Gates of Oblivion

The Gates of Oblivion are a portal leading to many other planes of existence on the Great Moon in the Shadow World history. These are guarded by the Goddess of Death, Eissa (Lorminstra), who is the final arbiter in deciding the fate of souls. In the I.C.E. Age lore she would deny requests for lifegiving if the fallen had died in a significant or meaningful way, which is perhaps why the concept of deeds was necessary for GemStone III. Souls would be swept from the world to the moon by the River of Life, ending in the Spring of Youth where they were cleansed of taint. This is a natural phenomenon resulting from the flows of essence between Kulthea and Orhan. These are symbolically represented in the Order of Vult (Voln) courtyard and The Graveyard.

In the archaic religion she would destroy souls that were hopelessly corrupted with her Staff of Doom, which was otherwise used to remove and insert souls as a fatal channeling. Such bodies are in comas, put into a deep sleep. The worst fate in her theology is for the soul to be destroyed, which is only possible when dealing with something associated with The Unlife. The Empress Kadaena is unrelated to this, her representation in this respect by Bandur Etrevion is idiosyncratic. The Staff of Doom plays into his use of Ordainer symbolism.

The Keys to the Gates of Oblivion are carried by Eissa, with the keys of Life and Death opening the multitude of possible afterlives. There is a "forbidden" key which "must never be used", the Key to the Void, which were the demonic pales and so essentially hell dimensions. In the early Shadow World lore the nature of Oblivion was left vague. The death mechanics of GemStone III had its own special place called Purgatory, which represented the other side of the Gates of Oblivion. It was a limbo where souls waited to choose their eternal fate, with paths of light and darkness, which arguably reflects the possibility of being "lost to the demonic" literally. The Dark Lords of Charon (Lornon) would, in contrast, send the souls of their followers to the Pales.

Behind The Scenes

The "Gates of Oblivion" are now called "the Ebon Gate" in the modern history of Elanthia. It is no longer possible for player characters to be "lost to the demonic", and the other side of the gates is sometimes called Eternity. Some adventurers visited the moon at the end of the first Griffin Sword War, making use of Eissa's "Lake of Tears" which is not Shadow World canonical. (Eissa's tears were special gemstones that warded off evil.) The premise was that Eissa shed a tear for every soul that had chosen the path of darkness, and every life that had ended unfulfilled or prematurely in an insignificant way. This was an aspect of her archaic theology which is not represented in the modern lore as Lorminstra.

The death mechanics of Purgatory represented "Oblivion" as a timeless void suffused with hopelessness and doom, where all memory and sense of identity of the material world washed away into nothingness. This was GemStone III specific and relevant to the symbolism of The Graveyard, with the additional nuance of the moon of the dark gods being named after the mythological ferryman of hell. However, this stems from the Shadow World source material itself, not GemStone III. The relationship of the Dark Lords to the symbolism in The Graveyard is far more subtle than Eissa and the Gates of Oblivion. It was more overtly elaborated in The Broken Lands, with their relation to the Lords of Essaence, which should be regarded as a spin-off of the same story.