Chapter Six: The Known Worlds

After the birth of wisdom, living beings in different worlds began to imagine what lay beyond their homelands. Civilizations on life-bearing Stars looked up at the sky and saw myriad stars and distant light; civilizations within Realms observed Realm walls, Realm currents, and the boundaries of rules; while the inhabitants of Lands and Interspaces came to realize, through shifting anchors, fissures, drift, and unfamiliar echoes, that a wider world existed beyond the dimensional spaces to which they were attached. Their languages differed entirely, yet they left behind a similar question: was there other life beyond their homelands?

Before they had truly left their homelands, many civilizations had already begun recording the distant unknown. Life-bearing Stars recorded the movements of celestial bodies and anomalous lights. Civilizations within Realms recorded tides in the rules, changes along Realm boundaries, and external disturbances. The inhabitants of Lands and Interspaces recorded breaches leading to the primary world, anchors, and cycles. These records later became the earliest body of knowledge about distant travel. Different civilizations also left messages for distant recipients in their own ways. Some inscribed messages into light, some wrote them into rules, and others conveyed them through Realm currents, folds in space, or echoes of consciousness. They did not know whether any answer would come.

Throughout the early histories of many civilizations, such calls appeared time and again. Later, some civilizations truly received replies. Some came from among the stars, some from Primordial Realms or acquired Realms, and others from structures among Lands and Interspaces that had never previously been classified. When a civilization first confirmed that another form of intelligent life existed in the distance, miracles, ancestral spirits, visitors from other worlds, and natural phenomena all served as early explanations. Only when communication became repeatable did they gradually confirm that the response came from another community of intelligent beings, likewise possessed of history and choice.