The Forgotten Citadel

The Low Limbo, or Da'ath, was a little-known, metaphysical realm beneath the disparate branches of Sephiroth, where stories that had become meaningless or lost their function found their resting place. This world existed in a dark, insubstantial limbo, where broken remnants of abandoned stories floated among mists of fragmented memories and unraveling plot threads. In this surreal weave of half-conceived ideas and dying whispers, even the ground itself was unstable, shifting and dissolving. Among its inhabitants were the forgotten, shadowy outlines of character ideas who could have been great ideas in the Prime Dimension, but now moved through dissolving roles.

There were also The Reapers, as creations of Lord Thanatos, who ensured that such remainders did not merely atomize into nothingness, sometimes integrating fragments into the canon when they were significant or in vogue once more. The Low Limbo embodied the cycle nature of narrative, whereby stories ebbed and flowed between stages of ascendance and fall, importance and obscurity. Those stories that had achieved the pinnacle of power and influence might have been lost to absolute oblivion, yet remained within the general cosmic balance. It was a world where stories could be left behind, yet their traces could still affect the world of the living, revivifying or restating lost particulars. Low Limbo was therefore a treasure trove of innumerable forgotten stories, abandoned in the obscurity of being.

Thanatos, the child of Nyx and the embodiment of Death arrived here not by chance but as the unavoidable force that governed the cessation of all things—be they lives, stories, or worlds. His very presence was the ultimate finality that all narratives must eventually meet. Unlike mere reapers who took the lives of individuals, Thanatos' essence was the governing end of the stories themselves—the completion of the cycle. He was not simply the final chapter of a tale; he was the absolute termination of the narrative itself. When stories became irrelevant, when they could no longer evolve, they were abandoned to Da'ath, to be overseen by Thanatos, whose power could close the door on them once and for all. There was no hope of return, no possibility of a new beginning, for he embodied the irrevocable conclusion.

Thanatos did not enter the low limbo (Da'ath) with grand fanfare or a battle for dominion. There was no struggle, no challenge. His arrival was the inevitable consequence of his existence. The nature of the low limbo shifted upon his entrance. What had once been a chaotic and aimless realm of forgotten remnants now became a space of absolute finality. The Forgotten and the Wretched, souls and entities adrift without purpose, found themselves tethered to his presence. They were drawn into the silence of his reign. Here, no stories were allowed to linger or fade away without a conclusion. Thanatos brought an order of death to these abandoned stories, ending them with finality. Under his watch, the Low Limbo was no longer a realm of lost media. But it became a place where lost tales were sealed into a cycle of rebirth, being sometimes canonized back to the Prime Dimension (Malkuth)

For uncounted ages, Thanatos had ruled unchallenged in Da'ath, a realm of one-way closure where stories were dispatched to never return or reach their final ending. There, however, behind this shadowy supremacy, there existed a nascent force—a strange presence that insidiously began to invade the hidden corners of Da'ath. It was Carcosa, the city of madness, and its mysterious master, the King in Yellow. Unlike Thanatos, which was the complete ending of stories, the King in Yellow thrived amidst the chaos of reclaiming—a capability devoted to remaking and defiling forsaken stories rejected by the editors of the Umbra (Gevurah).

The King in Yellow was a creature linked with the incompleteness of stories, as opposed to their termination. His kingdom, Carcosa, was a decaying reminder of madness, a city composed of discarded narratives, rejected pieces and abandoned ideas. He was a monarch who clung to what the other forces of the Sephiroth discarded. But there was a massive difference between the Eldirtch King and Thanatos—the King in Yellow did not seek the end of stories, but rather their continuation, no matter how broken, twisted, or corrupted those narratives had become. The King in Yellow's power allowed him to reclaim discarded ideas and transform them into a perverse mockery of their original forms. His city was a labyrinth of madness, where the walls themselves told forgotten tales and lost stories.

In his throne chamber of darkness, in a corridor of forgotten books and written pages, the King in Yellow shaped Carcosa into a city of chaos—a city where the lost could be reclaimed and reformed into something else. But his power, as great as it was, was limited. He was king of the rejected, but he was unable to create actual order from the rejected. Carcosa, though sprawling and vast, was an isolated bubble of reclaiming in the broader landscape of Da'ath. Though he sat as king in Carcosa around an iron, unspoken will, King in Yellow was forever hindered by his one desire for the unworthy—those rejected fragments of reality that could never actually be anything more than that.

At last, the King in Yellow's corrupting power could not be evaded. His efforts at redefining the lost, and reviving the incomplete and forgotten stories, began to compete with Thanatos' relentless reign. The King's efforts at reviving discarded stories, no matter how meaningless or anarchic, vexed the very soul of Thanatos' dominion. Thanatos was the final destination, the terminus of all things, and he would not allow the King's incessant reworking of abandoned stories to proceed unhampered. While the King in Yellow sought to resurrect the moribund, Thanatos sought to place the fate of those stories beyond reach, once and for all.

Their lessons collided one day when the King in Yellow burst the limits of Carcosa, his power increasing as he stretched for more of Da'ath's forgotten tales. But Thanatos, master of the entire kingdom, was no man to concede. The conflict was not of fire and blood, but of substance and will. Thanatos was not only the king of death but the very embodiment of the end of stories—the force that would place an irrevocable ending on the forgotten. The King in Yellow, however, was a force of disorder, unwilling to accept that some stories simply had to fade away and die. His rule, mighty as it was, could not be matched by the irrevocable finality that Thanatos embodied.

The meeting of the two was not a clash of armies, but a clash of concepts—a war between the inexorable conclusion and the chaos of reclamation. Thanatos, in his icy, unyielding silence, told the King that the age of renaissance and reimagining had ended. Da'ath's world was not a place for the rebirth of broken stories but for their eternal rest. There would be no second chances, no revived plots. The King in Yellow, with all his facility for turning and rewriting what had been lost, was unable to prevail over the absolute certainty that Thanatos represented.

Finally, Thanatos did not struggle but simply remained the immovable power of the end. The King in Yellow's grip on Carcosa began to fade, as the universality of the end crushed him. The King, for all his powers, was unable to resist acknowledging the truth of Da'ath—that everything, even the forgotten bits of knowledge, eventually must come to an end.