What Was the Blaze in Baroque?
The Blaze is the end of the world in Baroque, dated precisely: 14 May 2032. Before it, a religious research order, the Order of Malkuth, discovered that the Absolute God had returned to Earth, and with it the Consciousness Orbs, enormous sensory spheres God used to compress and hold reality. The Order did what researchers do. It experimented.
The experiments distorted the world a little at a time, and people began to twist into Meta-Beings, humans deformed by the delusions they cling to. The Archangel, the Order's leader, tried to manage the damage in secret: he built false orbs that made things worse, and then he removed pain itself from God, harvesting it as a crop of small beings, the Littles, to be fired as bullets of purification from a weapon called the Angelic Rifle.
A breakaway group inside the Order, the Koriel, chose the direct route: fuse a human with God and hear its will. The Archangel learned of the rite and interrupted it mid-fusion. That interruption is the Blaze. The boy chosen for the fusion survived it mute, his conjoined twin dead, his memory gone, holding a power he did not ask for: the ability to purify. The game is his sentence and his errand, to walk down the Neuro Tower, grown over the site of the rite, and reach the god waiting at the bottom.
