Places

As with the High and Middle Umbrae, the Tempest houses a multitude of Realms: Dark Kingdoms, hellholes, the dens of powerful entities, and the refuges of souls considered lucky by the standards

of this region. According to death-mage lore, ghosts forge so-called Necropoli upon islands in the Tempest. Beyond these Dark Kingdoms – which are built, from what I’m told, out of crafted souls – there’s a titanic Labyrinth chewed out of the Maelstrom itself by monsters that might have once been human. At the center of that cyclopean maze, legends say, there’s a Void… THE Void, called by some folks the Great Unmaking. This gateway to Oblivion is the punch line to our cosmic joke. All that is, was, or ever aspired to be gets swept into the Void eventually and becomes nothingness once more.

Oddly enough, certain mystics consider that a comforting thought. If everything ends in a Void, then everything must come from that Void as well. The Universe can’t be an endless flow of water going down the drain; eventually, that water – all matter, all energy, all potential – must get cycled back again. Just as living bodies break down into soil, so the new lives spring nurtured from that soil. And so, by that reasoning, the Void is our metaphysical recycling program, from which all new things come.

There’s just one problem with that thought: maybe the Universe isn’t endless. Perhaps a finite amount of energy, matter, and potential exists… and it’s literally spilling away. Whether you call such speculations “the heat-death of the Universe” or some more mystic name, there are theories that speculate that we really are going down the drain. That this life is everything, and after it comes nothingness. Forever.

And that, perhaps, is where the Nephandi draw their inspiration from. Not from Ascension, but from Oblivion.

Comforting thought, isn’t it?

Stepping away from such gloomy ruminations, I want to talk about dreams. Literal dreams, the dreams that Realms are made of. Fleeting pieces of our vast cosmic puzzle, the Zones drift through all three Worlds without belonging to any of them. Like the Tempest, these regions exist in a sort of hyperspace – separate yet bridgeable. And for Awakened and unAwakened souls, these Zones slip in around the edges and occasionally occupy an aspect of reality. I mentioned the Null Zone earlier; the other Zones, as they’re commonly defined, have been divided in the following ways:

These are such stuff as dreams are made on, and their reality is rounded by our sleep. As usual, mages debate whether the Maya – “the illusion of life” – predates humanity and therefore shapes us or whether it was the dreaming minds of our ancestors that first brought this Zone into being. A few people even assert that our Earthly reality is the true Maya, the Matrix-like shared dream/ nightmare that only seems real to us, and that the Dream Zone is where Reality actually resides. The old Zen joke about a man dreaming he’s a butterfly who may truly be a butterfly dreaming he’s a man… that’s the essence of such puzzles. Once again, Chicken, meet Egg – now try not to break yourself figuring out who came first!

Like all Zones, the Maya exists independently of the three Worlds, the mortal plane, and the other Zones. Bits of it cross over for brief moments, but the place itself exists on its own terms. It’s tempting to think of it as an outgrowth of either the High or Middle Umbra, and some authorities see it that way. More often, though, cosmologists consider it a region with its own metaphysical laws. Although powerful dreams are said to expand into the Mythic Realms of the Middle Umbra or the Afterworlds and Courts of the High Umbra, most of them exist in the ephemeral fabric of their own Zone.