MUJASU: A PLANETARY FANTASY
Beyond the Light, there is nothing.The thirty worlds that make up the cosmos sit in the middle of a vast cloud of glowing dust. At their centre lies The Heart, Sua, so small and yet by far the brightest thing in any sky. And yet, as the planets turn away from their Heart, there is a sky filled with impossible shapes and colours lighting up the night. This, like the universe itself, is called the Nebula, Mujasu, the Great Holy Place. And, of course, there are the other worlds.
Some are smaller, some are larger. Great gas giants with brightly-coloured moons tread in a stately manner across the void, while small swift worlds whizz along on their course. There are desert worlds, and water worlds, and worlds of unquenchable fire. And yet every single one of the thirty planets is habitable. Every single one is inhabited.
None of them are native to this part of the cosmos, of course. All of them...even the memories of the Sandman, oldest and wisest being in the cosmos, are unclear on what their original worlds were like. But drawn they were, to the centre of the universe: the Sandman, the Ghosts, the Flowers, the Tripods, the Shadows, even the Apes (though they call themselves “humans”). Everyone who lives in the Light has lived there only for a relatively short amount of time. For humans, it’s been less than 3,000 years. The Tripods have been here for longer, but not by much—only 60,000 years, enough time for them to be in a lapsed state again. The Shadows have lived here for 140,000 years, the Ghosts for nearly half a million, the Flowers a million and a half (short-lived creatures, of course, but their racial memory is the envy of the cosmos). The Sandman has long forgotten when he first came here, only that the worlds have remained in perfect balance for all that time.
Across jungle worlds and tundra worlds, small rocky moons and seas of air vast enough to swallow continents, the Six Peoples have had to learn to keep to themselves. Despite the local “glitches” that people learn to live with, the worlds are full and rich, and the Light is vast and airy enough to travel across (if a little thin to breathe), even by gulls harnessed to boats or a determined enough human cannonball. And local magic isn’t that bad; humans can’t use it (although it can use them, and other species like the Tripods make much use of it), but there are some benefits...