Ruins

The realm of destruction. Serves to "break down" immaterial things such as ghosts and complex spirits, just as the Abyss breaks down material things.<ref name=":0">[2.7] Location Diary</ref>

The Ruins has semi-literal layers to it, with deeper layers being smaller (allowing for faster travel) and more hostile,<ref>Snowdrop jumped in as the water exploded out, washing over everything around, and swallowing Avery up, taking her elsewhere.

Brownies chased and they seemed a lot less bothered by the Ruins this time around.

Giving her no choice but to descend.

Descending into a scene fresh in her memory, watching a fellow student slip and fall down a riverbank, head and face smashing into rocks. -excerpt from Gone Ahead 7.7</ref><ref name=map>“We might need clothing for rough weather,” Lucy said. “Remember the simulation? Deeper Ruins?”
[...]
“You pay the entry fee,” Jessica told them. “We need to dive deep if we’re going to be able to cross. The Ruins map out emotions, emotional imprints, and the wilderness is hard to cross because there isn’t much.” - excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.10</ref> and the deepest layers requiring one shed one's body to reach.^{[citation needed]} Travel between the layers may be accomplished physically or magically.<ref>“Climb,” Jessica said. “Get out. Draw on the connections to the items you gave the echoes. Reel them in, reel yourself up.”

Snowdrop wriggled energetically in Avery’s pocket.

“Snowdrop knows- knows ways to get around, around here, I think,” Avery said, wincing as an echo grazed her.
[...]
They climbed. Out of the tunnel, then up the side of the hill.

Toward familiar ground. They’d been approximately here, a while ago.
[...]
Snowdrop climbed free of her pocket. She led them to a hollow between tree and bridge, up through gutter-water, and to the bridge itself.

To a shallower part of the Ruins, like where they’d encountered the eyeball collector. Not all that far from here.

Avery reached for her connection to the photograph and memory, then gently reeled it in.

As she did, the world came more clearly into focus. Like the rays of light that could appear around light sources when squinting, the rainfall went in and out of focus. - excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.10</ref>

It maps to strong emotions so humans in cities would make for good stuff to make a local facet of the Ruins,<ref name=map/> this also applies to animals and similar but due to the less dense population of the wider wilderness there is less Ruins matter there in comparison.

Described by experts as akin to a cube or other playing dice, with multiple different facets meeting to form different places:<ref name=":3"/>

The most accessible aspect of the Ruins is the region that combines the facets of dampness and darkness, depression and apprehension.<ref name=":3">Jessica had described the ruins as being like a cube. The side they were closest to and most familiar with was at the edge of two sides, wet and dark. Close to depression and apprehension. Humans and civilization dwelt pretty close to that. They’d taken a side track, now.

The things that lived here in this cold were well past depression and into grief and despair. The people who lived in those emotions were far removed from things- their homes and rooms like cabins in remote wilderness. Animals were far more familiar with that resigned despair, starved and trapped, so they occupied a lot of this space. Their echoes were strongest here. Like the deer’s. - Excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.3</ref> Resembles the real world, but with damage that has been repaired in the real world still present. Damage and problems which annoyed people in the real world are more prominent - it's always raining, there's rust/damaged paint/cracks etc everywhere which annoyed people in the real world, and the only buildings which are standing are those which people cared about and extensively repaired. Roads are deep pits, with crosswalks being rope bridges over them.<ref name=":0" /> Largely limited to urban areas, which makes it unpleasant for goblins.<ref>Verona held out the nugget, then held it back as Cherry reached for it. “Do you go to the Ruins at all?”

“Not much,” Cherrypop said, still reaching, wobbling on her perch of cans. “It’s mostly made up of stuff Goblins can’t deal with. Stuffed metal.”

“Stuffed metal?”
[...]
“Metal with water running through it, like pipes,” Cherrypop said. “Metal with electricity running through it. Metal that’s hot, not so common. Metal with gas, like more, funner pipes. Metal with sand or rock running through it would be the same, but that’s rare. Hurts to be near, makes us weak. Lots of it in the Ruins. The other places we’d normally go are missing.” - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.7</ref> It's damaging to spirits that exist there over the long term, though some have been able to deal with them.<ref name=":4">“Who would go to the ruins?  What Others are comfortable there?”

The two goblins talked over one another,  Verona held up a hand, then pointed.

“The Choir has a bunch of kids there most of the time,” Gash said.

“Good.  Munch?”

“There aren’t many who go there because they like it.  The Ruins are this thing, for a lot of Others, like they’re in a tunnel, there’s a light of an incoming train, but they can’t tell how far behind them it is.  Echos, incarnations, especially the weak incarnations, uhhh, spirits, but not all spirits.  The special ones.”

“Like Edith.”

“Yeh,” Munch confirmed.  “She could go there, but it wouldn’t be fun.  Rain to you or me, acid to her.”

“But it would be a potential hiding place.  She could go there on her own?”

Munch gave her a lopsided shrug with lopsided shoulders.  “Yeah, sure.” - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.7</ref>

Deeper layers of The Ruins are similar, but with more obviously missing terrain pressed together, harder rain and far more echoes everywhere.<ref>The world was broken up and crowded, and drenched in rain. The school was there, surrounded by broken earth, water coming down from the trees with enough force and vigor to carve out moats. The broken earth formed an island, and the island was pressed up against other, similar spaces. Towns. Roads were decrepit, eaten-through like swiss cheese or leaves that caterpillars had gotten at, and when enough of them had broken up, they’d pressed in close, mashing together.

Images swept past Avery. Some rude, others violent, others scary. Many were like Lucy’s memory of the man who she’d been in the laughing circle with. Barely pieced together, or off, blurry.

They were wading through a crowd, on broken ground that was sometimes sloped, sometimes deceptive in how intact it was or wasn’t, water pouring down around them like a light stream or river, cold enough to numb.
[...]
They were covering a lot of ground, she realized. The areas they moved through were all residential, all small towns, all compressed down to their most populated, emotionally active areas.
[...]
Echoes continued to lance through them. Water rolled past them, sometimes up to mid-calf, sometimes with enough force that she slid back a few feet with both feet firmly planted. - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.10</ref>

Another region of the Ruins is the Veil - filled with building shrouded in mist, dominated by emotions of anticipation, wariness, and attentiveness. Anger may be represented by desolate ruins.<ref>Another facet of the Ruins. Buildings loomed on either side, only vague silhouettes, shrouded by fog.

Figures darted in and out, or they watched, obscured. Echoes moved through the fog as well, and they didn’t have the wide, sweeping effects that the other echoes Avery had run into did. These were tighter, more personal. Focused on their own things. They brushed up against Avery, surprising, and pushing ideas and things into her head. Desires, wantings…

“Fog of… love?” Avery asked.

“Attentiveness, wariness, anticipation, the veil that tempts interest,” Jessica said. “Very different, and we aren’t staying long.”
[...]
“Reminds me of my Sight,” Avery mused, looking around.

“The veil?” Jessica asked.

“Yeah. Mist.”

“Yeah. I’ve heard people theorize that the Sight might lean on these sorts of things, depending on who we are. Desolate ruins for anger, darkness for fear and apprehension. Cold for mourning.” - excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.3</ref> Another region is the one dominated by grief and despair - cold, a wilderness far from civilization, with animal echoes dominant<ref name=":3" />, prone to collapse into other regions if the echo-fabric is damaged.<ref> “But we don’t want to do that. This place is built of scenes like this. Especially this facet of the Ruins. Take out one piece, and things will collapse inward.”

“Things? Other scenes?” Avery asked.

Jessica nodded. Then she crouched. “Look. See how wet the ground is?”

Avery nodded. The deer’s trampling footsteps as it danced, trying to free itself, were making the ground a muddy puddle beneath it.

“There’s also water running down the branches. Now see how dark it is?”

The grouping of trees blocked out most of the light, not that there was a ton of light here. It made the whites of the deer’s eyes and teeth stand out more. Front legs kicked at the air.

“Yeah. I see it.”

“Clean salt can remove that scene from this tapestry, but you’d plunge back into Ruins more familiar to you if you tried.”

“Rain and darkness.”- excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.3</ref><ref>And with the scene gone, things began to slide around. A mini-avalanche, a bit of water. A tree fell, and let snow start to tumble. What looked like a hill flattened out into a sharp slope.
All converging on or aiming at the location where the echo had been. More echoes loomed at the ridge, ready to take up residence in the bowl-shaped depression.
[...]
They navigated their way away from the cloud of snow, and Avery had a view of the echoes colliding and wrestling with one another. Two seemed to merge, and might have become kings of that particular pit if they weren’t torn in half by something animal that was hidden by snow.

It looked like that would take a little while to resolve. Each one had been pulled there by the absence of the car family, and now that they were close, they were switching to their ‘mad desperation’ states. - excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.3</ref> There are connection points to other realms like the Abyss at certain places.<ref>They walked up to a lakeside.

“Careful on the ice. If you fall through, you end up in the Abyss, not the Ruins, and it’s a lot harder to get out,” Jessica said. - excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.3</ref>

Filled with strange, faceless Others who prey on ghosts and astral travelers.<ref>Silent, like an eel, something with a head as big as one of the ruined buildings off to the side slipped by. Eyeless, legless, skimming over the water and ragged ground.
[...]
With skin as white as paper and slightly melted, like candle wax, slick with rain, a creature sat, as large as a building. It reached out with long fingers to pick ghosts out of the crowd.

Jessica seemed wary of that one.
[...]
Echoes scampered out of the way. Four, five, or six indistinct shapes, slick and fishlike, pulled away from the gloom. Avery hadn’t even seen them.

“Hurry. Go, go, before it dims,” Jessica told them.

They hurried.

The morass of dark, slimy things closed in behind them as the light passed. - Excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.10</ref><ref name=":0" /> Ghosts in the real world are just the "tip of the iceberg" of their true form in the Ruins (larger and blurred together), while ghosts too weak to manifest in reality are everywhere here. Some Incarnations and related beings can also be found here occasionally.<ref name=":09">The Ruins seem to be about emotion and the cost of that emotion. The Others are kind of like that. They make you feel stuff but they don’t really show much.

They don’t tend to have faces, or their faces are hidden. They tend to be very dark and ominous, like presences, weirdly solid for a place that’s all aobut things that aren’t solid. Their role is to find + tear down the complex spirits and echoes as a kind of recycling and clean up. I guess if they got their hands on a human, they’d take stuff away?

[Floating ghost lady]

They’re slow and pretty content to let their food come to them but with the ‘rising water’ analogy, and their ties to things like death, and dream, and other fundamental forces of the unvierse + crap, we think they might be really terminator-like. Not like slasher killers (that’s apparently Bogeymen) but slow, steady, dangerous, + they come at you forever.

[Large shadowy figure with eye necklace]

The one we ran into was all about eyes. If echoes are all about specific events, and incarnations are all about like, one major thing, then they might be specialized?
[...]
There’s also Incarnations, which represent concepts but we didn’t see anything except the Hungry Choir. - [2.7] Location Diary</ref><ref name=":4"/>

Wraith Storms

As a feature of the Ruins Wraith storms show up as well the echoes within the Ruins welling up and pushing out into the real world.<ref>In a house nearby, an Echo sparked into existence, fleeting, borne of fury, and then was claimed by the Ruins almost immediately. It would not trouble Kennet, but where it appeared, others might emerge. If enough similar echoes appeared, they might stack together and bleed out of the ruins as a wraith, if they had enough commonalities and external power to draw on. The Carmine Blood all but guaranteed there was enough of that external power, and enough events for a wraith to emerge. - Excerpt from One After Another 10.b</ref>

Treasure

"Treasures" can sometimes be found in the Ruins, things filled with the concentrated emotional energy that has been shed by the echoes there, Warmth to fight the cold, light to fight the darkness, etc. Power<ref>“Rough patch ahead,” Jessica announced.

She could talk in the midst of all of this?

Jessica reached into a pocket, then lifted up a bottle with what looked like a firefly within.

It flashed, flickered, then glowed, shedding a broad orange light.

Echoes scampered out of the way. Four, five, or six indistinct shapes, slick and fishlike, pulled away from the gloom. Avery hadn’t even seen them.

“Hurry. Go, go, before it dims,” Jessica told them. - excerpt from Leaving a Mark 4.10</ref> Some Others are known to carry these treasures around with them, such as the Ghand (see below),<ref name=g1>“When I get a chance to learn or do something new, I start with the essentials. Stuff that lets me stay in the Ruins longer. Because not much ruins my day more than seeing a glimpse of what I’m after and then having to leave it behind because I have to come up for air. Or food. Or light. [...] Power concentrates, down there. You might see something bright or something that still glimmers, when so little can. Sometimes that’s an echo, or a bird in a rusty birdcage that some skinny guy is carting around. The trick that lets me ‘lose count’ of my snacks and never run out was one of those things.” - excerpt from Gone Ahead 7.9</ref> or use it as a trap.<ref>Snow was pointing at a distant house. Where every other place seemed so dim, unlit within, there was a warm red light glowing within that place, to the point it lit up the exterior walls.

“In nearly any other circumstance, I’d go there,” Jessica stated, staring.

“What is it?”

“Treasure. Distilled power. Echoes and things shuck off goodness, joy, and serenity here, and those things are pushed away by the grief, sadness, and despair. Those scraps gather and concentrate in a hallow, which pulls in more. Most are small. An apple that glows with a light within, in a dark part of the Ruins, or a small mouse that warms like a fireside without burning flesh. Even those are valuable.”

“That doesn’t look small,” Avery noted.

“No. Which makes me think it’s bait.” - excerpt from Vanishing Points 8.3</ref>

Residents

• Echoes the matter of which the Ruins are built.
• Ghand<ref name=g2>The Ruins are a slice of the cosmos where the abstract is processed, reduced down to its constituent elements. When there is something abstract but, for lack of a better word, 'precious', the Ghend (drawn from proto-Indo-European 'to take, seize') are the covetous forces that seek to protect them.
  
  Many Ghend start out as ghosts who are drawn to bright spirits, crystal clear echoes, and the tropes of the incarnate forces of the world. They keep these things, and may nurture them (feeding the living), build protective enclosures, or otherwise attend to them. Through this they draw power from them as a human might warm themselves by the fire. Often the 'fire' in this case will burn away the impurities and abstract, making Ghend gradually more clean, with less rough edges or 'echo' to their echoes. Many are naked (the clothes burned away) with very pale or dark skin with very little dirt or 'mess' on them, or have simple, clean clothing. They are moths that bear their own candleflames. Not especially powerful or influential, some may become merchants or thinking individuals, but they are mostly tracked by Ruins-delvers who know that where a Ghend is seen, their treasure is often hidden close by. - Wildbow on Discord</ref>Others that have found treasure to call their own, their possession of it changes them and some can elevate themselves with it, more often than not they become targets. A not uncommon sight in the Ruins.<ref name=g2/>
• Incarnations
• Meninx<ref>The native denizens of the Ruins are often night-black, eyeless, and groping, dwelling in the lower areas with the heavier feelings, managing the parts of the universe that resolve and devour the residual spiritual forces, psychic echoes, and other abstract forces that the universe might otherwise hold onto. But some Ruins-Dwellers, which may come from a variety of origins (natural entity, mature ghend, other Others who've been too saturated with Ruins-stuff) maintain or develop the strength to rise to the higher ruins, where the light can bleach parts of them white and bake them hard, and there is beauty to be found once ichor and shadow are wiped away. Curious, sometimes childlike or naive, they grow in a staggered, uneven way, developing wisdom, interests, or wherewithal, often collecting or gravitating toward the glimmers of the things in the Ruins that still shine, such as those held by Ghends. Some may make it a mission of theirs to resolve snares or wraith storms. Rarely lords unto themselves, as those with the stature or ability may slip out to the spirit or become minor deities. Knowing and maintaining the acquaintance of a Meninx can be a family defining trait for necromancer families or those working in higher Ruins, and meeting a Meninx can be what breaks someone accidentally entering the Ruins (such as by astral traveling) into the practice - their naivety or open natures make then unabashed about the risks.
  
  Meninx often have the nature of a wide eyed child, curious and unpredictable, with frames and physical power that put them above ninety-five out of every hundred Ruins-dwellers, at a minimum. These two things in combination are worth keeping in mind at all times. They have particular eating habits, often seeking specific types of echo or forms of energy, and may possess powers like emotion-altering screams or transformations into darker, aggressive versions of themselves. - Wildbow on Discord</ref> - Are among the top tier heavy hitters of Ruins denizens, can easily be a Patron for practitioners. Combining power with curiosity can make a disturbing foe.
• Wizened<ref>The Wizened are natural extensions of a population that is broadly cut off and weakened by events such as war, drought, and collective poverty. Among this population, the living and dying may be set apart by their individual grit or devised reasons for persisting. A dream, a cause, a habit, family... when these reasons occlude the withering or diminished person, we get the Ruins-dwelling Wizened. Often emaciated or weak, the Wizened will keep to one place and may be very still or stuck in a routine, a corrupted reflection of whatever it was that kept them going; writing on walls, making charms, or making and tending a 'dinner table' of family members fashioned with decaying meats or collected bodies. If disturbed they may violently lash out. They are not a serious threat in a fight; they are strong and driven and may wound, but they can often be struck down in a single blow.
  
  They pose two issues for practitioners, however; the first being that they are something of a hazard for astral travelers, echoes, and other immaterial forces, and for the psychically sensitive. Left idle, they create a nebulous area of hazardous terrain for the spiritual, and when disturbed, they 'flare', like an echo at its strongest. This effect could be called a mystical flashbang, and may stun or afflict the target long enough for the Wizened to get their hands on the immaterial, which they can wound just as easily as they can the material.
  
  The second issue is that their 'alerted' state tends to attract Others in a wide proximity, including echoes, vestiges, and other psychically greedy entities, even bringing them in from adjacent realms. The Wizened may shriek or cause a commotion, charging in blindly and die in a single blow, but their attention often heralds an imminent onslaught of everything the practitioners were hoping to sidestep. In groups this effect can compound. Some predatory Others may partner with the Wizened for the help in hunting. - Wildbow on Discord</ref> - a hazard when working a Ruins section adjacent to a dilapidated urban area, can easily interact with the material as the immaterial. If alerted they can 'flare' in a way that is blinding to any observer, and will bringing denizens from both the wider Ruins and adjacent realms.
• Typhlotic - the various Ruins predators that feast on echoes
  • Havours - mutated examples of such.

References

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