Places

There are supposedly more permanent Realms among the Dream Zone, too: the collective dreamscapes of cultural memory, like Hollywood, the Land of Nod, and the fearsome Dream Theatre of the Dead. Or like the primordial Onerae, where comatose and demented people spend their entire lives.

Dream Lord entities, the Oneira, make their homes among these regions, shaping dream-stuff into powerful Demesnes. Given the relationship between the Onerae and insanity, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the deranged Marauder mages share a cosmic tie with the Oneira. When the Mad Ones disappear into vortices of their own insanity, they might even become Dream Lords within the Onerae. Perhaps this is what Ascension is to them… in which case, some Marauders essentially become gods.

At the center of all things, it is said, there’s a Realm that is All Realms and yet part of none of them. A primal expanse of virgin wilderness, it reaches to the borders of the High, Middle, and Low Worlds, branches into dreams, winds around the Paths of the Wyck, and pokes tendrils into the furthest corners of the Digital Web. This is the Ur-Forest, supposedly the origin of all forests everywhere. Legends call it Eden, Paradise, Midrealm, the Root of Creation. And at its center grows the largest tree in the universe: the Aelder Bole, a World Tree that reflects the majesty of life itself.

Ringed by a wall of rainbows that few travelers – and no technology – can pierce, Midrealm features four eternal rivers. Each one begins at the base of the World Tree and then ranges off into the distance, pointing almost exactly along the four axes of North, South, East, and West. In between those rivers, various biomes – forests, glades, wetlands, meadows, plains, and even deserts and ice – divide Midrealm into every earthly environment.

The Tree itself, a titanic pillar that reaches beyond the clouds, has been called by many names: the Tree of Life; the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; or the dense embodiment of the Otz Chaim, which traces the 10 Sephiroth that lead from the Divine Crown to Earthly Matter and back again. In the Tree’s branches, a Protean Hawk guards the secrets of the immortal fruit of the Tree; under its roots, the serpent-dragon Typhon – said to be seven miles long – creeps through endless burrows dug beneath the surface of Midrealm. A Hall of Many Meetings, shaped from living wood, greets visitors who have a purpose; the titan Forethought hangs from a bough in a copse of oaks and pine trees, his blood nourishing the soil beneath his body. Some folks see Forethought as Odin; others view him as Christ. By any name, he embodies the Hanged Man, drawn between planes of existence and sacrificed to himself in the name of wisdom.

Some folks have tried to climb the World Tree. That’s no easy task. Few travelers can even find Midrealm, much less enter it, and so although various legends speak of journeys up the World Tree, I’ve yet to meet anyone who could prove he’d actually performed that feat.