Far beyond the breathtaking, opalescent majesty of the Temple of Origins, past the chiming crystalline plateaus and the sprawling oceans of liquid starlight, lay the cosmic dumping ground of the Sacred Land.
It was known in ancient, whispered texts as the Fringes, but to any mortal who might have survived the crushing spiritual gravity, it would simply be recognised as the Astral Slums. This was a lawless, decaying sector of the divine plane, a jagged asteroid field suspended in a suffocating, lightless void. The shifting, brilliant ribbons of violet and magenta nebulas did not reach this far; the sky here was the colour of a bruised, festering wound. The air tasted of rusting metal and rotting ozone, heavy with the accumulated misery of ten thousand years of celestial exiles.
Deep within this desolate expanse, on a shattered chunk of black bedrock that drifted aimlessly through the dark, a ragged, agonised gasp shattered the heavy silence.
