The Avid Horizon

"This is the end."

"Two vast winged shapes guard a gate of something like resin, smooth but uneven. It is deep gant - the colour that remains when all other colours have been eaten. Ice crusts over the crack between its valves. Approach, and your breath freezes, falls tinkling in shards from the air. It would be utterly foolish to touch the thing.

A merciless wind blows from everywhere to everywhere. It passes without effort through your bridge-coat, your flesh, your lungs. The dock lies empty."

This is the end. Art from FL

Brrrrrr. Art from Sunless Sea.

The Avid Horizon is the northernmost known place in the Unterzee - as in, travel North far enough, from anywhere in the Zee, and you'll find yourself gawking at the guardian statues. It's bitter cold there. By 1900, nobody's gone further. Dozens have died trying. Zailors, of course, are advised not to go.

One of the docks there offers those who have been exiled from London a chance to beg for forgiveness, but they must be willing to sacrifice everything, and there is no guarantee the Admiralty will choose to accept the apology.

The realm of the Judgements, the High Wilderness, lies beyond the gate. Passing through said gate strips a traveler of their body, and they must somehow forge a new one while inside.

The other side of the Avid Horizon, Art from Sunless Skies

You near the Avid Horizon, the door that led London into the Heavens. It is closed fast, now.

This is the end of the sky. You can go no further.

By 1906, these barriers to access have somehow been eliminated. The British Empire has colonized the High Wilderness, establishing Albion by moving the entire city of London through the Horizon, brick by brick. The Avid Horizon served as the Empire's gateway into the heavens, as it was there that the Parzifal, the first spacefaring locomotive, was built and launched. The horizon is a lot bigger on the other side, and fittingly, it's located at the southernmost parts of Albion (though cardinal directions are rather meaningless in space).

Sometime afterwards, the gates of the Avid Horizon have been sealed by Her Renewed Majesty. However, a sea has since formed in the High Wilderness under the gates. Of all of the possible explanations, one is that this small Silent Sea is a part of the Unterzee that poured into the sky when the doors were opened. (Would that make it a Zilent Zee? The Overzee?). Like its counterpart in the Neath, the Empire uses the Horizon to get rid of people who piss off the royalty, by forcing them to wait for a pardon that will almost never come. Oh, and there's a weird cult there now, but what doesn't have a cult these days...

We kindly request that no one reveal what happens beyond THE KING OF WAYS in Seeking Mr Eaten's Name.

-Kestrel/Birdadmirer