Part One: The Archaic Era: The Pathbreakers

【Overview of the Era】 Surviving sources on the Age of Pathfinders are exceedingly limited, and neither its precise beginning and end nor the earliest extraordinary lineages can now be confirmed. Modern historians use the Age of Pathfinders to refer to the long interval between the Fireseed Age and the wave of Realm-creation, encompassing a change that appeared concurrently in many worlds unknown to one another: sapient life began actively opening paths from difference, and some of that experience gradually became transmissible to companions and descendants.

[From Isolated Anomalies to Early Traditions] Most traces of the extraordinary in ruins from the Age of Embers are isolated from one another, whereas sources from the Age of Pathbreakers begin to show continuous use, repeated rituals, and similar structures. Such remains have been found on life-bearing Stars, in Primordial Realms, and throughout ancient Lands and Interspaces, yet there is no evidence that these early civilizations ever made contact. Modern histories of the paths therefore tend to understand them as instances of “pathbreaking” that occurred independently in many places: for the first time, life stabilized its perception and understanding of a particular difference, along with the way it exerted power through that difference, and attempted to pass this knowledge to companions or descendants.

The Blackstone Rings of the Western Continent on Chiqiong Star and the White-Shell Remains of Yuluojia in the lost Primordial Realm are the two groups of evidence most frequently compared. The Blackstone Rings consist of more than ninety stone circles with similar orientations, and comparable structures were later discovered on several life-bearing Stars and in ancient Lands; the White-Shell Remains preserve large numbers of unidentified creatures that appear to have died at nearly the same time and share a common direction of migration. Together, they allow researchers to see that ancient life repeatedly confronted questions of direction, migration, ritual, and the effects of anomalous rules.