It was often wondered by those who rarely visited the West End how such a small area could hold so much of the evil and ill that permeated Rhydin City – the teeming masses of ragged poor, the multicolored ‘street knights’ of the rival gangs, the sick antics of monsters, human and non – how all of it could be squeezed into an area so small, just a few city blocks. It was a subject that came up every now and then, over coffee and brandy in drawing rooms, or in the op-ed pages of the more well-to-do papers – usually under titles such as “Cleansing the stain on the city; What to do About the West End?” There was yet to be produced a satisfactory answer, mostly because people just didn’t want to give the End that much thought. Better to wipe it clear and start over – and if the baby went out with the bathwater, well, it had been an ugly and misshapen child anyway, probably the milkman’s get, and good riddance to it.

It was a classic problem, common to large cities. The docks, vital to the flow of trade and commerce that is the very lifeblood of civilization, require people to work them – labor, unskilled and untrained, valued only for their strong backs and thus paid the meanest possible wage the owners could get away with. Low wage workers require a low rent neighborhood in which to live, someplace close enough to the docks that they can reach their jobs on foot – and voila, a ghetto is formed. Criminals rise, the inevitable byproduct of poverty – disease, starvation, and violent crime contribute to the death rate, skyrocketing it, creating a culture where life is short and cheap and only the pleasure of the moment matters. Prostitution, drug addiction, and alcoholism are rampant – anything to kill the pain of living, before something come along to kill the person living. For most, the only escape is into the soil of the potter’s field, or the flames of the crematorium.

But that only covers why life in the West End was so bad – the same old story, urban decay and the tragedy of the poor, written out once again across the cobbled streets and in the cracked squares in letters of blood and despair, just as it has been in the Five Points, or London’s East End. The question is how can so much misery be crammed into so small an area? Sheer population density is certainly one reason – the Five Points was only one neighborhood, smaller than the West End is on paper, with tens of thousands of the destitute crammed into its tenements and flophouses, creating a pressure cooker melting pot that often exploded in riots and revolts, or gave vent to its constant simmer in a never ending stream of brawls, gang wars, and simple murder. This is certainly the case in the West End – but not the whole story.

The long and short of it – the thing rejected out of hand by strangers to Rhydin, folk from logical worlds, who haven’t yet realized that the realm itself enjoys playing sleight of hand with reality and considers the laws of nature more as guidelines, really – is that the West End is larger on the inside than it appears on the out. The ‘official’ maps of the city are drawn from sources well over a hundred years old – when the area was still moderately upscale, the domain of traders and bankers in their stately brownstones, the noble and wealthy in their riverside manors. As the Nexus’ activity increased – ‘what is the Nexus?’ is a question outside the scope of this review – and otherworldly immigration rose, the nobility fled… and the area began to change. Streets didn’t always connect to each other as they had before. New neighborhoods sprung up like mushrooms after a spring rain, in many cases already rotting and decrepit, as though they’d been sitting in a closet waiting to be used. No sign of their builder was ever found, but already there were people ready to move in – no matter how bad the building was, there was worse to be found on the street. One erstwhile philosopher postulated a universe of urban decay, where all the buildings destroyed by urban renewal or revitalized by gentrification were saved up until they were needed – but the truth may never really be known. It’s hard to philosophize when you’re busy dodging bottles and bullets.

People often speak of the West End as though it were a living, breathing entity. Perhaps it is. It moves, twisting around on itself apparently at random, shuffling neighborhoods about and reorganizing blocks and courtyards. One reason the gangs in the West End are constantly fighting is because their territorial boundaries refuse to stay defined; instead, alliances and rivalries are fluid, demanding renegotiation – often at the point of a blade – on a regular basis. There are different layers to the West End, places you can’t reach by following the streets on the map – but which you might find if you take four quick lefts, moving widdershins around the block. Take four rights, and you’re someplace else entirely. It’s easy to get lost when you wander out of the ‘stable’ neighborhoods, the fringe next to the dock or the blocks around the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery.

But that’s probably not why they call it the land of lost souls…