Abyss

• A plane in the Spiritual Realms

Although the demons of the Abyss loom large in legends, few scholars dare study the Abyss in depth, for even the study of its nature is said to taint the mind. Most who claim to have seen the Abyss are presumed to be liars, madmen, or worse, and even the most credible accounts contradict each other. In the most comprehensive collection of tales of the Abyss, The Chronicle of Ruin, it is described as a place of endless decay, where fortresses fall to ruin overnight, kingdoms dissolve into filth, and rivers of blood carve paths through landscapes that shift and crumble with every breath. And yet the Chronicle also describes endless layers spiraling downward into the domains of the demon lords, who shape their dominions into nightmarish echos of themselves, endless and eternal.

A painting of the Abyss as imagined by Aveline of Isingue

Origins of the Abyss

While studies of the true nature of the Abyss may be shunned by scholars, arguments concerning its origin are not. In the ancient Drankorian text The Riven Veil, the theological cosmologist Marcion of Iridelclaimed that the Abyss came into being through the worse impulses of humanity, following the centaur philosopher Chironides the Wanderer, who argued that humans who preached hellfire and damnation unwittingly shaped the Abyss out of Soulstuff, and now the nightmares of humanity sustains and strengthens it. While the Faculty of Metaphysics have not been kind to Marcion of Iridel, and the Standard Multiversal Model considers the Abyss to have arisen as a counterpoint and entropic backlash against Creation, the vivid theories of the The Riven Veil persist in the popular imagination.

Portals to the Abyss

Empirical cosmologists have long been concerned with the observation that the Abyss spreads its corruption wherever it touches. The ancient treatise Upon the Fractured Earth, which has survived only in fragments, suggests that even a briefly opened portal to the Abyss can blight the land, twisting plants into grotesque mockeries of life and imbuing the very stones with whispers of madness. Worse, a partially translated fragment describes a summoning circle that remained unsealed for over a hundred days, and left behind a region so twisted that centuries later, the land wept black ichor.

While minor summoning rituals may not produce such lasting scars, the demons of the Abyss is never content to remain sealed away, always striving to find new cracks through which to seep, feeding upon the worst impulses of mortals and waiting for the moment when they may drown the world in their endless hunger. As Yendalo is said to have preached: Though the Abyss lies beyond the Veil, every whispered temptation, every act of unchecked cruelty, every moment of primal greed is another crack in the barrier that holds it at bay.