Interregnum

The Interregnum is the period of temporal and spatial suspension that traps the Endeavor between ordinary destinations. Its decisive significance is that it converts travel into a ritual of survival: the crew can move, but cannot reliably locate themselves, measure their progress, or trust the laws that normally make a voyage intelligible.

Definition and Conditions

The interval begins after the Endeavor leaves the remains of Danner’s Grasp. The settlement is still smoldering with zint, lingering fire, and fragments of sheltershrooms whose green light survives among the ruins. Although the storm has passed and the mercenary ship has been blown far away, the crew does not return to normality. The ship carries the dead, the memory of bombardment, and the uncertainty of a route through a wilderness where familiar navigational assumptions no longer hold.

The Interregnum is therefore not simple inactivity. The Endeavor continues flying, yet its movement produces no secure sense of arrival. The ship crosses landscapes where red creeper gives way to silver and gold leaves, where metallic gourds stir beneath the lights, and where flying beasts attack the vessel. At the same time, repairs expose missing crates of tools and supplies, leaving the expedition materially weakened. When a bright vein of luminiferous terrestrite finally appears, it reveals not a natural landmark but an entire human settlement, complete with machinery, white walls, mooring towers, and busy streets. The sight is described as an impossible flame of civilization shining in the wilderness, a sign that the expedition has entered a region where distance and expectation have ceased to correspond.

The Suspended Voyage

The Interregnum’s most immediate effect is disorientation. After the Endeavor’s damaged envelope and steering surfaces are patched, the crew still cannot assume that the route ahead will behave like a conventional passage. Jonathan Heights has to reckon with depleted replacement parts in the middle of the wilderness, while the ship’s lights attract hostile creatures. The technical survival of the engines contrasts with the fragility of everything surrounding them: the machinery functions, but the expedition’s practical systems of supply and orientation have been compromised.

This suspension becomes especially clear after the Endeavor leaves Terminus. Jonathan Heights expects resistance but encounters none, and that absence itself appears suspicious. He concludes that the settlement’s temptation is part of a malign trap, whether natural or artificial, genuine or synthetic. When he and Eleanor McAvey return to the port, the ship is already in upheaval: Antomine and Captain Montgomery argue at the gangplank because Martin and Oscar refuse to return. The Interregnum thus affects not only location but allegiance. The crew’s shared movement begins to fracture as individuals decide whether departure is safer than remaining within the uncertain world they have entered.

Ritual, Death, and the End of the Interval

The dead remain central to the Interregnum. Antomine conducts a formal service for three crew members aboard the Endeavor, including George, whose empty casket acknowledges that his body cannot be recovered from the ruined settlement. The caskets are immersed in distilled luminiferous terrestrite, rendered into dust, and dispersed into the wind. This ceremony gives the suspended voyage a temporary order, imposing a recognizable human rite upon circumstances that otherwise resist human categories.

The interval reaches its most solemn point beside the corpse of a dead titan. The enormous body appears as a contortion of land and space, and the Endeavor seems to have flown through it as much as above it. Antomine recites, “From dust ye were made and dust ye shall be,” while Penelope, the ship’s cat, stands on his shoulder with one paw on the missal. Jonathan Heights and Antomine briefly agree that the corpse must be given a pyre. Their agreement does not erase their larger conflict, but the burning creates a shared act of recognition: the dead being is treated with ceremony despite its alien antiquity and immense scale.

When the pyre takes hold, the heat catches the Endeavor and lifts it, while the fire drives foul air from the ship. The flames illuminate the surrounding landscape, including canyons that resemble marks from enormous claws and the distant outline of Widow’s Peak. The crew breathes more easily as the ship travels east, and Captain Montgomery orders everyone to determine their position while the temporary light lasts. Jameson uses the triskolabe, while the lookouts compare visible landmarks with Jonathan Heights’s maps. The end of the Interregnum is consequently both physical and epistemic: the ship escapes the corpse’s grasp, and the crew briefly regains the ability to orient itself.

Thresholds Beyond Ordinary Time

The Interregnum prepares the Endeavor for a series of spaces in which ordinary temporal order remains unstable. Ukaresh is governed by few laws besides power, and its dangerous eastern weather requires protections Jonathan Heights arranged in advance. The ship has little company there, and Captain Montgomery distrusts the city’s not-quite-human inhabitants. Even safe mooring depends on Jonathan Heights’s prior knowledge and on an exchange of insect specimens for berth and protection, showing that ordinary money and ordinary hospitality have limited force beyond the established human world.

The Dead Battle intensifies the same condition. At first, Jonathan Heights regards the spectacle of two forces locked in endless combat as impressive but ultimately passive. Only after a full day does he realize that the observation room has expanded, its windows growing larger while the tableau appears to recede. Two immense figures emerge in the distance, and recognition changes the scene itself. The Dead Battle is not merely a battlefield preserved in time; it is a place where perception and duration alter in response to knowledge.

The Arch of Khokorron provides the clearest spatial image of the Interregnum’s logic. Its impossible machinery withdraws to reveal a tunnel several miles in diameter, lined with burning lights and extending beyond sight. As the Endeavor enters, the tunnel’s red illumination produces landscapes that may not exist, while an alien presence takes knowledge itself as payment. The passage cannot be paid for twice: the fruit Jonathan Heights carries, or alternatively a life, can be surrendered only once. When the fruit is missing, the journey exposes the irreversibility that governs these threshold spaces. Afterward, the Endeavor emerges through a much smaller aperture into the barren desert near the Lofted Lakes, where floating bodies of water and glowing flowers replace the tunnel’s machinery.

Meaning and Narrative Function

The Interregnum is a bridge between successive systems of reality rather than a gap in the plot. It suspends the expedition between departure and arrival, life and death, civilization and wilderness, knowledge and ignorance. Its ceremonies attempt to restore continuity: the burial service gives the dead a place, the pyre gives the titan a final rite, and navigation under the corpse’s light gives the living a temporary direction. Yet each restoration is provisional. The missing supplies, the crew’s refusal to return, the changing architecture of the Dead Battle, and the one-time toll of the Arch of Khokorron all show that passage through the unknown permanently alters what the travelers can carry forward.

The interval’s final contrast is with Bright Defile. There, Jonathan Heights reaches a threshold where darkness exists in a land defined by sunlight, and the last barrier can be crossed only by shedding every remaining shadow. He sacrifices memories, relationships, past choices, his cane, and finally the last separation between himself and the light. The Interregnum’s suspended world has prepared this passage by making ordinary continuity impossible. Its deeper function is to stage the cost of transition: the Endeavor can emerge from one end of the Arch of Khokorron, but Jonathan Heights can enter Bright Defile only after accepting that no return to his former identity remains.