Blood Red Wednesdays: The Hollow Heart and Darkness

As the Psychonaut steps into the ring, They are bathed in the lights from the spiraling galaxies that hang impossibly overhead. In the Foglands, a perpetual blood red twilight washes over the face of any visiting Pasychonauts. In the perpetual night of the Mirrored city arcing currents of electricity and neon reflect off the smog and smoke that threaten to drown the city and any unwary Psychonauts. In Arcadia, sun and moon and firelight alone will light the Psychonaut's face. In the Painted Labyrinth, phosphorescent fungi climb the walls and bioluminescent creatures flit through air and stagnant pools of water, casting eerie light by which a Psychonaut may navigate the dangerous tunnels.

But in the Hollow Heart, there is no light.

Dark as the human mind from which the Shadowlands is birthed and in which it the Shadowlands grow. Dark, but not still. The Hollow Heart does thrum with what can only be called a heartbeat. The sense that the Psychonaut receives upon arriving in the Hollow Heart, is that one has been swallowed by some great creature. When Jonah was swallowed by the whale or "greate fyshe," the sense he received would have been similar. And perhaps Jonah had found a way into the Hollow Heart under its other common name: the Hidden Heart.

The Hollow Heart is also the Hard drive of the Shadowlands. The Shadowlands is procedurally generated like an unfolding fractal flower from the stories encoded into the fractal mirrored rooms of the Hollow Heart. A Psychonaut who manages to make the arduous and maliciously concealed journey to the Hidden Heart will find themselves with the entirety of the Shadowlands at their fingertips. The Universe of Stories would be theirs to control and reshape, if they can master the manner in which the Hollow Heart encodes and projects its store of tales out into the world. And, while a Psychonaut who unlocks the secrets of the Hollow Heart can reshape the Shadowlands, the stories and the archetypes which underpin the universe and which are its basis are not changeable from Hollow Heart.

And it is rumored among the veteran Psychonauts that the Hollow Heart is actually the top most layer of a vast underground network of minor realms. But what these are, a Psychonaut will have to discover elsewhere.

• Mirrored Here: https://bloodreddreaming.blogspot.com/2018/05/hollow-heart-and-darkness.html