The Heavens
Far above the realm of mortals, only grazed by the summits of the highest mountains, is a realm of pure consciousness. It is called by many names - the Silver Sea, the Celestial Realm, the Astral Plane - but to most it is simply known as Heaven. A boundless timeless firmament, Heaven is a realm of silver-white mists and expanses of inky night. The empyrean vaults of Heven glitter with stars that can be seen from all over creation.
The rulers of Heaven are the Celestials, nine eternal beings said to have been involved in laying the foundations of the world. They are the greatest of the stars, leading the dance of heaven as they move across the sky. They are called planets - wanderers - by astrologers, and in the West, each has been given a special name. Since time immemorial, men have watched the movement of the stars with wonder, and catalogued their movements. The stars, and the Celestials particularly, have a mysterious relationship to the passage of time, lending another name to Heaven - the great jeweled clock. Men have long used the dance of the Celestials to write prophecies, for they reveal - in part or in whole - the secret will of destiny. The Celestials are viewed as teachers and guides of mankind, pushing them toward their eventual end - for good or for ill. They are aloof, expressing themselves to men only through their dance - and there is much argument among scholars whether the Stars control the destinies of men, whether they are messengers for a force more powerful than themselves, or another option, more mysterious - and possibly sinister. Among the other denizens of Heaven are the choirs of angels, sometimes called the heavenly host. Angels are beings born of Heavenly light, and they express that light, exemplars of the virtues represented by the Celestials. The Angels are keepers of cosmic order, and in cosmic wars between the forces of creation and oblivion, they have on a whole been on the side of creation. This is not to say that all angels are always good, and many have fallen to selfishness and violence. Heaven is not organized according to the rules of the mortal realm. It is a place of concept and mind, where distance and time have no influence over travel. The further one drifts from the mortal realm - the higher (or perhaps deeper) one travels into the Celestial Realm - the further divorced it becomes from mortal understanding of reality. Celestial spheres - realms shaped by thoughts and memories left behind by the minds of the living, or formed by the dead - drift through the mists beyond, like islands separated by a timeless sea. They are linked by threads of thought, common points in thought or memory that wind from one sphere to another. The greatest of these spheres are linked to each of the Celestials, each connected to one of the virtues, and organized around it. It is in these spheres that the dead live on in dreams and memories. Those who have died find themselves wandering once more the paths that they tread in life, reliving the experiences that made them who they were in life, and are now, until they reach the end and tread them once more. They are free to leave the path, as their memories and thoughts blend with those of others, conjuring a dreamscape where they might explore possibilities unrealized in life. Separated friends and loved ones reunite here, and those who have lived lives of evil are at last made to confront the suffering they wrought in life, and the suffering within themselves - and either to reconcile, or to further isolate themselves from all other living things. Though it is by all accounts strange to those unaccustomed to it, Heaven is not a faraway place disconnected from the mortal realm. The sky can be seen by all by both day and night. In some places, determined pilgrims may even travel directly from the mortal realm into the Heavens above - from sacred mountaintops so high they reach out of the mortal realm altogether, touching the starry expanse above. From here, travel takes on an entirely different meaning, as they wander through the Celestial Spheres. Wanderers through the Heavenly realm may return to find themselves far from their point of origin - not merely in space, but in time. They may find themselves flung far into the future, or into the distant past - or they may find that, though an eternity in Heaven has passed, mere moments have gone by in the world below. Author's Note: In a pretty recent iteration of Thraea, Heaven was populated by asgardian/olympian style gods. Thraea borrows a lot of its cosmological assumptions from the standard DnD setting, with some major differences, which meant that "clerics" got their magics from the gods. However, as the world of Thraea changed, I realized I didn't want to do that, although that flavor of magic still exists in Celestial Power, a tradition of magic descended from the Giants, and originally, the angels. Since (other than granting divine magic) the gods weren't doing terribly much with all that power they have, I retooled them into the Living Saints, which I'll probably talk more about another week. I think the Saints are much more interesting anyway. Heaven has always been the afterlife in Thraea since the earliest iterations, and its particular design draws from the Dream Bubbles from Homestuck, although considerably reflavored. While I really LIKE the design of the afterlife, it's one of the things in Thraea's continually evolving landscape that I'm not COMPLETELY satisfied with, since it doesn't really have any kind of basis in real-world folklore or mythology. It very elegantly fits into Thraea's cosmology, but it doesn't at all hearken to notions of the afterlife popular in antiquity and earlier - where the land of the dead is a place of dust and darkness, populated by shades who don't do very much of anything, and is typically associated with the Earth - the Underworld. I might change it eventually, but for now I'll live. Heaven also introduces "Narnia Time" to Thraea's cosmology, allowing for time travel adventures!
















