Then London is behind you, and the Unterzee stretches broad and dark before you, black as an Aztec mirror, stippled with moonish light. Back in the foggy embrace of London, it's easy to forget just how big the Neath really is.

They dazzle the eye. The purest white coat, and strange, spinning red eyes. Strange even by horse standards.

He mentions that secrets are inscribed upon the interior of tomb-colonist bandages, and says you are welcome to his.

All the secrets that you find pale in comparison to his face.

At first they watch, then they lean close - like the surface of the moon! - and begin to eat. They start with your fingers, then suck on your heart. They eat and eat, every bit of you until there's nothing left but them.

The wind screams, like a god cut in half.

I find some of the descriptions of Is-Not really touching.

"She will rise from the zee and the ice like dawn. She will be garlanded with red and decked with gold."

"If you burn, you burn like a candle. If you die, you die like dawn."

I think the sharp contrast with the darkness and grittiness of Neath makes it easier to truly appreciate the splendour of Parabola.

Catherine Raymond wrote:

FL has much writing that is memorable, and the posters above have alluded to my favorite segments. But beautiful? It's hard to think of most of it as beautiful. (There *is* a part of the Eaten story that lies Beyond the Gate, but because it lies Beyond the Gate I cannot quote it.)

The most beautiful thing I know of in FL is the sunrise image that is used as the "Visions from the Surface" icon.

Fallen London has so many aspects that it would be hard for me to just pick one to describe it. There's the comedic, and then the comedic itself comes in different types. Sometimes it's dry wit, sometimes it's very tongue-in-cheek, and sometimes it's just plain silly. Sometimes the Gothic and the horror aspects range from befanged hats and bat motifs to things like the truly disturbing origins of red honey. But if I were to do my best to describe the Neath to someone unfamiliar with the game, I would say the Neath is a Dark Place.

It's a place where you're forcibly reminded that human ideas of fairness and goodness and loveliness have very little relevance to the order of the universe. Even in a place hidden from the gaze of the stars, when things break the rules, they rarely break them in a way that's in human favor. And so, when the Neath manages to be beautiful, I get the feeling it's its own strange kind of beauty, independent of what humans might prefer. That's what makes the setting unique. A smooth, black subterranean sea and stars that could be jewels or insects, or jeweled insects. A rainbow of colors that don't exist, like cosmogone and violant. The idea that even beings of unimaginable greatness and alien psychological makeup can be heartbroken, and that even though humanity may be of very little importance to those beings, we have that much in common with them. That perhaps our own frequently doomed endeavors to love and be loved might matter on some cosmic scale in spite of our assigned roles in the stories. That's the beauty of the Neath. Since those things stand out to me the most I can see why the emphasis on beautiful imagery might be strange, because it's also the same game that gave us the Pre-Emptive Guinea Pig and the Ratskin Suit. ("Your 'umble ratskin is hard-wearin', it's waterproof, and it's remarkable warm. And silk comes out of a worm's arse.") I think it's a mark of the versatility of the writers that makes both co-exist so naturally in the same universe.

I like your example of the sunrise image, because I myself tend think of it as a visual representation of the other kind of beauty in Fallen London, the kind which is shaped by human sentiment: Wistfulness.

This truly made the world real for me.

The Neath is a unique place in many, many aspects, one of the most glaring being the inability to permanently die (at least in Fallen London). And, well... of course art would make use of that.