The Wound
The cooling
also: cold lane · a lane cooling
A junction becoming measurably harder to hold open, year after year — the frontier's version of the bill arriving.
In full
A junction needs a standing gradient to hold a navigable fold at all. Draw on it hard enough for long enough and it starts to go: the lane cools, the fold takes more to sustain, and the slope runs for years rather than weeks. Crews describe it exactly as it feels — a long slow slope, two years deep, the junction getting harder to hold every year. And the more traffic threads it, the more it draws, and the more it draws the harder it gets.
Key facts
- A cold lane will not fold; traversal simply fails.
- Observed as a multi-year slope, not a sudden failure.
- Self-worsening: use accelerates it.
- The central observable of the frontier era.