The Spirit Realm
The Ancestral Deep is the after-pressure of life.
When something lives, it leaves more behind than a body or a soul. It leaves memory, emotion, intention, regret, love, and unfinished meaning. Most worlds discard this residue over time.
The Ancestral Deep does not.
It is a realm formed from what remains when life ends but does not fully let go.
If the Drift Expanse is the space between worlds, the Ancestral Deep is the space left behind by living things.
The Ancestral Deep exists adjacent to all worlds where life, death, and memory occur. It overlaps most strongly with places of burial, remembrance, tragedy, devotion, or long cultural continuity.
Atherfall’s long history of reincarnation, survival, and unresolved identity makes it especially close to the Ancestral Deep.
Entry is often accidental:
Through death
Through grief
Through ritual
Through obsession with the past
Leaving is possible—but rarely simple.
The realm is layered by depth, not distance.
Descending deeper does not require physical movement so much as emotional and conceptual weight.
The uppermost layer, closest to the living world.
Populated by the recently dead
Filled with emotional echoes
Familiar places appear almost intact
Time flows loosely but recognizably here.
A deeper stratum shaped by long memory.
Ancestors tied to families, cultures, and peoples
Extinct civilizations remembered only here
Spirits that have accepted death but not disappearance
Language, architecture, and identity remain strong.
The lowest and most dangerous layer.
Forgotten gods
Erased cultures
Names no one remembers anymore
Sound fades. Memory thins. Identity becomes fragile.
Nothing here demands attention—and that is the danger.
The Ancestral Deep resembles the living world as remembered, not as it was.
Common features include:
Familiar landscapes warped by emotion
Cities built from shared remembrance
Roads that lead to places that no longer exist
Structures that crumble when forgotten
Gravity increases with emotional weight. Places of great grief or devotion feel heavy, difficult to move through, and hard to leave.
Maps of the Deep change slowly, but inevitably, as memory fades.
The Ancestral Deep enforces a few core truths:
Strong emotion anchors entities.
Love, hatred, duty, or regret can keep a spirit intact for centuries.
Forgetting causes erosion.
Forgotten spirits lose form, then coherence, then presence.
Time flows inconsistently.
A moment may last decades. A century may pass unnoticed.
Nothing here is truly permanent.
The recently dead, emotional remnants, or fragments of consciousness.
Some are aware. Others repeat moments endlessly.
Spirits who remain because they are remembered.
They often serve as guides, judges, or guardians of cultural memory.
Memories of land, rivers, forests, and beasts given will.
They often act as silent witnesses rather than active participants.
Gods who lost all worship but not all existence.
Reduced to echoes, landmarks, or sleeping intelligences.
Layer: Shallow Reach → Mid-Depths
A vast hall where the names of the dead appear carved into stone, wood, bone, or light.
Names fade as memory weakens
Speaking a name strengthens the spirit tied to it
Erasing a name has permanent consequences
Used for resurrection rites and ancestral judgment.
Layer: Mid-Depths
A massive city built from the shared memory of a long-dead civilization.
Architecture shifts as stories conflict
Inhabitants reenact cultural rituals
Outsiders risk altering the city unintentionally
Ideal for cultural memory arcs and lost-history exploration.
Layer: Shallow Reach
An open plain where gravity increases with unresolved emotion.
Grief pins spirits to the ground
Acceptance allows movement
Living visitors feel crushing pressure if burdened by regret
Often used for personal reckonings.
Layer: Mid-Depths
A sprawling complex where incomplete lives are recorded as fragments.
Journals that end mid-sentence
Paths that stop abruptly
Buildings with missing rooms
A common destination for those seeking closure.
Layer: Transition to Deep Silence
A narrow passage where sound, color, and identity fade.
Spirits who cross without anchors dissolve
Some pass through deliberately
No one guards it
Considered a final choice.
Layer: Deep Silence
A field of colossal fragments left behind by forgotten gods.
Each shard radiates faint influence
Touching one risks identity loss
Some still dream
Extremely dangerous, but powerful.
Layer: Shallow Reach
A peaceful forest where trees grow from acts of remembrance.
Each tree corresponds to a life honored
Cutting a tree erases memory
Nature Spirits guard the grove fiercely
A rare place of calm.
Death here is not final, but dissolution is.
Spirits who lose all anchors:
Forget their names
Lose form
Become ambient echoes
Some eventually drift into the Drift Expanse.
Others simply stop being distinct.
The Ancestral Deep is best used for:
Ancestral quests
Consequences of resurrection
Confronting unresolved pasts
Recovering lost histories
Cultural and generational storytelling
Combat is possible, but rarely the point.
The Ancestral Deep does not exist to punish the dead.
It exists because memory refuses to vanish all at once.
Everything here lingers for a reason.
The danger is not being trapped forever.
The danger is being forgotten.