I never “discovered” I was Gifted. I just realized everyone else wasn’t. Imagine, if you would, that you have ever lived your life submerged up to just below eye level in the water of a giant mirror lake. Now and then, not always, but now and then, something will disturb the lake and a wave will cover your eyes. Be brave enough to keep them open, and you will glimpse under the surface. I remember a fellow student once said something similar. He said it felt that he had only been assigned to side seats in the theater. Now and then, he would see the actors waiting for their queue before they take center stage. It was, for him, part of the experience, that knowledge of the existence of backstage; that understanding that the play the rest are watching is but the surface of the sea, the façade of forces long and hard at work beyond our sight. All magic was, at the time, was reaching into the depths under, piercing the surface willingly and with purpose, rather than randomly, then stir the water, just so, to make the wave you wanted. I suppose for my friend it was like prompting the actors, knowing they are such. 

– From the introduction of “Poetry of Currents” by Erme, Who Moves the Oceans

While all Gifted have a very vague and only instinctual understanding of the architecture of the cosmos, few can claim more comprehensive or more firsthand knowledge about the subject than the Sorcerer Kings. This, however, did not happen overnight; even the four sorcerous deities stumbled and wondered in their explorations and their quest for understanding the Domains. Like pioneers sailing into uncharted seas to discover untouched lands, so did the four god-kings, their apprentices and their followers, brave the unknown of entirely different worlds, learning and understanding like few before their structure, connections and influences. It is, perhaps, appropriate, when one tries to learn about such things, to follow these hallowed footsteps of the giants that came before. They have, in fact, dedicated centuries and entire generations of sorcerous apprentices to this task.

To begin our understanding, it would be prudent to begin with what was known before and what is largely understood by most students of magic. In this Primordial Rule of Balance, its greatest manifestation, the very “image” of Balance, is the world as we know it, the Material Domain. Also known as the Prime Domain among the Sorcerer Kings, Ikoumeni, meaning the Inhabitable, among the scholars of the City States, the Midgard or Middle World according to the Nords, the World Apparent according to most Chapters in the Hundred Kingdoms, the Breghertu for the Dweghom, meaning the world that can break, or the Ne’nea for the W’adrhŭn, which is an interesting word, a loaned term from a lost civilization that predated the Old Dominion, the Material world has been named many things, all of which imply one thing: there are other worlds beyond it. It is obvious that magic practitioners have ever understood this truth and it is not hard to see why. Since magic stems from a spiritual, ‘soul’ imbalance, those Gifted with magic and, therefore, with such an imbalance, are almost not fully attuned to the Material. They, almost by default, live life from a position that allows them to “glimpse behind the curtain,” as it were, to see beyond the border of the Material world and whatever else is out there. But that experience alone has taught Gifted three things, not just one. One, the Material is not the whole world, but only one state of existence, one Domain. Two, if the Material is but one, there must be at least one other such state or Domain. Three, for the Domains to exist in parallel but untouching, there must be a border between the two.

It is well established that attempts to enter other Domains have walked hand in hand with the theoretical knowledge of their existence. In many ways, no one was really interested in proving the Domains existed. Most mages who focused on the task already knew they did, as mentally reaching into them was, in fact, ever part of Working magic. What mages were really interested in was visiting the Domains; for if mental reach into them offered the power of spells, what would physical visitation endow..?

To achieve this, the scholars of magic, primarily during the Old Dominion, attempted time and again to study the “border,” that thin layer that separated the Prime from the rest of the Domain or Domains. Known as the Mantle, the term for that border is almost as old as magic itself. But success came relatively early – or so did scholars of the Old Dominion believe – in two ways. Firstly, the Mantle was crossed, and mages could for the first time enter a new world; but not one they expected or hoped for. Rather than the elemental powerhouses their minds envisioned, they entered a bleak domain, muted in its topology and experience.  Naming it the Shroud, it was as exciting to reach as it was uninteresting to explore, considering what they were after. What was interesting was that the existence of more Domains could be safely concluded as a certainty from inside the Shroud. This brought the second success: connecting items to elemental forces, making them a medium to these Elemental Domains. But reaching the Domains themselves, physically, proved impossible and the same techniques and spells that had pierced the Mantle in the first place proved counterproductive within the Shroud, spitting the mages back into the Prime instead. Traversing the Mantle to enter the Shroud was a giant first step into the exploration of the Domains. But the true nature of this “Shroud” became apparent much later.

It took the studies of the Anathematic and, therefore, the practices of his four apprentices, to understand that, metaphysically speaking, a “thin” border which shields and filters the influences of the other Domains on the Material world is anything but. The Anathematic first realized that the Mantle and the Shroud were, in fact, the same thing. The first “Domain” his predecessors had successfully visited was nothing but the very border they were trying to pierce. Their incantations to pierce it further did nothing of the sort because, from their inception, they were transportive, bringing them in and out of the Mantle. If one wanted to reach the Domains, one had to do better; much, much better.

It is unclear what the Anathematic did, what paths he traversed before he disappeared; even to his four greatest students. To them, it was obvious that the two things he did leave behind for them to find were immensely powerful, dangerously so. One was the ritual to kill a god. The other was the means to achieve the power to cast that ritual, a direct route to the very essence of each Elemental Domain, their metaphysical cores, as well as the means to bind one’s soul to them.

And yet, as they readily embraced those teachings, the Four Sorcerers that brought down a god knew that his true research and accomplishments remained a mystery. As dreaded as it is coveted to this day, his research eludes them, for what he left behind were only partial, tested and “safe” techniques, cautioning against the dangers of truly piercing the Mantle. Despite their eagerness to test their master’s teachings, the Four never challenged the wisdom of not breaking a dimension, much more one that shields the Prime Domain. Instead, to enter the Elemental Domains, mind and body had to be prepared and one should rely on enhancing (ridiculously so) an element’s influence on one’s mind and on the Prime Domain, stretching the Mantle’s philters without tearing it. This, in the Shroud, manifested as a window into the Domain itself. The four Sorcerer Kings now had each a whole Domain to explore and master, bound to its deepest, most powerful expressions. But before they did that, like dutiful students, they had to first mitigate the damage; for the Fall, Ninuah’s sacrifice, their own deicidal ritual and the raising of a continent had wreaked havoc on the Prime, the Mantle and the Elemental Domains themselves.

For centuries, therefore, the Four simply dove time and time again into their respective Domains, coordinating to undo the cosmological damage they had played a part in causing, second only to the Breaking by the Dweghom. But minds such as theirs do not abandon the quest for knowledge, even amidst duty. With an entire civilization budding around them and focused on their needs, they soon realized that they did not need to explore their Domains in person: they needed explorers in their names. Soon, a race of exploration began, with each Court attempting to visit and understand their Element’s Domain.

The Elemental Expeditions were neither rushed nor careless; one does not reach the heights of magical mastery of the four god-kings without properly understanding and respecting the dangers of their craft. Their students were held to the same standards of prudence and meticulousness. For a century, therefore, the Sorcerers of the elemental courts carefully and diligently prepared an entire generation of candidates, creating schools and orders that concentrated on the exploration of the Domains. First, students were expected to learn how to mentally visit the Domains, controlling their journey and presence there. This method, too hectic and nebulous with the techniques known at the time, proved unreliable. Each sorcerer claimed that the experience of the Domain could differ from visit to visit, with the element feeling sometimes more intense than others. Each time, the Domain seemed to mirror the Material, albeit distorted, of course, and with the element of the Domain having an exaggerated presence. More than that, early explorers reported almost face-like or animalistic manifestations within the elements, which seemed to resemble life; an absurdity by all accounts at the time. At first, they were believed to be an unintended influence on the Domain by the mental traveler or maybe even other Gifted or semi-gifted individuals. Nevertheless, they became something of a terror turned urban legend for those early interdimensional pioneers. But the true dangers were not hiding within those harmless “shapes in the clouds” as one Initiate called them. The true danger came when the physical exploration began. And despite such unreliable and puzzling accounts, these mental expeditions were paramount in opening the pathways to achieve this.

True terror came when members of the first small group that was expected to physically enter a Domain together ended up separated and unable to contact each other. The first such incident put a halt on all expeditions, as some expedition members were never recovered. By all accounts, all of them should have had entered the same ‘location’ of the Domain, using the exact same method and from the same location, in the Material. The teachings of their god-kings offered no explanation to this, and neither did the accounts from the mental expeditions.  While each explorer had shared that the experience of the Domain may differ, they had never suspected that they had been entering the Domain in different, perhaps random, locations.

It took different theories, and some more brave volunteers, for the truth to be eventually uncovered. The early pioneers had neither concealed nor misinformed their pupils. They had simply missed a simple fact in their early explorations, for, mentally, one can only travel alone. Thus, while they all agreed in their experience that sometimes the Domains seemed more… intense, than others, they had failed to realize that this was happening at the same time and it was not the location of the Domain that was different; it was, in fact, them. Depending on one’s mental, physical and magical readiness, capacity and endurance, the same ‘location’ in any Domain could exist in different states at the same time, presenting different properties, changes in the landscape and even a different intensity of the element’s presence. Each of these states, named “Layers”, seemed to exist almost as distant from each other as the Domains themselves are from the Material world. The same Domain existed in different states; the same Domain was not one new world. It was, at this point, that the Sorcerers understood why their gods had need of them: each Elemental Domain was not one world to be explored. It was multiple. This discovery was almost as terrifyingly exiting as discovering the existence of an explosion of elemental flora and fauna in the upper Layers of each Domain…

These discoveries became an obsession of the Sorcerer King elite. It is not hard to understand how and why their tribal population would distance themselves as they did; their former masters simply did not care about this world enough. The entire economy of the continent revolved around the Elemental Expeditions, with those focused on the “Vertical Exploration” of the Layers proving increasingly costly in resources and manpower. But the astounding discoveries in each Layer has put a dent to Vertical exploration, as it became apparent early on that “horizontal” exploration of each Layer should be ensured as well. Filled to the brim with elemental beings, waiting to be bound by powerful Sorcerers and Initiates alike, establishing footholds in each Layer became paramount and extremely beneficial. People believe that the first colonies of the Sorcerer Kings are the two on the shores of Alektria. This is wrong. Entire generations of pioneers have been populating the different Layers of the Elemental Domains. And, to this day, they venture deeper still, discovering more about the way the entire cosmos works.