There is no good term for "the entirety of places a person can visit", truly. 'The world'? There are many of them. 'The universe'? Again, it's seems quite likely that it is not singular. 'Reality'? Outright incorrect; many of the places one can visit are decidedly, distinctly un-real. Many scholars would say there are two universes, or worlds, or what have you; there is the one we know, to which humans are native, where the planets orbit stars, light is law and the Judgments rule from atop the Great Chain of Being. This is the realm of Is. Then, on the other side of mirrors, behind the glass, lies Parabola; ruled by the Fingerkings, home to great cats and the eldest of devils, outside time and life and law. This is the realm of Is-Not. They neatly carve up all that could be; a thing either Is, or it Is Not, and lives in the corresponding realm, and so these are the two univeres. That's the theory, at least; as you may have gathered, I disagree.
Firstly, consider the Neath. A great cavern under the earth, where sunlight does not reach and most of the laws of nature are suspended. But merely suspended, not negated; death is strange in the Neath, but not unknown. Breaching the Great Chain and elevating oneself (or, theoretically, debasing oneself, were it not that the Great Chain considers humans to be nearly as debased as it is possible to be) is possible, here, but difficult, and nearly impossible without a counterweight which moves the opposite direction on the Chain with the same magnitude. It is easy for us to access Parabola, especially compared to the Surface, but we are manifestly not in Parabola, as you may note easily from the fact that causes lead to effects, motion passes through the intervening space, and the vast majority of locations are in the same place on Sunday as they will be on Friday week. We are not Is-Not, but not quite Is either.
Then, consider Irem, far across the Zee. Irem sits outside time, and one can take a stroll through its pillared streets and find yourself in Parabola, then wake from that dream and find yourself in an unfamiliar bed in a room you will have never entered. Irem will be, is, and has ever been, all at once, and ideas may be held in the hand, there. It will be very much like Parabola, and clearly will not be in the realm of Is, but it will not quite be Is-Not either. (The odd tense in which one will always find oneself speaking of Irem will be another aspect of its unreality.)
These establish that the distinction between Is and Is-Not blurs and has gradations, not a simple binary. But even within the Neath, there are stranger realms in evidence. Consider Frostfound. It is a realm of ice, in which time does not pass linearly, suggesting that it Is-Not. And the reflections in the mirror-bright ice of Frostfound have a life of their own, likewise similar to Parabola's gateways. But one cannot reach, or even see, Frostfound from dreams, and the Fingerkings not only have no power within its walls, but appear to find it utterly terrifying. If time is a river flowing to the ocean, Parabola is a placid lake where eddies swirl in any or every direction, but Frostfound is a boulder sitting mid-stream. It defies time, deflecting or imprisoning anything which attempts to impose causality upon it. This is very hard to reconcile with any gradation of the Is/Is-Not distinction, indicating strongly that it lies outside that spectrum.
I submit that the explanation can be found in one myth of Frostfound's formation, which is in at least some sense true. This myth goes that a stray Judgment entered the Neath; not the Lovelorn King who Surfacers call 'the Sun' but a star from a far-distant land. This traveling king sought something, something it felt a powerful need for. It sought it across the High Wilderness but in vain, for what it sought is not. Judgments cannot visit Is-Not, nor would they be permitted if they tried, but it heard that the Lovelorn King had made a realm outside star's light and yet not Parabola, and so it opened the Avid Horizon and entered the Neath. When it was here, it sought its desire in the irrigo depths of the Cave of the Nadir, it sought it from the Mountain of Light which is the god Stone, and it sought it in the peligin deeps of the Zee, but still in vain. the Traveling King spoke to the shapelings of the Neath-roof, and learned that what it sought cannot be found in any star's light - d___ inconvenient, as it was itself a star. But it is the Neath, and breaking the Chain is possible. The Traveling King could make itself no longer a star. It carved from its timeless nature an eternal island, so that whatever changes it might undergo would have always been so, and yet it would still know how to appreciate things it had once wanted; this was Irem. It carved out its memories of its search and the hunger Stone's light had amplified, and placed them as a great castle at the edge of Stone's light, and this was Kingeater's Castle. But it was still too much a star, and so it carved out the desire itself, creating something that eternally Was and yet Is Not. The twin paradoxes of this need being always true-in-the-past but never true-in-the-present, and of the Traveler excising the need and yet remaining driven by it, made water, minds, and even time freeze around it, and that was Frostfound. And then the Traveler, no longer a king, went East from Irem, seeking its desire in the unlit eternity of the East.
Frostfound is, according to this story, a crystallized paradox, Is-Not created from the raw soul-stuff of a Judgment, which is anathema to Is-Not. Like a hole dug so deep that it wraps around to fall from the sky, Frostfound is at the same time the direct opposite of Parabola and a duplicate of it. This explains a number of events and phenomena where items extracted from Frostfound both have transportative properties reminescent of prisoner's honey but also inhibit prisoner's honey or Glass-work by their presence. I posit furthermore that just as the nature of Law-distortion, as developed from Parabola and demonstrated in the Iron Republic, forms the discipline of the Red Science, investigating the nature of Frostfound in detail will reveal an equal and opposite discipline, which I shall provisionally name the Blue Science. This is not limited exclusively to Frostfound; the Drownie bubble-London of Dahut, on the floor of the Unterzee, seems to operate along the same lines. (This suggests that the Fathomking may have some skill in the Blue Science, though as His Complexity is known to trade with the Fingerkings, that picture is manifestly - pardon the pun - a complex one.) Certain reports from the High Wilderness, in domains such as the Garden-King's realm which no longer possess a shining Judgment, also point to similar principles; I particularly note the Silent Saint and certain well-substantiated ghost stories. The Saint may have been formed by a similar mechanism as Frostfound, but no record survives of its formation. The ghost stories are more intriguing; multiple stories from the former-Garden include principal figures capable of acting as living men for considerable time, hours or days, and which leave physical traces of their presence and actions, which remain even after their ghostly nature is discovered and the figure himself has disappeared. These walking shadows appear to share the Was-Yet-Is-Not nature of Frostfound and the Blue Science, and without the direct involvement of a Judgment, which is quite intriguing; should I venture to the High Wilderness myself, confirming and investigating these stories shall certainly be my first research subject. Broadly, I expect from these examples that the Blue Science is not capable of effects as dramatic and powerful as the Red Science, but that it is will also prove much easier to control and harness, avoiding a known shortcoming of that anarchic field.
However, the existence of this realm invites a broader point. First it appeared that there was a binary choice between Is and Is-Not, and later a spectrum which admits of many gradations of gray, and even positions on this spectrum which could be manipulated selectively so that some aspects were close to Is and others to Is-Not (the subject of the Red Science). But this realm is not on that spectrum; if we view degree of reality as the number line, with zero at Is and unity at Is-Not, then this realm is not a fraction. It may be a negative number, which would be perplexing given its observed properties but not entirely inconsistent. More interesting is the idea that it lies outside the real numbers entirely; not entirely orthogonal to the axis of Is to Is-Not, but skew to it, a complex number of whatever magnitude. This raises the question: if more than one direction, one angle in the polar form of complex coordinates, is possible, why only two? How many other realms of strange quasi-reality are attainable? Is there a whole rainbow of cousins to the Red Science? Is there a Green, a Silver, a Violet Science? For that matter, is there a Gant, Irrigo, or Violant Science? And if these do exist - and surely, some of them must, as where there are three categories there must surely be many - how might we begin to uncover them? I admit without shame that this question has consumed me since I first conceived of it, despite having no idea how it might be answered. Beyond even this is a further question, which in candor I am not even sure how to ponder: If realms may be mapped as rays in complex space, not merely scalars, why confine them to only a single plane? As the late Irish Arch-Theorist described the complex plane, these rays are vectors, rooted at the origin. And if we use his framework in describing the relation that the Blue realm has to the spectrum from Is to Is-Not, we can ascertain only that it is neither a more extreme form of one of those two, nor is it orthogonal. But any two non-parallel vectors may define a plane, and so until we find a third, we have no reason to think there is a single plane that all possible vectors lie within. They may differ on many axes; a space of three, five, even a dozen dimensions. It may even be that they are not simple vectors at all, but more akin to Sir Hamilton's more esoteric work - namely the system of quaternions - or to the octonions of Benthic's Prolific Fellow, or to mathematics yet more arcane. I have utmost confidence, however, that whatever the system may be, it shall be describable by mathematical means. Even in the darkness beyond Law, the study of Number has remained the Queen of the Sciences, and has not admitted of any field which was not Her subject.
