THE FOUNDATION & THE EXILES: TALOS-II LORE

Two of the most loaded words in Arknights: Endfield are “Foundation” and “Exiles,” and the reason they hit so hard is that they mean two completely different things at once. Read them one way and they describe the plain history of Talos-II: a colony that was founded by pioneers from Terra, then exiled from its home world when the gate behind them collapsed. Read them the other way, with the capital letters the game deliberately puts on them, and they name a mystery that a Sargonian lord is willing to poison a whole planet to solve. This piece walks both readings, keeps the confirmed lore separate from the theory, and shows why Endfield keeps circling back to the same two words.

Alleikhreos, Chiliarch, the first “Foundite” enemy, described in-game as “a creation of the Foundation.” Source: Arknights: Endfield official. © Gryphline.

TL;DR - Key Points

• “Foundation” and “Exiles” carry a double meaning. One is the literal founding and exile of the Talos-II colony; the other is a capitalized in-game mystery from beyond the Æther.
• Talos-II was settled roughly 152 years before the story, by Terrans who crossed the Cosmic Gate (the Æthergate) and then lost it in the First Aggeloi War.
• The gate’s collapse turned settlers into exiles, cut off from Terra and forced to build a civilization run by corporations and syndicates rather than nations.
• Endfield Industries was founded by Rhodes Island and partners to colonize, industrialize, and defend the moon, with the Endministrator at its head and Perlica running day-to-day command.
• The capitalized “Foundation,” also called the “Exiles,” is what Ardashir is hunting from beyond the Æther, and his search is tied to the Blight and the Æthillu phantom in Umbral Monument.
• The Foundation is not only a name anymore. Alleikhreos, Chiliarch, the Version 1.4 boss, is the first “Foundite” enemy, described in-game as “a creation of the Foundation” that roamed the Ætherside, which is the most concrete lead we have.
• Almost nothing about that second meaning is confirmed, so treat the connections here as reading the clues, not reciting canon.
• The Aurora at the north pole is the ticking clock hanging over both readings, and likely where the two threads eventually meet.

The Two Meanings of “Foundation” and “Exiles”

Most guides treat these words as flavor. They are not. In Endfield they operate on two levels, and the game is fully aware of the overlap.

The first level is descriptive. Talos-II is, at its core, a story about people who founded a colony and then became exiles when the way home was destroyed. That is not a metaphor; it is the literal shape of the timeline. Every faction, every corporation, and every survival system on the moon exists because a group of pioneers got stranded and had to make a home out of what was left.

The second level is a proper noun. Late-game content, especially the endgame Umbral Monument thread, introduces “The Foundation,” also referred to as the “Exiles,” as a specific target that a character named Ardashir is chasing “from beyond the Æther.” The capital letters matter. This is not a description of the colonists; it is a name for something the game has not fully explained yet.

The trick, and the reason this is worth an essay, is that both readings point at the same wound: a people separated from where they came from. Whether that separation is the Cosmic Gate collapsing or something older and stranger on the far side of the Æther, Endfield keeps asking the same question. Who got left behind, and what happens when someone comes looking for them?

Foundation: How Talos-II Was Settled

Start with the confirmed history, because the mystery only lands if you know the ground it stands on.

Talos-II is the second moon of a gas giant named Talos. It has a nitrogen-rich atmosphere with enough oxygen and greenhouse warmth to support life, plus mountain ranges, river systems, and dense vegetation. In-world astronomers treat that habitability as almost too convenient, given the moon’s position and the presence of a gate.

Roughly 152 years before the events of the game, pioneers from Terra (the setting of the original Arknights) reopened a passage sometimes called the Cosmic Gate and elsewhere the Æthergate, and crossed to Talos-II. This was not a casual expedition. It was a full colonization push, backed by the kind of institutional muscle it takes to move people and industry across worlds.

For over a century after arrival, Terrans and their descendants spread out, raising outposts and towns across the moon. That century of expansion is the “foundation” in the plainest sense: the physical and social groundwork of a human presence on Talos-II, built by people who still, at first, had a road home.

Exile: The Day the Gate Collapsed

Then the road home closed.

The gate was destroyed during the First Aggeloi War, the opening catastrophe that also lit up the northern sky with the Aurora. In a single stretch of history, the settlers went from “colonists with a lifeline” to “survivors with none.” That is the exile. Not a banishment handed down by a court, but a severance: a whole population cut loose from Terra with no way back and no reinforcements coming.

What grows in that vacuum defines the entire tone of Endfield. With no home government to answer to, power on Talos-II reorganized around whoever could actually keep people alive and fed. That meant corporations, syndicates, academies, and armed orders rather than nations. The habitable, defended core of the moon became known as the Civilization Band, a strip of relative safety surrounded by wilds, Blight, and Aggeloi.

This is the part that gives the setting its hard, corporate edge. When we talk about Endfield’s world feeling like a frontier run by companies, that is not set dressing. It is the direct downstream consequence of the exile. A civilization that cannot call home builds different institutions than one that can. The comparison between Endfield’s operators and their Terra originals leans on exactly this point: the moon rewrote who these people had to become.

Endfield Industries: A Company Built to Colonize a Moon

Into that vacuum steps the faction you actually play for.

Endfield Industries was established during the early settlement era by Rhodes Island and its partners. On Terra, Rhodes Island was a pharmaceutical and paramilitary organization built around managing a planetary crisis. Endfield Industries is something different in purpose: a forward-prospecting conglomerate and think tank created specifically to handle the colonization, industrial buildout, and Aggeloi defense of Talos-II.

That distinction is worth sitting with. Rhodes Island was a company built around managing a disaster that already existed. Endfield Industries is a company built around claiming and holding new ground. One is triage; the other is expansion. The shared DNA is there, but the mission flipped.

Structurally, Endfield runs like a real corporation with a frontier mandate. Its headquarters is the OMV Dijiang, described as the only orbital spacecraft over Talos-II, which doubles as command deck and safe harbor. Below the top, the org splits into divisions: specialist tech, engineering, logistics, procurement, medical, HR, security, and more. The Automated Industry Complex, the factory system players spend so much time optimizing, is the industrial arm of that colonization mandate made literal.

Two names anchor the leadership. The Endministrator sits at the top as the enigmatic founder-figure. Perlica serves as Supervisor and public face, the person the divisional leads report to. During the Endministrator’s long absence, Perlica held the line, running the Crisis Team, the organization’s core operator unit, across the Civilization Band. Warfarin, meanwhile, remained one of the few public-facing leads, tied to the Reconvener project while much of the old guard went quiet.

The Endministrator and the Protocol Network

You cannot talk about the foundation of anything on Talos-II without the Endministrator, because in the moon’s own mythology they keep showing up at the founding of everything.

In-world records treat the Endministrator less like a CEO and more like a recurring guardian: a figure who has surfaced at multiple points in Talos-II’s history to pull civilization back from the edge, then vanished again. Few people have actually seen them. To the rank and file of Endfield Industries, the Endministrator is a trump card more than a colleague.

Two traits define them mechanically and narratively. The first is a mastery over Originium and the Protocol Network that does not rely on the usual technology; they manipulate the material directly, which the company guards as its single most valuable secret. The second is the need for long, periodic hibernation, sometimes described as retreating into an Originium cocoon. The story begins with one of those hibernations ending: the Endministrator wakes into a Talos-II that has grown chaotic in their absence.

That wake-up is the hinge the whole game hangs on. A founder-figure returns to a foundation that has drifted, and has to decide what still holds. If you want the timeline framing for that awakening, our Amiya and the precursor legacy analysis places it against the wider Arknights chronology.

Reconveners: Memory Brought Across the Gate

There is one more piece of the founding you carry personally, because the player character is part of it.

When Terra was still expanding into Talos-II, it sent a First Originium crystal through the gate. That crystal was not just raw material; it carried stored data, including the memories and skills of operators from Terra. In effect, Terra tried to ship its people’s knowledge across worlds as information.

The First Aggeloi War damaged that crystal, and the data fragmented and corrupted. What comes out of those fragments are Reconveners: new individuals reconstructed from the broken records, inheriting partial memories and abilities of the original Terra operators while developing their own personalities on Talos-II. They are not clones and not ghosts. They are something the moon made out of what survived the crossing.

The player is one of them, tied in-story to the Protocol Recycling Department. That framing is quietly brilliant, because it makes you a living version of the same theme as the Exiles: a fragment of something that came across the gate, reassembled on the far side, carrying memory that no longer has a home to return to. The deep dive on the Feranmut Proxies and the Wuling hegemony traces how the First Originium and its contamination ripple through the wider region.

The Other Foundation: What Ardashir Is Hunting

Now the capitalized version. Everything from here down is more theory than fact, and it deserves the warning label.

In the Wuling arc and the endgame Umbral Monument content, a character named Ardashir steps forward as one of the game’s primary antagonists. He presents himself as a traveler, but he is a “Pasha,” a high-ranking lord of Sargon, described in-game as a land of gold and windswept sands “from the other side of the Cosmic Gate.” He commands teleportation Arts, summons Æther-related monsters, and works alongside Nefarith. Crucially, his goal is to find “The Foundation,” also called the “Exiles,” from beyond the Æther.

Sit with the geography for a second. Sargon is on the other side of the gate. Ardashir did not grow up on Talos-II; he came through, the way the original settlers did, except his agenda points outward, past the Æther, at something he calls by these two specific names. He is willing to stir the Blight, the corrupting matter that leaks from the Aetherside, to get there.

That is why the Æthillu phantom in Umbral Monument reads the way it does. Its flavor calls it “a manifestation of destruction, a sedimentation of ancient senescence,” and it is framed as one of the Æther-things that answer Ardashir’s call. Our full breakdown of that fight and its funerary theming lives in the Harrowing Æthillu stage guide, which is where the “Foundation / Exiles” line surfaces in the current story.

So what are they? The honest answer is that the game has not said. The strongest reading, given the pattern, is that the capitalized Exiles are another group separated from a homeland by the Æther, exactly as the Talos-II colonists were separated from Terra, and that Ardashir is either hunting them, hunting what they left, or hunting the truth of what the Æther did to them. But that is a reading of the clues, not a confirmed answer.

Foundites: The First Thing the Foundation Actually Made

Here is where the mystery stopped being pure name and started leaving fingerprints.

Version 1.4 introduced Alleikhreos, Chiliarch, the boss that caps the Wuling arc, and his official Crisis Intel card calls him “a creation of the Foundation and a veteran of countless battles” who “roamed the Ætherside until he recovered his lost sword and tore open a moment for his return.” That single sentence does more lore work than anything Ardashir has said out loud. It confirms the Foundation is not just a target; it is a maker. It builds things.

Alleikhreos is also the first member of a brand new enemy classification: Foundite. Endfield already sorts its enemies into families such as Aggeloi, Landbreakers, Blightshades, and Wildlife. “Foundite” is new, and right now he is the only one in it. When a game opens a fresh enemy category with a single entry, that is a promise, not an accident. The Foundation is a thread the story fully intends to pull on, and Foundites are how it will show up on the battlefield. Our full Alleikhreos boss lore and combat breakdown digs into the fight itself and the “Foundite Weapon” gimmick.

Two details tie this straight back to the Ardashir thread. First, Alleikhreos “roamed the Ætherside,” the same Æther-adjacent space Ardashir points to when he talks about the Exiles being “beyond the Æther.” Second, his whole existence, a manufactured war-relic that was switched back on after a long defeat, reads like exactly the kind of thing you would find if an ancient power built an army and then lost it. If the Foundation is that power, Foundites are its surviving hardware.

The Ætherside: Where the Two Threads Overlap

The connective tissue between the founding history and the capitalized mystery is a place: the Ætherside.

Community lore documentation frames the Ætherside as the regions of Talos-II where the “Depth reading” sits at 1, and it currently overlaps with realspace, with matter and energy confirmed to pass between them. When the barrier ruptures, it opens a rift. The bleaker in-universe hypothesis treats the Ætherside as a separate universe drifting through a slow heat death and saturated with toxins, which is the space Alleikhreos crawled out of and the direction Ardashir keeps pointing.

That matters for our two words. The founding exile was a separation from Terra, a place you could once reach through a gate. The capitalized Exiles are described as being beyond the Æther, a place you reach through a rift. Endfield may be rhyming two different severances on purpose, or it may be telling us they are the same story told from opposite sides of the same wall. Either way, the Ætherside is where the founding history and the mystery are most likely to finally touch.

Confirmed vs. Theory

Because the two meanings sit so close together, it is easy to launder speculation into “lore.” Here is the split as it stands.

The line to hold: the lowercase founding-and-exile history is solid, and the capitalized Foundation/Exiles mystery is mostly open. Anyone telling you exactly who the Exiles are is theorizing, and that is fine, as long as it is labeled.

Reading It Two Ways: A Quick Guide by Interest

Different players care about different halves of this, so here is how to spend your attention.

• If you want settled canon, stay in the founding history: the crossing, the severance, Endfield Industries, and the Reconvener system. All of it is confirmed and none of it will be retconned by the next patch.
• If you want the mystery, follow Ardashir, Sargon, the Blight, and the Æther content in Umbral Monument. Expect it to move, and expect early theories to age badly.
• If you want the theme, notice that both readings are about separation from a home you cannot return to. That is the emotional core Endfield keeps pressing, whether the subject is a colonist or a capitalized Exile.

What Would Change This: Watch List

Lore this open moves with every major patch. A few specific triggers would rewrite parts of this piece, and we will update it when they land.

• A direct statement of what the Foundation is. If a story chapter names the Exiles as a people, a place, or an object, the entire theory column above collapses into confirmed fact.
• More Foundites. Alleikhreos is the only Foundite so far. A second entry in that enemy family would tell us whether the Foundation built an army, a bloodline, or a one-off, and each answer points at a different kind of power.
• Ardashir’s full backstory. His motive is currently a goal without a history. Any reveal about why a Sargon Pasha is chasing something beyond the Æther reframes his whole arc.
• Anything that breaches the Aurora. The Auroral Barrier and the Æther Tide at the north pole are the impassable wall over the whole setting. If the story finds a way past it, the “beyond the Æther” language around the Exiles suddenly has a physical address.
• A link between the two meanings made explicit. Right now the overlap between the founding exile and the capitalized Exiles is our reading. If the game confirms they are the same thing, this stops being an essay and becomes a summary.

Final Read

Endfield built its whole world on a separation, then named its central mystery after the same idea, and the doubling is not an accident. The lowercase story is clean and confirmed: Terrans founded a colony on Talos-II, lost the gate home in the First Aggeloi War, and rebuilt as a corporate frontier under Endfield Industries and the returning Endministrator. The capitalized story is deliberately unfinished: a Sargon lord named Ardashir is chasing “The Foundation,” the “Exiles,” from beyond the Æther, and the game is content to let us wonder whether he is describing a stranger’s tragedy or a mirror of the colony’s own. Hold the confirmed history tight, hold the mystery loosely, and watch the Aurora. When those two threads finally touch, this is the seam they will run along.

FAQ

Are the Exiles a playable faction in Arknights Endfield? No. There is no playable faction named “Exiles.” The word appears two ways: as a description of the stranded Talos-II colonists, and as a capitalized mystery term Ardashir uses for something beyond the Æther. Neither is a joinable faction.

Is “The Foundation” just another name for Endfield Industries? There is no confirmation that they are the same. Endfield Industries is the colonization conglomerate you play for. “The Foundation,” capitalized, is what Ardashir hunts from beyond the Æther. Treating them as identical is a theory, not canon.

What does it mean that the colonists were “exiled”? It is a severance, not a punishment. When the Cosmic Gate was destroyed in the First Aggeloi War, the Terran settlers lost any way back to Terra, leaving them stranded on Talos-II for generations. That involuntary separation is the exile.

Who founded Endfield Industries? Rhodes Island and its partners established it during the early settlement of Talos-II, to handle colonization, industrial development, and defense against the Aggeloi. It is led by the Endministrator, with Perlica as Supervisor.

Where did the pioneers come from? Terra, the setting of the original Arknights. They crossed to Talos-II through the gate roughly 152 years before the game’s story begins.

What is beyond the Æther? Unknown. Ardashir claims the Foundation, or Exiles, lie beyond it, and the Æther is tied to the Blight and to phantoms like Æthillu. The game has not shown what actually exists on the far side, so any specific answer is speculation.

What is a Foundite, and how does it connect to the Foundation? A Foundite is a new enemy classification introduced in Version 1.4, and its first and only member so far is Alleikhreos, Chiliarch. His official intel card calls him “a creation of the Foundation,” which makes Foundites the clearest evidence that the Foundation is an entity that builds things, not just a name Ardashir uses.

Who is Ardashir and why does he matter here? Ardashir is a Pasha, a high-ranking lord of Sargon from the other side of the Cosmic Gate, and one of Endfield’s primary antagonists. He matters because his stated goal, finding the Foundation or Exiles, is the clearest use of the capitalized term in the current story.

Are Reconveners the same as the Exiles? No, though they rhyme thematically. Reconveners are individuals reconstructed from the corrupted First Originium crystal that carried Terra operators’ memories. They are a confirmed system. The Exiles are an unconfirmed mystery. Both involve something crossing the gate and being reassembled or sought on the far side.

Is the founding history going to be retconned? It is very unlikely. The crossing, the gate’s destruction, the founding of Endfield Industries, and the Reconvener system are established canon. The open questions sit almost entirely on the capitalized Foundation/Exiles mystery.

Where does this thread go next? Most likely toward the Aurora. The Auroral Barrier and Æther Tide at the north pole are the setting’s central locked door, and the “beyond the Æther” language around the Exiles suggests that is where the founding history and the capitalized mystery will eventually meet.