CONTENT WARNINGS: earthquakes, discussion of reactions to natural disaster [0:50:42-0:52:46], detailed description of body horror [1:29:12-end]

More than anything, what the Gate had going for it by the end was just that: the gate, a constructed visualization of what was, ultimately, a rather ephemeral boundary between "safety" and "danger," the kind of danger the people who built that gate knew of all too well after watching their unfortunate neighbors in Jericho succumb to the horrors of the Ruin. It was the gate that kept people feeling secure enough not to turn tail and run straight back to the Earth that had forsaken them, the gate that allowed them some reasonable pretext to imagine that the same wouldn't become of them. A useful fiction necessary for the matter of living life so close to certain death.

But even still, the falling of Jericho shook the people of Ruin's Gate. So much that it wasn't until decades later that people began to forget just how dangerous this whole business really was. For a long, long time, the name Jericho sat on every parents' tongue, a warning not to venture too far, a boogeyman to keep kids from wandering past the gate. But for every person who uttered the name like a prayer against danger, there were just as many who took Jericho for what it was—a promise that no town on Antarras could ever be built to last, not really.

This week, on Ruin's Gate: A long-forgotten ghost town, far out into the Ruin.

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