◍ 01 — origin
In 1987, a mining collapse in the Ural foothills exposed a seam of tissue that wasn't rock, wasn't dead, and — by every test since run on it — isn't finished. The working name is Marrow. Anyone who makes sustained contact with it changes. Nobody has ever agreed on why, or into what.
Marrow does not behave like contagion. It requires direct, sustained exposure — bloodstream contact, deep wound, ingestion, or prolonged skin contact. It is not airborne. This has not stopped three generations of staff from washing their hands twice.
The leading internal theory: Marrow isn't a single organism. It's sediment — compressed genetic material from an extinction event so old that "species" isn't a meaningful word for what's layered inside it. Exposure doesn't graft on a random trait so much as offer the host a piece of something the Marrow remembers being, and let the body decide how much of it to keep.
◍ 02 — the institute
Publicly, the Cold Loam Directorate is a geological research consortium. Internally, it's the apparatus that contains, studies, classifies, and — when it's useful — deploys Marrow-touched subjects, referred to institutionally as Grafts.
Custodial Division
Security and field retrieval. Handles feral or unregistered Grafts. The division everyone is glad exists and nobody wants to talk to at a party.
Genesis Wing
R&D. Studies Marrow directly. The most morally compromised department in the building, and it knows it.
Pastoral Division
The friendly face. "Rehabilitates" cooperative Grafts into productive assets and manages the outward story that the Institute helps people.
The Silent Office
Internal affairs and memory management. If you know too much and you're inconvenient, this is who decides what happens to that knowledge — and sometimes to you.
◍ 03 — the premise
You play a new hire, or a new resident, at the Directorate — the framing changes depending on the route. Everyone around you is either a scientist rationalizing what they do, or a Graft rationalizing what they've become. There is no monster behind glass. The horror is realizing which side of the glass you're actually standing on.
continue to graft taxonomy →