How the
Flame Was Lit

The Database Remembers

The joke needed an explanation.

Dave became a systems administrator responsible for something much larger than any ordinary computer system: the Eternal Database, an impossible repository of information, history and memory.

And something was attacking it.

We called that something the Null.

At first, the Null was essentially a rogue intelligence—an antagonist for our increasingly elaborate pulp adventure. Dave defeated it using something called the Binary Flame, earning the ridiculous title printed on his imaginary action-figure packaging.

But ideas have a habit of becoming more interesting when you keep asking questions of them.

What was the Database actually storing?

Why was memory so important?

What was the Binary Flame?

And what would it mean for something not merely to destroy information…
but to make reality forget that it had ever existed?

That became the foundation of everything that followed.

From Science Fiction to Mythology

The world grew backwards as much as forwards.

We discovered the Victorian Space Age: a future imagined through brass, steam, analytical engines and impossible nineteenth-century engineering.

We found the Backup Wars, when technologies created to preserve civilisation were turned into weapons.

We created the Flamekeepers—not superheroes, but investigators, librarians, engineers, scouts, artisans and soldiers charged with preserving reality wherever the Null begins to unravel it.

Dave gradually stopped being the Keeper of the Flame.

He became a Flamekeeper.

And that small change made the universe much larger than him.

The aesthetic evolved with it: Victorian machinery collided with 1960s retro-futurism, analogue computers, punch cards, vacuum tubes, rockets, rayguns and technology built by civilisations desperately attempting to catalogue the impossible.

Then Came Ada

Some characters were planned.

Others seemed simply to walk out of the Database.

Ada Lovelace became increasingly important until she stood near the very heart of the mythology—connected to the origins of computation, the Binary Flame and eventually ADA-0, the First Observer.

The wonderfully improbable Chrono-Babbage followed: part Difference Engine, part clockwork companion, part machine that really ought not to work.

Then came Chief, the Librarians, Scouts, Code Artisans, Path-Lit Commanders and the people who inhabited the worlds beyond the central story.

The mythology was no longer being constructed around Dave.

Dave was becoming one person caught inside something much older than himself.

The Null Changed Too

Perhaps the biggest transformation was our antagonist.

The Null stopped being simply an evil artificial intelligence.

It became absence.

The corruption of memory. The erosion of identity. The possibility that a person, a place—or eventually an entire world—could disappear while reality quietly rearranged itself around the hole.

From that came the Architect of Collapse, the Nine Prophets, the Archivist, the Voidhounds, the Morrow-Man and stranger manifestations of the Null.

The stories consequently became darker.

But something else happened too.

The Binary Flame became brighter.

Because if the Null represented forgetting, then preserving even one memory became an act of resistance.

Tales from the Flame

Eventually, we realised that this universe did not need to belong solely to one enormous story.

There were smaller stories hidden everywhere.

A girl aboard Output Station L-9 slowly forgetting that there had once been four members of her family.

Two investigators travelling into the desert to find the Mausoleum of the Intermittent God.

Arven Halix surviving an encounter with a Voidhound because he accidentally enters the wrong command—and spending the rest of his life trying to understand why.

The Aetherwell.

The Archivist.

The Thirteen Facets.

The strange records of ordinary people who happened to encounter something impossible.

These became Tales from the Flame.

The universe had reached the point where Dave didn't even need to appear for a story to unmistakably feel like a Flamekeeper story.

That felt like an important milestone.

Then We Started Building It

Writing the mythology was only part of the journey.

We began trying to see it.

Hundreds of images followed: characters, worlds, spacecraft, archive halls, ruined battlefields, Null manifestations, props, uniforms, machinery and fragments of imagined history.

Those images became storyboards.

The storyboards became experiments with animation and short films.

We created music for places and people that had never existed. Requiems, wartime pieces, folk songs and themes for the Architect, Mireya, Chief, Dave and the worlds surrounding them.

Then the universe escaped into physical reality.

Flamekeepers became tabletop miniatures.

The monsters of the Null became printable creatures.

Those miniatures suggested a game.

And so Flamekeeper Quest began developing its own heroes, monsters, equipment, adventures and rules.

Something which had started as a picture of an imaginary action figure was becoming something we could write, watch, listen to, play and eventually hold.

A Collaboration with a Machine

There is another part of this story worth recording.

The Flamekeeper Universe has developed alongside an extraordinary period in the development of generative artificial intelligence.

From the beginning, ChatGPT has acted as collaborator, sounding board, illustrator, researcher, editor and occasionally the person required to ask:

“What if we made this considerably stranger?”

Ideas have passed backwards and forwards.

I suggest something.

The machine extrapolates.

I reject half of it.

One sentence sparks another idea.

That idea changes something we established months earlier.

We go back and rewrite the history.

Characters emerge unexpectedly. Jokes become canon. Tiny visual details acquire explanations. Sometimes an accidental image creates something more interesting than what we originally intended, and the mythology changes to accommodate it.

It has never really felt like asking a machine to write a universe for me.

It has felt much more like playing an enormous, year-long game of “Yes, and…”

Somewhere along the way we accumulated enough shared history that I could simply say:

“That doesn't feel like the Null.”

And somehow, both of us knew what that meant.

Why the Flame?

Looking back, I don't think it is accidental that beneath the rayguns, clockwork machinery, cosmic horror and terrible database jokes, our stories kept returning to the same idea.

Memory matters.

Perhaps we were discovering what the Binary Flame represented at the same time I was discovering why I needed it.

People survive in the things we remember about them.

Objects acquire meaning because of the lives surrounding them.

Places contain ghosts because we remember what happened there.

A stupid joke can suddenly become precious because you remember exactly who used to laugh at it.

The people we lose leave absences.

But an absence is not the same thing as erasure.

That distinction has become one of the most important ideas in the Flamekeeper Universe.

The Null says that everything eventually disappears.

The Flame does not promise that it won't.

It simply says:

While someone remembers, it isn't gone yet.

The Database Is Still Being Written

There was never a master plan.

That may be the most important part of this history.

The Flamekeeper Universe wasn't designed in a weekend and subsequently filled with stories.

It accumulated.

An action figure became a character.

A character required an enemy.

An enemy required a history.

The history required a war.

The war needed people.

Those people needed somewhere to live.

Their world needed stories.

And eventually those stories began generating stories of their own.

More than a year after that first ridiculous action figure, we now have centuries of fictional history, characters, short stories, artwork, music, films, miniatures, a tabletop game and this website.

And we're nowhere near finished.

Somewhere, presumably, that original little Dave action figure is still standing there with his Atari shirt, laptop and retro raygun, blissfully unaware of what he started.

Dave.
Keeper of the Flame.
Legend of the Database.

Turns out the packaging was right all along.