The Mortal Realm
The Fifth Paradigm is host to all the works of Humanity. It is where countless generations of prideful Mortals rise and fall across the wheel of time. This is the "real world" to Humanity and their many siblings in space, time and spirit (x, y, z, t, s). The lattermost is why this is where the magic happens. The spirit, the spark, intrinsic in every thing that feeds, breathes and breeds is both the inner fire from which will, thus strength, flow and a gateway to the divine. Logic is the enemy of magic; logic and fear. Nearly every Species is infected with cowardice and tends to forsake the old ways to embrace more mundane miracles. This tendency is natural for the workings of the Art and the Way are intimately tied to the sciences. This progression of the intellectual evolution of common anthropomorphoid Mortals is illustrated by the following: Wonder, Artifice, Invention, Destruction. Every generation of Mortals have thus annihilated themselves by killing wonder and producing slaughter. Perhaps it has to do with the shape of this galaxy, the spiral reflected in all living things, that leads all Mortal worlds, inevitably, to their destruction. The uncountable tribes of sapient beings strewn across the light arms of this galaxy are often the source of the greatest stories ever known. Tragically, however, they are all doomed. Mortals must die to live as they do.
This, more than any other Paradigm, is the Milky Way Galaxy of Mortal experience. For them, the Fifth comprises the whole of reality and is, in their eyes, the Universe. Some rare few believe in other realms and fewer still have actually seen them, but the vast majority live very much in the here and now.
While all lifeforms possess a spirit, the same is not true for souls. Truly, no one knows where they come from, but it is certain they are not spawned here. It is an impossible thing to categorize, as not even every member of a species, or even a bloodline, might be thus blessed. For unknown reasons, souls only seem to manifest in the Fifth. Souls found in other Paradigms invariably got there from here.
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