Philosopher's Information Concerning Extraplanar Wounds

To the petitioners who inquire how a wound between worlds is made to cease its respiration,

How exquisite that you ask. I keep a catalogue of such lesions and confess pleasure in their anatomy. Attend to the first and only generality: there is no universal closure for such rifts. Gates obey craft; tempests, vortexes, and upwellings do not. Each breach between planes presents its own configuration of strain, flow, and habit. One studies that wound or one fails it.

I write this with the vortex at Isingue, that you have constantly in your thoughts, foremost in mind. This place where Limbo’s influence thickens the air and the fields forget their measure. For this lesion the remedy is not a seal but a correction of relation: Limbo must be set farther from the Material at that site. When the planar separation increases, the shear slackens and the tearing abates. This is not priestcraft; it is geometry and pressure.

Do not be tempted by the easy cut. A rash lancing from the near side only spreads the corrupt humour: the pus runs outward, the inflammation widens, and the patient sickens though the wound looks neat. The proper art is inward. You must enter from within Limbo, reduce the swelling at its seat, and draw the foulness away from the body you mean to save, so the tissues can knit to the new calm you impose. Work it from our side, and you merely drive the filth through the flesh; work it from within, and the cavity collapses upon what you have set for it, and learns a better shape.

Such work demands a focus, an amplifier fit to carry a single will past the ordinary fatigue of mind. Seek in Limbo what ought not endure there: a precinct that has remained itself for years upon years. The strongest intellects condense the plane’s potential until it hardens into an anchor, a relic of reshaping in the old inventories’ language, a precipitate of Limbo governed by thought. Find such a locus and you will have a handhold on the world; without it, your adjustments scatter like breath on glass.

From that locus the rite is conceptually simple and practically merciless. Seize the anchor and compel the plane to increase its distance from ours by measured degrees. You will quiet the local turbulences; you will impose a small change; you will verify; and you will repeat. The steps are few; the burden is singular: the leading mind must be of a keenness seldom born, steady under protest, and tireless in count. If the will slackens, Limbo resumes its former habit, the chaos expands tenfold, and the mind is consumed into the chaotic essence of the plane itself, never to think again unless rescued by the operation of the mightiest magic known to wizards or the will of the gods themselves. If the will holds, Limbo itself breaks and reforms where you set it.

Do this work – from within, at a stable locus anchored by such an instrument, under the governance of a mind that does not dull – and the lesion will drain, close, and quiet its breath. I offer no recipes beyond these necessities; vivisection is not for the weak of mind. Either you compel the plane, or it you.

Signed,
The Knife Between
On behalf of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Philosophers