I wrote this for the Disco Elysium Wiki Project, but I'm posting it here too (you can check the sources over there)
The point of transition between the world (matter) and the pale is known as porch collapse. Joyce describes it as "a grey coronal mist, cold vapour, marked by spores of an opportunistic microorganism - a mould that's adapted to grow at the edge of the unrest." When the pale is advancing, fruits mould when it is a few weeks away, and when it arrives it's likened to a killer wave or a tidal wave. A killer wave can come together from a number of smaller waves that one day birth a near-vertical, extremely unstable wave monstrosity. It absorbs the energy of the movement of other waves, and the water pulls around it more tightly. The normal waves turn into flickers and the killer wave almost collapses under its abnormal weight. But before that, there’s huge potential for destruction that it can sow. The same non-linear effect also explains the pale's advancement, they use it in entroponetics. It sounds like an ominous rumble, a low crackling noise, like a wave breaking, slowly. Objects float in this area, trees and buildings tear from the ground and slowly drift into the sky.
Beyond the porch collapse, areas covered by the pale are mostly dim and grey. It can have a blue tint in the morning. Other colors are rare. It is also extremely silent, the spoken word and noises echo in it. Time sometimes freezes: movements stop, watches freeze. The time of day still changes, there is daylight and night time. Animals are able to travel within this area for a few weeks, before their sense of time gets broken down and they become comatose. Their brain strays in the pale faster than that of a human. Eventually, mould grows on them. People can only stay sane with the help of certain techniques or if they possess special entroponetic powers. In some places in this area the pale moves in waves. The near pale is about 30-40 kilometers from the edge to where the far pale begins.
The world’s times of day don't register in the far pale at all. It is very dark, like looking into the ocean at night. It is also a territory that can advance. Going deep enough (perhaps crossing into the pale superdeep) makes one experience memories, colours and nostalgia. It's described as having a terrible smell.
Once you've crossed from near pale to far pale only hybrid airships can tavel in it, because conventional rotors or jet engines no longer add velocity after the point of reference for motion is suspended.
Sound here is detached from its source, if not blotted out outright, the faintest of hums can be heard. Sound recordings of the far pale exist.
Pale superdeep (Wild pale)
An uncharted entroponetic mass that is not lit by radio frequencies, it is silent and dark. The mind becomes radiant with the past here. The superdeep is also likened to sunlight. Motorway South and Rodionov's Trench is located within it or can be reached going through it.
There is a story longhaulsmen tell: way beyond the established known pale that's lit by radio frequencies, where it goes silent and dark - if one strays too far off course on the U41-A, or in Lomonossov's Land - there is a point in the pale superdeep where every step you take is one step further from home, no matter the direction. It's a point you cannot come back from. Your mind becomes so radiant with the past - there is a flip. Instead of writing, it erases memory. "Nearing some kind of indescribable finale." According to the Paledriver, no one knows what's at the end.
According to Harry's Motorway South thought, to reach the end of the Motorway South is to be unborn. Nothing remains, everything is forgotten. "A blank space with no point of reference, where only one type of motion is possible. The motion of a human throat, swallowing."
Rodionov's Trench (Absolute negation)
Rodionov’s Trench is located in the heart of the pale, four thousand kilometres from the edge of the world. It would take years to fly there by an airship under usual conditions.
Ion Rodionov wanted to use it as a weapon of mass negation against the bourgeoisie. It would have been the communist's answer to a nuclear weapon. He couldn’t find that place within his lifetime, it was discovered later by other people, presumably the communist entroponaut K. Saronovich Voronikin.
There is a radio broadcast coming from Rodionov's Trench, hidden in the low-frequency waves. Repeating in an endless circle through all time, what for her (the person who is speaking) looking from the Trench is one and the same, a simultaneous and immeasurably complex event. It is a perfect closed system. The message is “Azimuth-Boreas-Sinus-Oreole-Laudanum Ultra-Tricoleur-Ellips-Nadir-Ellips-Gamut-Azimuth-Tricoleur Iikon-Oreole-Nadir”, the letters of the international alphabet, which read: ABSOLUTE NEGATION. This phase was known by Ion Rodionov too.
The swallow is a pillar of silence located in the Dolorian Church of Humanity, with a diameter of approximately three meters, surrounding a two-millimetre hole in reality. The hole is located high up near the ceiling. The characters theorize that it could be an origin point of the pale,with the two-millimetre hole being the "less than less than nothing, the final rest state for reality", around which pale will eventually form.Soona finds it's location with her radiocomputer when it produces a print filled with black ink and a single white dot.
Sound in the swallow gets muted, an effect that's stronger the closer the object making sound is to the hole. It sounds like far pale if one stands near it. Listening to the mathematical information from the anomaly as a waveform with Soona's equipment produces silence with a slight pressure change. With the raver's sound system the silence gradually become a low bass hum,a vibrating sound that shakes the building. The sound doesn't come from the speakers, it gets stuck in the mixing desk in a positive feedback loop until Egg Head pulls the plug. Harry feels like it originates from within him.
The anomaly can also swallow information, like the game studio's data from the Doomed Commercial Area.
Getting close to the two-millimetre hole causes memory loss. Tiago has been circling it for some time, and has forgotten most of his past but still remembers his name.He religiously worships it. He says he's a saeraff and calls the swallow the Mother of Silence. He believes that directly touching it will cause one to be "incinerated, but not destroyed - finally at one with the state of the world before reality began." Inland Empire wonders if a similar thing happened to Harry too. Martin Lugia supported the theory that the detective experienced amnesia after he interacted with it while he was drunk.
The church might have been built around the anomaly to contain it.
The end of Motorway South, Rodionov's Trench and the swallow are similar. My theory is that the swallow really is a "baby pale" -a small scale model of what the pale is. Rodionov's Trench is the heart of the pale, a hole in reality, and the pale is what is around it.
There are also mentions of "light that shines through everything" and "beyond the light" in relation to the pale that are hard to put anywhere. "It is not light that spills from the windows into the golden room, but a super deep paleness." but the pale superdeep is also described as dark and black.
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