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" />

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>“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>

Described by experts as akin to a cube, with six different facets meeting in different places:<ref name=":3"/>

The most accessable 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 prominant - 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> Deeper layers of this 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><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>

"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.<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><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><ref>“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>

Filled with strange, faceless Others who prey on ghosts and astral travellers.<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=":0" />

Fauna

• Incarnations
• Echos
• Ghand
• Meninx
• Wizened

References

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