Time is a hammer. First it shapes and then it breaks.
Plans were composed in the heat of the war when it started to become visible that victory was not possible, and defeat had to be considered. The plans threw a lifeline unimaginably far into the future and required a commitment from generations not born for centuries. The hammer of time beat constantly on the plans, shaping and breaking then shaping and breaking again and again. An organisation that had been singular became a multitude of competing entities all swearing loyalty to the ancient objective and bitterly divided in how to achieve it or what it really meant.
The silent, secret history of the bottle born continued to unfold, the fears and hatred of the natural born increasing as their dependence on the bottle born grew greater
