The Fracture

Everything in this entry is contested. I have been asked four times to remove the parts that disagree with each other, and four times I have declined. The Fracture is the only event every charted world shares, and we cannot agree on what it was.

What is not disputed

Within a single day, doors appeared. Not passages, not portals in the old ritual sense — doors, in the plain meaning: places where a person could walk out of one reality into another and arrive alive. Ferrum Astra logged the first in a Foundry Moon drydock. Concordia Vale logged thirty-one before anyone thought to start counting. The Archive dates everything from that day and calls it the first of Year One of the Bleed, which is a convenience and not a claim.

Also not disputed: the doors did not close. They still have not.

Three accounts, none of them provable

The remainder

Calculus Ruin's abandoned theorems have never stopped computing. Ruin-walkers hold that one of them reached a step requiring a door where no door existed, and built one — that the Fracture is not a wound but a working, and the Nexus is being charged for it. The Ruin's own notation supports this reading. The Ruin's own notation also supports the conclusion that the party reading it cannot survive, so weigh it accordingly.

The purchase

Meridian Command holds files it will not release. What has surfaced is that the Ouroboros consortium was buying materials from beyond the Bleed before anyone on Command's payroll knew there was a beyond. Either Ouroboros found a door first and said nothing, or Ouroboros made one. Command's analysts are not agreed on which answer is worse, and I have met three who have stopped asking.

The division

The Everheart's position, and the oldest: that Essara did not survive the event as one being, and that the four Aspects are what remains of her. Under this account the Fracture is not an accident. It is what happens to a multiverse when the thing holding it together comes apart, and every door is a place where she is thinnest.

I note, without further comment, that this is the only account in which the Fracture has a cure.

Why the record is thin

Most of what we would want is gone, and not all of it by accident. The first year was spent surviving rather than filing. The second was spent by several governments deciding what the first year would be remembered as. I hold a Ferrum drydock log and a Vale harvest-song from the same week, describing the same sky in terms that cannot both be true, and I have stopped trying to reconcile them.

"Third watch. Something opened in bay nine. It is still open. I am writing this down because I do not think anyone will believe me and I would like it on the record that I was sober."
— Drydock log, Foundry Moon Ashkelt, dated by the Archive to the first day of Year One

That is the earliest surviving account of the Fracture. It is four sentences long and it was written by a machinist whose name we do not have. Everything grander than it was written afterward, by people who already knew how the story turned out.