The Abyss of Ragnarok
Prison / Realm of Nastrond
Location: Abyss / Layer 4 — Grand Abyss
Listen well, blood—I recently returned from a scouting mission to the Abyss of Ragnarok, and I’ll share what I learned… though perhaps “returned” isn’t quite the right word. A part of me is still there, I think, lost forever in those hungering shadows. Let me tell you about this dread place while my brain-box still remembers the chant.
The Abyss of Ragnarok ain’t a place—it’s an absence, some kind of void that just… hungers. You’ll find it in the deepest reaches of the Grand Abyss, where even the tanar’ri fear to tread. But finding it is the easy part. It’s like a wound in reality, a place where the very substance of the Abyss itself seems to fold inward, creating a recursive nightmare of endless descent.
Getting there? Well, there are whispers of certain rituals, dark ceremonies performed by the Morthbrood witches under moonless skies. Some say you can follow the trail of devoured light, tracking the places where shadows grow impossibly deep. Others claim the mara will guide you there if you surrender your dreams to them for three nights running. But the most reliable way, if you can call it that, is to simply fall—fall from Dol-Moroth through the Grand Abyss until the darkness becomes alive around you, until the very concept of light becomes meaningless.
What you’ll find there… that’s harder to describe. The darkness ain’t just an absence of light, it’s active and it’s predatory. It moves with purpose, like thousands of invisible fingers reaching for you. The air is thick with ancient malice, and sound behaves strangely, sometimes dying out altogether, sometimes echoing endlessly when it should fade. You might catch glimpses of other lost souls falling through the mists—or perhaps they’re just reflections of your own growing madness.
The architecture of the place defies conventional geometry. Platforms and pathways appear and disappear without warning, and what seems like solid ground might suddenly reveal itself as nothing but concentrated shadow. The handful who’ve seen this place and survived speak of impossible structures that seem to be built from crystallized darkness, and of walls that pulse like living tissue. Well. Unliving tissue perhaps.
But the worst part is the whispering. Nastrond’s presence pervades every mote of this prison-realm, and his nihilism seeps into your thoughts like ice-cold water. The longer you stay, the more sense it starts to make—like the idea that perhaps existence itself was a cosmic mistake, that the void is the natural state of things, and that all of creation is just a temporary aberration waiting to be corrected.
Cutters who enter the Abyss of Ragnarok don’t leave—at least, not as themselves. Those who do escape will bring back something with them: a second shadow, a deadness that never quite leaves their eyes, a tendency to stare transfixed into dark corners for too long, or a newfound certainty about the ultimate fate of all things. Most however become unwitting servants of Nastrond’s will, transformed into wraiths who spreading his words across the planes like a slow-acting poison.
So if you’re mad enough to seek this place out, remember: the real danger isn’t that you will probably die there. The real danger is that you might start to understand it.
Sources: Alex Roberts, Jon Winter-Holt, inspired by the excellent ‘Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ by Alan Garner.