Annica

Annica is a tectonically active world despite its barren surface, its geological activity maintained by the combined gravitational pull of its red dwarf star and a gas giant in a more distant orbit. The planet is airless: no atmosphere exists, and no sound travels across its surface except through suit equipment. The surface is covered in red sands with black streaks and occasional escarpments, rising at one location into a mountain large enough to contain a promontory and an underground cavern system. Because the planet has no atmosphere, the sky is thin and the red dwarf sun appears as a pale, bloody-red disc. The star is described as nigh-immortal, having burned for an immense duration at a cold and sedate rate consistent with a low-mass red dwarf. Weak tremors periodically affect the planet's surface as a result of the tidal forces. The system also contains asteroids, which were used as targets for weapons testing during Demiurge's years of exile there.

Annica is uninhabited and has no indigenous population or colonial settlement. It is identified by Hadrian as the heart of the Quiet's dominion-to-be, a designation rooted in the nature of the ruins located there rather than any human or alien habitation.

The ruins of Annica are a city partly grown from a mountain, consisting of round arches of black stone, narrow passage entrances barely wide enough to admit a single person, and chambers broader than they are deep with ceilings lost in darkness. The walls of the chambers are covered in round anaglyphs forming components of a celestial machinery. The city is identified as the oldest of the Quiet ruins, meaning it reaches furthest back in time of any known Quiet site. It exhibits a remarkable temporal anomaly: the ruins operate as an engine driven backward across time from one of countless futures, such that effect precedes cause within the city. As a consequence, the ruins are physically rebuilding themselves over time — stones rise from the floor and cracks close of their own accord. Hadrian deployed sensors across the ruins to predict where defractures would occur by measuring the widening of time around those spots. He states that if one walked long enough down its corridors one would eventually come out on Emesh. Hadrian identifies the city as the birthplace of his god, the Quiet, and the place where the god raised him to new life. Stewardship of the site has been entrusted to Kaim-Olorin of Jadd. Camp equipment belonging to Tamerlane's crew is stored in white module lozenges at the foot of the mountain.