What follows is my first attempt at a Fan-fiction. Anywhere. I hope it is good and does not contradict any canon.

Long before the events of Spiral Knights, there was a glorious race. They spread across the entire galaxy, making nature into their own, but not enslaving it. Eventually, it seemed they could not be stopped by any force from the outside, anything the rest of the universe could possibly throw at them. They were right.

Believing that their physical forms should not be tied and locked as they were, they began to merge themselves with their technology, becoming more Mechanical than Biological every passing decade.

But not all agreed. Some still tried to resist the integration of technology, thought that they were becoming more machines than not. As time went on, the resistance became stronger, and also more violent.

The conflict of Ideologies split the Galaxy in two and a war the scale of which could never have been imagined broke out.

Exactly how many years they fought is unsure, as the fighting took place over such long distances that no one could really tell what had happened on the other fronts, but the war must have been several centuries at the least. Both sides were fragmented and nearly completely destroyed.

By the time the fighting had mostly subsided, most planets of people didn’t really care to be involved in a war, but with their cross dimensional power grid broken, the Mechanicals could not stay on any one planet, so the few large flagships that remained from the aftermath of the war, such as the Skylark, began converting their hangers into massive civilian stasis pods.

With its precious cargo of frozen to-be-knights, the Skylark set off in a search for a power large enough to sustain its residents. For many thousands of years it searched on semi-autopilot, but no planet had the raw amount of energy needed.

Except Cradle.

Detecting the radiating glory of Core, the Skylark plotted its multi-light year journey to Cradle, hoping that this was finally the planet that would be able to save the Knights.

But it was not to be. When it arrived, it began to survey the planet, but before it could deposit its cargo onto the planet, a Biological warship, one of the remnants of the Great Civil War, warped in and begun to fire on the Skylark. They had walked into a trap.

Having sacrificed its hanger to be a stasis room, the Skylark could not fight off the enemy warship, so prepared to launch the pods to the planet’s surface. But mere seconds before it could fire, it was critically hit by a shot from the enemy warship, right in the central processor.

Everything went haywire. Many of the pods launched, but the Knights had not been restored with all the Knowledge the Skylark had gained on it journey, and so were clueless to the events that had happened. The others remained in the Skylark, slowly falling onto Cradle where they are recovered one at a time, only to join Haven in the fight to the Core.

The Skylark did manage to get one piece of information to the Knights before it became a bunch of floating space debris; Get to the Core, find Me, repair Me, and go home. That is why we, the Spiral Knights, must fight through the clockworks to the core, so we can return to our rightful home.