I’ve posted before about doing away with the cosmic planes entirely and keeping astral and ethereal states of matter, rather than astral and ethereal planes. Everything is in the same world, except some things are material and can be interacted with, some things are intangible and barely visible (even then, only under special circumstances,) and some things are completely invisible/intangible to material beings, but highly mutable.
But what if there were a state of matter that went the opposite way? What would that be?
I propose the third mystical state: eternal.
An eternal object loses all distinctiveness, becoming a grey, motionless shape. It can be touched (feeling icy cold,) but cannot be destroyed or moved by any means. It is timeless and unchanging. Living beings that become eternal experience nothing but black silence, forever, but continue to be aware of their own thoughts.
Petrification (Flesh to Stone) may not actually be a transformation into stone, but rather a translation of matter from a material state to an eternal one.
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Would an Etenal object just sit at one point in space while planets and stars moved around/past it? If a planet collided with such an object would it be a cataclysmic event?
ReplyDeleteWe're talking fantasy cosmology, so by default, no. You could try something like that, but I feel most attempts to approach fantasy scientifically turn into garbage.
DeleteFollow-Up: If you were going to try to integrate science and mysticism, material substances would cluster around eternal objects. In essence, an eternal object creates a gravity field. Other eternal objects would perpetually maintain their position and distance relative to larger eternal objects.
DeleteIn a fantasy cosmology, the world (round or flat) would probably be built in some way on an eternal foundation.