Albrecht Entrati and the Void

The existence of the wall

For a long time the Void was, to the Orokin, less a place than a hypothesis. A nothingness that obeyed none of normal space’s rules and appeared only at the edge of measurement… Albrecht Entrati believed that nothingness was not empty.

To his mind, the road to the stars might run not through space but through the wall between realities. If the Void could be proved and controlled, Tau was no longer out of reach.

As the years passed, the rest of the Orokin lost interest in the research. To the elite of the Golden Age, a theory that produced no results was simply a failure. Albrecht was left with two choices: abandon the work, or step into the experiment himself.

NARRATIVE — An empire wanted new worlds. Albrecht would give it a door. Nobody had yet asked what waited on the other side.

The Seriglass Bell

Albrecht placed himself inside a transparent vessel called the Seriglass Bell, which he believed would shield him from the Void’s effects. When the apparatus in his laboratory opened the boundary later known as the Wall of Lohk, space and time rippled like a surface.

The crossing was not clean.

The moment the Bell touched the edge of the portal it split in two. As the Seriglass shattered, Albrecht fell unprotected into the Void. He felt his thoughts and his memories being drawn out of him. Then he woke in an impossible place that resembled his own laboratory, ringed with white light and black stars.

Standing before him was himself.

“Little Bengel”

This copy did not merely wear Albrecht’s face. It addressed him by the childhood name his mother had used centuries earlier, one nobody should have known: Little Bengel.

In that moment Albrecht felt something stronger than the wonder of discovery: the urge to run.

When he returned to his own laboratory, his body was torn by broken glass and his voice and sight were badly damaged. Unable to speak, he cut his hand and wrote in his own blood, telling his daughter to close the portal. Euleria stopped the apparatus. The closing boundary severed one or more fingers from the being reaching through from the other side.

CANON NOTE — The being Albrecht met would later be called the Man in the Wall and The Indifference. This chapter does not explain its nature; it records only the first confirmed encounter.

The fingers left behind by the Void

The Orokin feared this event as much as they wanted to profit from it. The severed pieces were studied, copied and placed at the heart of the technologies that made Void travel possible. The Reliquary Drive systems aboard the Railjacks and the Zariman carry the legacy of that discovery.

Albrecht had proved the Void. The energy that might open the road to Tau was no longer mere theory.

For him, though, the experiment was never finished. He could not be sure whether the man who came back from the Void was himself or the other one imitating him. That fear made him decide never again to use Continuity, the Orokin ritual of moving between bodies.

Discovery or violation?

Albrecht’s work was one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in the history of the Origin System. At the same time it opened the first plain door between humanity and The Indifference.

The Orokin drew a single lesson from the event: the Void could be used.

Albrecht’s lesson was far darker: the Void could look back.

What did we learn in this chapter?

Albrecht Entrati proved the Void as an energy source and as a gateway between stars. The first experiment led to contact with The Indifference and to the birth of Reliquary Drive technology. Tau now looked reachable — but the road itself had noticed humanity.

Next chapter: the grand design on which the Orokin staked their entire future, the Tau Colonisation Project.