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Going through my lore notes. And I'm playing a game with myself, so to speak: it's called "is this metal enough?", but with a side of quasi-metaphysical arcane technobabble plus mass wallmelting and nightmarishly psychedelic confusion.

For example... why are shadow gates a thing? Well, because of the undoing of time caused a multiplicity of parallel cycles that will, inevitably, slowly collapse upon themselves through a sequence of irreducible asynchronicities. But of course!

Now, as for the metal part, that's the undoing of time. You see, the Somberlain attempted to cast the most sinful signa in order to restore the desolate mortal realm as it stood on the brink of a world-ending cataclysm, this was after a decade of brutal, reckless litechnical abuse during the civil war fought amongst the first undecimvirate...

Now, he intended to roll back time itself as a way to avoid the cataclysm and restore life to the mortal realm, but the cost was immense: time was not rolled back, but rather __forcefully__ torn apart; it was effectively shredded, shattered, and undone.

Countless lives were lost as nearly six hundred years of Being were __erased__ in an instant, the most heinous large-scale blood sacrifice in history, spanning the entirety of the lower fragment of reality. I mean is this too dark, I'm not sure. How about I clarify: he didn't just snuff out their lives, no, they CEASED TO EXIST. THEY NEVER EXISTED. GONE. UNBECOMED INTO A TRUE IMMEMORIAL. OVER FIVE CENTURIES OF EVERY CONSCIOUS MOMENT ON EARTH DEVOURED TO FUEL HIS DARK MAGIC.

That's gotta have consequences, right? Well, obviously you'll get temporal distortions after that shit, I mean duh...

But wait, I'm lost, you say the undecimvirate deified themselves but were cast down after the whole superman spinning the earth backwards thing went full bathory and erased entire centuries from the fabric of the cosmos, so they were turned into the eleven thrones to guard over the eleven circles of the night eternal... but how is that linked to natural occurrences of teleportation?

First off, because *natural* teleportation is distinct from *artificial* teleportation. Failed experiments with (and miscasts of) mass transference of living matter are one of the leading causes of death among litarchs. It is not an instant transmission, just very, very quick, moreso than a mortal mind can process, that's why the "dilate" and "delay" sigils are added, so as to make the journey seem slowed down to the perceptions of whomever is teletransported, this is meant to ensure their brains don't __melt__ from the experience.

Similar reason as to why you have to give the _approximate_ total weight to carry when inscribing the ritual circle, you *do* know that it is __highly__ recommended to use accurate weighing scales to approximate this quantity, as under or overestimating it can lead to _FATAL_ consequences... do you not?

No, *natural* occurrences of teleportation do not have these constraints for two reasons: one, because both ends of the gateway are _fixed_ in both time and space due to the logic-defying occurrence of a future event being undeniably the cause of the past it revisited. Put on this toga. They are inextricably linked through the metaphorical and *literal* corpse of infinite collapsed timelines, which generates a conduit through the first circle of the night eternal, which *is* the domain of both forgetfulness and horror immemorial.

Second, the final layer on our stratified reality, that is, the final circle before the INVIOLABLE divine veil, wraps around the night eternal, which is why we call it "the shell". Or "Crisalida" if you dig Luis Alberto. It is a realm entirely outside of time, which is why the patriarchs can grant immortality, you see. By proximity to this sacred shell of existence, the timeline-corpse-conduit that links both ends of a shadow gate is, for all intents and purposes, approaching total chronostasis, therefore making it so bypassing physical space in a few seconds doesn't give you permanent loss of the sense of self as your brain turns into liquified jelly.

I don't remember what I was getting at and I don't care.