Shard of the Beyond — Heavens & Hells
By: Luca Vanzella
Tags: Fiction, Maps, Fantasy, Worldbuilding, Settings

The Collapse

The Demiurge went away, so the Angels and Devils fought for the throne of creation. A brutal war stormed the cosmos, unleashing an immense power that warped all existence. The Beyond fell on the world in fragments and pieces: shards of hell, heaven, and other metaphysical planes were now part of the landscape. Plans and animals mutated, bred with otherworldly creatures, unnaturally evolved to adapt to these new habitats.

The world now

The dust of the War settled a thousand years ago with the Accord, a peace treaty among all factions, and a subsequent division of the continents occurred. The Immortals, the beings native to the Beyond and blessed with a divine spark, would eventually lose their namesake eternal life, as the severing from the otherworldy energies made them mortal. In the couple of centuries that passed before death came, the Immortals built nations for their followers around the more meaningful shards.

There are different kinds of shards, based on the type of planes they were in the multiverse.

High shards: pieces of the afterlife, like Heavens and Hells;

Elemental shards: pieces elements sources and their combinations;

Transitional shards: made of what was between the planes, like the Astral Space, the Aether, the Dream.

Entropy shards: slivers of the continuum between Absolute Order and Primordial Chaos.

Fragments of other material worlds: what there was before the Collapse (and maybe other planets).

Unknown shards: visibly sharing similar features of the other shards but of unknown origin.

Two of the planes, the reign of the Fairies and the dominion of Horrors, became the two moons.

HELLS’ SHARDS

The Flesh Fields and the Bones’ Coast

The Flesh Fields a vast stretch of continuous living tissues. The region looks like millions of bodies of various dimensions melted and then reformed in a landscape. In the flesh fields, the ground is skin; there are forests of bones and prairies of hair and fur; mouths lead to underground intestinal caves; formation of teeth or eyes may dot a hillside; etc. The Bones’ Coast is similar, but under sea level, with just towering rib cages emerging from the waters.

The environment is revolting, hostile, and unwholesome: mists of sweat, puddles of unidentified liquids, patches of infectious goo, teethed crevasses, and all sorts of nightmarish sceneries.

But there’s also riches: mining flesh and fat is very lucrative, as is harvesting the skin to make leather and teeth to use as ivory. The prime materials are not of the finest quality, but they are cheap and in abundance. The food, in particular, has always struggled to find buyers: the taste of the meat from the Flesh Fields is not bad, but it feels wrong, like a sense of guilt in the mouth. The only way to commercialize it to a vast public has been to sell it as very spiced and smoked jerky.

Gehenna Lagoon

The waters of this lagoon are perpetually scalding hot, and they have a reddish glow that gives a twilight tinge even to the moonless nights. Nobody lives permanently on the small rocky islands dotting the lagoon: it’s like being in a sauna, and even the Ember Elf can endure that climate for a limited time. There are some settlements on the coast and a big town on the tributary river: the unnaturally warm weather offers the chance to farm many otherwise exotic crops. The sea fauna is also a resource even if the appearance of the fishes and crabs can be unsettling: to pull the nets and see fishes with human faces, some of which look like you, is not easy to stomach.

Hades Badlands

This region, also known as the Grey Wastes, is a barren landscape that unravels reality.

The Hades Badlands is a land scarred by clay slopes that lead to shallow canyons and derelict hills host of brown bushes and dry grass. The most impressive features of the places are the cubes of rock that look like they fell from the skies: some are like boulders, others are tall and massive as buildings or towers.

The Badlands are a land of oblivion, where things are undone and forgotten. The theory is that cubes emit an anti-magic field, so powerful end up erasing material reality. Many scholars went on to study the Grey Wastes, and the few that returned put the basis of counterspell and other give insight on the fundamental of magic.

Every part of the badlands will start the unmaking from a different aspect. It could start from the mind: memory vanishes bit by bit until only oblivion remains. It could affect substance first: a person becomes gradually more transparent and unsubstantial until she becomes a living ghost. It could affect shape itself, transmuting objects and bodies in amorphous blobs. It is said, but there are not record, that the cubes can affect space, making people bidimensional or reducing them. Some theorized that the Hades Badlands could erase something or someone from time itself, making them never being existed in the first place. Of course, there’s no way to know if it is true.

Ruins of the Nine Circles

The home of Devils was the Nine Circle of Hells: a stepped pit where guilty souls suffered their well-deserved punishment. The Circles, as all the places from Beyond, existed in a metaphysical space, with different dimensions and natural laws. When the Collapse forced the Circles into the material reality, they shattered: now what remains are massive curved pillars, tall as hills, separated from each other by leagues of fields and farms. Only The Ninth Circle is unbroken and looms as an enormous stone arch over the Capital city of the Infernal Empire, Goetia.

Compared to other Shards, the ruins of the Circles have little impact on the fabric of reality: divination and time magic are more potent near the pillars, but not by much. But this and the symbolic meaning of the ruins make them places of worship and pilgrimage destinations.

Tartarus Peninsula

The Tartarus Peninsula appears as a karst territory, full of sinkholes and caves, with rivers that disappear in limestone ground and resurface to dive from the tall, white cliffs facing the sea. Under that, there’s what remains of the infernal prisons: a sprawling and unchartable set of caves and dungeons. The depths of Tartarus are a destination for explorers and adventurers: one can find there exotic materials like the bones of the damned, the material remains of immaterial souls. The first yards deep are relatively well mapped and secure (with huts and refuges for the explorers), but the deeper you go, the more dangers you’ll face: acid oozes, monstrous moles and stone eating insects are just the heralds of an impossible ecosystem that as claimed many lives,

HEAVENS’ SHARDS

Ethereal Ocean

Here, a marine paradise coexists with a vast prairie in a paradoxical juxtaposition. At first glance, it could seem like this grassland host a species of flying fishes, but it’s more complex than that: the various marine creatures are swimming in out-of-phase waters. Corals, crabs, algae are living side by side with trees, bees, hares. All things can interact with each other even if they respond to different environmental conditions: small fishes graze the fur of bison, sharks hunt murmurations of starlings, prairie dogs look for clams to eat, Spiders weave their web to catch small shrimps, and so on.

The Angelic unison has many settlements in the region, all dedicated to fishing with unusual methods, like trawling carriages or net shooting catapults.

Only a limited region remains unclaimed: there some grotesque fish-humanoid, the Kuo-toa are holding their ground. They have an unbeatable advantage: their shamans can make anything “phase” from the “world of the sea” to the “world of the air” and vice-versa. If you venture too close to the Kua-toa’s territories, you will drown in invisible water, and your corpse will float in the sky, towards the unseen (or maybe inexistent) surface.

Floating Plains

One of the paradises was a series of idyllic islands floating in an endless sky: now it’s just slabs of rocks and dirt suspended on the land, some just tens of feet, other many yards. For travelers, the view is awe-inspiring: hills and boulders levitate at various heights over farmlands, sometimes sparse like stones clouds, other times dense like an archipelago in the sky.

The people living there don’t pay much attention to the phenomenon since the Floating Lands are more a nuisance than a resource. Every piece of floating land seems to follow its own rules: some have standard gravity, others have it upside down (like walking on a ceiling); some stay fixed on an exact point in space, others wobble around a fulcrum; some can sustain weights, others “sink” and others exert repulsive forces.

Second: the Floating Plains are not exceptionally fertile nor rich in minerals, rendering mining and farming operations rarely worthy.

The presence of these floating objects and their gravitational quirks cause issues with farming: casting unwanted shadows, covering from needed rains, redirecting winds and clouds.

Third: the Floating Plains are in the heart of the Angelic Unison, far from wars and border disputes, rendering the strategic advantage of high ground moot. There are still some castles and towers from the Schism wars of the V century but now are most in disrepair: climbing up to a floating land can be complex, especially with building material.

Many have tried to use magic to move the lands, but that proved to be a very delicate endeavor: a wizard trying to push a few feet aside a piece of levitating earth may end up it falling into the ground or jettison it into the sky.

Infinite Forest

Even if the Infinite forest has a perimeter, you can venture inside it indefinitely. After a while, you’ll notice the center of the forest is always near, but always some leagues aways. Some rangers spent weeks trying to go to the other side of the woods, but they all have to walk back from where they started. Everyone less than expert will lose themselves: there are signals craved in the trees and traced path, but the deeper you go, even the slightest deviation can cause you to lose orientation.

Some people decided to live in the forest. In time, they fall into a blissful daze losing interest in everything material, just desiring to “be with the trees” and, eventually, getting lost on purpose. Travelers can find abandoned huts filled with the stuff left behind by the people taken by the Infinite Forest. Most of them are Sappy poems about the leaves.

Menagerie Islands

This archipelago, off the east coast of the Angelic Unison, host many different animals. Too many, in fact. In theory, such small and mountainous islands shouldn’t sustain such a number and variety of animals, some of them of enormous size. In practice, the islands are full of thousands of species, almost all unseen in the continent, all of them thriving.

The celestial nature of the islands warps the ecosystem in an unclear way. Some scholars say there’s a “harmony field” that coordinates the action of the animals making the food chain unnaturally efficient. Others think there’s a hidden “source of vitality”: some energy that allows living with less food and water and promotes fertility.

The life forms that inhabit the islands defy classification: plant/animal hybrids are common, as are highly coordinated symbiosis and forms of sentience. Everything is brightly colored and overdecorated as nature itself was trying to impress some spectators.

The islands’ towns are just small colonies with temporary residents: the environment warps humans as it does with flora and fauna. Children born there all exhibit some mutations like claws, feathers, leaves, thorns, scales, petals. The problem is that some people could become linked to the habitat: once part of the islands, you can never leave. Angelic bureaucrats have tried many times to breed animals and farm plants from the menagerie, but this proved impossible (save rare exceptions). Far from the native shores, the animals and plants start to get ill, sometimes showing signs of madness. Even the plants: an orchard of delicious mushroom-apple strangled all the farmers that were tending to it.

Manna Cloud

A white cloud the sky over the hills of Malabolges, no matter what is the weather. The cloud changes shape, sometimes it seems like it’s dissipating, but it always comes back in its fluffy form. Everyone that looks at the cloud sees pleasant images: lambs, rabbits, flowers, baby laughing, and so on.

If it’s cold in the winter, the cloud comes down and becomes a thick fog that smells like someone is baking your favorite cake.

When it rains, it rains Manna, a sweet substance that sticks everywhere, especially on the trees, forming small stalactites (a sort of “sugar icicles”).

When it snows, a glue-like frosting covers the land, and every step becomes an ordeal (Stilts are a common means of transportation in winter for this reason). A summer thunderstorm can leave the countryside at the mercy of swarms of insects, ready to feast on the literally heaven-sent food.

Nirvana Caves

Dwarven miners found the Nirvana caves following a strand, not of ore, but metal artifacts. They dug bracelets, pins, swords, gates, completely encased in stone as they formed there.

When exposed to air, some parts of the strand would start to grow vegetations, even without light or water.

The Nirvana Caves are partially natural and partially artificial halls carved in stone. The walls are full of lushing vegetation and embedded objects.

But the real peculiarity of the caves is that there the dead will become ghosts. But not the “normal” kind of ghost. If a soul doesn’t dissipate in the mana field, it will hang between existence and oblivion, more and more scarred and twisted as time goes by (that’s why almost all cultures burn their dead). In the cave, a soul remains well adjusted but a little aloof and detached: time for them passes differently, and the absence of a body changes the perception of many things. Dwarves put the wisest people in the caves, so they can ask their advice even after they passed away.

Olympus Crater

Here is where the War between Heavens and Hells ended. Here, one of the tallest mountains of all Creation crumbled under the immense energies released by the death of Eosphorus, the First of the Devils.

Now there are only rows of concentric hills, with a crater lake at the center. The celestial soil made agriculture fruitful, but mystical magic that imbues the area cause many strange phenomenons. All that has to do with energy is amplified: lightings can break rocks, fire can suddenly roar, winds push stronger. Sometimes crops grow luminescent, as can happen to newborn animals and babies. Spontaneous human combustion is a rare but well-documented happening.

The Olympus Crater is a sacred place for the Angelist Religion and for this reason homes many monasteries and pilgrimage destinations. Here the pious come to witness the nefariousness of the Devils’ side and the vile act of their leader: he preferred to make himself explode than admit his defeat. Many are the martyrs that died that day and for each of them, there’s a little temple near the central lake. They are one hundred and eight in total.