I have been subtly implying that there is a larger world behind the Feengrenze in my works for some time. In fact, one could argue that the multiverse was the true star of last week’s adventure into the Scraplands, with the titular region filled with junk from across dozens of parallel Earths. Well, it’s time to pull back the curtain and reveal the Feengrenze’s place in the large whole of reality, my own personal multiverse based on the Many Worlds Interpretation. So let’s go on a brief tour of the infinite earths of the Manyfold.

The Manyfold

Let’s say you are faced with a decision: between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. You’re standing at your local ice cream shop, and they have run out of every flavor except chocolate and vanilla. What would you choose? Does this decision matter? Not really. But here is where it gets interesting: the simple act of choosing one flavor simultaneously gives rise to, or reveals, another universe where you selected the alternative. This is the essence of the many-worlds interpretation: every possible outcome of every choice exists within its own parallel universe, collectively forming the Manyfold—an infinite tapestry where everything can and does exist.

The Manyfold exists in a higher-dimensional space just beyond the edge of any universe. A vast, infinite expanse where bubbles containing the entire cosmos exist with their own laws of physics, metaphysical laws, histories, civilizations, and countless other unique characteristics. Surrounding and engulfing every universe is a vast sea of aether. Aether is the zeroth element — not air, water, fire, or earth, but the canvas upon which they are painted. It exists in a quantum haze of every state at once: fluid, gas, crystal, flame, and thought. To the untrained eye, it resembles a thick sea, but no two observers see the same sea. The universes float free through the aether, intermingling, clustering together like soap bubbles and drifting along.

While this might seem as disorderly as a beaker of shaken soap bubbles, there is an order to Manyfold. Each of the bubbles in the sea of aether is acted upon by six fundamental metaphysical forces: Negentropy, Entropy, Life, Decay, Belief, and Nihilism. These forces represent: Negentropy (the force of order and increasing complexity), Entropy (the force of disorder and dissolution), Life (the force of vitality and creation), Decay (the force of death and stagnation), Belief (the force of faith and shared conviction), and Nihilism (the force of nothingness and disbelief). The pull of these six forces, along with collisions with their neighbors, plus a possible undiscovered 7th force, keep each universe anchored in the same relative position to all the other universes. At the center, or as close as something infinite in size and scope can have a center, lies the mythical Zero Prime, the universe of absolute balance, where all six forces cancel each other out perfectly, a utopian realm, the perfect ideal of which all universes are pale imitations.

The supposed existence of Zero Prime is also used as the basis of the naming convention of the Manyfold. Since the relative positions of the universes of the manifold are relatively consistent, hypercosmologists use three-vector notation for simplicity, selecting the dominant metaphysical pulls in a given universe. Most universes “lean” in three directions — one force from each axis pair — and these vectors define a coordinate shorthand, where the numerical value indicates the degree to which a universe ‘leans’ towards a specific metaphysical force, effectively mapping its conceptual ‘distance’ from the absolute balance of Zero Prime. For our example, the distance our universe is from Zero Prime is 3-entropy-wise, 3-life-wise, and 5-Belief-Wise.

The Metauniverses

Certain concepts are universal in the most literal way imaginable. Ideas don’t merely spread across the Manyfold; they permeate and exert a pull on the universes themselves. The most potent of these idea clusters have coalesced into universes of their own that exist in the same space as the Manyfold. These universes are called the Metauniverses.

Metauniverses are not universes in the traditional sense; rather, they are conceptual spaces—infinite expanses that manifest a particular set of ideas, existing both within and beyond the Manyfold’s universes.

Wherever those ideas take hold — in minds, in media, in memory — the corresponding Metauniverse is partially present. Yet they are also places that exist beyond the Manyfold that mortals may traverse.

Each Metauniverse is infinite in size and governed by its own set of metaphysical and physical laws that define what is and what is not possible. The resident concepts of each Metauniverse permeate each one, shaping its landscape, history, culture, creatures, and people in very specific ways. However, each Metauniverse is fluid enough that no two visitors experience the same journey, even if they walk side by side.

The Prime Metauniverses

There are 6 Prime Metauniverses in total, each one corresponding to the six cardinal directions of the Manyfold, Faerie, Oblivion, the Primordial Sea, the Great Lattice, the Void, and the Allsource.

• Faerie: The timeless realm of life, ever-growing and enduring, in all its myriad forms. Bathed in the warm glow of a never-ending summer evening, everything in Faerie is larger than life. The fey folk who live in Faerie are creatures of pure, unrestrained vitality and spend their days making merriment and living life to the fullest.
• Oblivion: The dark realm of life’s antithesis. Oblivion is where decay, despair, depression, shadow, and lethargy originate. The Metauniverse is a dark, cold, infinite expanse of rolling hills of grey ash. Undead wander these hills, putting the barest amount of energy into existing, and grim towns can be found filled with pale-skinned humanoids that do nothing but lounge about in ennui.
• Primordial Sea: The Primordial Sea is the world of pure entropy. A vast soup of the alchemical and periodic elementals constantly forming greater wholes and as quickly dissolving. The primordial sea is where chaos and change originate. The elemental creatures make their home in this churning sea of raw universes.
• Great Lattice: The Great Lattice is the realm of absolute order, from which mathematics, logic, and causality spring forth. Its landscape is a mathematical lattice, a sea of equations written in the air by tireless constructs armed with pieces of chalk.
• The Allsource: From the Allsource, all belief springs forth. The Allsource is the realm of beliefs and associated concepts, such as morality, reincarnation, and faith. It is the hardest of all the prime metauniverses to accurately describe because it is shaped by the viewer’s beliefs. What is known is that it is the home of the archetypes of all beliefs, genderless, mostly formless entities embodying the essence of a particular belief. They are the Forms of which Plato speaks in his writing, of which the gods of every universe are but avatars.
• The Void: The Void is nihilism made manifest. The Metauniverse of the void is a bog of nothingness that eats all belief. It is from this bog that Nihilism, immorality, and apathy flow into the multiverse. Sometimes, a bubble of nothingness will emerge from the swamp and form into a demon before melting back into the swamp.

The derived Metauniverses

The six Prime Metauniverses define the Manyfold’s boundaries, their zones of influence converging at the vertices of a conceptual cube. At these junctures, where they bleed into one another, lie the strange, beautiful, and often horrifying Derived Metauniverses.

• The Black Sea: The Black Sea, where Oblivion, Void, and Primordial Sea converge, manifests as a realm of ultimate despair, destruction, and self-destructive madness. The realm is one giant primordial sea of black ooze, spotted with sunken continents and shattered structures, bereft of shore or light. From this sea, demonkind sloughs into the Manyfold, seeking the destruction of all things, for they are the antithesis of Manyfold itself.
• The Infernal Reich: At the vertex where the Great Lattice, Oblivion, and The Void meet is the realm that mortals often call hell, from which greed, betrayal, and tyranny emanate. Here, the devil kind rules over a vast fascist bureaucracy where damned souls are the currency, the property, and the labor of the state, forced to work in meaningless drudgery. Petty tyrants, grifters, and backstabbing bureaucrats thrive, each devil scheming to rise through the Party’s infernal ranks.
• The Grey City: The confluence of belief, decay, and order creates the lifeless grey city, a realm of calcified routine and thoughtless obedience. Here, the undead and the hopeless toil day and night to further some long-forgotten divine purpose under the dictates of angelic overseers. Everything here is measured and timed to perfection; there is no deviation, just cold, predictable tyranny where everybody believes they are on the right path despite the evidence that their struggles are pointless.
• The Abyss of Doomed Prophecy: There is an endless stormy ocean where the Allsource, Primordial Sea, and Oblivion meet that churns with divine madness. Here, the mad, the foolish, and the desperate seek visions of the future only to be met with the harsh truths of the Manyfold, truths that would break the most steadfast of souls. The abyss is filled with the drowned bodies of would-be petitioners, and the raft towns are filled with apocalyptic cults and mad prophets.
• The Red Masque: At the vertex where Faerie, the Allsource, and the primordial sea meet is a massive chaotic fair or festival, the size of a city. It is a chaotic fair or festival, city-sized, where the essence of every nightmare and hallucinatory excess converges into a roiling sea of carnal pleasures and debauchery. It is the realm of delirium, obsession, madness, and the perversion of the beautiful into the grotesque.
• The Silver Reaches: Where the Allsource, Faerie, and the Great Lattice meet is the Silver Reaches, the supposed realm of absolute good. It is a place of shining cities with absolutely perfect architecture, angelic rulers, and noble paladins.
• The Still Gardens: Where the Great Lattice, Faerie, and The Void overlap, there is a lifeless garden. The still gardens are a realm of carved flowers and trees, perfectly arranged sculpture gardens, geometrically ideal crumbling cities, and absolute tedium. In the realm of eternal tedium and lifeless perfection, the residents slowly turn to stone as they contemplate the one remaining avenue to explore: philosophy.
• The Well of Life: Where entropy, life, and nihilism meet is a primordial swamp where new life comes and goes in the blink of an eye. The well of life is where the manyfold tinkers with new forms of life, continuously creating, mutating, and destroying creatures without rhyme or reason. It is a realm of novelty for novelty’s sake where life seeks function at the expense of everything else.

Traveling the Manyfold

Navigating the Manyfold is possible through three primary methods: hopping between universes, traversing a metauniverse, or employing advanced spells or technology.

• Universe Hopping: When universes collide in the Manyfold, they briefly meld at the collision zone, allowing jumps between them. However, this method is rarely used due to the immense time and extreme dangers involved. These collision zones are typically far from inhabited areas, and within them, the laws of physics collapse, causing chaotic reality fluctuations.
• Metauniversal Traversal: There are places in many universes—ancient holy sites steeped in belief, untouched arcadian glades filled with life, and sites that witnessed unspeakable amounts of death—where the influence of a MetaUniverse can seep more strongly into a universe. In these places where the walls between realities are thin, one can find hidden portals into a Metauniverse.
  Once through a portal, navigating a Metauniverse becomes a philosophical challenge as much as a physical one. These conceptual landscapes, born of thought, defy conventional geography, offering no guarantee of reaching a specific destination. Experienced walkers of the Metauniverses know that it is folly to travel through one without a guide.
  That being said, Faerie is considered the easiest metauniverse for travel purposes. The residents of Faerie tend to be pleasant, helpful, and easy to recruit as guides or direction givers. There are even so-called faerie roads complete with inns and taverns through the Metauniverse that allow for quick and relatively safe travels. However, traveling through Faerie is not without its dangers; time moves inconsistently in Faerie and the fey are notoriously mercurial.
• Magical/Technological Wormholes: The most common and costly method of Manyfold travel involves deliberately creating wormholes through magic or high technology. These wormholes demand immense power, often requiring the energy output of multiple Dyson spheres or the sacrifice of archmages to open even a temporary conduit to an adjacent universe.

Whither the Feengrenze?

While many believe the Feengrenze lies in the Manyfold’s most distant, law-bound reaches—a deterrent to those seeking to free the fey’s imprisoned deity—this is a deception. In reality, it is hidden in plain sight: a pocket dimension nestled entirely within Zero Prime. This minuscule cosmos, comprising only the Feengrenze and a single orbiting star, is almost entirely inaccessible. Its boundary with Zero Prime lies within the heart of an ordinary Red Giant star, located where all Metauniverses converge and cancel, save for Faerie. Thus, the sole entry and exit is through Faerie, whose residents, keenly aware of the creature’s near-destruction of the Manyfold, would never aid its release.

However, their vigilance may be futile. The Feengrenze is failing. The insane power of Faolan, the insane artist king and one-time High King of the Fey, is steadily eroding the earthen walls of his prison. It is only a matter of time before he breaks free to walk the Manyfold and remake it to his insane designs.