatolar's memorial recovery mission enters an ancient trap that makes devotion to Kavaron indistinguishable from extraction.

   A fragment of Kavaron drifts toward the Wurmwall with a possible memorial vault inside it. Sergeant Farakatolar leads the mission because the Kav cannot afford to lose more of their broken world. Drilling reveals a white structure too curved for Kav construction and too resistant to instruments to classify. At its centre waits a blue orb that seems valuable enough to justify the voyage.

   Rooms seal, the artifact moves and each member of the squad meets a different impossible death. Farakatolar keeps leading forward because retreat would make the sacrifices meaningless. That logic is the structure's sharpest weapon. It turns the need to honour the dead into permission to risk whoever remains. Takoluk dies with a shattered skull; Dornnuk tears himself apart, and a swarm engulfs Rakoro.

   She reaches into the node and discovers that its surface does not separate outside from inside. Injury, blood loss and crushing pressure only intensify her determination to claim it for Kavaron. When her fist finally closes, nothing is left. The mission repeats the homeworld's history on a smaller scale: preservation destroyed by the extraction meant to secure it. She recognises a Vaar node connected to the Hylderhigh; knowledge is the lure, not a recovered Kav memorial. Farakatolar recognizes the blue orb as an ancient Vaar node associated with the Hylderhigh only after her team has been dismantled by the impossible structure. The supposed memorial is not recovered, the squad's deaths are not reversed and the final attempt to grip the orb leaves nothing of its claimant. The mission's official language of preservation cannot be allowed to stand in for a successful rescue.

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4. 04

   The Doors of Uthros

   Geldan descends into Uthros to clear a debt and finds an ancient presence that converts her hunger for freedom into surrender.

   Solidbodies Research sends Geldan and Rezint into a hidden Illvoi installation near Uthros's core. Reaching a sealed door is supposed to transmit enough information to clear the latest layer of favour-debt. Pressure suits, storm currents and corporate secrecy make the route dangerous, but Geldan has spent a life turning beauty and risk into objects somebody else can sell. She pockets an ornament before discarding it for the larger prize.

   The deeper corridors awaken a pull. Rezint deciphers warnings about a deity or world-eater and urges retreat. Geldan instead decides that the mission's modest reward can never make her free. She disconnects the instruments so the discovery beyond the door will belong to her, not the people who purchased her labour.

   The chamber contains a titan's corpse or surviving influence, reality-bending and intimate enough to wear the shape of her fears. Geldan interprets horror as unique value and kneels, willing to become material for its design. She chooses to remain; neither debt clearance nor a subsequent transformation is witnessed. Rezint reads the warning signs and urges escape; Geldan abandons the original assignment precisely because reporting the door would leave its apparent wealth controlled by her creditors. The story ends with her kneeling to the titan's presence. It does not show a completed transformation, release from debt or return journey, so those outcomes remain unknown.

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5. 05

   Scar in the Weft

   Ghan follows an Eldrazi-tainted artifact through a damaged timeline and chooses to save its many victims instead of restoring the partner he lost.

   Drix wefthunter Ghan traces a wound from abandoned Cail Station to Kesori Umberlin. She uses an alien device to reach backward toward her sister Errit, who died when an evacuation favoured expensive machinery over ordinary residents. Each jump drains Kesori, harms bystanders and cuts the Weft wider. Grief has found a tool designed to make restraint feel like betrayal.

   Inside the Weft, Ghan can steer the artifact toward the past. He sees chances to warn Kesori, save Cail and even approach the recent moment when his own partner Sorothir still lived. That final possibility is the device's most precise temptation. Ghan refuses it because one restored love would consume the power needed to prevent many deaths.

   He reaches Kesori weeks earlier and gives her Jadnis's contact. The revised present saves neighbours endangered by the artifact; it does not reverse Cail's twenty-year-old deaths. Jadnis and Kesori pursue that injustice through an investigation. The artifact is severed and the scar sealed. The next warning concerns an emerging Kav protobeing named Tannuk, linking the private hunt to the Seriema's route and showing that Sothera's ancient war has not finished producing consequences. Ghan refuses the device's invitation to restore his dead partner Sorothir. His actual intervention reaches a point weeks before Kesori's use of the artifact, not the much earlier evacuation that killed Errit on Cail. The old injustice must still be investigated; the warning about a Kav protobeing called Tannuk is an emerging lead, not a proven diagnosis of what the Seriema's first mate will become.

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