SISSEKAI: The Nine Realms

In the mythos of VALKYRIE, the world that the players inhabit--Tiresia--is but one of nine realms in total, each one presided over by its own member of the Nine Sisters. When a mortal perishes on the face of this central realm, their soul faces its final judgement; and whatever verdict is given shall see them to the realm that best aligns with their virtues (and their vices), where they shall live out the rest of their afterlife!

Calliope 
Blissful infinity

The final resting place of artists, dreamers and sculptors; those sweet romantics whose beauty may well have been too pure for the world below to bear. Between the infinite glory of the Resplendent Palace of the Sacred Lotus Petals, the mirror-clear brilliance of the waters of Sigil Lake, and the endless parade of starry slices of heaven that make up the Diamond Way, there’s no shortage of beautiful sights to bless the eyes of those lucky souls who have earned a place in the realm of Cassiopeia.

Asphodel
Final rest

The final resting place of those good souls who simply need a release from the toil and suffering of their mortal coils. In the silver halls of Asphodel, all pain is muted; one can simply lay themselves flat and abandon all sense of self, if only for a time. The work here is performed solely by lekythoi, the faceless spirits of death emanated by Phaetokoria herself; their beloved dead can look forward to an afterlife of nothing but idle fancies, waited on hand and foot by their personal spirits.

Aleph
The ever-ticking city

The final resting place of scholars, historians, and mathematicians; those bright minds who dedicated their lives to the pursuit of knowledge, in whatever form they most hungered for. It is a vast and ingeniously engineered city--Tesel Caduceus herself works with the finest architects in her custody to generate new additions to the realm at all times. At the centre of it, in the Prime Ward, the very oldest part of Aleph, sits the vast Panopticon. Both Tesel’s palace and her library, it is here that all the goings-on of each of the Nine Realms is recorded, in triplicate and in perpetuity, by her host of artificed drones.

Aurelia
Where heroes dwell

The final resting place of those brave heroes who dedicated their mortal lives to the pursuit of justice and honour. Warriors make up the bulk of Aurelia’s grateful dead, but among them are also those philanthropists and moral thinkers who sought to better the world no matter the cost to themselves. The great palace of Praxis Hyperion sits at the very core of Aurelia; its angelic legions march alongside the exalted souls of mortals, vigilantly gazing upon the world below at all hours of the day.

Tiresia
Life goes on

Those souls who are chosen to return to Tiresia return not as souls; rather, they are reincarnated as spirits of the world, dryads and nymphs and fauns and beasts. Tiresia is unique among the Nine Realms as the only realm where mortals can be born; it is the realm that undergoes by far the most change and growth, as people are born and live their lives, as empires are founded and then reduced to rubble, and the wind and tides shift the ground beneath their feet.

Aphagon
Sea of demons

The final resting place of those heartless souls who lived by the creed of Ariana; to cheat or be cheated, to harm or be harmed, to kill or be killed. Her belief is that nothing matters more than one’s continued existence, and this is echoed in the makeup of the endless black ocean of her realm; it is filled to its infinite brim with the mutated, twisted, deeply wounded souls of its victims, who have been warped into demons over their millennia in this evil place. They hunt and kill and devour each other, ad nauseam and ad infinitum, being reborn in the image of their killer whenever slain. 

Gehenna
Primal wilderness

The final resting place of those brutes for whom civility--and the whole concept of civilization--is just an inconvenient suggestion, better left to those feeble souls who need it to survive. In Gehenna, the untamed forces of nature are king; it is dominated by instinct-driven, ancient beasts, and animating spirits who are known as the Thousand Arms of Gimel Gargantua, though there are far more than merely a thousand of them. Accordingly, the geography of Gehenna is never set in stone; most navigate by the motion of the Seven Greater Arms, and the storm that surrounds Gimel herself, following slavishly in her wake, Mare Jovis.

Asmodeus
Smokestacks and drudgery

The final resting place of those foul spirits whose greed outweighed any considerations of morality. Thieves, swindlers, loan sharks, greedy kings--any who would put wealth over their fellow man descend into Asmodeus, where they are promptly put to work for the rest of eternity. Over the millennia, an elaborate society has developed in the fiery depths of this realm, fomented in no small part by Delia Aichora herself. They have built cities; factories, forges and foundries; mines and farmland (though the ‘crop’ they harvest is only tangentially edible); and countless hideous towers.

The Pleroma
Silvery void

The final resting place of the enlightened. The afterlife most commonly trafficked by the living, owing in no small part to the fact that very few souls remain in here for any length of time; though it is classically considered a mystery by men of science, the ancient teachings of Aperiori state that the Pleroma is the site of the final test for one’s soul. If, in death, you are able to embrace the truth of the world, you shall pass peacefully on to a state that exists beyond life or death, beyond being in its entirety. But if, in death, your soul clings to the false image presented by the world, you shall be devoured by an entity known only by the cryptic epithet of ‘the Yearbeast.’