The Orphan World

Somewhere in a sea of dream flux, in a roiling ether of pure thought far from the Center and on the borders of what a mortal mind can comprehend, floats the port city of Merrida, a sprawling cosmopolis built on fragments of the Worlds Before. The city is ever-changing, a tangle of gold brocaded bridges and gem-studded towers, of ancient temples built into the husks of enormous seashells and winding shadow-stalked alleyways that winnow around guildhalls and huddled homes. This dizzying tangle of disparate architectural styles and cultural manifestations constitutes a chaotic summation of the Orphan World as a whole, a loose representation of almost every living society (and many dead ones) in the Orphan World. Merrida is a lonely hub for the wandering souls of the fractured universe, those who find themselves lost along the road of years, or who have intentionally strayed, hoping that blind fate will lead to revelation and reward. Like the other lands of the Orphan, it is built on the detritus of a devastated cosmology, the pieces of planets sundered eons ago when the Adversary Soul's betrayal lead to the disintegration of an entire solar system, ripping apart reality itself and creating what is now a vortex of displaced consciousness--the consciousness of billions, of gods and mortals, and creatures not quite either: The Ever-Flux or Dream Sea.   Below Merrida, many other worlds exist on similar fragments of varying sizes. Here, the remains of the Before are baked into the terra in various strata of ruin and fossil. Over the past millennia, new life has covered the old, driven by the Many Minds that began and continue to mold our present reality, our current state of order. Some of these minds are, or were, great in scope, creating vast swathes of existence across thousands of miles. Others represent smaller beings who have carved out intimate corners and dimensions within the sprawling whole; and yet others still are unified collections of minds, the consciousnesses of shared cultures and communities that have made a fresh way for themselves, that have struggled and survived to stamp their testimony the pages of history.   The Many Minds are multitudinous and diverse, but among them, one soul in particular has had an overwhelming influence on what the sages of the library city Librus call the Orphan World. This is the mind of the Orphan itself, kin to the Adversary and prime among those betrayed by it. The Orphan is a young spirit, naïve and frightened, and the reality it has created is not the reality of a meticulous and omnipotent author god, but rather a mind muddled and misspent, one inherently concerned with order and beauty, and yet easily influenced by the Adversary's malice and thirst for entropy. The Orphan's imagination is slave to the vagaries of its moods, and it creates unevenly, with emotion as much as with pure reason.   When the Adversary's betrayal allowed the Primus Nil (sometimes known as the Underwind) to destroy the Nexus Galaxy, the Orphan spirit lost its family and all its people. They either perished or fled to new dimensions, leaving the spirit orphaned and alone. As a being rooted in the purest principles of creation and being, the Orphan's will proved surprisingly tenacious, refusing to succumb to the full state of perfect zero that the Adversary craved. In a moment of strength and fury, it reached out with all its might, gathering and rescuing what it could of the disintegrating planets. On these devastated fragments, the Orphan sparked new life and new consciousness, restoring some semblance of natural order and evolutionary process. The Orphan's mind crafted everything from advanced eco-systems to the beginnings of future kingdoms and civilizations. Overall, the resulting worlds are a collective expression of all the Orphan knows, knew or can dream of, and all that it continues to learn and dream of.   There is the Primeland of Ethra, the First Fragment, the biggest terrestrial plane at the heart of the Sea of Pure Thought where the most sprawling and coherent civilizations have risen and fallen over hundreds of thousands of years; some still thriving on the eastern continent of Essa and some now slumbering and forgotten across the Center Sea on the western continent of Wyst. Around Ethra, roiling tendrils of Dream Sea conceal the hag-haunted moors and forests of Ber Tommen, and the sunken city of Dalvia, the Isles of Old Mourning and the Archipelago of the Saints. Above is the moonplane of Lunis, once home to the Children of Exile who upon fleeing the disaster of a cosmic civil war, founded the present era's primary human civilization along the River Hedra. Just beneath these lands, folded into layers of stable materia are inner realms of manifest abstraction: the Dream of Lost Things and the Dream of Flesh and Blood, The Untold Visions and Unspeakable Vows; the Fields of Now and the Graveyards of Then; the living loom of the Time Feelers who spin and weave human fate. The giant, city-sized library of Librus floating unmoored in the Flux, passing the enormous shapes of Elder Things, some still living and some long dead. These constitute only a handful of the lands that comprise the Orphan World and beyond their tenuous cluster are other broken fragments, touched and shaped by The Minds Within.   From somewhere else entirely, the Minds Without watch the Orphan's struggle, curious but ultimately indifferent to the grand drama. They look at us as one might peer into a snow globe, observing how the Orphan's fluctuating moods often interfere with immediate reality, bringing fear and sadness, joy and love, a whole gamut of emotions not so far removed from our own. It is truly an epic drama, and all the while, the Orphan is searching for a new home, a new people, a new way of being in the universe. Its journey and ours are inextricably bound.