First appearance: Into the Mirror, Session 1 · watch it on YouTube
The Sands of Eternity is a realm of the dead unlike any other. It is a desert of cold blue sand under a sky that never moves, cut off from the living for some two thousand years. Only the souls it has claimed find their way there. A small party of the lost crossed it in search of a way home, and a familiar scholar was among them: Vythorn, who recognized the place with something close to delight. It is a place where the dead go on, more or less. If they die again, there is nothing after it.
Description
The Sands are a howling expanse of cold blue sand that glitters like shards of glass, scoured by an endless wind beneath a celestial, void-like sky. The sun and stars never move. Bodies there stay in a kind of stasis, neither aging nor changing. When the party arrived, they found themselves standing among dragon bones. The realm seems to take its shape from whoever is looking at it: “Your experience here is what your mind makes it.”
Nobody in the Sands is alive in the usual sense. As one old legend put it, “This is not a place to live and go.” The realm sits apart from every other underworld and “doesn’t quite exist in the same place as any other underworld.” Not everyone who dies ends up there. Only those “whose soul has in some way been attached to this place, who has been consumed by this place in some manner” are drawn in, wherever they happen to be.
Those who do arrive build a life of sorts. The realm holds many cities, peoples and cultures, among them the city of Mortaurios. Outlanders roam the dunes between them, along with sand scorpions and, by one account, “mean people.” The dead from The Void land here. The rule that matters most is this one: death in the Sands is final. Those who die here become sand. Books are scarce, since it is “odd to make books of sand,” but there are one or two libraries. The ground around one of them dulls some kinds of magic.
The realm once produced at least one wonder. A very powerful device called the Orrery of Dreams was crafted within the Sands, with “an immense power capable of shaping reality.”
History
A realm cut off
The Sands of Eternity were once adjacent to the Living Plane. Doors between the two were opened regularly by those who lived there, people came and went, and there was trade. “That all ended some 2000 years ago, maybe? The doorways closed and the realm itself seemed to have vanished. Other than the connections through the mirrors.” From then on the living could not reach it, and some scholars came to believe it had been destroyed.
The lost party arrives
In Into the Mirror 7–9 - Claws of Sand, Shifting Sands, Hourglass (session 2), a party of wanderers found themselves among the dragon bones in the blue dunes. Once she had steadied herself, Elianna dug through what she had read. Nobody knew much about the place, but she recognized its name from books, scrolls and whispers. The name stirred a memory in Toddleheim as well, from “some deep, dark library… maybe decades ago… when you were a young man, even, warring over tomes.” He remembered a book of legends, pieced together from loose sources and secondhand accounts, that described a realm for the dead apart from any other underworld.
The road to Mortaurios
In Into the Mirror 10 Shatter + Into the Mirror 11 Mortaurios (ITM session 3), the party learned what the Sands meant for the people who lived there. Elianna walked beside the leader of a band of guards and peppered him with questions. Had everyone here died? “Yes, that is how one comes to find themselves in the sands of eternity.” Were they happy? He was philosophical about it:
“As happy as anyone can be anywhere… Better to be alive here than nothing somewhere else.”
When she asked how long he had been there, he looked down at his shield. “After centuries, it all melds together. Time doesn’t really seem to exist for me anymore. I just am.” Elianna admitted she was “really just a librarian,” and he warned her she wouldn’t find many libraries in a land made of sand.
Vythorn recognizes the Sands
In Into the Mirror 15–16, Old Friends - Sky, the party met Vythorn in the Sands. He had just watched Elianna and Flynry seal a blood pact in a book, with Toddleheim signing as witness. “Well, that was exciting,” he said. Then he looked around and, almost excited, announced: “I know this place. We’re in the Sands of Eternity.” Cerys introduced herself as a traveler of these realms who had helped bring the others here and was now looking for a way back. Vythorn’s question was blunt: “To the living plane?”
The party then learned the history of the realm’s lost doorways. Toddleheim found books on the Sands themselves, with pictures of its cities, Mortaurios among them. The books showed the realm was far bigger than anyone had guessed, and maybe “you just have to know how to navigate the sands.” A second search only confirmed that the Sands had once been connected to other planes. One volume described the Orrery and its reality-shaping power but said nothing about doorways. Vythorn, who had found nothing he didn’t already know, turned to the party with a pointed question: “Is there something you know that I don’t?”
Not everyone who walked the Sands left them. Locket, one of the travelers, is dead for good, because a soul that dies in the Sands dies forever. Her companions still hope her soul gem might somehow bring her back.
Afterward
Vythorn’s soul did escape the Sands, only to be sidetracked by Fil. In S4E14, Vythorn’s Return Part 1, he crouched beside a lantern in a strange in-between place and studied a substance still clinging to him. He was trying to work out whether he had reached the material plane or was still tied to the Sands of Eternity. The substance turned out to be alive, humming with a faint electric magical charge. In the lantern light he thought he saw something familiar in it.
Notable Figures
- Elianna: a self-described librarian who recognized the realm’s name and questioned the guard leader about life among the dead.
- Toddleheim: remembered the Sands from a book of legends and later found volumes describing its cities.
- Flynry: part of the lost party, and blood-pacted to Elianna there.
- Cerys: a traveler of these realms who helped bring the party to the Sands.
- Vythorn: recognized the Sands and later escaped them.
- The guard leader: a centuries-old resident who found the Sands “comfortable” enough.
The Green-Sand Desert
The Sands of Eternity first appeared, unnamed, in Into the Mirror, Session 1, where Flynry woke after his death in what the party then knew only as a desert of cold, mirror-green sand, “the in-between.” A stinging wind blew across it, there was nothing in any direction for hundreds of miles, and fingers of sand rose from the dunes into a black sky of nebulas and planets to form new stars. The horizon could never be reached and time was impossible to judge: for Flynry, what passed there might have been years or decades. The sand, they learned, is made of completely destroyed souls, the magic of the place is “evil in nature,” and few who end up there ever return. The desert had a proper name that hadn’t been given yet. In the next session, Elianna recognized it from books, scrolls and whispers: the Sands of Eternity.