On the Manufacturing of Cause After Responsibility Became Unbearable
History was less an account of events than a series of commands issued to the future. In the years following the terminal implementation of the Arithmetic, the Imperium recognized that while stability had been achieved, the moral weight of that stability remained a volatile substance. To leave the decision-making process naked in the archives was to invite a slow, corrosive questioning that no amount of Luminaris logic could fully suppress. Thus, the first public account of the crisis appeared not as a confession, but as a clarification. It arrived bound in neutral grey vellum, circulated to academies and administrative schools under a title so bloodless it almost achieved a kind of mercy: On the Peripheral Catastrophe and the Restoration of Order.
The document provided the world with a face for its suffering. It did not point to the system, the underlying doctrine, or the cold requirements of the Arithmetic. Instead, it pointed to them.
The sect at the center of the narrative was granted various identities, each calibrated for a specific audience. In the crystalline halls of the capital, they were referred to as the Peripheral Convocation, presented as an academic deviation that had tragically exceeded its mandate. Within the Flame-aligned territories, they were rebranded as the Blasphemers of the Quiet, heretics whose hubris had led them to invoke forces beyond the sanctioned rites. In the outer provinces, the name was far more visceral: The Ones Who Broke the World. The choice of target was a masterstroke of administrative precision. The group was small enough to be erased, strange enough to be feared, and, following their disappearance, obscure enough that no living voice could emerge from the Deep Review to contradict the official record.
The resulting chronicle offered a sequence of events that was surgically clean. A deviant sect conducted an unsanctioned ritual; a metaphysical breach occurred; the Imperium enacted emergency stabilization; order was restored. This chronology contained no mention of the Resonance Tax or the specific ratios of the Sigma Directive. It omitted the enumeration of populations designated as absorptive and stripped away the language describing how the choices of containment had been weighted. The Arithmetic of Sacrifice was not explicitly denied; it was simply excluded from the light. The Imperial response was framed as a reflexive necessity—an act of cauterization performed upon a wound it had not asked for. The chronicle focused entirely upon the precision of the cauterization, omitting the reality that entire limbs had been consigned to the fire to save the heart.
The Flame institutions received this narrative with a palpable sense of relief, for it restored a moral geometry that the Arithmetic had threatened to flatten. The sect's failure was declared a False Invocation, a cautionary tale of what occurs when humanity reaches beyond its ordained station. The deaths that followed were folded back into the familiar comfort of religious trial: they were the price of purification, a burden borne by the faithful so the world might endure. Public rites were amended to reflect this new reality. In the Ether-rich regions, memorials were raised to the Guardians of Continuity, while in the Sigma'd zones, the liturgy reframed death as a necessary unmaking—a dissolution into the greater structure. The Flame did not lie; it merely selected which parts of the truth were holy enough to be remembered.
Within the Luminaris circles, the chronicle triggered no formal debate, as the data technically supported the chain of causality. The sect had indeed initiated the breach. What disturbed the junior archivists was the systematic reclassification of the alternatives. The appendices detailing different models of evacuation and the records of the Council's internal friction were not destroyed—the Luminaris were too obsessed with preservation for such crude measures—but they were severed from the public indices. Citations were removed; cross-references were broken. The archive did not forget the cost of the crisis; it simply learned the art of discretion.
Outside the capital, however, memory behaved with a different, more stubborn logic. In the districts that had been designated as Absorption Zone Theta-9, the chronicle was received in a heavy, pregnant silence. The survivors recognized the names of the sect and acknowledged the failure of the ritual. They remembered the match that had been struck. But they also remembered the days that followed with a clarity that no vellum could erase. They remembered the evacuation orders that never arrived and the supply lines that were rerouted away from their gates. They remembered the exact moment they realized the Imperium was not coming—not because of a lack of capacity, but because of a presence of choice.
The brilliance of the narrative lay in its function as a pressure valve. By assigning the blame outward, the Imperium relieved the internal tension of its own ruling class without reopening the wounds of deliberation. The sect became a scapegoat large enough to absorb the collective moral outrage of the continent, yet small enough to be safely annihilated in the public imagination. Sentences were passed upon the dead, and the act of judgment restored a much-needed illusion of agency to the throne. Someone had been punished; therefore, the world was just. Meanwhile, the Arithmetic remained untouched, a silent engine humming beneath the floorboards of civilization.
It was in this gap between the official record and the lived experience that the most enduring animosities took root. The Ferronas enclaves did not hate the Imperium merely for the loss of their kin, but because the chronicle proved the system would rather rewrite causality itself than confront its own design. To them, the narrative was a confirmation that their lives existed only as neutral metadata. The Erothen tribes, who had watched valleys sealed off to protect the Resonance-nodes, remembered how swiftly the center's concern had narrowed. Even Arvendral, as the inheritor of the center's machinery, carried the quiet burden of knowing how the story had been constructed.
Within a decade, the narrative had solidified into a natural fact. Children learned of the crisis as a cautionary tale of deviance, and scholars cited it as evidence of the Imperium's resilience. The Arithmetic vanished from the public vocabulary, replaced by a simpler, more potent lesson: the Imperium saves the world, while others endanger it. Blame had acted as a powerful solvent, neutralizing the guilt of the administrators and allowing the structure to persist unchanged.
Yet, as the archives grew and the vellum aged, a residue remained. Unspoken and unprocessed, the memory of what had truly occurred settled into the soil of the continent like a slow-acting poison. It hardened into a collective suspicion—a growing certainty among the Silent that the center's version of the truth was no longer meant for those who had paid its price. The Imperium had successfully found a cause for its tragedy, but in doing so, it had ensured that the world would eventually demand a consequence.