The Grey Sun

You know this one. You’re in the realm of the Grey Sun right now. It’s also called Shadow, because it is the shadow of the Actuality (to be more precise, it is mostly the shadow of Indigo). In the same way that a shadow can be an elongated, shortened, or otherwise distorted version of that which casts it, so too is Shadow an imperfect, twisted reflection of what’s real. It’s like looking into a funhouse mirror, except for your whole life you’ve mixed up which side is real and which side is the distortion.

Many of the inhabitants of this realm aren’t real—they’re shadows themselves. A few, however, are vislae who exiled themselves to Shadow to escape the horrors of the War. Now that the War is over, many have returned, but many more have lost their way, having lived within the lie of Shadow for so long that they have forgotten the truth, and forgotten the Actuality. Stranger still, a few rare shadows from the Grey Sun have left it and discovered how to live in the real world.

The number of the Grey Sun is 5, a number associated with mortality and humans.

If there is a warden of the Grey Sun, no one knows them. However, it is worth taking a moment to discuss the being known as the Demiurge, an entity infused within Shadow that may or may not exist. The doubt comes from Shadow’s illusory and false nature. Is the Demiurge a ruse or a myth? For a very long time, learned sages and vislae everywhere believed so. But now a growing body of evidence suggests that there is a singular being that is both god and devil at the heart of the realm of the Grey Sun.

Could it be that the lie inherent within the Grey—including the lie of the Demiurge—became so singular and so powerful that it became truth? That would not seem to be the nature of lies. Lies simply beget bigger lies, not truth. But Shadow has become such an intricate falsehood, with so many beings of truth believing in it . . . well, as they say in Shadow itself, all bets are off.

Or has the Demiurge been alive from the beginning, the very perpetrator of Shadow? The Prime Liar, as it were? Under the auspices of the Demiurge, the Grey has taken on the role of prison more than anything else. Shadow seemingly does not want the vislae there to return and learn the truth. A few groups and individuals from the Actuality have taken it upon themselves to try to free them, but their motives are not always pure.