Syele.
24th of Ianua, 1492.
Twilight Sanctuary, Bodhi Tree Darkworld.
7:25 AM.
***
I knew these realms were vast. Or, I thought I did when I was liberated, but never would I have believed the realms below the surface could stretch so deeply. I thought I did when I returned to the surface on a pilgrimage. The lands I saw, the things I'd seen. Snow. Open skies. Trees, animals, and insects. People and their winding cities. It was… unbearable. Even with the grace and the visions and the therapy, I did not like the surface, but I could not deny its beauty. As the saying went, however, I did not know true beauty until I left it behind.
The Underground. The Darkworld. In their unique ways, they were beautiful, yet they were doubly as dangerous as the surface, and so their beauty often went overlooked. From the comfort of the vehicles we received, we could admire that beauty, but there was an entirely different danger. Insanity. Madness born from confinement within a metal tube that rattled all hours of the day and night. The fearful insanity of being stuck close to hissing pipes and buzzing screens. If I was not a pious woman, I would have surely lost my mind, but instead, I prayed, and because my God was glorious, he answered. He graced me with silence and peace of mind while we tunneled deeper and deeper until finally, we came to a stop.
We'd hardly made a dent in the Underground by then, but by the 11th of the month, we made it deep enough for magma channels to be common all around us. It was there that we found a small cavern and sent our undead out to claim an area. Or that's what I thought.
I was enraptured by many things. Prayer. Worship. Admiring the many enchanted items sent through the shadows and cheerfully imagining where the many new zombies and skeletons came from. It was due to that, that I did not notice what was being constructed until it was already complete; and with the Owl being the Owl, it was a form of worship to find joy in learning what it was.
It was a… platform. Two platforms standing above parallel rails of Darkspace-infused mithral. Lodges were attached to each of them, boasting fancy taverns and inns combined in a single building to offer us respite from those uncomfortable conditions. But that was not the main feature. The main feature was what sat atop those rails. A chain of cylindrical mine carts, completely sealed and linked together by the dozens. At the front sat two connected beasts of enchanted machinery. The second drove the entire chain- or as Madame Opal called it, the train forward. But the first head was the centerpiece.
It was a drill made larger than any gray dwarf could even imagine- a house for some form of specter. The wraith's job was to scout the area ahead of the drill and direct it away from caverns or occupied territories. In turn, some sort of mechanical system used a temporally displaced enchantment to install more Darkspace rails along the route using some strange and complex machinery.
That alone increased our tunneling speed by leaps and bounds. However, the drill didn't crush rock so much as it ate them, transporting the material into a timeless subspace just behind the drill head. There, machines and undead refined and fabricated the materials into the components of a tunnel that would emerge and be installed as the rest of the train went along. There was a catch, however. The Underground and the Darkworld both contained natural pockets that led to the Shadow Realm. Thus the Plane of Darkness was where the tunnels would stretch. Or rather, a quasi Plane of Darkness.
The Darkspace Tunnel.
There were no noisy vibrations in the tunnel of night; and, while there would normally be nothing to see outside the windows, the enchantments within the sealed carts afforded us the same views as if we were clinging to the outside of the train, and in a level of luxury on par with the worlds of Eotrom. The spaces were much bigger than they would seem on the outside. Wide halls seemed like streets overlooked by terraces of porches and windows above while markets and restaurants lay scattered across the ground level, tended to at all hours by the well-dressed and noticeably clean undead. And the best part of all, the entire train was temporally distorted.
Of course, Madame Opal and I never had to leave our private carts, and with our seconds, Perry and Rita, we didn't need to. So instead, we looked through false windows to gaze upon the passing landscape while I learned as much as I could about our new domain.
As I stated before. Never would I have believed the realms below the surface could stretch so deeply.
I thought myself so insignificant when I saw that line of golden light snaking through what appeared to be a plate. And then, the illusion was 'magnified.' More and more the image blew up until I came to realize how deep and how far into the ground we were to go.
In short, as deep as physically possible.
From Elijah's estate on the surface, at the base of the Rhar Mountains, we carved our way through 10,000 kilometers of rock and metal to reach the realm in which I spent my entire life. We made it to the Darkworld, but still, we plummeted deeper at a nonstop pace for days more, watching the landscape pass through the perspective of our spectral scout and preaching the Owl's wicked word to the thousand-plus passengers in the carts behind us.
According to the Owl's teachings, that was the tip of the mountain.
The unnamed, corruptive energy infamous to the realm was what marked the transition between the mound dwarf and rock gnome-occupied Underground and the Darkworld we were all familiar with. The border, however, was based on much more than that. 10,000 kilometers was said to be the average depth of the World Seas. At such depths, pressure saw water solidify into an exotic form of ice known as Ice VII. Additionally, it was at that depth that, below the ground surface, magma and molten metals were crushed under so much pressure that they no longer flowed as liquids, behaving more like solids whilst in liquid form. Everything above that was the Underground, where we left beacons for future undead to build refineries and chemical plants for the common metals and oil found in abundance up there.
Everything between a depth of 10,000 to 200,000 kilometers was the upper reaches of the Darkworld, the land of bioluminescent fungus and mutated creatures corrupted by the foul energies of the place. A place those of the Nox and thus we of the Black Plume designated as the Dark Sky. It was here where I spent my life in bondage. Now, with the train a few carts shorter, it would be the lands that would welcome our new acolytes.
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As we continued, passing through those furthest reaches, the Owl's Feathers taught us that such depths were the transitional area of plate tectonics, where rock and magma no longer flowed to push mountains into the sky or rip landscapes apart. As such, the realm grew to be more exotic, with wildly fluctuating temperatures in various regions.
We saw what he meant through the false windows displaying massive steaming tunnels and glowing walls of magma alike. Molten metals, Opal corrected me without fail. But I digress. Due to the geography above, we learned that ores containing metals with high melting points like tungsten, mithral, and adamantine often fell through less dense areas of rock or magma and heated metals above, clumping into large bodies until they gained enough mass to fall through to the next layer.
Those chunks had enough heat to melt through rock and ice easily, forming vast caverns and tunnels that become exotic landscapes and hot spots as the, often city-sized deposits become insulated in stone and cooled slowly over time. That, I learned, was the reasoning behind flowing water being a common sight despite us descending further by the second. But so too did I learn that the vastness of those caverns made this the most populated region of the Darkworld, where caverns could bloom to the size of the counties and provinces far above. And though it took a fair detour to maneuver around civilized caverns or tunnels filled with life, we eventually found a vast and relatively dead cavern to leave a few carts behind in. Yet, we descended further.
We tunneled beyond the 400,000-kilometer mark and continued down to 900,000 kilometers. Down to a place not even Opal, or any of us other than the Owl had seen. One that made us erupt in zealous prayer by witnessing its grandeur.
"The True Darkworld." The Owl made his presence just to declare its name to us. It was a gelid expanse of almost nothing but ice and precious metals crushed to unbelievable densities. Called 'True', because its caverns spanned tens of thousands of kilometers in all dimensions, in some cases equating to the realms found above. Many of them mirrored entire surface continents. This one, however, was not the case. It was still vast enough to give the illusion of being outdoors, however, with skies as high as the surface, curtained by mountainous pillars of dense metal and colossal bioluminescent roots.
Even more grand was the abundance of material that passed by our eyes. The depth was so grand that it seemed rocks and gemstones had been forced out of the walls, leaving walls and pillars of dense and highly pure ore painted with a mural of exotic ice white, adamantine gray-green, and mithral gray-silver, standing between dust deserts, mushroom forests, mossy hills, slime swamps, and hard water seas.
Rather than raise a world in the sky, the Owl explained, the worlds of the Black Plume would be here, in the True Darkworld, filled with hundreds of millions of individuals graced by twilight to thrive in the darkness. Indeed, many of the carts remained in that vast expanse. Yet, more continued down another 5,000 kilometers through the impossible-to-mine metal; but the interdimensional drill snaked on all the same, breaching through to an entirely new realm in just a few hours.
That realm was the Deep Dark. A realm almost absent of rock and ice entirely.
Set between 900,000 and 1.4 million kilometers underground, the metals were compressed to their maximum, a state the Owl called, 'Degenerate Matter.' That compression- that pressure led to an ambient temperature high enough to melt any ambient ice in the area, in turn cooling down the caverns to a reasonable level. But the problem was the structure itself. Being in a Degenerate state, the Owl explained through the aid of a vision, made mining the already hard mithral and adamantine nearly impossible even for the heartiest gray dwarf. Instead, any creature, civilized or not, would find a naturally occurring chamber to occupy and use as a vault. Assuming they could descend this far in the first place.
As our ride has shown us, however, we had no such problems. Indeed, the Deep Dark would be where the Exalted Gloom's riders and the high clergy of the Plume would train. But still, it wasn't the end of the line.
Unbeknownst even to the undead Shadeforge King, there were four thousand kilometers of degenerate matter separating the Underdark from a corruption-less realm known only to those associated with the Nox.
The Abyss.
Like one of a thousand air bubbles in a pan of boiling water- or one of the trillions of support arches spread across the realms- pockets like the ones we arrived in were scattered across the Mortal Plane from rim to edge as if to act as supports for the uncountable tons of material above us. Or, that was the theory.
Only five thousand kilometers of open caverns separated that ceiling from 1,000 kilometers of degenerate matter on the floor that, in itself, created a barrier between us and the Mortal Plane's foundation: the indestructible material the Owl referred to as Telinite. Indeed, this was the closest one could physically get to the Underworld without approaching the gate in Hell. A perfectly square space with a perfectly smooth floor measuring 2,500 kilometers to each side, ending in sheer cliffs for walls that rounded up into fan-vaulted ceilings that seemed both natural and handmade.
We erupted in praise as the Owl flapped down from the train and stood to take on the darker form of our God, appearing just like him as all our Doppelgangers would. He cradled a shade tree in his arms - a miniaturized one - and from his pit of darkness came a flood of stone, water, seeds, and other materials not native to this place. They spun about the air around him, at least until the Owl plucked an acorn off the shade tree to imbue it with twilight- a blessing to have it persist dually on many things. Light and darkness. Pestilence and Purity. Metal and Blood. Life and Death.
As he would with a divine tree seed, the Owl sowed the Dusk Tree alongside a divine wise rock, buried atop the mountain of material he pulled from his darkness, and with a final burst of deep blue, sea green, and gilded black energy, the vast expanse around us changed in an instant.
Our praises rose to a pitch that seemed to vibrate the walls around us, even as they bloomed and expanded to distances far beyond what they once were. The walls and ceiling seemed to be chased by the arcane veins of golds, purples, oranges, and blacks spreading in each cardinal direction and down into the abyssal sea as much as the ascending mountain, inverted on the ceiling to form a mound for the Dusk Tree, sown in the heart of the Bodhi Peninsula.
Those burrowing roots uplifted the stalactites that had grown along the ceiling, creating floating hills or castles suspended above the abyssal expanse beneath the inverted tree, dusted with the same black, violet, gold, and orange flora as the verdant Duskwoods sprawled around the tree, filled already with felines both big and small, exploring their new territories from the trees to the hills. Minks, badgers, ferrets, and werewolves were digging through the fresh soil introduced to the dank cavern to begin mining the dense material above. Otters and beavers got to work exploring the abyssal waters to build waterways and dams. Dusk rodents and gloom serpents slithered through the eternal shade, hiding forever from the silent killers of the eternal twilight.
All of those creatures were venerated, of course. But none so much as owls. Owls and Shadow Dragons. Thus it meant everything to us when our newly fledged dusk owls descended upon me and Opal, bestowing me a divine wise rock, and Madame Opal, a Divine Tree seed. Moreover, they spoke to us. Mine introduced itself as Dewie and told me to throw my rock at one of the floating boulders to make a nest while Madame Opal's told her to wait until the Owl instructed her to plant the tree and instead, do as I did and raise her tower. And so, Madame Opal went to the alcoves at the southern wall to raise her blood-powered gothic tower of precious metals, gilded stone, and darkened gold. I followed to raise my tower in the alcove across from hers, creating my nest from the same materials.
The other creatures of the night descended upon the undead, giving them tasks to turn this place into a true Sanctuary. Meanwhile, our seconds, Perry and Rita took their seconds, Daniella and Newton, and organized the other prospective members of the Body behind them. As did Grotto and Mika with the members of the Talon; as well as Limy and Grooshk from the Beak; and Kele and Art from the Nest.
All of the groups were vastly different in terms of purpose and worship. But, as they stood before us as silently as the skeletons, I could hear their hearts screaming in tandem for the same thing as mine.
And so, we began.