The following is an in character account directly from the book, exemplifying the difference between Mortal Reins and other fantasy settings.
Other planes - do they exist? Maybe for gods and other endless entities like them, but Mortals like me and you are left to wonder. From what the magi and other practitioners of magic are able to deduce, an invisible aether surrounds our world, normally imperceptible to us. Various particles and energies are able to move through this layer, completely non-interactive with the physical realm except through the application of magic. It is in this layer all around us that gods exercise their force, and the conscious and unconscious manipulation of this layer allows us mortals to make use of magic.
Although we do not often see the manipulations of the aether, we can infer certain things about it. For example, while a person lives, their soul is bound to their body, and they have a certain field around them, pushing and adjusting the particles of arcana. If the physical body is killed or in much more rare cases the soul is destroyed, the other component can only remain for a few months. Much as we see a dead body rot, wither and become earth, a soul without a host will fade away, lost in the churn of the invisible aether. Much like decomposition, this process can take a variable amount of time based on many factors, but often the soul lasts as a ghost for a period of a few months. This is how ghosts are able to haunt the places they died at, how necromancers and priests can communicate with and bring back the dead.
With this knowledge, we can infer what the gods are. These entities are able to tell us anything we want to hear and are incentivized to do so - but from what small part we can verify, we know this: Consciousness can exist in the magic around us. Beings can live entirely on their own in the aether, and affect it without having a physical body. Usually they choose to coalesce in places with fewer people due to the effect a soul has on the magical fields around them, either in the sky or deep below the earth (physical barriers of course being at best trivial formalities and at worst completely imperceptible to these beings) but occasionally they will live with the people, at the tops of mountains or in lakes, places where they can keep themselves whole.
Why then do they interact with us at all? It appears living entirely in the aether, or a different plane of existence as some claim, comes with some limitations. For one thing, they are unable to affect the pathways of magic except through ordained miracle workers, to whom they grant a portion of their power. Perhaps more importantly, they crave and gain power from their worship by mortal souls. For this worship they offer many boons - miracles, as previously mentioned, but also explanations of how the world works, and more importantly, hope.
The path of Sonnon Shu’um for example, tells its travelers that once they die their souls do not simply waste away and become part of the aether, but instead transcend to a different heavenly world where their sins are forgiven, and they can live forever in bliss. From our position, we have no way to verify this statement, but more and more believers turn to this southern religion.
Some of these entities are not above giving up their own identities and latching on to existing beliefs to gain more worshipers and therefore power for themselves. Among scholars, it is considered an open secret that the imperial creed of the Scorbosi Emperor and similar beliefs about god kings in the south and east of the Empire is not the power of the man or elf at the head of the empire, but a symbiote of sorts, a deal struck between a god-entity willing to assume the role of the Imperial God, and the mortal who wants to appear as if they possess divine power. The emperor offers his considerable subjects as worshipers, and the god gives them a divine mandate and providence.
Once such structures become too large other entities flock to them, as even the scraps of a large enough symbiote are larger than what they would have gained on their own. This is where the imperial angels and apostles come from. The lead entity in this system is unable to process the prayers of so many worshipers and hands out regions and individual believers to others in a perverse mirror of the feudal systems of the mortals. Even then, each of the minor gods strives for a larger piece. The Antiholian Heresy for example was a movement in the breakaway city of Ysier lead by former priests and philosophers that stated that the god emperor of Scorbus was in no way divine, and the gods in the creed were simply keeping up a ruse to maintain their hold on the people in the largest religion in the world. If they are to be believed, what a coup it was for a relatively minor god to come in and take over the position of divine emissary to all the citizens of the city state, the oligarchs of which could no longer abide by the worship of the emperor.
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