Ain't Talkin'

No one remembered what year it was, even though time was one of the few consistencies across planes. All anyone was collectively sure of was that the catastrophe had occurred one hundred and two years ago.

Top rated scientists had delved too deep into the construct of things. Atoms and molecules and chemically stable ribbons of particles hadn’t been descriptive enough. Mankind had to know more. What made up the fabric of the fabric of existence. What made up the tiniest pieces of the tiniest pieces?

Their experiments and their research took them far and away to greater lengths than science had ever gone before. It all brought them too far.

The catastrophe had been a product of mankind’s folly. It had torn holes in the world. Many planes had arrived at the same conclusions in experimentation simultaneously. The holes had eroded through existence like an overheated film reel.

The final conclusion of was this. Universes were laid over each other. If everything you had ever known or had ever happened in history could be written on a single page of paper, then the number of existent universes would encompass an endless encyclopedia of variants layered over one another. Something had gone wrong in the world’s researches, and a birdshot blast had opened holes in these variants from one world to another and another and another.

With that, the ether, the white had spilled in. The space between worlds was as vast and as sparse and as unpredictable as the space beyond the universe. Blank and pointless and without description. Whiteness.

The world moved on. The ether burned at the edges of reality and the world heated up. Oceans dried away to nothing, species died by the thousands and the world lost it’s shape. It wasn’t long before governments collapsed upon each other and ate one another. It wasn’t any longer that people started walking between worlds. Thousands of people got lost at first.

They entered the holes between worlds and never returned. In the expressionless, featureless landscape they lost their way and wandered into oblivion. Those that managed to navigate found that they learned the trails and highways between worlds. They perfected their craft, and they found out a strange little nuance to the white, the ether. . .when there was nothing there truly was nothing.

The physics of the world existed because the walkers expected them to exist. Gravity was a truth because the walkers acted as though it ought to be and moved in accordance with the rules that they had grown to accept as passive reality. When they learned to accept that these were no longer truths, they found they could overcome the lack of strictures.

Time also ceased to pass.

The longer the walkers stayed within the white, the more they ceased to age, their features only lengthening for the duration of time they spend in the planes beyond the nothing.

The people in the worlds outside aged beyond the walkers, and before too long the families of those who chose the white grew old, and died, and their children grew old and died, and so on and so forth. The walkers became ghosts amongst their own people in a world that had just as quickly moved on to scattered city-state governments who relied more on self-preservation and the longevity of isolation.

The walkers were a force unto themselves, and they moved through the worlds from one to another. They made their way by bringing passengers.

Roche was a walker, and he made his way as a hunter. He stalked prey and found what was missing. And in all things he was wholly and completely alone.