The Entrati

Before the solar rails, before the Zariman, before the empire had anything but theory about the space beneath space, one family went and looked. The Entrati were an elite scholar house of the Orokin: Albrecht Entrati, the first human to breach the Void, his daughter Euleria, and the generations raised inside the family business, which was the impossible.

Nearly every Void-touched thing in this archive routes through their estate. The drives that carried the Zariman. The Requiem words. The applied craft of the Helminth. The Heart of Deimos, the buried engine that feeds Void power to the entire system and to every Tenno in it. The Orokin owned the Void's roads. The Entrati held the deed, and paid for it in ways the empire never asked about.

Their seat is the Necralisk, a research enclave sunk into the moon Deimos. When Old War weapons loosed the Infestation across that moon, the family hid Deimos inside the Void entire, and there they waited: out of the record, past the fall of the empire, until their own failing engine forced them back into the sky over Mars.

Albrecht Entrati declined the empire's appetites: the fashionable elongations, the sculpted vanities. What he wanted was not more life but more answer. He built a bell of seriglass and took it down through the boundary his notes call the Wall of Lohk: the first human crossing into the Void.

Something was waiting. It wore his own face, with a depth no mirror has, and it greeted him as Little Bengel: his mother's name for him, which nothing on the far side of reality should have known. Albrecht fled. Euleria sealed the gate behind him, and the sealing severed the visitor's fingers. On those fingers the Orokin built an age: the Reliquary Drives, the Railjacks, the engine that carried the Zariman Ten Zero toward Tau. The empire called it progress. The thing in the Void calls it theft, and has kept the account open ever since. Its record is held under the Indifference entry.

His research into the Void yielded eight words of its own tongue: Lohk, Xata, Jahu, Vome, Ris, Fass, Netra, Khra. The Requiem, words with the authority to end what Kuva refuses to let die. And he refused Continuity for the rest of his long life, for a reason his own writings preserve: he could not be certain the man who walked out of the Void was the man who walked in. The record cannot be certain either. It says so, and keeps the question where it can watch it. Over the sealed gate he raised the Heart of Deimos: the wellspring that pumps Void power out to the whole system, and beneath every act of Tenno Transference since.

The family that met the modern era is not quite human anymore, and knows it. The wound was domestic. The Son, starved for his parents' regard, bred Infested beasts and breached his own containment to be noticed. The spores took everyone. The Entrati endure as half-Infested, personality intact, grudges thoroughly intact, and their names dissolved into the hivemind. In that house a name can come back only one way: as a gift, one member bestowing a new name upon another. For a long time, no one was on speaking terms enough to give one.

The record keeps them by their offices. Mother: born Euleria Entrati, the daughter who sealed the gate, custodian of the Heart, who hid the family through the whole of the New War to keep the Heart safe. Father: engineer, restorer of the Necramechs, the house's war machines that fought the Sentients before the Warframes existed. Daughter: biologist of the waters. Son: keeper of beasts, and seller of the Helminth Segment, which makes this family the gatekeepers of everything the system may do with the strain that makes Warframes. Grandmother: the Father's mother, fully Infested, flowering in her pod, the house's mediator. She had a name once and gave it away whole, to a faceless Warframe with nothing of its own: "When you ride away, you shall be Dagath. And I shall be only Grandmother." Below them all, two glass servants: Cephalon Loid, written from the skull of a man the family believed dead, and Otak, an Archimedian crystallographer cracked by Deimos and carried, half-merged, inside Loid's shell. Deimos damages everything. Loid made room anyway.

The Heart forced the issue in the end. Failing, it dragged Deimos out of hiding and back into the sky over Mars, under the twin wyrms named for two of Albrecht's words: Vome and Fass, order and chaos, killing one another over the Cambion Drift in an endless turn. Then a rogue Necramech, its maker unnamed in any source, broke the Heart outright. The archive holds that gap honestly. What is attested: Tenno powers failed system-wide, the Tenno helped the family restore both the engine and, gift by gift, the names, and the family adopted the helper. At the Entrati table, the Tenno is called Ayatan.

Beneath the Necralisk, deeper than the family goes, Albrecht's own laboratories kept working for centuries after the man was gone. When the archive speaks of the Sanctum Anatomica, it speaks of what those laboratories held.

They held the Cavia: the animal subjects Albrecht sent into the Void in his place. Most died. The Void, his notes insist, responds to uniqueness, and the unique came back alive, intelligent, and talking. They threw away their disposal tags and named themselves: Fibonacci, Bird 3, Tagfer. They call the man who sent them into the dark Papa, which tells you something about the Void, or about fathers, or about both. The laboratories held the Vessels: titanic frame-analogues grown from Deimos's Grey Strain at Loid's suggestion, shaped with anatomy lifted from Ballas's records and a mind-template carried out of another century entirely. And they held the deepest provision of the Kalymos Sequence, the layered working Albrecht filed under his kavat's name, whose warding stage is kept under the Hex entry. A sleeper in cryostasis. Loid. Not the glass copy in the backroom: the man himself, Albrecht's attendant and his lover, who nursed him back from the Void, destroyed the time device on his order, and lay down in the dark to wait. The family had mourned a man who was never dead, and been comforted for centuries by his replica.

The last page of the story is the one this archive re-reads. Albrecht's grimoire, relayed across time by the Cavia, ends in an open declaration of love for the man he left behind, and the Indifference, arriving in strength, recoiled from it. Of everything the Entrati ever brought back from the Void, this finding ranks first: the entity has exactly one attested weakness, and it is love. Loid has since gone upstairs and let the family see his face. Joy is attested. So is a shared bitterness toward the man who abandoned them all. So is Loid's answer to the question no one quite asked: he served out of love. Never duty.

Albrecht did not run from the Indifference through space. He ran through time: to Höllvania, in the year 1999, the Plague Year, deliberately drawing the entity's gaze away from Loid and ordering the road burned behind him. There he practiced as a doctor under borrowed names, and to volunteers sick with the Techrot plague he offered a very old medicine. Helminth. The result was the Hex: protoframes, human beings carrying a Warframe's gifts with their own minds still in their heads. His notes do not expect the humanity to last. Their record is held under the Hex entry.

The Indifference followed him even there, wearing a stolen major. What the year cost is told whole in the Hex's own record. What belongs here is the accounting of Albrecht: in the timeline that failed, he shot one of his own protoframes dead while the others burned, and when the Drifter refused to abandon them and come with him to Tau, he shot the Drifter too, and the year reset into the stable loop that holds Höllvania to this day. Then he left. The archive notes, without further comment, that this is the same man the Cavia call Papa.

The Old Peace closes the known trail. Albrecht Entrati has reached the Tau System: beyond the Tenno's reach, beyond the Hex's, and, for the present, beyond the Indifference's. What he intends there is not attested anywhere in the released record, and the archive declines to furnish him with motives. The family he made and abandoned keeps his Heart beating without him. The record remains open, the way a door does.