Imagine, for a moment only, that you were ripped from everything you knew. When you open your eyes, an unfamiliar landscape unfolds itself in a grim welcome. Suddenly, the world that is yours has slipped out of grasp and into the confines of memory: it is too far away, perhaps farther than distance can count.
Be it by the hand of a random chance, or the turning wheel of karma, or the hand of a trickster god, you are taken to worlds that are so undeniably alien… Yet so undeniably human.
Spaces that hate us.
Spaces we do not belong.
Great plains littered with bridges, ruled by melancholy and mystery. An endless maze of yellow carpet — the mire of loneliness and misery. A city razed by the fury of a dying star, but littered with glimmers of faith and curiosity.
All of them so different, but by one thing linked: solitude, ever-present.
Every one of these places is far too large for you. There is rarely anyone around, and if there were, they would be too few to halt the vertigo of infinity. These places seem to have expected more of you: were they abandoned, or never inhabited? Did somebody build them, or did the whims of chance manifest the impossible out of thin air?
Even when you find others like you, you will all still be alone in a world for men, yet of men devoid. Some of them believe in fate. Some believe in God. Some in chance. Some don't believe, and they only seek.
Every single one is strange, perhaps wounded by the trauma of finding themselves here. Or perhaps this place welcomes those like you: the broken, the unfulfilled, the sinful and the lost. It embraces you, coldly, and in that embrace company will find you.
You will find purpose, or you will languish. To explore, to discover, to escape, to recover normality — whatever drives you. The gates are open for those who seek them, who wish to leave the world behind. But even in the thrill of exploration, the shared comradery of loneliness, the strange net of homes and faiths and sciences woven by the wandering…
You may still find yourself at home. It will be the only home you'll ever have from now on.
Welcome to the Archives, our little haven for those stranded in the other side of reality. There's so much work to do, and so much more to see… Go ahead. Throw your stone to the surface of the sea. Join us, and watch the ripples glimmer.