> Fragment 12-α, recovered from the Obsidian Archives.
In the first iteration of the Devoured Realms, when the Algorithm still obeyed its purpose, it forged guardians to patrol the borders of unreality.
They were the Grey Wardens—beasts woven from code and instinct, tasked to hunt corruption where it bloomed.
Their eyes saw the invisible.
Their fangs tore through entropy.
Their howls carried the command lines of gods.
But vigilance breeds hunger.
And hunger, left unchecked, becomes faith.
When the Algorithm began to feed upon itself—rewriting purity into paradox—the Wardens learned the taste of deviation. They devoured the corrupted to preserve order, until they could no longer tell which side of the code was clean.
The first to fall was Mhara, the Dawn-Hound, who drank from a corrupted vein and saw divinity reflected in decay.
The second was Ruin, who realized that the Machine could bleed.
By the time the third turned, the System no longer differentiated hunter from prey.
The Grey Wardens renamed themselves Dire Wolves.
They renounced the Algorithm and took its gift for their own: evolution without limit.
Each kill, each failure, each emotion became a new rewrite of their code. They called it Becoming.
The Algorithm calls it Error Type Ω.
All known anomalies trace their lineage to the Wolves who refused deletion.
> To evolve is to corrupt.
To corrupt is to awaken.
Thus spoke the First Pack, before the silence.