Content warning: blood, gore, maiming, torture, sadism, liminal spaces, religious imagery, cannibalism, sexual activity

Beyond our reality, there lies the domains of Light, Dark, and Wild. Some say that the realms have always existed. Others say in the beginning there was only Darkness or Chaos, and that the Light burst forth eons ago. The world of the Unnatural is full of liars and visions, so who is to say what really happened?

Let us explore the spiritual geography of the worlds beyond the mundane. Only the spirit not the body can travel to these realms, either by death or projecting while alive beyond the astral. Many cultures have had visions of these worlds, and filtered them through their own prejudices and biases, leaving no one in the mundane world with a full vision.

The City of Light

Your astral spirit pierces the veil between worlds, and you look up. There is a place that radiates light into the dark, a golden place that shines brighter than the sun. It looks like a perfect ray, rising into the sky, a mountain of dazzling light. And you can follow its beam upward to its terrible end.

There is a city at the peak of that beam, sitting upon a white mountain. You walk through the city gates past high walls inscribed with the name for God in every language known and unknown. You walk its pristine streets of gleaming white marble and gold. You look through the sterile temples to a thousand gods; and the churches with their ideal statues of saints and angels. They are all empty. They are all perfect. They are all silent.

As you travel into the city, you hear only one sound. The distant sound of prayer fills your ears, and it draws you further inward. There is an open gate gleaming with gold in the sparkling light, but you pause next to the columned Romanesque building near it. You drift inside that building and see shelves upon endless shelves of books. They rise higher than the exterior would allow, into a shining cloudy light. Many armed gods made of jade and gold with faces of carved white stone move among the shelves of this ascendant library. They place and move books, inscribe new ones, and cast others into holy fires. They write and record all things as they should be – not how they actually are. One stops and stares at you, its carved face without emotion, only judgment. You leave the way you came.

You follow the sound of prayer through the golden gate. You enter a great square, where an untold number of souls kneel in prayer. They make great concentric circles around a circular temple of crystal, shining from within with the purest white light. They pray for forgiveness. They pray to be purified. They pray to be worthy.

All of the souls are maimed. You see one with half of its face shorn off, another missing its arm. , yet another mumbles incoherently with its head neatly sliced open, revealing an empty brain cavity. They do not bleed, instead their wounds are sealed with gleaming liquid gold.

Among the souls move robed winged figures carrying great reflective blades inscribed with prayers. These angels – if that is what they are – move among them. They grab a soul and inspect it with white shining eyes. Then they hew a part off. A soul will be worthy of the temple only when every corrupt part is shorn away. They toss that which is unworthy away, over the edge of the mountain.

You follow a maimed limb on its journey through the air and gaze over the cliff edge where they are tossed over. There is a dismembered, endless pile beneath you. Eyes gaze back at you, still blinking and crying. Hands clench fruitlessly as muscles twitch. Across the mountain of discarded refuse, huge strange beetles made of blue gold climb over it. They pick pieces and put them together. When they have enough, they will have a body ready for one of the Light’s servants to depart into the mortal realm.

You look back to the temple and approach. You are surprised no one stops you, but they seem to have concerns other than some astral traveler. Or perhaps, they want you to see. The golden armored guardians at the stairs to the temple make no move to stop you, their spears planted at their side. You take the marble steps upward toward the open pillared temple.

You enter the perfect clear crystal temple, and see a tesseract of pure light hovering over a backless throne. It shifts and turns impossibly before your eyes. Inside, a song is sung with no clear source. It invades your mind, promising everything from peace to love. All it asks for is surrender. You watch a soul – a maimed finally worthy soul – be led into the room by the robed angels. It falls to its knees before the tesseract, and in a burst of light, it is gone. The soul is nothing but mist, absorbed into the one true Light.

You flee this place. You flee the song that tempts you to give up every part of yourself. You flee the consuming light and the sterile stone. You have seen enough of Heaven. 

Now it is time to see what Hell has to offer.

The Dark Principalities

Downward seems easier than upward. You fall from the mountain of the Light and into the darkness. The gleaming pure white grows darker, shifting colors until it is a dull red. Smoke curls about you, darkness manifesting against the Light. You land upon a floor of cracked obsidian and look around. There is the sound of hissing lava from deep within the cracks beneath your feet, but everywhere is steeped in a black and grey fog revealing and hiding far vistas of spikes and crackling red lightning.

Great citadels and dwellings grow from the mountainous landscape in every imaginable style of architecture ranging from gothic cathedrals to grand stone castles. You catch glimpses of them in the breaks in the fog. You walk toward one on a path that crackles underneath your feet like discarded burnt skin. You pass great crosses and hanging cages, where the desiccated remnants of once proud souls are displayed. You come upon a high-walled citadel carved into the black rock. The soldiers upon the battlements watch you but do not interfere with your passage.

You enter the courtyard. Chittering demons with spiked backs crawl upon the walls, tending to chained prisoners that line the yard. Sharp pipes jut from their wrists and sides piercing them like Christ was pierced. Blood leaks slowly from them into goblets and basins, and blinded servants take them when they are full. Some of the damned stare at you, mouths agape, but none dare make the futile gesture of asking you for help. 

The most unsettling part of this realm is the ever-present hunger. Even the blind servants dare a drink from the goblets. It is not the body but the soul that is being bled slowly here, draining the bodies of the light within them. And everything here hungers for more than these souls can give. 

You dare to enter the tar-black doors of the citadel’s keep and enter its grand hall. A banquet is in session. There are pale and garishly dressed courtiers, some looking more human than others. A fat impossibly bloated creature with a mouth full of needle-like teeth sits in the place of honor and sucks the eyes from a decapitated head. The courtiers dance to strange piping music or eat corpses of both demons and human souls in various states of consumption upon the tables. The blood from the courtyard flows into glasses, and is greedily drunk. Blind servants circulate, keeping the meals refreshed from great platters. Courtiers gossip and whisper of great swings in politics, of which principality shall earn a greater claim to the harvest of souls, and of battles eternally fought for primacy.

The hunger feels even stronger here. You can feel the urge to indulge in the feast yourself, to know the taste of the flesh of souls and the remnants of the light within them. You turn and leave, shunning the temptation.

You start traveling outward from this place. You pass a field where great armies clash with soldiers and strange beasts as these petulant principalities vie for dominance. The sound of the battles are deafening, but you keep moving outward.

If Hell is hunger, what do the children of Chaos have to offer?

The Wild Domains

The ashen, obsidian ground gives way to tall grasses and then primeval trees covered in vines. The foliage grows denser as the Light above fights to penetrate the canopy. You hear chittering in the woods, and the undergrowth roils and shifts with your approach. Some of the trees have faces and hands but are frozen sentinels. Nevertheless, you feel watched.

You find the corpse of a demon that wandered too far. Its flesh shows signs of a thousand cuts. The jewel-winged sprites feasting on it with bloody mouths might be responsible for this death. They laugh and chatter to one another in a sing-song tongue before flying away when you get too close.

You spot a path through the ancient forest and follow it. You come upon another traveller on a journey in the opposite direction, a blue-grey hunchbacked humanoid creature with a lantern and an overladen pack on its back. It offers you fresh dreams and bottled emotions – everything from stolen sadness to forgotten love. You have nothing to pay with, you reply. It smiles and makes you an offer for things you would never part with, and never knew you could part with. You continue on your way, sensing danger in even continuing the conversation.

Hanging trees offer you their fruit, but you dare not take them. Whispers off the path try to lure you closer, but you ignore them. The ground here is lush with greenery and life, but you feel no safer than you did in the realms of darkness that you left.

You are passing under an arch of wood when the world shifts. There is a castle now, built of moist stone, standing before you where nothing once was. It is covered in vines, with violet banners blowing in the wind. It sits beneath enormous twisted oaks. There is the sound of beautiful wild songs emanating from it. You hesitate on the path toward the door, but then a beautiful man with pointed fingernails and ears emerges from the trees nearby. He graciously invites you to join the festivities and tells you it would be most impolite to turn such an invitation down.

You wisely agree to follow. You are told the celebration is a prelude to a hunting party. You ask what there is to be hunted, and the man smirks. He tells you of the Chaos that exists even beyond the Wilds and the huge lurching creatures that emerge from it from time to time. They are good sport to hunt, he tells you. They take great joy in the hunt, though many perish. You pass by a stand of horses that look at you with very human eyes, desperate and sad.

The inside of the hall is beautiful, not the dark smokey place that the demon’s hall was. The Fae sharpen their knives and feast. They sit upon both wooden chairs and bent souls twisted into chairs. At the center of the room, two souls are bound in coitus, and the Fae around them laugh and sigh at the feelings it conjures. Elsewhere, one on table, a soul is pierced by uncountable needles, and another one is being added. He weeps, and the Fae show the same ecstasy.

You are asked for your name. You politely decline to give it. You are asked for your thoughts. You politely refuse again. After the second refusal, the tone of the room changes. Eyes start watching you, and you attempt to excuse yourself. You walk out, and start to run. You hear the beat of horses behind you, as the good people of the forest have chosen another target for their hunt.

You scream, and claw your way into the woods. You stumble into the ashes of the darkness. You launch yourself toward the place between the Light and the Dark.

You awaken in a quiet room, back in the mundane world. You have touched the worlds beyond and seen no paradise. You wonder if that is all there is in the beyond. 

You will never learn the answer.