Astral Landscapes

Open Plains

Space is never truly barren, especially where humans have dwelt for nigh one thousand centuries. Rogue worlds and les

ser stars, wisps of ice and matter have long been by the union seeded or turned into imperial islands of civilization.

In comparison to denser regions, the civilized presence on the open plains is minuscule. Even so, there remain crucial if fragile bridges between the higher worlds. Waystations and lighthouses mark navigable paths, as the apparent emptiness of interstellar space often conceils dramatic concentrations of unobservable dark matter. Charting changes in those passages is an everlasting task for countless astral navigators.

Witching Streams

The spatial leylines which once took humankind to the stars have long passed into ancient history, subsumed by changing cosmic laws into the greater art of witchspace travel. In their stead, broad rivers have emerged weaving in between the stars.

Along these these witching streams the barrier to witchspace is thin and the currents strong, allowing interstellar vessels to dive into witchspace easily and be carried far in little time. Naturally, these have become the foremost travelling ways across the galaxy, their banks verdant with seeded worlds, interplanetary life, and old constructed wonders. To control their flow of commerce is to control all systems in a region.

Stardust Nebulae

The death throes of mighty stars tear the fabric of reality, bleeding vast clouds of exotic energy and matter. To interstellar navigators, these nebulae are cosmic mountain ranges of insurmountable peaks and steep gravitic slopes, dangerous to approach and near impossible to scale. Their winding paths and valleys are rife with unforeseen phenomena and lined with broken worlds flung from their dying suns.

Few human settlers dwell there, and those who do are strange and hardy folk, prone to darkness moreso than the light. Other, stranger forms of life often call these regions home and there are dens of stellar wyrms reported across much of Gondwana.

Cosmic Glacierfields

Mere centuries ago all of Gondwana was icebound in the swell of cosmic winter breaking forth from the wounded witchspace titan. Glacier sheets spanning light years blocked interstellar travel and in time the ice sank down planetary wells until even satellites degraded and civilizations were rendered planetbound.

With cosmic winter now receding, much of Gondwana was freed again, and many worlds reclaimed. But remnants of the glacier fields and gusts of cosmic cold still haunt all interstellar spaces. Frigid conditions and anomalies beset the systems still in in winter's grasp. Many more are still recovering, banishing the last flecks of ice in the dawn of new starfire.

Eidetic Fractures

Spaces of eidetic fracture elude comprehension. Wether by mind or instrument, their nature continues to defy determination, obfuscating any record and memory.

It is speculated their elusive nature may be a function of the local noosphere untethering from the knowable universe. In certain clades of the Mechanist Union it is believed these are the woes of the nascent god, the Demiurge being born.

Despite the uncanny nature, fractured spaces are neither hostile nor explicit lairs of dark entropy. Many vessels have entered them and returned, perhaps lost in space, unstuck in time, but always bringing back discoveries of the most peculiar and treasured nature.

Singularity Gardens

In the deepest spatial valleys, black holes in their gravitic dance enthrall dense veils of dust and shimmer.  In their gardens of growing shadows, light is bent and shackled, ripped away from living stars. These are domains of darkness, lairs of entropy.

To venture there is to invite all that humankinds' Twin Civilizations ward against, down to the very passage of time, relativistically accelerated as though to hasten all decay. False stars shine with ghost light, beacons sing with voices from the dead, and space contorts into bands of moebius.

These regions can be braved, but not navigated. Any journey through these parts is one at the whim of powers beyond the explicable.