Dimmr Deep

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"In Memory of Those Who Never Returned"

Fellow citizens. Colleagues of the Spacetrek Collective. Faculty and students of Startorch Academy. And all of you still holding your posts in Lahai-Roi.

Today, we stand once more beneath the light of Helios.

The last time we gathered here, we celebrated the New Solar Ceremony. We had just ignited an artificial sun in Lahai-Roi's sky. We cheered for the future.

We didn't know that months later, we would endure the largest Void Storm on record. We would activate "Duskveil," our final contingency. And we would face the Threnodian, Aleph-One, head-on.

But we have driven the Threnodian back. We have sealed the Stridergate. We have crossed the Twilight Epoch, the very period of time Royan mythology said would end everything.

Yes. We have triumphed.

This victory is unprecedented. The known over the unknown. Humanity over the Threnodian.

But as the head of the Spacetrek Collective, it is my duty to tell you what this victory cost.

In the past months, Lahai-Roi has recorded nearly one hundred Void Storms. Five exceeded the highest alert level. Over thirty of our monitoring stations, research facilities, and defense nodes have been destroyed. In our search for the runes, we lost countless Mechascouts. Seventeen of our best operators suffered Voidmatter contamination. Most of them will never return to Lahai-Roi.

And most critically, we lost the cornerstone of the Spacetrek Collective itself. The Exostrider—the one who carved out Lahai-Roi's future.

And yet, this is the greatest victory we have ever achieved in our long war against the Voidborne Threnodian.

This frontier was built by the people of Solaris. Countless pioneers have been lost to the Void Storms. Their Cassettes still sit in the deepest vaults of our archives.

Roald, Koki, Mingxia, Beverly, Bajcetic—many of you have heard these names. They were the first explorers. The first researchers to come from every corner of Solaris to these frozen lands. And they were the first to try to conquer the void through their recordings, helping us learn the truth about Void Storms.

And before them, there were so many more whose Cassettes could not be recovered. They remain forever lost to the Void Storms.

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Today, I stand here to recount these "costs." Not to dwell on suffering, but to remind you, and myself, that this very moment we are living through, and every tomorrow to come, is a chain of miracles built on the accumulation of all that came before.

I still remember my first speech after taking office here. It was at the memorial for the Roald expedition team.

Since then, I have witnessed the disappearance of many fine explorers.

But they were never just cold, lifeless names on a list. The traces they left behind still guide us forward.

Together with the Roya, lost in darkness since ages past, they endured. They resisted dissolution in eternal darkness.

The Roya. The people of Rinascita. The people of Huanglong... People from every corner of Solaris, even in the deepest darkness of the void, they resisted dissolution. They kept moving forward. They kept exploring.
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As for what came after, I believe everyone here already knows. We are still standing here. Even when nothingness tried to consume all of Lahai-Roi, we are still standing here.

Yes. We have lost so much.

But right now, we are still standing. And we will keep moving forward.

Aleph-One tried to make us believe that everything eventually returns to nothing. But it was wrong. That signal, sent by a probe Solaris explorers launched years ago, was not white noise. Not cosmic background radiation.

It was the voice of the beginning. The afterglow of the universe's birth. And we can still hear it, across billions of years.

So remember this: everything that has ever existed always leaves a trace.

The Spacetrek Collective will not stop. One day, we will break through the Etheric Sea. We will venture into a wider world.

And as the Exostrider once said:

May we meet again in the boundless sea of stars!