The Shape of Our Cosmos

ꙮ The thing about the constellations is that anyone, from any world, has seen the patterns in the stars before, in anything that the eye could look at and find patterns in - they’re in clouds, in whorls of smoke, in patterns of leaves dancing in the wind. And, more than anywhere else, in the stars, and so your eyes are drawn to them - at least, those constellations that you can see, from your current vantage point. The dome of the observatory only covers some of the sky, and you can see the Soldier-and-Brother, the Fiend Engine, the Golden Lion, the Hollow Skull, sparkling jewels in heaven’s vault.

ꙮ That principle which observes lovers reaching out towards each other over an uncrossable gap; that principle which observes the powerless and the underestimated. Visible high in the night sky of the Beast, now, at this orientation relative to one another, and at that elevation, and between the two of them, that principle which observes impossible mechanisms and those who might construct them. With hours, and the right calculations and charts, you could determine your own position, relative to the Beast, if you knew your vantage point from that plane, if you knew the precise time and date – or, with an [Empyrean Intuition] you could not name or pinpoint if you tried, you know where the Beast would have to be. Lurking, just out of range of the viewing-dome’s available azimuth. [Take Half]

ꙮ It’s Salme who notices the stars move. The tiniest, tiniest movement - the flutter of a leaf, an insect beginning to begin to decide to take flight - when the Awoken’s hands find the crystalline contacts.

ꙮ It is not, of course, the case that the entirety of the vault of heaven moves with your will. But it certainly feels that way - the stars shift, and turn, slowly, the viewing frustum indicated on the armillary sphere that’s part of the complex mechanism shifting, millimeter by millimeter. And the two of you, and the telescope itself, you remain perfectly still - but the entire room spins on its axis around you, and with it, the telescope’s reference azimuth shifts. ⁂

ꙮ Round, wreathed in burning gnosis and thick atmosphere, shards of metal and rock piercing through the skin at angles you recognise, haloed with six bright, close full moons, the Beast in all its glory. It looks almost small– but the Beast could never look small, could never be other than awesome in its bulk. At the same time, you feel like you could reach out and hold it in your hand, from here.

ꙮ Is there any part of it which is not dark and strange? Could there be? Sunlit, the ridges of rock and metal cast shadows deep as night in which bright-eyed fiends and monsters thrive.

ꙮ Vaguely, vaguely oblate, its moons laid out like a perfect little hemicircle from your perspective. As equally-spaced from this angle as they seemed from the surface.

ꙮ Well, that’s strange, isn’t it?

ꙮ I described this as the day side of the Beast, and six full moons - and, looking up at the moons you can see, the lit face normal to the direction in which you know to look, light coming, obviously, from somewhere, to illuminate them, and thereby the Beast itself. But there is, of course, no source of light.

ꙮ A second strange thing:

ꙮ You immediately feel confident that, even were Salme to send up a flare, you could not see it, or her, or the far shore on which she waits for your return. (Conversely, if the Awoken were to send up a flare - it would be small, and dim, and time-lagged, certainly, but Salme could, in fact, see it through the scope. They may try this! I assume that they will.)

ꙮ The third strange thing: You do know precisely where to look. Your eye guides you to the centre of the Empty Space. 🙧

ꙮ And she does, of course, see it, as I predicted.

ꙮ The Library does shine. You know it does, and you know it’s beautiful. It is, after all, yours; your gnosis courses naturally through its channels. And yet, in that same certainty is the knowledge that its radiance will go unseen by the Awoken.

ꙮ If that were the case, then the moons would always appear utterly full looking up at them from the ground on the Beast, rather than having phases, albeit subtle ones! No, they all six appear full from where you’re sitting, Salme. Is there a sun hiding in your eyes? The Awoken seems to think so, I believe.

ꙮ Some azimuthal distance away, but not too much away, another orb suspended in the vast.

ꙮ This one’s marbled, swirling, green, swollen with Flourishing gnosis, with a faint blush of red cast along its surface; the hemisphere that faces the Observatory is significantly darker, almost black-green at the centre, thirsty for light. There are rings around it, haloing it from your perspective, scattering light in chaotic rainbow-ways. Like irrica dust, almost, to a first glance; if you could count them, each by each, there would have to be thousands of them, but they’re finer than fine, and it’d be hopeless to try.

ꙮ Something about it does feel like a plant’s coloration, like the striations on a melon, rather than any sort of rot.

ꙮ …a description I’ve been avoiding out of tact, but must corroborate.

ꙮ Like the adumbration, it feels like a natural property of whatever makes up the– well. Knowing what you know of Almachadta, this would have to be its outer surface. Its shell? Its rind? No words seem appropriate.

ꙮ Ah, Melpomene. The fire of her does sing to you, doesn’t it? [Take Half]. But it does not sing from widdershins ways or turnwise tilts but rather – you’ve explored azimuth, but not elevation. And you know, Salme, immediately, that to see Samudra, you’d have to look down.

ꙮ Are you capable of disbelieving in gravity?

ꙮ And with the ascension, the controls of the telescope - no, the entire Observatory - are yours; the room entirely spins off its axis, immediately going deliriously, hilariously arse-over-tip with the two of you safely ensconced in the armature as it slides smoothly along every axis of freedom granted it by its gimbal; Jory begins squawking in utter indignance but is not disrupted from his perch, which says good things about the effect this might have, or the lack thereof, on anyone NOT safely seated in the mechanism. ⁂

ꙮ And, through the viewport, as it dips down precipitously, you see, almost immediately, and then taking up the entire viewport, an endless cloudy and watery expanse, stretching seemingly to the celestial horizon, far far below.

ꙮ How do you mean? From your perspective, Samudra is ‘down’.

ꙮ Well… it’s funny that you mention that.

ꙮ You’d think that someone, from some perspective on the Beast, would be able to look ‘up’, from their position on its surface, spherical enough to count, and see Samudra. And yet– that doesn’t seem to be the case.

ꙮ Hard to imagine ‘distance’ counting when faced with what seems, at least, to be a truly infinite plane.

ꙮ That would seem to be the case.

ꙮ And– you would know, if there were a trace of Radiance or Tenebrousness to follow, like Salme followed Melpomene and Flourishing gnosis to find Almachadta and Samudra.

ꙮ Wherever they are… they are without of any azimuth and elevation which the Observatory can observe.

ꙮ And you look up, and up, far past the familiar houses of the constellations, and you see the bright and shining star at the zenith of the vault of heaven, but as bright as it is, it is not the Radiance you seek, and as dark the depths around it are, nor are they the Tenebrous plane you knew.

ꙮ Those of the Beast, who know the stars by name, may know. Or, perhaps, those of another plane, also familiar with the stars? That is another story, though, and will be told another time.

ꙮ A smooth, almost perfectly featureless whitish orb, or so it seems. No craters, no crenellations to be seen.

ꙮ Just hanging in the air like the cueball from the pool table next door.

ꙮ Anyways, the next moon… is as perfectly smooth and featureless as the last one was.

ꙮ Maybe the moons that vanished were picked first because they had interesting craters and blemishes on them, and these five are spotless and so were saved for last…? There’s no knowing. Anyways, moon three… and four, and five, all look identical to the first you looked at through the telescope.

ꙮ Nothing there. Just a clear view of stars.

ꙮ The gnosis signature is… both oddly familiar, and slightly dodgy, and it’s only because the two of you are in methexis and so familiar with the contours of one others’ souls that you pick up that it’s– when you try to focus on it, it’s doing some kind of optical-illusion trick. Not a mirror, exactly - but feeding you a reflected, upside-down, version of your own gnosis, overlaid over a consistent pattern of stars.

ꙮ Oh, absolutely. It’s the same pattern as the stars visible if you look up from any point on the Beast.

ꙮ Have you ever felt, in your life, like you were looking at something that didn’t want to be seen? Your intuition tells you where it must be - and then you see the light of a distant star curve, and twist, and bend, and dodge, lensing around– something.

ꙮ And as you turn the telescope, you keep seeing light lens around a point, twisting into a disc around an ink-black sphere.

ꙮ Any invocation, any information sent out questing towards it is swallowed, never to return. A light-eater, a thing turned in on itself, a thing so dense and weighty that neither light nor gnosis can escape its clutches.

ꙮ The strand of gnosis fires off straight and true up into the sky, a bolt launched into starlight from the Awoken’s fingers–

ꙮ It trails off higher and higher into the sky, to the point where it’s almost out of sight, moving swiftly –

ꙮ – and then it impacts something, in the sky, and -ceases to be-. It doesn’t fizzle dramatically, it doesn’t CLANG BONK off anything– it just stops and isn’t, any more.

ꙮ And the expanse contracts, here and there become, so very briefly, a single here– the fiend establishes a homing signal via the Awoken’s link to Salme, and then spins up and -jets- through the momentary hole in reality into the depths of space! ⁂

ꙮ It is very, very confused, for a few moments - caught between facing in two different directions, it eventually picks one at random - it goes incoherent, briefly, from Salme’s perspective, but then it turns to face her, and lowers its mirror-hat deferentially towards the telescope. ⁂

ꙮ She sees… nothing, at first. The emptiness of the Empty Space in the Sky. But, as the telescope resonates with gnosis - within that empty space, there’s a shimmering sigil, the faint suggestion of the rose-window on the doors of the Kinder, Gentler Paths, a rainbowed cross made of fractally-inverted, bright, vivid eyes, gazing out from the Empty Space. 🙧

ꙮ The fiend is quietly and politely glowing error-message red, but it’s holding steady in position.

ꙮ You touch it, and it relays its flight data to you– including, bafflingly, that it detected Salme’s homing signal coming from two locations simultaneously. Which must have been why it was confused as to which way to orient itself…

ꙮ One vector, pointing straight at the annex. The other?

ꙮ Points towards the space around which the Beast and Almachadta orbit.

ꙮ In half of all possible worlds, it pointed towards the Empty Space. In the other half of all possible worlds, it pointed towards the middle of the system; the fiend seems confused about which half it found itself in… BUT, you know you saw the blackness of the Empty Space behind the shimmering lens-sigil, and not stars or Almachadta or the Beast in the far distance.

ꙮ Well, you can see the Empty Space from the Beast – and the Awoken, and Salme through his eyes, sees what looks like a brief, faint shooting star lighting the Empty Space for just a moment.

ꙮ You find… nothing. Nothing, in all of what you can see through the telescope, whirling gently through every angle and arc, that matches the signature of the rakaznar slab.