Aetrimonde

Before I get back to building the latest Inquisitor sample character (and if you haven’t already voted on their ancestry and faith, go do that now!), I’m putting up this one last post related to faith and religion in Aetrimonde. Today, I’m talking about the heavenly realm!

…Which means it’s going to be a short post, because despite the best efforts of Aetrimonde’s planar explorers, there simply isn’t that much known about it.

Where Faerie and the Underworld are fairly easy planes to visit, the Heavenly Realm is quite difficult to reach. This is partly because crossings to the Heavenly Realm are rare: they occur only in places that have seen singular acts of genuine faith, and as such, they tend to wind up with shrines and temples built on top of them, with priests who tend to want to vet anyone using their temple to go and explore heaven. Complicating this is the fact that crossings to the Heavenly Realms are harder to actually use, as though universally closed off by the Seal Planar Crossing ritual.

That said, a scarce few expeditions to the Heavenly Realm have succeeded and returned, and while some of the early ones were clearly pushing a doctrinal agenda in their recountings, there have emerged a few commonalities…many of which raise more questions than they answer.

• The Heavenly Realm is an apparently infinite expanse: it has a perfectly flat ground made of an utterly invulnerable substance variously described as alabaster, white opal, and mother-of-pearl, and is suffused by a constant white light emanating from no particular source and leaving no shadows. There are no bodies of water and no plant or animal life; between that, the unsettling lighting, and the lack of a horizon, the plane is actually one of the more hostile to mortals, for both logistical and psychological reasons.
• The plane’s only native inhabitants are angels, most of whom are so intent on various ineffable tasks that they pay no attention to mortals. The rare few that so much as acknowledge mortals can often be persuaded to provide food, water, and other supplies from unknown sources, but they seldom answer questions about matters of theology and when they do, the answers are uniquely unhelpful.
• The only landmarks in the Heavenly Realm are scattered monolithic structures, ranging from the size of towers to the size of cities or mountains, which later accounts describe as having the quality of machinery but without any visible means of function or operation.¹ There is an apparent center to the plane, a region densely packed with these structures² and in which all recorded planar crossings from the material world are located
• Some of the structures appear to be in a state of disrepair; others are tended by angels who may or may not be operating them. It’s unclear what the angels’ interactions with the machinery serves to accomplish, since for the most part their actions consist of flying to an unremarkable part of the structure, staring intently at it for a moment, and then briefly laying a hand on a spot indistinguishable from any other before flying off again.
• Some of the structures appear to be off-limits to mortals, as attempting to enter draws first a polite rebuff from nearby angels, and then (as one unwisely persistent expedition discovered) an forceful response from angels that descend in rapidly increasing numbers on intruders. However, there are other structures where mortals are tolerated, which is to say mostly ignored.
• Geography in the Heavenly Realm works familiarly to mortals: directions and distances are consistent, meaning that it can actually be mapped! What isn’t consistent is time: the subjective time experienced by mortals is increasingly compressed as they move further from the plane’s center, such that what seems a day to them passes as months or years in the mortal world. (One early expedition, initially thought lost, was devastated to learn that in the subjective month that they spent exploring the outer reaches of the plane, more than two centuries had passed.)

Up Next

There is of course one exception to the prevailing conditions of the Heavenly Realm, which is the Pit of Hell. But, I’m saving that for a later post series…perhaps for Aetrimonde’s second Halloween!

1. Earlier accounts, from before Aetrimonde’s industrial revolution, focus solely on the monolithic size and scale of the structures. More recent accounts compare various features of the structures to pistons, boilers, ducting, and other familiar mechanical components, although they note that the parts have not actually been observed to function as such. ↩︎
2. “Densely” here meaning that the structures are separated by mere miles. ↩︎