Chapter Text
The Truth of the Old Ones part I: The Undoing
The Old Ones were, until now, lost to time. Their great cities and civilisations felled by an unknown cause. But now, thanks to yours truly meeting with the last survivors of the Old Ones, the people who call themselves the Alphas, the truth is told in full. As was believed by ourselves and our allies in the Banuk tribe, the Old Ones undoing was their hubris. An Old One and possibly another survivor, unknown at time of writing, Ted Faro created the Shadows, the army that the Carja in Shadow tried to use to raze our great city of Meridian. This army he called the Swarm and he and his company (a kind of tribe) sold them to the highest bidder. However, the great beasts, the Corruptors, the Deathbringers and their Metal Devils went rogue and wiped out the Old Ones. However, their tale did not truly end.
A group of Old Ones, led by a great leader, the mother the Shadow’s Slayer and the great Champion Aloy, created a “Spirit” called GAIA and a host of others to combat the plague, restore life and repopulate the world with us. We are the descendants of the Old Ones. However, one of these others was the Buried Shadow himself, HADES was his name and his job was to undo GAIA’s work if she messed up. However he and his brethren broke free, causing the derangement the machines (we still don’t know why more and more dangerous ones are turning up, even the Old Ones have no clue what’s going) and the birth of Aloy herself. The machines were actually part of the process of GAIA herself. We have been, for centuries, hunting the only things keeping us alive; how ironic?
While GAIA is gone, her two most loyal brethren stayed with her; their names are MINERVA and ELUTHIA. MINERVA created our great spire to send the Shadow Army, aka the Faro Plague, to sleep while ELUTHIA was responsible for our earliest ancestors’ birth and cultivation. Now, Aloy and her family are searching for the other brethren of these three protectors of us. We must not let the Old Ones sacrifice for our own existence be forgotten; we must make life, not death. We must make life better for those who come after us.