On Loria Broadly:
The Labyrinth
The Labyrinth is not an edifice so much as a world folded inside stone. It sprawls beneath the surface like a second continent, a mountain hollowed from within, every corridor lined with the dust of centuries. To enter its gates is to step into a city older than memory — one still alive, one still changing.
The first impression is not danger but enormity. Pillars climb higher than torches can reach. Bridges span gulfs where no bottom is seen. Walls bear carvings so intricate they seem to breathe. The Labyrinth is no ruin, though it has outlasted all empires: it is a dwelling, a temple, a library of silence.
A City Beneath Stone
More than a thousand souls live here at any given time. Scholars, pilgrims, mercenaries, priests. Kitchens smoke with broth for caravans of explorers. Libraries echo with the scratching of quills. Grand lecture halls resound with disputes on philosophy, while in the outer chambers cults light incense and chant to gods both remembered and forgotten.
The Labyrinth has grown into a city that pretends it is not one. Its people carve alcoves for shrines, niches for markets, platforms for rest. Forges burn hot beside prayer altars; classrooms border barracks. Every corridor hums with overlapping lives, each drawn here by the promise of knowledge or glory.
Yet the longer one dwells, the more it feels like the Labyrinth itself is the host, and its people the passing guests. The air is never still. A hum — felt more than heard — trembles faintly through the stone, as if the place itself remembers.
Secrets of the Depths
The upper halls are grand, but they are only surface. Beyond them stretch staircases that fall for days, and tunnels that curve like ribs into deeper dark. Those who descend return whispering of places not built for human scale: doors big enough for giants, chambers carved in shapes no hand could reproduce, murals of beings that seem angelic one moment, monstrous the next.
Artifacts surface from these places, objects of such strange design they can barely be called tools. Some shine with lights that never fade, others sing when touched, others crumble to ash as if ashamed of being handled. The Great Houses hoard them all. They employ scholars to study, thieves to steal, priests to bless, and soldiers to kill for them.
It is said that one level deeper still lies a machine that moves without wheels, and another where the walls are alive with fungal roots that pulse as if they were veins. I cannot say which tales are true, only that I have heard enough to know the Labyrinth is not a prison of stone but a puzzle of creation itself.
The Portal
Deeper within, past the guarded libraries and vaulted halls, stands the greatest wonder: the portal room. A single circular door set into flawless stone. It does not lead to more corridors, but to realities of their own making.
Those who bring offerings — relics, blood, things unnamed — may awaken it. The door yawns open into worlds confined yet real. A chamber of desert where sun burns but no sky is seen; a banquet hall where food itself grows teeth; a grove where time runs crooked. Each is enclosed, yet to breach their walls is to fall into a void of nothing.
One cannot leave until the trial within is answered. Sometimes this means battle. Sometimes silence. Sometimes surrender. Survivors rarely emerge unchanged. Some carry treasures or relics. Others stagger out with eyes that no longer focus on the ordinary world. Many claim to have seen glimpses of truth: visions of gods, fragments of the ancient past, or the terrifying sense of being studied by something vast.
The portal does not explain itself. It simply waits, patient and hungry, as if each offering is a question and each room an answer in return.
Philosophy and Fear
The Houses call the Labyrinth their possession, but no decree could tame it. For common folk, it is a promise and a threat. Enter, and risk death for glory. Stay away, and watch others return crowned with relics and revelations.
Temples preach it is a gift of the gods. Skeptics call it a trap left by civilizations older than the world. Whispers among adepts suggest something worse: that it is a device, a machine, a program of reality itself, showing fragments of truths Lorians are not meant to bear.
Whether gift, curse, or mirror, the Labyrinth persists. It feeds on wonder and fear alike.
Closing Thoughts
I have walked its corridors and watched children play in its markets, unaware they sleep beside chambers that could erase them. I have spoken with scholars who believe the Labyrinth is alive. And I have stood in the portal room, where the air itself trembles like breath held too long.
The Labyrinth is not owned. It is not finished. It is not understood.
It waits, it remembers, and it will outlast us all.