Ignis (Smoke Pass)

Ignis is a dimension of smoke, fire, and... new life? Home of the kipitin species, it has grown as the species that calls it home has.

Ignis is an extra-dimensional space that is not tied to any specific planet.  It is generally assumed to distantly connect to many afterlives, but those areas cannot access Ignis, nor can denizens of Ignis access those areas.

In fact, very few beings of any sort can access the Ignis - only those who have a chance to become Kipitins may visit it as the fire that kills them burns, and only those who take the Creator’s gift to become a Kipitin may then come and go as they please.  There are ways for Kipitins to bring non-Kipitins over, though, which are covered elsewhere.

In the first few centuries of inhabitation of Ignis, it was a rather barren place - red earth with a few smoke vents as far as the eye could see, and a flaming, glowing sky of red, orange, and yellow.  A small village was painfully and magically carved into a hillside, but it was difficult to create anything - more often, Kipitins brought over items taken from planets they visited, and it was part of what initially made killing organic species a popular choice.  If a Kipitin killed them, and then sufficiently found a way to infuse their essence into their buildings (or could hold the items they wanted), they could transport them into the Smoke Pass.

Over time, as more Kipitins came into being and chose to live there, features began to grow.  The first thing was a light cycle - the original red, orange, and yellow sky gives way after roughly 12 hours to a sky of blue, purple, and black.  After a further 12 hours, that blue, purple, and black sky returns to the red, orange, and yellow one.

With still more time, further features appeared.  One day, a patch of almost smokelike grass.  The next day, a copse of trees that looked almost burnt, with smoky leaves.

Slowly, Ignis grew an environment of its own.

The plantlife made the dimension seem more pleasant and welcoming, and enabled Kipitins to begin to build easier without finding a hillside to carve up or taking the effort of infusing their essence into a building in order to bring it into the Ignis.  (Admittedly, building with the materials of the native plants of the Ignis is more akin to gardening than traditional construction methods).

Plantlife also soon spawned something else…

The animals of the Ignis are not exactly ‘living’ in the same sense as an organic animal, but they seem to possess similar intelligence and may resemble animals found on planets in some ways.  Based on experimentations from crueler (and/or more scientifically minded) Kipitins, these animals are not created by the killing of animals on planets, however, so any resemblance is purely superficial.