The world’s atmosphere is very dense and comparatively thin, couching primordial heat close to the boiling rock surface and letting very little warmth escape even a league away from the world. It is hot without that loss of energy, and the world is covered in an ocean of molten rock. The viscous magma on the surface is agitated by strong electromagnetic currents and age-old Coriolis effect.
Over millennia, this agitation becomes more profound, devolving into entropy. Not an entropy of cold, dispersed energy but of disorder and chaos. Chaos theory would allow us to unpack the centuries and centuries of minute fluid variation that leads to the crushing waves of magma the world sees. The magma sees only its trajectory.
As the waves reach new heights, the tallest begin to breach the dense yet thin atmosphere, pushing aside clouds of tungsten hexafluoride and tungsten oxyfluorides to reach the unimaginable cold of space. The magma cools immediately upon contact and, as thousands and thousands of these peaks occur simultaneously, the heat the planet had kept, blanketed by heavy gas, is quickly dispersed through conduction. The boiling magma surface cools near immediately.
The stress of such rapid change in its state of matter—the abrupt end to the cycle of trajectory and being, movement and location—leads to canyonic cracks in the surface. There is simply not enough matter in the magma to contract and yet still fill the same space it once had. So the world becomes one of incredible heights and incredible depths. Much of the heavy atmosphere sinks into these cracks, leaving the mountaintops protruding comically toward the stars.
Millenia further pass in relative stagnation. The most notable event in a century is often the final, centrifugal-stressed breaking-off of a peak into a satellite. As this happens again and again, the planet develops rough rings. The orbiting debris knocks off mountaintops in epic collisions, accelerating the development of the ring and sending massive shock waves down the spires.
Often asteroids and comets hailing from the outer reaches of the world’s solar system careen into these rings, creating nuclear-like domino effects as the impacted chunks of rock hit other spires, hit other rocks, hit other spires. There is no sentiment directed toward these interlopers. There is no memory of the stability these displaced mountaintops once had. There is no bitterness about their loss of the warmth of the blanketed surface. They simply move as they move because that is how they’ve been directed. The rings see only their own trajectory.
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Eventually one of these interloper-comets bypasses the rings, crashing into a serendipitously-placed crevice parallel to the surface. This crevice is nestled in the quarter-league-thick layer of the atmosphere above the tungsten compounds yet below the void, created and kept against the planet almost by chance of molecular bouncing and heat and gravity. Chaos theory would allow us to parse the causes of this thin layer of nitrogen and oxygen and methane.
Also almost by chance, the comet splinters into shards of ice which melt instantly on the hot rock spire and puddle together in a divot. The water splashes in currents not unlike the magma of ages and ages past, and soon (in the cosmic scheme of things) the planet hosts life.
To say life would have the capacity to evolve into anything resembling our perception of a conscious being within the amount of water transported by a comet would be facetious and immediately difficult to believe, and so that was not something that happened on the world. But still, there was conscious life moving, crab-like, from the crevice sea to the edge of the spire.
Much as dogs grow to resemble their owners and trolls to resemble the mountains, these troglodytes resemble the planet that incubated them.
Their water-softened skin features deep pits through which nutrients can be filtered and absorbed and long spines which originally protrude from the water for heat regulation and artificial nitrogenation and which over time evolve the third function of sensory input. The troglodytes observe purely through the delicate sensing of vibrations in the air of the crevice and whatever they can touch with their sharply elegant limbs.
They develop in a typical way for an intelligent species: through simple tools, mathematics etched into rock, psychedelic relaxation found by resting an oscillation-sensitive spine in the sea and allowing an intimate to agitate the water nearby. There is cosmic satisfaction found in this final pastime. The sea moves the same way the magma once had, millennia ago.
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One young adherent to the practice—who are called Ripplers and characterized, with no small fondness, as the sort of languid, self-reflective hooligans who have eschewed the pranks and impudence of their peers in favor of the artistic pursuit of more and more intricate ripple patterns, sensation seekers in the way of symphonic composers—one young adherent finds herself curious about that which she is unable to touch.
Water and life have made the crevice lush, yet the maw-like opening in the spire has not closed. The troglodytes, without sight, can only be aware of those imperfections in the air’s stillness which reach them. The stillness of the world outside of their world is void. It isn’t even understood as the drop from great height that it is—just pure emptiness, broken only by what can be, through echolocation, recognized as great masses: the other spires. Existential awe abounds but is kept in polite society to murmurs and intellectual speculation.
The Rippler is too clever, too introspective to fall prey to l’appel du vide, the black and simple fascination with the emptiness that claims—presumably—many lives in one lifetime. She spends the eons of her adolescence practicing a near-spiritual technique, studied among those troglodytes whose occupations require them to stray far from the cooling sea, of expertly utilizing their dexterous pores to create a constantly circulating shield. True adherents of the technique can maintain a watery atmosphere around their bodies, protecting themselves from the unknown the way the skies protect their world from whatever is past its rings. The Rippler’s studies pull her from the ripples, from the psychedelic calm that had previously been her only pursuit. She’s determined to be the one to succeed in exploring the void. To feel what no one ever has.
Finally, after years of study and practice, she finds herself standing at the precipice. An infinitesimally small portion of the sea swirls around her in chaotic patterns even she, their creator, would be unable to parse. She steps forward and begins to fall, as she had expected. The velocity is incredible. She strains downward, waiting for the inconsistencies in air flow that will alert her to the approaching world floor and the need to ready herself. She doesn’t notice her water shield slowly corroding.
Tungsten compounds, the main component of her world’s atmosphere, react with water nearly instantaneously to create hydrogen fluoride, an intensely corrosive gas which begins to bite at her skin. This chemical reaction is completely unknown to this world—tungsten has never reached up to the spire, and water has never fallen down to the lower levels of the atmosphere. The reaction spreads, molecules bouncing off one another in a pattern which chaos theory would tell us is as comprehendible as the toppling of dominos.
Quickly, before her fall is over, all the tungsten hexafluorides and tungsten oxyfluorides have become hydrogen compounds, gases of various toxicities and corrosive abilities united in one similarity: they are far, far lighter than their predecessors. Molecules fight to be as far from each other as they’re able, and they find quickly that they’re very able. The new, deadly atmosphere expands. Biological weaponry is known to the troglodytes, like they eventually become known to any advanced civilization, but never like this. By the time the Rippler has fallen halfway down her spire, the domino effects of her suicide bombing have reached the crevice’s mouth. The sky seems to have turned against them.
The Rippler notices none of this, not even the bite of pain and her imminent death by dissolution. She sees only her own trajectory.