The Aether

The Aether is a land that parallels humanity's Earth. It is a shadow-realm springing from a thousand intersections of a thousand things and is at once more and less real than its counterpart. In short, it is a land of possibility. The landscape itself embodies this by shifting and changing without any notice. It is an unmappable Earth where monsters lie around every unexplored bend. A red light fills the eastern edge of every night sky. Indomitable creatures hold vast rumored, kingdoms that have never been reached with certainty. And, the only way for a human to come to this place is to step down the wrong path at a crossroads or wander through the just right place in just the right way.
It is not a place that can be tamed. It can only be survived.

Geography

The Aether encompasses every bit of terrain that can be found on Earth. Though the areas most of humanity has settled are the forests and hills that correlate to those found near great population centers. The landscape of the Aether is ever changing. A hill passed on the way to town every week may suddenly be a thousand miles away with a desert dune in its place. Roads promising safety may dead end at the entrance of a forest too dense to enter. Even travelers glimpsing a town on the horizon may turn away only to find a barren steppe in its place when they look back.
Only a supreme strength of will can keep it from fracturing and adjusting to its own indecipherable whims. In ancient times, that meant colossal figures and god-like figures out of legend were the only ones who could build stable societies. The past few centuries have seen a rise in the number of human city-states that have established themselves. Centered around the idea that a thousand small wills can stabilize as much land as one titanic will, these city-states scour their territories for lost travelers to secure every inch of the fragile fiefdoms.

Fauna & Flora

The Aether is the home to most every beast humanity has ever imagined and some few mundane creatures that are hardy enough to survive in a world that is ruled by the strongest or craftiest of any given environment. The forests hold pixies and fairies of all stripes. Unicorns with their wicked horns and awful tempers live beside that tend carnivorous trees. Mountains serve as the homes to ogres that must watch out for the living rocks that live to plummet upon the unsuspecting. Only the plains are somewhat hospitable and that is only because the shifting landscape means a creature without cover can easily fall prey to one in cover that sudden appears.
Carnivores make up majority of the observed ecosystem of the Aether. Though any creature suited for defending itself against numerous and omnipresent threats can live here, there are many super-predators that would have hunted themselves to extinction in a world with a constant landmass making it an inherently dangerous place.
There are, of course, omnivores and herbivores, but these are usually sapient, intelligent species that have found ways to band together against the myriad of threats that exist. Even these are not, by necessity, gentle.

Alternative Name(s)

The In-Between; The Beyond; The Land of Nightmare; The Home of Dream.

Type

Dimensional plane