Just as the Necroplane is a parallel world to Earth, so is the Astral Plane.
After the Big Bang, the Astral Plane took a whole different approach to the creation of life. Every spark of life was given an equal chance. Inhabitants of that small reality were pretty much immortal unless they died of unnatural causes. They didn’t age or die in their beds; they were destined to be a part of the great Astral hunt circle. They never felt any emotion either. The Astral Plane was only about passionless survival.
The creator of Astral Plane was either very busy or had to abandon the project very early on. Only 3 species were native to the void: the asauri, the krakentueri, and the pihhiel. The asauri were the smart bipeds, living in tribes scattered on many tiny planets. They glided from one planet to the other, eternal nomads roaming space. Each tribe was led by the Keeper of Thorns, a spiritual creature that from the moment of her birth would possess the power of ripping reality to travel in space and time.
The asauri spent most of their time hunting the colossal krakentauri, peaceful beasts with tentacled maws and wings that would propel them through the cold void.
Generations of asauri mastered hunting krakentauri; the oldest and most skillful huntersfound their prey by attuning their hearing to the sounds of the krakenturi’s wings in space.
The krakentauri, far from smart or ferocious, would drift in the space to find colonies of mite-like creatures named pihhiel, the best food they had ever tasted. The behemoths had the most keen senses in the whole universe: they could smell little pihhiel hives from light years away and tirelessly pursued them to the edges of the Astral Plane
.There was only one scent that could elude a krakentaur on the trail, that of an Astral Rose, the key link in the great hunt cycle. Astral Roses were Earth’s equivalent of human souls. They bloomed in sacred places protected by entire tribes of asauri hunters. The mites launched berserker raids, their swarms slaughtering the guardians, snatching a Rose which protected them from the krakentauri, if only for a couple of days. The unlucky asauri, whose Rose has been plucked, would dissolve into nothingness over a couple of days, the process neither being painful nor tragic. This was just the way the Astral Plane was.
The force behind the Astral Plane either knew the definition of the word “irony” or came up with it. See, if any being was hunted down and killed in the Astral Plane, it would re-incarnate in the form of its slayer’s species, bound to hunt down its former kin to survive. So a dissolved asauri would become a pihhiel after his former comrades’ Astral Rose, while a pihhiel would become a krakentaur, with all the memories of where his previous hive was. A hunted down krakentaur would become an asauri and so the eternal wheel kept rolling.
While the symmetry of the circle appeared perfect, there was a flaw that would rip it apart. Blood Rose was the Keeper of Thorns for one of the tribes guarding the Astral Rose field. The pihhiel in that sector of the Astral Plane were low in numbers so she and her tribe often engaged in krakentaur hunts, gliding in space after the sleepy behemoths. On one of those hunts, the tribe set up its ambush, with their hunters camoed in their star-glitter cloaks and their sharp spears ready for hurling int the big beast’s mouth. Blood Rose stroke the reality, checking for thin spots of the fabric, ready to pierce them at any time and send the hunters through the temporary doors next to the beast.
Starlock, one of the most experienced hunters, used a hand signal to announce the approach of a beast. The spears flew and struck the target, the krakentaur bled and sprayed the hunters with a deep blue fluid. Then, something unexpected happened: the dying beast transformed into a weird hybrid of all species who, being as surprised as the asauri, attacked the nearest hunter’s throat.
The new species not only had the strength of a krakentaur, cunning of an asauri, and the speed of a pihhiel but also transformed anyone it touched into a hybrid similar to itself. The void cracked and a wave of massive uncontrolled transformations swept through the world. Crazed asauri-pihhiel-krakentaur hybrids fought each other in a universe-wide chaos. Seeing the impending doom, Blood Rose blinked to her tribe’s Astral Rose Garden and saw it turn into the battlefield.
Since the natives to the void never knew any emotions, she made a quick analysis of pros and cons and since the math was right, she teleported all of the surrounding hybrids into a black hole. Because the transformations were an incurable plague, she repeated this process in every corner of her universe.
Soon, Blood Rose was the last being alive in the Astral Plane. She picked her own Astral Rose and then her world ceased to exist. The massive implosion sent Blood Rose hurtling through time and space. Being just a glitch inbetween the worlds, she took the reins and ripped reality, entering our Earth in the 16th century. After hundreds of years of hiding her true identity under many guises, she joined forces with Blood Watch who were the only ones to understand her powers and never tried to abuse it. Haunted by the fact that it took only one day for her universe to die, Blood Rose is on a mission to keep the fabrics of her new home intact. Without her, all of the gates to other worlds would have opened a long time ago, and Earth most likely ruled by the tyranny of Necroplane.
