From ‘Introduction to the Planes,’ by T. Ketzvih:
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PRIMORDIAL
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The Primordial Realms are something of an odd grouping. Officially, they are all those Realms which cannot be properly sorted into any of the other categories, yet even a casual inspection of its members reveals that this is far from an adequate description.
According to some, they are all the realms which embody some deep, fundamental aspect of reality, but in a way even deeper than the Divine realms and their existence as the ur-examples of mortal ideas. Primordial realms are thus more akin to the base concepts which the entire cosmos exist upon. Yet, what base concept is the Morningstar built upon? The Maelstrom? While I present a definitive answer for the purposes of this text, many of the Primordial realms are far more complex than a book could possibly describe.
Perhaps they are those realms which do not have a god ruling over them? No, even then it is not wholly accurate. Deities of the Primordial are far less likely to interact with mortals, yet they exist nonetheless and may be far, far more vengeful when seeking to punish an interloper into their lands.
Regardless, all Primordial realms are basically incomprehensible to mortal minds. When traveling to them, unless special preparations; magical, spiritual, and mental alike are taken, then they appear as a facade of sorts. This is not an intentional shield for the sanity of mortals (insofar as can be determined), but rather the natural result of non-native life manifesting within the realm. Why this is the case remains a point of ongoing research, but is speculated to be the simple result of the realm attempting to remain in-phase with all of its contents.
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Green Lands
The Green Lands, for all that they possess the most benign facade, are perhaps the most genuinely incomprehensible of all the Primordial Realms.
It is the nexus of all of time across the entire multiverse, every past and every future accessible from within its bounds. While the exact machinations of time are best left for a study in advanced Chronistry, it will suffice for our purposes to say that time is not a single sequence of cause to effect. Rather, when not subjected to the forces of a singular timestream, it is more clearly a mass of tangled snarls, of subsequent moments of ‘present time,’ each a focus for countless possible pasts and futures.
The facade of its primary plane is an infinite meadow, verdant and green for all that it is completely absent of all other forms of life. Venturing deeper into the realm unveils facades of cities and ruins, caves and rivers. Other than any moving water which may be present, everything is green, usually said to be covered in thick green moss, giving this Realm its name. This culminates in the City of Then and Now, an emerald city where time is traversed just as surely as any street and bartered with like a copper coin.
Breaking past the facade takes one outside the bounds of time, watching the loom of time spin by, pasts becoming the present becoming futures.
Green Land Primordials are perhaps the most singularly powerful category of being, as they all possess a unique relationship with time. At its most benign, this manifests in the Kraz-Viol Samsara, who are united in that upon death, their soul is returned to the moment of their birth/creation, granting them nigh-omniscience for everything pertaining to their life. (In truth, the soul of a Samsara is not truly returned, but simply always existed that way, yet a full explanation of advanced Chronistry is beyond the scope of this book.) This extends to the excrons, whose existence as innately outside of time, even upon leaving the Green Lands, renders them all but omnipotent.
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Chaos Beyond
The Chaos Beyond, sometimes known as the Far Realm, borders every realm at its most distant plane, and is the most varied and chaotic of all the Primordial realms. In this place, reality itself shifts unpredictably and concepts, not matter, are all that truly exists. What exactly the heart of the Chaos Beyond is like, if it truly even has such a thing, is unknown and largely believed to be futile, for nothing can survive its shallows. Spells go awry, being twisted beyond their own existence into foreign forms and concepts. Those who venture into it never return, and the Primordials which exist are so incomprehensible to the minds of mortals, elementals, and even divines as to be meaningless.
It is a place of madness, the darkness beyond the stars of the Astral, the skies above the sky of Heaven, the bedrock deeper than the deepest layer of Hell, the bottom of the Abyss. Those ‘Primordials’ which have appeared within the lands of sanity are never in their true form, but simply translated and given shape by either the rare spell capable of reaching them or more commonly the ‘echo’ of a ritual, carrying with it a fragment of such a being’s reflection.
Even these reflections (which shall be referred to as the Primordials of the Chaos Beyond for simplicity) invariably wreak havoc upon reality, forcibly altering the manner in which the lands they appear within either temporarily or forever.
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Abyss
The Abyss is often said to be the heart of all evil in the cosmos. That is ridiculous. ‘Evil’ is not some cosmic force which infects the souls of man and causes them to perform heinous acts. That is merely the measure of the soul.
The Abyss is, however, the heart of malevolence.
It is actively hostile to all existence and being which is not itself, a force of destruction and hatred which still does not ‘infect’ the rest of existence any more than the Green Lands ‘infect’ reality with the passage of time. It is simply a planar manifestation of the phenomenon.
Abyssal Primordials, known more commonly as demons, are the Primordial which most of my readers are most likely to be aware of. Unusually for Primordials, demons are actually relatively comprehensible by mortal minds, likely due to their Primordial nature being an emotion common to most forms of life. This actually makes demons the least constrained to their base nature, and while it is not likely by any metric, it is not uncommon for a demon to overcome their base nature and genuinely transcend their origins. This incidence is of course far less common than mortals setting aside malevolence in favor of cooperation, but is in many ways comparable to a mortal becoming an Elder creature.
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Digressions on the nature of demons aside, the Abyss’ facade is that of an endless void, an eternal pit of unknown (yet massive beyond conceptualization) size. Within this void, planes drift like islands whose facade resembles any number of other environs, yet invariably featuring structures, either natural or ‘artificial’ which the traveler describes as appearing ‘hostile.’ The exception which proves the rule are the Planes of Bliss, which are described as impossibly welcoming and inviting as to prevent the wanderer from ever leaving.
Despite the relative commonality of traveling to the Abyss, it is important to remember that all sights and descriptions of the Realm are indeed merely of the Facade, and the true appearance of the Abyss is just as incomprehensible and indescribable as any of the other Primordial Realms.
The Abyss, as a final point of note, is the most likely of all the Realms for a Slip to open, as being foundationally made of malevolence means that it is entirely possible for any mortal with a grudge to connect to the realm purely through their desire and hatred. This is especially common among mages with powerful souls, and is why careful emotional control and detachment is so commonly espoused as a virtue among practitioners of sorcery.
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Maelstrom
The Maelstrom is predominantly theorized to be the Primordial realm of chaos and destruction, though such a descriptor is close enough to that of the Abyss that it is clearly insufficient for the realm. However, the Maelstrom is fairly universally agreed to be impartial with its destruction, contrasted with the desire for harm the Abyss demonstrates.
Its location within the grander cosmology shifts not quite randomly, but certainly unpredictably on longer time-scales, and wherever it passes planes have been ripped from their realms and chaotically reshuffling both their location and their occupants and contents. In fact, there is ongoing debate as to whether the Maelstrom even is a realm, as it seems to have no consistent set of planes which make it up. Some planes have been within the Maelstrom, even the heart of it, for as long as anyone has been able to keep records of such things, yet none have managed to determine whether they are truly a permanent part of the realm.
The facade of a plane within the Maelstrom is that of the original plane’s appearance, save that it appears randomly rearranged, with oceans ending suddenly as a giant wall of water, only for a mountain to then grow out of that wall of water, with no clear point wherein water is replaced with stone.
The Primordials of the Maelstrom, collectively known as the Apep, are intensely variable in form even within members of a species, however there do remain enough trends (usually in the manner in which their presence affects their surroundings) that they are capable of being categorized and recognized.
Of course, while the chaos is certainly the most notable aspect of the Maelstrom, it too is an aspect of destruction, and some planes that it consumes are not later released, but instead wholly broken down into its smallest constituent parts, then usually recombined with a plane somewhere later on. Other times, these fragments drift into the Morningstar, and are spread in that manner.
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Morningstar
The Morningstar is the Primordial realm of creation, and is the largest realm in all of the cosmos save for perhaps the Chaos Beyond itself. Each and every action taken within the Morningstar spawns new planes, new collections of planes, and is the source of all new planes, and is often believed to be the source of the additional substance which existing planes expand with.
Its facades are highly variable, yet always include some aspect which is associated with growth or creation. Massive factories, lush forests, volcanoes, and eternally flowing fountains are all common features of the Morningstar, yet to put any limits upon this realm is to understate what it is and what it can do.
Even its Primordials are entities of existence and creation, from the living planes that are the albeists, to the infinitely long, infinitely growing ouropoiesis. Less well-known are the brightmuses, creators and inspirations for ideas, as that too spews forth from the Morningstar.
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Uror
Uror, sometimes called the Loom of Fate and occasionally thought to only be an offshoot of the Green Land, is the Primordial realm of fate. Its facade is described as a transitionary space, and one of the most genuinely useful Primordial realms, to the point that some consider it an honorary Liminal plane. Countless strings, planes in their own right, are looped together to fashion the connections between everything in existence. The stronger the connection, the more defined and ‘real’ the facade representing the connection is.
Past the facade, it is said that Ilinor the Fatespinner sits pulling upon the threads of fate to guide the paths of every being in the entire cosmos. It remains inconclusive whether Ilinor is a deity, an exceptionally powerful norn, or even exists to begin with.
It is considered just as inadvisable to attempt to utilize Uror to sever one’s fate, to eliminate connections of either their own or their enemies, or to strengthen such connections, just as attempting to change one’s past or future is inadvisable within the Green Lands. Doing so goes poorly, often leaving would-be fatestealers as literal shades of their former selves, either torn asunder by bonds far too strong for their own existence or erased from the ability to affect or be affected by anything.
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Akasha
The Akasha is the Primordial realm of knowledge, and thus contains nothing less than the sum total of all information in all of existence. Every theorem, every passing thought, every discovery, all exists within the realm whose Facade is often described as an infinite library.
Of course, the Akasha possesses all knowledge, including false knowledge, and this is an important fact to keep in mind when utilizing it for divinations. Further compounding this difficulty is that even true information may not be true for the location believed to be queried. Thanks to interactions with the Green Land, it also contains knowledge about what could be, or could have been. That this extends to radically different interpretations of fundamental reality is a matter I shall leave for the philosophers, as it is also possible that such knowledge is simply incorrect information, regardless of the minuscule likelihood some of the misconceptions could have come into being naturally.
Once a new thought is made, a new fact discovered, the Akasha grows to incorporate that new information. This has lead some to speculate that the Akasha is in fact a form of universal afterlife, keeping the true records of a being’s essence in perfect preservation, and that record of a being, that perfect creation of everything they ever were, may manifest as something approximating their existing personhood once their information is ‘complete,’ becoming a bookkeeper. That there is no evidence for such a thing has not stopped these people from persisting in their beliefs, yet the Akashic Cults remain a pervasive enough presence that they demand mention.
Conversely, in the event that something is wholly annihilated from the Akasha, so too does that information vanish from the entire cosmos. This process is known to be possible, and to even have happened, yet naturally what information was destroyed is unknown. There are many, many failed attempts, however, as evidenced by the number of concepts whose only record is the knowledge of their destruction, itself found within the Akasha. Many of these failed removals are best left unexplored, yet the original identity of the Plaguebringer is one such surviving factoid.
Primordials associated with the Akasha are odd. While some, such as the bookkeepers, are undoubtedly persons in their own right, fully sapient and aware entities comprised of pure information and naught else, there is even less of a clear divisor between what is and is not a Primordial or simply a feature of the realm, or even just a property of information itself (if there even truly is a distinction between the latter two possibilities). As an example, memetins are little more than a single facet of knowledge, a solitary idea which resides within the mind of another, and is spread like any idea, growing and mutating as it progresses. In many ways, memetins act like a living being, and with the appropriate spells it is possible to establish rudimentary communication with the memetin. It remains unclear, however, thanks to the rudimentary ‘intelligence’ of these simple Primordials, whether there is a true conversation occurring, or simply a set of divinations which can learn information about the origin of a solitary idea.