SURVIVAL DIFFICULTY:
Class 0
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A burial monument within The Grave, marking the still-dreaming corpse of the entity known as "The First of Knights". Image obtained through Via Cruento astral projection, blood tithe category horriblis.
The Grave is the lowermost Level of The Backrooms, without number or calculable depth, the cosmic nadir.
Description:
Discovery
The Grave is the destination of ensouled beings that die within The Backrooms or any of its itinerant subspaces.
For decades, it was presumed that death in The Backrooms functioned the same way it did in baseline reality. Evidence of an afterlife (or afterlives) was considered just as much an impossibility within the extradimension as it is on Earth, until psychodynamicist Dr. Ibrahim Figueroa suggested that the overall weakened realm-integument of The Backrooms could allow access to post-vital domains, if enough energy was provided.
To test this theory, a joint experiment was conducted to examine the integrity of The Backrooms’ spiritual partitions. The parties involved were as follows:
| Party | Role |
|---|---|
| Dr. Ibrahim Figueroa (and other select personnel from the Schola Obscura) | Spiritual architecture, baseline theory, astral shunt manifold configurations |
| The Conclave of Insurrectionists | Ritual stabilization, bloodworks, knowledge of the true name of EBORIATH, living sacrifices |
| EBORIATH, Archdemon of the Adverse Firmament | Arcane amplification, technical advisory |
| Bluesky Telecom™ | Funding, electromagnetic insulation, monitoring equipment, data security |
Initial trials were inconclusive, due to errors in the astral shunt array, moral impurity of sacrifices, and EBORIATH’s lies, but subsequent tightening of experimental procedures and resource procurement eventually led to success, and the first astrotelemetrically-verified images of The Grave resolved on visual recording equipment1. As visual fidelity and the rate of sacrifices increased, sacrificed individuals could occasionally be seen rising from bodies of water within The Grave, falling from the sky, appearing from behind stones, or manifesting in other ways.
Once the manifesting individuals were confirmed to be those sacrificed to the experiment less than three minutes prior, the experiment was halted, to be continued at a later date and under more a more secure ritual stricture.
Environment
Topographically, The Grave is not dissimilar from some environments found on Earth (or in a select few known exoworlds). The majority of the space is an identifiable landscape composed of earth, partially featured with hills, mountains, rivers, and other recognizable terrestrial landforms. Observed portions of the region thus far are colonized by plant life, though their specific species and makeup are unknown. Wind is frequent, and precipitation is occasional.
The Level undergoes a day/night cycle, but the periodicity is approximately 36 hours rather than 24. The Grave is illuminated not by a sun, but by what appears to be a geometrical array of moons or other non-plasmic celestial objects that each emit light at a different frequency. These different sources combine to provide light that is near-white in coloration. Additionally, the night sky within The Grave contains stars, but their arrangement is unknown, and appears to change at speeds that would violate the speed of light in baseline reality.
Most notably, the landscape of The Grave features monuments and structures associated with death and interment. Some of these are familiar headstones, grave markers, and tombs, but some are of dimensions grossly exceeding those needed for human-sized bodies. Other structures are entirely unfamiliar, but are believed to represent the graves of beings with existences outside of conventional human understanding. Several examples include:
- A city-sized complex of gray buildings, each surface of which is lined with stone mortuary shelves. Estimated to house over ten million corpses in a state of arrested decay, only very few of which are verifiably human. Notably, every human corpse in this complex thus far has been found headless, dressed in regal vestments with a crown or other form of royal headdress placed upon their chest.
- An extremely large two-handed sword2 driven into the earth at the center of what initial observations estimate is a meteoric impact crater, now flooded and eroded, indicating the causative impact took place more than 50,000 years ago. Approximately once every nine years, when a specific (unknown) star aligns with the sword’s hilt, a glowing inscription of omnicomprehensible runes appears in the sky above the crater and shines for exactly nine minutes and nine seconds. The inscription reads: “RESTS HERE THE CHAMPION, THE GRAND EMPYREAN, IMPERFECT AND GLORIOUS, FIRST OF KNIGHTS. HIS WORK IS DONE. YOU ARE SAVED.”
- A colossal mountain-sized machine, resembling hundreds of intricate cathedrals built on continuous track treads. This vehicle moves across the landscape of The Grave and has never been seen to stop, regardless of what is in its way. In each of its appearances, hymns can be heard coming from it, sung by no less than several thousand voices speaking an unknown language. The smoke emitted by its exhaust stacks occasionally gathers into clouds, which leave rain in its wake. Several of the rivers seen within The Grave are presumed to be a result of this machine’s movements.
- A statue several thousand feet tall, of an entity with eight arms of varying lengths and a head featuring hundreds of closed eyes. Its eight hands cradle an energetic construct resembling the singularity of a black hole. This object’s gravitational field draws in vortices of air, clouds, and small objects such as leaves, but does not appear to have any effect on the monument itself.
The fate of those arriving within The Grave is, ultimately, unknown. Visual contact with the few identifiable sacrifices sent there during the course of experimentation has only lasted for several minutes at the longest, and none have been seen since initial sighting. Experimentation of greater scope is currently being considered, as improved methodology and materials become available.
Currently, the only means of interface with The Grave is high-intensity Via Cruento astral projection, and the risks involved with this process make study infrequent. No individuals confirmed to have been sent to The Grave have ever been observed returning to realspace in any capacity, nor do they appear to have any means of transmitting information beyond the domain.
Entrances And Exits:
Entrances
Death.
Exits
None.
