The First Page of the End

“History isn’t written by the victors—it’s written by whoever survives the apocalypse.”

Let me tell you a story. A true story. One that spans 40,000 years of triumph, folly, and divine reckoning. This is the tale of the birth of stars and the death of worlds. Of angels forged in celestial fire and demons born from the Creator’s doubt. Of humanity—those fragile, dual-natured creatures—who stumbled into a war older than time itself.

Where did we come from? What threads bind our past to our future? And why does the Codex Aeternum, a relic older than Earth, whisper of a Collapse we cannot escape?

I will show you this story through every lens: the sacred texts of forgotten gods, the equations of quantum historians, and the bloodstained tablets of kings who bargained with hell. We will sift through lies and legends to find the unbroken truth. For our guide is the Codex itself—a fragmentary chronicle of creation, written by a being who cannot lie. A being who knows how it ends.

This is not a myth. It is a warning.

The air in the floating lecture hall hummed with the static of holograms. Outside its glass walls, the neon sprawl of 2489 CE pulsed—a city of anti-gravity skytrains and flickering advertisements for immortality upgrades. But inside, the students of Professor Kael Veyra’s “Apocalyptic Historiography” seminar held their breath. Her cybernetic eye, a relic from the Martian Purge Wars, glowed cold blue as she swept her gaze across the room.

“Let me be clear,” she said, her voice a blade. “We are not historians. We are morticians.”

A flick of her wrist, and the air above her podium erupted into a timeline—a spiraling helix of light spanning millennia. At its end, a void pulsed crimson: THE COLLAPSE.

“This,” she jabbed a finger at the void, “is why you’re here. To autopsy a corpse that hasn’t finished dying.”

Boots clicking against luminescent tiles, she paced. The students—chrono-archaeologists, quantum linguists, and the odd cynical skeptic—leaned in. Among them sat Jin, his neural implants already syncing to the holograms, his pupils dilating as glyphs flickered to life.

“Two centuries ago,” Veyra began, “the UNSS Horizon salvaged an artifact from a rogue planet’s corpse. A slab of metal older than Sol. Etched with symbols that predate language.”

The hologram shifted, revealing Fragment AE-001—the Codex Aeternum. Jagged, obsidian, its surface crawled with glyphs that twisted under scrutiny. Jin’s breath hitched; for a moment, the glyphs coiled into a figure—a being of fire and shadow, wings spanning galaxies. Then it vanished.

“It is not scripture. Not poetry. It is a manual,” Veyra said. “A guide to halting the Collapse. But this—” She zoomed in on the fragment’s fractured edge. “—is 1/12th of the whole. The rest is scattered across time. And you,” she paused, eye blazing, “will retrieve them.”

A scoff cut through the silence. Rhea, her hair shaved into neon circuits, leaned back. “Time travel? Even if it’s possible, how do we find scraps in 40,000 years of noise?”

Veyra’s smirk was glacial. “The Codex wants to be found. It leaves… breadcrumbs.”

Her cybernetic eye flickered. Grainy holograms bloomed: a medieval knight gripping a stone etched with Codex glyphs. A Bronze Age priestess painting them in blood. A Paleolithic cave wall depicting a black slab falling from the stars.

“It’s a paradox,” Veyra said. “Older than humanity, yet woven into our DNA. And if our translations hold… the Collapse isn’t an accident. It’s a test. One we’ve failed. Again. And again.”

Jin’s tablet buzzed. A glyph—a jagged eye—burned into the screen. He glanced up, but Veyra was already at the podium, her voice dropping to a whisper.

“Forget your textbooks. Forget your gods. The truth? We are not the first. Just the first arrogant enough to think we’ll survive.”

As students filed out, Jin lingered. The glyph on his tablet pulsed. In his ear, a metallic voice hissed—not his implant, but something older, colder:

“Seek the First Sin. Only the guilty can absolve the damned.”

Outside, the city blazed, oblivious. Somewhere, a star died silently. And the Codex, patient and perpetual, waited.

Thus begins our story—written in the ink of dead stars, narrated by the echoes of what we dare not name. A story of angels who forgot their hymns, demons who remember their prayers, and the mortals foolish enough to bargain with both.

Turn the page, little godlings. But tread lightly.

The First Sin is watching.