Everything

Like many other Umbral Realms, the Realms within the Vulgate usually appear infinite when you’re inside them. Space has no real meaning here. Although Realms have barriers around them – little Gauntlets that are sometimes referred to as pericarps – those barriers are typically invisible to folks within the Realm. As usual, there are exceptions, places where you really can reach the Edge of the World. For the most part, though, a traveler must be looking for that Edge of the World to even have a chance at finding it.

Most often, the Astral Realms have doorways leading to other Realms that share a conceptual link to the realm in question. You could, for example, find a path to Heaven if you’ve gone through Hell to find it. Once again, however, the traveler must hold her destination in mind if she wants to find it. It’s frighteningly easy to get distracted in the Otherworlds… and, by being distracted, to get horrifically, perhaps even fatally, lost.

For non-astral travelers, the Vulgate is as far as you can go without help. Although some other entity might open a portal to a higher Realm, we poor mages are stuck wandering around the High Umbra’s basement until and unless we learn to untether our consciousness and project it upwards to a higher plane. It’s hard to talk about the higher Realms without using air quotes and dense metaphor, because language is such a limited thing. To reach beyond the Vulgate, you have to also reach beyond common ideas and into the realm of abstract thought…