Celestial Lore and Lexicon | Wraithstars Wiki

Mythos, cosmology, and the philosophy behind the pulse.

I. Origin of the Lexicon

I was a quiet kid. Not shy exactly. More like someone who had already done the math on social interaction and found the returns insufficient. I turned inward early, and what I found there was stories. Poems. Films. TV shows. Anything with a universe I could live inside for a while.

Stars were different though. Stars weren't escapism. They were the thing that made the world feel correctly sized: vast enough that my own silence didn't seem like a problem, just a small weather pattern in something much larger. I read about them obsessively. I learned the science. I learned the names and the distances and the lifecycles. At some point I started a Tumblr blog and wrote about astronomy plainly and directly, for anyone who wanted to read it.

But there was another layer I never posted.

Before the science, I had quietly built a private language, a way of describing things using stars as the framework. Like a lens I mixed with metaphors. A vocabulary for forces and relationships and patterns that I couldn't find adequate words for anywhere else. Voids. Signals. Orbits. Furnaces. Remnants. The words existed in astronomy already, but I was using them to mean something additional, personal.

I tried, in subtle ways, to bring people into it. Through conversation I would slipping a metaphor in, leaving a thread available to pull. The most common reaction was confusion. The second most common was being treated like I was strange. So the language stayed where it had always been: internal. Quietly accepted as something that belonged to me alone. The lexicon required going somewhere else, and most people didn't want to go there.

I made my first online multiplayer account under the name Wraithstars. I used that name everywhere after. The astronomy knowledge and the private language had always run in parallel — one I shared, one I kept. That stayed true for years.

Then I went through a relationship that ended. It was the kind of experience that teaches you a great deal about yourself and perhaps even more about other people --- how they're built, what they're actually made of, how many of them are content to stay at the surface their whole lives. When it ended, I understood something I had always suspected but never quite accepted: most people really are surface-level. That isn't a criticism, so please don't be weird and take it personally - I don't know you. It's just a fact about how people move through the world.

But it also meant the lexicon wasn't a problem waiting to be solved. I didn't need to find the right person who could finally understand it. It was mine. It had always been mine. And I could let people into it without needing them to fully meet me there.

So that's what the lore on this website and the celsetial imagery in the narrative podcast is. The first time THE astronomy and THE language have existed in the same place. Not because I found an audience that deserves it, but because I stopped waiting for permission to stop hiding it.

The sky I've been describing to myself for years is the same one you can find stronger hints of now.