What lies beyond the edges of the observable world? Ask any Cirean, and the wide swath of potential answers filtered through a myriad of belief systems and individual perspectives will converge on one commonality: The Aether.
It's an answer that amounts to little more than a truism in the context of this world, where the Aether is synonymous with the unknown itself, representing everything that may have been forgotten, obfuscated, or ignored—or simply exists out of reach of conscious understanding. A thought that occurs spontaneously with no obvious source after all is often said to have come "from the Aether."
On a tangible level, the Aether is the medium that envelops the material universe. Imagining this universe as a solid object, the Aether would be the fluid in which the object was submerged, interacting only with its outer surface. But material reality is not a smoothly continuous or static solid. It is a dynamic, porous one, with gaps in its objective truth through which the Aether can seep and flow. As sections of reality's structure expand or contract, Aether surges to fill the vacant space, generating currents and tides of constant motion through which it occupies the smallest alcoves of ambiguity and the widest gulfs of the truly unknowable.
Certain collisions between the churning Aether and the delicate fringes of reality may disturb the contours of their borders, causing the material world to bend and scatter at the point of contact like light in water. Small isolated instances of these refractions may produce something like a novel genetic mutation, an oddly prescient dream, or an improbable coincidence. The largest refractions have far more dramatic effects, some of which can only be adequately described as magic.
In the world of Cirea, all of humanity possesses an innate baseline understanding of how the Aether relates to reality, such that some even speculate that the acquiring of this intuition was the origin of sapience itself. Metaphors and models for it are as universal a hallmark of culture as language, and it is easy to note the similarities across all of them, the way they each define the relationship between Aether and reality through reticulated space.
Distinctions instead lie in the nuances of each analogy, and what they reveal about the values and philosophies of their creators.
Those who favor the honeycomb model for instance place a great deal of stock in the premise of an orderly and utilitarian truth to the world, crafted in predictable patterns where each cell of negative space serves a function. The cavern model is almost its opposite, envisioning the unknown as a disorienting tangle of twisting passages and dead ends, a dangerous realm where one may lose oneself, that is not to be encroached on carelessly.
Other models still prioritize vitality and circulation, with the Aether as essential lifeblood flowing through the veins of the world, or the water surrounding and permeating a sea sponge, a living system that breathes and grows, nourished by the moving currents. The Fai Mhoir people of Eillring specifically liken their material world to the braidwood fir, its latticed trunk the extension of an aerial root system that adapted to breathe the island's dense obscuring fog.
Then there are unique analogies like the archipelago model, which imagines not a single continuous shared truth to the world but multiple distinct ones, each inhabited by its own population, simultaneously separated by the Aethereal unknown and connected by the course that may be charted through it.
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