As the spacetime fabric expanded following the Big Bang and matter began to condense from the soup of exotic quarks, a hairline fracture appeared in the nascent underlayment of the cosmos. The fissure grew in width and length in concert with the burgeoning universe, filling in with a subatomic mix of what came to be termed ‘dark energy.’
Each clump of matter condensing to form a proto-galaxy triggered a forking of the dark energy stream, such that every new galaxy contained a filament. As the galaxies were flung further and further apart, the connecting filaments stretched but did not break. Over the eons the contiguous dark energy region spawned a form of ‘distributed’ life that developed sentience as a by-product of a vast number of quasi-neural connections entangled with one another and so able to communicate instantaneously.
While every galaxy in the universe contains a dark energy filament, that filament in some areas is no wider than ten light years across. As a result, comparatively few stellar systems are actually embedded within that continuum. What eventually became known by some as ‘magic’ is possible only on planets orbiting those rare stars. Where it exists, however, magic is a powerful force available to any sentient who learns the techniques for invoking and manipulating it.
As the universe and the dark energetic continuum connecting its galaxies grew in unison, the continuum itself underwent various conformational and energetic adjustments until it reached initial thermodynamic equilibrium roughly two million years after the Big Bang—not that time or its units of measurement were particularly meaningful at this point. The nature of the continuum was such that the movement of the megastructure through space and time generated large quantities of the eleven-dimensional matrix that constituted the continuum itself. The structure was able to accommodate the influx of material for a while, but eventually it began to destabilize. The intelligence present in the continuum recognized the danger and fashioned animate creatures capable of opening channels to shunt away the excess and perform other ‘maintenance’ tasks. These servants they designated ‘appendages’ and gave them names: Ot, Pok, Ix, Lyv, Eq, Cux, Wo, Sa, and many more. These are the same entities some of which later became known on N’plork as the ‘Arcanelementals.’
With each passing era the continuum grew in size, but maintained its identity and ‘consciousness’ as a result of the particles constituting the original super-dense aggregation having been entangled with one another since inception. The sentience residing in the continuum divided itself into an increasing number of discrete units, which called themselves Lumeniles, in order to administer the ever-expanding volume.
Eventually the first generation of stars began to reach the end of their lifespans and collapse into various forms depending on stellar mass and death process. The quantum gravitational effects of these end-stage events on the still-expanding continuum were varied in both scope and degree. The most prominent and consequential of these effects was the formation of ‘graviton displacement.’ The continuum surrounding these anomalies became pinched and elongated, which shifted the filament away from the center of the galaxies in which they occurred. This resulted in positional asymmetry of filaments as future galaxies formed, such that the location of the continuum filament in any given galaxy became unpredictable. In the first generation of galaxies the filament had passed within a hundred light years or so of galactic center. As future generations came into existence, the cumulative effect of the graviton displacement distributed the filament more randomly in each new galaxy.
Magic, as a manifestation of dark energy, exhibits characteristics not seen in conventional energy signatures. In practice, this anomalous aspect is what lends magic its usefulness as a tool for shaping matter and manipulating kinetic forces. Once the universe was old enough to have generated intelligent species on planets embedded in the continuum, the Lumeniles realized they could train sentients to assist in keeping the continuum energetically stable—a growing concern for them—by sending their appendages to teach them how to use excess dark energy to accomplish otherwise impossible tasks on their own planets.
As more and more sentient species appeared, the Lumeniles continued perfecting their methods. Eventually there were billions of magic-using creatures assisting in maintaining stability along the now twelve billion-light year expanse of the dark energetic continuum. Each of the planets where these magic-users resided had its own mythology surrounding the introduction of magic to the sentient population. These narratives ranged from the mostly factual to the deeply fantastic, depending on the societal tendency to embellish.
On N’plork the goblins who first dabbled in matters arcane were known as the parasciencers. They in turn named the appendages that visited them, as previously mentioned, the Arcanelementals. The appendages represented a class of beings never previously encountered, so they were regarded as demigods by the N’plorkians just to be safe. There’s no sense in being disrespectful to someone who demonstrates the ability to turn you into a small amphibian, after all.
Since the parasciencers were goblins, they spoke an early form of what came to be known as ‘Goblish.’ Once the existence of the dark energetic continuum had been revealed to them by the Arcanelementals, they named it according to its perceived function from their point of view—Ta’slizh’I, or ‘the energy source.’ This term was corrupted over time to ‘The Slice’ in modern Goblish.
History does not record with any certainty whether the Lumeniles, their appendages, or archmages themselves first developed the procedure for transcending. It is most likely that the initial generation of archmages realized such a thing might be possible in theory, but that the Lumeniles participated either actively or indirectly in solidifying the knowledge necessary to design and complete the rituals. In any event, once transcendents took up permanent residence in the continuum its landscape began to take on form as the new residents shaped it to suit their tastes and requirements.
At least a billion years has passed since the first transcendent, with the result that The Slice now contains millions of architectural structures and topological features of every imaginable sort. It would be very difficult to explore all of it before the entropic death of the current universe, in point of fact. The precise population of archmage residents is quite difficult to estimate, but it likely numbers in the hundreds of thousands, spread across billions of light years. Finding any particular person or place without directions is next to impossible, however: there is no Google Maps in The Slice.