Celestial Planes

An excerpt by Archivist Thalen, Lorehold College, Strixhaven

The sky is not where the heavens begin. That was my first mistake. Or perhaps my third. The Celestial Planes are not above us- they are behind things. Behind time, behind thought. Behind the noise of reality if you press your ear to it hard enough.

We call them divine realms, but that is a kindness. They do not glow. They resonate. They think. They are not places so much as conditions. Conditions under which the world becomes... malleable. Folded. A song played backwards the rough a jawbone.

There are more planes than the sanctioned diagrams admit. Dozens, I suspect. Maybe hundreds. Some orbit the dominion of known gods, yes- but others fester on the edges. Some were never named at a ll. I once uncovered a plane charted only in the scar patterns of a penitent monk who had no tongue and too many eyes.

You don't travel to these planes. You are noticed by them. You fall into them in dreams. You remember them before you were born.

There was a man- I hesitate to write his name- who returned from a single hour in The Black Woods of Chronovorus. He brought no journals, only carvings made from his own mola rs. He insisted the trees there keep time. Not metaphorically. Literally. The bark
pulses. The roots count. The leaves fa ll in perfect, calculated succession and whisper what will happen before it does.

And I understood. That's the part that unsettled me. I see angles now. In light. In people. In my own hands when they shake. The Celestial Planes are not heavens. They are conscious. And we- fragile, finite, hopeful fools-are the hallucinations they share with each other
when they sleep.