The Threaded… a difficult beast to describe.

Born of authoritarian rule and rebellion at once, the Threaded are an unfortunate side-effect of the Null, like many of the plagues that arose anew in the midst of the Tide and perhaps the most horrifying of them. Though there exist Threaded that lead still a fulfilling life, or at least one not defined by persistent torture like their animalistic counterparts, most are relegated to nigh-mindlessness. There is not even a hunting instinct, a desire to consume and survive, and as far as anyone can tell the Threaded have all but surpassed the need for ‘consuming’ and ‘surviving’, left only to wander the wastes of their civilization and struggle to hold onto any fleeting thought, any spark of the intelligence they once had.

And grand wastes are they—sprawling cities to rival those metropolises of the Vigil, clamoring towards the sky and sprawling for hundreds of miles around. The Threaded, aimless and docile, toddle through the halls and homes of their prior life, like observers disengaged from this universe. They pay no mind to the presence of others around them, not even if things that once belonged to them are ransacked; they have long since lost the capacity to feel anger, need, want, anything at all besides a faint wistfulness, an empty curiosity that their hollow minds desperately cling to. All they care to do is inspect their surroundings, committing them to a memory that vanishes as soon as it forms, sentencing many of them to spend who knows how long inspecting and reinspecting the same things over and over.

They are scars in space, they are wounds in reality, they are mistakes, although some good can come from even the most grave of mistakes at times.

The event that spawned them was at least successful in damaging the Null, perhaps enough to have slowed it down and given many people a chance to survive that they would not have otherwise had. Together they were bound under the countenance of the Empire of the Thread, minds psionic and non joined into a network, the only way they could think to form a truly efficient interstellar communications network. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the elite heading the Empire’s communications arm were able to use this to help keep tabs on the populace for their prying oligarchs.

When the Null arrived, and when its powerful intelligence brushed against this network, it received in full, unwavering force the unfiltered fury of trillions of intellects. Its presence accidentally triggered a fault in the network, one that provoked a visceral and unavoidable reaction before anyone could recognize what happened; all at once, the psionic energy sapped from every living thing in the Empire. Their consciousnesses formed into ‘clots’ in the psionic highways between minds, torn away by the force of the reaction from their physical brains and seemingly preserved in a way not previously understood to be possible through psionic energy alone. In fact, the anomalous burst of energy was so unthinkably powerful that it tore the fabric of space asunder.

All were left deformed, poorly anchored to this universe under the weight of spatial anomalies, and treading lands now devoid of intelligent life bound to decay slowly around them. They express no suffering, but the remaining intelligent Threaded still feel pain and suffering and are often wracked by such due to their state, and so it seems likely they feel similar things. The lands they stagger through are disorienting and warped, as space desperately tries to stitch itself back together after the sundering weight of trillions of psionic minds crying out.

Threaded territory is empty, now, for the most part. There are many ruins there, many secrets to unearth, but none worth the dangers of subjecting oneself to constant spatial anomalies. Plus, it bears mention that the network that binds all Threaded together remains still, bridges between empty minds, crossed only by strange sourceless whispers and the occasional message that manages to escape the ‘clots’.

Some, for whatever reason, are ‘lucky’ to remain intelligent. Different from all things that exist in this world, the Threaded whose intelligences survived are much like their peers tethered tenuously to this dimension and possessed of a cosmic force that propels them ever onward without food, water or rest. A fragile state of being; though without age, without physical needs, it would seem eternal, it is common for Threaded to be paranoid that their cosmic luck will run out someday and the mistake that their existence represents will finally be brutally corrected by the universe.

Questions about the Threaded remain unanswered. Their brains are practically without function in this state, as with many of their other organs; from whence their consciousness originates is not well understood. It seems like many of the basic functions of their body are frozen in time, buffering, and it is only a matter of time before the universe catches up to its mistake and they either return to form entirely or vanish just as thoroughly.

Until they are corrected, though, those who remain intelligent among the Threaded have generally resolved to exploit the borrowed time they’ve been given. It’s best they tread lightly in that, however—unlike most intelligences, there are no means by which to transcend or return from death. With no understanding of how their brain or consciousness works, and the fact that their body seems to completely wink out of existence at the moment of death, a Threaded’s death is completely irrevocable.