The Broken Door Way

Posted on Wed Mar 25th, 2020 @ 2:26am by The Narrator

Mission: S2:2: Best Laid Plans
Location: Carpathia Star System
Timeline: MD1: 12:30

It arose, like a leviathan from the darkest abyss of nightmare, and breached the surface. But no crashing waves or roiling surface applauded its arrival. Instead, plasma boil and magnetic fields strong enough to flense matter apart by the atom raged against it.

This was a bur under the skin of a star, a spiked confection of pearly white bone scrimshaw fashioned under the touch of Prior science. It rose further from the chromosphere, blunting a solar flare that rose near it. As it rose the bone like spars of its construction began to open, unfolding like the legs of a spider or some byzantine puzzle, to reveal its beating heart.

It flickered in and out of reality, constantly fluxing between somewhere else, and somewhere much further away. As the cage-like spars spread wider and wider, this flickering energy began to bend and shift. The flicker became a flare, became a maw, and then an omnidirectional funnel from which a wrongness beckoned the unwary.

And then the Prior Whisper Gate snapped shut, throttling the throat geometries of the gateway into phase space. The old sentience that rode within the gate did not know how to measure time, but it knew its duty: the gateway must never be allowed to remain open longer than necessary. Least things with long memories find a hole into more agreeable environs.

It then folded back in on itself, enclosing around the phase space fracture at its heart, and sank back into the relative calm of the stellar furnace of Carpathia’s Star. And as it did so, the moon-sized construct barely registered the Myriad Thorn Ship that was even now burning its engines hard to escape the gravity well of the star.

The business of the material realm was below the threshold of awareness for the Prior Censor that sat in residence within the old bones of their technology.