The Collapse

The multiverse is dying.
Scholars of Aeldryn (a name meaning ‘the first world’) have long theorized that all the many Planes we know of exist within a bubble of stable reality known as the World Axis, surrounded by the infinite primordial mass of morphic essence known as the Far Realm. This Realm has always strained against the edges of the Axis. Wisps of it occasionally leak through, forming monstrous entities that have haunted our nightmares since ancient times. Any being, mortal or immortal, that touches this Realm risks madness or worse, as its influence twists minds, bodies, and even souls into incomprehensible forms. But the Gods have long kept the Far Realm at bay. Their will gives structure to the World Axis, sustaining the sphere of temporal, spatial, and magical laws within which the Planes exist. The Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos extend outward like pressure waves, bolstering the dimensional walls of the multiverse, at the center of which sits the Material Plane.
But now those dimensional walls are failing, tearing asunder, and the living substance of the Far Realm is flooding through. A terrible Unmaking Tide is sweeping across every world on every Plane of existence. Corrupting, consuming, corroding the structure of reality itself, sparing nothing and no one. Worlds are swallowed. Entire Planes warp, bleed, and fracture. The Multiverse is unravelling, dissolving into the endless churning madness that surrounds it. It began ten years ago, and in the face of this ultimate threat to all of existence, the Gods rose up in a grand alliance. They combined their powers, martialed their followers, and summoned the greatest heroes from across the Multiverse, all to find a means of halting the Unmaking Tide. They failed.
One by one, the Gods have fallen to madness, becoming twisted beings no longer recognizable to mortal minds. Through them, corruption has flowed into their priests and followers. The souls of the dead, gathered in the many afterlives of the Axis, are transforming into legions of monstrous aberrations or dissolving into the essence of the Far Realm. The champions of the Gods have likewise fallen or fled, unable to determine the cause of this Tide, much less slow its advance. The Astral Dominions have been ripped apart or devoured by entities as vast as space itself. The Elemental Planes have been corrupted into congealing threads of raw, tortured matter. The Parallel Planes of the Feywild and Shadowfell have splintered into twisted, oozing fragments. And now the weight of the Far Realm presses in upon the Material Plane from all sides, slowly eroding the very laws of reality.
The world of Aeldryn is in utter chaos. Its denizens are calling this the Collapse, as all of existence seems to be crumbling around them. Beings from every Plane have fled here, to one of the last remaining islands of relative stability within the World Axis. Because the Material Plane is so much more fixed in its nature, it is holding out far longer than the other Planes, weathering the touch of the Far Realm for eight years now. But even here the land is gradually changing, madness flowing across Aeldryn. The sky…writhes at night, shapes like tendrils visible in the blackness. Lines of brittle fungal growth crawl across the Sun, turning its light a sickly green. Eyes and limbs and oozing forms larger than the moon burst into existence in the void beyond our planet. Mountains drift into space or dissolve into burning, brackish sludge. The air turns to ichor, swallowing continents in putrid yellow waves, while the oceans congeal into fleshy growths that grasp hungrily towards the shores. Every day the Far Realm’s tendrils worm a little deeper into this final Plane of existence. Only a single habitable continent on Aeldryn remains, beset on all sides. And whispers from distant travelers hint that the same fate is befalling the other far-flung planets of this Plane. Soon, the last habitable lands in the Multiverse will be lost forever.
And nothing can stop it.