“I’m a ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’ kind of guy,” Jason said. “You either keep your mouth shut or accept that someone's going to put a fist in it from time to time.”

Clive shook his head. “You’re a crazy person. Just listen up, alright? So, all the cosmos is a bowl of dumpling soup.”

Clive paused, tilting his head in thought.

“Now that I’m talking about it,” he said, “I really could go for some dumpling soup.”

“I know, right?” Jason said, nodding his agreement.

“I know a really good place back in the city.”

“We’ll go when we get back,” Jason said. “Annihilation, the cosmos is soup, remember.”

“Right. So, in this dumpling soup, each world, each physical reality, is a dumpling. Your world, a dumpling, my world, a dumpling, every world out there, a dumpling. The astral is the soup through which we are all the dumplings, all the worlds, are floating.”

“Alright,” Jason said. “With you so far.”

“The astral, the soup, is also the source of all magic,” Clive said. “That’s what it is, just magic. Pure, unadulterated; the most fundamental building blocks of reality. Every world, every dumpling, is swimming in it. Some dumplings soak up a lot of the soup, like this world. Our world soaks up the magic, which takes various forms as that magic gets shaped by our physical reality. That’s why we have essences, awakening stones, quintessence, monsters, all just appearing out of nowhere.”

“But my world doesn’t have any of that,” Jason said.

“That means your dumpling soaks up very little of the soup.”

“So, how did I end up here?”

“Alright, think of the soup kind of congealing around a dumpling. That’s how you get astral spaces, which are a sort of magical dimension attached to a world.”

“Like the one that produces all the water that makes this delta.”

“Exactly like that,” Clive said. “But not all that congealed magic is as stable as an astral space. It can kind of drift away, especially if someone goes and pokes a hole in the side of the dumpling.”

“Like a big summoning spell.”

“Precisely like a big summoning spell,” Clive said. “Some of that congealed magic can drift off the side of the world, like a tendril. And if it happens to touch another dumpling, a brief, unstable link is formed. In this case, that link was between a world very good at soaking up magic, and one that isn’t. So my world sucked in a part of yours through that magical link.”

“How big a part?”

“Tiny,” Clive said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been the only one to arrive. But that link was never established properly; it was a phenomenon created through random forces, which means a couple of things. One, the link would have collapsed, almost immediately.”

“So, no using it to get home,” Jason said.