Every pantheon on Tikor has roots in the planet, except this one.
The Otherworlders come from outside Tikor’s reality. Their realms — Umbra is the most studied of them, but it’s only one of many — run on rules that don’t match Tikor’s. Different physics. Different sense of time. The Etherforce that powers most of magic on this planet barely works inside their dimensions, and what does work there is closer to a foreign language than a deeper science. They show up on Tikor when something on the planet is wobbling. What they want when they arrive is almost never made plain.
There’s no hierarchy among them, and no shared agenda anyone has been able to identify. They’re independent entities who happen to share a habit of slipping through the thin places when the rest of the world isn’t paying attention. Some of them deal with mortals — Garuda’s Shadowtails keep careful pacts with one lineage of them in order to do Shadow Invocation at all — and most don’t.
Shadowcats
The most famous of the Otherworlders are the Shadowcats, and they’re the reason Shadow Invocation is even possible on Tikor.
A Shadowcat is feline in shape and phantasmal in appearance — twilight wrapped around something with predator instincts and predator size. Some have been reported at seven hundred kilograms. They hunt the way a feline hunts, by ambush, and what they do to a target who fails their judgment is usually described after the fact as a long silence and a missing person.
They are the gatekeepers of the Shadow Realm. To do Shadow Invocation is to ask one of them for permission, and the permission is not always granted. In 1780 D.A., an untrained invoker tore the veil open in the Ilun Valley by accident, and a pack of Shadowcats came through. Hundreds died. Garuda’s King outlawed Shadow Invocation outright after that, and the School of the Night later renegotiated controlled access to the practice. The Shadowcats agreed to terms. Nobody who works in the School pretends to fully trust them.
Umbra Shades
The Umbra Shades are the cheaper accident.
They aren’t gatekeepers, and they aren’t sentient in the way the Shadowcats are sentient. They’re closer to residue — flickering, half-corporeal echoes of shadow energy that leak through wherever the veil between Tikor and Umbra has gone thin. Failed Shadow Invocation rituals tend to summon them. Etheric surges summon them. Big cosmic events summon them, often in numbers, and the Umbra Convergence in southern Vinyata is the one most scholars still argue about.
When a Shade arrives, the air tends to go strange. Temperature drops without a cause. Reflections come out wrong. Sound distorts. Most people who’ve been near one describe a stillness so total it felt like the world had momentarily forgotten how to make noise.