Worlds In The Dark

The ground below you is hardly solid. We sit atop a crumbling foundation, one waiting to collapse into the hungry blackness below. Layers upon layers of rot, root, ruin, and empty, winding cavern.

The Dark Continents.

They are spoken of in whispers by the lay folk whose lives they have not yet reached. An immense, wildland, a gaping wound in spread across the World, an inverse infestation of empty space, warmed by the great Inner Fire and chilled by the walls of uncompromising stone.

The Dark Continents are irregular. They shift. They are drawn to the worn-out and tainted places of the world. Sites of mass death, of great magic. A mausoleum might lead into them, or a pit open up in an old, forgotten battlefield. Or maybe you just turn a rock over one day, and find that you peer into a great, empty hall now swallowed by the earth, and hear the sound of skittering and thumping within as things are drawn to the light.

Make no mistake, the tunnels of the world are wholly irregular, shaped by the natural forces of water and the shifting of the earth. But the Dark Continents are different. They are as the surface, but with a roof of stone. Pillars and great mazes abound, yes, but so too can entire cities, great chasms, which all our Worldly scholars say would collapse under their own weight. It is as if, rather than the surface of the world being a true surface, we live atop a great midden, the refuse of millennia collecting below us. Just as any heap of detritus has its nooks, its crannies, its crawling vermin, its mouldering flora, so too does this realm.

There are great roots that stretch deep into the earth, forming entire forests of nothing but twisting, leafless wood, where Oneirian creatures of foul disposition skulk and toy with travelers. There are great beds of rot, seething with insects and their own more mobile kin, teeming with disease. And there are ruins, countless ruins, strewn about, compacted by time, taken from across hundreds of leagues, across hundreds of years.

And stone. Endless, endless halls of empty stone.

What dwells in these places, be it Worldly or Un-Worldly, mundane or miraculous, is like that of the deepest sea, which the magi of piscine chimerae tell us of. A great, lightless abyss, in which all preys against all, and everything starves. But when food does draw near, those most desperate of beings ignite themselves into frenzied action or careful pursuit, for a meal may well sustain them for days, months, even years. 

Great Wurms which scrabble through the tunnels they gnaw into being. Pallid Monsters, their humanity long since lost, tracking the scent of their unending fixations. Failed Chimerae, their grafted bodies suited to the darkness, their minds devoid of anything save the urges of a beast. Hateful Nightmares, who embody the fear of the cruel eyes in the dark, or the terror of losing one's bearings, or one's comrades, one by one. The Living Dead, innumerable down here, wandering through empty black with eyes that no longer see. Skittering hordes of chitinous scavengers, or blind predators of black air and still waters.

If one were to venture in these depths, they would never be alone. Their smell, their sound, carries for miles. They are foreign, clumsy, an intrusion into depths that know each other well. Even if but miles behind, they will be shadowed by scavengers and hunters before long. And the longer they stay, the greater the chance one of them will act. 

There are few truly random encounters here. If they are, it's one-sided. The thing that found you wasn't surprised. It smelled you coming hours ago. You might be surprised, though, and that's what it was counting on. 

This is is not insurmountable, however. It is not merely beasts that dwell in the dark, but men. Tribes and cities of natives, of exiles, lit by faint lamps of glowing moss or shimmering vermin, or nothing at all. Just as beasts, they starve, they act desperately, they know you are here. If you come upon their lands, you best have offerings to give, or exceptional charisma so that they decide you are better off alive and unenslaved.

But solve this, and they will teach you. How to move silently, how to hide your mark. Special powders that absorb the residue of your flesh so it does not leave a smearing scent trail everywhere you go. Hidden places where you may relieve yourself without your spoor aiding a tracker. Knowledge of what all the quiet, echoing sounds around you really mean.

It is not wholly a dismal place. There are spots of beauty, regions of empty tranquility, communities which have eked out a living not reliant on the murder of others. In some places, cities or even entire kingdoms burrow down as much as spread out, and one need simply go down a stairwell or walk deeper into the center of a great metropolis to suddenly find oneself in the Dark Continents, albeit perhaps a settled fragment of it. The line between the "mundanity" of the surface and the "madness" of the underworld is no clear delineation, but a gradient, one which flexes and warps, each intruding upon the other in ways unpredictable.

But do not let such things cloud your mind.

The Dark Continents bear the touch of many a fell hand, be they man or other or something which was so but is no longer. It is the great perdition, where all unwanted by the sun gather to share in their misery, and those who never sought its light in the first place proliferate to hunt or be hunted by them.

And below that, on the Inverse Surface where the Inner Fire writhes and spasms, crawl things unspeakably worse.

 

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Here's my take on the Veins of the Earth, or a mythic underworld, or what have you. Porous, sprawling, far more open than caves ought to be, and dripping with age from all the epochs they've swallowed up, ruins piled atop each other like layers of sediment. Not quite so wild and otherdimensional as the Veins, but hopefully with a character beyond the typical Underdark. Its inhabitants are closer to the former than the latter in their ways, but in its design it veers more to the latter than the former. It has sprawling, open expanses along with the packed cavernical madness which Veins goes into, and is no untamed wilderness rather the product of an entropic force which drags cities and wilds alike into its embrace. It isn't content to rest quietly below the surface. It is a hungry, shifting thing, burrowing upwards through stone and time to take the choicest morsels for itself, just as its denizens do. Maybe I'm speaking metaphorically, here.

But maybe not.