Keter
Author: Tevish Szat
Keter is an artificial plane so ancient and complete that even most planeswalkers believed it to be a natural plane until very recently. Some time after the Mending, the magic that held Keter together started unraveling at the seams. Now the plane teeters on the brink of oblivion…
State of Decay
Keter is a world that’s running out of time. Over the last decades, the land itself has begun to crack and crumble… some cracks are tiny, rips in the fabric of the universe that might seal, but other times, they widen, becoming great gulfs, canyons of infinite depth that snake across the world, slowly swallowing up mountains, rivers, homes. Erosion here has become very swift and very permanent.
As it stands now, the Void gulfs represent significant terrain features, but more like rivers and canyons than a sea in which land floats. They grow slowly, but constantly, and many suspect they are growing ever faster…
Living on the Edge
The people of Keter are no longer shocked by the expanses of utter emptiness encroaching on their homes, on their land. It has been well over a generation, the first appearance of the cracks vanishing from the living memories of humans. All those who now bear the weight of the world on their shoulders grew up with Keter in much the same state as it is now. The cracks in the universe have widened, perhaps, or lengthened. A new one may have opened the next county over, but the matter is that they are a fact of life.
Few enough, however, are deceived as to what the cracks mean. Perhaps they do not understand the arcane mechanics, the meaning of their origin, but they know enough: their world is ending, and not just some day but some day soon. Anything lost to the void gulfs, be it something dropped in or a feature of terrain consumed by relentless erosion, is gone for good, never to return.
This impending doom, from the day of birth onward, has given the people of Keter an odd outlook on life: most have chosen to live what they have to the fullest, and they are remarkably unconcerned, as a culture, with the future in general and the sort of future that is coming knocking at their doorsteps in specific.
The people of Keter are almost entirely human, their form of sentient life the only one that was transported to the artificial plane at its inception, and before the unraveling began that fact the main tell that the plane wasn’t as natural as it seemed. However, there are several distinct cultures among the survivors. While nations have given up their colors in the face of oblivion, creed remains as strong a driving force as ever.
The Commons: As described above, the common Keter human is a man or woman of a certain degree of heedless hedonism, more than willing to trade an uncertain future for a pleasing present. After all, when the world could end tomorrow, today is all that matters. To some degree, it’s a defense mechanism. Think too much about the end of the world and you’ll go insane.
Apostles of the Void: Perhaps the only doomsday cult in the multiverse whose belief in the end times is both well founded and not intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, the Apostles of the Void are those who feel that this end of all things is necessary and proper. Different sects disagree on whether it’s divine punishment or simply the inevitable process of life into death, but all believe it must be accepted. The apostles are an ascetic group, forsaking earthly pleasures and seeking instead to achieve inner emptiness as outer emptiness is evident around them. Great groups sometimes gather upon the edges of the rifts, gazing endlessly into nothingness, their meditations interrupted by epiphany, the call of a leader, the call of base needs, or the collapse of the ground beneath their feet into the very void they were formerly contemplating. The apostles are a proselytizing group, and believe that true rest will be found only when all accept emptiness. Of course, some fringe groups take to a more aggressive approach, one of kidnapping and casting victims into the darkness.
The Eternal Guard: The Eternal Guard is dedicated to knowledge. Founded shortly after the collapse of traditional power structures, the Guard seek to preserve the lore of Keter, a history dating back countless generations, for whatever may come after the end. The mages of the guard have built great moving citadels, filled to the brim with histories and research, while ‘lorekeepers’ commit to their own memory volumes worth of history that may be lost in any other form. Scholars of the Guard frantically research ways to allow material, even people, to survive immersion in the Blind Eternities, and while they have so far been unsuccessful in their attempts to cast a light into a nonexistent future, their advocacy of preservation puts them strongly at odds with the Apostles.
The Seekers: The Seekers are perhaps the only people on Keter who think their world can be saved. They are named such, because they are seeking a way to regenerate the world, mend its wounds and restore what was lost. In some places, druids and mages dedicated to the Seeker cause battle against the void, vainly attempting to grow new land where the old has eroded away into nothingness. While no mortal force could hope to truly repair the damage of a dying plane, they can make some process with great effort, crafting terrain inch by inch from the aether and sealing some smaller rifts until the weakened world tears open again.
Eye of the Storm
Keter has become interesting to Planeswalkers with the beginning of its collapse. It is not that those who can choose to leave are not moved by the plight of those who cannot, but at the same time there is not much the average Planeswalker can do, so those who do not sorrowfully turn their backs on Keter are present to watch it burn, taking their once in a lifetime opportunity to see what happens when a plane comes undone.
This calculated research is in the true spirit of Keter. The Planeswalker who created Keter built it around a research station of sorts, an artifact of his design that had acted as a seed and maintained Keter against the ravages of the Blind Eternities. He populated Keter with humans, to see how they would evolve in a vacuum, choosing them for their comparatively short lives (next to elves) and their relative sameness throughout the multiverse (Compared to goblins). However, somewhere along the line, waiting for the great work to yield results became tedious, and Keter’s creator sealed himself away within the research station, the Eye of Void, readying a stasis cell for a long sleep.
Unfortunately, he could not have predicted the Mending, and the artifact systems designed to support the life of a planeswalker were no longer sufficient now that the sleeping entity was little more than an average mortal. He died of dehydration within his self-made prison, never waking to gaze upon the world he had created, and with his death many of the systems of the Eye shut down, resulting in the beginning of the end for Keter.
Recently (within the last five years or so), the explorations of Planeswalkers into Keter have brought the knowledge of the Eye to its major factions. The common people, as is their way, don’t particularly care (and thus the knowledge hasn’t circulated among them, as it was not worthy of repeating), but all three of the major sects are interested: The Eternal Guard see a vessel that could bear their knowledge through the nothingness, the Seekers see a faint glimmer of hope to power the Eye and save their world, and the Apostles of the Void see a machine that threatens to stand in the way of their “god” consuming all of Storm. Among those who know about the Eye, a sort of race has begun, to recover it and either possess or destroy it.