World of Khaas - What is the Nexus?

Known widely across the continent are the myths, legends, and reality of the Nexus Gates. These ‘gates’ provide a supernatural exchange where all possibilities meld and merge, allowing anything to happen. Opening into temporal, spatial, and dimensional locations, the gates lead to places in dreams, uncharted jungle worlds, or steams of time not yet seen. Perhaps the biggest question asked about the gates is the very question of its existence.

The largest number of these 'portals' lie in Arduin. While the Arduin nexus has its own quirks, there are some things in common to all nexus.

Physically, nexus can look like anything from innocuous fronds of vegetation slowly moving to some unknown breeze or the region between the arches of some great carven stonework (like the Shadow Gate of Lost Shamballah). Nexus can occupy a space, anchored to something like the space between great monoliths (such as on the Plateau of Forever in Arduin), or just a region of land or air (like the Valley of Corrupted Magik in Viruelandia). There is no rhythm or reason to their occurrence or how they bind or bond to the physical, or not! More than one seemingly innocent ‘space’ of air held a ‘gate’… usually untraceable or indistinguishable from the region of air next to it…

Nexus gates are often surrounded by great conflagrations of unusual happenings, such as fierce storms of fire, celestial events or strange occurrences. These are rarely permanently occurring but usually herald its operation, arrival, or decay. Certain nights of the year are both feared and dreaded by Khaasians worldwide—especially those nights of Triangularus , the Red Solstice, and the Grey Equinox, when the moons align in the sky or disappear from sight. These times are well known to Khaasians, for they herald a period when the nexus are active and ‘gates’ to elsewhere and elsewhen open and close, releasing things of terror, demonic night, or ultimate salvation.

These ‘gates’ are natural phenomena and inherently unstable (so that sometimes they exist and at other times they don’t) - sort of like an electromagnetic storm that opens 'rips' between worlds. Most nexus gates are characterized as stable or unstable. Stable ‘gates’ generally have a constant temporal, dimensional, or geographic component: they may located in the same spot, open to the same place, and last a set (though indeterminable) period. Some require a manifestation of arcane or divine power to affect their opening and transmission.

Unstable or entropic nexus gates do not have a constant temporal, dimensional or geographic component: they randomly move, do not open into the same places or times and tend to decay at a random rate until they ‘expire’. Decaying nexus gates can be benign or dangerous—it truly depends on the rate of entropic destruction the ‘gate’ undergoes.

Nexus Gates are usually one-way, two-way, random or don’t seem to do anything at all. Sometimes nexus gates are one-way portals into someplace/sometime/somewhere. There is no way to truly know until these portals are tested. More than one adventurer has braved a gate to find there is not way home! Some are two-ways, both opening into and back from that same said place. Others are truly mad, seemingly working randomly, changing how they function at will or after some mad design. Some, to the confusion and chagrin of those who ‘know’ all about nexus gates, don’t work at all! Why this is so is unknown as only the truly unwise claim to known all there is about the nexus gates!