The Breaking of the world
The claims were too far-fetched to be true.
It sounded like some obscure fairytale.
(We the readers don't know what was unreal. A device? A solution to a problem?)
The world kneeled.
The ground became the enemy.
We could not resist.
It was a powerful truth, if it could be called that.
The world was falling apart, the laws of physics turned on their heads.
Other dimensions, met at the close.
It all came together as one in the dark vacuum of space.
They were not the cause.
They only wanted help, but we could not give it to them.
Their world had succumbed.
Ours was just beginning to.
Gravity wells, antigravity fields.
Portals in the dark to the alter verse.
Warped time-fields, taking the contained forward and backward in great shifts.
Pieces of the planet, "fragments", broke away.
The moon was rent asunder by the anti-gravity wells.
Its glittering chalky remnants formed the lunar asteroid belt. A ring of dust and debris that circles around the planet in a flat disk, like the vagrant rings of Saturn.
A strange surreal beauty, a planet drifting apart and together like floating islands in a sea of stars.
Held together by the Terra-Well gravity well the planet retained its life as its exposed core was subdued and contained by gravity, and anti-gravity wells in a cosmic force-field.
The broken chunks of the planet were suspended haphazardly around the contained molten core.
The mantel had long since hardened, as it had no gravitational pull of its own and floated unprotected in the icy reaches of space.
The oceans were no longer contained by the planet and drifted around it in great streams of liquid that flowed in the remnants of the jet stream of the upper atmosphere and encircled the planet. There was of course, no longer a jet stream, or even a stable atmosphere, as the gravity ebbed and flowed.
Alongside the main airborne currents of water were great clouds of brown-tinted water vapor that were lazily suspended in space. They had absorbed the debris and dust from the cracking of the planet and retained the golden brown color of the earth. When the sunlight shone through the mist, it took on a golden hue that was in stark and beautiful contrast to the usual brown of the celestial clouds.
Now at this point, certain pieces of the "Shatter-field" (The broken pieces of the planet) are locked in a permanent backwards crawl through time, while others are locked in a permanent fast-forward progression.
The portals flash in and out at times, taking swaths of the remaining planet with them into other dimensions where none have returned from.
At the end of the "Chaos Shifts" at the "Breaking of the World", all life was not lost. In fact, many of the humans alongside the alien creatures who had come to us for help, had survived. Parts of the planet were stuck at certain times from before the break and retained all of their previous features from before, in perfect condition. Only the planet's structure had been affected, not the surface. Occasionally, when time warps happened, people came back. People that had died, and people that had lived. Sometimes people had to grow used to living around multiple copies of themselves. These anomalies, these incongruences; They became the norm.
Other than people, creatures came back. Early human ancestors in places, and dinosaurs in others. Even dragons came back, from beyond the veil.
The veil was a dark shimmering force that ensconced the entire planet and let nothing in or out. This "Planet Earth" was now effectively cordoned off from the entire universe.
Now, to clarify; The dragons were never real. They were just one of the fragments of the imagi.
The imagi was the remaining ethereal wisps of the thoughts and imaginations of the dead ancestors of the past. Both from the humans and the other creatures of the planet, these "imagi" were remnants of their greatest hopes, dreams, and strongest thoughts they possessed. It had congealed into an intangible mass that inhabited the spaces between the fragments of the planet. It swirled and shifted like the aurora borealis in the northern reaches of the planet.
Places hold partial oceans and lakes, suspended in the ether, untouched by the solid earth that extended out of a partial reservoir that they were originally contained within. . .