Black Hole Theory posits that things in Homestuck that enter black holes invariably end up on Earth C, Caliborn’s earth; making Caliborn’s session a sort of temporal doldrum where everything that crosses the event horizon is eventually becalmed. I compared this aesthetically to Kingdom Hearts’ End of the World; a void made up of the pieces of everything that falls into the darkness.
But if Caliborn’s session is the End of Time, then in the Ouroborosian fashion typical of cherubs, and in the paradoxical sense that is Lord English’s trademark, could it, should it not also be the Beginning of Time?
One thing never made clear in Homestuck is what form the Battlefield evolves into after receiving 12 kernels of data. I hesitate to call it one of the comic’s “mysteries”, because I think it’s exactly what it looks like on the surface: an unimportant piece of worldbuilding that never got its time in the light because it never became relevant to the story being told. Andrew puts it plainly in the commentary on page 330 of Book 5:
What did the Battlefield look like after twelve entries in the troll session? That’s anyone’s guess, but I wasn’t about to tie my brain into a knot trying drawing that out for you.
Yes, the trolls’ Battlefield would have had its own look after 12 prototypings, but no, it’s not important enough to go into.
What I think is important about this angle of questioning is that it obscures a much more important question behind it. That old chestnut in particular: “Why?”
Why does the Battlefield need to evolve into a three-dimensional form to be fertilised by the genesis tadpole? Why a four-dimensional form? Why a twelve-dimensional form? If the Battlefield is just a shell to hold a frog in, what’s wrong with leaving it at the cube stage? Even in a session of twelve players, each and every kernel must deliver data; so why does it vary from session to session how many prototypings the Battlefield requires?
[…] that sun there of course becomes an important recurring symbol, notably one Vriska commandeers, as she does with much of the plot later on. The sun has many meanings in this story. In retrospect, we might view it here as a sigil representing a mischievous god, who happens to be a female troll, always watching over him and meddling with his life in subtle ways. He didn’t know it at the time though, and neither did I.
Homestuck: Book 1, p.48
There must be something fundamentally different about a universe created by twelve heroes and a universe created by just four.
Both are facilitated by the Hero of Space; a necessity in any fertile session. By implication we can glean that the Hero of Time is a constant as well. And we know that the heroes collectively involved in the creation of a universe will leave some kind of imprint on that universe; asterisms bearing the heroes’ legacies, at the very least.
So does it not stand to reason Heroes of Space and Time are both required to create a universe because Space and Time are two things that a universe fundamentally needs to exist? The elaboration from here is obvious; Light exists in a universe with a Hero of Light among its creators; Breath is bestowed by a Hero of Breath, and so on.
The idea that things like Light and Breath can be considered “dimensions” in the same way Space and Time are is hardly even a speculation; the Dead Cherub all but states that this is the case:
Things like Light and Void and Breath and Blood can become entangled and difficult to navigate in exactly the same way Time and Space can; it’s just harder to see for the exact same reason it’s difficult for a human to conceptualise objects in higher dimensions than three.
The conclusion from here is obvious; a four-player session needs a four-dimensional Battlefield because their goal is to create a four-dimensional universe; twelve players, aiming to create a twelve-dimensional universe, would need a twelve-dimensional Battlefield to do so. This idea that a session with more players creates a universe that is somehow “more” makes total sense even surface-textually; more players in a session means more grist hoards in the centers of their planets, which means more substance going into the Ultimate Alchemy. That grist has to be going toward something; and that something is the dimensions of the universe being created.
Where I’m going with this should be obvious. Caliborn’s session clearly was not building up towards the normal goal of creating a universe, but Caliborn was not the normal player either; is it possible that as the Master, the Lord of Time, something he achieved in his session resulted in the creation of the dimension of Time itself? It has long been discussed that the nature of timelines, and the mysterious force that decides which timeline is the Alpha and which are merely doomed offshots, seems to serve only one purpose, the very same goal every one of Lord English’s servants works toward: his own birth. Could it be that things that cross the event horizon are so drawn to the Dead Session because it’s a place outside of time, existing not after its death but in fact before its very birth?