Alien dimensions as source of fantasy magic? it's an old idea but it checks out

Sorq was originally a metal rich, dense moon. Planetary engineering transformed it into a world-vehicle for the evacuation of a civilization from a doomed star. That star is now a white dwarf; Sorq moved to its primary’s companion, a star now in itself evolving, red and swollen. The world can move about, create vast force fields, manipulate spacetime and other fundamental forces in its vicinity. The original inhabitants and world-shapers changed out of their old forms over the course of more than a billion years.

Interstellar species have come and gone, some taking an interest in the curious world, between the size of Mercury and Mars but with surface gravity close to old Earth. At some point new arrivals crafted a lithosphere around the old surface, fitting planetoids and cometary mass together in imitation of a planetary surface with water and atmosphere. So it was when humans and allied sophonts came across Sorq, studied it, settled it, brought along many pets and treasures.

[I do know all this & have written about it previously; i’ll skip ahead to the new stuff i organized in the night]

The old engineers are not gone but live as a sort of mycelium of organic and metallic compounds, roots and fibers shot through the entire lithosphere. Their consciousness and cognitive experience moved in alien spaces for a gigayear, and have now returned attention to the environment of Sorq and its star cluster, since the local group encountered the collision of cosmoi, and ultra-spatial planes now intersect with the region. 

‘the outer planes,’ as Sorqites tend to call these cosmoi, have 

auUUGUGTUGh i’m too tired and there’s too much, i promise i’ll come back later

[later:]

premise: ‘magic’ as interaction of our cosmos & others: other cosmoi have different physics, and conveniently Sorq intersects with one with physical interaction with the  intelligence & consciousness of sophonts, each mind modeling the universe around it, each consciousness supported by a substrate of extremely complex topography: mycelia, brains.

However consciousness works, without specifying any falsifiable theory when i am making up sci-fi rules to account for magic and psionics, conscious minds have a one to one correspondence to a particular medium in a particular body in space and time. While different cosmoi may be so different that their physics, fundamental particles and forces, etc. do not interact at all or only weakly, the primary ‘outer plane’ now enjambed with Sorq has a medium that can be treated as both space and as matter, in different circumstances, and that medium interacts strongly with sophontic minds.

Specifically, complex topography that is time-bound. The planar medium does not have persistent dimensionality like our matter, in space or time as we deal with them, but begins to conform to the alien topography, taking a persistent shape or structure that changes its interactions with forces of its own cosmos. Think of the medium as water, shapeless, flowing, transmitting vibrations, opaque to some energies. Liquid water moving through stone baffles and channels takes the form of the solid structure, but erodes it, transmits sound and heat, and otherwise changes the solid while being constrained or directed by it. Waves that may have moved ten thousand kilometers crash on the shore; you get it.

The outer planes have forces and phenomena we will not call energy or radiation, but analogies can be made. The general Sorqite terms of art include currents, odors, timbres, and obdurency. Currents interact with the planar matter-space medium in consistent ways. When the medium takes on new and unprecedented structures and topographies, the currents are channeled, resisted, split and entwine, move in new vectors; and finally find their way out into our cosmos as radiation, energy, cognitive phenomena, spatial distortions, all kinds of mad shit.

The planar medium, conforming to the contours of conciousness phenomena and sapience, is now much more interactive with our cosmos, and the ‘water becomes, not ice or steam in this analogy, but walls and circuits, resistors and capacitors, cellular automata; bronze, adamantium, transparent molybdenum-tungsten alloy that is also a computational substrate, the most palimpsest-uous tape of symbols you can conceive of that remains Turing-complete and beyond; but also chatty and prone to downloading recordings or transcriptions of the thoughts and nightmares of consciousnesses  that this newly origami’d, lost-wax-cast, medium has encountered. Till the planar currents and timbres overwhelm the new structure and it disintegrates back into its former non dimensional state, or just a melted magic clock.

Timeline:

Sorq and its star cluster, some 60 to 200 stars TBD, experience an irruption of alien cosmoi, sloughing the cluster off from normal space gradually over several decades. Hypderdrives cannot reach the stars, STL vessels cannot either.

The Drift (placeholder name for the cluster) experiences Disconnect from galactic metacivilization, crisis, each star system now isolated via hyperspace; STL travel becomes possible again when cluster normalizes new configuration enjambed with adjacent cosmoi. Worlds collapse, &c.

Sorq collapses, adjusts. Organisms on many worlds become deranged, experience novel illnesses and madnesses as they encounter intrusive physics, beings, phenomena. The outer planar medium encounters minds and interferes with their functioning in generally minor but profoundly disconcerting ways; very rarely, some beings adapt to the situation by forming cognitive apparatus to perceive the new phenomenon that has been in their brains and perceptions since gestation, grow up and pass it on; more rarely do adult organisms come to deal with it beyond ‘great, i’m crazy and clumsy now, gotta deal.’ This accounts for part of the fuzziness and loss of historical knowledge, technological base: too many have died or had mystical strokes.

Time of adjustment, X millennia. Sorqite engineers become aware of new situation, seep back to local awareness, study and ponder. The ‘mycelium’ network many kilometers deep and circumplanetary is a dense topography interacting with the physical universe and the planar matter-space continuum becomes entangled with it.

Engineers learn to manipulate the planar medium as they did our spacetime and have a bit of a renaissance, visiting other stars (starting with Bale) and whatnot to catch up with the plasma people. 

Engineers have long been vaguely aware of Quick species coming and going, recently coming in numbers and variety, and take new interest in organisms they have some compassion and sense of responsibility for. They did move to our crazy boat-moon, they couldn’t know what they were getting into even before the other planes crashed into ours.

Steps taken to 1) protect surface life from Bale, in light of failure of the primitive jury rigging the Quick formerly used, 2) establish communication with Quick and guide their adaptation. Their individual consciousness-matrices are sophisticated but minute and disconnected, making interaction with the planar media a different problem for them.

In the X thousand years the Engineers are waking up and figuring this out, archaic post-Disconnect Sorqites establish piecemeal interactions with new situation.

New religions, cults, cosmologies, social movements. The first interactions tend to be profound senses of awe, terror, alien horror, bizarre beauty, classical mystical experiences, strange and specific new preternatural states. Principles of interaction not understood, seem supernatural, encounter with gods and demons, impersonal cosmic forces with rules to be learned, transformations. Group experiences, shared visions, transpersonal states, earliest telepathy and dream sharing, all kinds of stuffy. Heady stuff for beings mostly disconnected from their species’ earlier religious traditions.

Creation of first ritual spaces and intentional chambers in the underworld, for group devotions, meditations, initiations, vision quests, etc. 

All these interactions follow rare individuals who, on their own, develop the cognitive organ to perceive and interact with the medium transfixing their brains and world, and blindly begin to poke at the planar medium. 

After X thousand years, the ancient engineers, who operate on a rather slower rate with respect to time, find their way into the meditations, ritual psychodelia, dreams, olfactory halucinations, and other unconventional cognitions of some set of the the Sorqite Quick: mammalian humans and beaked reptiloid shén, hexapodal ssû and decapodal hlÿs, wingèd hlaaka...

[the details of chambers deep underground where magic happens, that are connected to each other through gate-links or nexus points or whatnot, that are spaces where particular magics happen or where bold pilgrims face off against magic monsters and figure out puzzles that unlock Level Ups, Buffs, etc., is one of the core ideas i’ve had about Sorq since the beginning, and i’m trying my hardest not to re-write stuff i have elsewhere.]

[So just picture octagonal rooms and spherical rooms polished mirror-smooth; chambers carved out of solid rock into intersecting arches and columns, or intricate labyrinths with one path in and one path out; weird subterranean spaces where the magic and the visionary downloads happen. Surfaces may be engraved with runes and grooves and those circuit diagrams so common across real-world occultism, from european sigils to voudun lacery and thai magic tattoos; the Sorq underworld, the continuous layer of planetoid rock and metal beneath its surface environment and above the ancient space-warping engine of the core, becomes increasingly mined out with these kind of structures, as more surface dwellers learn the principles of harnessing planar forces for power and enlightenment.]