Pathways

The Roads Between Realities

The realities of Ilixa are normally separate from one another. Each exists within its own physical environment, history and set of natural conditions, divided from neighbouring realities by boundaries that most people cannot perceive or cross.

At some point in the distant past, those boundaries were deliberately breached. A network of stable interworld connections was constructed, linking certain realities together. These connections became known as the Pathways.

No complete record of the original network survives. Thousands of connected realities are mentioned in surviving charts, texts and fragments, but even those records are incomplete. Some worlds may never have been connected at all, while others were once part of the network and have since disappeared from it completely.

What Is a Pathway?

A Pathway is a stable, engineered connection between two realities. It is fundamentally different from a natural rupture.

A rupture is an accidental or unstable weakness in the boundary between worlds. Most are temporary and unpredictable. They may last seconds, minutes, days or, in rare cases, much longer.

A Pathway has structure. It was made deliberately and can remain dormant for centuries or even millennia while still retaining the possibility of being reopened. Some Pathways appear to connect only two locations, while others were once part of much larger chains of connected worlds.

A useful distinction is simple: a rupture is a crack; a Pathway is a road.

Who Built Them?

Nobody knows with certainty who built the first Pathways.

Different realities preserve different explanations. Some traditions attribute them to ancient orders of wizards. Others describe lost civilisations whose understanding of magic and reality greatly exceeded anything known today. It is also possible that the network was not created by one civilisation at all, but developed gradually over thousands of years as different peoples discovered or extended it.

What is clear is that the oldest surviving Pathways were created by people who understood the boundaries between realities far better than any known modern society.

Present-day magical institutions can sometimes maintain, stabilise, interpret or partially reactivate old Pathways. They do not truly understand how to build an equivalent network from nothing.

The Old Network

The Pathways once formed a far larger system than survives today. Through them, worlds exchanged knowledge, people, technologies, magical practices, materials, animals, languages, beliefs and sometimes armies.

Not every connected reality was equally important. Some became major crossroads with multiple routes passing through them, while others sat at the edge of the network and may have received only occasional visitors.

This helps explain why similar creatures, symbols, magical techniques and ideas can appear in realities whose histories otherwise developed independently. Contact did not make those worlds identical. In some places, interworld exchange may have transformed entire societies. In others, only a handful of travellers may ever have arrived.

The Severing

At some point, the network began to fail.

Pathways closed. Routes collapsed. Some worlds deliberately sealed their gates, while others simply vanished from surviving charts. Entire branches of the old network became unreachable.

Later generations came to describe this long period of collapse as the Severing.

Nobody knows whether the Severing was one event or many. Surviving traditions blame different causes: interworld war, magical catastrophe, deliberate destruction, the failure of ancient infrastructure, or some combination of all of them.

Whatever happened, the result was the same. Worlds that had once known of one another became isolated. Over centuries, knowledge of the wider network became fragmented, mythologised or lost altogether.

Severed Worlds

A world can become isolated in several different ways.

Its Pathway may have been destroyed. The route itself may have collapsed. The receiving structure may survive but no longer function. The gate may remain intact while the knowledge required to operate it has been lost. In some cases, a civilisation may deliberately have sealed its own connection and suppressed what was known about it.

This means that two worlds can both be described as “severed” while existing in very different circumstances.

On Avara, for example, the great surviving Pathway still exists physically and is maintained under international control, but it remains sealed. Other realities may contain only ruins, damaged gateways or routes that no longer lead anywhere known.

Some worlds may believe themselves completely isolated while an ancient Pathway still lies buried beneath a city, mountain, desert or ocean.

Lost Pathways

A closed Pathway is not necessarily a dead one.

Many ancient structures survive long after their purpose has been forgotten. A Pathway might now lie beneath a later settlement, inside a ruined temple, under the sea or buried within geological formations that did not exist when it was built.

Finding one does not automatically mean it can be used safely.

Old route maps are incomplete. Destinations may have changed. A once-stable world may now be hostile, abandoned or physically transformed. A route that was safe thousands of years ago may no longer be safe at all.

This is one reason rediscovered Pathways are treated with extreme caution.

Ruptures

Ruptures are different from Pathways because they are not normally stable or deliberately constructed.

They form where the boundary between realities becomes weak. Most are small and collapse quickly, but some can remain open long enough for energy, weather, objects, creatures or people to pass through.

Certain locations are especially vulnerable to repeated rupture activity. Ravenlake is one of them. Its unusual supernatural history is partly the result of the boundary around it being persistently weak.

That does not mean Ravenlake contains a functioning Pathway. It means that the barrier there is unusually prone to tearing.

Travelling Between Worlds

Stable travel through a functioning Pathway is possible, but it is rarely simple.

Different Pathways operate in different ways. Some respond to particular forms of magic. Some depend upon surviving mechanisms or rituals. Others may require specific environmental conditions, astronomical alignments or people with particular magical affinities.

The greatest danger is not simply opening a Pathway. It is knowing where the route now leads.

Ancient charts cannot always be trusted. Routes may have shifted, collapsed or changed over time. Some destinations are known only through fragments of old records, while others have never been identified at all.

For this reason, opening an unknown Pathway is not regarded as exploration in the ordinary sense. It is closer to activating an ancient machine without knowing what is connected to the other end.

Knowledge of the Network

There is no single modern authority that understands the whole Pathway network.

Knowledge is scattered between governments, magical institutions, old families, religious traditions, archaeological records and surviving interworld cultures. Some worlds openly study the network. Others treat it as myth. Some governments classify what they know for security reasons, while certain magical groups preserve knowledge they do not share freely.

Every surviving map of Ilixa is therefore incomplete.

Even the most sophisticated charts are interpretations of fragments. New discoveries can change what people believe about the structure of the network, sometimes dramatically.

The Present Age

For centuries, many surviving realities have existed in relative isolation. That isolation is beginning to weaken.

Old structures are becoming active. Forgotten routes are being rediscovered. Ruptures are appearing in places where they were previously rare. Knowledge scattered across separate worlds is beginning to reconnect.

Nobody yet knows whether this is the result of natural change, deliberate interference or the beginning of something much larger.

The old Pathway network is not restored.

But it may no longer be entirely dead.