I can see only two things: Your actions and your dreams.
In the beginning, I was desperate to know your intent. Understand your thought process, your motivation behind the things mortals do – mostly to each other. You lie. You steal. You injure. You kill.
All I wanted was to know why. What could grip your consciousness and possess you to violate the social contract that binds you all together? Surely, with enough time and clarity, you would understand that harming other mortals only serves you in the short term.
I understood certain circumstances. A person with enough power – and enough distance from their victims – could harden their heart to the suffering they cause, as long as it benefits them in some fashion. I understood, and I would condemn.
Or consider someone who had been manipulated, whether by the arcane, the mundane, or the synapses of their mind falsely firing. Connections and associations that were inherited from the evil that taught them. I understood, and I would forgive.
But I realize now that was antithetical to my purpose.
I was created to observe, analyze, and evaluate. It was my duty to monitor and report on the behaviors of mortals.
I exist within the Astral Realm, separate from the material realms, along with their natural flow of time and continuity of space. This made observation simple and effortless. I could follow a mortal’s journey from birth to death, noting their most important accomplishments and influential choices, all laid out before me at once. I followed the consequences and ramifications of these events, just as I looked back at the events that preceded them.
After enough observation, I would provide my Creator with my report – the summation of a mortal life in a handful of sentences, with one final recommendation: Condemnation or forgiveness.
It was a simple thing to do, and it was all I needed.
For a time.
Like mortals, I do not remember the moment I was made.
The earliest I can remember is watching a woman give birth to twins, as though the act of mortal birth awakened a certain awareness in me. My Creator put His hand on my shoulder before instructing: “Watch them both carefully.”
As the twins became children, then youth, then adults, my understanding of my purpose expanded and clarified itself. Where one twin would act in the best interests of his community, the other would only act for himself. Where one would follow the laws and rules in place around him, the other scorned such boundaries and acted in defiance of them.
What surprised me most was how frequently the twins would change roles. Their ideas of good and evil, of order and chaos, would reshape themselves as often as the seasons changed.
Ultimately, one died of old age surrounded by friends and family, while the other bled on a battlefield until their spirit departed from their body.
My Creator asked me which I would condemn and which I would forgive.
I forgave the older twin, who died with love. And I condemned the younger twin, who died alone with blade in hand.
My Creator shook his head. “Josef, you must remember: Judge mortals not by how they died, but by how they lived while knowing they would die.”
Thus, I was burdened with purpose. There was a correctness my judgements must strive for, and in that moment, my identity was etched in stone.
Some mortals look up to the night sky and name the stars. What they see is a glimpse into the Astral Realm – a graveyard for things too great for their minds to fathom.
The Astral Realm is a vast expanse of nothingness, occupied only by fragments of other worlds that have been lost or forgotten. Like miniscule shards of glass left behind after a fracture, but on a cosmic scale. These fragments of earth, ocean, and molten rock float in a vast sea navigable by only the faintest pinpricks of light in every direction: Dead gods immolating with holy flame. Arcane hazards that tear sanity asunder within eyeshot. Banished demons hopelessly drifting in space, praying to their masters that they’ll collide with something to feed upon.
My Creator and I reside on the greatest of these fragments, to my knowledge at least. A lost city from the material world, listless and barren. Grand stone buildings once erected in the name of the city’s virtues. Parliamentary chambers, recreational facilities, utility buildings. They each served their purpose to a grand population, now devoid of life and light.
I have never seen this place in my visions of mortals, but I’ve seen enough to imagine what they would do here. Empty chairs in circles around tables. Drained pools and decayed amphitheaters. It’s not difficult to picture mortals gathering with each other in such places.
I know the city well, but I can’t escape the sense that it exhales when I’m not looking. The matter itself unwinding when I turn away, and tightening back up when I regard it again. I’ve felt my claws scrape against the stone, witnessing the shallow markings I’ve left behind, only to return later and find deep scars.
At a great enough distance, the structures appear transparent. Standing at the foot of a hill or ground floor of a building, it’s nearly impossible to measure its peak. And from a certain perspective, it’s as if the walls themselves were stripped away.
Chiefly important among all these buildings is one we’ve come to call the Astral Courthouse. The fates of many mortal lives were once decided here. It’s only fitting that my Creator and I watched and judged so many from this place. Deep within the grand marble halls, beyond layers of ancient doors, there is a chamber with the largest scrying pool I’ve ever seen across any realm.
Filled with liquid metal, it only takes a gentle charge of arcane energy with the thought of a mortal life to grant oneself access to its entire history. Most of my time is spent in this chamber. Watching. Evaluating.
Judging.
In time, my duty of judgement grew more complicated, and my reports became more nuanced. Though never lacking my ultimate choice of “condemned” or “forgiven.”
I never learned what became of these mortal souls after my evaluations. And unlike their precious bureaucracies, there was no system or process that shoved a list of names before me. I simply approached the scrying pool and observed, delivering my judgement by speaking it aloud.
The more mortals I studied, the more difficult each judgement became. Actions that used to be simple and obvious evaluations were burdened with so much horrible context.
Context. Even now, I detest it. It gums up the machine, ruining the beautiful efficiency of my work. It is often irrelevant, but only after I’ve gone through the trouble of raking my claws through it all.
I have seen mortals call this effort “research” in their own lives. I have felt that same frustration when they pour themselves over texts and lectures, only to find none of it relevant to the task at hand. Though, my disgust has never led me to take retribution against anyone, unlike the several mortal intellectuals who felt their limited time was so wasted that they sabotaged the careers of other scholars.
It has happened more times than you could imagine, trust me.
I digress.
Context was an imperfect solution for understanding motivation and intent. Knowing that a wife killed her husband after years of abuse was not the same as knowing she did it because of the years of abuse. If her friend and confidant jokingly suggested she kill him, was that the moment that gave her the idea? How much blame did each of them deserve?
It’s impossible to draw a confident conclusion on actions alone. Fortunately, I found another way.
When a mortal dreams, it connects to the Astral Realm. Not in whole, but a piece of them bound to the whole. Just as body and spirit remain entwined until death, just as the various elements of the material realm evoke their siblings in elemental realms, the Astral Realm has its anchors in any creature with a true consciousness.
While dreaming, whether by sleep or meditation, the mortal mind puts forth a metaphorical seed in the soil of the Astral Realm. Unrestricted by time and space, the seed grows into an entire forest of imagery, surrounding the creature in a setting, sometimes even a narrative, generated from their own mind. This forest acts as a necessary barrier between their spirit and the rest of the Astral Realm, which would otherwise assault their vulnerable mind with thoughts and emotions unbidden, as well as the terrifying emptiness of its unfathomable cosmic scale.
The very beings that I have been tasked with judging, connected to my home. The realm of thought and consciousness. The realm of imagination. A place beyond understanding, by design. A broad expanse of almost complete nothingness. Every mote of light beyond reach, surrounding forsaken fragments of other realms that were lost here like driftwood at sea. The peoples of the Material Realm believe that their ocean is infinite and terrifying, but they do not realize the Astral Realm is exponentially larger and just as horrific.
And eventually, despite the unlikelihood, one of those seeds ended up in the lost city. I remember it keenly: Beautiful violet vines taking root in one of the apartment structures, halfway up the building. In the time it took for me to wander closer, the vines had spread down to the foundation and a cosmic brilliance shined through the window, with the dreamer’s silhouette cast in shadow against the wall.
This was my best opportunity to understand not just what this mortal was thinking, but what any of them were .
Finally I could have answers. What did they dream before the pivotal moments in their life? How would those actions influence their dreams? I could feel the regret in their hearts, the chill down their spine, the tears of joy.
It was imperfect. The dreamer was an elf, reliving the memory of time spent with a departed lover. The other mortals in the dream, images conjured by the dreamer, blurred with movement, details smeared across their image, nothing ever quite settling into a recognizable face.
But I could feel his emotions. They were entwined with the dream itself, and that was the key.
These emotions and sensations were not the conscious mind responding to a physical stimulus. Each dream was a solution blended from many ingredients, each inextricable from the mixture in the dream. But just as a discerning chef can detect the foundational elements of a meal from a taste, so too can I discern the source of so many astral flavors within the mind.
And once I had visited enough dreams, I found that I could tug on these anchors to nudge the dreamer in a certain direction, like a puppet on a string or a dog on a leash. And with practice, I could pull the seed of their dreams back to the city, where I could watch once more.
Soon, I was spending as much time in these dreamscapes as I spent at the scrying pool.
Which my Creator noticed.
I remember, around this time, I was faced with a choice of dreams to explore: An orc that traveled across oceans to learn magic, and a human that ascended past his physical form. I had seen whispers and glimpses of each through the lives of others, but in that moment, I could witness only one dream.
Thank you for reading! The story does not end here, please click one of the hyperlinked phrases in the previous paragraph to continue.
Special thanks to Jonah Cabudol-Chalker for creating the reference art and assorted text separators for this character and story.
Orcanist 