An unfamiliar symbol, somewhat like one he knew, yet different.
The Circle split in two had no cracks at all and remained largely intact. Apart from the horizontal line running through its middle, it had nothing in common with the one he knew.
But as he studied it, he felt a faint sense of being watched. A gaze met his from beyond the line.
It was like staring directly at the Shattered Celestial Body, only much fainter—so faint that it was impossible to notice without paying close attention. If that sensation of being watched hadn't been so distinctive, he might well have dismissed it as a trick of his oversensitive imagination.
The symbol engraved on the Prism gradually merged with the Shattered Celestial Body in his memory. The crisscrossing cracks faded away. This was what it had looked like originally.
Yes—if it had cracked, where had the fragments gone?
The lines came alive. In a distant age, an unimaginable force had shattered the only observable celestial body in the black firmament. Countless fragments had rained down, been caught by gravity, and turned into a sky full of meteorites.
Those fragments had burned through the atmosphere, then fallen into a plane far removed from, yet akin to, the Present World.
Fragments from that Celestial Body had naturally inherited its dull, uninteresting texture, as well as its power to drift between incomplete planes.
A civilization whose history had not survived carved a record of this unprecedented large-scale contact into the meteorite, using their—or perhaps its—unique aesthetic.
Then, for reasons unknown, these things with their vague awareness had become corrupted and multiplied without limit, using as their source the intelligent beings most readily able to come into contact with the Deep Layer.
From then on, they had roamed planes close to the Present