Mune'stahr and Pylott: HELLMARROW, a tale of the Ventriculum

INTERLUDE: O'er Time Itself, So Dark and Devilish a Reign

There is an old Terran-Earth saying that "The Devil is in the details". It is an idiom that refers to a clause, snag or mysterious element hidden in the significant individual features of any particular thing or idea wherein something that might seem simple at a first, will take more time and effort to complete than expected. The phrase derives from the earlier expression, "Le bon Dieu est dans le détail" or "Good God is in the detail" which expressed the idea that whatever endeavor in which one becomes involved, is an endeavor that should be executed thoroughly. The idea of "The Devil" replaced the reference to God in the phrase as it came to embrace the frustration and vexation felt by those human beings who used it when they encountered problematic circumstances, as they felt "bedeviled" by context.

In The Ventriculum, the phrase took on an entirely new and unexpected meaning. Existence Itself was a minefield, a slumbering ever-present threat that masked itself with a thin veneer of methodical and empirical "normality" and The Devil was the Unexpected Likelihood that no matter what precautions one took, The Ventriculum and everything in it was always conspiring to kill you.

What made that realization worse, of course, was the fact that there really WERE "devils" existing in the Metaflow. Ultimately, if all the devils did was to simply kill you, then they were doing you a kindness. And it was generally understood that a violent death within the confines of The Ventriculum was simply a matter of Time...

Nothing was supposed to live there.  Eventually, though, as if to stubbornly countermand that dictate, scores of prokarytic microbes, lacking in a membrane-caged nucleus and bereft of mitochondria, invaded the osmotic void through the eruptive seizures from half a dozen celestial white dwarf stars that had shifted from Newtonian/Einsteinian space through the dimensional veil into the interplanar corridors between Realities. Super dense stellar core remnants of suns, composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter, the white dwarfs acted as inverted black hole suns -- instead of swallowing all matter and light caught in its gravitational vortex, the dwarfs ejected matter out into the interdimensional voidal cavity of The Ventriculum. The hardy microbes were able to survive the passage from one Time-State to another and took root on the surfaces of physical matter, mostly orphaned planetary debris, in the habitable Goldilock-Zones of various fractal manifold regions in the oceanic Ventriculum. As a white dwarf has a size similar to that of a planet, each invasive white dwarf maintaining a surface temperature of less than 10,000 kelvins potentially harbored a habitable zone within a distance of c. 0.0053 to 0.02 Astronomical Units. That zone could exist upwards of 3 billion years, more than long enough for what were once simple microbial organisms to jump full-on into the process of evolution and the birth of intelligent Life. All it took was time...

The concept of Time and its passage was a complicated and paradoxical knot when pondered in relation to the "Hows" and "Whys" of The Ventriculum. Being a omnidirectional fractal metaflow, it was imbued with the characteristics of a paraphysical medium at perpetual chemical "triple point". At that juncture, structured molecular-based Matter was not "solid", and neither molecularly-cohesive "liquids" nor unsolid collections of atoms composing a variety of elemental compounds like "gases" retained any quantifiable measure of their normal identifiable states of being. Everything was everything from moment to moment, and each moment was inclusive of what could be defined as the Past, Present and Future savagely vied for existence simultaneously. It was a crazy-quilt 360-degree world of perceptual obtuseness. This created a rather tricky non-balanced environment, a climate of electromagnetic storms and gravitational whirlwinds and ionic blizzards, in which organic sentient Life stubbornly sought to thrive. It is an accepted fact that Life, both as a scientific concept and as an organic bio-molecular conceit, will, if given any kind of a foothold, fight for its right to exist regardless of environmental conditions.