The Underworld is a great confluence of dead waterways. It teems with oceans of void and rivers of darkness, flowing ever away from Creation, carrying souls and memories into its depths… perhaps to reincarnation, but all too often, simply away. These tempest-wracked seas and torrents of anti-light divide the strange islets that make up the landscape of the Underworld—a multitude of paradises, purgatories, and stranger afterlives where the restless dead tarry, pinned by passion, trauma, slavery, or happenstance.
The abode of ghosts is an inauspicious place, by turns bleak as a bare skull or flush with heart- wounding beauty. Strange stars wind through a sunless sky (where there is a sky at all), turned by the massed force of the prayers of the dead. Mortals fear to venture here while still possessed of their blood and breath; to travel abroad between the isles of the Underworld is perilous even for the shades that dwell there, and vastly more so for the living. The ancient dead are envious of their blood and breath, and rest in the Underworld offers little renewal of mind or spirit. Many ghosts seek passage back into the world of sun and flesh, either to fulfill their frustrated passions or to carry out the business of the lords of the dead; the Underworld is a land of many kings and riches beyond counting, and so the dead are never without ambitions or temptations.
The Ancestor Cult
The Immaculate Philosophy forbids contact between mortals and the dead; to linger as a shade is inauspicious and improper, and contact with such beings, the Immaculate Order maintains, can do nothing but pollute a mortal’s spiritual health.
Still, the ancestor cult flourishes in the lands beyond the borders of the Realm, where the
Immaculate Philosophy’s hold is uncertain or altogether absent. Mortals there need supernatural patronage to protect them from the dangers of predators, disease, disaster, greedy neighbors, and malicious gods and fae; in the end, they often turn to their own dead to provide this support. It’s unusual for a ghost to be as individually potent as a god, or as easily able to reach his living descendants, but what the dead lack in raw strength they make up for in numbers and familiarity. Where the Hundred Gods Heresy flourishes, an entire village is likely to worship the same upstart god; but in ancestor cults, most families maintain their own shrine and propitiate their own familial spirits.
The dead may be able to offer up small blessings, knowledge from beyond the grave, or strange treasures smuggled out of the depths of the Underworld. In return they demand veneration—care and maintenance of their graves and shrines and frequent prayer to fortify them in the
Underworld are the normal foundation of any ancestor cult, with more particular favors for the living being solicited with the spilling of blood, or the burning or burying of tokens pleasing to the dead. Lavish funerals are the norm in areas dominated by ancestor cults, the better to arm the dead to later aid the living.
Fear of the ancestor cult isn’t merely a matter of Immaculate propaganda. Ghosts are creatures driven by desire and passion, and lack for restraint. For every spirit motivated by love for those left behind, there is an ancient family matriarch willing to drive her descendants into poverty or worse to advance her status among the dead. Ghosts are often unreasonable, demanding, and vicious when they feel slighted—and the greater the congress between living and dead, the more easily a shadowland can flower should the proper circumstances present themselves.
Shadowlands are almost always dominated by the ancestor cult, and the dead are usually the controlling members of that relationship.
Shadowlands
Perhaps there was once a time when death was the only means of passage between the lands of the living and the dead. If so, that time was long ago; the Underworld resides close by Creation in the Second Age, and where too many souls have passed into the lands below too quickly, or where the living world has been scarred by sufficient atrocity, the Underworld may bleed up into the sunlit world. These places, where death and life commingle, are known as shadowlands. The topography of a shadowland is fundamentally the same as before falling into the embrace of the Underworld, at least at first. The course of rivers remains the same; the same hills and mountains continue to jut up from the land; the same roads lead from village to village, passing the same landmarks. But the Underworld leaves its mark upon all these things. Many wild animals will leave a shadowland, if they can; game animals are difficult to come by, while spiders, rats, and raitons thrive. Domestic animals eventually become listless and wan, or sleek and hungry. The people of shadowlands are often pale, and may take ill easily; in a shadowland it seems easier to let go of life.
Colors leech out over a span of decades, or become flush and violent in their intensity. Storms are unusually savage; those blown in from the Underworld may carry with them drops of blood,
mercury, or salty tears. Strange and winding designs impress themselves upon stones as
generations go by, while boards and buildings stretch high and narrow and queer. The flavors of food grown in shadowland soil are often strange and bitter, or oddly intoxicating. The crops and goods of shadowlands are disturbing and distasteful to many, but some collectors, artisans, and exotic gourmands will pay high prices for the exports of lands touched by the Underworld, particularly if the mixing of boundaries produces some prodigy that may be obtained nowhere else.
The borders of shadowlands are frayed and unstable places. Crossing the boundary by day takes the traveler away from the shadow of the grave and into the lands of the living. By night, the borders of a shadowland lead out into the dark vistas of the Underworld.
Most importantly, shadowlands permit the dead to walk among the living—to speak, and touch, and do more than touch. By night, ghosts are as solid as mortals, though few could be mistaken for such. In most shadowlands, ghosts fade away with the rising of the sun, unable to be seen, heard, or touched by the living; in older or stronger shadowlands, the dead only fade away when sunlight falls directly upon them, and retire to windowless ancestor houses during the day. In either case, they return to full solidity with the coming of night.