The Firmament

And stars are kindling in the firmament.

— Samuel Roges

  From a distance, the Firmament appears something like a milky white sheen in the perfect black of the Void. As one finally finds the Path of Possibilities, the silver-white sheen begins to take the shapes of stars, nebulae, and galaxies. This is where the Firmament begins.  

Behind the veil of each night, there is a smiling dawn.

— Khalil Gibran

  Sable Aradia sometimes refers to this outer border of the Brightscape as "The Veil of Night" or simply "The Veil." Hidden within the patterns of stars and galaxies are a kind of universal astrology that, upon contemplation, can reveal things that will be.   One can astral project to this part of the Firmament, and it is here that the Star Goddess of the witches may be encountered. Sable believes that this is simply part of the consciousness of the Void, one that likes sentient beings and wishes to connect with them.   This is not the same thing as the Heart of the Void, a.k.a. The Void Mirror , which will answer directly any question asked of it, if the one doing the asking is sufficiently attuned. These messages, says Sable, are perceived as song, symbol, or allegory, and must be interpreted.  

A terrible violence of creation,
A flash into the burning heart of the abominable,
Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,
The burning lake turns into a forest pool,
The fire subsides into rings of water,
A sunlit silence.

— Theodore Roethke

  Deep within the heart of the Starscape, one finds a disk of flaming chaos. Sable Aradia and Tempest Kwake say that this where The Overflow connects to the Firmament, like "the belly button of Creation." Passing through that, one finds a place where all paths converge on a radiant pink and gold disk of light. In this torus of churning starstuff, realities converge and merge and reform. This is the sub-layer that Sable calls the Star-Forge or the Cosmic Womb.  

There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

— Leonard Cohen

  If one takes the leap into the pink and gold disk of light, that Interstellar Well, one finds oneself in an ocean of radiant nebulae and stars that permeate the universe like cobwebs.   At least, that is what Sable Bright-Eyes claims. To anyone's knowledge, Sable Aradia is the only one in living memory to claim to have leaped into the Star-Womb, and returned.

Bright ass motherfucking scape! Fuck you and your bright light!

— Princess Sunny, grumbling away from the Firmament with a migraine

  As might be imagined, the Starscape is very, very bright; especially when contrasted with the darkness of the rest of the Void. While Princess Sunny was able to reach it, she turned away once within the Veil, because it quickly became clear to her that this was not her place.  

The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fairy-tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament.

— Marc Chagall

  The Wererabbit now known, among many other titles, as the Star-Bunny, says that within the Cosmic Womb, an endless font of creative possibility exists. Unicorns fly side-by-side with dragons, chimera and ki-rin, and worlds are created and destroyed in what seems like heartbeats.  

Myths and legends rise from the soup of starstuff like bubbles, and vanish just as quickly. Absolutely anything is possible. And yet, I couldn't help but feel I was impossibly small, a mere speck of dust in the fabric of galaxies.

— Sable Aradia

  The Mother of Bunnies believes that the Star-Womb and the Firmament by extension, represent the raw font of Creation. Anything and everything is possible, because this is where raw primordial chaos is spun from possibility into physical being. As a result, everything in the Star-Womb has a certain "intangible" quality, in that it is not quite given form yet. And yet, if one were to master those possibilities, one could literally create anything their heart desired.   Sable Aradia makes no claim to have mastered this ability.

Thoughts create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy, from which new arts flow.

— Paracelsus

  According to Sable Aradia, thoughts and ideas spawned in the Star-Womb have direct effects. Dreams and nightmares are conjured into being, and can be banished with a wish and a whim. She claims to have spent much of her time there in a state of terror, as her anxieties and other negative thoughts brought living nightmares out of nothingness. Yet she also claims that after a time, she learned to give more energy to more positive thoughts and ideas, which gave them more permanence.   This brush with the font of Creation transformed Sable in distinctive ways. It is likely what spawned her "Kind Bear powers," and it is almost assuredly how she became uniquely Voidtouched.   However, she also admits that when she returned to the Realm, the whole experience felt so dreamlike that this is what she thought it was for many years; some kind of vision, dream, or hallucination — a profound mystical experience, but one with no real-world effects. But as a new age of Literomancy set in, and as Sable met and got to know her Voidtouched siblings and son, she discovered that it was very real — as were the changes it wrought.