From the Depths: Gold - The Gate to the Abyss

This is the first of a series of novella for the upcoming Torment: Tides of Numenera game.

While the writing is enjoyable and the plot interesting, I can tell there's something that I'm missing to be able to fully understand the story as a whole. I managed to fill in some blanks by googling around but it would've been nice to have some questions answered within the novella itself.

I got the gist of what the story is trying to showcase - the Gold Tide. The tides are basically the alignment system in Numenera (the game). Tides attempt to classify actions irrespective of morality or intentions. The gold tide is about empathy, sacrifice, and charity. It encompasses false philanthropy as well as martyrdom - tides are not as simple as good vs. evil, but more about the actions and the end results.

So based on that, we have both the protagonist and the antagonist representing this tide differently - one presents the selfless side, the other, the selfish side. This message was delivered pretty well throughout the story. One was trying to save her people, wanting to keep them from repeating the same mistake over and over again. The other was also saving the same people, but came with a completely different reason. This group of people took refuge is a hostile environment, and soon found that they were not alone there, and things are not what they seemed.

I just didn't really get the ending, even after doing some reading. But I guess that's part of the theme of the Ninth World (setting for Numenera), where the numenera are just not meant to be properly understood.