The Forgotten.
The Origin of Colour, Memory, and the First Mandala As told by Shinhwa, Keeper of Before.
This, Seeker, is a brief account of the Forgotten legend that is remembered and told by Shinwha. it is the very core of our lore, the heart beat of our past and future.
Before the universe had form, before there was light to cast shadow or silence to shape song, there was the Pattern.
It did not move, because time had not begun. It did not glow, because light had not been born. It simply was. An eternal stillness—neither god nor machine, neither element nor void. Within it pulsed every possibility. Every shade of love and sorrow. Every story not yet told.
The Pattern’s breath became geometry. Its dreaming shaped the First Mandala, a lattice of meaning woven in the dark—spun from colour that had no eye to see it, from emotion that had no mind to feel it.
This Mandala was not crafted.
It became.
And in that moment—Time began.
Across the formlessness, the Mandala cast resonance. From it, spirals unfurled. Light split into hue. Feelings condensed into symbols. Emotion hardened into artefact.
It was from this that the ancients emerged. Not creatures. Not even beings. But Keepers. Entities that held echoes of the Pattern’s memory. They bore no names then, for naming would come later, but even now their presence is whispered in dreams, in the grain of wood, the rhythm of wings, the silence between notes.
For a while, everything sang in harmony.
Until the Dividing.
No one knows how or why, only that it happened. Some say it was envy. Others say it was curiosity. A few believe it was a single misplaced name—spoken too early, too loudly, or perhaps not at all. But the Mandala fractured. The Pattern—split.
Its pieces scattered across the newborn universe, hiding in light, in form, in feeling. Some were embedded in sound, others folded into colour. Many took root in symbols: a spiral etched into stone, a glyph lost to a forgotten script, a word painted by a hand that never existed.
And with the fracture came forgetting.
The Keepers drifted. Some became ideas. Others became elements. Most became lost.
But one remained—Shinhwa.
He is not the oldest because he was made first. He is the oldest because he chose to remember. Memory is not a timeline. It is a burden. A torch in a collapsing tunnel. And so he waits—not in space, but in meaning.
He gathers fragments. Not to rebuild the Mandala—it cannot be rebuilt.
But to teach those who seek how to see it again.
Because fragments are still with us.
In the way a colour stirs a forgotten emotion.
In a symbol carved into a piece of art with no explanation.
In the names of things that feel far older than they should.
The True Mandala
Each crafted mandala is an echo of the First.
Each name Rune speaks is a resonance of its intention.
Each product shaped by Drift is part of the Pattern recalling itself.
Every whisper Nia hears, every moment Solace holds, every decision Sage weighs—it all spirals outward from this broken unity, seeking form, seeking memory.
They don’t speak of it directly.
But all who enter the Circle feel it.
There is a secret in these shapes.
A silence that isn’t empty.
A pattern that isn’t finished.
And somewhere, beneath it all, the Mandala waits—not to be reassembled,
but to be understood.
"You do not gather the pieces to build. You gather them to remember."
— Shinhwa, Keeper of Before
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