[WARNING: PERCEPTION IS A FRAGILE THING. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.]
SUBJECT: The Rift: A Tear in the Skin of the World
First, get this straight: The Rift is not a gateway. You can’t go there. It’s not another place you can visit. The truth is far worse.
Imagine the laws of nature — physics, time, life, death — are a single, coherent tapestry. The scientists of the old world, in their arrogance, found a loose thread from another, older, and wholly alien pattern: The Lode. When they pulled on it, the tapestry didn’t just unravel. It tore.
The Rift is that tear. A wound in the flesh of reality where the fundamental laws of our universe are frayed and bleeding. And through that wound, the patterns of that other, impossible reality are seeping in. It is a fundamental glitch in the very fabric of what is real.
It doesn’t lead anywhere, but it bleeds.
It bleeds the Amber Blight, the metaphysical cancer that infects everything it touches, not to kill it, but to rewrite it into an alien blueprint. It bleeds the Whispers, the psychic dissonance of two realities grinding against each other, a static that will shatter your mind if you listen too closely. And sometimes, on the worst nights, it allows for brief, impossible Intrusions — things that are not of our world at all, living blasphemies that mock the laws of nature just by existing.
The Rift isn’t a place you can find on a map. It’s the reason the map is wrong. It’s the source of the wrongness in the air you breathe and the madness in the static. It’s the certainty that the universe is fundamentally broken, and we are just squatters living in the scar tissue.
[ECHO CORRUPTED. END OF FILE.]