Eldritch Location / Fan Works

• The Amazing Spider-Luz in: Across the Owl-Verse!: The Knee is weird. For whatever reason, the caverns below the Knee will move and shift around like rooms in a procedurally generated video game, seemingly at random, with the hole that Amity and Luz fell through vanishing as soon as no one was looking, the walls are made of something that Luz can't Wall Crawl on, two of the rooms are what appears to be a human church and military base, and time is weird (Luz and Amity were in the tunnels maybe half a day from their perspective, but it was much later when they got out, which apparently not everyone manages). Really, the fact that the tunnels have light with no visible source, apparently from interactions from the magics used to light some of the rooms and basements caught up in the effect, is one of the less weird things about it.
• Subverted in Asshai's Flames: Asshai only has the reputation we see in canon because it's comfortable for the residents (mostly sorcerers and Red Priests/Priestesses) this way. In fact the city is fairly average, if more soaked in magic than the outside world, and most of the rumors are false or just misinterpreted (for example there is no agriculture, but because the city can afford the import, not because the plants don't grow there).
• In the Slender Man fic By the Fire's Light, the Slender Man hangs out with his victims in a dimension filled with fire, ash, and stunted, gnarled, and blackened trees.
• Child of the Storm has several examples owing to its mixture of canons:
  • As per The Dresden Files, the NeverNever, which as its entry below states, is approximately twenty times the size of Jupiter. It contains, among other things, the Faerie realms of Winter and Summer, which are quite bad enough to begin with.
  • Hogwarts is a milder example, owing to the fact that the stairs move and the building is actually sentient. And possibly dating JARVIS.
  • The Dark Levels of Strangeways prison, which is like a high tech Azkaban, minus the Dementors. It's humming with countermeasures both magical and mundane and the air within tastes rather strange, thanks to its processed nature. The whole impression is somewhat unnerving. And that's before one takes into account the inmates...
  • MI13 seem to have acquired one for their new base, suggested to be a disused part of London's underground system. It's dark, it's dank and it's full of portals to the Nevernever.
  • Asgard is, apparently, also sentient and likes Jane. It's also an Adventure-Friendly World in the most literal sense - it's a World of Badass because you've got Everything Trying to Kill You and not being a badass is a good way to end up as lunch.
  • Project Pegasus is one thanks to its attempts to weaponise magic. According to Ward, they got close to creating a new Super-Soldier. According to Coulson, who was there when all hell broke loose, that was the problem. Whatever was down there, it was bad enough that Alan Scott, a Green Lantern at the very height of his powers, barely managed to subdue it and seal it off from the world. When it appears in Unfinished Business, it lives up to this billing and then some. Among other things down there are symbiotes, ersatz copies of Archangel (which apparently somehow aren't clones), various mutated ex-human horrors, Humanoid Abominations, Animalistic Abominations, Botanical Abominations (a forest made of people is arguably the least disturbing part), Bio Punk killer robots, what looks very much like a broken but functional (and open) Stargate, a layout that bears only a passing resemblance to reality, countless cybernetically augmented mythical monsters... and a deep connection to the Green and the Parliament of Trees, which is composed of the Cotati - which have been extinct for hundreds of millions of years - and the ghost of Alan Scott. And then there's the heart of it, which is why it's so eldritch: Project Pandora, which involved ripping open a Ley Line nexus to get at Earth's raw magic and channel it through a suitable vessel into someone like, say, the person responsible for it - Nimue. It got so bad that Scott had to leave his Lantern as the cork in the bottle.
    • It's also worth noting that what we see in Unfinished Business is a) the heroes being guided away from the most dangerous bits, b) Alan Scott scoured the facility of the worst of it.
  • The Dreaming is specifically stated to be even more bizarre than the Nevernever. In fact, the Nevernever is itself actually just a small part of the Dreaming.
  • The Rock of Eternity is in between dimensions, and serves as, basically, the ultimate prison. It's described as being the original Demonreach, and is powerful enough to contain top-tier Physical Gods.
  • Sakaar qualifies as this when introduced in The Phoenix and the Serpent, being a mishmash pocket reality made of a mixture of reality and the Outside which has somehow not exploded, and ruled by a mad god. It both bends and outright defies logic and the laws of physics, with vari-coloured skies, countless differing layers of the world, stars on sticks that splinter into drifting comets, Dyson Spheres, Ringworlds, connections between worlds, with countless planets and civilisations literally fused together... and it's all the size of a dwarf galaxy. Oh, and even more than brushing it with cosmic senses makes Harry throw up.
• Children of an Elder God: The city of R'lyeh was a kind of multi-dimensional dreamworld "forced into reality", forged by an Eldritch Abomination, where real world laws of physics were nothing but mere suggestions.
  R'yleh was nothing more than a dream forced into reality, a memory of a place long destroyed - reduced to dust by the dream's creator, in his arrogance and power. And now the dream was over and reality surged in, and the laws of Earth asserted themselves.
  Buildings which twisted through five dimensions suddenly were confined to three, and fell in chunks or crumbled to dust or toppled over because the supports in the fifth dimension were no more.
  The very ground below it evaporated or inverted or became one-dimensional threads which snapped under the weight.
• Dominus Mundi : The King of Kings, a Harry Potter fanfic, has the Graveyard, a by-product of the creation of time and standing in opposition to the Future. The Mandarin described it as the place where "time goes to die", and contains all events that occurred before the main point of the timeline. It is stated that mortals cannot enter it, or they cease to exist due to the Graveyard's proximity to non-existence itself. It also seems to be impervious to the laws of physics.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami features several levels of this. First, there are dungeons from the perspective of normal people, with both a population of monstrous horrors and corrupt magic that actively and visibly sculpts the landscape of the surface world. In extreme cases, this means into places not dissimilar from a nightmare. Then there are the temples dedicated to dark gods, which never seem to be perfectly silent, and which have even more horrific architecture. Then there is the gladiatorial arena of Azzaratha, which apparently supports a literal endless pit; if you fall in, you get to meet Azzaratha personally. He doesn't go easy on the defeated...
• Five Nights At Freddy's: Lost Souls: The park itself. The animatronics are incapable of leaving it, time often goes crazy when you enter and it's haunted by several supernatural beings.
• It's Always The Quiet Ones: Luna's family spell temporarily lets everyone view an alien dimension filled with horrible fishy things and what is implied to be the Deep One city of Y'ha-nthlei.
  The illusion on the ceiling faded steadily, but revealed when it finally vanished was not the stonework of the castle, but a view of a sky that belonged to nowhere on earth, pallid stars forming unrecognisable constellations, past clouds radiating unclean light, reflecting the output of some hideous sun hidden beyond the walls. Somehow, they could all tell it was no illusion, no synthetic reality due to clever spells and cantrips, it was a true view of a scene no human should gaze upon. As the words continued, the walls between the columns around the room were, one by one, replaced with the same view, affording all the ability to look out on a glutinous sea lit by that same dying star low on the horizon. Things were in the water, not visible directly, but the slow rolling waves that moved with definite intent through the glistening viscous fluid betrayed their presence.
• The Emiya Clan basement is the equivalent of an epic dungeon crawler. It's basically where they throw all the junk they accumulate that is too dangerous or unstable to use. It's also where they lock any Eldritch Abomination that is too hard to destroy. Put two and two together and you get something along the lines of Moria.
• The Astral Plane from Equestria Divided serves as an afterlife, however as Pinkie Pie can tell you there are some parts that you'd rather keep away from.
• Equestrylvania: The Heavenly Doorway is the place between worlds that Aeon has to traverse in order to travel between dimensions. It appears to be sentient, and actively torments travelers in attempts to feast on their minds.
• Goddess Reborn Chronicle: The physical world is half of one, there being four in total. It's noted that the creation of the working teleporters and Demon Summoning Program healed the divide between Assiah-Gashmi (physical world) and the rest of Assiah, allowing things like mages, angels, demons and various strange things exist on Earth. Dr. Steven, understanding the trouble humanity was in, then distributed the DSP to as many servers as he could, which minimized casualties and changed humanity forever.
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality implies that Hogwarts is one. Harry himself is warned that when he gets lost (not if, when), ask a painting for a direction, and if he thinks he's higher than the castle should be, don't move, search parties will be along shortly. If not, everyone will find him in six months, and he will somehow be two years older, and that's if he stays inside the castle.
• In the Eye of the Beholder:
  • The Mirror World, where Shadows lurk and whole areas made of quartz are created from a person entering, much like the TV World in Persona 4. For instance, Allie's takes the form of a rave warehouse, while Damien's takes the form of a massive quartz skyscraper.
  • The Velvet Room in this incarnation takes the form of a dressing room, which Victor calls the Velvet Dressing Room.
• Infinity Train: Boiling Point has the Boiling Underworld, the stomach of the Titan where the Might Makes Right mentality of the Isles reaches its logical conclusion: Not only does everybody get designated as being either "Strong" or "Weak", but the latter have their organs harvested to feed the Strong. And if that's not enough, it's the Womb Level of a Giant Corpse World.
• I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?: Like all dungeons, Taylor's interior geometry and conditions have at best a nodding acquaintance with normal spacetime. Her first floor is the least eldritch, but it is still capable of having rooms upwards of twenty or thirty feet high despite the fact that her entrance stairs only go down about ten feet. And then her second floor has an open sky (despite being still underground) and a secondary entrance that just requires going up some stairs but comes out on the other side of the country. And her third floor is a windswept plateau standing out above a vast and misty expanse of nothingness.
• Hogwarts in Itachi, Is That A Baby? not only has over three thousand secret passages, but several of them don't make any sense at all. One starts at the dungeons and goes up several floors, including outside a few times, and ends in the Entrance Hall despite going upwards the entire time. Another goes from the kitchens ceiling to the fifth floor but somehow bypasses the Great Hall directly between them. Not to mention all the passageways that don't always exist or can only be seen after you're already progressing through them.
• The Last Great Time War has the Thanatos Anomaly, a vast region where time and space have been twisted and mutilated by the War.
• Little Hands, Big Attitude: Obsidian turns his house into one as part of his Traumatic Superpower Awakening when Commander Walters attempts to kidnap him. He turns the house into a strange Mental World where everyone is trapped into separate but vaguelly connected recreations of the past of alternate realities. Around the house there's a stormy barrier made of Chaos Energy.
• Lost Cities: The Everfree's description leans towards this more than it "simply" being an Enchanted Forest. It stands in defiance of the magical laws that govern the rest of the world, and every year tries to creep a little farther out and swallow a little more land. Its depths are filled with increasingly alien and dangerous life — parasitic, chimeric or magically reactive plants and powerful predators are already common on its borders, and things grow more dangerous further in — and it's crossed by paths that somehow ward off the predators, but which periodically vanish from existence in a manner that, according to magical monitoring, causes them to occasionally just... never have existed at all. This is emphasized in Natural Histories, which depicts it as a place profoundly twisted and altered by magic left to decay and fester over a millennium.
• Harry Potter passes through one such location in The Master of Death; his companion explains that "Outside Existence" simply means that "Nothing exists out there... you'll find there's a great number of things that don't exist."
• In Maybe the Last Archie Story, Mad Doctor Doom's Limbo fortress is a floating, spherical castle located beyond the space-time continuum. Walls, windows, arcs... appear, multiply, shift or vanish every second.
  They were in what probably passed for a courtyard in the Limbo castle. Beneath them was, recognizably, soil and the equivalent of grass, though it was of a light yellow color. A wall enclosed the courtyard on more than three sides, but in front of them was the castle proper, or at least a wing of it. There were several arches before them...Archie found it hard to count them, as if their number altered from moment to moment...and doors beyond them.[...]
  Jan boldly went forward to one of the doors under the arch. It looked to be made of wood, though Archie thought that just might have been what he perceived. The door opened to Jan’s touch, without her having to twist a handle. "Follow me," she said. The crew could see what looked like a hallway beyond.
  The Time Police woman stepped inside.
  After her heel went through the doorway, the walls closed in behind her. There was no door anymore. Only a brick wall in its place.
• Memories: Discord's homeland (later revealed in the sequel to be "off the Edge of the World") is described as this.
  Discord: "It was like a prison. Gray. No color. Just... a horrible grayness. And darkness. There was no sun. No sun," [...] "I felt confined. Trapped. And soooo boooored,"
• Danny Phantom fanfic, Mortified, has the Digressed Tower, which is eldritch even by the standards of ghosts. Basically, every floor functions as a miniature alternate universe that changes the past of anyone who goes inside as long as they remain on the floor. The entire thing was the result of a failed psychological experiment. Interestingly, someone built a casino on the 80th floor.
• In My Little Metro, a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the Metro 2033 series crossover, many places in the Metro (much like in the original Metro), have their own strange properties, such as a tunnel that extends much longer than the physical space between stations should allow.
• The Night Unfurls: Of course there would be a number of these places throughout this Bloodborne fanfic.
  • Presumably as a result of Shamuhaza somehow managing to discover some of the School of Mensis's research, Rad has been twisted into, in succinct terms, Yarha'Gul 2.0. A cloying silence permeates what was once a bustling fortress city, with statues in resemblance of Rad's townspeople galore. The Yarha'Gul reference is more apparent when the last foe Kyril faces in this place is a half-corpse, half-stone amalgamation of faces and bodies that crawls out of the void from the darkened sky above, much like The One Reborn.
  • The Malys Estate. The rumours of it being haunted by ghosts or spirits turn out to be false, but that doesn't make it any less wrong. There's Alien Geometries, there's vile, overgrown vegetation, and for some reason, there is a great lake that houses an insectoid Eldritch Abomination that is the source of the "eldritch" stuff happening in this fanfic. Goes on to show that otherworldly voids, dimensions and universes are not a prerequisite for a mind-screwy location — even an unassuming estate building is enough.
  • Proving that even the safest havens can also be places that don't make a lot of sense, there's the Hunter's Dream. On the surface, it is a foggy, tranquil and melancholy place, with a workshop that sits on a small hill overlooking a field of white flowers and graves. It also houses two of the most powerful entities in the series (i.e. a doll and her squid), one of them is the master who controls the Dream however he wants. To be precise: only the two can enter and leave freely as they wish; time flows according to his will; any wounds sustained heal more quickly; visitors are present only if he allows them to be there, like a private Discord server; and the amount of fog present outside the workshop is dependent on his mood.
• Nobledark Imperium: The Veiled Region is an area of space largely believed to be cursed; no one ever settled it — the ancient precursor empires all gave it a wide berth, their modern descendants do the same, and nothing lives there now except for a very primitive species of slug things and a few Orks, because there are always Orks. In the Veiled Region there is a star system, around an old red giant; it is surrounded by an asteroid belt made out of unguessable numbers of petrified Daemons, their faces forever locked in terror, and beyond there is nothing. Oh, observations may show that there is a planet in there, with traits to measure and a surface to land on, but those observations would be wrong. The planet doesn't exist, and anything that lands on therefore also doesn't exist. It's believed that this is where the C'tan Llandu'gor was killed using weapons that tore away at reality itself, and the current state of things is the result of universal constants being changed, erased and reinstanted.
• Of Sheep and Battle Chicken: The entire planet of Khar'shan thanks to the Dark God cabal of Leviathans who slumber beneath the waters of the Black Lake. Batarians can and have killed themselves creating sculptures in the middle of nowhere for reasons they can't explain, and said sculptures are typically disturbing and-or horrifying to view.
• OSMU: Fanfiction Friction: The forest of Hy-Brasil is thick and expansive, home to many weird creatures and even weirder people. The island itself is a mythical island that only appears once every seven years.
• Persona: The Sougawa Files: Every location taken over by Shadows, starting from Shadow Wilma and beyond, warps places into this. The worst example is Shadow Arata's, which somehow manages to fit an entire outdoors village inside an abandoned prison.
• PMD: The Rogue Team: Like the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, mystery dungeons look like unnatural mazes that change their layout every time they're entered. Unlike the games, they're described as "parasitic, reality-warping locations", spreading and modifying natural areas in the pokemon world. Pokemon that chose to stay in the dungeons instead of leaving for other untouched natural lands slowly turned savage, with their population declining until fully disappearing. Their eventual replacement with illusory copies imply that the dungeons may have consciously caused their extinction, indicating a level of sentience.
• In Pony POV Series:
  • Discord's palace in Dark World is this, being a constantly shifting, random, living place with an entrance that can drive people insane. The most reliable way to find where you're going is to not look for it. It remains alive after being purified and became New Canterlot Castle, but loses many of its eldritch traits.
  • The Spirit World is this, being a place beyond time where normal physics don't apply and full of Alien Geometries. While not sanity breaking, it can still not be properly comprehended by mortals.
  • The domains of Concepts, which are also them. They're so incomprehensible that even other Concepts can't fully understand a realm that isn't their own.
• The Powers of Harmony has the Hollow Shades, a forest of massive trees, which was corrupted by Nightmare Moon a thousand years ago. The lingering magic doesn't affect ponies, but has mutated all the wildlife into massive Star Beasts (like the Ursa Major).
• A Prize for Three Empires has Marcus' palace, located in a dimension beyond physical space and time called Limbo. The walls are shifting and fluctuating, and different time periods flash around of the building.
• Queen of All Oni:
  • The vision Jade has of the lost city of the Shadowkhan implies this about it. For bonus points, the scene describing it has a very Lovecraftian feel to it.
  • It's commented on several times that the Vault of Endless Night cavern is far too large to naturally exist under Mexico City and go unnoticed; characters on both sides agree that it must be a result of the place's inherent magic warping reality.
• Robb Returns has Hopemourne, the furthest North location in Westeros. When the Children of the Forest first emerged in Westeros, these ancient ruins were already there, inhabited by something (speculated to be the Great Other), which repelled the Children and later created the Others in a mockery of them. And ever since their defeat in the Long Night, the it has been where the Others have lived, gathering their power and preparing for Round 2.
• In the Danny Phantom/Beetlejuice crossover, Say It Thrice, there are a few alternate dimensions that were mentioned in Canon that qualify in the fanfiction. The Ghost Zone, the Netherworld, and Saturn are all not quite the same as the human world, due to their unique compositions, physics, passages of time, and geometries.
• Miss Grimmwood's school in Scooby Doo and the House of Monsters is noted several times by Velma to not make any sense despite appearing to simply be a large two story house from the outside. The ceiling of the first floor is three stories up, doors right next to each other lead to the middle of different rooms, and Velma first reaches the room she's staying in by walking in a straight line for several minutes.
• In the Jackie Chan Adventures and Teen Titans crossover fanfiction A Shadow of the Titans, Jade experiences two (the realm the Cackler resides in, and the TT world shadow realm).
  • The Buried Brick Homes and Gardens are a sunken apartment complex below Gotham that, due to a failed ritual attempt to summon an eldritch horror, were sunk trans-dimensionally and only quite exist if you approach them from certain directions.
• The Terminators: Army of Legend, a supercrossover fanfiction, features the Inner Dimension, a realm that lies between the two Capstone Universes, the home of the mystical Beams—and where the Alpha Breaker is currently wreaking havoc.
• The Black Moon in Thousand Shinji. During Third Impact, that was the place where the energies of an alternate dimension poured through a crack in the fabric of reality as several Eldritch Abominations came into being. Concepts such like space, time or laws of physics worked in erratic ways.
  Deep within the Black Moon, the Egg of Lilith, the Warp bled out into reality, creating the perfect gestation grounds for the beings within. In this seething cauldron of unreality, things had many layers, and viewing things from different angles could have a profound effect on what was seen.
• Top Hats and Tigers has the Mindspace, a place where the conscious minds go while the subconscious minds are swapping bodies. It resembles a White Void Room, except it is checker-patterned.
• The Zone of Desolation from T.R.O.T.T.E.R. Shadow of Cheernobyl is one of these, much like its original inspiration. The weather changes entirely on its own, unicorn magic is unreliable at best, and even time and space are not constants. It's also actively malevolent. And just to make it even worse, there are many more anomalies than the games.
• The Seventh Magniverse in the fanfic Ultraman Moedari, where the Great Names are sealed by the power of the Pillars and The Keystone.
• An interesting example comes up in The Wonderland Subject. According to Nick Fury, it's been discovered that the multiverse is essentially a "stack" of universes. Going up the stack leads to more orderly universes and going down leads to more chaotic ones. Apparently, the Buffyverse is the -3125 from the Marvelverse and the most chaotic they can live in (with +3125 being the most orderly); people from the Marvelverse can't exist beyond those boundaries due to the universes being too chaotic/orderly.
• The World of the Creatures takes place inside a human mind. Specifically the mind of someone obsessed with creatures from across the boundaries of time, space, and imagination.

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