THE RINGREALMS OF VAGEVUUR:
A BRIEF GAZETTEER
Around and around the rings eternally spin, with one full cycle taking forty hours to complete. For thirty-six of those hours, their configuration resembles a gyroscope, but then for four hours commonly recognized as the mid-day, the rings come into alignment to form a flat, circular disc over six thousand miles in diameter. Seen from a quarter of a million miles away, the disc reveals itself to be comprised of four distinct, concentric rings — Bjerg the Realm of Rock, Ís: Ring of Ice, Eyomirk: Ring of Desert, and Vatn, the World Vine
— all surrounding a central, wooden, spherical core called Tre Reikstjarna.
As self-contained ecosystems of their own right, each ring possesses its own distinct geographical features and native flora and fauna that form complex and vibrant ecologies. Together, however, these five landmasses comprise the Ringrealms of Vagevuur, a world floating alone in the beautiful and deadly aurora of the Engulfing Darkness.
THE ENGULFING DARKNESS & THE MANIFOLD
The hypnotic, rippling lights of the Engulfing Darkness surround the Ringrealms in all directions, and fill the night sky. In actuality a kind of interspiritual fabric for the storage of souls, the Engulfing Darkness encodes souls within, where they wait in temporary stasis until collection. The waves of light that appear as the aurora are, in actuality, the rivers through which souls are channeled between the Tangible and Intangible Realms.
As the four rings glide silently through the Engulfing Darkness, they collect these souls and ferry them to their ultimate destinations. Legends say that moments of time from the past, present and future, as well as messages from the departed, can be found in the patterns of the Engulfing Darkness, and superstitious inhabitants of the Ringrealms sometimes gather to watch the skies, attempting to glean messages from relatives or friends. Souls of those caught in the gears of the cosmic machinery, however, appear as shooting stars sparkling and crackling with the friction of rough entry into the Ringrealms, and it is said that their screams of agony can be heard all through the Ringrealms — until they are ultimately silenced by being slammed mercilessly into the surface.
BJERG: REALM OF ROCK
Bjerg is an immense ring of rock billions of years old and, with a surface area of over ten million square miles it is also by far the largest.
The outer land mass of the ring is mountainous, composed of craggy ranges, the peaks of which are encrusted with densely packed layers of snow and ice that becomes as hard as glass in the winter. The inner land mass is formed of immense plates of stone that turn to sheer cliff faces, dozens of miles high, at the inner edges. Standing on the peaks of the highest mountains, one gets a good sense of the geography of the Ringrealms of Vagevuur and its isolation within the Manifold.
Looking outward, the colorful and silent storms of the aurora rage across the Engulfing Darkness. Inward, the concentric rings of Ís, Eyomirk and Vatn successively separate Bjerg from the spherical core of Tre Reikstjarna, which rises like a spherical mountain at the center of the disc. The peaks themselves follow the ring and curve out, in and around, meeting so far in the distance (the Ringrealms of the Infernal is over six thousand miles in diameter) they cannot be seen by the naked eye.
As the outermost ring, Bjerg is traditionally viewed as the gateway back to the Tangible Realms and many falsely believe that should they make it over the peaks of Bjerg they will find themselves back in whatever reality that they came from. Nothing could be farther from the truth, however, and those that attempt to traverse the mountains (and manage to survive) find themselves at the true, geographical edge of the Ringrealms, which lead to nothing but the cold, black sea of the Engulfing Darkness.
Because of its location and despite its harsh and unforgiving climate and geography, Bjerg has continuously attracted immense numbers of lost souls seeking release from purgatorial imprisonment. There is never any shortage of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hopeful pilgrims attempting to make their way back to the Tangible Realm and over time it has grown into the most highly populated ring.
With a population of nearly a quarter of a million, the Waystation of Lost Souls serves as the official capital of Bjerg.
TRAVEL BETWEEN RINGS
Once every forty hours the four rings of the Ringrealms of Vagevuur align, and those intent of crossing from one to another must either employ the services of the Transportation Guild, or take a chance on their own.
Through relatively new technologies developed over several centuries, the artisans, craftsmen and engineers of the Transportation Guild (referred to colloquially as the Tee-Gee) have designed and constructed enormous mechanical marvels in order to ‘jump the gap’. Large, incredibly long cranes supported by complex systems of ropes and pulleys telescope outward to move vessels, loaded with passengers and cargo, from the surface of one ring and upward and outward into the sky. At the halfway point, these vessels are met by another crane that receives them, and then the passengers and cargo are transferred from one to the other. The well paid engineers and pilots of Transportation Guild, however, roll their eyes at the idea of danger. Jumping the gap, they would point out, is statistically less dangerous than crossing the street.
In recent decades, however, the Transportation Guild has made great strides in developing secret, cutting edge technology that utilizes väsen and the abilities of their own Voyants to actually fold spacetime. Taking advantage of the Manifold Inert, teams of Seers and Navigators create paths between target points in time and space to transport passengers and cargo across vast distances nearly instantaneously.
ÍS: REALM OF ICE
Ís, Realm of Ice, resembles a series of hundreds, and at times in its history thousands, of ocean-sized, liquid pearls clinging through the properties of adhesion and cohesion to the third ring. These massive ocean globules have been nicknamed The Deep Blue, for their aquamarine tint, and are famous for their incredible depths. (The deepest globule is three hundred miles in circumference, making it one hundred and fifty miles deep.) The oceans of Ís are believed to have been formed as a result of billions of years of constant runoff from the scraping and friction of the mountain ranges of the closest ring, Bjerg.
These oceans provide a rich environment for life, as is evident by the extraordinary creatures present in the The Deep Blue. Bizarre, beautiful sea creatures often hundreds of feet long glide silently through the viscous, inky dark. Many of these creatures are, in actuality, hopelessly trapped lost souls from the Tangible Universe, but many more still have actually evolved on their own over billions of years.
These ancient creatures, attracted to the dimmest light, faintest sound, slightest smell or most ephemeral taste, are often brought to the surface by the prospect of food. Journeys by ship across the oceans of Ís are done under cover of darkness and strict silence, and passengers are mostly kept belowdecks in holds sealed against light and sound leakage. If even one of these enormous creatures detects a presence on the surface above, it may sense a meal and come gliding up through the depths, wrap its tentacles around the unsuspecting vessel, and then force it into its’ magnificent maw. These colossal creatures can be several times larger than the vessel, itself, and fighting them is often a useless endeavor. Worse yet, the sounds of battle and thrashing water reverberate, effectively ringing the dinner bell for other creatures and bringing certain doom to the ship and its passengers. The only hope the crew and passengers often have is that two or three of the creatures will end up fighting each other long enough for the vessel to dock in the relative safety of one of Ís’s ice plate cities.
There is no land on Ís, and ships eventually can lay anchor at one of several hundred artificial islands, enormous engineering marvels composed of concrete-like ice plates reinforced with wood and lashed together with ropes as thick as tree trunks. While a few of the seas of the ring of Ís are so populated with colossal sea monsters as to be uninhabitable, settlers have created clusters of island cities of various sizes and populations on the safer ones, stretching out like chains across the surface of the oceans. These islands resemble collected pieces of shattered glass plates, varying in size from over a mile across, to not much more than a few hundred feet from end to end. As the surface of the seas rock and roll, the pieces grind and slam together in a never-ending cycle, and the engineers of Ís have lined the plate edges with thick wooden bumpers designed to dampen the repeated impacts. The full forces of nature can never truly be mitigated, however, and it’s not unusual for cracks and fissures to form as pieces collide. Teams of engineers travel in boats around and between them, constantly performing repairs to ensure that their cities stay afloat.
EYOMIRK: REALM OF DESERT FOREST
Carved and constructed by the engineers of the Transportation Guild from Eyomirk’s native Sky Trees, the platforms above Eyomirk, Realm of Desert Trees, float delicately between the gravities of Ís and Eyomirk. From the outside, jets of steam vented from ports adjust positioning to keep the platforms perfectly suspended in the sweetspot between the ring of Ís ‘above’ and Eyomirk ‘below’. These floating platforms serve as way stations for weary travelers, and numerous businesses have sprung up onboard, and with that a few primitive towns. With the exception of occasional visits by Factionnaires, these isolated settlements are relatively lawless, and the Transportation Guild employs its own private security force to keep the peace.
Composed of long swaths of bone dry sand and rocky detritus, the surface of Eyomirk is a barren desert of rolling dunes occasionally interrupted by rocky mesas while clusters of mammoth, thousand-year-old Sky Trees that hang hundreds of feet in the air above the desert floor like mirages. At one time long ago Eyomirk was rich with väsen, but the Sky Trees evolved to such enormous sizes and developed such a thirst for it that they eventually drained it completely, leaving the surface a powdery, chalk-like consistency poor in minerals and nutrients.
Thousands of years of väsen-fueled, accelerated evolution have granted the Sky Trees a kind of sentience, but more significantly an awareness of the Manifold. As some animals might root out grubs from moist soil, this awareness enables the Sky Trees to bend spacetime to tap into richer supplies of väsen from points in Eyomirk’s past. While the upper portions of the Sky Trees are physically present in our time, they fade backward in time toward their base, and their roots are firmly planted in the past. This gives the trees the appearance that they are floating, when in actuality they are simply rooted in another time.
Synchronauts, natives of Eyomirk, exist simultaneously in the present, past and future. This lends the body of the Synchronaut a mildly translucent appearance and their ghostly visage can be disconcerting to others. When leaving their Sky Tree clusters Synchronauts often use their minds to bend shadow and light into patterns around them to hide their appearance. While not quite isolationists, Synchronaut communities keep mostly to the safety and security of Sky Tree clusters.
Lush, the most highly populated Sky Tree cluster at just over twenty thousand inhabitants, is one of the few open settlements within the Sky Tree clusters. Though non-Synchronauts are barred entry to the trees of the inner core, a large mixed community has grown up in the trees surrounding. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of other clusters floating about the desert floor, the most populated and notable of which are Prime, Seminal, Quick and Share. In contrast to the ripe ecosystems of the Sky Tree clusters are the harsh, unforgiving conditions of the desert floor, where even the most microscopic creatures struggle on a daily basis for survival. Because of this, bands of human lost souls have gathered into tribes (some might describe them as gangs) that remain on the move, constantly seeking out the source of their next meal.
VATN: THE WORLD VINE
The final and innermost ring, Vatn, is a single, enormous vine with millions of relatively smaller branches, tendrils, and shoots that are thick with green leaves and flower clusters so stunningly large that they are covered in settlements and small cities. Arcing magnificently around the core of Tre Reikstjarna, Vatn grew from a single, thumbnail-sized seed that lodged in the innermost ring millions of years ago. The seed became Vatn, the World Vine that snakes its way clockwise around the final gossamer ring.
From the trunk of Vatn grow thousands of relatively smaller, and yet still enormous, branches that are thick with mountain-sized leaves, each in turn covered in lazy fields and green pastures, sloping hills and magnificent mountains that have oriented themselves ‘upward’ relative to local gravity. Most are overgrown and wild, but pioneers have cut paths on the smaller, outer branches and organized colonies and more formal roads on the larger, inner branches closer to the main trunk. Strung between these branches like sparkling constellations, seed pod transports called shucks ride the thermal winds, ferrying passengers and cargo between branch settlements.
The warmest and most lush of the four rings, Vatn’s ecosystem is rife with flora and fauna. Millions of years of turnover of organic matter have produced long stretches of rich soil and marshland fertile with the life-giving, so-called spider blood of väsen, which soak the leaves and ‘upper’ sides of the branches and trunk. The soil of Vatn, essentially composed of the shed, decomposed cells of plant matter, is the richest and most fertile in all the Ringrealms. The flora and fauna of Vatn have grown relatively unchecked for millions of years, and the ring is spoken of anecdotally as the deadliest. Adventurers that stray too deep into the wild are not often heard from again.
Those that make it out often tell outlandish stories of bizarre wildlife that defy classification. Creatures that scurry through the half-mile-deep valleys running along the vine’s bark, slither along the undersides of leaves as large as small towns, or sleep in seed pods that float suspended in air and just out of reach. Intelligent trees called Zaps uproot themselves on hilly grasslands to reorient toward the light of changing seasons, and during the dry season carpets of grass called Greenlooms for their beautiful patterns migrate to areas of higher rainfall on legs no more than a few molecules thick. Hundred-legged creatures, called Centishunts, unfurl the multi-colored leaves on their backs like preening peacocks to attract mates. Living globules of poisonous liquid called Leeth, held together by the most delicate of surface tension, scan for prey with organs that might be eyes, and then dive into veins of väsen pumping through Vatn’s branches. The Stex, intelligent creatures with sharp, angled bodies no thicker than a few centimeters but nearly ten feet tall, hibernate in plain sight on the bark of the vine, tapped into deposits of väsen just beneath the skin of the tree and feeding as they slumber. For each one of these creatures, however, there are thousands more and legends tell of wondrous creatures, mysterious places, and secret colonies of lost souls hidden deep within the wild, unexplored branches of Vatn.
TRE REIKSTJARNA: THE CRAFTED CORE
The final and least accessible region of the Ringrealms of Vagevuur is the mysterious, wooden planet core. Known as Tre Reikstjarna, the core is an engineering marvel unparalleled in all of Creation. At nearly five hundred miles in diameter, the man-made structure is constructed of wood that was at some point harvested from nearby Vatn, and is a confusing labyrinth of passages, tunnels, rooms and chambers containing spaces anywhere from several miles to several inches in diameter.
Tre Reikstjarna is thought to have been built by the Unknown Architects several thousand generations ago. Though some of the outer structure has started to rot from the elements, every last square inch of the planet has been lovingly and painstakingly crafted and, for the most part, the structure has remained surprisingly intact. Surfaces are plained, sanded and polished to finishes like glass, joints are dovetailed, fingered, mortised and tenoned with such exacting precision as to be virtually invisible to the naked eye, and seams are sealed tight enough to keep out air, water, and in some cases the vacuum of the Manifold. Those fortunate enough to have entered Tre Reikstjarna come away with stories of interior passages and chambers pregnant with fragrant, rich smells on par with the interiors of finely crafted instruments. Indeed, when strong winds blow across the surface of the small artificial planet, the tunnels and passages vibrate and sing like thousands of finely tuned woodwind reeds, and the tones can be heard around the planet and even sometimes in the branches of Eyomirk.
The surface of Tre Reikstjarna is covered in a layer of detritus from the nearby vine of Vatn that, over the generations, has accumulated like soil. It averages just a few feet deep, but reaches dozens of feet in areas where it becomes rolling, fertile hills complete with patches of well-rooted forest and beautiful grassland. Inversely, there are thousands of square miles of exposed surface area where the wooden surface of Tre Reikstjarna peeks through like bone. These areas are barren wooden deserts, devoid of all but microscopic life. Like the wooden planet, itself, Tre Reikstjarna’s climate is manufactured by one hundred enormous weather engines that rise up out of the surface like pyramids ten miles high.
Tre Reikstjarna City, the only organized settlement, serves as capitol. Covering approximately one square mile of the surface of the planet, TRC is considered an independent city-state. With a population of less than 1,500, Tre Reikstjarna City’s citizens are mostly composed of the Blood Guard, a specialized arm of the Monks of the Bleeding Spider.
The Blood Guard have sworn loyalty to, and protect, Weaver the Creator, who is said to be hibernating at the warm center of Tre Reikstjarna. Legend tells that the Unknown Architects constructed the complex, labyrinthine wooden structure around Weaver to protect her. The Blood Guard hold services to Her every morning and evening, and travel once a year to the center of Tre Reikstjarna to display their devotion in person. The Blood Guard believe that honorable displays of loyalty and fealty will someday awaken Weaver once more, and have been charged with protecting Her while she sleeps at the wooden planet’s core.