Twilight

Just beyond the first veil, where the living heartbeat of Creation fades into stillborn silence, lies Twilight, also known to different people as the Shadow Realm, Darklands, World-Shade, Penumbra, Upside-Down, Abyss, Stíny, or the Other Side. It is a dark and decaying mirror-realm, an uncanny echo that clings to the living world like a black mould. A shadow that hungers.

Indeed, Twilight shadows and mirrors Creation, but imperfectly and slowly, always struggling and failing to catch up to the endless changes of the real world. Twilight cities are hollow, their streets silent and broken. Permanent structures - mountains, temples, great trees - are always present, yet everything ephemeral is fragile, or missing, or found in states of ruin. Shattered cups, torn banners, books whose pages crumble to dust at the lightest touch and whose ink spells only madness-muddled nonsense.

Some say that Twilight lies at the very edge of Creation, where it meets the Dead Dimensions and the endless Void Beyond. That this uncanny mirroring is a universe's defence mechanism, a thin layer of corrupted reality that, just like tarnish, seals and protects the healthy reality beneath it.

Upside Down concept art from Stranger Things

 

There is little light in Twilight. No sun, no stars, nothing but the suffocating blackness of perfect night. Torches sputter and even magical flames grow dim. Only occasionally is the realm's cimmerian firmament punctured by thunderstorms of red lightning, or contaminated by creeping clouds of bioluminescent, carcinogenic spores. Sunlight, if somehow cast into this realm, does not illuminate - it burns and scours away creatures and matter of Twilight, leaving behind only drifting motes of soot.

There is no water in Twilight, at all. While blood will remain in the veins and liquids in their bottles, any spilled drop or free-flowing stream rapidly dissipates into nothingness. Attempts to conjure water end in failure and water elementals perish screaming.

The vegetation of Twilight is sparse and terrible. The only things that truly grow there are black mould and wrixling vines, which feed on warmth and magic, respectively, rather than light. Trees stand as pale ghosts of their counterparts in Creation - dead and petrified, their branches twisted skyward in eternal agony. Leaves or grass collapse into ash when touched.

Yet Twilight's ashen bedrock bears one treasure the living world cannot produce - black iron ore that, once smelted with captured souls, can be forged into spectre-slaying soulsteel weaponry.

And rarely, strange monuments can be found in Twilight that are not a reflection of the mortal realm. Obsidian monoliths, inhuman statues, sprawling complexes of bleak geometry. Necromancers claim that these mark the entrances into the Labyrinth, a vast under-realm of impossible angles and shifting gravity. The Labyrinth is said to touch most worlds - including the Land of the Dead, the Dreamlands, and perhaps realms even older and odder.