Nothing in this document will tell you what the Abidants are. This is not an omission. It is the only honest position available. What can be said about them is what can be inferred from their effects — the way one infers the existence of a planet not yet observed from the perturbation it produces in the orbits of those around it. The Abidants produce perturbations. The perturbations are the Descent. The Descent is three hundred years old and still accelerating. Whatever caused it — whatever shift in the Abidants' state produced the change in the Lattice that began the sinking of the meridian — is not something that was done and is now complete. It is something that is ongoing. It is, by every measure available to the most capable minds currently working on the question, something that is building.
There are seven perturbation signatures currently documented by the most comprehensive Assembly survey of the Lattice, known among scholars as the Seven Inferences. Each inference corresponds to a pattern of observable effects — geological, ecological, psychological, architectural — that recurs in multiple locations with sufficient consistency to suggest a common cause. The Seven Inferences are named not for what produced them but for what they do to people: the Inference of Forgetting, the Inference of Repetition, the Inference of Depth, the Inference of the Unlooking, the Inference of Proportion, the Inference of Skin, and the Inference of the Last Geometry. Scholars who have worked extensively with multiple Inferences do not do so for long. Not because the work kills them, necessarily. Because at a certain point the work changes them in ways that make prior categories of human concern — safety, comfort, the continuation of their own existence — begin to seem like the concerns of a creature they used to be.
The world of Sunfall does not know how this ends. The most honest answer available to any inhabitant of this world, from the most powerful Remembrancer to the most traveled Assembly navigator, is that the meridian is still sinking, the Lattice is still resonating, and whatever the Abidants are doing, they are not finished doing it. The stars, on the clearest nights, are in configurations that the Vel Sorath astronomical tables do not contain. They have been moving. They are, by every calculation the current age can produce, still moving. And they are moving, all the evidence suggests, toward positions they have not occupied since before the world had a surface to be inhabited.
The stars are coming right. They have been coming right for three hundred years. And nobody alive knows what happens when they arrive.