The Astral Plane is the plane that connects all other planes, known in two worlds of the archive: in Antiterra as a luminous, navigable matrix where time does not run, and in Vala as a silver void without ground, wind or reference.
This name refers to different places in 2 worlds; the versions are not merged.
| Type | Plane |
| Worlds | Antiterra; Vala |
| Spanish entry | El Plano Astral |
Antiterra
Place in the cosmos
There is only one Astral, and it “is on the other side”. It connects all planes — “the stars and the voids” — and is a sacred place without time of its own, where dissipating consciousnesses go and through which every teleportation passes. The most recent school of cosmographers no longer treats the planes as separate levels of existence but as distances measured in time, “light years”; the Astral is therefore navigated, as the naval realm of the planar world.
Appearance
It is luminous, open space with no stated ground. Astral winds blow there; when they leak into the material world through doors left open, they are felt in the mind, not on the skin. Every open door leaves a channel that blows that wind through.
In the distance move slow giant beasts, apparently astral whales; one is larger than the rest, and they sing. Gods “turned to stone in the astral plane” are scattered in the light, petrified but still invocable: the Quescalis summons them.
Entry
- Projection: the body sleeps on the other side and a silver cord comes out of the traveler’s back. Someone must guard the bodies, “because if I don’t guard them, they destroy them”.
- Travel spells.
- Items: a cloak of the stars allows a plane shift limited to the Astral, a single round trip.
Some places of the world have no contact with the Astral at all.
Time
Its time does not keep pace with the primary world. A traveler said: “I am in a place where time does not continue”. A quick answer given inside can arrive sixty years later in the primary world, so a traveler may return unharmed to a world that has already buried him.
It has been proposed as a battlefield: drawing Tiamat “here to the Astral Plane” to defeat her.
Neighboring planes
- The elemental planes are substances in pure state and open as portals over specific places on Earth: the aquatic ones; fire; lightning, connected to the Veneto and the electric fields of Venice; diamond, which holds most cosmic diamonds.
- The ethereal plane, full of invisible ethereal creatures, is “another way of seeing that universe”: the cosmos as something full, the elemental basis of substances. Uchronic Paris developed the cosmology that treats astral and ethereal as distinct levels.
- Created demiplanes and parallel planes, such as the Plane of Swann, entered with a key that “wasn’t magical or anything, but really was a key to the little house”.
- Spells of planar binding, with their scroll, create a place where a particular creature is called.
The head that fell came from another reality connected through the Astral, not from this cosmos.
Significance
Because the Astral links teleportation, death and the stars, any alteration of it touches all planes. Voices of the archive record “the fall of the astral plane” as an event of apocalyptic scale, tied to invading hosts.
Open questions
- What the Quescalis is — artifact, place, spell or word of power — is unknown.
- Who guards the sleeping bodies, and what would destroy them, is not stated.
- When “the fall of the astral plane” happened, who invaded and what was damaged are unknown.
- Schools dispute whether the elemental planes lie inside the Astral or are separate destinations reached through it.
- Which places lack contact with the Astral, and why, is not recorded.
- Whether the petrified gods and the dissipated consciousnesses form one deposit or two strata, and how astral distance is measured in practice, are unknown.
Vala
Nature
The cosmos of Vala counts the astral among its great orders, beside the elemental, transitive and infernal planes. It is a silver-white void radiating light with no source. There is no ground, no wind and no spatial reference, which produces “a sensation of falling without falling”. It is also a dwelling of gods, which makes it a destination as well as a passage. The planar structure was set out in an interlude by Tittiframe, where the Feywald and a “Dschaufe” were also named.
What floats in it
- Red asteroids suspended below.
- Crystallizations.
- Silver cords, visible “at the last moment before being sucked out of the astral plane”.
- In some zones a black floor with stars appears, while the silver light persists.
- At least one labyrinth, whose territory “seems to fork between deliberate paths”.
- Remains — “dead, crackers, pieces of octopus… left on the shore” — in a doubtful account.
Laws
- Movement: there is no gravity; one must fly. Whoever cannot fly stays suspended in place.
- Time: it runs differently from the material plane; nine years inside can be a short while outside. The same voice that gives this rate doubts that time exists there at all, and says imagination can be projected within the void.
- Exit: one is “sucked out of the astral plane”, seeing the silver cord just before. Entry is recorded only as the itinerary formula “To the astral plane”.
- Loss: the risk is permanent and total — “everything was lost in the astral plane”. Above all waits the Astral Implosion, always named as pending, never as happening.
Open questions
- The nature, cause, trigger and reach of the Astral Implosion are unknown.
- What is lost when “everything” is lost — objects, body, memory, the cord — is not stated.
- Which gods dwell there, and where, is not fixed.
- Whether the black starry floor is a region, a threshold or a neighboring plane is unknown.
- What the crystallizations are, who drew the labyrinth and how it is crossed without weight are unknown.