Hollow Heart and the Darkness

As the Psychonaut steps into the ring, They are bathed in the lights from the spiraling galaxies that hang impossibly overhead. In the Foglands, a perpetual blood red twilight washes over the face of any visiting Pasychonauts. In the perpetual night of the Mirrored city arcing currents of electricity and neon reflect off the smog and smoke that threaten to drown the city and any unwary Psychonauts. In Arcadia, sun and moon and firelight alone will light the Psychonaut's face. In the Painted Labyrinth, phosphorescent fungi climb the walls and bioluminescent creatures flit through air and stagnant pools of water, casting eerie light by which a Psychonaut may navigate the dangerous tunnels.

But in the Hollow Heart, there is no light.

Dark as the human mind from which the Shadowlands is birthed and in which it the Shadowlands grow. Dark, but not still. The Hollow Heart does thrum with what can only be called a heartbeat. The sense that the Psychonaut receives upon arriving in the Hollow Heart, is that one has been swallowed by some great creature. When Jonah was swallowed by the whale or "greate fyshe," the sense he received would have been similar. And perhaps Jonah had found a way into the Hollow Heart under its other common name: the Hidden Heart.

The Hollow Heart is also the Hard drive of the Shadowlands. The Shadowlands is procedurally generated like an unfolding fractal flower from the stories encoded into the fractal mirrored rooms of the Hollow Heart. A Psychonaut who manages to make the arduous and maliciously concealed journey to the Hidden Heart will find themselves with the entirety of the Shadowlands at their fingertips. The Universe of Stories would be theirs to control and reshape, if they can master the manner in which the Hollow Heart encodes and projects its store of tales out into the world. And, while a Psychonaut who unlocks the secrets of the Hollow Heart can reshape the Shadowlands, the stories and the archetypes which underpin the universe and which are its basis are not changeable from Hollow Heart.

And it is rumored among the veteran Psychonauts that the Hollow Heart is actually the top most layer of a vast underground network of minor realms. But what these are, a Psychonaut will have to discover elsewhere.

• Mirrored Here: https://goodcult.blogspot.com/2018/05/blood-red-wednesdays-hollow-heart-and.html

The Hell Keys

There are numerous minor realms in the Shadowlands. None of them are so well established as the Realms of Fair Folk. Their realms connect to all the major realms and the liminal realms. And the doors to the various demenses in this realm are the Hell keys.

Death in Arcardia

The Guides of the Fallen

The concept of death to the Free Peoples would sound very foreign to the Civilized folk of the Glass City. The City of Mirrors sees death as a reaper, personified in various guises by the Broken, from Falsenight to Starheart and on. To the Free Peoples, death splits along two lines, neither of them an end but a beginning. As these are broad abstract concepts, they have been personified as a married couple: the Masculine Little Green Man and the Hermaphroditic Rainbow Moth.

The Little Green Man

The great instructor and the regenerator. The death of the Little Green Man is the death of green of the forest in face of cold of the darkening solstice. As autumn draws to a close, death creeps in and the world goes quiet. As Winter passes and the Rains come, life returns, regenerating from apparent devastation. The leaves are not the same leaves, the fruits are not the same fruits, but the pattern is the same. The Little Green Man does not pretend that death cannot reach us, but points out that death cannot stop us. What we have taught the next generation lives on in the next generation, they are the rains and the coming spring and summer, as their teachers are the Autumn and the inevitable cold of the Dark Moons. Death is merely a pause: breath in, hold, breath out. 

The out shell looks different, but the pattern remains, the story continues to unfold. Death is merely an interruption. Do not fear it, prepare for it and the next generation will carry your tale for eternity and you will never truly be dead.

Death is the source of all life in Arcadia. Don't fear the reaper.

The Rainbow Moth

As the Little Green Man personifies death as a regeneration, so the Rainbow Moth personifies death as a transformation. From Larva to Pupa to Adult, the Rainbow Moth is the blossoming of something new and greater- death as a shedding of lesser form. Before death, the inhabitant was small and frail and merely physical in form. Now, in death, the inhabitant's greater form bursts forth: a powerful set of accomplishments and ideals that they have lived well enough to have added to the archetypes of the Freepath and the stories of the Tribe itself. Freed from the constraints of the body, the life that the inhabitant lives becomes more an greater than said life every could have been while the inhabitant was alive.

The Rainbow Moth also venerates sacrifice and legacy and may be a little too comfortable with the idea of dying well for a great cause, but when a warrior seeks to die gloriously to buy the tribe time to retreat as the Harvester and the Men of Black and White bear down upon a village, it is to the Rainbow Moth that said Warrior says invocations.

The Upcoming Luni-Solar Year

The end of the Full Dark is coming. The new Luni-Solar Year starts on Jan 16, of 2018. There's a weird thing to say huh? Use another calendar to explain when calendar starts. Oh well.

A closer look at the Wendigo

All monsters begin as something mundane. The fractal begins with simple rules, and then spirals out into something more, and sometimes, something much worse. The origins of the Giants are unknown to the Psychonauts, but the origins of the Wendigo are not. The Wendigo were once human.  

The Wendigo are what happens when the hunger of the Grey Locust is left wild and uncontained by the Locust King and the constraints that the Grey places upon the Hungry Empire in an attempt to maintain its cold order.   

The hunger drives them, and in the early stages they still seem human.  

The Stillborn  

From a distance, one might mistake the Stillborn for people. Up close, the mistake is unlikely. The Stillborn's skill has gone white and chalky, and clouds of dry skin cells explode around them with sudden movements. Their eyes have gone milky blue-white and the skin has tightened all across the face to give the eyes a sunken look. The Stillborn's hair has bleached to translucent silver and seems to defy gravity, floating about the skull like an unholy halo.   

The Stillborn still speak, but their language is unintelligible to any non-wendigo. They have their own culture and mythology, those none who understand it are able to transmit it back to those who still understand human speech. The path to hunger is nearly always a one way journey.   

The Hungry Ghost  

As the body is consumed by the hunger, the Stillborn go from emaciated to truly skeletal, with skin stretched so tightly of bone and sinew that they could be mistaken for desiccated corpses if they choose to remain still. The teeth sharpen and elongate and the eyes decompose completely in the head, replaced by cold blue lights. At this point, the Wendigo is known as a Hungry Ghost. The Hungry Ghost, like the Stillborn army, still physically eat. However, they no longer attempt to cook their food, and seem unable to digest it- as the food sits inside their huge distended bellies.   

The Ravener  

The final state of deterioration. The Wendigo's head is now a skull with glowing eyes, resembling nothing so much as the terrible love child of an elk and a bear. Carnivores teeth poke out of a herbivore's jaw. A predator's eyes sit uneasy in the skull of a prey animal. What skin remains is ragged and wispy and flutters in the slightest breeze. The Ravener is an animate skeleton that glows with a cold blue light. The body of the skeleton too is twisted, elongated and ape-like, but with the hooves of an ungulate, the ribcage and fore paws of a polar bear, and bizarre protrusions extending from the individual vertebra of the spinal column.      

The Recurrence of the Tower

Whether its the Tower of Retribution in Berserk or Kami's Watch Tower in Dragon Ball, The Tower of Babel in Ancient myth or the New Tower of Babel in the film Metropolis, The Dark Tower quoted in King Lear or the Dark Tower in the works of Stephen King; no matter the form of the story, epic tales grow towers like damp houses grow mold.

 

The Leviathan

The Fading Lake and the Drowned City are not deep bodies of water for the most part, but there are deep parts. And in those areas, sink holes and trenches, buried caverns formed of sunken bits of a long past golden; here the Leviathan makes its nest.

Most of the time, the Leviathan is content to remain hidden beneath the waves, feeding upon whatever has left the scars in its mutilated hide. Most of the time. Some of the time, the great giant sea monster explodes up to the surface and devours settlements on the Coast. Like the Behemoth, the Leviathan is singular. There is no more than one to bear the name. Unlike the Behemoth, the Leviathan is predatory, and those sentient beings that it devours it certainly does not devour by accident.

Unlike the Behemoth, there are not structures on the back of Leviathan that the Psychonauts might plunder. But when the Leviathan is active, the ancient underwater tunnels and structures where it normally sleeps are open for exploration by the bold and near suicidal. But psychonauts should be wary. The Leviathan got its scars somewhere.