The Planes of Existence: Life's Forms

• An excerpt from the arcane textbook __The Planes of Existence: Life's Forms (How the existence of sentient matter and the process of thoughts and feelings being given physical form has taught us about the nature of life and existence)__*

"What is life? Is there a definitive answer?

Yes.

There is only one criteria: self-replication.

What we have discovered in our exploration of the nature of the outer planes makes this question a non-starter.

We have seen living beings whose essence is the existence of nature. Other creatures who are reborn anew when they are slain, or just...whenever they've decided, at times. Others are reborn by taking control of a body and bringing all of its lives' experiences with it.

But the most curious yet, are those born of an ideal. Entities like the deity called Tyr. If the essence of creation that binds his form together is destroyed, even in totality, he will be, eventually, reborn in his home plane as long as a single entity, anywhere in the entire known universe, stands for an ideal of true justice. They are born of mere *thoughts.*

To kill entities like gods is to remove the essence of their being from the whole of existence. To scrub clean the entire universe of a concept, an ideal, is near-impossible.

Can a goddess of trickery be destroyed without destroying man's innate drive to compete?

If, Tyr, god of Justice and War, were to perish, would there be no more Justice? Or no more war? Would justice be needed without war? What of the god Tempus? Does he run rampant without the influence of Tyr?

If a god was ever truly killed, how could we know?

So, I posit my theory: the beings in the outer planes do not know their origins, but I believe I do.

We are their creators. The ideals that created them were created by us, not them. The first time an ancestor stood for doing something right, even when it was the hard this to do, *they* created Tyr.

The first being to strike out in vengeance created yet another ideal.

The universe collects our energy. For eons. Then reflects it back at us. To guide us, at times, to control us, and, at times, to consume us. Like we consume each other.

We developed, purely naturally, then in our eons of growth, in our strength of essence, our ideals out-paced our progress.

In alternate planes, the energy of our thoughts and feelings coalesced. It grew boundlessly. But yet, those from those planes know of a time before they knew of us, and yes, before we knew of them.

In the outer planes, they have only recently come to terms with the passage of time. What changed? When? *These are questions I will discuss in my tome: __The Time Before Time: Life in the Outer Planes before 'The Great Link (How beings of pure thought, or energy, track, or don't track, their histories)__*