Evervoid

Our home, darkness and light. Peace and danger intertwined...

The Evervoid, one of the innumerable dimensions of Axocora, is a dark and ethereal realm. With no sun to speak of and no turning of the heavens to indicate a day/night cycle, all life operates on its own rhythms under the dim light of the wandering moons.

Structure

The Evervoid's structure is a relatively homogenous collection of floating islands, stratified by material, size, and composite motion into an effective series of layers. In general, islands stay at the same layer, but some processes of drift and breakup do allow vertical mobility over thousands of years. These islands float independently of one another, moving according to incredibly slow currents of motion.

Layers

The layers of the Evervoid have been named according to the type of object that rests at that height by its primary inhabitants, the toxelugh of Khyth Vaaxa. Their relative size varies immensely.

Starveil

The Starveil is the highest layer of the Evervoid, located an unknown and undefined distance up. It is where the stars linger, untouchable by anyone or anything. Not much is known about the patterning of stars, but it is thought that they may be like larger and brighter moons, simply so far away as to appear pointlike.

Moonwalk

The Moonwalk is where the moons wander through. Moons are titanic spherical islands, colorful and luminous, that rest thousands of kilometers up in the sky. Moons vary in size but are usually a couple hundred kilometers wide, and they float through the Moonwalk in great celestial currents across the course of years. The pressure is so low up in the Moonwalk that none have been able to reach it without perishing. If it were to be breached and made livable, it offers almost endless swathes of resource-poor land to settle on. Besides the odd lunar metal that is much more readily accessible in the Sea of Stars and the freedom from Darkshine, no use can be gleaned from the moons.

Cloudrest

The Cloudrest is the third highest layer of the Evervoid, traditionally defined as the layer in which the clouds form. Fog and lower clouds do appear in other layers, but the Cloudrest is where only clouds inhabit. It starts a couple kilometers above the highest islands, and is so high that rain can take half an hour to find land down in the lowest layers of islands. There is no land to speak of in the Cloudrest, and the pressure is low enough to be debilitating without being necessarily fatal. It is generally the least notable of the layers.

Heavenspire

Heavenspire is the highest layer of land in the Evervoid, where a few lone islands hang above all the rest. They are largely vertical islands, resembling obelisks or shards more so than traditional landmasses. These landmasses are almost always empty of life but rich in metals and rare stones, giving them some redeeming worth. The Temple of the Moon is located on a Heavenspire island artificially bound to the Great Beast Archipelago.

Summitdrift

Summitdrift is the middle of the three land-layers of the Evervoid, containing a sparse spread of medium and large landmasses. The lands of Summitdrift have exaggerated landscapes and wilder climate variations than the other layers. While their terrain is interesting and lends itself better to complex weather patterns, no Summitdrift islands are a part of the Great Beast Archipelago, and their drifting and breakage often sends hardier and harsher foes to the Archipelago. The pressure is lower than Grovespan, but tolerable compared to Heavenspire.

Grovespan

Grovespan is the lowest of the three layers of land that the Evervoid supports, with the most land by far and the greatest variation in size. Tiny landmasses can be found next to islands that stretch on seemingly forever. While expansive, a lot of this land is flat unless disrupted by a local terrain anomaly or debris from vertically drifting islands. This is where the "baseline" of pressure is taken from, due to it supporting the greatest population of any of the classical layers and being the layer that the lands of the Great Beast Archipelago are from.

Lakesleep

The Lakesleep, below landmasses of all varieties, is the layer where water is held up by the ambient pressure and floats. Its varying sizes of bodies of water, along with local temperature variations, form the basis for much of the Evervoid's weather cycling. Whenever water runs out in an area, there is a good chance more is just waiting a dangerous distance below the islands.

Sea of Stars

The Sea of Stars, not made of literal stars and not quite a sea, is the name given to the bottom-most layer of the Evervoid. Shards of luminous stone, presumably that of moons, are suspended very far down beneath the Lakesleep, held aloft only by mighty pressures that crush most who try to reach it. How these shards come to be or why they are washed out into a stellar white instead of being the colorful arrays seen in the moons, is currently unknown. The Sea of Stars is both one of the Evervoid's great mysteries and one of the most lethal environments a toxelugh can venture to. Even without being fully pulverized by the pressure, they may lose consciousness and fail to regain it before perishing.

Pressure

A sort of esoteric pressure, related to but not the same as air pressure, exists on a gradient along the vertical axis of the Evervoid. Higher up, the pressure thins to a dangerous degree, causing air to not bind to the respiratory organs of living creatures and gas transfer to become impossible. The body tries to decompress and suffers because of this. Above Cloudrest is generally accepted as the highest habitable limit for average-sized animals. Lower down, the pressure increases gradually, to the point that any matter far down enough will be crushed as if stuck at the bottom of an ocean ten thousand kilometers deep.

Ecosystem

Biomes

The climate zones of the Evervoid seem to be randomly arranged, with little tangible matter causing a divide between scorching desert and frigid torrential rain-tundra. Upon closer inspection with esoteric principles attained from the study of emanations, the climate zones are controlled via fluctuations in some fundamental gradients of emanating concepts related to weather and temperature. Why they are so uneven, and furthermore why they are so unstable as to be malleable by a few thousand individuals over centuries, is unknown.

Temperature zones throughout the Evervoid seem anchored to major landmasses and can range anywhere from 45°C down to -70°C. Precipitation patterns shift a lot throughout the decades, but for chains of islands stable relative to one another they seem to end up relatively consistent. The Great Beast Archipelago in particular has had its weather patterns significantly shift since the Sundering, though local climates have stabilized into a dense collection of biomes.

The void between landmasses carries a very smooth gradient of their local temperatures, giving some rudimentary way to find far-off lands via subtle wind patterns.

Darkshine Flora

Often called "Darkshine Trees" due to their most common form, Darkshine plants exist in a wide range of forms across the Evervoid's collective biomes. They all sprout from the same type of seed, meaning that a tundral Darkshine shrub can give rise to forests of temperate Darkshine trees and even desertic Darkshine grasses and cacti. It forms the backbone of first-order producer biodiversity for the majority of the Evervoid's ecosystems. Many herbivorous and omnivorous animals feed off of Darkshine flora in the Humming Wilds.

Darkshine flora, while common and generally thought to be mildly nutritious, is a promoter of stagnation and regression in the dimension. The only example of a sapient species, the toxelugh, are rendered purely animalistic by the presence of Darkshine, and it is very likely that any other species vying for a self-aware mind is also held back by this species. A toxelugh of Khyth Vaaxa is rendered entirely and irreversibly feral within three days of exposure. The area of the Evervoid beyond the Great Beast Archipelago, that covered almost entirely in Darkshine infestation, is known as the Humming Wilds.

Darkshine is said, in the faith of Ket Maragh, to be the curse of the Sleepless Dark, the lord of nonexistence and regression that killed the Great Mother Lugha. It is regarded as a deeply profane and unholy substance, for good reason given how deadly it is to their personhood. Because consciousness is regarded in Ket Maragh as being a physical part of their Goddess, loss to the Darkshine is one of the greatest spiritual tragedies in the entire faith.

Feral Toxelugh

Due to the influence of Darkshine, most of the toxelugh throughout the Evervoid are feral and unintelligent. Biologically at a mid-level for most of the Evervoid's food webs, the feral toxelugh live in a careful balance between being prey and predators. Without higher thinking, their behavior is quite antisocial and aggressive. Feral toxelugh have territories that they roam and defend, usually in solitude but rarely in groups of up to three individuals. Their eyes, unlike that of civilized toxelugh, are entirely blank, betraying no direction to their attention.

It is believed that toxelugh once had sapience across the infinitude of the Evervoid, a vast civilization spanning the entire dimension, before the Sleepless Dark created Darkshine and stripped the species of its personhood. Given the presence of feral toxelugh as far as the Wildrunners have travelled, it is clear that the species exists likely far beyond the reaches of civilization, potentially a staple throughout the infinite reach of it.

Domesticated Flora and Fauna

Several species within the Evervoid have been domesticated in the civilization on the Great Beast Archipelago by the toxelugh. Many of these are primary herbivores and small omnivores, taken from the regions of the Humming Wilds closest to the Archipelago. Their wild counterparts still exist out in the Humming Wilds, attuned to a life beyond civilization with no guarantee of food or continued life. These animals can often be deceptively serene, ready at a moment's notice to either flee or attack.

Much of the domesticated wildlife from the Evervoid's great expanse is aquatic, pulled from the Lakesleep and from terrabound bodies of water from across the Wilds and raised in the Archipelago's own lakes. These fish, of which there are several dozen varieties, are the staple meat of the toxelugh of Khyth Vaaxa.