WETLANDS
OF THE
NIHIL CLOUDBURST
Most of you are not going to believe me or the contents of this writing, and that is ok. It reads like an elaborate hoax, yet what follows within is what I fully believe to be the truth.
I believe I have a brother who was erased from time.
My discovery of a box pushed to the back of the family home's attic has opened my mind to impossible fictional notions, and I have spent the last years untying a perplexing knot of skepticism regarding my newly discovered brother and the records of his unorthodox life. At this point now I fully believe that there are worlds beyond our own, that 'magic' and other such superfluous notions might be real, and I am skeptical that we can call anything in this life an epistemic truth. Everything I once believed I now question, because of a dusty little box filled with the autobiography of a man named Jacob, an archivist.
Jacob was my brother, but no memory of him remains; not with me or anyone else. I believe he discovered something. Something incredible, dangerous, and alluring, and not just a new world adjacent to our own — one impossible to place on any map — but something else within it that Jacob followed incessantly to his terminal obscurity: washed away in the rain as he discovered the wetlands of the nihil cloudburst.
Liminal Classification:
In Jacob's own words,
» Terrain Grading | IV | These wetlands are nestled in the valleys between ragged and sharp mountain ranges. None of it is easy to traverse. Prep your kits to be waterproof and bring plenty of redundancy. |
---|---|---|
» Biodiversity | · | Aside from some ferns and shrubbery, naught but the haunting skeletal totems of the giant hogweed trees gaze upon the marshlands. |
» Ecosystemic Hazards | V | The curse of nihil falls upon this land in sheets of drizzling rain and furious storms, washing away all thought, meaning, and existence. We confined ourselves to this abuse too late; until oblivion swallowed our memory both within and extrinsicly beyond the limspace. |
» Liminal Resonance | III | You've likely accepted the burden of archiving long ago. An archivist's affirmation of life requires no recognition, and the wetlands remind us that legacy unites us over memory… which fades all too soon. |
The Contents
Below is a story of adventure, discovery, and loss. Jacob wrote candidly and frequently about his experiences and worldview, and about how the liminal world changed him.
Including the entirety of Jacob's writing would be exhaustive. The box was delivered to the house long ago, considered trash, and promptly forgotten in the attic — but he had filled it with dozens of journals and piles of unsorted looseleaf covered in scribbles and ravings. Only some were about the wetlands — most of them detailed other strange and impossible places. He took photos on and off the trail, leaving undeniable proof of his contact with liminal worlds. I’ve compiled what I believe to be cohesive and relevant for the wetlands fairly dutifully, and confident I haven’t missed any key details, but it’s hard to say. He crammed a rich and colourful life into his years as an archivist, often staring into the face of death just to say “I went there, and I saw it with my own eyes.”
This is the legacy of Jacob.
"For Will and all the others…
Claire’s encouraging I write this down for the archives before we go back a second time with her. I liked her inspired speech at the coffee shop, so, here’s what happened on our first trip. I’ve written it in as much detail as I can to preserve at least something from everything that we lost. I’ll write down everything I can remember.
- - -
The Discovery
We were driving dirt roads deep into the forest. Will plowed into the mountain turns with reckless speed, cruising without care that only a waist-high metal barrier was between our rusty pickup truck and a 90-meter tumble to our deaths down the side of a mountain. Whitenuckling the holy-shit handle with one hand and sipping black coffee with the other, I gazed out the window and absorbed the landscape whizzing by in blurs of sepia-tinted green mixed with umber. It was early — just 5 AM — and we were already on the trail. The golden dawn glazed and spilled over the mountaintops with first light, its elegant sunbeams carved through low-hanging clouds nestled in the canopy, stirring the morning fog up and out from its roost in the tree line.
We reached the spot marked with a hoodoo on the edge of the road and pulled into a grassy patch. He killed the engine and we kitted up. I know he insisted on rubber coveralls with built-in boots because he bought me a pair. We wrapped our hiking bags in plastic for safety, like how I had an extra supply of sealed matches and firestarter tucked under my hat; just in case. We began the hike, carving each footstep out of raw untouched overgrowth. It started dry and uphill, and we squeaked every step of the way. Soon it went downhill, quickly turning wet. Will was leading us right into a bog, I was suddenly very happy for the coveralls.
Four hours into it we took a break, snacking on apples and some beef jerky, and by this point, I was quite anticipating a letdown. Nothing could be worth getting eaten alive by this many mosquitos and bumbling horseflies in the baking sun — but we pressed on because we were already this far in. Despite it all, I did love the excuse to get out and clear my head.
We continued our trek, sloshing through marshy bog, skirting around dry ledges of mossy knolls and through squelching pools of mud. Soon, I began to feel strange. It was in the subtleties, like the realization that there weren't any more mosquitos or the last time you noticed a horsefly was half an hour ago. In the silence of the air… no birds. In the tree trunks that began to look more like bleached bones, stripped of bark, their roots unearthed, twisted as if they had writhed along the ground like wiggly snakes before realizing they were made of wood. The creeping awareness that you did not know where you were and that maybe, you did not belong.
We had no service on our phones and our compass spun in confused circles. It was subtle enough until it wasn't: when Will stopped me, reached into the bog, and like a scene from Hamlet pulled out a skull. I knew at that moment that something had changed. We weren't in Kansas anymore, as the story goes. Evening was setting in and the sun glowed bloated and orange through the overcast valley. Will told me that we were here.
This was my first taste of the new world: the parallel place. Some people are thrilled by the 'new', but I was frightened. Around me was a sea of death, drowned in the bog, silent and still. A flooded necropolis with bones strange and unrecognizable. Interspersed among the swampland were mossy knolls sporting leafless hogweed trees that had grown to mammoth heights, towering over us and splaying their skeletal umbels towards the sky. Never before had I seen a place so haunting, so beautiful in its horror, and something compelled us to walk further into its petrifying depths.
I wanted to leave the second Will plucked the skull from the waters, but something tugged at my mind that kept panic from overwhelming me. There was a solemness here, a serenity which befell this place. It enveloped me with its spell. Despite the drowned bones it didn't feel dangerous, it felt hallowed. This was not a place of danger but a place of rest, detached from the world we know, serene and undisturbed. We were lost now in a place unreal, and dusk was setting in. For better or for worse, we were spending the night here; camping under novel skies.
- - -
The Oblivion
I remember setting up our tent. I remember sitting beside our meagre campfire as the moonless sky bared itself open and endless to us, sprinkled with nameless honeydew stars. I remember the wind picked up and low clouds crept over the mountaintops into the valley, roiling upwards and frothing into heavy supercells promising a downpour, encouraging us to pack it in for the night. I remember falling asleep, and I remember forgetting.
The storm, which had come upon us with wind and fury, now had subdued. I was alone in the tent and a drizzle of rain was lambasting our shelter with a gentle rapping. I remember that specifically — rain under a tent was always something I found particularly beautiful: the sound and smell which consorted with a drop in temperature was of one of life's softest orchestras.
I lay there for a while listening to the sound of the rain and musing a sense of presque vu that left me vaguely disoriented. Something was amiss, but that something was the lack of something. Whatever the something was, however, I could not identify. I played with it in my mind, prodding at the nothing that irked me, rolling it around again and again as I lay there unable to sleep until I was rousted from my nest by anxiety.
When I sat up it came to me immediately. There was a second sleeping bag in the tent, and I could not remember who it belonged to. At the tip of my tongue was a name, but I could not access the part of my brain where that name was held. I saw objects that weren't mine: a rugged hiking bag adorned with custom strapping and cords, a long knife, and tactically simple clothing that was suited for the hike but had little personality. The person they should be attached to, however, was so entirely missing (not just from the tent, but from my sense of recognition) that it sent me into a spiral of panic.
I grabbed the strange knife and stashed it in my sleeping bag, cozied up to my leg. A stranger was sleeping here, and I could not recall if they were friend or foe. Irrationality led to instinct, and I began to frantically search through the strange pile of objects in the bed next to me, desperate to find something recognizable, hoping not to find a loaded gun. How long until they came back? How long until I had to fight? Had I been kidnapped? Delirious, I recalled the strange place I was in and started distrusting even myself.
I had walked here, alone. Certainly, that's what I remember. But I didn't know where here even was. Why did I come here? Wasn't it Saturday? I took the day off work yesterday. Why? There was a gap in my mind, flashing with half-memories — what I was thinking and doing felt carved up and murky — like reading a serial killer's manifesto made of jumbled cut-outs and maniacally pasted letters. The rain drumming on the tent turned to white noise as blood pressure filled my ears with ambient rumbling, my eyes felt wide and staring, and I realized my breathing was rapid and shallow.
Looking back on that night fills me with dark contemplations. Will was gone, and I did nothing to save him.
To me, at that moment, Will no longer existed. Worse, he never had existed. I was feeling secondhand effects of the wetland’s curse: the rain. I cannot explain why or how but I know in my heart it was the rain that did it. While I slept he left the tent and got soaked in the storm, every drop of rain washing a little part of him away. It made me forget him, and it made him forget everything. I did not know that he was out there in a worse state than I was; exposed to the full brunt of the storm, walking through waking oblivion under the rains of obscurity. I did not know if I should have even cared.
I sat in the tent freaking out for some time, unable to move, grabbing my head and failing to put together the puzzle in my mind. The rain stopped. Night slowly turned to dawn, and with the morning I returned, just slightly, to sanity. Still confused and with no memory of Will, I left the tent, surveying the landscape like a scared rabbit leaving a burrow, gripping the knife tight.
I was met with nonpareil stillness. The contrast of my perturbation against the quiet of the marsh was tangible — the drowned bones still slept undisturbed by my peril, careless of the rising sun and all other things. Only one thing was out there, sloshing through the bog, leaving ripples cascading outwards into this hallowed, quiet world. Will.
I heard him before I saw him. Waist deep in the bog, soaked, dirty and dazed, was the other man — a stranger's face that evoked nothing in me but panic. In my state, I was expecting almost anything, ready to lunge at him like a cornered animal, hold the blade against his throat and demand he tell me where I was and why he brought me here. But after a moment of tension, I saw how harmless he was. His eyes… they were glassy reflections of my fear and confusion. Across his face was the same look of pallid forgetfulness that had been tormenting my brain all night, and as he stumbled through the marsh towards our tent he looked helpless and terrified. I lowered the knife and let it slip from my hands, plunging blade-first into the soft earth.
Will reached into his back pocket and fumbled to pull an ID out of his wallet. He couldn't remember his name, but that piece of plastic was proof he existed. We tentatively introduced ourselves but it was clear there wasn't much for him to introduce. Just as I could not recollect him, he could not recollect himself. The clothes in the tent were just as alien to him as they were to me but he packed them up with efficiency, instinctively aware of how his equipment fit together. They were objects. Objects that defined him — but he no longer had a definition.
I forgot if I knew him well; if we shared moments integral to my life. Perhaps I hated him. Without the context of my memories of Will I did not know how shattering this development was to me. We were two strangers meeting for the first time in a strange place, starting fresh, the slate wiped entirely clean. Everything that Will had ever said or done had been obliterated. He was an empty shell.
We packed in a daze and retraced our way to the real world. Will started his truck, and knew how to drive it, but couldn't tell me anywhere he'd ever driven it, or where we lived. With what clues we could gather from his glovebox and wallet I guided us to his house. Then I took a taxi home, leaving Will to put the pieces of his forgotten life back together. I wondered who he was. Wondered and could not bring myself to feel anything — not even sadness. It was death without death, a phoenixlike rebirth — not of fire, but of water. Whatever memories we lost were laid to rest among the silent bones of the swamp; drowned in still waters.
- - -
The Allure
Weeks passed. The change in my own life was a subtle one. The silent swamp lingered in the back of my mind as a haunting phantom, stirring within me strange questions. I watched Will suffer a beautiful destruction that, try as I might, I still cannot quell an abstract romanticism for.
Will's parents could not remember him. His job (which he forgot he had) could not remember him — but had all the records of his employment — and fired him assuming he was a clerical error or a fraud. Walking through town he was a phantom; an apparition chained to dubious obligations of a bygone life, a stranger stumbling through unfamiliar habits and uncanny places. He could navigate his apartment with ease; the spoons were here, the cups were there, and his clothes were folded there… he somehow knew the layout of past Will's life without knowing it. New Will found the whole affair quite disturbing.
He contacted me often since I was the only person who knew his predicament. He would tell me over and over about his first memory; the first thing he knew was him standing in the water with an audience of sunken bones, staring upwards into the sky at the withdrawing skyburst, a ghost in the night. I think remembering it brings him stress, so discussing it in repetitive detail was his form of therapy. It gave me shivers. With no one else to talk to, Will spent his time searching for answers, and in time he found them.
The archivists.
They lurked in fringe chatrooms and tiny conspiracy communities across the internet, ignored by most and assumed to be crackpots, LARPing, or goofing around. What's more; they liked it that way. With that visage, they could hide in plain sight, and gatekeep anyone who had never experienced the liminal by hamming up their faux insanity. Will had found his way into their circles and was able to tell his story, and that's how we both met Claire. She took an interest in him and was relatively close by, so an arrangement was made, and Will roped me into it as well.
We met at a cafe in a small highway town and partook in a rather extraordinary brunch. We were a ragtag group: I was in over my head, fidgety, and inappropriately urban for the setting. Will was starry-eyed and quite visibly at the mercy of the biggest midlife crisis ever, and he hardly took his gaze away from Claire — who, much to my disappointment, was not mysterious or imposing in the slightest. She was awkward, slightly pale, and dressed like an overgrown teenager. Over black coffee, cold-cut sandwiches and underripe fruit slices Claire told us about the other worlds — the liminal worlds — and the people who were fated to seek them.
She started fairly pedestrian; testing the waters to gauge how much we were willing to believe. A chemistry quickly formed between her and Will, letting Claire open up to more candid and unbelievable details. I mainly stayed quiet as she recounted experiences and supported them with props and photographs that she eagerly presented from her knapsack like a child doing show and tell. We sat there, sipping our coffee. Soaking it in. It was all fantastical and full of whimsy; photographs of mushrooms that towered higher than skyscrapers, or archivists wading through thousands of glowing lilipads. Motorcycling through rocky expanses under two moons. Yet, it was all covered in a veneer of technicality — indexes, rating systems and tactics; coverups and networking. There was a seriousness entwined with the wonder, but I felt the unspoken subtext running through it all: the allure.
The allure was the peril, the thrill, and the novel. These archivists were addicted to the allure of limspace and spent their lives seeking it out and sharing it with their underground family of relatable eccentrics. And I understood.
Over the last weeks in moments of quiet, I would find myself looking at mundane things and experiencing an incomprehensible sense of detachment; a derealization. Often I would dose off in blips of waking dissociation, during which I would parse the world around me as… mundane. Basic. Standard. Routine. The majesty of existence was bigger than city streets, a 9 to 5 job, and whatever I was filling the time with on the side. I realized how much of a spiritual awakening my brush with the liminal world was.
Whenever I came to, those mundane things that sent me into dissociation would crystalize into a new clarity. My mind would detach from that mundane thing, begin to hate it, and feel alien towards it; knowing that it was a manicured and planned part of my life controlled by someone else, and that all things I saw and did were removed from what life truly was. The liminal world was out there, untouched by man, untainted by constructions, and real. It was the truest reflection of what God had made without the perversion of human ideals. Over the last few weeks I considered that I was living a false life, a catered life; letting time slip by doing things 'according to plan'.
It was a terrifying feeling, it made me feel sick and disoriented. I couldn't escape it, either. Things that I once saw as comforting now brought me intrusive thoughts of worry and detachment. Increasingly so, where I began to see the fakeness everywhere. In fashion, media, grocery stores, even the furnishings of my apartment. Everything was made to distract, to cover up the glaring truth: that none of this mattered, and none of it was real.
The real world was out there, and it was calling to me, as it did to all the other archivists drawn to its allure. I am unsure how healthy these intrusive thoughts are, or if they would have passed in time — had we not agreed at the end of our meeting that Will and I would show Claire the Wetlands. So, with a little bit of encouragement and some emailed guides and templates, I set to writing an 'official' limspace file about our discovery, so that it may be shared with the rest of the archives.
“Don’t forget to give it a bomb ass name, too.” She insisted. That comment stuck with me and still makes me chuckle. In every way, these people were speaking my language.
And so, in a single afternoon, I had been eagerly indoctrinated into the ranks of the archivists. To answer some questions about Will, properly document what we had seen, and quell some dark thoughts within myself, we planned to return all together: Claire, Will, and myself, to the Wetlands of the Nihil Cloudburst.
- - -
The Descent
The trail we had taken seemed to have healed itself entirely. The path had overgrown, renewed, as if we had never disturbed it before. It was like walking through fresh untouched wilds, but I recognized the markers as we went that Will pointed out on our first escapade. This time, I was more alert and aware of what to expect, and I was able to catch more details about the transition between our world and the next.
The sky, for one, shimmered and shifted hues quite abruptly as we walked from our taken-for-granted comfortable Earth blue to a hazier and swollen shade of blood orange, as if the sun was resting along the horizon sleeping in eternal dusk. A golden hour sheen blanketed everything here, illuminating the wraithlike thin trees in a light that felt uncanny and heavenly. Much of this world felt like a juxtaposition: where fear shook hands with solace, and where the waking moments of experiencing something new and unseen were held hostage against mind-destroying rain.
I spent a long time thinking about Will. How terrifying it would be to come back to a world that forgot you. How crushing it would be to forget the world you came from. Honestly, I had been drunk enough to stop thinking about it many times, especially on nights he would call me and tell me again about his first memories in the bog; staring into the receding rain.
But, it clicked one day during one of my dissociative episodes: Will was not miserable. He wasn't scared. He was busy trying new things, meeting new people, seeking answers — and getting them. The fear I thought he was feeling was my fear. The terror was a reflection of my deeper anxieties. I realized it was not a horrible thing that happened to him, but a freeing one. Will was released from every bond that tied him down to this fake reality, and as a result, had no fear over what was lost. This world in turn had given him a passage; an egress, without any anger or pain, grief or loss. He was reborn and could begin life again. A real life, without baggage, spent seeking out the liminal and becoming one with the Godly realms.
I think that is why I agreed to go again. In my heart, I knew it would not be the last time either. This was already an addiction. My every waking moment was spent wondering what else lies beyond the marshlands — if there were more liminal worlds within the one we found. Claire had described a connection to other liminal realms that was common to encounter in places like this, and set upon us a mission to discover if this limspace was a node of a much larger system of liminal worlds. We could confirm this connection easily: if we discovered a place she called the Heartwood. As long as I had a mission to complete there was no time for me to contemplate my dark ruminations.
Claire suggested we head across the swamp to a rocky ridge near the horizon, where the valley began to creep out of the waters and upwards in elevation into scraggly mountains. It was a long trek, but we were prepared for a multi-day out trip, and as long as we could find solid land to pitch a tent on before nightfall, that would be all we needed. To prevent amnesia in the event of rain we also brought respirators and ensured our coveralls had rubber hoods that, when paired together, would leave no skin exposed. With a sealed suit, we were confident that the rains would not destroy our consciousness, even in the worst-case event of being stuck in a downpour without cover. Luckily we did not have to put that equipment to the test.
For the longest time, we waded through the marshes, gently pushing aside drowned bones. This one was a ribcage, this one a femur. This one; unrecognizable, certainly not human. Now the pelvis of a large animal. A skull. A spine. More ribs. Miles and miles of them, all resting in the waters of Nihil. I wondered how many of them had been forgotten in the rain before they died.
In time Claire's plan worked, perhaps due to a sixth sense she possessed after traversing so many liminal worlds, or perhaps simply because she was lucky. By her loose guidance and a heading towards the mountains ahead, we eventually stumbled upon the most incredible thing yet, and she exclaimed upon its discovery that she knew we would find something like this if we went deep enough.
An impossibly large cave opening, wide enough to fly a jumbo jet through, awaited us at the edge of the valley. The maw was carved from the mountainous rock ahead and cut deep into the earth below, and water from the marshlands poured into its depths in grand, frothing waterfalls. The cave walls were smooth, almost polished. The walls sported sedimentary lines which gave it the appearance of an enormous petrified trunk of wood. I was in shock at the sheer size of it, so large it created wind — and it was so deep I could not fathom its end. Light cascaded and reflected far into its overgrown and echoing depths for miles, but it swallowed it up into pitch-black tunnels of smooth, twisting, ancient stone, branching off to worlds and realms unknowable.
According to Claire, this was an entrance to the Arborescent Liminal System — a cosmic tree trunk entwined with countless blooming worlds. This was the reason she was interested in meeting with Will and I in the first place; in the slim chance this cave existed she had to find it, and did everything she could to have us to lead her here; not that we were difficult to convince.
Imagining what worlds lie within the Heartwood encapsulated my mind and soul. Perhaps it was the repressive dark thoughts compounded with the death that had surrounded me for the hike leading up to this moment, but something within me changed. As I stood before it I felt small, laid bare, judged like a soul in the underworld. This cave was like the gates to Tartarus, and I could feel its otherworldly power — inanimate yet alive — gazing into me and through me. Reflecting my existence and showing me how small we humans were. At that moment I knew in my heart my life was worth nothing, and the only true spiritual thing to do was to pursue these liminal worlds.
It was when I stared into the great maw of the Heartwood and it stared back at me that I made a choice… a pact, to truly become an archivist.
One day I would return, and willingly give myself to the rains."
Closing Thoughts
I do not remember living with Jacob, who he was, or when he left. But I do remember our old guest room filling me with strange dread, and our father pawning many boxes out of storage wondering how we ever got so cluttered. The guest room was my brother's, and I confirmed it with yearbooks from our high school.
I do not know why our world was not enough for Jacob, but I have read these journals countless times to try and understand. The most frustrating thing of all though, is after all these years, I have been unsuccessful in contacting these 'Archivists'. Jacob left more stories for them, and I am compiling all the worthwhile diaries and matching photographs together to one day try and reach them. Perhaps there is simply a form of destiny with this sort of thing.
All Jacob has left behind is the physical proof he existed. These photographs, these journals, this legacy. I wish I knew him better. It pains me to read these passages that feel written by a stranger, and never once see our family mentioned. The liminal world swallowed him up entirely, stealing even his thoughts — which, it would seem, had never been on us at all. I do hope that he is well.
I feel like sharing his stories is the best I can do to keep his memory alive. To prove, at least somehow, that he existed. I wonder if that was what he wanted all along.