Compiled by Scholar Valerius Thorne, with practical annotations by Kael Redfern, Licensed Diver
Written in Threshold, Year 287 Post-Breaking
This entry represents three years of research, testimony from forty-seven Divers, consultation with two Lanx shamans, and one disastrous personal expedition to what we call the Outer Boundary. That expedition cost me the ability to recall my mother’s maiden name for six weeks. I have attempted to be comprehensive, but I must warn the reader: this document contains contradictions. Witnesses disagree. Measurements conflict. This is not scholarly failure, this is the nature of documenting a place where consistency itself has ceased to function.
My field assistant Kael has provided marginalia throughout, drawn from his thirty-four expeditions into the Lacuna. Where my academic perspective fails, his practical experience illuminates. Where we both fail, we have been honest about our ignorance.
Read carefully. Trust nothing completely. And if you value your continued existence as a coherent person, never approach what we call the Deep.
— V.T.
Approximately three hundred years ago, though records from this period are fragmentary and often contradictory, the northern territories were home to a thriving civilization of scholar-mages. They called themselves the Ascendant Circle, and they had achieved unprecedented mastery over ritual magic. Where other practitioners carefully followed established forms, the Circle sought to understand the very foundations of reality itself. They wanted to grasp the threads that the Weaver used to maintain the world.
They were not content with manipulating what existed. They wanted to rewrite the fundamental laws of being.
The exact nature of their final working has been lost, though I have recovered fragments. One partially burned scroll, preserved in a collector’s vault in Threshold, reads: “We shall compile ourselves into divinity, ascending beyond the limitations of token to become Form itself.” Another fragment, this one carved into a stone that causes headaches when examined too closely, declares: “The Substrate awaits. We shall touch it directly and remake ourselves in our own image.”
What we know with certainty is this: they failed catastrophically.
No living witnesses exist from the event itself. The closest settlements were fifty miles distant, and even at that remove, survivors reported phenomena that defy conventional description. I have interviewed the descendants of those survivors, who pass down the accounts as sacred warnings.
One testimony, preserved in the oral tradition of a refugee family, describes it thus: “The sky tore. Not the sky alone, everything tore. Color drained from the world like water from sand. Sound became flat, distant, wrong. My great-grandmother looked at her daughter and could not remember the girl’s name. Then she could. Then she couldn’t. The world flickered between versions of itself. When it stopped, and grandmother said it lasted perhaps ten heartbeats, though it felt like hours, the north was simply gone. Where the great city had stood, there was only absence.”
Seismic records from distant cities show massive disturbances on that day. Several temples to various gods report that their connection to the divine faltered briefly, as though the gods themselves had paused in confusion.
Where the Ascendant Circle’s city had stood, there was now a crater thirty miles in diameter and approximately two miles deep at its center. No buildings remained standing. No bodies were ever found. The mages themselves had not died in any conventional sense; they had been unmade. Unwritten. Removed from the narrative of reality so completely that even their past became uncertain. Historians disagree on how many mages had lived in the Circle’s city. Records conflict on basic facts like the city’s name.
What remained was absence. A wound in the world where the Weaver’s pattern had torn. Where narrative consistency no longer held. Where the very concept of “being” had failed.
We call it the Lacuna. The gap. The missing section.
Kael’s annotation: The short version is this: they tried to become gods without understanding what gods actually are. They thought divinity was just another level of power, another tier of existence they could reach through knowledge and will. They were wrong. They succeeded in dispersing themselves into pure concept, but concept without instance, Form without token. They’re still there in the Deep, sort of. They’re screaming mathematics that used to be people. I’ve heard them. I try very hard not to think about what I heard.
The Lacuna is not uniform. It exists in what I can only describe as concentric zones of increasing ontological instability, like ripples spreading from where a stone broke through ice.
At fifteen miles from the center, you encounter what appears at first to be nothing more than a shimmer in the air, like heat distortion on a summer road. This is where narrative space ends and non-narrative space begins. This is where the Boundary-entity manifests, though “manifests” is perhaps the wrong word for something that exists as pure separation.
Crossing the Boundary feels like passing through a membrane: there is slight resistance, a sense of pressure, and then a subtle pop as you pass through. On the other side, the world is immediately, subtly wrong. The temperature is exactly sixty-two degrees regardless of season or time of day. There is no wind; air currents simply stop at the membrane. Vegetation ends with surgical precision: grass stops mid-blade, trees are severed cleanly through their trunks.
Some plants near the edge exhibit what I call “frozen growth.” A rosebush caught mid-bloom three centuries ago, petals neither opening further nor falling. The colors are still vibrant. The thorns are still sharp. But the plant exists in a single eternal moment, unable to progress forward in time because time itself functions differently here.
Animal life will not cross the Boundary. Birds veer away midflight. Insects stop at the invisible line as though encountering a wall. I once observed a deer approach the membrane, extend its muzzle toward it, then leap backward as though burned, though there was no visible cause for alarm.
And then there is the Boundary itself: the entity, the person, the concept made manifest. You cannot see them. There is no body to observe, no face to recognize. Instead you experience the overwhelming sense of HERE and NOT-HERE being defined. Colors are slightly different on each side of an invisible line. You feel observed, but not by eyes: observed by the concept of edges itself, by the space between things, by Division contemplating you from every angle simultaneously.
Kael’s annotation: The Boundary is always there. Always watching, if “watching” is even the right word. You can’t see them but you feel them in your bones. Sometimes I think they’re in agony. Sometimes I think they ARE agony, stretched across ninety-four miles of perimeter, holding back the void for eternity. I apologize every time I cross. I say it out loud: “I’m sorry. Thank you. I’ll be quick.” I don’t know if they hear me. But once, just once, I felt something like acknowledgment. Not words or thoughts. Just… awareness meeting awareness. I cried for an hour after. Still don’t know why.
From ten to fifteen miles from the center lies what Divers call the Fringe, or more commonly, Salvage Territory. This is where most commercial diving takes place, where the risks are manageable and the rewards substantial.
Magic still functions here, though it requires more concentration than usual. Practitioners report that spells feel “slippery,” as though reality is less willing to accept their invocations. Rituals that normally complete in minutes may take hours. Some days magic works perfectly; other days it fails entirely without apparent cause.
Memory begins to waver at the Fringe. You lose track of how long you’ve been there; your internal sense of time becomes unreliable. Minutes feel like hours or vice versa. You might forget why you came, then remember suddenly. Small details slip away: the color of your companion’s cloak, whether you ate breakfast, which direction is north.
The ruins of the old city are partially intact here, though “intact” is a generous description. Buildings lean at impossible angles, held up by nothing. Staircases lead to doorways that open onto solid walls. Architecture defies sense: windows on the inside of rooms, doors that are simultaneously entrance and exit to the same space.
Strange growths appear throughout the Outer Zone. Crystalline formations erupt from the ground, growing in geometric patterns that hurt to look at directly. Plants sprout with too many leaves, or too few, or leaves that exist in states between present and absent. I once observed a tree that bore fruit and blossoms simultaneously, while also being completely barren, all three states coexisting without contradiction.
Light behaves oddly. Shadows point in directions inconsistent with the sun’s position. Reflections in puddles show scenes that don’t match their surroundings. Twice I have seen my own reflection move independently of my actions, though my assistant insists this was simply degradation-induced hallucination.
Gravity occasionally varies without warning. You might feel heavier in certain areas, lighter in others, with no visible cause. I have documented locations where dropped objects fall sideways, or upward, or simply hover uncertainly before deciding on a direction.
The entities here are what Kael calls “rendering errors”: things that exist incompletely, sketches rather than finished beings. Sketch-Things slide along surfaces as pure two-dimensional shadows, unable to interact properly with the three-dimensional world. Echo-Beasts exist primarily as sound; you hear them approach but never see them, and they leave no footprints despite the unmistakable noise of their passage. Fragment-Folk are perhaps the most unsettling: humanoid shapes composed of disconnected parts that drift near each other but never quite touch, moving in stuttering fashion as though existence itself keeps forgetting them.
Kael’s annotation: The Fragment-Folk are sad. They watch us like they’re trying to remember how to be people. One followed me for nearly an hour once, mimicking my movements with its disconnected limbs. It never threatened me, never attacked. Just… copied. Trying to learn. I think it used to be human. I think it’s trying desperately to remember what that means. I didn’t have the heart to drive it away. Eventually it just stopped following and stood there, watching me leave. I still think about it sometimes.
The salvage value in the Outer Zone is substantial. Void-touched metals can be found in the ruins, along with crystallized concept-shards that scholars pay fortunes for. Pre-Breaking artifacts occasionally surface: books, tools, personal effects of the vanished mages. These last are dangerous; I know of three collectors who have gone mad from reading recovered texts.
From five to ten miles from the center, the Lacuna’s effects intensify dramatically. This is where casual exploration ends and only licensed, experienced Divers venture. This is where people begin to lose themselves.
Magic functions erratically or not at all. A spell might work perfectly, fail completely, or produce entirely unexpected results. I have heard accounts of healing rituals that aged the target ten years, fire invocations that produced ice, protective wards that invited in what they should have repelled. Mages who enter the Middle Zones often refuse to cast anything at all, knowing that the unpredictability makes every invocation potentially lethal.
Memory becomes actively unreliable. You remember events that never occurred. You forget things that did. Worse, you cannot tell which memories are real and which are false; they all feel equally genuine. Divers report remembering childhoods they never had, recalling dead friends as living, forgetting the names and faces of people they love. These false memories don’t fade upon leaving the zone; they persist, competing with true memories for authenticity.
Identity itself begins to flicker. You forget who you are, then remember, then forget different aspects. You might recall your name but not your profession, or vice versa. Some Divers report experiencing themselves from outside their own bodies, as though observing a stranger. Others describe moments of being absolutely certain they are someone else entirely, complete with that person’s memories and personality.
Causality becomes negotiable in the Middle Zones. Effects sometimes precede their causes. You might feel pain before the wound appears, or see the result of your action before you perform it. The world operates on narrative logic that has come untethered from sequence and sense.
The architecture here has transcended mere impossibility and achieved something approaching madness. Staircases that ascend and descend simultaneously. Doors that are also windows. Rooms that are smaller on the inside than the outside, or vastly larger, or both. I have walked through corridors that bent in directions that have no names, turned corners that somehow led me back to where I started while also taking me somewhere completely different.
Colors exist here that have no names because the human mind has never encountered them before. They are not merely unfamiliar shades; they are hues that should not be possible, that operate on principles of light and perception foreign to our reality. Looking at them directly causes intense headaches and temporary blindness. Even recalling them now makes my temples throb.
The entities of the Middle Zones are genuinely dangerous, and I must be frank: several of my informants died providing the information I relay here.
The Hollow Men are voids in human shape, absences that walk. They are not darkness or shadow; they are actual nothing, gaps in reality that have learned to move. Looking at them too long causes memory loss; you forget what you’re seeing, then forget why you’re running. Their touch brings immediate, terrible cold and the erasure of recent memories. One Diver described it as “having hours of my life stolen, not just forgotten but removed from existence, so that the time I spent conscious simply never was.”
Geometry-Eaters are formless things that consume spatial relationships rather than matter. They do not eat the distance between objects, they eat the concept of that distance existing. Areas where they have fed become wrong in ways that are difficult to articulate. A room might be both impossibly tiny and vastly expansive. The exit might be simultaneously visible and unreachable. Divers caught in these spaces report walking for hours toward a door they can clearly see without ever getting closer.
Name-Thieves are perhaps the most insidious. They are nearly invisible, shapeless entities that steal abstract concepts through touch. They can take your name, your sense of direction, your ability to speak a language, even fundamental concepts like “hunger” or “fear.” The theft is not immediate; you don’t notice at first. Only later do you discover you can no longer access the stolen concept. Sometimes the theft is temporary and the concept returns within days. Sometimes it never does. A Diver named Marcus lost the concept of “home” to a Name-Thief. He still remembers his house, his family, his life; but the feeling of belonging, the sense of having a place that is fundamentally his, is simply gone. He describes it as “remembering what home should mean but being unable to feel it.”
The Reaching Hands emerge from nowhere: from air, from ground, from shadow. Disembodied limbs, sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes unidentifiable. They grasp at anything nearby. Their touch causes what I can only describe as ontological degradation: you become less real, less solid, less certain of your own existence. Some of the Hands plead silently as they reach, fingers forming words in sign language that spell out HELP, REMEMBER, LOST. This suggests they were once attached to someone. The implications are deeply troubling.
Kael’s annotation: I’ve been to the Middle Zones more times than I can count. Literally can’t count them; my memory of individual dives has started to blur together. Sometimes I remember events from dives that other people tell me never happened. Sometimes I forget dives that definitely did happen, only to remember them weeks later.
A Geometry-Eater got my crew once. We were walking in tight formation, could see each other clearly, calling out to maintain contact. Then something ate the space between us. Suddenly I could still see my partners but we were impossibly far apart. No matter how we walked, we couldn’t get closer. We shouted ourselves hoarse. After three hours we gave up and individually found our way out.
We all survived, but when we reunited outside the Lacuna, we couldn’t agree on what had happened. I remember it one way, they remember it completely differently. The Eater didn’t just consume our distance, it devoured our shared experience. We no longer have a common past.
From zero to five miles from the center lies what we call simply the Deep, or sometimes the True Void. Very few Divers have entered it. Fewer have returned. None have returned unchanged.
Magic does not function in the Deep because there is no framework for the Weaver to execute. The invocations find no purchase. Rituals dissolve mid-performance. It is not that magic is suppressed, it is that the fundamental structure magic relies upon does not exist there.
Memory does not persist. You forget continuously, instantly, completely. You cannot build a coherent understanding of where you are because each moment erases the last. You cannot maintain your identity because identity requires continuity of memory. You become a series of disconnected instants, each believing itself to be the first moment of awareness.
Causality does not exist. Actions do not lead to consequences. Time does not flow in any recognizable direction. Sequence itself is meaningless. The concepts of “before” and “after” cease to have referents.
“Environment” is the wrong word for the Deep because it suggests there is a “place” to be. There are spaces that contradict themselves. Matter that exists in impossible states. Sensory input that has no source: you smell colors, taste geometry, hear textures. The categories by which we organize experience break down entirely.
I cannot adequately describe what exists in the Deep because I have not been there; I approached close enough to see it and fled immediately, overwhelmed by existential terror. Those who have entered and somehow returned describe things I struggle to transcribe meaningfully.
Fragment, a Diver who spent what her timepiece measured as six minutes in the Deep, though she remembers six hours and outside observers insist she was gone for six seconds, now lives at the Outer Boundary, halfway between narrative and non-narrative space. I have interviewed her multiple times. Her testimony is always unsettling and never quite consistent.
“I am six and sixty and none,” she told me during our first meeting, speaking in three voices simultaneously, each saying different words that somehow combined into coherent meaning. “I was there when they broke it breaking broke them breaking all. The center is everywhere edge. You ask what’s Deep? Deep is shallow is nothing is ALL. They’re still casting the spell that unmade them making it still.”
When I asked if she meant the original mages still existed in some form, she looked at me with eyes that seemed to perceive in more directions than exist, and said: “Exist existed existence. They are mathematics that scream. They wanted to touch the Weaver’s threads and they did and the threads touched back and now they are threads, woven into the absence, present through being absent, calling out in equations.”
Fragment cannot maintain a consistent appearance. Her features shift subtly when you’re not looking directly at her, sometimes even when you are. She remembers events from the Breaking itself despite being born long after it occurred. She carries salvage from the Deep that should not be able to exist, objects that are both present and absent, solid and intangible, that cause observers to question their own perception.
Other Deep survivors are less coherent. One man, who gave his name as River and then Marcus and then refused to provide a name at all, lost the concept of “forward.” He can only move sideways or backward. Another woman remembers being three different people who never existed and occasionally forgets that she ever was herself. A third individual simply dissolved into concept over the course of several weeks after returning, becoming progressively more transparent until witnesses could no longer confirm he was present even when he insisted he was.
The entities of the Deep, if “entities” is even applicable, are incomprehensible. Fragment describes Bodies-Made-of-Absence, humanoid shapes that are not merely empty but actively nothing. The Former-Mages, if they can still be called such, exist as thinking without thinkers, awareness distributed across conceptual space, still trying to complete their ritual three hundred years later. She speaks of the Attention, which is not a creature but an awareness, the Deep itself noticing you, which causes immediate and catastrophic identity fragmentation.
Kael’s annotation: I’ve been to the edge of the Deep. Not in it, just close enough to see it. That was enough. More than enough.
Imagine looking at a hole in reality and the hole looks back and you realize the hole is also you and also your mother and also the concept of holes and none of those things simultaneously and all of them forever. Imagine forgetting what “you” means while still being it. Imagine your name becoming a question you cannot answer.
I turned and ran faster than I’ve ever moved in my life. Didn’t stop until I was past the Middle Zones and could remember my own name consistently.
People ask what’s at the center of the Lacuna. The answer is: nothing. Everything. The mages. God’s discarded draft. Pick whichever answer helps you sleep. They’re all true and all wrong.
Spending time near or within the Lacuna causes measurable psychological and ontological damage that worsens with exposure. We call this semiotic degradation: the erosion of meaning, identity, and narrative coherence.
The stages progress predictably, though individual variation exists. I have documented hundreds of cases and established the following general progression.
After one to four hours of exposure to the Outer Zone, most individuals begin experiencing difficulty with specific recall. What color was that door? Did I eat breakfast this morning? Was that yesterday or last week? Competing memories arise; you remember both having done something and not having done it, with both memories feeling equally authentic.
Temporal confusion accompanies this. The sequence of events becomes uncertain. You cannot reliably place memories in chronological order. Cause and effect remain clear, but when things happened becomes negotiable.
Minor disorientation is common. You might forget which direction you came from, which path leads back to camp, whether you’ve been to a particular location before.
Recovery from Stage One is usually complete within a day of leaving the Lacuna. Rest, familiar surroundings, and conversation with people who know you well help stabilize memories. The false memories fade or become recognizable as false, though some uncertainty may linger.
After one to four hours in the Middle Zones, or eight or more hours of accumulated Outer Zone exposure, degradation intensifies significantly. The self becomes unstable.
You forget your own name temporarily. Not forever, it comes back, but for seconds or minutes you simply cannot access it. You know you have a name, know it’s important, but cannot recall what it is.
Biographical facts become uncertain. Are you married? Do you have siblings? Where were you born? You remember multiple contradictory answers and cannot determine which is true. Sometimes all of them feel true. Sometimes none of them do.
A sense of dissociation accompanies this stage. You feel as though you are observing yourself from outside, watching a stranger pilot your body. Your own thoughts feel foreign, as though someone else is thinking them through you.
Contradictory self-memories emerge. You remember always having been a soldier. You also remember never having fought in your life. You remember loving someone deeply. You also remember never having met them. Both sets of memories are complete, detailed, and feel entirely genuine.
Recovery from Stage Two is partial at best. Most memory stabilizes within one to two weeks, but some contradictions persist indefinitely. Identity anchoring helps; surrounding yourself with photographs, journals, objects from before exposure. Social reinforcement is crucial; friends and family must repeatedly confirm your history until it feels real again. Professional therapeutic assistance is recommended, though not always successful.
After any exposure to the Deep, or extended exposure to the Middle Zones, degradation becomes permanent and catastrophic. The self cannot maintain coherence.
You are multiple contradictory people simultaneously. Not metaphorically, literally. You possess complete, detailed histories of being different individuals with different pasts, personalities, and memories. All of them feel equally true because from your perspective, all of them are true.
Memory insertion intensifies. You remember things that provably never happened with perfect clarity. You remember conversations with people who never existed, visiting places that aren’t real, experiencing events that conflict with documented history.
Your perception of reality diverges from consensus. You see things others don’t see, fail to see things others do. Colors appear different to you. Sounds have wrong sources. The world operates on rules that no one else acknowledges.
Ontological uncertainty sets in. You cannot be certain you are real. Your own existence becomes a question you cannot definitively answer. Some victims describe feeling “translucent,” as though they’re fading from reality while still somehow being present.
There is rarely full recovery from Stage Three. The damage is permanent. Ongoing therapeutic support and reality-anchoring rituals can help you function, but you will never be entirely whole again. Many Stage Three sufferers end up living at the Boundary, unable to fully exist in either narrative space or the void, belonging to neither and to both.
After extended exposure to the Deep, degradation reaches its terminal phase. Personhood cannot be maintained.
You lose all coherent sense of self. The question “who am I” has no stable answer. You might be multiple people, or fragments of people, or concepts that were once people, or nothing at all wearing a shape.
Others begin to forget you even when you’re present. You become “translucent” to reality. People look through you, forget you were in the room, cannot quite focus on you even when trying.
Gradually you un-compile from narrative space. The Weaver stops maintaining your existence as a coherent entity. You flicker in and out of being, present and absent simultaneously, until finally you’re simply gone in any meaningful sense.
There is no recovery from Stage Four. The process is terminal. Some victims request mercy killing before dissolution completes. Others walk into the Deep voluntarily, preferring to become part of it entirely rather than fade piecemeal.
Kael’s annotation: I’m at Stage Two, trending toward Three. I can feel it happening. Some days I can’t remember my sister’s name. Some days I remember a brother I never had. Some days I wake up and have to check my journals to figure out which memories are real, and even then I’m not always sure.
Valerius keeps telling me to stop diving. He’s right. But part of me is already in there, and the part out here is trying to rejoin it. Or maybe that’s just degradation talking, giving me false justification. I don’t know anymore.
What I do know: every Diver knows the cost. We know what we’re trading. We do it anyway. Maybe that makes us brave. Maybe it makes us insane. Maybe there’s no difference.
Despite the dangers, or perhaps because of them, the Lacuna supports an entire economy built on salvage and risk.
Void-iron is the primary export, the material that makes diving economically viable. It appears as dark metal, nearly black, with rainbow iridescence when caught in certain light. The material itself is unremarkable in most respects; no stronger than steel, no lighter, no more durable. What makes it valuable is its relationship to magic.
Void-iron disrupts magical workings completely. It does not absorb them or deflect them; it simply creates zones where magic cannot function. A sword edged with void-iron cuts through magical defenses as though they don’t exist because in its immediate presence, they don’t. Armor incorporating void-iron panels provides protection from spell-work that no amount of conventional enchantment can match. Prison bars forged from void-iron hold mages more securely than any ward.
The applications extend beyond the military. Surgeons use void-iron scalpels to excise magical afflictions. Researchers employ it to create controlled environments where they can study magic’s absence. Wealthy merchants commission void-iron locks for their vaults, knowing that no amount of spell-work will bypass them.
The nobility pays extraordinary sums for void-iron goods because in our current political structure, where mage aristocracy rules much of the known world, void-iron is the great equalizer. A peasant with a void-iron dagger can challenge a court wizard and stand a genuine chance. This fact has made void-iron the subject of intense legal restrictions, fierce black markets, and political maneuvering at the highest levels.
Reality-glass is rarer and more expensive. These crystallized concept-shards form when abstract ideas achieve temporary solidity within the Lacuna, then are extracted before they dissolve back into void. They appear as impossibly clear crystal, absolutely transparent, yet somehow visible because they seem to contain colors that shift as you observe them.
Looking through reality-glass shows the “true” properties of things: lies become visible as distortions, hidden emotions color the faces of those observed, the essential nature of objects reveals itself. Some scholars use them to trap small concepts inside: anger, warmth, a specific memory, preserving these abstracts in physical form for study. The glass is extraordinarily fragile outside the Lacuna, however, as though it belongs properly to void-space and resents being forced into narrative reality.
Entity remains vary wildly in property and value depending on what was slain. Hollow-Man dust causes temporary invisibility when inhaled, though the side effect of short-term memory loss limits its appeal. Fragment-Folk pieces find use in identity-shuffling rituals, though I cannot elaborate on these illegal practices. Geometry-Eater residue allows architects to create buildings with impossible interior spaces, though such structures have an unsettling quality that prevents them from ever feeling like home.
Pre-Breaking artifacts are historically valuable but often dangerously corrupted. Books, tools, personal effects of the vanished mages, all offer glimpses into the lost civilization and their catastrophic final working. Some retain powerful enchantments, which makes them sought-after despite the risks. I know personally of three collectors who went mad from reading recovered texts, their minds unable to process magical theory that was never meant to be completed.
Becoming a licensed Diver requires passing through the Threshold Guild’s certification process, which includes basic training in Lacuna navigation, entity identification and avoidance, memory anchoring techniques, and emergency egress procedures. Unlicensed diving occurs frequently despite being illegal; the potential profits tempt many beyond caution.
Mental stability evaluations are mandatory for licensure, though this requirement is often circumvented through bribery or simple desperation. The Guild knows that those most likely to repeatedly dive are often those already showing signs of degradation, and economic necessity outweighs safety concerns more often than officials will publicly admit.
Divers typically progress through predictable career stages. Rookies with fewer than five dives work only the Outer Zone under supervision, recovering low-value salvage while learning to recognize danger signs. Mortality at this stage is approximately forty percent; many discover too late that they lack the particular kind of courage or madness required for this work.
Journeyman Divers with five to twenty expeditions work the Outer Zone solo and venture into Middle Zones with partners. They begin developing personal techniques for navigation and entity avoidance. Degradation signs become evident: memory gaps, occasional disorientation, the first hints of identity flicker. Mortality drops to twenty percent as skill compensates for increased risk.
Veterans who have survived twenty to fifty dives are experienced enough to work all zones except the Deep, recovering high-value salvage and teaching newer Divers. Significant degradation is evident in all veterans; it becomes a mark of experience. Their mortality rate in any given dive is lower, around ten percent, but permanent psychological damage is virtually guaranteed.
Deep Divers are those rare, arguably insane individuals willing to approach or enter the innermost zones. They command premium prices for unique salvage, but sixty percent eventually dissolve into the Lacuna entirely, unable to maintain enough coherence to return.
Kael’s annotation: I’m at thirty-four dives now, transitioning from Journeyman to Veteran territory. The money is extraordinary. I’ve made enough to retire comfortably, establish my family securely, never work again if I choose.
But I keep going back. Every time I say it’s the last dive. Every time I find myself at the Boundary again within a month, apologizing to Division-made-manifest, crossing through the membrane into that wrong, cold, hungry place.
Why? Maybe it’s addiction. Maybe it’s the money, though I have enough now. Maybe part of me is already in there, has been since my first dive, and I’m just trying to complete myself. Valerius thinks I’m being metaphorical when I say that. I’m not. I genuinely don’t know whether I’m a Diver who’s becoming Lacuna-touched or a fragment of the Lacuna that still remembers how to be human.
Divers are simultaneously respected, pitied, feared, and avoided by conventional society.
Respected for their bravery and skill, for being willing to risk dissolution to provide materials that no other source offers. The void-iron that makes rebellion against mage aristocracy possible comes directly from Diver work, and many see them as heroes of a quiet resistance.
Pitied for what they’re losing. Everyone knows what happens to Divers. Everyone sees the degradation progress. Watching someone slowly forget themselves, become fragmented and uncertain, is heartbreaking even when they insist they’ve made their peace with it.
Feared because they’re becoming something other than fully human, something touched by the void, something that doesn’t entirely belong to consensus reality anymore. Their presence makes others uncomfortable in ways that are difficult to articulate. You cannot quite trust your memory of conversations with them. Time feels strange around them. They remind you that identity is less solid than you’d like to believe.
Avoided for all these reasons combined. Divers tend to socialize primarily with other Divers, the only people who truly understand what they’re experiencing. Many end up living at the Boundary between expeditions, halfway between the world and the wound, unable to feel comfortable in either.
Retired Diver Grandmother Stone, who completed forty-three dives over twenty years before stopping, described her current life thus: “I made enough money to set up my children well, buy a home, start a business. I retired at forty-five, which most Divers never manage. But I can’t remember my children’s names sometimes. I forget my husband died. I remember conversations that never happened and forget ones that did. When I look in the mirror, sometimes I don’t recognize myself. Was it worth it? Ask me tomorrow. I might give you a different answer. I might give you three different answers and believe all of them.”
At the perimeter of the Lacuna exists something that defies conventional categorization. It is simultaneously a person, a god, a concept, and a wound. We call it the Boundary, though that name describes function more than essence.
Approximately two hundred and fifty years ago (chronology becomes uncertain when discussing anything connected to the Lacuna) a philosopher-mage whose name has been lost to history undertook a meditation on the nature of separation. Not merely physical division, but the fundamental principle of Division itself. Here versus there. Inside versus outside. Being versus non-being. Self versus other. The essential whatness of boundaries, of edges, of the space where one thing ends and another begins.
According to fragmentary records I have recovered from various sources, this mage achieved something that few philosophers ever manage: genuine understanding of the Form they contemplated. They perceived Division-in-itself, that Platonic ideal that exists independent of any particular instance of separation. They understood it so completely, so perfectly, that they became entangled with it.
The transformation was not gradual. When you achieve that depth of understanding, the Form notices you in return. Division itself looked back at the one who had finally, truly seen it. And in that moment of mutual recognition, the mage ceased to be a token of humanity and became instead a token of Division.
They went to the Lacuna, whether drawn by the understanding or by deliberate choice we cannot know. At the Outer Boundary, where narrative space meets non-narrative void, they underwent the final transformation. The retrocausal consistency rewrote itself. They had always been Division. They had never been anything else. The human who had contemplated the Form was retroactively unmade, and what remained was separation given consciousness, edges given purpose, boundaries made manifest.
The Boundary exists at every point of the Lacuna’s perimeter simultaneously. They are not in multiple places, they ARE multiple places, or rather they are the single concept of perimeter extended across ninety-four miles of circumference. You cannot point to where they are because they are not located anywhere; they are the location itself, the definition of here-and-not-here.
They have no visible form. There is no body to observe, no face to recognize, no physical presence to detect. Instead you experience them as the sudden, overwhelming awareness that things are divided. You feel the membrane between narrative space and void become tangible in a way that has nothing to do with physical touch. Colors shift subtly on either side of an invisible line. The air tastes different though nothing has changed. You are being observed, but not by eyes; observed by the principle of separation itself, which is both examining you and being you simultaneously because you too are an instance of division, a self separated from not-self.
Some Divers report feeling “permission” when crossing; a sense that they have been acknowledged and may pass. Others encounter resistance, finding themselves physically pushed back, unable to proceed no matter how they struggle. A few experience complete indifference, crossing as easily as one might step through a doorway. There is no discernible pattern to these responses. I have interviewed dozens of Divers seeking common factors and found none. The Boundary accepts or rejects according to criteria we cannot determine, or perhaps according to no criteria at all, responding moment by moment to factors we cannot perceive.
The question that haunts everyone who studies the Boundary is this: do they still think? Is there consciousness in there, trapped and aware, or has the person been so thoroughly subsumed by the concept that nothing resembling human thought remains?
We cannot know. They do not communicate in any language we understand. Sometimes Divers report hearing whispers in no particular tongue, sounds that bypass language entirely and communicate directly the concept of SEPARATION, of HERE-NOT-HERE, of EDGE. Whether these whispers are deliberate communication or simply the sound that Division makes when it exists is impossible to determine.
What makes the Boundary truly terrible is not their existence but their function. They are, in the most literal sense, load-bearing. The Lacuna exists as a wound where narrative consistency failed. Something must maintain the division between narrative space and the void, or that wound will spread. The Boundary is that something.
Every moment of every day, for two and a half centuries, they have been stretched across ninety-four miles of perimeter, holding back the encroachment of non-being. If they are conscious, and I suspect they are, in some way that consciousness is inadequate to describe, then they have experienced two hundred and fifty years of being nothing but edges, nothing but the space between things, nothing but the eternal work of keeping the wound from widening.
Imagine your entire existence dedicated to a single function: separation. You are not a person who maintains boundaries; you ARE the boundary itself. Every crossing of that boundary, every Diver who passes through you, is a breach of your fundamental nature. Does it hurt? Does it feel like violation? Or have you become so thoroughly what you are that individual crossings barely register, the way a human hardly notices individual heartbeats?
We depend utterly on their continued existence. If the Boundary were to fail, whether through dissolution, exhaustion, or simple cessation, the Lacuna would spread unchecked. Non-narrative void would pour into narrative space. The Weaver would attempt to compile it and fail, creating more wounds, more gaps, more spreading absence. Conservative projections suggest that within a decade the entire northern territories would be consumed. Within a generation, perhaps half the known world.
Thousands of lives depend on the suffering, if it is suffering, of a single entity who has been holding back the void for longer than most nations have existed.
Kael’s annotation: I talk to them every single time I cross. Out loud, regardless of who hears me, regardless of how foolish it makes me look. I say the same words: “I’m sorry. Thank you. I’ll try to be quick.”
I don’t know if they hear. I don’t know if they understand human language anymore, or if they ever did after their transformation. I don’t know if my words mean anything at all to something that exists as pure Division.
But once, just once, on my seventeenth dive, I felt something like response. Not words. Not thoughts. Just awareness meeting awareness. Like standing in a dark room and suddenly knowing someone else is present. It lasted perhaps half a second.
I stood there at the Boundary for five minutes afterward, crying like a child, and I still don’t understand why. Grief for them? Gratitude that they acknowledged me? Terror at the contact? All of these? None?
They’re holding back the void. Alone. Forever. The least I can do is say thank you. Even if they can’t hear me. Especially if they can’t.
Several philosophers and theologians have wrestled with the implications of the Boundary’s existence, and their conclusions are uniformly troubling.
If the Boundary is suffering, then we are complicit in perpetuating that suffering every time we benefit from the Lacuna’s containment, which is to say, constantly, simply by continuing to exist in a world that hasn’t been consumed by void. We cannot stop the suffering without destroying ourselves. We are trapped by necessity into becoming torturers.
If the Boundary is not suffering, if they have achieved something beyond suffering through becoming purely their function, then we face a different horror: the knowledge that complete subsumption by a Form is possible. Any of us who contemplate deeply enough might cease to be human and become instead a tool of ontological maintenance, a cog in reality’s machinery, potentially content but fundamentally lost.
And if the Boundary is something in between, partially aware, partially function, flickering between person and principle, then perhaps their state is worse than either alternative. To sometimes remember being human while being unable to be human. To experience both the satisfaction of perfect purpose and the grief of lost personhood. To exist in perpetual contradiction.
We cannot help them. Any intervention risks destabilizing the very division they maintain. We cannot even properly honor them, because we don’t know if they want honor or if such concepts still have meaning to an entity made of edges.
So we cross through them, again and again, and we apologize or we don’t, and we take our salvage and we live our lives, and we try not to think too carefully about the fact that our continued existence is purchased with someone else’s eternal transformation into a principle they cannot escape.
In the absence of complete understanding, scholars have proposed various explanations for what the Lacuna fundamentally is. None are entirely satisfactory. All contain uncomfortable implications.
The most prevalent explanation treats the Lacuna as exactly what it appears to be: an injury to reality itself. The world, in this view, is something like a vast tapestry that the Weaver maintains. The Ascendant Circle’s catastrophic ritual tore that tapestry, creating a gap where the pattern no longer holds.
This theory aligns well with observed phenomena. The concentric zones of increasing instability match what one would expect from a wound: maximum damage at the center, gradually healing as you move outward, though “healing” is perhaps too optimistic given that the Lacuna has been stable in size for three centuries.
The Boundary entity fits this model as well. Wounds require edges to prevent them from widening. The Boundary is that edge, whether naturally emergent or deliberately positioned. Just as scab tissue holds a physical wound closed, the Boundary maintains the division between intact narrative and damaged void.
The primary weakness of this theory is that it explains the Lacuna without explaining what was wounded. What is reality made of, such that it can be torn? What lies beneath the narrative surface that the mages exposed? The theory describes without illuminating.
Some scholars argue that the Lacuna is not a wound but an erasure; a section of reality that was deliberately unwritten by the Weaver in response to the mages’ violation. In this view, the Ascendant Circle attempted something so fundamentally transgressive that reality itself deleted them and everything around them as a form of correction.
This would explain the complete absence of the mages themselves, who did not die so much as cease to have ever existed in a coherent form. It would explain why the Lacuna feels like absence rather than damage; it’s not a hole torn in the tapestry but a section where the threads were carefully removed.
The void-entities that emerge would be, in this interpretation, attempts by the Weaver to compile things into the erased space, efforts that fail because the fundamental framework for their existence has been removed. They are beings that reality is trying to write into a section where the narrative structure no longer functions.
The weakness here is theological. It suggests the Weaver acts with deliberate intention, possibly even moral judgment, rather than functioning as pure ontological maintenance. This contradicts most of what we understand about how reality operates. The Weaver maintains consistency; she does not punish transgression.
A minority of scholars, mostly those studying the recovered fragments of the Ascendant Circle’s research, propose that the Lacuna represents successful rather than failed magic. The mages sought to access what they called “the Substrate”, the fundamental layer beneath narrative reality, the raw material from which the Weaver constructs being.
In this interpretation, the crater is not damage but revelation. The mages tore away the narrative surface and exposed what lies underneath. The void is not absence but presence of something more fundamental than narrative, something our minds cannot process because we evolved to understand only the compiled surface reality.
The entities would thus be things that exist at the Substrate level, incomprehensible to us not because they’re incomplete but because they’re too complete, too fundamental, operating on principles that precede the narrative structures we use to understand existence.
The mages themselves achieved their goal in this theory, they accessed the Substrate, they touched it directly. The cost was dispersal into that more fundamental layer, existing now as principles rather than persons, mathematics rather than minds.
This theory is deeply uncomfortable because it suggests the horror of the Lacuna is not corruption or damage but truth. We are disturbed by it not because it’s wrong but because it’s too right, too fundamental, too real. The narrative reality we inhabit is a comfortable illusion constructed over something vast and terrible and true.
Kael’s annotation: I don’t know which theory is right. I don’t think it matters practically. What I do know is this: when you’re in the Deep, close to the center, you feel something looking back. Not entities. Not the Former-Mages. Something underneath all of that.
It feels old. It feels vast. It doesn’t feel malicious or benevolent. It just feels like it IS, and we are very, very small things happening on its surface.
Maybe that’s the Substrate. Maybe that’s what the mages found. Maybe they’re still down there, trying to understand it, and the trying is what they are now.
I don’t want to understand it. I want to take my salvage and leave and remember my own name.
A more recent and controversial theory proposes that the Lacuna is not a static phenomenon but an evolving ecosystem of its own. The void-entities, in this view, are not errors or intruders but native life adapted to non-narrative existence.
Proponents point to the apparent organization of entities by zone, suggesting ecological niches. The Sketch-Things that can barely exist in the Outer Zone. The more coherent hunters of the Middle Zones. The incomprehensible dwellers of the Deep. This looks, they argue, not like random corruption but like an actual biological gradient from edge to center.
Furthermore, the Lacuna appears to be slowly expanding, approximately three inches per year by my measurements, though other scholars dispute this. If it’s growing, perhaps it’s not a wound but an invasion, a different form of reality attempting to colonize narrative space, creating appropriate inhabitants as it goes.
The Boundary entity would thus be not a person transformed but a defense mechanism, possibly emergent from reality itself rather than from any individual’s transformation. The Lacuna pushes outward; the Boundary pushes back. The stability we observe is not healing but equilibrium between two opposed forces.
I find this theory speculative to the point of fantasy, though I cannot entirely disprove it. The growth rate is so slow as to be nearly unmeasurable, and could easily be attributed to instrumental error. The entity organization by zone could be coincidental or a natural result of partial compilation, of course barely-coherent entities remain near the edge where reality is strongest.
Yet it troubles me that I cannot dismiss it entirely. If the Lacuna is alive in some sense, if it wants to spread, then our entire understanding shifts from managing a stable disaster to fighting a very slow invasion. The implications for long-term survival would be dire.
Having cataloged the horrors, I feel obligated to provide whatever practical advice might keep readers alive should they ever find themselves near the Lacuna.
Certain indicators suggest you are too close to non-narrative space and should withdraw immediately.
Time distortion beyond simple confusion is serious. If hours pass in what felt like minutes, or vice versa, your connection to narrative causality is weakening. If you experience the same moment repeating, or events occurring out of sequence, retreat at once.
Visual anomalies that persist after you look away indicate perceptual degradation. Shapes that hurt to observe. Colors without names. Objects that exist in contradictory states. Your mind is struggling to compile what you’re seeing because what you’re seeing cannot be properly compiled.
Memory replacement rather than mere uncertainty is critical. If you find yourself remembering events you know are false but cannot stop believing they happened, if you recall being someone else with perfect clarity, if your past becomes negotiable, you have been exposed too long.
Identity dissolution has specific markers. Forgetting your own name for more than a few seconds. Experiencing yourself from outside your body. Feeling uncertain about whether you are real. These are medical emergencies requiring immediate evacuation.
The cessation of rhyme in Fae speech, while not directly related to Lacuna effects, often indicates the presence of reality-destabilizing phenomena nearby. Fae are more sensitive to narrative degradation than humans; if they stop rhyming, something very wrong is affecting the local ontological framework.
If you recognize degradation symptoms while still in the Lacuna, certain interventions can minimize damage if applied quickly.
Anchor yourself to identity through repetition. Say your name aloud repeatedly. List biographical facts: birthplace, family members, profession, formative memories. The act of speaking these things helps maintain their reality in your mind. This is not psychological comfort; it is ontological maintenance. You are continuously reinforcing your sense of self against the Lacuna’s destructive influence.
Maintain physical contact with another person if possible. Touch provides a reference point; there is someone else here who confirms your reality by perceiving you. Many Diver teams travel linked by rope not merely to prevent separation but to provide continuous mutual confirmation of existence.
Mark your skin with identity information if you anticipate extended exposure. Your name, your home, your purpose written in ink on your forearm. When memory fails, these external markers can pull you back. I know of Divers who tattoo their entire life story onto their bodies for exactly this reason.
Navigate by landmarks you’ve marked yourself rather than by natural features, which may shift in the Middle Zones. Chalk marks, paint, distinctive damage you personally inflicted, these are more stable than the environment itself.
If you begin to experience Stage Three symptoms: multiple contradictory identities, memory insertion, reality disagreement, do not attempt to navigate out alone. Signal for help and remain stationary. Movement while fragmenting often results in getting lost in impossible ways, walking for hours without covering any actual distance or ending up back where you started by routes that shouldn’t connect.
Once safely outside the Lacuna, immediate intervention can reduce permanent damage.
Spend time with people who knew you before exposure. Their memories of you provide an external anchor against which your own uncertain memories can be calibrated. Let them tell you stories about yourself. Let them confirm your history. Their narrative of you helps stabilize your narrative of yourself.
Maintain detailed journals and review them regularly. External records combat memory replacement. When you remember something that contradicts your journal, the journal is more likely to be accurate. Over time, this helps you distinguish true memories from inserted ones, though the process is painful; learning that your memories are false feels like learning your life is a lie.
Avoid isolation. The more you exist only within your own mind, the more difficult it becomes to maintain consensus reality. Regular social contact, conversation, interaction; these keep you tethered to shared experience.
Professional therapeutic support exists in larger cities, though it is expensive and not always effective. Memory integration therapy helps patients acknowledge contradictory recollections without fragmenting under the contradiction. Reality-anchoring techniques taught by Lanx shamans use ritual and symbol to strengthen your connection to narrative space. Neither is guaranteed to work, but both improve outcomes significantly.
For severe cases, some healers can perform identity stabilization rituals, though these are controversial and potentially dangerous. The ritual essentially overwrites uncertain aspects of your identity with more stable constructs, trading authenticity for coherence. You become more definitely yourself, but the self you become may not be the self you were. The philosophical implications trouble me deeply, though I understand why some choose this option over continued fragmentation.
For those with permanent degradation, life requires adaptation.
Maintain rigid routines. When memory and identity become unreliable, external structure provides stability. Eat at the same times. Sleep at the same times. Follow the same paths. Predictability compensates for internal chaos.
Create external memory systems. Not merely journals but comprehensive life documentation. Photographs labeled with context. Letters from friends confirming shared experiences. Contracts and receipts proving what you did and when. Build a fortress of evidence around yourself.
Accept that some questions have no answers. Was that memory real? Am I the person I think I am? Which version of my past is true? Sometimes these questions cannot be definitively resolved. Learning to function despite uncertainty is crucial. The need for certainty will drive you mad faster than the uncertainty itself.
Find community among others who understand. Many cities near the Lacuna have support groups for the degraded. Being around people who experience similar symptoms reduces the isolation and provides practical advice. They understand in ways that the unaffected never can.
Consider whether continued exposure is worth the cost. Many Divers keep diving long past the point of safety because they cannot imagine any other life. But there is no shame in stopping. There is no honor in dissolving into the void for profit. If you still possess enough self to make the choice, choosing to preserve what remains is wisdom, not cowardice.
Kael’s annotation: Everything Valerius wrote here is correct and I have ignored most of it.
I should stop. I know I should. I have the money. I have the connections to find other work. I could walk away tomorrow and live comfortably on what I’ve saved.
But there’s a part of me, maybe the degraded part, maybe the part that was always there, that doesn’t want safety. That wants understanding even if understanding costs me myself. That feels more real in the Lacuna than in the world.
That’s probably degradation talking. That’s probably the void whispering. That’s probably me justifying addiction to risk, painting it as philosophy.
Or maybe I’ve genuinely changed. Maybe I’ve seen enough of what’s underneath that I can’t pretend the surface is all there is. Maybe I’m caught between two realities and belong fully to neither.
Follow Valerius’s advice. Don’t follow my example. I’m not a guide to anything except what not to become.
The Lacuna’s existence has implications far beyond the immediately affected regions. The salvage economy, particularly the void-iron trade, has shifted political power in ways that threaten established hierarchies.
For centuries, magical ability has determined political power across most of the known world. Those born with the capacity for deep ritual work, or wealthy enough to afford extensive magical education, form an aristocratic class that rules through ontological superiority. They can reshape reality. They can enforce their will through invocation. They are, quite literally, more capable of imposing their desired outcomes on the world than those without magical training.
Void-iron disrupts this entirely.
A peasant with a void-iron knife can kill a court wizard. A merchant with void-iron locks can protect wealth that no amount of spell-work can access. A revolutionary with void-iron weapons can challenge magical defenders on equal footing. The fundamental power imbalance that undergirds the entire social structure suddenly becomes negotiable.
This is why void-iron is heavily restricted in most territories. Possession without noble license is often a capital crime. Black markets thrive on illegal sales. Political tensions simmer around questions of access and distribution. The mage aristocracy recognizes, correctly, that widespread void-iron availability would mean the end of their uncontested rule.
Some regions have already changed. The Mountain Lanxes maintain a culture where mages serve as spiritual advisors rather than rulers, and I suspect void-iron availability contributes to this stability. When magical power can be countered by anyone with access to the right materials, magic ceases to be an automatic claim to authority.
Other regions are changing now. The southern kingdoms, where mage-nobility rules most oppressively, are seeing increased revolutionary activity equipped with void-iron weapons. The aristocracy responds with increasingly draconian control measures, which further inflames resistance. The cycle accelerates. Within my lifetime, I expect to see at least two major kingdoms overthrown by void-iron-equipped rebels.
Divers are thus not merely salvagers but potential revolutionaries, whether they intend this role or not. Every gram of void-iron they extract is ammunition for those challenging established power. Every piece of equipment they sell tilts the balance slightly further from magical aristocracy toward more egalitarian structures.
Some Divers embrace this explicitly, selling selectively to resistance movements at reduced prices or even donating salvage to revolutionary causes. Others maintain strict political neutrality, selling to the highest bidder regardless of their intended use. Both approaches have ethical complications.
The question I wrestle with is whether void-iron proliferation genuinely serves justice or merely replaces one form of tyranny with another. Yes, it challenges magical aristocracy. But it also enables violence, facilitates assassination, makes warfare deadlier. A blade that ignores magical defense is still a blade. The capacity for harm increases even as the power imbalance decreases.
Furthermore, the long-term effects of widespread void-iron presence remain unclear. Does non-narrative matter, distributed throughout narrative space in increasing quantities, have cumulative effects? Does it weaken reality’s stability? I have no evidence of this, but neither can I dismiss the possibility. We may be slowly poisoning our world in exchange for short-term political advantage.
Another concern that keeps me wakeful is whether the Boundary entity can maintain containment indefinitely. They have held for two hundred and fifty years, but eternity is considerably longer.
Every Diver who crosses the Boundary is a breach, a momentary failure of the division they maintain. Thousands of crossings per year, accumulated over centuries. Does this weaken them? Are they eroding under the constant pressure, the way stone erodes under water given enough time?
The Lacuna’s expansion, slow as it is, suggests the Boundary is not entirely successful. Three inches per year is nearly imperceptible, but over decades it becomes significant. Over centuries, it becomes critical. If the expansion continues at current rates, in ten thousand years the Lacuna will have doubled in size. In a hundred thousand years, it will consume the continent.
These are timeframes beyond human concern under normal circumstances, but circumstances are not normal. If the expansion is accelerating, and I cannot confirm that it is, but neither can I confirm that it isn’t, then catastrophe arrives much sooner.
We have no contingency plans. No methods for containing further expansion. No way to strengthen the Boundary. We are entirely dependent on a single transformed individual maintaining a function they may not be able to sustain forever, and we have no alternatives.
This is, to my mind, the greatest threat the Lacuna poses. Not the entities. Not the degradation. Not even the political upheaval around void-iron. The slowly advancing possibility that one day the Boundary will fail, and the void will pour out unchecked, and we will have no response except to flee and hope we can outrun it.
After three years of research, countless interviews, personal expeditions that cost me more than I care to articulate, I find myself unable to provide a satisfying summary. The Lacuna resists conclusion. It is absence that asserts itself. A wound that remains open. A question that cannot be answered.
What I can say with certainty is this: the Lacuna is permanent. It will not heal naturally. The mages who created it succeeded in breaking something fundamental, and what is broken cannot be unbroken without understanding how to perform unbreaking, which we manifestly do not.
We must therefore learn to live adjacent to void. To accept that part of our world has failed. To navigate the implications with wisdom and caution. To honor those who maintain the barriers we depend on, whether they can hear our gratitude or not.
The Divers who risk themselves extracting salvage deserve respect for their sacrifice, even as we acknowledge that their work may have unintended consequences. The Boundary entity deserves recognition for maintaining containment, even if we cannot help them. The victims of degradation deserve compassion rather than fear, even when their presence unsettles us.
And those of us who study the Lacuna must continue to document, to understand, to warn. Not because understanding will solve the problem (it will not) but because ignorance in the face of such danger is unacceptable. We must know what we face, even if we cannot fix it.
My recommendation to those reading this is simple: respect the Lacuna. Maintain distance unless you have compelling reason to approach. Support those who work its edges. Prepare for the possibility that it may not remain stable forever.
And if you ever find yourself at the Boundary, preparing to cross, take a moment to acknowledge what stands between you and the void. They deserve at least that much.
— Scholar Valerius Thorne, Threshold, Year 287 Post-Breaking
Kael’s final note: Valerius is right about almost everything in this document. He’s wrong about one thing: he says the Lacuna resists conclusion. That’s not quite accurate.
The Lacuna IS the conclusion. It’s what happens when you push understanding too far. When you try to grasp the foundations. When you succeed in seeing what you were never meant to see.
The Ascendant Circle got exactly what they wanted. They understood. They touched the source. They saw truth.
And truth unmade them.
That’s not a warning against seeking knowledge. It’s just acknowledging that some knowledge costs more than you have to pay. The Lacuna is the price tag, written in absence and void, saying: this is what understanding cost.
I keep diving anyway. Maybe I’m looking for my own price. Maybe I’ve already paid it and just haven’t dissolved yet. Maybe I’m already gone and what’s writing this is just the memory of someone who used to be Kael, animated by habit and momentum.
I don’t know. That’s the truest thing I can say: I don’t know.
But I’ll be at the Boundary again tomorrow, apologizing to Division, crossing through into that cold hungry place, bringing back pieces of void to sell to people who’ll use them to kill each other.
And maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s what I am now. A bridge between narrative and void. Neither fully real nor fully absent.
Take care of yourself. Remember your name. Don’t dive deeper than you have to.
And if you see me at the Fringe, don’t ask me if I’m okay. I won’t be able to give you an honest answer.