The Dark City

It was the street I had wandered a thousand times, but so far away from home. It wasn't as comforting as I would've liked.

— Sodai, Kaia

At the heart of the Labyrinth, the Dark City beckons. It is a shattered mirror, reflecting live from all across Araea. It is at once familiar and alien, both ancient and new - memories of every home and every filth-riddled alley-way has is vomited out into the Dark City, buildings rising from the cavern stone like pus from a wound. Some find the Dark City to be a quiet, somber place, devoid of life and little more than a shadowy monument. Not all are so lucky.

Ageless City

Never before has one step taken me so far.

— Xael, Theurg

The Dark City is an amalgamation of cities from all corners of the world, crushed together into a single cavern of immense size. Buildings lay haphazardly upon one another, with streets crawling across the cityscape like scars on flesh, not caring what they carve through. Tunnels circle the great cavernous city in winding mazes and rarely do they take travelers to the same place twice. There is no discernible order to the city, with slums stacked next to grand galleries, battlefields and warrens crossing through palace and estates.

by Fragments Of Euclid

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The city smells of antiquity and the hint of something familiar. Indistinct noise echo down the twisting mass of buildings, a cutting maze of impossible angels and gravity-defying structures. It is always dark, an oppressive gloom that dims any light brought into its grasp.
No path is ever easy within the Dark City - stairways fold in on themselves or sprawl like a spider's web.

Door way leads to sheer drops or into another building - from the wall or ceiling. Direction becomes a painfully relative concept when traversing the Dark City.

Every part of the city is at once detailed and lacking. Less an imitation and more of an approximation of what it should be.

Travelers can walk on the sides of a building with the street looping beside them or crawl through a window in the ceiling to emerge on an angled balcony. Deeper into the city, the buildings close tightly on each other until it becomes a maze, only occasionally separated by vast, black gulfs. With every step downwards, the city grows more ancient and less recognizable, each detail becoming less distinct. No one has yet reached the bottom of the city or seen why strange lights twinkle and move among the shadows there.

Eyes in the Dark

Here, the shadows are hungry.

— Sodai, Kaia

Though sometimes empty, the Dark City is home to countless hosts of Specters, labyrinth-spawned spirits of damnable human-like appearance and feral mind. These are spirit-like things can move around the city without any of the trouble plaguing explorers, and do so seemingly with great purpose. While Specters found in the Labyrinth are little more than blind and ravenous ghouls, those found within the City are... Different.

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Specters within the city itself are constantly toiling, and even when unseen or undiscovered, the sound of labor rings through the fear-shadowed city, along with other, less readily recognizable sound. Most have been seen digging, carving their way through the cityscape with pick or even claw. Others craft effigies from bloody remains and scattered equipment of those lost within the city.
In a small mercy, Specters in the City are less likely to harry travelers as long as they are undisturbed, though it hasn't always been the case. Those who interrupt a Specter in its work are attacked and often end up as raw material for whatever they were doing.

by Feig Felipe Pérez

Some believe the Dark City is where Specters are born - or perhaps made.

Besides the Specters, precious little lives in the Dark City. Save for the occasional lost best or explorer, the city has no rodents, no insects and no fungi or mushroom. When empty, the Dark City is quiet and hollow, giving space for thoughts to wander into the darkness and take form unbidden. These phantasms are always brief and rarely seen directly, instead glimpsed as a familiar face at the corner of an eye or the sudden scent of a favored meal.

Heart of the Labyrinth

If you want the truth, look for it within the Dark City.

— Key of the Black Star

Almost everyone who wanders the Labyrinth finds their way to the Dark City, drawn like moths to a fire. With a thousand paths into the city, few ever see the same sights, but enough have emerged to whisper of the vast and terrifying splendors within. Many become convinced that the Dark City is a hell or purgatory, where the souls of the lost are tormented by the Specters or transformed into them. Certainly, something is keeping the spirit-things busy.

by Tomasz Strzalkowski

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Though finding the Dark City is easy, escaping can be another matter. Paths shift and turn out of sight, tunnels lead to different ends and Specters watch from the shadows. Those do leave often say that the city let them go. Many never return at all - meeting their end due to madness, accident, or a Specter's claw. Other remains lost in the City, wandering forever without escape.

No one is certain what came first - the Labyrinth or the City?

Not many know that the Dark City exists. Even among those who do, most consider it to be a myth. Some feel it call to them, from the depths of the Labyrinth like a distant, shadowed echo.

The Labyrinth
A realm of broken dreams and dying thoughts, the Labyrinth sprawls across Araea - it is everywhere, but few can find it. Entry into the Labyrinth is almost always an accident rather than design. Such passages can appear anywhere below the Outer Shell, from unknown caverns to forgotten alleyways that.
It is a shifting, changing place, haunted by things long forgotten and hungry shadows.
Read More About Labyrinth

by Sungwhooan Le

The Port

At the end of a long, winding river that scales the cliff-side of the city before pooling inside a cup made from the surrounding buildings, the Port mimics the underground lakes and oceans at the center of the Dark City. The waters are dark and lifeless, only on occasion haunted by ravenous Specters that seem unable to break the surface.
There is always a single boat at the Port, reminiscent of the crafts employed by sailors of the Abyss. Though the vessel has no issue traversing the twists and looping turns of the river, any traveler must strap in tightly. Those who do find the river can take them to many otherwise inaccessible places of the Dark City, hidden behind waterfalls and beneath placid lakes of black waters.

Some parts of the Dark City defy recognition. Vast structured made from perfectly fitted stone blocks, without mortar or the mark of tools has been sighted in the lower reaches of the City.
The only comparison ever made to the equally unknowable Ziggurath, half a world away.

Specters

Feral spirit things clad in the flesh of man, Specters are the nightmare inhabitants of the Labyrinth and of the Dark City. At home in the maddening chaos of either, they haunt every visitor to their realm, often unpredictable but always hostile.
Although incapable of any speech other than a gibberish or a scream, Specters nonetheless hunt their prey in packs. In the city, Specters toil at some great work, far from mortal eyes.
Read More About Specters

Faded Fortunes

It only took a short time for someone to recognize the similarities to the estates of the wealthy in the Dark City and even less to wonder if they too held wealth.
And they did.
Since then, many corpses left in the Dark City met their doom with their pockets weighed down with too heavy a burden of trinkets.

It is even rumored that the famous treasures have been found and brought back out to the world, like the Exarch's Mask.