Glimmering Depths

Stars below, shining bright

The Blue is not, as we have been taught, a finite thing. In the age of exploration, our ancestors looked out at distant stars and wondered what might be out there. Now, we have been convinced to keep our eyes firmly focused on the ground. But who knows what wonders still exist, far beyond the horizon.

— The Wilde Sky Beyond, popular Untethered text

The world that exists beyond the edges of the Shattered worlds is a mystery to most of the Blue. To most, even to most academics, there is nothing worth finding out once the islands stop. With nowhere to land, there's nowhere to build a stop to refuel and to continue to explore. Some attempts have been made, to find what is out there, but most do not return. Most are content to let the winds claim all that lay beyond the edges of the map. But some, radicals of the hybrid religion and ideaology known as the Untethered, are not content. In their primitive skyships, they wander the endless, empty sky. And some of them, stumble upon this wonder.

The Stars Below

When night falls above the Blue, the sky fills with stars. Some are white, some are red, some are blue. The differences are slight, and in the cities of Ilysium or Sayles, the fainter stars will get blotted out by the electric lamps that line the streets. But, in a certain section of the empty expanse beyond the shattered worlds, the Depths alight with stars as well. Like the stars above, these stars below are mostly white, though they are far less static than the stars above. Their colors are warped, by the gasses of the Depths, often making wild and vibrant colors.

Bioluminescence

The Untethered that make their way out to this section of sky have found out that the stars shining beneath are primarily from a creature they call Ferastels. These creatures, which look like a snake with sails on their back and stomach, are thought to extract the glowing substance, called glimmer by the Untethered, to disguise their exact location from predators.

Harvesting

Gathering the glimmer from the Depths is a very dangerous endeavor, as it takes both resilient materials and a talented Skyblood to sift the glimmer from the toxins and acids that make up the majority of the Depths.