Vendav Ring

"Do not look; glance away from those wondrous visions; to stray into the Vendav Ring chasing dreams is to die."

- Otolin saying

The Vendav Ring is a circular hoop of yolk-yellow synth that floats about the Phaeton Halo.

Background
The Vendav Ring is approximately just over half a mile in diameter but hundreds of feet thick. A thin screen of dim light reaches across the ring's interior portion, depicting scenes within of unknown locales: a sunrise over a ringed planet, a lightning storm surging through some cloudscape, coral-like growths blooming in a sunlit, aquatic environment, a star entering into supernova, a galaxy being devoured by a supermassive black hole; a waterfall tons of miles long; a herd of what seem to be strange animals along a prairie, an organic eye as large as the ring itself, a completely alien landscape, etc. However, each of these scenes will only last a second at a time and almost never repeat.

Those that wish to explore the ring will only uncover a faint energy signal of some kind. All attempts to travel with the ring have failed, ranging from mechanical devices passing threw only to its opposite side, with their interior electronics fried, to organic lifeforms which simply disappear and reappear later as ghosts, flickering in and out of existence.

Regardless of its original purpose, however, these days it's used by the otolin population for suicide as well as for the execution of biomechanical criminals, when all else fails.

Miscellaneous
Vendav is actually the name of a mythical being in otolin lore who was originally the "betrothed" of Phaeton, prior to the latter's destruction.