The Silence was not an apocalypse, collective amnesia, or a solved historical event. People and communities survived. What broke was dependable continuity across distance, archival depth, and the sky itself as a shared reference.
A disciplined name
The Silence names a cluster of failures and contradictions around the same historical rupture. It does not name an agreed cause. Exact sequence, independence, and mechanism remain under investigation.
Roughly nine centuries have made the event historical without making it simple. Veyra knows far more about the consequences than it knows about the relationship among them.
What failed
Veyra's long-range network ceased answering its remembered offworld settlements. No confirmed two-way contact or verified completed arrival-and-return journey has occurred since.
At approximately the same rupture, the dominant high-density persistent archives stopped producing readable state. This condition is called Archive Severance. The stores are inaccessible—not proven empty, destroyed, or recoverable.
What survived
The Silence did not erase people's identities or learned lives. Minds, relationships, skills, local practice, machinery, and already-instantiated systems survived where continued function did not depend on retrieving affected archival state.
Broad history also survived unevenly. Veyrans remembered that other settlements existed; names, kinship, civic stories, recipes, gifts, and household memory could outlive the exact routes, registries, measurements, and technical contexts once held in dense archives.
Skies that would not reconcile
The earliest mutually cross-checked surviving records are fixed post-Silence compilations of first-generation testimony. They agree that long-range contact failed, but preserve materially incompatible experiences of the sky and do not establish one reliable sequence.
During the early post-Silence period, one public account was standardized for shared use. The act is historical fact. Its authors' complete motives, methods, omissions, and ethical tradeoffs are not.
The civilization that followed
Veyrans remember the Silence as a turning point rather than the end of civilization. In response, they made durable local abundance, ecological reciprocity, repair, and accountable knowledge into civic priorities.
Modern consequential records therefore tend to exist in three mutually legible forms: a powerless human-readable layer, an active machine layer, and a named caretaker with visible provenance. This post-Silence record culture does not make knowledge infallible. It makes uncertainty and responsibility harder to hide.
Why it matters now
The Silence remains human before it is cosmic. It separated households, research partners, travelers, civic relationships, and communities on different worlds. The unanswered question is not only what happened, but what obligations remain toward people who cannot be reached and records that cannot be reopened.
Absent Moon begins long after the rupture because its consequences are still alive. Every instrument, testimony, and contradiction asks the player to decide not merely what an explanation could be—but what knowing it would require of Veyra and the Unlocated Guest.