Places

That brings me to the Courts – another type of region that we won’t visit now, but you should keep this in mind for future reference. Gods and angels and demons and other entities make their homes in the Astral Umbra. These courts can be whatever the resident entities want to make them: temples of light, clockwork dominions, deserts of shadow, thrones of blood and fire… they’re all out there someplace.

Occupying more or less the same conceptual layer as the Afterworlds, these Courts are shaped not by human expectations but by the plans and desires of the entities that forge them. (The

entities themselves might be shaped by human beliefs, but… well, Chicken, meet Egg, and you guys can go sort things out between yourselves.) Umbral entities keep their Courts in whatever fashion seems appropriate to them; you could sip tea with a Mad Hatter or three in some Wonderland (there are several…), pay a visit to a Monkey King’s prison beneath a mountain, knock on Heaven’s door to have a chat with an entity called Saint Peter, or go visit Santa’s workshop in one of the several dozen North Poles floating around the Astral Reaches… and hope that you get the Santa you had wanted to find!

This might be the most crowded region of the Otherworlds. There are so many Umbral beings and so many concepts out there regarding heavens and hells and their holy and unholy inhabitants that the Astral Umbra could be seen as a giant fizzy cup of soda, with bubbles crowding the top of the glass and a film of sediment at the bottom. Unlike that glass of soda, though, the Otherworlds don’t occupy physical space. They seem physical when you’re inside them, but a theoretically infinite number of Realms can exist without shoving the others aside.