The Avid Horizon

"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"

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 had somehow been eliminated. The British Empire has now colonized the High Wilderness, having established 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. After New London had been built and the vast majority of the city had reestablished itself in the skies, the Empress sealed the gates to the Horizon "sarcophagus-tight;" there was a long enough span of time before this happened, however, that a sea has formed in space. This small Silent Sea is most likely a part of the Unterzee that poured into the sky when the doors were opened. (Would that make it a Zilent Zee? The Overzee?)

It is worth noting that the Horizon is a lot bigger on the space side, and it's rather far from New London. It's quite a feat of engineering that they got all the pieces of London so far away from the gate to the Wilderness.

Like its counterpart in the Neath, the Empire uses the Horizon to get rid of people who anger the royalty, this time by forcing them to wait in front of the rather imposing gate for a pardon that will almost never come. There's also what's supposed to be an immigration office there too, but since Her Renewed Majesty sealed the gate, it's become rather bare-bones and vestigial. Oh, and there's a 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