Everything

The Vidare Mortem shows us a glimpse of the dead realms – a gloomy forecast of earthly mortality. Even for the living traveler, this view of the world seems rotten. Dead and dying leaves hang on spindly trees, trunks cracked with terminal malaise. Glass surfaces are smeared or shattered. Soil squirms with pale white maggots. Every building seems like a tenement, each door or window tilting crazily in its frame. There’s no day or night in the Shadowlands – only Dark and Deeper Dark. The few faces you behold in this place are corpse-like, all too often showing the marks of their deaths.

Without either the proper magicks or an actual death, a living person might see the Shadowlands but couldn’t enter them. I suspect that deeply morbid people, mages and Sleepers alike, live more in this Vidare Mortem than they would like. To truly step over – to pierce what’s called the Shroud, Death’s own Gauntlet – while still living requires special magicks with a heavy cost. I’ve mentioned the agama sojourn earlier, and though other groups – even the Technocracy – have different names for it, the essence of that Art is the same: a combination of Entropy, Life, and Spirit that few people can command. Haunted locations have thinner Shrouds too, where a living soul might temporarily cross over if she’s desperate or unfortunate enough to try. I’ve even heard that vehicles occasionally traverse into this dimension – lost airliners and ghost ships and hell-bound trains. If that is true, though, the effects on their crews and passengers must have been horrific indeed.

As always, there’s that Penumbral mist, as if some mad stagehand went berserk with a smoke machine. It seems thicker in the Shadowlands, though… and terribly alive. That perpetual fog feels uncannily organic, too, like vaporized flesh. And the sounds you’ll hear, if you stop to listen, might be the most disturbing things of all.

Why would anyone visit this place? Why would someone want to? I suspect it has a lot to do with a simple yet unnerving truth: everything that lives is dying too. And to visit this realm is to see that truth head on, without comforting illusions.

Depending upon the Storyteller’s wishes:

The death-mages I’ve known embrace this truth. It’s part of their Awakened Path. To recognize mortality first hand, I’m told, is oddly liberating. Just as old-school shamans, ascetic mystics, or Ecstatic mages of the Left-Hand Path will “die to themselves” in order to be reborn, these death-mages find deeper understanding when confronting the most awful aspect of life’s cycle. Out of birth comes life; out of life comes death; out of death comes rebirth. This is the cycle of Earthly existence. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. By confronting the Shadowlands in person, a mage chooses suffering in order to understand – and transcend – the inevitable pain of life.

And if that sounds gloomy… well, the Low Umbra is gloom personified.