The Dark Place

The Dark Place is a place of pain and suffering, of long hidden agonies and petty greed. It is not a pleasant place to live. Those who dwell there willingly do so because they seek to hide themselves in the all-encompassing darkness, or else they fear the light. The rest are prisoners, of one sort or another, or lost.

The Dark Place is a plane of reality with physical laws and substance that are quite similar to those of the outside world, the primary difference being the absence of any useful degree of light. As in the lands, there is no direct source of light, the entire sky glows with a diffuse illumination as though through heavy cloud cover, but here the soft glow is so very faint that it provides little more illumination than the stars of a moonless night. The Dark Place is not truly a separate plane of existence from the Lands, they are instead as two sides of the same coin, one dark to the other's light. The description is more accurate than it might at first appear. Both the Lands and the Dark Place do in fact exist on opposite sides of the same physical structure: A huge, flat, vaguely elliptical disc-like world, finite but unbounded, only a few miles thick but several thousand miles across, on the longer axis. "Finite but unbounded" simply means that while both the Dark Place and the Lands have a definite size and shape, they do not actually have "edges". While these worlds are literally flat, and vaguely elliptical in shape, you cannot "fall off the edge" because there is no edge. If one were to go within a short distance of, say, the far eastern edge of the lands and set out walking to the east, one would not come to some sort of barrier or cliff, but rather, after walking for a while, one would simply find oneself back at one's starting point, without having ever turned around. Space seems to simply folds back on itself at the "edges" of these worlds.

Although no one knows for sure, the Lands and the Dark Place, or rather the structure upon which they both exist, appears to be the only thing in the entire universe in which it exists. There are no "other worlds" circling distant stars, there are in fact no stars at all, simply a cloudy nothingness covering the sky above both sides, glowing faintly with diffuse, indirect light, brighter on the Lands side and fainter over the Dark Place, and that is the entirety of the universe in which the Dark Place and the Lands exist.

Residents: The Shadow Lords and their Servants, as well as many others