Lydus
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Lydus is an immense spiritual world, also known as the "Astral Sea", an endless and turbulent ocean where every material and spiritual world is like an island. Lydus is nowhere and anywhere. It's the place by which a person can travel from a world to another in one instant, through the different currents of the sea, even if each of them is physically situated at the other end of the universe, provided the traveler knows the right path. When you take a portal, be it a magical gate or a technological device, you actually travel through Lydus. If the portal works well, you will be transported to your destination without even realizing it. However, if you are unfortunate enough to use a defective portal (a very rare occurrence), you could end up as a stranded traveler somewhere in Lydus, lost in the middle of that infinite expanse.
The Barrier of reality
Lydus can be a pretty dangerous place, but it's not so bad if you know what you are doing. It can be best described as an endless grey sea of a liquid strangely similar to water, although somehow dense enough to be walkable. The sky is perpetually illuminated by millions of small furtive lights silently crisscrossing it at unimaginable speeds. With some training, anyone can, at will, plunge under the surface but that's where the main dangers lie. Many bizarre astral predators, such as the dreaded Metaphrobes, roam the depth of the Lydusian sea. The deeper you go, the denser the liquid gets, gradually making progression harder and harder, and the more dangerous and formidable those monsters become. Past a point, the liquid itself turns solid and becomes what is known as the "Barrier of Reality". Even a god couldn't get through it and would become an easy prey to its denizens. Theoretically, if a being was somehow powerful enough to swim through a matter quickly becoming harder than diamond, they would be able to reach the other side of reality, the dwelling place of the "outer-ones", nightmarish things that could make a primordial demon cower in fright. Fortunately, the Barrier of Reality is nigh unbreachable, besides some extremely rare occurrences. The few times in the history of the universe where it happened were disasters of unimaginable proportions, where entire worlds were annihilated and casualties counted in billions.
It's quite possible for an unexperienced traveler to wander Lydus for eternity, lost in a maze of conflicting currents, although distance, as well as time, can be a very abstract concept in this strange place. Seasoned planewalkers soon learn to use this fact to their advantage when traveling through Lydus, using their thoughts rather than their "spiritual" legs to go around. Lydus has many small cities and settlements scattered amidst its endless sea. If you reach them, it's possible to find your way to a bigger one and, from there, to be oriented to your former destination. Many stranded travelers are then shocked to find out that their absence lasted nothing more than a couple of seconds in their world, when they wandered for what seemed centuries in Lydus. Once someone exits Lydus, unless they are very used to dimensional travel, they will start to progressively lose the memory of what happened there, somewhat as though it had just been a dream. It's also interesting to note that two worlds that are physically very far away in the universe can somehow be very "close" in Lydus. This particularity is called "dimensional proximity". The climate in Lydus is capricious and, sometimes, a huge astral storm forms itself and starts moving at random, cutting the passage between some worlds.
Felarya in Lydus
Natural dimensional flows and currents form themselves around every world in the Lydusian sea. They usually don't reach very far, and very rarely connect by themselves to other flows, unless they are dimensionally very close. However, there are unstable worlds possessing wild currents that override others and have an infinite reach. Thus they can connect itself to virtually any other world in the universe. Such anomalies are not only disruptive to the universe but dangerous as well, as they soften the barrier of reality where they stand, creating the risk of a breach.
Felarya is often defined as one of those anomalies and it could be the main reason why it was attacked by the Correctors in the past. They tried to eliminate and remove Felarya entirely, but Felarya is protected by a very solid dimensional barrier that prevents any direct strike on it from Lydus. Thus, they had to enter it and battle the Guardians of Felarya in their home. The war turned to a fiasco for the Correctors and, as the theory by some renowned Versologists goes, they had to stop when they realized their efforts were only making the situation worse, softening further the matter of the barrier. Nowadays, Felarya has recovered some measure of stability and the barrier has hardened itself back to a certain extent, no longer posing an immediate threat.
Another, opposite theory says that after the last breakthrough of the outer ones into the multiverse, a culmination of powerful beings and gods managed to push them back over the course of thousands of years. After the conflict a massive exertion of every type of magic and power available was used to re-seal the broken barrier. The resulting seal was an unfathomably complex intertwining of dimensional currents holding shut the door to the outer darkness. Gradually, as the seal stabilized, it began to create a viable dimensional plane of its own that developed its own space-time medium that could support the translation of energy into matter and permit the flow of electromagnetic radiation. Drawing on information and material present in other worlds, this new dimensional plane began to synthesize a life supporting environment with a gravitational pull conducive towards that goal. The beings who had sealed back the barrier in lydus, through their intertwining of dimensional currents had unknowingly created a form of "brain" or intelligence who's system runs through exchanges of dimensional tides rather than electrical signals. And this intelligence was now assembling itself into a world of its own which would later be known as Felarya. Needless to say this particular theory cast The Correctors and their attempts to destroy Felarya in a dubious light.
- Credits to String fountain for his theory about Felarya as a seal.
