▸⠀The Valhalla Dancehall
Look up at the lights, at the disco ball. This is a mummer's farce. The place where mask after mask is traded and kept and bled into and bound, faces and names fading as we die and wake up again, again, again.
And the thing is that you want it. It becomes the only thing you’ve ever wanted.
Take me. Please.
- An alleged survivor, delirious from rescue at an undisclosed threshold. Part of the wider Borne Collection, a vast catalogue of such parapsychic experiences across limspace systems.
LIMSPACE CLASSIFICATION
Difficulty | Unknown | Models of difficulty have not been discerned. We don’t know. |
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Entity Count | Unknown | We don’t know how many there are, or what they are, or if it even matters. Does it matter? After everything? |
Chaos Gradient | 5/5 | The Dancehall is proposed to be endlessly self-sustaining, with the distinct abilities to both reanimate any life forms, and establish magnetic fields at will to anomalously heal all wounds. The rates at which this occurs and if it does occur at all varies wildly. |
Basset-Frazier Index | 4.5/5 | Regular surveys performed by both enthusiasts and the observed afflicted alike has allowed us to determine with some degree of confidence the irregularities of this space. But still, it is a survey from afar. Because people die. We can’t save everyone. |
FOREWARD
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 Seekers1 and Archivists alike for generations of Written Time.
Ancient encrypted files from one predecessor tribe or family or incest-ridden commune to another mostly failed in their search. But there was one location, distinct among the others, that loomed stark in the emptiness of the limitless imagination these limspace systems have to offer. A realm of delights and fancies, where you could be anyone and anything, only to dance yourself to death, and give yourself to it thereafter, becoming a prop in the next entree’s fantasy.
Such a mythical location is, relatively, impossible to prove. The only verification of it is that it seems to move in the psychomembrane of limspaces, interrupting signals in the Terminal and is purported to invade dreams of Seekers. Juna is also aware of its existence, however cagey she might be about it.
At thresholds, it is possible to experience seizure symptoms and ‘phase’ into such a space, if for a brief time. This discovery was almost accidental, and repeated self-experimentation by both humans and entities to test the limitations of how long one can remain submerged in it before giving themselves to its delights is how such a wealth of information was collected here.
Far too many souls were lost for that knowledge to be proven worthwhile.
Early Seekers had no name for it but Elysium. Others called it the Cornucopia, for its gifts, its illusions. In modern, more civilised times, there is only one consistent name that people recognise when it is spoken of: Valhalla. The Valhalla Dancehall.
The scene upon entry is impermanent, vague, and different from person to person. The Dancehall constructs itself to seemingly recall distant memories from the happiest time in one’s life, yet also the most unattainable. Modern consensus from research of the cultures of various limspaces and respective systems in outer fabrics (that is, systems inaccessible from Baseline), demonstrate a diachronous cultural fascination with the idea of what the Archivist Guillard outlined as the ‘last horizon’; that one day, the individual will find belonging, and their prolonged existence within transience will end, following the reunion with those they have lost in a ceremonial dance presided over by psychopomps and/or a psychopomp. Descriptions of these beliefs are united by a similar pentatonic rhythm, almost always associated with the concept of death or the ending of things - even if the entities espousing such beliefs are unable to truly know it.THE PASSAGE
AMMENDED 9/27 XVI: This is unlike anything I've seen in my thirty years mapping limspaces and their surrounding fabrics. I can't write this like normal, and I cannot catalogue it as I would according to standard Archivist protocol either, due to its inherent irregularities and frankly, impossibilities. I have organised it as follows as best I can. This is fascinating to me; it is the Beyond, even in the most distant of stations.
- Archivist Frank Borne, formerly of the Thespos Companions web, though he has not been with them for many a journey since.
Repeated experiences with the Dancehall are rare, if they do even occur. Your average Archivist who attends their family's Christmas dinners will never find themselves in this space. Instead it is the ones whose connections to 'reality' have frayed, whose anchors have slipped from their ankles, that are vulnerable to the Dancehall's draw. Recipients when they first arrive in such a space enter into what is here called ‘the Window’, a room of carved ivory, with a door that looks out into nothing. There, after waiting for an extended period of time, the recipient is approached by someone they once knew, and lost. In the event that they never lost someone, something or someone they believe in will approach them instead - or even an ancestor, an ideal that the recipient respects or cherishes. They are the guide, and it is through them that admittance into the Dancehall is possible.
Such a guide is visible in the location of transition; controlled tests along thresholds reveal black winged ‘angels’, with mouths full of bright eyes and wings made of hands seen briefly during moments of phasure. It is unknown if these are the ‘guides’ themselves, but their relation to the entry of this limspace is undeniable, and given that manifestation only occurs very early on in a visit to the Dancehall both inside and out, it is likely that they correlate with one another.
It is unknown how many such guides exist; if there is only one, or if there are many. It is assumed at the time of the writing of this report that they are in control of the Dancehall, but it is not known if they have been permanently in charge of the establishment, or if they seized ownership from a more ancient power.
After leaving the Window, the guide will take the user through the doorway into what first appears to be a vast wide lake of white fog, passing scenes of events both past and imagined. This is the seduction: you are immersed in love, in acceptance, in completion. Here, you find the end of your journey, after so long wandering alone in empty dreams. Your family, perhaps one who you never even met in your life, comes to you with open arms. You live a thousand half-lives, each and every one with your guide next to you, watching your every move, but never letting you stall - you must always move forward, ever forward, never looking back. Throughout, the guide will sing a song; its melody is always the same, regardless of whoever you might be. It is the song of the Dancehall, and it is through said song that you are trapped.
At last it will take you to a great gate, with all the remnants of your life that have joined you in your journey. You are admitted to the Dancehall, and there memory and dream fade together, becoming muddy at best. Here there are the most holes in all accounts that have ever been made. You dance yourself past exhaustion, and cannot stop. Your organs spill out, your mind frays, your blood swims in the air like snakes, but you don’t care. You cannot care. The love does not leave you, and your euphoria only grows with every part of yourself that you destroy, every leg that you break in your revelry, every voice you lose when you scream.
Night and day, however hazy and ill-defined, seem to exist in such a place. At the beginning of every day, you are put back together, nursed to health by your guide who sews your body together again piece by piece, afterward taking you to the Hall again. The process repeats indefinitely, each day with you losing more and more of the vestiges of the dreams you met prior to the entry of the Dancehall, until there is nothing but nameless faces, sweat, blood, feral and primal recollection. And the song, oh, the song.
And then-
It’s unknown what happens, after that. Most who come in, leave broken. The account above is pieced together from many different people, and is a highly incomplete picture at best. From what we can gleam, they were ‘rejected’, for some reason or another. But the level of rejection is not uniform, nor is it fair.
Some people end up dead in the ground, their body trampled to dust. Most are raving madmen. And upon rejection even if you survive, you can never, ever, go back. Attempts to do as much have resulted in incomplete phasure, with memory pollution permanently rendering the thresholds used for testing unusable - memories of the former subject permanently infecting the lining of the gate and any who attempt to use it. This has only occurred once. I was We were never so sloppy again.POPULATION
It has been previously thought that past entrees into the Dancehall that were not rejected, were ultimately assimilated in the system, becoming entities in and of themselves. However, given the modern realisation of just how much of the experience of the recipient is constructed by the Dancehall and whoever or whatever might control it, if even such control exists - it is possible that they too are just constructs and not truly real.
A true population count, or record of such a population, is impossible. Perhaps the scouts might count as entities? But even then… Even then.
ENTRANCES AND EXITS
As aforementioned, any true entrance is unknown, but common thought is that cultures observed in systems with melodies similar to the rhythms recorded in the study here are positioned closer to thresholds where phasure is more likely. This observation was proven true countless times.
I want to see her again. Why won’t she come back to me?
Why won't they let me find her?