Arcane Cosmology

“Alright, arcane cosmology review time!” Honn picked up her own pen and grabbed a spare sheet of parchment from her desk, then began scribbling. “Some of what we know about the layers of reality--planes, realms, whatever you want to call them in a given language--has actual direction and distance, right? The Abyss is the big wet dark that surrounds everything we know. Inside that, though, there’s us in the physical reality--”
“Material plane,” Kiandriel muttered.
“Whatever.” Honn drew an uneven oval, then wrote ‘us’ inside of it. “We know that the Otherside is right next to us, overlapping.” She drew a second oval over the first, the outlines not quite aligned.
“Hold on. Are you talking about the arcane plane or the actual realm with spirits and such?” Kiandriel frowned. “They’re not the same thing.”
“Spirits. I refuse to believe there’s a bloody arcane plane. It’s part of our physical reality.” Honn drew an arrow pointing at the second oval, then wrote otherside (ghosties).
Kiandriel drew breath to argue, then exhaled. “Well. Alright. It’s mostly an aid to conceptualizing the cosmology to consider the arcane plane separate from ours, but I can’t actually agree that arcana is on an entirely different plane of existence.”
Honn pointed the blunt end of her pen at him and grinned lopsidedly. “I know my shit, Bell. Moving on!” She drew spokes from the inside of the ovals to the outside, then began adding bubbles to the ends of the spokes. “We have the weird little elemental pocket realms, which don’t have a lot of distance between us because that’s how we get their magic here. Like lint on the surface of our reality.” She drew symbols into each of the little bubbles for the eight pure elements of arcana.
Kiandriel pinched the bridge of his nose and didn’t say anything. Any one of his past teachers would be having conniptions at Honn’s summary.
Honn drew a much larger circle around all of her markings so far. “Good ole weird-shit realm, yeah? All the creepies are out here, and we know we can physically travel here without outright dying.” She wrote outerside (creepies).
“Oh, for-- Where did you learn these names, Honn? It’s the sidereal--the astral plane. Because that’s where the stars are.”
She rolled her eyes. “What do you call the Otherside, then?”
“Colloquially, the mirror realm. Casually, the immaterial plane. Technically, the asomatous plane.” Kiandriel huffed. “Better than ‘our reality,’ ‘the other reality,’ and ‘the outer reality.’”
“Asomatous is a dumb name, since you can get there physically, too. Anyways, those are the only ones that have any directional relation to each other.” Honn scribbled a wave-like pattern around everything she’d drawn. “The Outerside eventually runs up against the Abyss, but that’s not something any of us puny mortals have ever been able to prove, because that’s way far away. None of these places are technically empty, right?”
Kiandriel eyed her, but nodded.
Well below her illustration on the page, Honn added a wavy oval. “Then there’s Eldritch, which has no… orientation around our reality. It’s just… somewhere, and sometimes things get from there to here, like demons.” Without looking up, she jabbed her pen in Kiandriel’s direction. “I know there are plenty other pockets that aren’t directly connected to us, but right now, that’s not the point.”
She looked up and continued. “Eldritch may as well be overlapping our physical reality, or as far as the Abyss, and we can’t tell. But! There’s a reason Eldritch hasn’t just consumed all of life, right? And a reason the Abyss hasn’t washed the Outerside away. Neither of them can expand into a pure void. So… what if there were layers of actual void between the Abyss and the Outerside, and between Eldritch and all of this?” She gestured to her illustration.
“Okay, and…?” Kiandriel was frowning.
“We know there’s not a gap between us and the Otherside. But what about between us and the Outerside? More void, maybe? Keeps the creepies from falling out of the deep sky on us?”

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