This place is not a cave.
It is a scar.
The Chamber of Sundered Veils marks the site of a catastrophic rupture that occurred long before Rootworld learned restraint. Whether caused by a dying god’s impact, a sorcerous miscalculation, or the birth-cry of the Crimson Death-Maw is unknown. What remains is certainty: reality failed here.
The boundaries between worlds tore open, forming what is now called the Great Tear—a permanent breach where the multiverse bleeds into Xylos’s depths.
It is now guarded by a @Trinity Maw Warden over watched by Drow to prevent destructive beasts from entering the realm at a 96% success rate.
The Drow were not born of Rootworld.
They fell into it.
Through the Tear came refugees, exiles, survivors—beings cast from collapsing realities into a world that was already alive and already watching. Many died within moments. Others went mad. A few endured.
Those who survived adapted not through reverence, but precision. They learned restraint because excess here invited correction. They learned violence because hesitation meant extinction.
Rootworld did not reject them.
It incorporated them.
The Tear remains active, a fifty-foot vertical rift of unstable planar energy embedded in the chamber’s far wall. It emits a constant psychic pressure—a low hum that erodes cognition and resolve over time.
The Tear functions as a one-way ingress. Entities still fall through it: broken creatures, alien predators, fragments of other worlds. This explains many of Rootworld’s most anomalous lifeforms.
No known method allows safe passage back.
At the chamber’s center lies a perfectly still pool. It is not water. It is condensed planar bleed—liquid reality failure.
Those who look into it do not see themselves. They see elsewhere: shattered skies, unfamiliar suns, dying cities. The pool acts as a scrying focus for the entire chamber, amplifying instability.
At its deepest point rests a Stabilizing Keystone—a flawless crystalline structure radiating all five chromatic energies of Rootworld. The Keystone anchors the Tear. Its removal would cause catastrophic destabilization within hours.
The chamber’s walls are lined with precise, spiral fungal formations—white, luminous, geometric. These are not decorative.
They are a single sentient mycelial organism, grown by Rootworld itself in an attempt to close the wound. The fungi absorb psychic fallout, regulate energy flow, and suppress uncontrolled expansion.
They are not passive.
When threatened—or when the Keystone is disturbed—the network reacts violently, releasing psychic spores and enforcing containment.
Rootworld defends its scars.
Throughout the chamber, faint afterimages flicker—repeating fragments of past intrusions. These echoes reenact final moments: confusion, terror, arrival.
They are not spirits.
They are residual imprints.
Lumcap Sages believe these echoes help Rootworld anticipate future incursions.
The Drow did not seal the Tear.
They learned to live beside it.
Their culture—discipline, emotional restraint, preemptive violence—was forged here. They became Rootworld’s specialists in containment because they understand failure at a cosmic scale.
This chamber is still known to them.
They do not return often.
The Chamber of Sundered Veils remains active, stable, and monitored. Rootworld tolerates its existence because it no longer threatens collapse.
For now.
Rootworld remembers the Tear not as a mistake,
but as proof that even worlds must survive their own wounds.