Four Worlds Beyond the Material One
I think I need to step up my Carnival game. I'm the host in the end. So a sneak peak of my Sword of Don setting project, the part connected to the topic of the Worlds Beyond. Sword of Don is a broken setting, like them all. There used to be seven Major Gods. The Order, Blade, Womb, Sun, Tree, Firmament and Egg.
The Order, god behind the natural order of things, of divinity being separate and above material world, oldschool divine powers being given to humans, not taken by them. It is said they were slow to act, intervening only when the balance was at stake, choosing a hero only after the monster terrorized the nations, burning the disease only after it took half the population. Yet always successful in keeping things in check. There were a lot of warriors swearing oaths to them, hoping for the power to struck the unjust. Although prayed to in moments of true peril the regular worship was rather minor if any.
And then at one point human rulers and warriors and mages decided to take matters in their own hands. Given knowledge and arcane enlightenment from the Sun and purpose from the Egg - symbol of hope and change - they did a series of terrible rituals. They made a massacre in the temple of Order. Drew a sigil of Blade from the dead bodies and summoned avatar of Order. Then killed them, an ultimate sacrifice to the Blade, using secret knowledge of the Sun. This act of unimaginable violence - sacrificing one god to another - was enough to change to world forever.
The Order did die for a second. But world wasn't consumed by chaos, the new Order was born one breath later as an Undying parody of itself and the Blade unable to contain a gift as large as itself simply crumbled leaving only destructive flame in the void. And Major Gods began to decay slowly, losing power and active involvement in human world. Until nothing was left of them. Previously separated realities now are more like layers on each other, where you could get deeper the more you are like the divine plane.
The Undying is the most vicious place for humans. Actively harmful, some say it is a vengeance on those who took their life but Yellow Mystics and Grey Priests claim Major Gods are no longer alive and these planes are their divine corpses not yet claimed by growing amount of Minor Gods. In order to see and enter first layers of Undying one needs to be marked by it. Some people intentionally let parts of their bodies rot. Others keep themselves sick or dose poisons as to never be truly healed. The one thing that is sure to draw attention and affiliation of Undying is working towards human demise, destoying organisations and societies. Places in Undying layers are full of corpses, rot, mold and dust. There is nothing actually beneficial to regular human condition, the only thing to seek are ways for one to become immortal - which required one to be transformed just as the Order was, to be killed and turned into something else. If one dabbles with Undying there will surely be pain and death brought upon the living.
But there are more horrible places in the cosmos. The Blade crumbled and became a Flame. It is a divine flame, pure destruction that burns alone in the void far away from anything. But the emptiness of the Flame was soon inhabited by the weirdest and strangest creatures, things unlike anything from material world. Things so alien that even absolute destruction didn't affect them. Colours of outer realms, fires of unknown origins and eaters of worlds.
Major God of healing and love and family, the Womb, slowly withered and died and transformed. Now when you pray to one of thousands of statues which portray pregnant woman with feathery wings you pray to Overgrowth. It is cancerous growth, fleshy reality of distorted tissues and additional limbs. When stepping into places close to it you may encounter weirdest things, hair instead of grass, trees made of bone, rivers of blood and lymph, skin-like soil and whole ecosystems of mangled creatures.
Champion of human enlightenment, the Sun, became the Dim. It is an eternal darkness, with paths hidden in the dark, at night, during no moon or underground (and deep below the waves). But it is full of passivity, to step into the Dim usually means one has to be full of nihilism, ignorance, lack of direction and nonaction. Creatures that come from there are humans transformed into monstrosities by their unwilling to change and inaction when given choice. As well as everything that lurks in the dark. Material sun still warms the land but it doesn't grant wisdom as it used to.
There are no other distinct world beyond. The Tree died and now is just absence of nature. The Firmament turned from the sky showing past and future to astrologers now is just a static curtain of the night sky. The Egg hatched into new hope and was lost in the Dim, hidden in eternal darkness.
Major Gods are dead and twisted. Stepping onto planes closer to them is really dangerous and rarely ends up different than making one a monster.