Shadowlith

This page contains content from Underrail: Expedition expansion.

This article contains heavy spoilers.

Shadowlith in Abyssal Station Zero

“ To merely call the monolith dark would not be accurate. Its blackness is not merely the lack of reflected light, but emptiness in every way. Its space is not vacant or filled with dark substance, but rather it feels as though there is not even any space there. It is more like a tear in space-time or perhaps a tear in reality itself, revealing the nothingness beyond.

At the same time, the monolith does appear as if it has some sort of existence itself; and its existence seems clearer and more fundamental than that of everything else around it. ”

— In-game description

Matte black rectangular prism in Abyssal Station Zero, in the Research and Development section.

Between the fall of Lemuria and the arrival of the player, an event occurred which the four alternate personas of Todd refer to as the disunion. The Atlantean personnel who were experimenting and doing research on the Shadowlith started to gradually become more violent and insane. Logs found in the R&D section hint that the researchers came into contact with, and then fell under the influence of an entity that they called "Flottsørmir", which was connected somehow to the Shadowlith. Eventually, they armed themselves and butchered the Lemurians and any fellow Atlanteans who refused to join them before taking a chunk of the Shadowlith with them and using the docked subspheres and submarines to leave for the Black Sea, where they eventually became the Sørmirbæren. The few remaining Lemurians and Atlanteans then sealed off R&D and never returned there.

When the player claims the Acorn, the Shadowlith will activate, plunging the room into almost supernatural darkness and spawning Void Creatures which will attack the player. The only way destroy it and stop the spawning is with the Ethereal Torch.

Characters with Psi Empathy, 6 effective Will score as well as at least 80 effective skill in any psi school, are able to focus on it, see its visions and gain Outer Visions feat.

Vision

Requires Will (6)

"You focus your mind on the monolith - the experience is unlike anything you've known before. All the thoughts you direct towards the monolith are swallowed by its infinitely hungry darkness. You persist in your attempts and soon you can feel your consciousness gliding over the surface of the void represented by the monolith. Every now and then, with your mind's eye, you can see a spark inside the void that lights it up, and when the void is lit up it projects many sounds, colors, shapes, thoughts, and other concepts and elements: curved rays of light, many-dimensional pockets of space, liquid color that springs from ethereal fountains, purple fires that burn in reverse. None of these you can experience fully and some are too strange and unintuitive to even behold - those remain veiled inside the void. But there are also awful things in the void - long sinewy worms with needles at their tips, amorphous blobs of corrosive gelatinous matter, curtains of razor wire cutting through thick fleshy smoke and other things too gruesome to describe. But these things don't seem to have life of their own, but instead for every glimpse of this deranged spectacle you pay a blood price. You are unable to maintain your focus long and when it finally breaks, you feel drained and empty, unable to move. Your vision turns dark until you're nearly blind. Even your thoughts seem to be slowing down and are dangerously close to stopping. You start to panic, scared that your own existence will come to an end soon and you will disintegrate into innumerable dust particles and be swallowed up by the void. It's as if all your will, all your life force, has been taken from you. Realizing that you cannot will your way out of this predicament, you do your best calm yourself and let this paralysis of being come upon you completely. Your thoughts keep slowing down and your vision darkens until everything is completely still and dark. But somewhere deep inside there's a persistent pulse and an eye that can still see. Slowly, but surely your mind starts grinding again and your senses are restored to you. You might have been dead for a moment, but you seem fine now. There's something in the back of your brain that still bothers you greatly, though. There was something else in the void far worse than the terrible things you remember seeing there. It might have been made out of those things or merely resided inside them. Maybe the horrors seen were made out of it or by it, you are not sure, but its form was eerily familiar to you and its hateful devouring eyes were upon you."

See Also

• Black Rock
• Shadow Dust