Forward
We are the inheritors of shadows.
What you now hold is no simple book, nor even a book of books. It is an archive of echoes: the voices of explorers, martyrs, historians, poets, AIs, and dreamers—layered across centuries, each speaking over and through the other, each believing they were the final word.
The Quaternary Texts are the last great attempt to gather the fragments of humanity's long journey outward: from the grey dust of Luna to the oceans of Eridanus, and beyond into realms only half-remembered. Herein you will find the earliest field logs of Lunar Base Alpha, the first theological commentaries from the Eridan colonists, and the heretical interpolations of the Scribe-AIs before their disappearance.
Truth, in these pages, is not singular. It is a palimpsest—rewritten, redacted, reframed with each passing century. A prayer uttered in 2036 becomes, by 4428, a prophecy. A simple act of survival is canonized into liturgy. Facts erode. Myths harden. Meaning blooms and decays in tandem.
The final editors of this edition have chosen to preserve the contradictions, the silences, the broken chains of commentary. To do otherwise would betray the very spirit of these texts: that history is not a line but a labyrinth, a living thing that cannot be caged.
We invite you, reader, not to seek certainty here. Seek instead communion—with the living and the dead, with what was dreamt and what was lost.
Seek the song beneath the static.