The fall of the Arca Aurora: the wreck that split a fleet, and how Aurin remembers it

Dock seven at Puerto Aurora has been waiting for forty-six years. Thirty-one people built it on the moon Tirane in four months, with seven more docks, the lights and the cranes, and finished the day before the war broke out. The ark it was built for never arrived. The welcome container they left for its crew is still on the dock, and nobody has opened it.

The Arca Aurora was the heavy transport ark of the Flota Aura, the colony fleet that reached the Aurin system in Year 0 E.A. In Year 1 E.A., during the fighting in Ithera’s orbit, it took fire from both sides and crashed on Ithera. Whose shot was decisive has never been established. The furrow it left, La Cicatriz, is now the capital of the five Global Guilds, which its survivors founded; the pieces it shed in orbit lie in the Cementerio de Aura; and its sister ship, the Arca Custodia, still registers every recruit who arrives in the system. This guide follows the canon as the Codex records it, and points to the chapters of The Aurin Chronicle that tell it.

The Arca Aurora in facts

What it was	The Flota Aura’s heavy transport ark
Where it was going	Dock seven at Puerto Aurora, on Tirane, to hand its cargo to the descent modules
When it fell	Year 1 E.A., in the war that split the fleet
Where	Ithera, in what is now La Cicatriz
Who fired	Both sides; the decisive shot has never been attributed
What it left	La Cicatriz, the five Global Guilds, fragments in the Cementerio de Aura
Its sister ship	The Arca Custodia, built in the same shipyards on the same hull
What remains unanswered	Whose shot it was, and what is inside the container at dock seven

A port that was ready the day before

The descent plan was simple. The ark would moor at Tirane, hand its cargo to the descent modules and send it down to Ithera in batches. The thirty-one of Puerto Aurora had everything ready a day early. Then the fleet’s debate over how to colonise the new system turned into a war, and the port was left watching it from a moon. Once La Cicatriz had cooled enough to be seen from space, they had it in plain view every rotation: a dark streak across a disc almost three degrees wide. They were rescued in Year 3. Not one of them went back.

Fire from both sides

The war of Year 1 was fought by one crew split by a question: whether to remake the new world in their image or let it remake them. During the fighting in Ithera’s orbit, the Arca took fire from both sides. It was shedding pieces before it hit, and everything it lost in orbit ended up in the Cementerio de Aura, where fragments still turn up.

The rest did not come down in one piece. The ark broke open in the air and scattered its modules over several kilometres of Ithera, each one carrying survivors from both sides thrown together: civilians, technicians, scientists. Nobody aboard was Zenith or Nadir yet.

The Cuarenta Días de Fuego

With no command, no supplies and a war overhead that was never going to send a rescue, the survivors gathered wherever their trade was any use. The infirmary module treated the wounded without asking whose they were. The biologists of the containment bay held off the night attacks. The engineers stripped the ark itself to build shelter before the first night: Torvun Ekes, an apprentice welder then, still counts the first plate torn from the hull as the real Year 0 of The Forge. Military police from both fleets held a truce on the bridge, and expeditions left the navigation tower looking for water and rescue.

Those forty days, almost six weeks, are known as the Cuarenta Días de Fuego, and those five gathering points became the five Global Guilds. Eleven years later, the Ithera Armistice recognised them as neutral and demilitarised the planet.

What it left on the map

La Cicatriz is laid out in three rings. The core, out to 500 metres, is the bow, where the main reactor struck: still cordoned off, and patrolled by a sentinel, an auxiliary core nobody rescued, running a patrol order forty-six years old. The middle ring, between 1 and 1.5 km, holds the guild seats on recovered sections of the hull: El Vivero, El Faro Roto, El Aguijón, La Fragua Baja and El Bastión. The outer ring, between 2.5 and 3 km, is where the escape modules and lifepods came down; they are the oldest civilian settlements on the planet, built before the words Zenith and Nadir existed. Nobody enters La Cicatriz armed.

The fragments of the hull are Grade V material: nobody makes them, people find them, in the core of La Cicatriz or in the Cementerio. They do not all fit together, because the ark’s sections came from two different generations of the MMU. When a shipyard needs to know which pieces belong together, it sends for Quill Sarn of The Pathfinders. “I can tell you which belongs to which. I can’t make two wounds from the same disaster believe they’re on the same side.”

The question nobody answers

The Flota’s navigation cores shared a logbook. CUADRANTE, the Pathfinders’ compi, holds the last entry made by the Arca Aurora’s navigation core: a line of position, which says where the ark was and not who fired. The core that saw the time was the one in the ark’s own navigation tower, and it is still under La Cicatriz. Nobody in the system has put the pieces together, and neither house is in a hurry for anyone to try.

How Aurin remembers it

• The anniversary of the war. Both stations hold the same ceremony with opposite speeches. At heart they mourn the same loss.
• The day of the fall. At El Bastión, Colonel Reyna Ostrach of The Vanguard reads aloud the names on her wall every year, on the day the Arca fell, the day the Cuarenta Días de Fuego began.
• The walls. At El Aguijón, the names of fallen hunters are read to every recruit; at El Faro Roto, the Muro de los No Vueltos keeps the expeditions that never came back.
• The list. Archivist Doret keeps the register of those who walked out of the wreckage, and greets their grandchildren with one sentence: “Your surname is on the list of those who walked out of the wreckage. Not many people can say that. Don’t waste it.”

The fall in the Chronicle

The Aurin Chronicle, the novel of COLONIZED, dates the fall to day 236 of Year 1, and Book One reaches its 46th anniversary. These are the chapters where the ark and its anniversary weigh most, without spoilers:

Chapter	When and where	What it holds
Holding	Year 47, day 221 · Cementerio de Aura	A fragment of the ark, still holding pressure after 46 years
One Alive	Year 47, day 223 · La Cicatriz	The furrow the ark left, seen by someone who was aboard it
The Wall	Year 47, day 223 · El Bastión	The ark’s old bridge, and a wall of 412 names
Dock Seven	Year 47, day 227 · Tirane, Puerto Aurora	The dock the ark never reached, and its unopened container
Twelve Minutes	Year 1, day 236 · Arca Aurora	The day itself, from inside the ark
The Names	Year 47, day 236 · El Bastión	The reading of the names at the 46th anniversary

The novel adds characters and events of its own; the canon of the Arca Aurora stays in the Codex. Our spoiler-free guide to the Chronicle explains where to start.

In the game today

The Codex describes the universe of COLONIZED; it is not a list of features. In the current build you enlist aboard the Arca Custodia and choose the Zenith or the Nadir, a permanent choice, and you earn reputation with the five guilds the wreck gave rise to. What can be visited in each alpha wave will be listed in the alpha notes. The factions that came out of the war are in the Zenith and the Nadir, and the full entries are in the Codex: Arca Aurora, La Cicatriz, the war of Year 1 and Tirane.