leviathaned | World Reference

In Which Kaji is Pretentious as Shit.

Think about the universe. Imagine that it, in all it’s infinite expanses and possibilities, was nothing more than a bubble in the sea. Imagine that there are hundreds of thousands of bubbles, some close enough to other bubbles to attach and form clouds, others drift alone and apart. Imagine one bubble, deeper in the depths of the ocean where no light really shines, held in the hands of unspeakable things our mind can’t really comprehend. No, no, to the left. Yes, there.

The Sea of Shards encompases not just one universe, but all the possibilities therein. It can also be likened to books on a shelf; every book is a new world with it’s own rules, and ones with similar rules can be grouped near each other, or sometimes there’s a romance novel on the ass end of the shelf surrounded by psychological horror and books on mezzolithic paleontology.

The shard-sea is theoretically governed by Yezua, the Demiurge, but most shards are self-contained and self-sustaining. In many cases, shards generate their own gods and pantheons that stay contained in their own expanse; Those who can move between the shards freely, known as Travelers, are extremely rare, but we’ll get to that in a second.

The sea is held together by a set of ‘rules’, and every shard itself has it’s own rules of reality, the bending of which causes damage to the shard and insanity to those exposed to too much of this warping. The basic, and truly only rule of the Sea itself is that life cannot exist in the Sea. Passing through it to another shard is a horrifying and instantaneous process, as being in the space between reality exposes you, simultaneously, to every single one of them. This is kind of bad.

Heaven and Hell are, in fact, shards in the sea, however they are both larger and are stitched together of many shards. The dead belong in neither; the Sea recycles dead souls, sometimes allowing one to be reborn in different shards, or duplicating them across, and this process is automatic and self-maintaining. While both Heaven and Hell can theoretically affect the souls of the dead, they cannot pull them out of the reincarnation cycle, only temporarily delay them in attempts to foil the other side.

Heaven

Heaven is, in a sense, the Sysadmin for the entire Sea of Shards. For every shard that they have influence over (gained by the amount of belief in Yezua as the original creator, in whatever form that may be), they manipulate the laws of the shard to further encourage their manipulation. While they originally only instilled enough rules in newly formed shards to prevent them from collapsing, more and more shards have been reformed to be nearly devoid of will, perfectly peaceful but static.

Heaven itself is the perfect example of this stasis; while everything is beautiful and pristine, nothing changes. Time does not appear to pass, the sun does not set, nor does any wind blow. Living spaces are sterile and orderly, and conversation between the rank-and-file angels is rare, as they are kept general separate. After Lucifer’s fall and subsequent loss of half the Host, the free will and soul of angels was entirely removed. While the lower ranks such as angel and archangel, all the way to Dominion, are given an illusion of autonomy, they are strictly programmed and meant to act only in accordance with it. The Thrones have absolutely no will of their own, nothing more than puppets with awareness, and the Seraphim are not afforded even that much, unable to so much as speak without Yezua’s direct command.

While the archangels enjoy more freedom, it is only because their purpose is to directly interact with the creatures in shards. They appear initially human only because of the commonness of humans among shards, and will immediately take the form of the most common denominator in shards without humans. With the exception of Israfel and Raziel, no angel nor archangel is aware of the programming instilled in them, and believe completely that they act of their own accord for a greater good. In the mentioned examples, Israfel and Raziel are aware and prevented from acting on their knowledge. As with all programming, there are loopholes, and it’s through these an angel may eventually ‘fall’, or be expelled from Metatron’s network.

Any angel that falls after the initial battle will slowly go insane as their programming glitches, although how long that takes differs from angel to angel.

Yezua himself is a vengeful god. While he is not the true creator of the Sea, he believes wholeheartedly that he is, and destroys any contradictions like a child throwing a tantrum. Impulsive, ill-tempered and petty, Yezua has no true concept of ‘good’ or ‘evil’, but ‘with him’ and ‘against him’. It is implied in some circles of Hell that Yezua’s true creator abandoned him and the shards after Yezua’s temperament became more apparent. Yezua behaves according only to the script it was given, where it is Good and all else is Evil, and tolerates no deviation from this narrative.

Israfel, the archangel of music, routinely weeps for human suffering. Unable to Fall as his role is key to Judgement Day, and barred from leaving Heaven after Raziel’s disappearance, Israfel is unable to reconcile the careless treatment of the humans that love them with the messages supposedly key to their design. When a young man dies at Zephon’s hands, Israfel puts his soul into the reincarnation cycle with half of his power and thus vanishes from Heaven.

Raziel, the Archangel who rules over secrets and mystery, left from Heaven to the Farthest shard, is both fully aware that his autonomy is an illusion, and smart enough to seek the loopholes that give him some measure of tiny freedom. Unable to act in such a way that would cause him to Fall, Raziel is forced to try and move the pieces towards the fall of the Demiurge without actually being able to act.

Elijah , a fallen Dominion who refused to kill Sei when they found out his true identity. Cranky and married to a mortal woman, he regards Sei as an idiot on his good days and a pain in the ass on the bad ones. Due to Dominions being brainwashed and programmed, Elijah’s mind is slowly breaking under the strain of his programming being basically stuck on the “burn everything” command, and keeps himself sane with judicial application of loving his spouse and absinthe. A whole hell of a lot of absinthe. When his sanity breaks, Sei is forced to kill him before he wipes a country off the maps. Ooops.

Hell:

Hell is, similar to Heaven, a stitched-together collection of Shards, although in this case they function as separate sections than a truly fused shard. Hell has no central organization, and several factions exist inside it, each with their own goals and predilections. Lucifer is named king solely due to having the largest faction allied to him, a faction that aims to destroy the Demiurge.

Because there is no true structure or organization to Hell, the sections of it are mainly used to separate out factions likely to end up being a volatile mix. Two cities, Dis and Pandemonium, are used as hubs to the other shards. Most denizens of hell are not innate travelers like angels, but can be summoned to a shard by any process that creates a ‘hole’ in the shard’s reality. This usually ends badly.

Lucifer and his cohort have taken to outright destroying shards that have the Demiurge’s influence in an attempt to weaken his influence and power. Other factions of hell alternate between destroying shards or fucking them up, with no real rhyme or reason why. Lucifer himself is a Traveler, and does not spend a great deal of time in any Shard to avoid being found by the forces of Heaven.

And Other things:

Heaven And Hell are not the only forces at work in the Sea. In the Sea itself, there are creatures born out of that hideous mix of all realities with a dash of something very fundamentally not right, made so incomprehensible to most minds that they drive creatures insane by their presence. Known as the Outer Gods, they exist in the depths and outer fringes of the Sea in direct defiance of the Sea’s one rule, and they exist inside multiple Shards at once, by many names and forms. Similar to demons, the Outer Gods motives are wide and varied, some of which only bear vague resemblance to actual emotion and thought as we know it. Unlike demons or angels, it is possible for mortal beings to become ‘corrupted’ by continued exposure to the Outer Gods, and if they survive it they can eventually undergo apotheosis. Furthermore, many of the Outer Gods can take humanoid shape and interbreed freely, but with few exceptions this does not tend to work out so well. The offspring or either killed or forced into a human-shape box, as it were, and unsettle literally any human near them.

Aside from the Outer Gods themselves, many gods and other fantastical creatures are born intrinsic to their own shards. For the Verdigris shard, nearly any kind of mythological creature from folklore around the world can be said to exist or have existed, although there’s a pretty high chance if they’re a god, Azathoth ate them. While the Outer Gods can eat shard-bound dieties, all gods do not succumb to death permanently and at most can be put in a stasis. Only human beings can permanently kill a god, be it outer god, demiurge, or local deity. This is consistent across nearly every shard, although since it is not a rule of the Sea, it is possible for there to be far-flung exceptions. We’re not dealing with those.

About Travelers:
As noted above, Travlers are beings-any beings-that can naturally move between shards. While it is possible to travel without being one, it is very difficult and 9 times out of 10 ends with everyone dead or insane.

There are two known kinds of travelers; Natural travelers who are simply tuned in enough to the ‘rules’ of a shard to move between them and out, and artificial travelers, who use a pre-created path or door to travel. All angels are artificial travlers, using Yezua’s influence as a pathway out into shards. The rituals that summon demons also act as a kind of pathway.

Natural travelers are rare, and almost never human. They are most often seen in Witches, beings of immense magical power that gain their abilities through long periods of intense suffering. Even rarer is the ability to create new pathways, which does not come standard to Travelers.

Since Travlers are innately aware of the rules of a Shard, they are also theoretically capable of bending or altering those rules. However, since travelers are more sensitive to warps in reality, doing so can cause them extreme physical pain and isn’t recommended.

The Outer Gods are not considered true Travelers, as their ability to exist outside shards and inside multiple shards at once bends and breaks the rules in Shards they touch, as opposed to moving between them.