The twenty-seven laminae are unimaginably varied and vast, and all the superlatives of the multiverse lie within their folds. In the malignant wilderness of the BloomA dazzling and hideous jungle in which everything blossoms and transforms and regenerates unpredictably. To its children, the Florets, it is a paradise garden for endless play within the forgiving embrace of their Mother.Turn to chapter there is a sheltered garden laboratory that holds a plant from which is brewed what must be the most spectacular tea known to conscious minds. On the UnfoldingArtists and engineers that have architected all of the most famous constructions in existence, original copies of which fill archipelagos that spread across the Glass Ocean, where the enormous automaton wind shifters interlock and glide across empty waters.Turn to chapter original copies of each of the greatest architectural wonders of the multiverse crowd around the feet of the towering Scaffold, while on the InevitabilityAn otherwise-empty wasteland graced by the exuberant and chaotic Procession in which Unravellers joyously manifest the forces of entropy, that universal and implacable slide from order into disorder. Troupes each pursue their own flavors of entropy: rotting food, aging, combustion, romantic miscommunication, broken furniture, political dissolution, and myriad others.Turn to chapter stands an Unraveller who holds simultaneously in her awareness each egg being cooked in that instant across all of reality. Buffeted by the primordial maelstrom of the PremiseThe Premise roils with the bare phlogiston of Creation ꧠ, upon contact with which all matter erupts into chaos. Enormous trees rooted in nebulae form islands of stability for Rhemes who intend microcosms into existence out of the raw stuff of this place, enacting free will in a world lacking cause and effect, while the nautilus-shelled city of the Mutatorium invites seekers of self-transformation.Turn to chapter endures the nautilus-shelled city of the Mutatorium in which you may reimagine yourself at will, or you might instead seek out the Universal Story of the BellBeautiful, storm-drenched mountains inhabited by the keepers of the "Universal Story", an indescribably transformative experience which they offer to visitors and continually seek to perfect.Turn to chapter and be transformed in ways impossible to foresee.
An ordinary mountain shows us what is possible to achieve with constructs of stone, and while the stone cottage we build cannot match the strength and size attained by mountains over geological ages, the cottage is better suited to our needs and can be married with other resources around us. As the mountain shows us what is possible with stone, so the laminaeAfterworlds that are each aligned with a particular set of facets. The twenty-seven laminae are layered on top of our reality and interact with it in myriad ways.Turn to chapter—boundless reservoirs of physical and notional forces—show us the shapes and possibilities of nature. On cardinalThe cardinal worlds make up our foundational, everyday reality over which the laminae are layered.Turn to chapter worlds we must contend with the intractable diversities of personality and culture, with all their resulting fruits and labors, but the laminae shape their inhabitants towards concentrated philosophical extremes, and so are able to reach baffling heights and alarming depths only attainable with aeons of unified effort.
To such places I am a visitor and will remain a visitor, as would you be should you follow in this visitor’s footsteps. In our cardinal realities however we are not visitors, and with our stones and seeds and cultures must build lives for ourselves and each other. We would do well to understand laminal forces, for in each lamina the seeds of human psyches and building blocks of reality play out to myriad conclusions, but we should not aim to emulate them literally; rather we should draw from them what we need.
Over decades of travel and residence on the twenty-seven laminae this visitor found little of what she initially sought, but let go of much, and can only hope that the knowledge and perspective gathered in this work provide some avenue of interchange between the laminal and the cardinal, between realms of the abstract possible and the lives we share with our kin.
You may forgive this visitor any ignorance or provincial incredulity that reveals itself in the following text. It is not intentional, but we all carry our stories with us. One must attempt to be generous in understanding the nature of drastically different states of mind. May you reach compassion and even insight in the face of the alien and fantastic modes of being in these pages.