One of the distinguishing features of Aeirn, the world where my story is set, is the Rift. Created by the abuse of magic, in a string of wars a thousand years ago, the Rift is a tear in the fabric of reality giving a physical expression—and access—to naked Paradox, the inexplicable and improbable union of order and chaos responsible for the creation, or destruction, of all realms. It is the chaos of all possible forms of Order; encompassing the order implicit in all forms of Chaos. It is the expression of Perfection that embraces and supports all of the imperfections of Existence—the shadow of the Absolute. The Rift is like a door into the mind of God, where only thought—and the soul behind it—is real and reality is as fluid and elusive as a thought.

In the simplest terms, entering the Rift—or falling into it, as is most often the case—is like stepping into a dream. Things become the ideas they represent, and only the “ideas” with minds of their own (or the things a mind exposed to paradox can hold onto) can survive there. When the Rift was created, some of the people who fell in at ground zero were able to hold onto the idea of the world, and pull most of its shattered reality back together. To save their reality, they made the impossible possible. A thousand years later, when my story begins, people are still trying to figure out how to live with it, a slice of reality where none of the usual rules apply, that can be anywhere—at any time—without warning. Unless you have the psychic aptitude to sense the Rift Tides and warn others of the Rift Storms, or to shelter and guide people through them.

That said, it is only a matter of time before a given person is exposed to—and stripped naked by–the Rift. I always assumed I’d pursue this epic in text, so I didn’t need to concern myself with the handling of scenes with nudity or sex until now. I knew that the nature of the Rift would have the effect of breaking down most nudity taboos on Aeirn as a consequence of being used as a means of transport—among other things. As a matter of course, sexual attitudes and behavior were forced to mature once occasional public nudity became a necessity for real trade and travel. Telling this story in a visual format means I have to design it with a mature audience in mind.

Paradox

Exposed by the Cataclysm
Closest to the heart of existence lies Paradox. If there is anything that may be regarded as “the beginning”, it is the paradox of the Absolute confronting Nothing and becoming aware of itself. This is the point where pure potential differentiates between everything and nothing — and truly became something.

In infinite contexts, or with unbounded concepts or constructs, an expression of something that exists without constraints can support the interpretation of something divided by nothing extends to infinity.

Contexts where infinity is valid include undefined; the literal interpretation is “no end (in the sense of termination or determination)”; it just goes on. As a condition that is fundamentally without limits undefined is caught somewhere unknown between is and not.

In standard arithmetic, division-by-zero is labeled “undefined.” An intuitive or naïve interpretation of division-by-zero may jump to infinity after a simple calculator experiment — where infinitesimal denominators amplify any numerator to the inverse order of magnitude — establishes the trend. In practice, it is simply not allowed because an inverse of multiplication using zero cannot retrieve the initial value with any number, including infinity.

But, where 0 is a number with no value, infinity is a value with no true numerical representation. We apply it only to things that require no limits — imaginary numbers, concepts, qualities. The very notion of undefined implies a state without limits: a condition that cannot be captured anywhere between, or even separately as, 0 and 1. It is simultaneously none and all.

This simple fact led me to what I call the point-paradox: a state that expresses, at once, the values 0, 1, and ∞, where ∞ is the set of all possible values The full definition of point-paradox uses division to resolve the conflict of 1 encompassing all and containing nothing. Whatever its true magnitude, this singular-duality is division-by-zero in the literal, intuitive sense.

That version of division-by-zero is simply an interpretation that uses the paradoxical mathematical expression to translate everything the singularity into everything the plurality. In an infinite context, division-by-zero result of infinity works, but the inverse multiplication problem remained, so long as no one could follow up on _where the numerator went.

That answer is simply, “wherever it could go.” The math for that ultimately depends on the operative context and recognition of the fact that something removed from one context could still exist in another. It seems more likely that an irreversible process might make it unrecoverable, but short of that “undefined” is only true in cases where no one tries to figure it out.

It is 0, 1 and ∞ — all-exclusive, exclusively-inclusive, and all-inclusive. Paradox is what divides all absolutes and encompasses all finite expressions without discrimination or denial. It simply embraces the possibility of anything with potential. It supports things that contradict, or that cannot or do not support, themselves. It is where the impossible has the highest probability of existing if there is a potential expression of it. It is where violated and invalidated things end up.

A paradox is not what breaks things, it is the domain where broken things are indiscriminately accommodated when violated or invalidated.

Paradox does not oppose existence; it reveals the terms under which existence is possible at all. As the Absolute first confronted Nothing, the distinction between being and non‑being did not resolve into order or collapse into chaos — it simply persisted. In this liminal state, contradiction is not a flaw but a condition of emergence and or endurance. Paradox embraces what cannot cohere, sustains what cannot stabilize, and permits what cannot exist in any structured domain. It is the space where broken or incomplete expressions endure because “anything derived from [Potential] has constraints and ceases to be extant when they collapse; collapse only folds potential back into itself.”

In this sense, Paradox is not merely the beginning — it is the ongoing substrate beneath all beginnings. It is the reminder that existence is not justified by coherence but by possibility. As long as Potential remains the Absolute, “nothing that can be can truly be denied,” even when its expression falters, fractures, or dissolves. Paradox is the quiet guarantee that collapse is never erasure, that impossibility is never exclusion, and that every identity, however compromised, still rests upon the same inexhaustible ground.

Paradox is the operant domain where Potential expresses without structural constraint, allowing contradictory, impossible, or incoherent identities to persist. It is the threshold between context and the Absolute, where collapse cannot erase and coherence cannot govern. Paradox is the habitat of the impossible because Potential does not require consistency.In concept, speaking in operant terms, division-by-zero applies to redistribution conserving magnitude in S_d translations and transforms. Such operations are applicable to a “point with magnitude m”, a “line with magnitude m”, a “plane with magnitude m”, a “cube or sphere (volume) with magnitude m”, etc., following geometric computations for “intensity”, “length”, “area”, “volume”; because these solve magnitude-energy-power-force equivalencies at the practical level in physics actual and real.

A paradox of the condition presented as The God Problem, — where the presence of boundless potential defies expression because no limit applies to it but nothing can stop it — can resolve itself by simply being potential. What comes to be expressed does so because the expression cannot help itself; because, frankly, boundless potential needs no help.

It’s a singular-duality. One condition with two (or maybe infinite) truths in seeming opposition that resolve into one unavoidable solution. There was no “why”; there was just the possibility inherent in the situation (which itself is a derivative of potential as it exists — or even simpler, as it is present).

Doing so allows me to understand and articulate the mechanism of concepts like undefined and exists that possess a singular-plurality or boundless extensions. It comes into play in things like the conserved nature of energy which “cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be redistributed”. It usually slips past people that, by this definition, energy has no beginning or end, it just moves around in the total system forever.

The mathematical paradox of division-by-zero is that it reveals a boundary condition between finite, infinite and absolute expressions. This illuminates what the paradoxes observed in rifts as being examples of what occurs when a structure with magnitude is divided by the null operant in a context that cannot host the mapping.

Magnitude is preserved, but the structure is excised from the provided relational frame and placed into an undefined (orthogonal) context. Worlds we thought obliterated in the Purge do exist in Paradox — as the Shattered Realms observed through rifts. Any one of which, can serve the canonical example of magnitude‑preserving, representation‑nullifying collapse.

Why This Matters:
This trait of paradox preserves and supports classical notions of absolution, conceptually expressed as the elimination of all things giving something definition. Though mathematicians refuse it, that is precisely what division-by-zero does: it renders them undefined — something that exists without the context it originally existed in:
— division‑by‑zero does not destroy magnitude
— it destroys contextual representation
— it forces the structure into a non‑assigned, non‑mapped, non‑contextual state
— it is the simplest possible example of superposition‑by‑exclusion

It defines the ground state because:
— no axes are involved
— no dimensional translation occurs
— no higher‑order operator is invoked
— only the null operant acts

This is the base case from which all other paradoxical operants generalize.

In practical terms, we have to note that structural compression, decompression, displacement, transposition, transformation, translation or transmission are between states in manifestation and abstraction — structure and information and operations synonymous with encryption-decryption. Without a full comprehension of expression across these contexts — how it would work or even be possible — we are merely speculating.