The Void

**The Void** is the term used to describe the lawless, transitional space between abyssal domains in the Tangled Depths. A vast, near empty span of darkness, it is here that the echoes of dead worlds and their respective underworlds find their way. Some echoes from living worlds make their way here as well in small part. Lost in the unending vacuum, as time goes on, they steadily form clusters that act as winding corridors across the Tangled Depths. These corridors become multileveled, dark mazes over thousands of years, where few ever tread. Though some do travel across the Void, due to its unpredictability and the ever-hunting corrupted shadow monsters that lay within, cryptid folk tales often speak warnings against braving the space between.

Those that brave the corridors of the Void are known as *"void travelers"*. These travelers may use the winding corridors to actually travel from one abyssal domain to another, through a combination of pathing intuition and a keen understanding of the effect it has on the mind. As the Tangled Depths is also a potent source of the more terrifying, darker powers of shadow magic, many also travel to the Void to draw from it. Others have succeeded in creating permanent paths, with portals that link two domains together.

The Void is home to the Blank Elevator.

## Mechanics

The Void is a region of space that is, naturally, without rule. The laws of physics in this place are known to appear to "break down" and function in unintuitive or strange ways, leading to supernatural phenomena that remains unexplained, even today. Space may twist and warp, buildings appear internally larger, and corners lead to entirely new places. Even time may dilate and bend. Very little may be known to make sense.

The corridors of the Void are known for evoking a sense of liminality however, as they are often transitional spaces themselves and largely devoid of life. Innumerable places and rooms that once may have been populated or lived in, now desolate and empty. These may be hallways, offices, malls, hotels, and countless other places often experienced "in-transition". They may also be natural settings, such as caverns, forest paths, and mine shafts. These places within tend to rearrange themselves and break off into others every now and then, which effectively makes civilization an impossibility. The passageways of the Void can manifest either as closed-in halls or wide-open fields. Events also often take place within the Void, whether as "natural" as an earthquake, or as "unnatural" as the walls slowly drifting apart.

As shadow magic permeates the Void, the corridors tend to draw from the psyches of those that visit them, often subconsciously "leading" them to where they will find places of strong familiarity. Just as much as they will find dark, alien architecture within the abyss, void travelers will find places they know too. It is from those familiar places that, without knowing a way out, one will eventually get lost in. The fate of those that descend into the deepest parts of the Void is, ultimately, "endless wandering, forever alone in a darkening dream".

As one approaches closer and closer to the Source, spaces become darker, more abstract, and eventually lose what little sense of reason there was. They resemble, by all accounts, "an artistic array of shapes and colors, placed on a black sea". Despite this, they never seem to get any less "familiar".

If one were to look outside into the Void in more open areas, they would find nothingness across a near starless black sea. The only features are distant wisping "veins" of mana, all spreading from the same point in space, "incomprehensibly" far away. This point is often not somewhere consistent, as there is no consistent sense of "down" in the Void.