Places

Eternally bathed in moonlight, the Penumbra clings to the landscape like a thick mist, shifting slightly but more or less in place. To find your way to other realms – often capitalized as Realms when you’re referring to a specific place or a type of realm – you head off into those mists and hope you’re going in the right direction.

How would you know? That’s where experience comes in handy. A traveler who’s skilled in cosmology; or who’s spent time learning the secrets of the werewolves to whom this land is a second home; or who has been initiated as a proper witch or shaman (as opposed to those New Age fruitbats who wouldn’t know a near-death experience if one gave them a heart attack) understands how to read the signs. Even then, though, finding your way through the Penumbra and into an actual Realm is tricky. Navigation in the Otherworlds is more a matter of instinct and intention than of direction… which is one of the many things about these realms that give people fits.

Navigation from this point onward is not a science – it’s an art. You follow your instincts, aided by experience, skill, and more than a little bit of luck. Mages who have werewolf allies speak of trods and Moon Paths, but those sorts of things don’t often work for our kind unless some other creature plays mediator for us. This is one of those areas where it’s a good idea to listen to your Avatar; our Awakened spirits often understand this world better than our conscious minds do. The Otherworlds are often counter-academic. Human learning, at least in our era, seems to get in the way when you’re trying to understand them. I’ve heard that people used to comprehend these things far better than we do now. But unless you’ve been raised in a shamanic culture, getting around once you pass beyond the Gauntlet appears to be one more of those things for which you have to unlearn all that you have learned. That said, technomancers who study Dimensional Science seem to have an easier time finding their bearings in the spirit world than most mages do. I guess that’s yet another example of expectations shaping reality: if you expect to know what you’re doing, you’ve got a decent chance at doing it.

Speaking of expectations, there are two terms I want to explain before we go any further: Tellurian and Tapestry. Both

are essentially metaphors for things that transcend words. When you’re dealing with cosmic concepts, poetry usually speaks better than numbers.