The Withered Land, The Empire Falls: ABYSSIUM

ABYSSIUM, Part Twelve

There is NO SUCH THING as a "tear" in the fabric of Time and Space.

Spacetime is not, despite popular conception, an actual physical object. It is a 4th-dimensional mathematical construct, a "Manifold", that being a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each definable termination point. The topology to which the idea refers is a set of points, along with a set of neighborhoods for each point, satisfying a set of mathematical axioms relating points and "neighborhoods". So the term "Spacetime" is an analogous metaphor, and thusly a simplification, used to describe something very vast and complex. It, Spacetime, is not something that can rend, split or cleave in the way you'd imagine ripping through a sheet of parchment, a finely-woven strip of cloth or a gossamer veil. And it cannot be severed, leaving jagged edges.

But it can be modified, renegotiated with, transgressed upon and devolved. All of which serves to present those who examine the nature of Spacetime with a near-endless supply of paradoxes.

To intelligent, conceptually flexible and knowledgeable minds, Paradoxes are more than merely confounding or maddening, more even than that which is often labeled as "dangerous", no indeed, to be accurate, Paradoxes are the very heart of the true cosmic insanity of the Universe and they are inevitable.

The Wound, that anomalous two-thirds of a Light Year-long dysmorphic ulcer in the outer rim of Teshiwahur's solar system, just outside the orbit of the planet Ombrusthylax beyond the lethally irradiated Makkaryenne Elasticity, was just such a paradox. The Wound was not a tear or a rip in Space.

It was indeed that which it had always been commonly called. It was the source of The Long Death.

The Wound was an exposed porous filter, an elastic sifter, through which a veritable, nearly endless waterfall of Anti-Time flowed. Anti-Time was a very unique, highly-specific brand of unmodulated fluidic energy that was a moving field representing the inverse of normal chronal photonic degradation. Chronal energy, popularly referred to as "Time", was more than merely a concept encompassing the linear measurement of passing events -- it was an actual force, like magnetism or gravity, capable of acting upon and exerting influence over the physical world. So, as such, it possessed a chiral identity, an opposite, and this was"Anti-Time" wherein, despite the terminology, did NOT mean that the passage of event s wound backwards from ending to beginning. Instead, the elemental properties of Anti-Time were such that they captured and degraded the dynamic quantum atomic particles that became exposed to it. Nuclear bonds broke, energetic fields decayed, the relational momentum and symmetry of physical objects were wrest awry and Probability Itself shattered like disintegrating shards of glass. The Wound was a leaking dam through which Anti-Time poured into this universe, displacing, devouring and demolishing the pre-existing volume of Normal Time it supplanted. Only the most highly-advanced technology of an alien culture could take advantage of that.  It was through The Wound that non-human slaves serving the conquest-hungry Rayth'kine marched to war. This was the sieve through which the marauding armies of the Gorgahnun Coalition had poured into an unprepared, unsuspecting solar system that cradled The Withered Land...

On one side of the mammoth, electromagnetic gravitational mesh was Teshiwahur and the few remaining space bases and outposts of the dying Hegemonic Emperium. And on the other was the unmoored, traveling, superplanet-sized cosmic wanderer the Gorgahnuns called "Vyt'Atourak".  The giant rogue planet was not home for the Gorgahnuns, their autogenetic kind, exemplars of strict sequential disposition and codification, couldn't ever have been comfortable headquartered on a volcanically-active, tectonically-malleable globe like the cosmic-rover. 

A smouldering, vegetatively near-barren TrojanOrphan world, Vyt'Atourak was a huge volcanic spheroid barycentrically-ringedby the mountainous remains of a pair of shattered moons that melded together toform a disc ring-system. But instead ofan accretion-disc of pulverized stone and ancient, hardened ice in particulateform, the ring around Vyt'Atourak was like a wall, made up of rectangular slabsof high-density iron, chromium and magmatic pyrrhotite. The massive ring surrounded Vyt'Atourak perpendicularto its horizontal equator. Incrediblydense, and mostly metallic, Vyt'Atourak's gravitational pull locked in thering-wall as it rotated in a rapid counter clockwise spin around what was acelestial body roughly the size of Uranus, if compared to planets in the fardistant Terran solar system.