Iphexar · The Planes

The Planes

Reality in Iphexar is organized into two distinct spheres separated by a barrier that has held since the end of the Divine War. One is where mortals live. The other is where everything that cannot come here has had to make do.

Theological and cosmological scholarship in Midralis has converged on a structural model of reality divided into two spheres: the Mortal Sphere, where physical existence unfolds, and the Divine Sphere, where beings who cannot act directly in the mortal world reside. The two spheres are separated by what practitioners call the Great Barrier: the consequence of the Divine Truce that followed the Divine War, preventing direct divine intervention in mortal affairs. The Barrier has held for over four thousand years. Whether it will hold indefinitely is a question the Celestrian Observatory does not address in its public publications.

The Mortal Sphere

The domain of physical existence — where mortals are born, live, and die, and where the fundamental forces of Prisma and Spira operate in their most accessible forms. Three distinct realms constitute the Mortal Sphere, each produced by the same originating event and each carrying the character of the forces that shaped it at the moment of its formation.

☾ Midralis — The neutral material world ◌ Veraldié — The Feywilds ■ Xum — The Shadow Domain

The Divine Sphere

The domain beyond the Great Barrier — where the gods dwell, where the fallen are confined, and where forces too large or too dangerous to exist freely in the Mortal Sphere have been placed. The Divine Sphere is not a single unified realm. It is a category that encompasses two very different kinds of place that share only the quality of being beyond the reach of ordinary mortal movement.

☉ Celosia — Where the Modern Gods dwell ◆ The Six Hells — Where the fallen are confined

The Separation

The three realms of the Mortal Sphere — Midralis, Veraldié, and Xum, share a common origin in the destruction of Auraprima, the First World, at the peak of the Divine War. Each was shaped by the specific energies dominant at the moment of that destruction. All three are therefore products of the same catastrophe, carrying different inheritances of it, and connected to each other through that shared origin in ways that make passage between them, under specific conditions, possible.

The Divine Sphere contains what was placed beyond the Barrier or what could not exist within the Mortal Sphere after the Divine Truce was brokered. Celosia was not built before the Truce — it was constructed by the Modern Gods in the period after it, using the accumulated weight of mortal devotion as its material. The Six Hells were established by the Truce itself, as the condition under which the beings who had fallen during the Divine War were contained. The two are not analogous spaces: one was made; the other was imposed.

“The Great Barrier is not a wall. It is the absence of a path that used to exist. The gods did not close a door when the Truce was made. They filled in the ground the door used to stand on. The theological significance of this distinction is that the ground can, under specific conditions, be excavated.”

— Attributed to a Ninefold Conservatory theorist, suppressed monograph, date unknown

The Elemental Planes

Outside this two-sphere model sit the six Elemental Planes: Ignifer, Aeolynth, Geolithra, Marivar, Arboria, and Ferronex. They materialized within the Mortal Sphere in the centuries following the Divine Truce and are not neatly classifiable as either Mortal or Divine in character. They predate the Cataclysm in their cosmological origin but took their current form from the violence of the events that preceded it. The beings who arose from them: the Elemental Lords, were defeated at Year 0 at catastrophic cost. The Planes themselves remain, restabilized, and are the source of the elemental forces that Prisma Currents carry. Whether they are contained or simply quiet is a question the Concordiax’s sealed archive addresses under a classification level that has never been made public.