The Salt Path
You find yourself walking along a pearly white and dusty road. The taste of salt filling your mouth and nostrils. The air is cool and dry. With each step, a cloud of white dust floats up around your feet. On you walk. Time passes differently here, it feels like it's been two days since you began down this path, yet you only feel an intense thirst. You take a sip from your canteen, but the feeling does not dissipate. No fatigue nor hunger grips you, only this unquenchable thirst. Forward, you march. The barren white desert around here looks alien against the black and starless sky. The first landmark in weeks is a degrading and half-buried white-stone hand reaching to the black heavens. You continue forward for what feels like an eternity. You have met other travelers, some were friendly, some tried to rob you, others pityingly crawled down the road. They all have their own paths as tiny have yours. Now, salvation leers over the horizon, a green light piercing the black sky like a beacon, and in your heart, you know that is where you belong. You arrive in a gate town constructed from the remains of giants, aberrations, and other great monstrosities. And ahead, you finally see it. The path travelling into the Beastlands.
Geography
The Salt Path is an uninspiring and infinitely expanding wasteland of salt, bones, and dust. The land is broken, allowing for a mixture of long stretches of land and short stubs of floating islands. The only fluids here are those that are spilled, which will linger in that area forever unless moved. Defining structures and landmarks along the Salt Path are the remains of enormous monstrosities that wander into the plane and were eventually defeated and the physical bodies of people who lost their way. There is no weather here and no wind. The air is still and cool.
The most appealing part of the plane is the fact that there are portals which connect to every plane of existence in the universe. To find these portals, people who enter the plane must have a destination in their hearts. From there, an internal light tugging can be felt in the direction of the place they want to travel to. These portals take the form of beams of different colored lights which shoot into the starless skies. They can be seen from miles away, and at their base is a seamless exit transition into the plane which changes based on the perspective of each individual's time of entry on the Salt Path. Around these portals are towns built from the materials of deceased entities along the Salt Path, from gigantic aberrations to feeble beasts. These towns serve as rest stops and relief on the journey through the Wending Way, and are graciously revered as true neutral zones for all beings.
Time on the Salt Path works strangely. An individual can spend a lifetime in the plane, but when they exit, it is as if they had simply teleported instantaneously to their destination. Souls on the Salt Path do not age or suffer from hunger or fatigue. Entry into the Salt Path is relative, for example, if Person A enters first, followed by Person B a few seconds after, then it would also appear as such on the plane. Simultaneously, their selves who completed their journey also appears in the destination they were traveling to. To these journeyed individuals, they had spent one year on the Salt Path. When these two individuals, Person A2 and Person B2, want to return to where they came from, say one week after their arrival, they will travel back into the Salt Path. In accordance to the Salt Path, Person A and Person B are only one week into their year-long journey as Person A2 and Person B2 reenter the plane. The active consciousness of these individuals belong to their most recent trek into the Salt Path, rendering Person A and Person B as physical echoes from another time upon the entry of Person A2 and Person B2. If Person A and Person B were to perish by the actions of Person A2 and Person B2, then there will be no consequences. However, if Person A2 and Person B2 perished, then the physical echoes will also perish. Regardless of who the real Persons are, both groups are just as real as one another. Person A will have the same reactions and actions as Person A2 and likely vice versa unless there was a major change in character since their last visit. It is then possible for generations of families to meet with one another physically on this plane or face oneself multiple times. If the most recent form is destroyed along the Salt Path, then they are erased from existence from the time they stepped into the plane forward. So if Person B ran into the plane and appeared in the Weave, but Person A ran into the plane to chase after Person B and Person A slays Person B along the Salt Path within the time limit of Person B making it to the Weave's portal and without Person B reentering the Salt Path at any point, then Person B is erased from existence from all other planes since the universe decides he died along the Salt Path and none of those other timelines occurred.
Fauna & Flora
There are few creatures who are truly native to the Salt Path and even fewer plants. Since the plane is a barren wasteland of salt, most creatures here are decomposers and carnivores. The decomposers of the plane feed on the bone, dust, and salt of the land. The carnivores eat travelers and the decomposers, and they are devious. Due to the nature of the plane, carnivores can be seen from miles away, granting prey an incredible advantage in avoiding them. So carnivores needed to adapt unique abilities in order to more effectively capture their prey, which spans from salt-gliding to utilizing illusion magic.
A few example decomposers that could be found in the plane are myconids, aberrant scavvers, and trilobites. Decomposers all have a few things in common in this plane: they maintain tight colonies, they are intelligent gatherers, and they rely heavily on camouflage. Decomposers send out a small group of scavengers to collect the dust of the plane and bring it back to their hives. Their hives are intelligently left alone for food, since their gathering would give away their homes. Decomposers are either naturally bone white or void black or they will cover themselves with bone dust to hide from predators.
A few example carnivores of the plane are the astral dreadnought, the sorrow-stricken, and the undead. As a land of passing, carnivores native to the plane rely on the travelers who pass through it. In order to close the distance between them and their prey, they have adapted to primarily fool the prey into thinking the predator is farther away or not there at all. All of this to put their prey into a false sense of security. In rare cases, predators do away with trickery and simply strike with brute force, although that is ineffective along the path.
Alternative Name(s)
The Plane of Travels and The Wending Way
Type
Dimensional plane
Owner/Ruler
Comments