THE REALMS

Calling them worlds would be easier.

It would also be wrong.

The Realms are pockets of reality: places with their own landscapes, peoples, histories, climates, rules and, occasionally, very different ideas about what should be possible. To somebody born inside one, there is rarely any reason to believe their home is anything other than a world. Most live and die without discovering otherwise.

The simplest way to imagine the Realms is to picture a million Petri dishes sitting beside one another. Now imagine something capable of 3D-printing worlds into them.

Mountains rise. Oceans fill. Forests spread. Civilisations begin. Some of those dishes remain separate. Some touch. Some overlap. Some develop routes into neighbouring Realms, while others spend thousands of years believing there is nothing beyond their own horizon.

And beside all those smaller dishes sits something much larger. One vast Realm around which countless others gather, intersect and occasionally bleed.

This is not literally how the Realms are arranged. It is merely less wrong than imagining planets floating beside one another in space.

THE NEXUS

At the centre of this impossible arrangement is something usually called the Nexus.

Descriptions vary.

A machine.
An engine.
A place.
A structure.
A heart.

Perhaps all of them.

The Nexus is connected to the creation and maintenance of the Realms, although exactly how it accomplishes this is considerably harder to explain than saying a machine makes worlds.

So, for now: A machine makes worlds. That will do.

The important thing is that these worlds do not together constitute the greater universe. They are also a pocket within it. An extraordinary one. An enormous one. One containing more histories, peoples and places than any person could reasonably explore.

But still a pocket.

And over that pocket hangs a name found again and again in its oldest stories.

The Sleeper.

Some describe the Sleeper as a god. Others as a creator, prisoner, dreamer, ruler or something for which those words are merely convenient. For the moment, it is enough to know that the Realms exist beneath its shadow. Whether their inhabitants realise it or not.

BETWEEN REALMS

There is space between the dishes. Except it isn't space.

Between neighbouring Realms, overlapping Realms and Realms that should have no route to one another at all exists the Between.

Travellers have crossed it. Things live within it. Paths can be made through it.

None of those statements mean it should be considered empty.

More importantly, the Between does not belong to the Realms. The Nexus did not create it. The Sleeper does not define its limits.

The Between exists between all things. Between places that occupy entirely different realities. Perhaps even between things for which place is the wrong word. The Realms merely happen to be one collection of places where the Between is encountered frequently enough that people have learned to give it a name.

This creates an uncomfortable implication.

If the Between exists between all things, then no world is ever entirely isolated. Not even one outside the Realms. Not even one outside their universe.

There is always something between.

And somewhere else, beyond it, there may be something on the other side.

ARCHIVE NOTE: Do not mistake a collection of worlds for the whole of creation.

The Realms are enormous to those who live within them.

Creation has never been particularly concerned with perspective.