The Between-London

The story of The Between-London

The Between runs on grief and passage: the shroud-things and lamplighters of the drowned streets, the ferrymen of the black canals, the living who slip in by accident and the dead who cannot leave. Silence is manners; a name spoken twice is a summons.

Places

• The Between-London · city. A drowned, spectral inversion of London where the city exists beneath a heavy, eternal river.
• The Drowned Streets · region. Victorian thoroughfares filled with stagnant, black water where the dead pace indefinitely.
• The Black Canals · region. A network of tunnels connecting the districts, perpetually navigated by funeral skiffs.
• The Underwater Gaslamp Districts · region. Areas where bioluminescent gas lamps burn with a sickly blue light beneath the surface.
• The Shroud-Court · landmark. The submerged, skeletal remains of the Palace of Westminster.
• The Thresholds · landmark. Rifts in the surface where the living accidentally fall into the Between-London.

Peoples

• The Bound Dead · corporeal-on-stone, memory-fade, damp-audibility. Residents of the Between-London who perished during the Drowning and remain tethered to the city's wet, cold masonry.
• The Accidental Living · intangible-to-stone, high-warmth, temporal-instability. Intruders from the surface world who have slipped through a fold in reality, appearing as translucent, flickering phantoms to the dead.
• Shroud-Things · fluid-locomotion, facelessness, memory-thievery. Ancient, sentient abyssal currents that took the shape of Victorian silhouettes after the city sank.

Powers and factions

• The Ferrymen · Charon-Smythe. Operators of the black canal skiffs who ensure the funeral processions never cease, ferrying the Bound Dead to their final, unreachable piers.
• The Lamplighters · Inspector Wick. Maintenance crews that maintain the underwater gaslight network, fueled by pressurized sorrow and methane.
• The Shroud-Court · The Veiled Sovereign. The arbiters of Between-London, ruling from the flooded ruins of the Parliament, dictating which processions must continue.

History

• The Last Dry Breath · Pre-Drowning. London stands as a bastion of industry, blissfully unaware of the rising subterranean pressure.
• The Great Inversion · The Drowning. Reality buckled; the Thames rose to consume the city, and the city simultaneously sank into the Thames, locking both in a watery embrace.
• The Eternal Present · 1888. Funeral processions reached their thousandth cycle; the gaslamps refuse to flicker out, marking the current age of mournful stasis.

Who lives here

• Nox Vale