The Below
Geography
The Layers
The Below is a layered, spherical plane of existence that has various levels descending down to the core. Each layer is said to be hellish in its own right, but the only eye witness accounts of The Below are from the topmost layer. Less than a dozen Mortals have ever visited The Below and returned and none have ever returned from any of the layers beneath the first.Fracture
The outermost layer of The Below is called Fracture. Fracture is the first layer that the souls of the damned arrive on after being delivered to damnation by Gos or Zat. Fracture is a massive oppressive desert with a cloudy tainted brown sky above and a grey sandy desert below. This layer is comprised of vast, empty terrain scorched by the heat of the Plane of Eternal Flame. On Fracture, souls are forced to walk around on the hot desert sand that is full of razor sharp pieces of obsidian under threat of being drawn further below. Bloody footprints crisscross the desert, as the Mortals here are forced to exist as a naked, perverted version of their corporeal form in which they can feel the pain of physical injury, but cannot die. Mortals are able to see other souls on this plane, but they appear as featureless and undetailed semi-transparent shadows or silhouettes and are unable to physically interact or hear one another. Mortals that stand still or rest begin to get pulled downward as the sand turns to quicksand, drawing the damned soul through the hot, razor sharp terrain. If a soul waits too long, they may become unable to free themselves once again. Once the damned soul gives up or waits too long and is drawn below, they spend weeks suffocating and unable to move in Fracture before falling through the bottom of Fracture and arriving in Cacophony.Cacophony
The next layer of The Below is Cacophony. Mortals deposited here by the sands of Fracture will suddenly find their sight, hearing, and skin sensation overwhelmed by the next layer of The Below, Cacophony. Mortals on Cacophony are surrounded by shrill piercing, clamorous sound that would shatter the hearing of Mortals on Jeharr. The sounds of Cacophony are said to be so loud as to be unimpeded by hands placed over the ears. Despite being beneath Fracture, Cacophony is full of light. Mortals in Cacophony will experience offensive bright flashes of multicolored light and see disturbing hallucinations. Not even closed eyes will protect from the visual attack, as their eyelids become fully transparent on this layer. Finally, residents of Cacophony will be assualted with prickling, crawling sensations all over their bodies that are so severe as to cause the Mortals of Cacophony to be entirely unable to remain still, moving, scratching, and writhing constantly. Mortals blindly move around on this level, their screams drowned out by the piercing, hellish ensemble of screeching metal and blood curdling crunching. It is unknown what prompts the transition to the next layer or how the transition takes place, some souls are said to be eternally lost on this layer forever waiting to move on. Following decades of torture, the noise, visuals, and sensations of Cacophony cease and the Mortal is on the next layer of The Below, Affliction.Affliction
When first arriving in Affliction, the Mortal will find themselves in their scratched and scarred body, though their flesh is no longer transparent. The Mortal will find themselves unable to move, floating in a dark void, dimly lit by an unknown source in a ghastly view. The Mortal will find themselves posed so that they are looking down at their own body. Over time, apparitions will begin to appear to the victim in the void and approach. The apparitions will appear to be exact duplicates of the victim wielding weapons and tools. The apparitions will begin to perform live dissections and attack the victim, tearing them apart in the most painful and brutal ways possible. The apparitions themselves are said to be aspects of the victim that will constantly insult and attack them. After the torture of the previous layer, the mind is made muddy and broken ripe for the beginning of the process of the destruction of identity. Eyes will be gouged out though the victim will still be able to see, their ears cut out but they will still hear, their hand cut off but they will still feel. It is said that the afflictions will take the eyes and ears of the victim back to Cacophony to relive the madness of the previous layer. In time, the victim comes to develop an unparalleled, searing hatred for their aspects, and by extension, themselves. The apparitions will continue to torture and annihilate the victim's body before repeatedly repairing and piecing it back together again and the victim will experience every moment in excruciating clarity. After centuries of violent torture, the Mortal victim will blink and suddenly awaken back on Jeharr.Anamnesis
The Mortal will find their memories of their past life foggy but present and their time in The Below will feel like nothing more than a vivid nightmare. Over time the Mortal will notice more and more that is wrong with their reality and their life as the memory of their life before death cracks and crumbles around them before the terrible realization overcomes them. They truly were dead and in The Below, and they never left. What follows for the Mortal victim is an endless onslaught of hallucinatory experiences of their own memories, perverted into a torturous transmutation of their old life. The tortured soul will be lured into believing that the memory might just be reality, safe. Then, at a climactic or unexpected moment, the illusion will be shattered. The victim will watch all that they loved and cherished be destroyed and tortured over and over again, before the sense of self is annihilated. In time, every Mortal victim that arrives at this layer will lose track of what is true and what is tortured perversion. Eventually, every memory becomes emulsified into tortured madness, irrevocably changed. Once their memory and mind are destroyed, the Mortal arrives in the next layer, Plunge.Plunge
In comparison to the complex, mental torture on the preceding layers, souls that find themselves in Plunge are forced to indulge in a much more primal torment. For centuries, those that arrive in Plunge will find themselves engulfed. Mortal souls in Plunge are submerged in an endless sea of a cold, tar-like substance. Dense and all encompassing, each Mortal releases their last breath and the cold tar seeps into their ears, mouth, nose, stomach, and lungs and they drown. Unable to die but broken from the previous layers, Mortals slowly sink, though unsure of which direction is down each victim simply experiences the sensations of drowning for hundreds of years. The dark, the cold, the tar, and the drowning are all the company that each victim will have for centuries, before eventually falling out of Plunge and into the final layer before the last, Aggregate.Aggregate
Once dispensed by the cold sludge of Plunge, victims find themselves in the vaguely writhing mass of other tortured souls. Their bodies broken and the tar having seeped into their entire being, every body piled in Aggregate is broken and sick. Each unfortunate creature in the great pile can barely move and is constantly becoming sick. The smell of defecation and bile is overwhelming. Over time, more and more bodies join Aggregate from Plunge and weakness prevents the old bodies from climbing back to the top again. Slowly the unfortunate creatures are crushed by the weight of those above, but they remain unable to die. The pile of decay and pestilence is of unfathomable depths and each unfortunate member of Aggregate, while weak and unable to move is acutely aware of every disgusting smell, taste, and pain. After hundreds, or even thousands of years on this layer, souls reach the bottom and enter the lowest level, the core of The Below, Untold.Untold
As its name implies, little is known about Untold by design, but it is here that the damned Mortals meet Gaulgulis and become Daemons. Untold is said to be the coldest place in Internus as the heat of Gaulgulis's rage is siphoned off to create the Plane of Eternal Flame. It is believed that the Daemons are frozen alongside Gaulgulis, permanently aware and awaiting Gaulgulis's awakening.History
The Below is said in legend to have been one of Ito's earliest creations, before the creation of Jeharr. It was an unfinished world, barren, complete with a Hollow, featureless settlment, now called The City Below. The Below already had its iconic layers, but the project would remain dormant in the time before time.
Following The Ascendant War and the victory of the Interventionist Gods, Ito was transformed into Gaulgulis and Baltus, The New God of Creation set about creating an eternal prison for the being that they would or could not kill.
The primary function of The Below is to imprison the most dangerous being known to exist. The Below imprisons the progenitor of all of existence and those Mortals who fall to their influence. The secondary function of The Below is to punish and annihilate through suffering those Mortals that are irredeemable. Those that would be denied or would deny shelter by every other God are damned to The Below, where millennia of incomprehensible suffering awaits them.
It is said that Gaulgulis remains at the heart of his spherical prison to this very day frozen, surrounded by those damnable Mortals that are similarly beyond salvation, though many foretell Gaulgulis' eventual return and the end of existence.
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