The Abyss

The Outer Planes: The Infinite Maelstrom of the Abyss

"We breached the Rift for seventeen seconds. The ship's sensors registered a billion years of evolution happening in a single moment. The hull screamed as it turned to flesh. I saw a star made of teeth. Don't go there. Don't even look. It's not a place. It's a hunger that has learned how to dream."

-Final log entry of a Star-Wanderer's League deep-void probe

Overview & Philosophy The Abyss is not a plane of existence; it is a failure of existence. It is the "cosmic wound" where the raw, creative energy of the Song of Creation bleeds into reality without any of the structuring principles of the Silence. It has no grand design, no philosophy, and no ultimate goal. The Abyss is the universe's cancer—a force of pure, selfish, and malignant existence that seeks only to consume, mutate, and transform everything into more of itself. It is chaos given a ravenous, biological form.

The Nature of Damnation: The Great Churn Souls drawn to the Abyss are not punished or repurposed; they are devoured. A soul's consciousness and life experiences are violently ripped apart in a process known as the Great Churn. This raw spiritual energy serves as the fuel for the Abyss's constant, pointless, and agonizing cycle of hyper-evolution. To be damned to the Abyss is to be eternally consumed, mutated, and reborn as a monstrous, screaming fragment of what you once were, your identity lost to a sea of infinite, meaningless change.

The Shifting Layers: Demonic Domains The "layers" of the Abyss are not stable planes but temporary, cancerous realities formed by the immense will of the most powerful Demon Lords. These domains are like tumors on the fabric of reality, constantly growing, shifting, and warring with one another. To travel the Abyss is to lurch from one nightmare to the next without warning.

• Thanatos, The Silent Empire (Orcus's Domain): This layer is a horrifying mockery of Asmodeus's "Great Silence." It is an entire simulated universe frozen at the moment of its final heat death. Zombie stars drift in a black void, orbited by planets of perfect, silent corpses. Here, Orcus reigns on a throne of negative energy, his goal to spread this perfect, hateful stillness to all of reality.

• The Midnight Maw (Y'gnoloth's Domain): Y'gnoloth's layer is not a place one can visit, but an event horizon one can fall into. It is a region of spacetime where reality itself is being consumed by the Star-Eater. Ships that stray too close are "spaghettified" into raw data and screaming chaos, their matter and energy converted into more of the Demon Lord's impossible mass.

• Zelatar, The Gilded Cage (Graz'zt's Domain): A shimmering, multi-layered city of impossible luxury and perfect, bespoke pleasure. Every sensation, every desire, every ambition is catered to. The catch is that the city itself is a single, parasitic, demonic entity. Its inhabitants are not prisoners, but willing victims, their souls slowly and ecstatically drained to feed the Dark Prince's eternal, narcissistic decadence.

• The Glitching Index (Z'ryth's Domain): This layer is not a physical place but a cancerous dataspace, a library of impossible scale where information itself has gone mad. The landscape is made of shifting, contradictory text, the demons are sentient viruses, and the air hums with a trillion paradoxical truths. To enter this realm is to risk not death, but having one's own consciousness and identity irrevocably corrupted and rewritten by the plane's impossible logic.