The Other, that which lies beyond the Veil, that teeming unseen world, the Six Layers.

	There is much more to your reality than most ever see. Metaspiritualists and their ilk are the most likely to gaze beyond the mortal plane, but most people will at one time or another take a fleeting and splendorous peek beyond the Veil and into the Astral Wilds, the first of many such layers. But there are more, some that have never been looked upon by mortal eyes, and some that are replete with legend and story.

	The Planes of which I am aware are as follows:

	1. The Mortal Plane; the plane of the Physical
	2. The Astral Wilds; the plane of the Ethereal
	3. The Arcane Channels; the plane of the Magical
	4. The Deep; unknown
	5. The Cosmic Clockwork; the cosmic ‘machinery’
	6. The Core; the cosmic ‘power source’

	The way each plane is numbered corresponds to its ‘depth’. Each plane overlaps with all of the others perfectly, but each one is separated further and further by Veils, magical ‘membranes’ responsible for stratifying each plane. Each Veil is stronger than the last; where one can reach past it with a bit of effort between the Mortal Plane and the Astral Wilds, puncturing the Veil that conceals the Clockwork is a task presently considered impossible by the people of your world. Anything which exists on a lower plane technically exists on and can be interacted with by anything on higher planes, but anything on a lower plane is incapable of seeing or significantly interacting with something on a higher plane unless that interaction is initiated by something on a higher plane, or unless they use some kind of magic to breach into a higher plane.

	The Mortal Plane is that which… well, mortals mostly inhabit. All physical phenomena occurs on this plane; your physical body anchors your soul to the world here, all of the most basically real things exist here, it is the foundation for all of reality.

	The Astral Wilds are where most spiritual and ethereal phenomena reside; mortal souls exist entirely within the Wilds, paired with mortal bodies that anchor them to reality, as they would often be too frail and formless on their own. The Wilds contain an entire unseen ecology blossoming and thriving overtop of that which already exists in the Mortal Plane; grass, flowers, bushes and trees, alien, colorful, translucent and ethereal, feeding off of the world’s [[Vital Essence]] and the emotions and fire of mortal souls. Spiritual animals inhabit this world as well, whether jagged, angular, burning red predators or sleek, delicate and coolly colorful prey.

	Gorgeous, unique ‘graveroots’ fill a graveyard, roots tangled invisibly around corpses and coffins, feeding on the symbolic power of the dead and the emotions of those who come to mourn and honor them, flourishing with each tear shed. An aged home is overtaken by an array of spirit-flowers, crowned with a massive tree with willowy golden leaves and gnarled roots, feeding for generations off of the emotions of those who lived and died in that house. Malicious, lurking spiritual threats haunt the deep wilderness, watching trails and chasing wagons, seeking to drain the life from mortals. The Wilds are a strange place, and stranger still is the fact that one’s soul has inhabited such a place all along, and yet could never, without training, see the truth of its surroundings. The Astral Wilds are still, among the domains, one of the most well-known, containing the beings responsible for most of the spectral anomalies one encounters.

	Deeper still are the Arcane Channels; it is here where the ebb and flow of magic lives. In the mortal plane, one can see the effects of magic, but they cannot see the reality of its complexity and the way it courses through our environments. Here, in the Channels, one could see threads of colorful light winding through, around and alongside each other, every little overwhelming detail of every kind of magic that makes up our world. It is often blinding at first, but with time, acclimation and study, one can learn to read it for valuable data. Here, as well, many strange spiritual anomalies have taken root; a good example are [[Embers]], the withered, emptied husks of ghosts, from whom every thought and feeling has decayed. Embers are vacant creatures, standing eternally still in the same spot where the last thought passed through their head, too faint to survive in the Wilds. Gazing into the Channels can be dangerous for some, as some things which come to rest in the Channels prefer to avoid attention…

	The last few layers of reality are… more obscure. Even I know very little about the workings of the Clockwork and the Core, and I have only just begun my research into the Deep.

	The Deep… I don’t really understand. In most of the functional systems I have encountered, there are 5 domains, rather than 6; but something has carved out a space here, and what is unclear. It could be something of an error in the clockwork when generating this universe, it could be the intentional creation of a particularly powerful [[Celestial]]… I need to do more research. It seems to be a dark, vacant void, innately possessed only of strange magical properties that defy all kinds of magical sight and scrying. The rules of reality in this place are inconsistent, and tend to be much easier to controvert than in other planes, a result of its unusual structure.

	Yet, still, life seems to adapt; what sole thing I do know for sure about this domain is that it is home to an array of ‘opportunistic’ phenomena, creatures, beings, and even once powerful mortals who wished to recede into a world where they would surely never be found… or perhaps were banished into a plane where they could surely never be retrieved. It seems to serve the purpose of a kind of oblivion or hideaway, and one which it is… usually wise to leave undisturbed. One notable inhabitant are the [[Vekhnamar]], who seem to use this plane as a hiding place when tampering with our world.

	The Clockwork and the Core I am only aware of conceptually. These planes serve as the final two layers of ‘underpinning’; they operate all functions of our world, one a sprawl of incomprehensible and unknowably vast dimensional machinery, and the other a burning, seemingly infinite wellspring of power, the source for every bit of energy that comprises our world and is employed by the Clockwork.