Now that we've covered the fundamental layout of this universe and the forces that go to work in shaping it, we can begin shifting our focus back to our world, its origins, and the secrets of its history. To fully understand this, though, we must first take account of our surroundings: the vast, exotic, hostile landscapes from which Gaia first emerged, and the entities that call these hellish places home.
Along the edges of the map, you'll notice that, along the edges of the Gaia's outermost sphere, instead of a homogenous geographic barrier like the Ice Wall surrounding Earth or the Montane Ring surrounding Atlas, there are instead a series of distinct expansive environments that run out beyond the bounds of the map itself. These regions are not part of Gaia proper and are in fact the inner surface of the Cosmic Egg itself. These are the "wastes" referred to in the true shape of the world post. Being the furthest away from the aethereal core, these lands are where the laws of physics are at their weakest. As one descends further into these lands they would witness the line between the real and unreal growing increasingly blurred. In the wastes, thoughts, concepts, and spirits are just as tangible as physical objects, and likewise any physical matter is just as fleeting and ethereal as an idea.
Stars and planetoid bodies represent tiny islands of stability in these great oceans of chaos. Only in their immediate vicinity do the landscapes of the wastes settle down into comprehensible forms, but the further away one goes, the more wastes behave less like physical landscapes, and more like the concept of landscapes, meaning they can be amorphous, overwritten, or appear and behave differently based on the observer. Not even directions function the same way here, there is no east, west, north or south, and navigation is not as simple as moving in a given direction for a period of time, as even the same set of movements can produce different results. It is a realm where nothing is absolutely consistent, and everything is subject to change.
Despite their bizarre and chaotic nature, there are a myriad of beings that not only traverse the world of the wastes, but thrive there. These entities come in four main categories:
Spirits are incorporeal beings lacking a physical body, such as demons, djinni, succubi, machine elves, ghosts, and various other spirits and thought forms. In environments in regions of higher elevation, these beings would be restricted to the astral plane, only free to move and manifest through the thoughts of material beings, otherwise incapable of interacting with the world around them. In the wastes there is no such distinction between physical and astral, and thus these spirits are just as potent as any material life form would be on a planet.
Most spirits have a parasitic relationship with conscious physical life forms, relying on the energies they provide to sustain themselves. In this way they can be thought of as analogous to the steppe nomads of ancient and medieval history, living on a barren landscape poor in resources, but venturing into the lands of settled peoples (in the case of spirits, planets housing conscious organic beings) to plunder their wealth and resources. As incorporeal entities, they are not concerned with material riches; what they seek to amass are metaphysical impulses: lust, greed, knowledge, pain, sanity, etc., cultivating these within the minds of the mortals they influence.
Some prefer to act in a cryptic manner, indirectly or subconsciously influencing mortals to produce the energies they desire. Others act much more overtly, demanding worship and rituals from the mortals under their sway.
The degree to which spirits are capable of manifesting on a planetoid body depends on the ambient aethereal pressure, meaning it decreases as the elevation from the wastes increases. In the case of Gaia:
In Akupara, they are capable of spontaneously manifesting in short intervals, freely invading the minds of mortal beings (which makes natural or external resistance necessary to avoid their influence) and permanently latching onto mortal beings or physical objects.
In Earth and Atlas, spiritual beings are, for the most part, only capable of action when channelled through the mind of a conscious being, usually requiring a ritual or altered state of consciousness in order to interact with them. Generally, channelling incorporeal entities is far more effective on Earth than Atlas (mostly thanks to the Moon).
Hauntings are instances of extreme localized potency in which a ghost or demon is capable of manifesting and, in especially severe cases, physically interact with or “curse” a given structure or area. These are far more common in Atlas than on Earth.
Ultraterrestrials are races that originated on planetoid bodies and achieved such a level of advancement that they are capable of navigating, and in some cases, settling the Wastes. These include many of the beings known from the study of UFOLOGY: the Greys, Reptilians, Pleiadians, Draconians, Little Green Men, etc., as well as other beings commonly (but incorrectly) identified as cryptids, such as the Mothman (specifically one of the 3 varieties; to be explained in a later post), Fresno Nightcrawlers, and the Flatwoods Monster.
Most ultraterrestrials live primarily on "snowman" structures, using the wastes strictly for travel and communication between celestial bodies. Despite the non-euclidean nature of the wastes, routes from one "snowman" to another can be reliably charted if some form of contact is established between the two beforehand.
Some ultraterrestrials have left their homeworlds behind and live entirely in the wastes. This lifestyle inevitably results in the species becoming warped by the chaotic environment, taking on the properties of spirits and becoming something in between physical and spiritual. These "half-corporeal" entities are no longer capable of surviving on the upper elevations of planetoid structures, the aethereal pressure too much for them to bear, and are thus often restricted to living mainly on the wastes, clustered around the lowest points of planetoid bodies. Being half-corporeal rather than fully incorporeal spirits, they still have a use for material resources, and so frequent areas of higher stability in order to gather what they need to survive. Of all civilized races, they are the most capable in navigating the wastes, interpreting the chaotic swirling conglomeration of environments, concepts and beings as naturally as a human would survey a landscape with their own eyes and ears. These waste-dwellers are capable of spreading their influence deep into the wastes themselves, establishing population centers that reshape the local environment. Such locations can be thought of as analogous to cities, sustained and reinforced by the collective willpower of all who live there, like a tangible mass-hallucination.
Monstrosities are titanic beings with immense power and reality-warping capabilities. The largest of these beings possess such powerful forces of will that they can reshape the terrain of the Wastes around them through their presence alone, effectively functioning as minor gods, imposing their essence across vast territories surrounding them as they move across the wastes.
Monstrosities can originate from a variety of sources. Spirits, sapient beings, animals, plants, or even sufficiently large objects can eventually grow into such an entity. This is a gradual process. If any given being consumes enough material (matter, energy, other beings, etc.), it will eventually grow to such a monumental size and power that it will begin to ambiently affect its surroundings (emanation), at which point it will be called a monstrosity.
Every monstrosity is unique, resembling anything from giant monsters to living storms, amorphous conglomerations of animate matter, eldritch deities or hivemind consciousnesses. Monstrosities can be mindless or intelligent, possess bodies or act as a disembodied force that warps local reality, and their intentions are often beyond mortal understanding. They cannot be appealed to or interacted with like spirits, for, to them, organic life forms are little more than microbes, too small for them to even notice, let alone understand.
Because of their all-consuming nature, these entities are universally hostile to others of their kind. If any two found themselves within each other's general proximity, it would inevitably lead to a conflict in which one eventually overpowers the other. Sometimes smaller monstrosities will submit themselves to far more powerful ones, becoming vassals, emanations of the larger entity's will.
These beings are massively weakened if they ever found themselves in regions of greater aethereal pressure than the wastes, such as the surface of a planetoid structure, usually rendered dormant or otherwise immobile, becoming trapped there until some cataclysmic event or dramatic change in the local environment gives them the opportunity to break free. The Isles of the Blessed, Nysia, and Lāla are examples of such entities becoming trapped on Gaia, with the anomalous natures of those regions reflecting the power levels of their respective beings and the elevation at which they were trapped. Planetoids emerging within the range of a sufficiently powerful monstrosity will be influenced by its nature. Similar influences can also be seen if a large enough monstrosity passes by the edge of a planetoid. The unique Wastes surrounding Gaia are an interplay between the lingering effects of monstrosities and the planet's own emanations, with the Irradiated Wastes, the Titanic Forest and the Walls of Asgard being particularly influenced.
The power of monstrosities is reflected by their size. Smaller "bestial monstrosities" are far more numerous than larger ones, their ability to reshape the surrounding landscape is limited in scope, and typically only done as the result of conscious action. They are more likely to manifest a body, and are typically tenacious and animalistic in nature. The general size of minor monstrosities ranges from fifty meters to a few kilometers in stature.
Larger “cosmic monstrosities” reshape the world around them through their presence alone. They are less likely to possess an identifiable body, their physical presence being marked instead by the terrain affected by their emanations, which can be anywhere from a million square kilometres to tens, hundreds or even billions of square kilometres in area.
Image from a telescope displaying an expansive area of the wastes containing thousands of celestial bodies. The blue-pink trail stretching across the image are the emanations of a cosmic monstrosity, distortions left behind as it moves across the landscape.
A dark planet closing in on a small planetoid structure as shooting stars rain down upon it.
As mentioned in a previous post, all "snowman" structures contain within them a central vein of Azoth that fuels their continuous growth, connected to a pore in the firmament that allows the essence of God to flow through. The earliest stage of a planet's development begins with the spontaneous emergence of one of these pores, which attracts one or more stars to descend from the aethereal core to mold the inflow of Azoth into a new world. The presence of these stars is usually sufficient to ward off any waste-dwelling entities seeking to consume the abundant Azoth, but not always. If a cosmic monstrosity were to gain access to one of these pores before the arrival of a star, or if it were powerful enough to resist the effects of their aethereal light, it could begin consuming immense amounts of azoth, allowing it to grow to such a gargantuan size at a frighteningly fast rate. This, combined with the exposure to the aethereal light produced by the nearby stars, spurs the monstrosity to undergo a unique evolution, transforming it into a massive globular structure known as a dark planet.
Their immense size subjects them to the increased aethereal density planets experience at higher elevations, which threatens to paralyze and trap the entity within a planetary shell. To avoid this fate, dark planets must constantly feed to sustain their eternal struggle against the Aether. Eventually the pore upon which a dark planet feeds will reduce its flow, prompting it to begin moving across the wastes, both to escape the light of stars orbiting the area, and to search for new food sources. These dark planets then begin seeking out other planetary structures in order to absorb their mass and feed from the Azoth pore beneath them. The effects of a dark planet's approach can be felt long before the targeted world's destruction, as they are capable of projecting their emanations as far as they can perceive, with the resulting chaos only intensifying as they close the distance. By the time the prey world faces its ultimate destruction it has likely already been warped into an unrecognizable state by the omens of this incoming doomsday.
Dark planets represent an existential threat to all planetary life, and the balance of the universe itself. The Archons, hyper-advanced beings that live near the aethereal core, have recognized the apocalyptic consequences dark planets possess were they to go unchecked, and have devised weapons to annihilate them, or at least slow them down. Their primary mode of attack is to fire the stars themselves at these dark planets, sending them flinging across the universe at impossible speeds until they come crashing down on the monsters with such force that they shatter and release all of their Aether at once in a brilliant explosion. If the dark planet dies mid-bombardment, the confluence of energies can result in the being itself being violently torn asunder, producing one of the most powerful events known to occur within the cosmic egg: reality-warping waves of destruction capable of annihilating everything within multiple lightyears.
The most common method dark planets use to resist the affects of aether is the creation of moons, free-floating globular bodies which orbit the dark planet in a similar manner to the suns of typical planetary bodies, but serving the opposite purpose, emitting an ominous "cold light" that weakens aethereal potency.
Luckily for us and most of the universe, Dark Planets are exceedingly rare and slow moving. Despite their monstrous capacity for destruction, much of the Cosmic Egg has remained untouched by the dark planets' wrath. Recently though, very interesting signals have been picked up from a region right outside the solar system...
FIRST POST
PREVIOUS PART: VRIL AND ORGONE
