Limbo, Hell or the Abyss is the term used for the transmundane layer that exists to catch things that fall through the cracks of the world.[1] Others lurk inside limbo, as well as people who have had their connections to the world completely severed or when whatever harvests the soul of the dead refuses to take them and drops them in.
A lot of Bogeymen are born here. It is later confirmed that their anger and hatred eventually boil over and allow them to surface. It still has a hold on them, however, and can take them back. Practitioners who fall through the cracks no longer have their powers, but retain their knowledge.[2]
Manifestations[]
The Drains[]
Also known as the Sewers or Compost Heap, it is a manifestation, where the sky above is nothing but sheer darkness that has a weight and presses down, making you want to crawl in the mud beneath your feet. Bits and pieces of things from the real world could be found there too. It's a constantly evolving maze that's only growing as more and more things fall through the cracks, but the different parts are connected to one another via tunnels and small lights.
The Forests[]
Floral manifestation(s) connected to wild areas. The Forests are where the Faceless Woman arose from[3] and where Midge vacationed.[2] Blake glimpsed a small settlement there where every sensation was grating and raw.[4]
The Tenements[]
A manifestation of steep vertical surfaces that look like apartments, the air is thick with choking dust, fog, and darkness. The bottom disappears into darkness and fog for a good kilometer or five, red and orange lights around that flicker violently. The windows are spaced too far apart, or clustered, and took different forms as sections of building had fallen and somehow jammed together, like a game of Tetris. Anything that looks easy is a trap and the hand holds are riddled with insects, broken glass, or other obstacles, while the insides are nests for Others and Bogeymen.
The Library[]
A manifestation that formed when the Hillsglade House fell through the cracks, stairwells and bookshelves lay along every wall, books filling them as water and dirt flowed in along the sides, streaming along the surfaces, turning what had been conventional novels into sodden messes. This manifestation of the abyss is aggressive, actively targeting and attacking those within it and shifting around at inopportune times, changing the landscape. It also appears to be petty; successfully navigating or bypassing its challenges sometimes results in it simply hurling unavoidable obstacles at its occupants instead. The books on the shelves are are empty, contain indecipherable gibberish, or hold things that will harm the reader. Anyone making noise within the library is subsequently attacked by the Others or a giant set of hands. At the time Hillsglade House fell into it, Bogeymen such as the Ink Man from other places in Limbo were attempting to position themselves to take on roles as Guardians of its exit routes, or to otherwise influence its formation.
The Outskirts[]
The area Blake arrived at, which mirrors the trashed outskirts of cities. Connects to the Drains, Box Store, Forests, as well as various urban regions of the Abyss.[2]
The Machine[]
The area Chain Man came from.[5] Filled with the gnashing of gears.[4]
The Box Store[]
An area Green Eyes encountered. She believed it was only intended as "scenery" and couldn't find an entrance.[6][2]
The School[]
The area the Schoolmarm came from.[2]
The Manor[]
The area Diary Girl came from.[2]
The Abattoir[]
Contains Bogeys such as the Milkmaid, the Ram-headed Man, the Calfbone Child, and the Font of Meat.[7][8]
The Carnival[]
Endless crowded streets.[4][9]
Rules[]
Inside any manifestation, certain rules hold true, such as cardinal directions. You are what you eat and lose your sense of Self. Its entire purpose is to break down whatever falls in and, if you want out, the only way is to go through by changing, adapting, eating, and getting stronger.
Regular spirits are practically nonexistent in the Abyss. Instead the Abyss relies on something spirit-like but it's colder, more detached, and tends to only follow its own rules. Generally it gets brought in or leaked from elsewhere, thus often manifesting as a leaking effect. It also has an insulation effect that makes whatever it covers gradually change into something more difficult yet also resistant to change from outside factors.[7] This also applies to items taken from the Abyss; they tend to be durable and inflict enduring effects.[10]
Practitioners attempting to communicate with the Abyss for favors will have to do so with a personification of the Abyss. Since the Abyss is quite hostile and abrasive, the personification will be as well. It's likely that a time limit will be placed during negotiations, with death traps being set up around them and Others converging on their location.[7]
By cooperating with Limbo, it provides an avenue of escape should the person in question be able to reach it. However, it will still have a hold on them and can pull them back.
Nemesis[]
The Abyss forces you to deal with your fears through visions and phantom pursuers. These solid entities aren't actually Others, but parts of the people in question that they have been trying to run away from. These torments are extremely varied and personal.[11]
Possibilities include:
- A predator which pursues you and tries to kill you, reminding you of your place on the food chain.[11]
- A personification of a specific trauma you suffered, which can either be escaped by sacrificing the memories or embraced (enduring a distorted vision of the trauma once again).
- True but misleading visions of how people you knew are coping without you in the real world.
- A detailed and highly specific dream of an entire potential life lived in cooperation with the Abyss, filled with knowledge that it's a real possibility.
Escape[]
Some ways to escape include:
- Visiting places where it’s closer to the real world than others where you must:
- Conform: Cooperating with the forces driving Limbo in some way, you become sensitive enough to possibly find a way out. Although most who do no longer desire to leave.
- Adapt: Green Eyes stated that in one part, you have to swim against a current for a while without a chance to surface, meaning you must change enough to resist the current and breathe underwater.
- Become powerful enough: Some parts are guarded by really strong things that eat you if you're too weak or make you agree to carry something back.
- Have someone visit Limbo and pull you out: Practitioners can open a way by using a circle and sacrificing something valuable to it that they will never get back.[12] This is the only way to get back to the material world while maintaining your sense of Self, but practitioners usually only seek out the worst monsters since finding someone specific is difficult and not worth the cost of entering. [7]
- Become a Bogeyman: Arguably a subset of the above options. These denizens are filled with rage and malice, Bogeymen bubble up into the material world.
Chronology[]
Formation[]
There are many theories to how Limbo came to be. The most common, however, is that it is a remnant of the primordial Chaos. Eva states that it is the ground-level of the world, where it all began, before gods and humans "set it straight".[13]
Zoey Artana theorizes that each manifestation was once a demesne, and it was attached to some vital process of reality. Through this vital process, it came to devour other demesnes and objects, and it swelled in size. It connected to other such areas, and formed the backbone for what might otherwise have been the original void.[14] Marie Durocher stated that the Abyss seemed likely to be a refined form of the same Primeval chaos she draws on.
Residents and natives[]
- Human adjacent
- Midge (Oddfolk) (Forest)
- Zoey Artana (Drains)
- Wretch - a low tier of abyssal resident not strong enough to come out of the abyss themselves.[15][16][17]
- Bogeymen
- Green Eyes (Drains)
- Diary Girl (Manor, now Library)
- Schoolmarm (School, now Library)
- Bookbrain (Library)
- Ink Man (Library)
- Defenestration Bogeyman (Tenements)
- The Milkmaid (Abattoir)
- Beasts
- Abyssal Spider
- Bathos
- Goblin Dragon (Drains)
- Gods
- Lesser god of light
- Deep Abyssal
Trivia[]
- The idea of integrating with your shadow, repressed feelings and desires harkens back to Jungian philosophy.
References[]
- ↑ Losing touch with reality.
Too much me given away.
“What… what happens?” I ask.
“You go where anyone goes, if they slip through the cracks.“
[...]
“It changes from place to place, urban area to rural. But it’s the spiritual equivalent of rock bottom. It’s where people like Dowght might go or be chased off to by locals when the imp is done with him, or where things like the goblin you fought might dwell, if they weren’t quite strong enough to hold a territory. Dark places, dog-eat-dog, unpredictable, hard to navigate. The spirit analogue to the deep wilderness.”
[...]
“Sometimes there’s shit,” she said. “Sometimes fire, sometimes a garbage dump or a lightless pit or it’s a frozen wasteland without any light to go by… like I said, it varies from place to place. It’s a place defined by the misery and self loathing and desperation of those who dwell in it.” - Excerpt from Conviction 5.3 - ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Wildbow:
On the layout of the Abyss - yes, it's all interconnected. Blake (and Green Eyes) starts out in the Outskirts, very close to the Drains. Had he taken another path, he might have made his way to the box store, or into the edge of a city/urban Abyss area. Or he could have gone further into the woods and ended up in a place similar to where Midge went.
Who you are, how you go, and where you are when you go determine where you end up. You're not going to go to a place where you'll immediately think "Oh, I'm in the Abyss"- it'll be similar to where you were when you dropped in. If you pass through from a wartorn area where people are lost, desperate, and trying to survive, you're going to find yourself waking up in a place where the city is all ruins, everything's burned, and 'bandits' are prowling around - and it steadily becomes apparent the bandits aren't limited to very scarred/mutated humans. Or you could end up in a series of buildings that are perpetually on fire.
By this metric, Blake goes from an area of wilderness of the sort you find on the periphery of a big city, trash strewn with hints of civilization or outlying buildings, to the outskirts. Except, you know, horrible.
When Hillsglade House fell to the Abyss, it connected to some similar regions, tapping Others more fitting for the Library than the School (Schoolmarm), Manor (Diary Girl), etc. Normally areas of the Abyss don't form so blatantly, but more as places are forgotten or lost.
Some places will be lost or abandoned (say, a small town struck by natural disaster and neglected by neighboring states or countries) but won't become Abyss so much as they trend that way over time, with more and more monsters and horribleness appearing over time, as Others find their way in (where there's a great deal of easy prey and easy living, until competition gets fiercer) and the Abyss gets more of a hold. Places can be pulled out of this 'sinking' state, but it's hard.
You can die and get ground down in the abyss, that route is available, but it's hard. If you fall from the tenements you're liable to land in another area with all limbs broken, but still be alive, as things come after you. If you get eaten alive, you might get partially torn apart, partially digested, and shat out with some semblance of life. There's also a whole tract of things in the Abyss that collect living things, whether it's to dress them up like a doll and add to a collection or keep in cages, to snip pieces of for later snacks. They do this because the life and emotion of living things is serves them like a campfire might for you or me. So, you know, you can die and probably will get ground away (or transmuted into something nonsapient) eventually if you're not very tenacious, but actually getting there is hard and it's fraught with peril of the 'now I'm in a cage for the next decade' kind. - Finished Pact a couple of days ago, quick review and questions regarding the Abyss inside (Wildbow, Reddit.com, 2018-05-29) - ↑ He turned around, giving me a more thorough look. “You came from the same place as her?”
I glanced at the faceless woman. She’d stopped pacing, though she still fidgeted. She held her hand straight up, fingers splayed, but for the two that held the cigarette, and grabbed her arm at the base.
“Forest?” the quiet man asked.
“No,” I said.
“Same general place, then,” he said, and the words were barely comprehensible.
“I suppose,” I said. - Excerpt from Mala Fide 10.2 - ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 I could hear the Drains, the wind whistling out of sync with the creaking of unstable architecture in the Tenements, distant howling and screaming, the gnashing of machinery, faint songs or tunes that might have been a carnival.
[...]
A small village, desolate, in the midst of a dense forest, with a screen door attached by only one hinge, caught by the wind so it slammed incessantly against the doorframe. Every sensation was raw, as if the place laid every last nerve bare. Something, I was pretty sure, lurked in the woods.
A festival. A crowd of Others and lost souls, bumping and jostling, leering, cheering, screaming. Here and there, the screams were real, as someone failed to keep up, lost strength and showed vulnerability near the wrong partygoer. The buildings that framed the narrow street had no windows, entrances or exits, more like tombstones than any place people lived. - Excerpt from Duress 12.8 - ↑ Execution 13.2
- ↑ I… it’s hard to remember the details, but I arrived, and I wandered for a long while in the rain. I found this big store, you know the kind, one of the huge ones you could spend half a day inside, but the parking lot was fenced in, and I tried walking around to find the front door, but it was like every side of the store was the back of the store. That’s when I first realized something was wrong, because I’d just left this… this place, and found a city and I somehow found myself-”
[...]
I found a group of people, and they told me that there was nothing there. That it’s just landscape, for show. They laughed at me and took what little I’d brought with me. I ran before they could hurt me, and I got here, after a couple days. Except I didn’t get far. I stepped onto that broken bit of ledge right there, and I fell. Just like you almost did. Water pushed me down, and I wasn’t strong enough to swim against it. Someone saved me. He wasn’t strong enough to lift me up, either, so he pressed his lips to mine, and breathed for me.” - Excerpt from Null 9.1 - ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 are there other potential uses for this portal?
Yes.
For example, if the practitioner can also pass through the portal, there are probably a significant amount of non-quite-bogeyman and other unfortunate ex-people who would love to negotiate for a way to exit
Yes. But you just sacrificed something valuable to get there. One could argue that overall, given a longer period of time, you're probably going to break even or fall short when it comes to finding useful Others and people in the Abyss. Some of them will backfire on you, because even if you're not specifically selecting Bogeymen, you're picking people who are at least a few steps closer than normal to being Bogeymen. By and large, you're probably only going to get more than your money's worth if you're interested in violence and terrorizing or if you need very desperate individuals for something. Think in terms of like, "For this job, we're going to have to limit ourselves to the ex-con homeless" somethings. Filling out the roster with ask-no-questions, doesn't-matter-if-they're-pretty people for your out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere pyramid of sacrifice? Good stuff, go shopping for your dredge cultists in the Abyss. Bank robbery? Probably not, unless the 'robbery' is more on the bloody side.
If you're good at negotiating and finding talented individuals, you might do better than break even for a while, until you get burned a few times, at which point you're only breaking even.
Or, if you're a Nomad/City Mage, could you communicate with the Abyss for favors and whatnot?
You can communicate. For favors? Well, you'd be talking with a personification/representative of the Abyss, and the Abyss eats up and digests people and spits out monsters. You're not going to get a wholly civil conversation here, and it's not necessarily going to be on a level playing field. So... you open a door or tap a door you've already made, you venture into The Abattoir, and you find a clearing big enough to open a discourse with the embodiment of that specific region of the Abyss. Chances are this conversation is going to happen with a very hostile, intractable, abrasive personification of this very hostile, intractable place. It may happen with a time limit, a horror movie deathtrap slowly setting itself up around you as you try to establish terms and talk, or it might be that Others are on the approach, reacting to unconscious signals from the Abattoir personification- the Ram-headed Man, the Milkmaid, the Calfbone Child, and the Font of Meat converging on your location while you talk.
Is it doable? Yes. But probably for very specific purposes. More often it'd be to broker passage or establish a place-as-an-ongoing-ritual scenario, one that would involve feeding the Abyss. More of an endgame play for a specific scenario than something one would set up for later gains.
Are there even regular spirits in the Abyss, and if so, are they subject to the "cosmic in-sink garbage disposal" effect?
Not regular spirits. Something spirit-like is in effect, but it's colder, more detached and self-referential, and tends to follow its own rules. Brought elsewhere or allowed to leak elsewhere, it would manifest in leaking effects from the relevant area. Corrosion, persistent ulcerous rust, bloodstains where there shouldn't be any, and an insulation effect, where things become both changing and stubbornly resistant to outside factors - spirits would have a harder time affecting a door that refused to close properly or lock, that creaked loudly as it swung open and closed, banged violently at the slightest brush of wind, and seemed to get more troublesome over time... but spirits would have a harder time affecting it. To an extent, you'll have a harder time affecting it too... this means connections to these things may not form, they may slip out of one's possession very easily, or not get any easier to use with time. Of course, that gets easier if one becomes more like them, meeting them halfway.
Around areas where the Abyss is closer to the surface (which happen to be areas which are less linked in to the rest of the world... and areas that are less likely to call news stations and say "Hey, I've got this weird thing!"), these things tend to find a way in. It's usually a harbinger (though not Harbinger) that a specific place is on the way out. People and animals can collect these traits too - family generations with more mutations or stubborn health issues (physical or mental), that somehow prove very long-lived and more and more detached from the rest of the world. Scourges may collect or extract that essence for use or fashioning crooked things, but it's a tricky process that requires more of a biopsy and then nurturing of the biopsied part, or a more complete extraction, but then with a 'it has no connection to you so it slips from your grasp' limited time as the metaphysical pocket has a hole in it and that essence is steadily lost over time until spent. - More Abyss Questions (Wildbow, Reddit.com, 2018-10-23) - ↑
Other Bogeymen resemble living people, but fall more into the realm of heavy carnivores, dining on fear. Like heavy carnivores, they don't need to eat often. Finding other things to eat helps fill the space between, so they'll do that a lot, and beyond that they tend to patrol or wander. If the Milkmaid locates herself in the abandoned farmhouse and the surrounding fields, then she might get to know the ins and outs of the property, where the fence is reliable, where the holes in the ground are, and she'd find the things to alter the property. A whole day can be spent on one window, so it's ajar but closes when someone slips through. A week can be spent on the floor, so that the window closes when someone comes running along the shaky floorboards of the house, directly toward the opening. Two weeks to a month to have the window close just as someone puts their hands or head through the opening.
This might be stretched out over long periods, the Milkmaid going through her routine of sleeping until evening, waking up, kicking at a floorboard here, adjusting a window there, getting her things and then going out to check the traps in the nearby woods for any caught foxes, deer, or coyotes. If any are caught, then a few hours are spent stripping the animal, the meat eaten with some glasses of milk (a little bit more strength, a bit more time before she needs to eat real human fear instead of trapped animal fear), the offal strewn in strategic locations, the bones added to the collection in a key location of the home (like in the cellar one will fall into if they run too hard along that one stretch of breakable floorboards). While passing through the home at the later half of the night, she'll adjust a door, move some curtains so that one hook isn't on the rod but is at a level to catch on some clothes, stomp at a floorboard. She fixes up her milking machine for a few hours, feeds and milks the cows, then goes for a walk, touring the outer edges of her territory, familiarizing herself with that ground, expanding her territory out a fraction, maybe moving a rock so a tire might pop on the road or breaking a branch or three so the farmhouse is more clearly visible for anyone passing down the dirt road. She watches the sunrise, then returns home and dozes off.
When she does get a victim, it becomes about milking them for fear, literally. They get snagged, caught, the exits turn out not to be exits, the fields have holes in them that don't seem to trip up this one-hundred-and-twenty pound woman with the cow-skin hood and wrapping, but do twist the ankles of the unwary. One victim is chosen, the rest killed off, and she drags her victim off to the barn, where they're summarily chained up. A cow is skinned and the skin is sewn onto and around the trapped man or woman. Then she starts up the rusty old milking machine, places the first three glass tubes with the suction going, holds up the fourth with its shattered edge, and then places it- the suction rhythmically pulls the glass edges in deeper, releasing, over and over, the blood flowing in with inexplicable milk and other bodily fluids the machine is pulling in, to join her collection of regular cow's milk. She'll have something to drink with her next meal of fox or deer, she has her supply of fear and pain for the next few days or weeks until her victim passes or slips into the Abyss, she gains some power, and she buys her continued existence in a world where she has quiet days and can watch sunrises.
It's not really a Crone Mara style adjustment of territory over decades or centuries - more that obsessive focus, memories of the Abyss, and the influence of the Abyss itself staining reality can help make this work. The places she visits and the things she does serve to taint areas and things. The milking machine is a big one for this particular bogeyman, as are the cows of her barn, which might start to end up more abyssal (mutated, with special properties, potentially with skins that transmit sensation after being sewn on). For Bogeymen of this type who aren't the Milkmaid, it could be something like the house being bigger from the inside, or hallways that look different when you revisit them. - What Do Most Others Do All Day?, Reddit - ↑ Reddit Comment by Wildbow
- ↑ Saturated; items that have spent a time away from our reality may pick up properties of the place they were set. Includes…
Warrens - Often have properties of disease, disruption, violence.
Abyss - Items that endure the abyss tend to be durable and inflict enduring effects.
Spirit - Time in the Spirit makes an item a hallow, then shapes it according to the spirits that have habitually used that hallow. Then the item is saturated and the spirits become inextricable.
Ruins - Tie into emotion, soul, and are peripheral to Incarnations.
Paths - Weird uses only tangentially related to the ‘idea’ of the item. High utility, often with sharp and unrelated drawbacks.
Again, may be latent.
- Pact Dice: Collectors - ↑ 11.0 11.1 Q: Are the shadows that pursue you in the abyss, like Carl and the black fish, as well as the visions Blake sees, unique to the drains or universal to everywhere in the abyss?
A: Universal, but very personal to the individuals, to the extent that I would urge avoiding lumping them into one category. Green Eyes' shadow, for example, isn't a bundle of memory and just wants to cause her physical harm. She is always, so long as she is in the abyss, prey of the Black Fish. - Wildbow on Reddit - ↑ “We need to sacrifice something of value, destroy it irrevocably, and say a few words.”
“Define ‘value’,” Peter said.
“If you have to ask, it’s probably not valuable enough,” Alexis said. - Excerpt from Duress 12.5 - ↑ “Andy said it’s hard, being a bogeyman. You spend a while in the Abyss, or Limbo, or whatever name you want to slap onto the ground level of reality, and it chews you up and spits a monster out, right?”
“Something like that. Haven’t heard it called the ground level before. Doesn’t seem much like reality.”
“Yeah, I bet,” she said. “You want Andy for that explanation. Mayans or someone thinking that all reality was basically chaos and void before the first gods set it straight. Humans following after, smoothing off the rough edges. I’m getting bits wrong already.”
“Sure,” I said. The entire world was essentially like the Drains, in another time? - [excerpt https://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/2014/10/04/malfeasance-11-11/] from Malfeasance 11.11 - ↑ - Excerpt from Null 9.3
- ↑ Wildbow on Discord
- ↑ A wretched bogeything -not even a bogeyman, but some victim of the Abyss that had been spat out- came lunging at her, and she went low, avoiding meeting the ground with her body, because a slide through a puddle might end her.
[...]
The lesser Abyssal wretch watched for a moment longer, then ran off, disappearing into darkness. - Excerpt from Finish Off 24.5 - ↑ Tenders (Name) - With a food offering and invitation ritual, cooperative, lesser- and least-tier Others can be called in to assist, guard, and do light and regular labor. They match the region (goblins for the Warrens, wretches for the Abyss, fairies for the Faewilds), are never special cases (eg. when Lost may have a 20% chance of having special abilities or a 25% chance of exceptional abilities), and have a high chance to flee from trouble. General Deals practice. Pact Dice: Gardeners