#69 Ziggurat of the Lost

Age: Outside of Time

Hidden or Lost?: Lost

History: When someone dies, we say that we've ‘lost’ them. When a person gets laid off they are said to have ‘lost’ their job. But neither is strictly true. To be lost is to suddenly have the world betray your fundamental understanding of what is real. When you can remember putting your keys on the table, but suddenly they’re no longer there. To be traveling down the road in one direction and suddenly find that you don't know where you are, the way you came no longer takes you back. For those people, things, or even spirits that truly become unmoored, the Ziggurat of Lost is the final destination.

Hanging in mid-air amidst a gray and featureless plane, the Ziggurat of the Lost is where all lost things eventually go. Carved from a single titanic crystal, its facets swimming with cloudy gray occlusions, the Ziggurat was not created so much as born from a primal force of confusion and despair. The interior is a maze of stairs and chambers that seem to have little rhyme or reason in their layout. Among other surreal spaces, there are rooms lined with tall shelves, covered in carefully cataloged odds and ends; a mapparium filled with uneven, nonsensical globes and charts; a vault full of ancient, valueless currency; and other collections of lost things.

The Ziggurat is inhabited and attended by a great number of the Neverfound, young children and unfortunate souls who became lost, the faces that end up on post bills and milk cartons. They can be found scavenging the scrap wastes that stretch endlessly in every direction around the Ziggurat or listlessly dusting the shelves inside. Some simply loiter about hurling threats and insults at the few despondent, shellshocked adults who wander the Ziggurat’s halls, endlessly trying to find their way home.

The Ziggurat of the Lost and its unorganized army of Neverfound are ruled by a being known as The Fletch. This demigod trickster did not create the Ziggurat, but seems to have moved in at some point, taking it as their seat of power. It often tries to keep people from escaping the Lost Wastes, even sending the occasional Neverfound child back into the world to trick people into losing themselves or their things to the Ziggurat. Whether The Fletch feeds on the lost or simply revels in their hopelessness is unclear.

If you lose your way and think you’ve found shelter at the Ziggurat of the Lost, you’ve simply found yourself at the end of hope.

1. Waygate of No Lock

2. The Keys

3. Lying Mapparium

4. Shrine of the Flaneur

5. Wayward Kennels

6. Berthwell of the Neverfound

7. Forest of No End

8. Guiding Shades

9. Seat of the Fletch

10. The Finding Eye

11. The Despairing Vertigo

12. Barrow of Loved Things