Nobody knows how many realities exist.

Thousands have been recorded. Many have disappeared from the surviving network. Others may never have been connected at all.

Severance-era stone relief depicting Avara, maker and original provenance unknown. Magerium Museum Archive.

Avara

Avara is a parallel-world counterpart to Earth (one of potentially thousands or more): recognisably similar in geography, technology and everyday life, but shaped by a different history, different nations and cities, and a much more direct relationship with magic.

Its continents occupy broadly familiar positions and many societies developed along comparable lines to those of our own world. Avara has modern cities, mass transport, global communications, universities, governments, intelligence services, popular culture and many of the same social and environmental pressures found on Earth. But its political borders, institutions, place names and historical development are its own. Countries such as the Vardane Federation, Calderan Union and Zoravin Federation, and cities such as Morcaster, Veyminster and Bellweather, occupy roughly comparable geographical and cultural positions to places on Earth without being identical versions of them.

The greatest difference lies beneath ordinary life. Magic is real, publicly acknowledged and scientifically studied. Practitioners, supernatural phenomena, ruptures and anomalous entities form a recognised part of Avaran history and modern society, even though most people encounter them only rarely. Governments maintain specialist agencies to deal with magical incidents, universities and regulated institutions study magical practice, and international law governs some of its most dangerous applications.

Avara was also once more closely connected to the wider worlds of Ilixa. Ancient pathways allowed limited movement between realities, carrying people, knowledge and magical influence between worlds. Most of those connections were eventually severed or lost. The largest surviving stable interface is now known simply as the Pathway, contained within an internationally administered territory and kept closed through a combination of modern security systems and the work of the ancient Custodial lineages.

Elsewhere, smaller weaknesses between realities still appear. These ruptures are usually brief and unstable, but they can allow energy, objects, creatures or other phenomena to pass between worlds. Certain regions are unusually vulnerable to them. Ravenlake, a small town in the state of Orenda, is one such place.

Different stories explore very different parts of Avara. Ravenlake begins in an outwardly ordinary town where young people gradually encounter the stranger reality hidden within their everyday lives. Other stories may follow practitioners, government agencies, researchers or people who eventually discover that Avara is only one world among many.

Explore Avara →
Explore Ravenlake →
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Preserved fragment of a late Connected Age ceiling fresco depicting the final magical wars of Mervaine. Magerium Museum Archive.

Mervaine

Mervaine was once one of the great centres of the Connected Age, a wealthy and powerful world whose cities stood at the forefront of Deep Magic. Its scholars and practitioners helped develop some of the most sophisticated magical systems ever created, including the knowledge behind Pathmaking itself. During the final years before the Breaking, it also became one of the principal centres of the escalating magical arms race.

When the conflict finally erupted, Mervaine was devastated. The collapse of immense, interconnected magical workings poisoned much of the surface, warping its landscapes, contaminating its ecosystems and leaving entire cities abandoned beneath a magically unstable atmosphere. Thousands of years later, much of the ground remains dangerous to inhabit.

Civilisation survived by moving upwards. Temporary refuges became permanent settlements, and over generations these developed into the extraordinary floating cities that now drift above the poisoned world. The greatest of these is Vilerune, an ornate aerial metropolis of suspended streets, towers, gardens, bridges and bustling districts, where ancient magical traditions exist alongside a sophisticated modern society. For most of its inhabitants, the ruined surface is simultaneously their ancestral homeland and somewhere they have never set foot.

Mervaine is not entirely cut off from the wider worlds. At least one ancient Pathway survived the destruction, but knowledge of it is closely guarded and access remains restricted. To much of the population of the floating cities, other worlds belong to history, speculation and persistent rumour. Stories circulate of travellers arriving from impossible places, secret expeditions passing through the ruins and powerful institutions that know far more about Mervaine's surviving connections than they admit.

Below the cities lie the remains of old Mervaine. Ruined palaces, laboratories, archives, Pathway facilities and entire buried districts have made the surface one of the richest archaeological sites in Ilixa. Salvagers and scholars have descended into these ruins for centuries, but the growing failure of the surviving Pathways has transformed that work into something far more urgent. Beyond the knowledge of most Mervainians, governments, universities, corporations, old magical families and private expeditions from across Ilixa are competing for fragments of the knowledge that once allowed new Pathways to be built.

What remains below may offer a way to reconnect worlds thought lost for thousands of years. It may also explain why so much of Mervaine was deliberately left buried.

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Visit Vilerune →

An early botanical study of Avelith serathis, documenting its unusual flowering, pollination and reproductive cycle. Magerium Museum Archive.

Vireza

Vireza is a warm, ocean-dominated world of sprawling coastlines, island chains and great maritime cities. Its best-known metropolis is Halcyon Bay, a wealthy coastal city of beaches, towers, nightlife and old neighbourhoods, where glamour and political influence exist alongside organised crime, corruption and a thriving supernatural underworld. Magic survives here in stranger and less orderly forms than in worlds such as Zifira, woven through local traditions, private societies and forces that most inhabitants only half understand.

Vireza was not always isolated. During the Connected Age, Pathways linked it to the wider worlds of Ilixa, carrying travellers and trade through settlements that grew wealthy around them. Most were destroyed or deliberately closed during the Severances, and the last known connection eventually disappeared. For centuries, Vireza has been regarded by the wider worlds as lost.

The truth is more complicated. Far beneath one of Vireza's oceans lies the remains of an ancient Pathway, buried among the ruins of a settlement swallowed by the sea long ago. Whether the road collapsed, narrowed or simply became too unstable to find is unknown. Almost nobody on either side remembers that it existed, and no living civilisation is known to use it.

Vireza has consequently developed for generations without meaningful contact with the rest of Ilixa. Other worlds have passed into mythology, while surviving knowledge of Pathways has become entangled with stories of drowned cities, impossible journeys and people who vanished beneath the sea. Even those who practise magic rarely understand these traditions as fragments of a much larger history.

In recent years, however, something has begun to change. In Halcyon Bay, unexplained disturbances are becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss: places seem subtly wrong, memories and emotions linger where they should not, and people occasionally encounter things that appear to belong somewhere else. Collectively, these phenomena have become known as the Drift.

Whether the Drift has anything to do with the forgotten Pathway beneath Vireza's ocean is not yet known.

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Visit Halcyon Bay →

An illustrated depiction of the Asterion, an ancient Zifiran instrument believed to have been used to observe and calculate magical relationships between realities. Magerium Museum Archive.

Zifira

Zifira is one of the great connected worlds of modern Ilixa, a place where magic was never hidden or driven to the margins of society. Its cities, institutions and infrastructure have developed around magic for centuries, making it feel markedly different from both the secrecy of Earth and the post-Breaking civilisation of Mervaine.

Among its best-known regions is a vast mountain city built across a steep tropical valley, where dense neighbourhoods climb the surrounding slopes and ancient monumental structures stand alongside the architecture of the modern magical world. Trains, cableways and other forms of transport connect districts at dramatically different elevations, while the mountains beyond the city give way to cloud forests, high plateaus and warmer lowlands.

The city is also an important centre of magical education. Its prestigious Adventuring High School and University draws students from across Ilixa, including families who relocate between realities so their children can study there. Magic is taught not simply as an academic discipline, but as something to be practised in the world, with students eventually undertaking expeditions, fieldwork and missions beyond the safety of the campus.

Zifira has also become increasingly important in the search for lost Pathmaking knowledge. Scholars at the Asterium study surviving records of the Connected Age, ancient magical systems and the deteriorating Pathways themselves. As connections between worlds begin to fail, academic research that once belonged largely to historians and specialists is becoming a matter of international urgency.

For the young people arriving here to study, however, those enormous questions can feel very distant. Their lives are still shaped by friendships, rivalries, parties, families, first loves, exams and the complicated business of deciding who they are going to become, even when their education might eventually take them to another world.

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