The Accursed Archive: Location
The Vault of Dark Secrets
Hidden away in a place outside the ravages of time, there is a singular library, accessible to only an unfortunate few. This place is known as the Accursed Archive, and it contains the hidden mysteries of the world, carefully collected and curated over untold centuries. Those who learn of this place are rarely the wise and well-prepared. More often than not, it is the foolhardy and impetuous, the brave, and the power-hungry, who find their way to this place. The reason for this is simple. These poor, misguided souls are the ones the Archive seeks to use to fulfill its purpose: the spread of insurmountable truth and suffering to every sentient being in the entirety of the endless planes. For those who enter the Archive and leave it, are often compelled to spread the knowledge they've learned to others, even if it takes the form of ramblings from a mad man. Sadly, few of these misguided souls are aware of this risk. The Archive's malevolent intelligence is cunning and alien. It does not communicate by words, but by the small twists of fate that guide its pawns to discover the entrance and open the way on their own. Despite this, if not for the four deities that watch over it, few can imagine how the Archive might affect existence if left unchecked.Entering the Archive
A forlorn and power-hungry soul will often find the Archive through what they would call sheer luck or chance. A drafty window will blow down a stack of papers, causing a scholar to scramble underneath a table in search of them, finding an ancient tome of forbidden lore in the process. A door left conveniently open will tempt a would-be thief into entering a dark hallway that leads to a place darker still. A desperate scion of a noble house will speak with a madman, who rants about the images that plague his nightmares before guiding the questing fool to a small monument carved from bone and lashed together with still-living sinew. In all of these cases, the result is the same. The scholar shall speak the words within the tome, the thief shall turn the final corner, and the noble shall chant alongside the madman. In an instant, they appear inside the Archive, staring around at the sights to behold within the great hall.The Great Hall
Whenever one enters the Archive, they will always find themselves in the great hall, within which is a unique and massive tome alongside a small bell mounted to a desk. Beyond this, seemingly endless space is filled with dark wooden shelves, alcoves, stairways, and seating areas. There are no lamps or flames here. Those who travel within rely upon the brilliant red light of the single full moon above, which shines down through the open space and is captured and reflected in the crystals that dot the walls. Fire is extinguished even as it sparks within the Archive, a phenomenon believed to be caused by the simple refusal of the intelligence within this place to suffer the indignity of loss. Statues of nightmarish monstrosities and vile horrors are commonplace, along with replicas of armor and weapons wielded by the greatest tyrants from all worlds. Each is sealed within a coating of pure force, preventing them from being tampered with or damaged except when the Archive decides that the time is right for these forces to be unleashed.
Within the stacks of books, scrolls, and unbound manuscripts, the darkest secrets and greatest triumphs of magic, religion, philosophy, history, science, and every topic ever researched or discovered by mortals can be found. However, the shelves themselves are not sorted by any conventional means. Many have been driven mad attempting to catalogue the shelves, as they seem to move and twist and distort whenever they are closely inspected. One will often find completely disparate topics adjacent to one another, seemingly categorized not by subject, year written, or author but instead by something as mundane as the color of ink in which they were transcribed. Many of the books within are inherently dangerous, bearing defenses such as sharpened steel sheets instead of pages, magical glyphs of blindness and destruction, living eyes and teeth that snap at observers, or poison in place of ink.