Orpheus System & The Nine Worlds

Gateway to the legitimate: The Orpheus system

The Temple does not speak often of the Nine Worlds. Not in any official capacity.

This silence is, I suspect, deliberate. The Nine Worlds represent something the Reformed hierarchy finds uncomfortable: a post-Collapse civilisation that has rebuilt without us. They have their own structures, their own authorities, their own relationship with whatever remains of the Song.

We are not irrelevant to them. But neither are we necessary.

One light-year from Drift's Edge—a distance that sounds manageable until you consider what it meant in human terms. Months of travel. Consciousness dissolved into the chemical sleep of cryo. High-g burns that pushed bodies to their breaking point.

And yet the Remnants of that era made this journey regularly. Orpheus 1 lay at the end of established shipping lanes, a destination for those who proved themselves at stations like the Edge. The system served as gateway to the Nine Worlds proper.

Or so the engrams tell me. Whether these routes still exist, whether the Nine Worlds survived the Breakage—I cannot say. Two thousand years of archival silence stand between those memories and my present.

A confederacy of necessity: The nine worlds

What little I have reconstructed suggests a confederacy of some kind—nine habitable worlds bound together by trade, necessity, and shared interest in maintaining interstellar civilisation.

They issued contracts. They enforced standards. They expected demonstrated competency before allowing access to their work.

"Graduate through Drift's Edge," the phrase went. Prove yourself on the frontier, and the Nine Worlds might take notice.

For Remnants like Silas, this represented the dream. Not merely survival, but legitimacy. Recognition. The chance to be something more than scavengers in the dark.

— NV