The Tartarian Gate
Mortals go to Hell as punishment for a sinful life when they die. Where do dead gods go when they've been cast out?The Tartarian Gate is a vine-choked circle of black metal ranging over a mile across with countless flailing limbs and heads of titanic size struggling to emerge from whatever black void lies beneath. The lands around the Gate have darkened, with streams and lakes becoming bubbling tar and plants feeble. Even sunlight becomes bleak near the Gate, almost grey when directly over the Gate itself. Decades of clawing and scraping by desperate limbs have dug deep furrows in the ground immediately around the Gate, though the black metal itself is unblemished.
Hell Is Other Gods
Before the End of All Things, the Tartarian Gates was the path to a hellish dimension of darkness and an empty void where the gods disposed of defeated or disgraced kin. Others banished their abominable children through Tartarian Gate to be forgotten. In time, those who dwelled in the dark forgot their old selves and became mad undead things, desperate and hungry. For thousands of years, they clawed and scratched against the Gate in the darkness, the other gods deaf to their wails. Then the End of All Things happened, and the Gate was cast open.
In the chaos of the End, the prisoners flooded out of the Gate - many were destroyed in the titanic battles that were unfolding as the universe cracked. When the planes collapsed into one, so too was the Gate sent crashing into Ithekshem's still rapidly reforming landscape. The great circle that had once hovered in the dead void between stars and locked for all time was now open, the screams of dead divinities reshaping the land around it.
When every undead monster within tried to escape at once in a mindless fury, their haste became another prison. They jammed themselves into the narrow circle, unable to break it open, and their enormous bodies crowding the only exit until none of them could enter Ithekshem.
It is, at best, a fragile chain.
Magic, Divine and Dead
The entirety of the Gate functions as a powerful and uncontrollable Demesnes of raw Necrotic energy, with the faintest trace of Divine to it. Access it is another matter entirely, but the flailing limbs of the dead gods sometimes loosen gobs of flesh or splinters of bone. These are potent components of necrotic energy, though some of them need to be put down before they can be used. The tar-like lakes and streams around the Gate bubble slowly with the screams of tormented Tartarian prisoners. When they pop, these screams are loosed on the world - if captured, they are another reagent of Necrotic energy.
Some of the prisoners of the Tartarian Gate have escaped their hell and now wander the world of Ithekshem as undead terrors.
by Miguel Eins
I'm really enjoying this world. This article is so evocative and creepy. Another giant source to mine for creativity.
Learn about the World of Wizard's Peak.
Thank you :D
Creator of Araea, Megacorpolis, and many others.