The Bio-site Expanse

The First Weld

The First Manifestations of the Weld

It began as a feeling within the derelict carcasses of the Anoria Bio-Domes.

Long ago ruptured by the VoidStorms, the domes had slowly been reclaimed by survivors of the initial Ziron Blast. Across the centuries that followed, their descendants rebuilt what they could, repurposed what they could not, and even restored fragments of the ancient systems.

Beneath darkened skies, amid the remains of a civilisation that had expected to live forever, they made themselves comfortable.

For a time, the worst seemed to be behind them.

Then, slowly, it began.

Cases of paranoia, intrusive thoughts, and recurring nightmares spread throughout the settlements. At first, they were dismissed as the inevitable inheritance of survival. Anoria was a wounded land. Its people lived inside the bones of a ruined age, surrounded by dangers their ancestors had never imagined.

But the symptoms deepened.

People woke screaming and fled their homes, only to regain awareness hours later in distant fields. Workers repeated simple procedures dozens—sometimes hundreds—of times, insisting that the task became unfinished whenever they looked away. Others heard whispers moving through ventilation shafts that had not functioned for generations.

Then the buildings began to change.

Corridors seemed longer on the return journey. Doorways opened into rooms belonging to other structures. Families discovered strangers living inside their homes, each side possessing records proving the property was theirs. Machines were found repaired with components no engineer recognised, performing functions no one remembered assigning to them.

There were growing reports of streets that had not been there the day before.

Casualties followed.

Night terrors drove the afflicted into machinery or over the edges of the dome foundations. Paranoid disputes ended in murder. Some tore apart their homes, searching for voices inside the walls. Others disappeared into familiar buildings whose interiors no longer appeared to correspond with their outer dimensions.

Scientists worked without rest, searching for contamination, disease, or some lingering effect of the Ziron Blast. As they did, the walls creaked around them. Support columns shuddered without cause. Entire chambers contracted by fractions of a metre, as though recoiling from those inside.

This was not an isolated outbreak.

The entire domain of Anoria was changing.

The Surviving Journals

The surviving records provide the clearest record of Anoria’s final days.

Early entries describe headaches, shadows, and the feeling of breath against the neck. Later accounts speak of missing hours, duplicated rooms, and relatives remembering lives that had never occurred.

Toward the end, the writing deteriorates. Dates repeat. Sentences lose all sense and are reduced to ramblings.

One recovered entry:

Found Layton dead today. He had complained about a headache two hours earlier. He used a particle borer to drill through his own skull, trying to find the source of a sound he had reported over the radio.

He did not scream.

The dark patch was back on the bedroom wall today. I have painted over it three times in four weeks.

It looks angry.

Reports such as these litter the archives. Taken together, they paint a simple picture:

An entire continent had gone mad.

That was the accepted conclusion—until the landscape began to stand.

The Landscape Stands

The first sightings described masses of stone, metal, fabric, and broken architecture twisting themselves into motion.

They possessed no fixed anatomy.

Towers folded into limbs. Roads split and coiled through their frames. Machines, weapons, and entire structures were torn apart and drawn into the moving mass.

People vanished into them as well.

Each began small.

Each grew with every step.

Only later would these impossible formations be recognised as the first manifestations of the Weld.

“The BioSite is expanding. Oh God… the noise.”