An interlude is how those few familiar with it might have described the unmappable space.

An archetype, others would say.

The Beings of Old who occupied Avram’s Bosom, named the Trinity of Gray by their peers, simply called it “home.” Two female, one male, as much as could be reckoned in such entities.

Three creatures sat around a table of stone. Three creatures counted sand from broken hourglasses. Three creatures fixed meters for measuring atomic decay at a perfect level of precision. Three creatures sketched chipped guillotine blades in dust. Three creatures tasted and knew death as only those intimately familiar possibly can.

“We have much work to do,” sighed the Gray Boatman. Leaning a bit farther from its socket than its left-hand fleshy counterpart, his pocket watch eye spun backward at a rate of months per second. His staff he held tightly, like a lover or an enemy.

“Work, and with so many newborns!”

Pearlescent Maria’s open mouth exuded opaline breath, viscous and swirling, wreathing her clasped hands with extravagant handcuffs. Tears like unrefined petroleum ran down her face.

“Newborns in nature, not simply in fact,” croaked Silver. Her hair flowed around her as it writhed, running from the table to the floor and into the dun sticky shadows of their abode. The colorless glow of the filaments suffused her surroundings, without lending any true illumination.

At the termination of her pleated tresses, a sea of shadowy figures of all kinds stretched into the unseen, a line a billion leagues long. Many of them had a greasy dimensionless quality, forged to look like anything and everything, so long as it was grotesque in its details. Beasts, they were called by the ones who knew of the beings. A term which might need replacement, now that the ravening creatures had suddenly begun to appear in the Trinity of Gray’s clientele.

After all, only those with souls - and a quite small subset of those - could ever arrive in Avram’s Bosom… and even the Olds knew Beasts as savage feral creatures, feeding from their leidbäume and wandering the Purple in undirected duress.

“How often do we see a new kind, a new breed, in this place?”

“Not often, thanks be.”

“A somewhat disturbing question: why this new one?”

A short pause before the Gray Boatman hazarded a guess to his own question.

“We relate to normal time in an imprecise and nonlinear function at the most predicated of instances. Even so, something has happened or will happen with profound consequences to the Purple.”

He looked at Silver meaningfully.

“I think,” he said, spinning eye faltering to a brief halt, “a misadventure involving the Device, almost certainly with it removed from the Oiler’s domain, is to blame.”

Three creatures contemplated the sudden change in the realm over which they had so long watched and fretted.

Eventually, three creatures left their thoughts behind on the table. After all, there was work to be done, and sifting through souls demanded copious amounts of dedication and a grave mind.