Riftspawn are our world’s life, rebuilt. Echomaws are our own history, replaying. The things in this file are neither, and the file exists because seven credible witnesses across four centuries described, independently, something the other two categories don’t cover.
The testimony agrees on this much. The encounters were brief, under a minute. Each witness insists the thing was there before they noticed it, some say long before. None can describe the thing itself, and the file’s collator stopped asking, because every witness described the world around it instead. Light bending toward it. Sound arriving late. Snow falling upward in a column. One caravan master, twenty years on the Ribbon, said the tracks it left were in yesterday’s snow.
The street calls them Transients, because they don’t stay. What they are depends on who you ask. The Undertow says visitors, and says it like the word is holy. The Ascendancy says advance parties and won’t say of what. A Zenith survey paper, withdrawn within a year of filing, used the phrase sustained locality failure and no further papers used any phrase at all. The codex takes no position and gives one instruction, the same as for anything you can’t parse, leave, and don’t look back to check your memory against the thing, because the witnesses who did are the ones whose accounts stopped agreeing with themselves.
Six of the seven witnesses relocated to the Bastion’s interior within a year and declined follow-up. The seventh went back out to find it. Her journal is in circulation, forty pages of it, and its last recovered line is in the atlas.
[FILE ENDS. NO ENTRY HAS BEEN ADDED IN SIXTY YEARS. THE COLLATOR FINDS THAT WORSE.]