Void Rifts



"The rift was beautiful. It danced in Billie's eyes, the Sliver burning hot in her head, clouding her vision with red and blue sparks until she could barely see the real world."

- The Tyvian rift.

Void Rift is a very rare supernatural phenomenon but started to widely appear across the Empire of the Isles in 1852.

History
Void rifts are fissures between the physical world and the Void that look like shimmering curtains of blue light, with undulating flame-like edges. It is impossible to see beyond or through them though they are not quite opaque. However Billie Lurk, who possesses the Sliver of the Eye, can see inside the veil if she concentrates enough. The rifts vary greatly in size, some are as small as human hands while certain rifts stretch for miles from horizon to horizon.

Void rifts appeared as a result of the Outsider's connection to the Void being severed by Billie. The Outsider, as other Void deities before him, acted as anchors for the Void, keeping it in place in relation to the real world. Once he was gone, the Void became unmoored, the two dimensions which once existed in parallel, now being pulled apart, the barrier between them sliding like a fault line.

The first Void rifts appeared shortly after Emily Kaldwin announced the dissolution of the Abbey of the Everyman in the Spring of 1852. Billie speculated that the reason the rifts did not appear immediately after the fall of the Outsider, is because the Abbey of the Everyman were performing some kind of ritual, holding the Void in place. However whatever the Overseers and the Oracular Order were doing had driven them mad, forcing the Empress to abolish the religious institution. Since then, travelers and traders started to tell stories about glowing cracks in the sky or holes in the world. Most of them are small, but some are as big as a house. The Empress had to mobilized her battlions at Whitecliff, local militia, and town guards to keep watch over some of the larger rifts in Gristol. The Academy of Natural Philosophy, however, completely disregarded these events, and insisted that Void rifts are a meteorological phenomenon.

The Veiled Terror
During a trek between Meya and Pradym, Billie discovered the Tyvian rift which stretches for miles across the tundra. Upon closer inspection, she realized that the rift was slowly moving, at the rate of a few millimeters per minutes, and it would eventually reach civilization, destroying everything in its path. It is theorized by Professor Dribner that the rifts are actually part of a single giant Rift, as they move and expand they would finally join together, consuming the world. It is later revealed that the Voidrite mine found inside the Abba rift is the last physical connection between the real world and the Void; and the mining activity undertaken by the Leviathan Company was further destabilizing this tenuous connection, causing the rifts to move.