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May 9th 2025
Site News
January 6, 2025
The System Contest 2024 is over! Check out the final scores, awards and entries!
✩ ★ ✩ SYSTEMCON 2024 ✩ ★ ✩
January 7, 2024
Check out the new System Contest 2024!
May 20, 2023
Check out the new Archaic Contest 2023!
March 20, 2023
The Tale Contest is over! See the winners here.
March 13, 2023
Voting for the Tale Contest has opened! Check out the entries here, and make sure to read and rate them by the 19th.
February 3, 2023
The Tale Contest has begun!
January 3, 2023
Site membership is now open again! Join the site here!
Site News
December 26, 2022
Voting has opened for the Archivist Lore Contest! Read and rate on the entries before the 31st!
Also make sure to fill out our Demographics Poll!
Also make sure to fill out our Demographics Poll!
November 6, 2022
September 21, 2022
Check out the new Liminal Writing Guide and Formatting Guide!
September 20, 2022
The Lost Places contest is over! See the winners here.
September 12, 2022
Voting for the Lost Places Contest has opened! Make sure to read and vote on the submissions!
August 1, 2022
The Lost Places Contest has begun!
July 23, 2022
Please fill out our Demographics Poll!
June 28, 2022
Liminal Archives is currently no longer accepting casual new members to the site or discord.
This means you cannot join unless personally invited by a writer already in the community. However, you may also be granted access to the community by messaging a staff member a completed draft you have written on our sandbox site.
We hope to encourage all of our members a productive time during this slow period, and we apologize for any inconvenience!
This means you cannot join unless personally invited by a writer already in the community. However, you may also be granted access to the community by messaging a staff member a completed draft you have written on our sandbox site.
We hope to encourage all of our members a productive time during this slow period, and we apologize for any inconvenience!
June 1 2022
The Horror Contest is over! Congratulations to the winners.
May 13 2022
Voting is now open for the Horror Contest! The submissions can be found here.
March 30 2022
The Horror Contest has begun!
March 4 2022
The site navigation and home page have been overhauled!
February 16 2022
A new hub has been created for international branches and on-site translations! Check it out here.
January 15 2022
The Threshold Contest is over! Check out the winners here!
January 6 2022
The Threshold Contest voting period has been extended by a week to give more time for people to read and vote on the entries. Voting will now end on the 14th, and winners decided the following day.
January 1 2022
Voting on the Threshold Contest entries has begun! Make sure to read the entries and vote on them! Voting will end on Friday, January 7th and winners will be announced the following morning (EST).
Site News
December 16 2021
The Threshold Contest has been extended! There are now two weeks left to write and submit entries before voting begins!
September 9 2021
We have started our Threshold Contest 2021! See the rules and submit your amazing thresholds here. What strange and wonderful places will be coming to baseline next? Can't wait to see!
September 9 2021
The Collab Contest 2021 is over! You can congratulate our disparate duos by reading their winning entries here.
August 27 2021
Voting has opened for the Collab Contest! Make sure to read the entries and vote on them before the 4th.
August 22 2021
Voting period for the Collab Contest begins August 27th!
Be sure to submit your entries before that time.
Be sure to submit your entries before that time.
July 17 2021
The Collab Contest has started!
July 16 2021
The Collab Contest is starting tomorrow! There is 1 day left to join!
May 29 2021
The limspace contest is over! Check out the winners here.
May 1 2021
Limspace Contest 2021 begins today!
Submit your articles during this three week writing/uploading period.
Submit your articles during this three week writing/uploading period.
April 6 2021
The front page overhaul is finished!
The plan is to update featured articles every two months, starting May 1st.
The plan is to update featured articles every two months, starting May 1st.
April 4 2021
The site logo has been updated to be cleaner and more polished.
Featured Archive:
Featured Level
Level 11 - The Neighborhood
Black metallic pipes stretch across the Cogwell Matrix, these pipes contain carpet fluid and will occasionally burst open and rain down on the houses below.
Featured Threshold
Undisclosed Threshold within baseline reality, a nuclear explosion frozen in time.
Featured Limspace
Held to closer inspection, the mist hides a frothing 'sea' of a noxious substance that phase shifts at random intervals between solid, liquid, and gas states of matter.
Featured Limspace System
We thrive underneath the holy light of the Lanterns which keep entities at bay - but beyond their light mystery and danger festers.
Featured Level
Level 14 - Boundless Retail
This level is one of the best to resupply, get rest, and then move forward to another level. If you ever need supplies or certain objects, the mall should have them if you come across them.
Featured Entity
Smilers are notably dangerous and mischievous entities. It is advised to avoid encounters with smilers if possible.
Featured Limspace
The Domed Meadows are perhaps the most serene and unsettling of the Domed Limspaces.
Never have I seen a world so clearly made to be lived in. The Meadow breathes with life where man sets foot on it, and rests in gloom when he is away.
This can be no coincidence…
Featured Tale
First Contact - Oculus
Their picturesque life, gone in an instant at the hands of pests…
With widespread support from people internationally, we will rectify this grievous mistake and strike back against the forces that would wish harm upon our world.
Featured Limspace System
Erysichthon is a malformed system.
It is recommended that all liminal explorers read this file and be able to recognize the signs of "consumption" by Erysichthon - failure to do so may cause entrapment within its infinite landscape. The best way to survive is to be educated on how to avoid it.
Anyways, I think I've finally reached it. The bottom. Or at least, I'm near the bottom. I can feel it. I've walked for so long…
Featured Limspace
With the limited knowledge we have about the Sargasso, we have yet to uncover what lies at the bottom of it.
The Sargasso, upon immediate observation, is akin to a landfill. The land spans out over 1.5 billion square miles…
Featured Threshold
Let me begin with a story about my brother…
They are like Alleyways, but they stretch on a lot. Pretty thin as well. The residents will always be there, no matter where you go.
Featured Level
This level no longer exists…
The expedition to the bottom of the level revealed that the outer floor bordered space, and was lined with hangars and docking ports for spacecraft of unknown design.
Featured Limspace
The Domed Forest is a pine forest that stretches infinitely, all encased within an impossibly massive dome.
Despite being infinitely large, the landscape appears to resemble a fractal pattern which allows for predictive mapping and an incredible sight from above.
Featured Tale
Deep in some forgotten corner of the Fellerwrath, amongst the autumn trees and dense ferns, a small force of soldiers in dark purple uniforms had set up camp for the night. A few of them had gathered around a small campfire, most of which were busy chatting away and drinking to their heart’s content.
Featured Level
A destination for lost souls. The terminal endpoint of glitches in reality. The first zone of the parallel dimension we call the Backrooms.
This is Level 1, also known as the Halls. It is sometimes claimed that Level 1 was the first discovered Limspace, but it is still far from the most understood.
Featured Level
Level 25 is a high school building, being separated into two floors. Wanderers will almost always enter on the lower floor.
Anyone unfortunate enough to enter on the upper floor must find a staircase leading down as soon as possible.
Featured Level
The waves crashing beneath you bring an intense wave of heat. Each crash causes your heart to stop.
As every knock on the fragile stilts of your shelter can be the last. Like a tree ready to be downed. When the stilts fail you will plummet into The Boiling Sea!
Featured Entity
There is a certain emotion you feel when you see another living creature out here.
I'm happy to say this one was ok with us hanging around…
Featured Entity
Horrendous balls of flesh lacking a single neuron, rolling around haphazardly.
Should any unfortunate lifeform be in its path, a swift strike will be all that is necessary.
Featured Tale
Jek laughed. “Emma! It’s good to hear your-” He stopped talking as he turned to face her. Emma. Chris. And something small, swaddled in pink cloth.
“Oh. Oh no, no, no…”
Featured Level
Human activity in Level 34 has caused Level 34 to become incredibly unstable, with provisional mineshafts and elevator columns composed of rotting wood, causing regions of Level 34 to collapse under their weight.
High-grade explosives have been recorded detonating in the lowest regions of 34 as to either, quickly reach a profitable material, or crush opponents underneath miles of earth.
Featured Level
Due to potentially hazardous insulation and rare gas leaks that sometimes happen in the cavity, it is recommended to bring a gas mask, especially for prolonged periods of traveling.
Some people have been known to traverse clusters of pipes located throughout the level; however, some pipes are very hot and may even result in third-degree burns if touched.
Featured Prose
The three-legged beast was bound by chains, fettered down by weights, and was held back in the shadows by four stocky figures surrounding it.
The eyes of the creature danced back and forth, pupils dilating and flittering as its body pulled against the metal that kept it in place. The antlers dripping a stark red color.
Featured Threshold
Each boat acts as a window into a unique liminal space, allowing one to view outside of baseline reality without physically exiting.
"Why I fish? Well, I'm not actually much of a fisherman. I'm more interested in the places that those boats can take you. Being out on the water allows me to finally see something new."
Contest Winner
But I cannot ever have something as it's given to me, no. I cut that joy short with a question: if it were such a heavenly place, why would he turn his back and depart? And for the dark moonlit vale, environed only by ruins?
He looked, and seemed to weep. Worse even than the haunting image of what he threw away was that he could not say why he'd left.
Contest Runner-Up
The Bloodpools. They ebb and flow a rancid tide of homogenous blood and saltwater through a series of dark industrial warehouses. This is an absolutely abhorrent place, found among the deep guts of Limspace adjacent to Level 1.
The overwhelming smell of the mixture flooding the level attracts millions of flies and maggots which live and drown in the blood and add to its revolting sludge.
Contest Runner-Up
The sharp whisper from the long-perished warns of something just beyond the corner.
Without mentioning what exactly it is past the bend, the voice continuously details the peril that awaits anyone who turns the fold.
Featured Limspace System
In the busy lives of countless people living in metropolitan areas scattered around Baseline Reality, people are constantly utilizing trains. Entering and leaving metro stations, fighting past the crowds of people all just trying to get to their intended destination.
In the mayhem of modern transport, It's very difficult to notice when the crowd becomes a few people lighter.
Featured Limspace
The Womb is a laceration in the flesh of reality. It is entirely comprised of biological material; such material pulsates with vaguely living energy.
As for the exact location, the barren fleshscape lies afloat in a distant sector of interspace — hence the obscurity and lack of in-depth exploration.
Featured Level
The Hub is a level of the Backrooms System, formerly serving as a nexus to all levels in the system in the Forgotten Era.
It is a vast subterranean complex, composing of an infinite interconnected network of tunnels.
Notably, the Hub is made of two sections: The Crossroads and The Temple.
Featured Prose
Karrin's sister Naomi had been sitting cross-legged on the carpet, knees bouncing in place, for the better half of an hour. Her antsiness was winning the battle.
What frustration! They had been walking for months, and now that they had finally arrived at the founder's valley, they had to sit and wait in an empty settlement muttering amongst each other and waiting for… waiting for what, even?
Featured Prose
A cascade of green light came to life, drowning the darkness blanketing the jagged stone walls around the expeditionary team.
Their forms and features illuminated by the strange lanterns of luminescent moss they carried, these four were very clearly inhuman.
Featured Threshold
What do you expect to find beyond the veil? Is the freedom of knowing worth more than the meat behind your eyes?
I know what happens when you let that sepulchral feeling take over.
I learned so from experience.
Featured Limspace
Minimalist towers soar high into the sky. These towers are moored to the icy wastes, but jut out the ground like stalagmites from an icy cave floor, deep into the unreachable heavens above.
Viewing the uninviting terrain, it seems unbelievable that many moons ago Vestasis harbored a mighty civilization and not just runaway vagrants.
Featured Document
Maria brought a bug home the other day. It was nearly half her size, had dozens of stumpy legs, and was ravenous for leaves.
Thanks to my little girl, Athenaeum is now home to a massive twenty-pound caterpillar.
Featured Level
We’ve all had the urge to see our home again. We want to go back, see our friends and loved ones, interact, and lead a normal life.
We never knew we’d end up here, our very minds forced to comprehend that we are now victims of a cruel realm, and those who couldn’t, soon fell to insanity.
Featured System Overview
Survival is achievable if you carefully prepare for the regions you traverse. Know the time periods and avoid standing out; bringing items to where they have yet to be invented may elicit witch hunts, mob lynching or similar.
It is absolutely crucial to avoid regions whose present year is approaching the current year of Baseline Reality.
Featured Limspace
Upon being transported here, you will find yourself at the bottom of an abandoned elevator shaft known as “The Pit.”
Be wary. Once you’ve been transported into this shaft, the only way to continue your indefinite journey is to climb upward. Be wary, at random points in time, the illusion of a freefalling elevator cart will suddenly materialize far above you.
Featured Page
The Liminal Archives is a decentralized organization focused upon the study, exploration, and documentation of liminal phenomena.
Its members stretch all across the globe and are dedicated to uncovering the mysteries present within liminal spaces.
Featured Document
Finally, that took a while. I’ve never seen English, you see.
When I saw someone was accessing the terminals and uploading new data it was a little bit of a process to figure out how to even read it let alone make this first contact.
Featured Level
Withheld behind the repulsive expanse of the Bloodpool Catwalks lies this: a disquieting catacomb of a massive dead shopping mall, plunged into darkness and predominated by an emergency broadcast that forever screams into its profundity.
"Attention Please…" The words echo in distorted cacophony through the darkness.
Featured Limspace
A gargantuan station harboring many types of trains, from which no traincars exit.
Although it is more than one large open area, its central chamber is approximately 8 miles in width, and 50 miles in length.
Featured Document
Upon the tragedy of both expeditions and the loss of friends, scouts and radio operators involved were instructed to keep a log of recent occurrences.
Most others had perfectly normal logs but Sierra-94/Dillan had encountered some sort of mind-affecting creature. Excerpts of the log will be archived below.
Featured Entity
Fawns are creatures that resemble young Cervus canadensis, or elk. However, Fawns have several biological characteristics beyond a baseline animal.
While they are seemingly incapable of aging, or age at a rate imperceptible to humans, their most notable feature is that over time, additional pairs of eyes develop along the head and neck of Fawns, with accompanying eyelids and sockets.
Featured Document
I feel as if I have been removed.
Today is a fitting day to get something off of my chest. Hopefully you'll all still listen, considering the fact that I have yet to release my whereabouts or… say anything really for the longest time. I can assure you all that everything I have to say does not lack importance, but unfortunately that is one of the only things I can be sure of.
Contest Winner
In a far and forlorn place, a woman hunched over a rusty computer terminal. Bits of its bare metal sparkled between the ochre - reflections from the shafts of light pouring through wind-worn windows and patchwork cooling vents speckling the walls. They lit up the dust-filled air, so thick and heavy that the woman had strapped a mask-and-filter over her face before entering the room.
Contest Runner-Up
The Sprawl is dull, desolate and dead, and has always been. The suburbs stretch outward, rows of simple houses, each indistinct.
There are parks and miscellaneous community centers scattered throughout the Sprawl, but all are completely empty.
The Sprawl is always exceptionally quiet. You will find no people, not even other wanderers, and there is no animal life. There are no birds, squirrels, or even any bugs. You are entirely alone.
Contest Runner-Up
The world is composed of an indefinite number of hollow spheres of glass, each containing what I assume to be a planet, arranged in a straight line stretching in two directions, perhaps to two infinities. Each sphere is attached to the ones before and after it by identical ladders; each ladder has seventy-two million three-hundred-twenty-nine thousand five-hundred ninety-one rungs.
Featured Level
You feel a calming sensation.
Sublimity is an expansive complex of interconnected rooms and corridors partially submerged in undulating, lukewarm water.
Each area of the level varies greatly in size and structure; some rooms are small, with their walls forming simple shapes and clean designs, whilst others are more bizarrely shaped, either lacking a definitive form, or being massive in size.
Featured Prose
Time travel. The ability to bend an unstoppable, unreasonable, unsympathetic force to our every whim.
Man's greatest universal query. Ever since the concept was spurred on by one H. G. Wells, really no one in particular, the human condition has taken a great fancy in winding back the three unwavering hands of God that ever tick the universe away, steadily whittling its cosmic strings down to fine dust.
Marching to a questionable end more alien, unknown, and unfamiliar to us than even the deepest parts of the seven seas, nobody can say for certain what the future may hold. Even so, the simple fact is this: time is but a human construct.
Featured Limspace
An entire world heard but not seen, an entire world in perfect harmony, an entire world at war and at peace simultaneously, The Valley of the Choir was truly one of a kind.
Life flourished in its own unique ways, the geography was stupendous, and the bounds of reality were pushed back simply with creativity.
Within the valley rested the muse of all song—The Ensemble.
Featured Limspace System
The waves call out to all eyes laid upon them.
To some, it is a harsh but hush whisper, fading as they leave the water. To others, it's an interminate noise, the driving force behind their every move as they travel deeper and deeper into the ocean, towards their only chance of respite: the Heavenly Seas.
It is here that their call may be answered, and it is here that they will live and die.
Featured Limspace
The Timeless Descent is a colossal, dull expanse, typically appearing similar to a vast mountain.
It is comprised of cliffs, thick clusters of floral life, and occasional pathways ingrained into the ground.
Trees and plants flourish despite its unchanging nature and are often found at every interval of the landscape, yet remain static and idle despite harsh influxes of wind.
Featured Person
The Saint-Scholar Jehak Paul (commonly referred to as simply "Scholar Paul") was an early explorer of thresholds in Europe, with his extensive documentation providing the foundation for the understanding of liminal phenomena and is often attributed as one of the founders of the contemporary "Vagrant" and "Archivist" school of thought, reflecting both his religious and scholarly influence respectively.
Featured Prose
The following is a transcript of an emergency call said to have been received 1,345 meters below the surface of the Plateau Seas, often used as a cautionary tale in the tutoring of inexperienced divers.
Although its legitimacy is questionable due to its lucid account of events—quite uncharacteristic of the caller's current condition—we believe it still holds an important message to those who've found themselves in the depths of the Heavenly Seas.
Contest Winner
Once you start to see the shadows of life, you can begin spotting them draped over other people's faces.
Contest Winner
Below is a discussion board on the niche paranormal site “The Other Worlds” created by Seeker Sarah to gain valuable information on possible thresholds and entities that civilians have discovered. This board is an example of how we should interact with those outside of the archives that have interacted with liminality elements.
Contest Winner
Once did the builder build a walled city;
a city to each and every among his kind.
"Malice with trials shall it survive"
Its builder said, to his kind waiting at its gate.
Contest Runner-Up
Kaya pulled up a multitude of A-Mi-Kuk pictures from the web, some of which were clear hoaxes, but others were plausible. She then pulled up the authentic photos of the Falsemen taken by Visionists in Shivergate. Most of the web photos were drastically different but a few were nearly identical to the Visionist photos.
Featured Rewrite
Eternity and immortality are topics of much debate even among those trapped in the limitless realms of limspace.
They wonder when will everything cease to be.
They ask when will they and everyone they know die.
They contemplate what will stand the test of time and what will be forgotten amidst its constant erosive force.
Will I be remembered? Is there an afterlife where I will be for eternity or is there an endless void?
Featured Entity
The Keepers of the Fortress are the animated statues of knights who inhabit and maintain the Fortress, treating sentient beings as pests.
They tirelessly patrol the corridors, taking the lives of all who cross their paths.
Featured Document
Watch this – I'm going to perform a magic trick.
You had nightmares last night, vivid ones, of him, didn't you…?
The Leviathan of the Oxygen Ocean.
So did I. We all did. You may recall most of us woke up screaming. Some of you couldn't stop clawing at your temples.
Featured Threshold
If you ever decide to head into the old part of town, through the insect-trees and aged plaster, you may happen upon a bone-white church, its steeple long degraded.
Its inside betrays its humble exterior: it's beautifully maintained, from the ornate gold trim to the delicately carved statue of Mary behind the spotless altar.
Contest Winner
I am a member of the city of New Bavaria. I have lived here for as long as I remember, working at the local factory.
All my life, I have worked diligently for the betterment of the city. When my orders come in on the terminal every day, I follow them to the tee. I always press the right buttons at the right time.
I have never given in to distractions such as recreational conversation or typing entries into a terminal detailing my personal existence.
However, something has fumbled my typical routine. During my last segment walking from the industrial sector to the residential sector, I was interrupted by a chaotic lunatic.
Contest Runner-Up
Ever since I was small I have longed to visit the Houndstooth Manor: that strange forlorn castle upon the Shatterrock cliffs that loomed above the scarlet woods.
It dangled there, upside down, jutting out of the rocky shield plate abovehead and visible for leagues around the Commonwealth.
That ghostly stone brick outpost, crumbling and abandoned, had been so often present on the horizons of our journeys that we would use the Houndstooth as a landmark for navigation.
Contest Runner-Up
Salutations, my name is John Eric. I was a crew member of the S.S. Mouette; a treasure-hunting vessel, which used to traverse the vast seas for ruins and wrecks. Anything salvageable we found, we traded with the Terraken towns.
Contest Runner-Up
Twenty years ago, I was but a lone meager child playing amidst the castles of sand that I had meticulously crafted with a simple spade and bucket. It was a pleasant day on that golden, sandy beach.
Contest Runner-Up
With the countless adventurers and crews that venture the many legendary seas of Thalasso, it is a given that some would write down their stories. Some write exaggerated tales of their heroics. Others write songs to honor fallen comrades.
Contest Runner-Up
A giddy wave of toxic excitement shot through his reinforced spine: a rushing chemical soup of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins spilled across his neural passageways. The adrenal gland is simply another component, doing what it was supposed to do. This is what the hunter lived for — the rush. Seas.
Featured Limspace
The Foyer is, in essence, a maze. It simply wears the skin of contemporary office space. But in truth, it is a labyrinthine system of rooms, with no known end. Each is even more bizarre than the last. No part in any of these places ever repeats.
You’d think that’d be useful right? That it would stop us from getting as lost? But, there are only so many ways you can design a mostly normal room before things have to become… strange…
Featured Rewrite
The Electrical Station is a vast, lifeless stone landscape overgrown with fields, forests, and metallic jungles of electrical equipment.
High-voltage transmission towers rise from the barren rock in all directions, extending out towards the horizon to form a jagged skyline of towers and wire.
The sky is blanketed in perpetual gloom; clouds obscure the source of light, and shadows are cast only as hazy blurs pointing in no particular direction.
Featured Joke Level
Featured Document
All records suggest a distinct lack of permanent thresholds leading to the Collapsing System.
The testimonies confirm my suspicion of momentary bridges existing in lieu.
Featured Limspace
The Snowy Wastes are a combination of rural and suburban regions, consisting of villages, fields, and forests covered in a constant layer of snow.
The ground here is frozen and, as such, extremely tough and exhausting to dig through.
It has been observed that deeper layers in the ground are significantly colder than those above.
Featured Limspace
Anthropologists have spread their spew in the Terminals for as long as they’ve been able to catalogue and record data, or so such groups claim.
And so, the human preoccupation with death, and the imagined possibility of a place where there is none, has also loomed at the forefront of the minds of Seekers and Archivists alike for generations of Written Time.
Featured Rewrite
With The Master Ensemble’s fall, the wanderers left in the sound were torn apart note by note until there was an emptiness where the valley once stood.
They had the ambition of the once incredible Ensemble that ruled the valley. So, they took control of the mindless Note groups as their Conductors. The Conductors led the notes in colonies of living soundwaves assimilating lesser Notes and their surroundings into their gestalt. These groups would become known as Ensembles.
Featured Prose
The radio crackles to life again.
You awake immediately at the sound of it, the faint whisper of a woman's voice interspersed with unintelligible static. The frequency on the handheld can't be identified, and you're certain if you tried to change it, she would return. She always does.
page revision: 93, last edited: 03 Sep 2025 17:45