Charos

Charos (pronounced /ˈtʃɑroʊs/ or /tʃɛəroʊs/) is widely considered the "central" plane on the cosmos of Ses—it is almost certainly the plane where known life began, and many scholars believe Charos was the only plane of Ses until Gomar the Ancient brought magic into the cosmos, and the gods emerged and other planes were created.

Charos consists of a vast plenum filled with multicolored transparent vapors called spacemist. Floating in these mists, a great distance apart, are the worlddisks where most of the plane's inhabitants live—great, flat, usually circular expanses of rock and earth and water. Though there are some exceptions, most of the worlddisks line up along three perpendicular directions. The disks of each orientation tend to bear their own characteristic types of life—each side of the disk bearing different kinds, for six main orientations total. The creatures living on disks of different orientations, naturally, will have appropriate corresponding gravitational directions themselves.

The disks of the orientation that humans are native to are collectively known as Qabede. Next to Qabede, perhaps the side best known to humans is a perpendicular side called Heqhesta, one of the predominant inhabitants of which is a race of weird six-limbed creatures called grazraith.

Near the worlddisks, the spacemist thins out slightly and becomes colorless and easier to see through—becoming ordinary air. Over most worlds, the transparent air and the colored mists have a sharp boundary; because of the slight differences between the two substances, it is possible for things to float on the interface between the air and space. In fact, there are some specially designed ships that sail on this interface, floating in the mist with the surface of the world looming upside-down far overhead. From this inverted vantage point, the colored surface of the spacemist does seem in many ways analogous to the ocean, which is what gives it the name of the dreamsea.

Rather, the oceanic analogy gives the dreamsea half its name. The other half—the "dream"—comes from the tiny ephemeral scenes that flit briefly into existence throughout the spacemist at seemingly random locations and intervals, lasting a few hours at most before dissolving into the mists. In these miniature worlds, odd and seemingly disjointed tableaus and events are acted out by phantom entities. These occurrences are very reminiscent of dreams, and in fact most scholars believe that that's just what they are—though if so, whose dreams they are remains an open question. In any case, it's because of that belief that these transitory scenes are known as dreamscapes. Not only that, but they lend their name to the whole of the expanse in which they appear; the entire vastness between worlds in Charos is called dreamspace.