There is a planet in a not so distant spiral of the galaxy that lives in the minds of all those who wander, seek, and die on this end of the wormhole. The destruction it brings to most who unwittingly end up there, through miscalculation or caprice, is known through all the systems and all the civilizations because of the ocean that roils its surface. The Ocean of Oblivion, they say, “where the tides are so strong that even metals are rendered unto dust…” Adventurers who slingshot across the sky and enter her orbit, testing the verity of the legend, invariably end up - bone and metal, gasp and scream - ground down into the surf by the invisible hand that presses and pulls through the shifting orbits of the planet and her moons.
For what is water but a source of life? To its own devices, it lays calm and flat; cool glass diffusing into empty spaces gently, slowly. The tales of an ocean so powerful and so malevolent skip off tongues like children’s rhymes and the teller never asks “why would an ocean hate men so?” The planet unnamed, most that hear the tale will feel their skin tingle and their hairs rise in fear, but then discard it and chortle it away as a fable. “How could any such place really exist? If it did, nobody would ever come back alive to tell the story?”
But what if there were some for whom the weight, the destructive tear of gravitational fields, was the least of their burdens? A people not born of that world but who, through despair, seek it out to make it their home. Ones who are inured to the weight of moons and tides because of a deeper burden. Like glass flung into the surf, they are smoothed until individuality is all but erased and compressed to the core attributes of their original nature. Those who endure become hulking trunks of muscle with bones like iron. Their shoulders and thighs like burls skimmed with slipcloth. Their physical stature barely hinting at their mental fortitude.
It is said that these people, these altered beings who have eschewed the galaxy for a life of asceticism and isolation, are yoked with a knowledge whose foundational question all others have forgotten how to ask. While some cultures still speculate, these wearied beings, these Keepers, hold the truth about the wormhole. All know about its existence - that great fissure-bridge in space that brought life to this galaxy - but the Keepers know why it is, how it traps those who cross its threshold, and the fate of all things to come.
The galaxy whispers of a legendary planet where an ocean grinds all things to dust. Quietly though, in the murmuring of the aged and the wise, lay the stories of the Keepers. The people who live above the Ocean of Oblivion and for whom the atomizing weight of gravitational waves is the comforting weight of home.
Excerpt from the private journal of Scealai, 16th Ecclesiar of the Gate Keepers and Bondservant of the Sanctum Salainen