Riftstorms

During a riftstorm, multiple cracks in the aether appear in the sky. Each crack appears for only a brief moment, but the storm itself can last hours or even days. Depending on the rift polarity of the cracks, the storm can consist of downrifts, uprifts, or both.

Downrifts drop matter, pulled from a different dimension. If that matter is water, it appears like rain. However downrifts can rain all sorts of things, like ash, lava, or even sentient life. The scariest part of a riftstorm is the uncertainty of what the storm will bring.

Meanwhile, uprifts pull matter into the rift. They cause the ground to bubble, branches to be pulled off trees, and shingles to fly off roofs. Given how uprifts affect the ground and air, earthquakes and tornados are common during riftstorms with many large uprifts.

Some scholars theorize that riftstorm activity is responsible for some geographic features in the world. For instance, riftstorms are rare in flat areas like the plains, while these storms are abundant in the prairie zone, perhaps explaining their sweeping undulations.

Trivia

• Some (as of yet) unanswered questions:

• How often do they occur?
• What causes them?
• Is there a limit to what or how much can be transmitted?
• How high up are they?
• Can they occur at ground level (riftfog?) or below ground?
• What about inside solid matter? Do they ever interact with floating continents? Can they be artificially generated?

• The author suggested some additional (as of yet, non-canonical) information: "The size, distance, number, and duration of rifts all matter in a mathematical way, resembling a physical force: A rift twice as large pulls twice as hard, but twice as far pulls only a fourth as hard. Anything without ethereal isotopes will be unaffected, but my thought is that this world is littered with enough ethereal isotopes that the soil is scattered with enough of them that it will feel the pull of the many rifts in concert, almost like how the moon pulls the tides of the sea. Now large, stable rifts are rare (that'd make interdimensional travel too easy), so these rifts collapse very quickly and would be too dangerous to use as travel to another dimension (plus you have no idea where it leads or how to get back even if you successfully manage to slip through one without being destroyed). But the downrifts are just uprifts backwards. They've opened up in some other dimension (say in the middle of another world's ocean) and are sucking up that matter and spraying it onto the world. Imagine the horror if those rifts opened in a chamber of magma and rained lava down on you. Also, now that I'm thinking of it, there could also be rather innocuous "nightrifts" where it these rifts open in the middle of space. They'd technically be downrifts but there's nothing on the other side to spray down, so it should be a rather calm storm, but it basically just appears as blinking stretches of starry nightsky piercing the blue heavens."