Location from The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir
The dimension of death that runs beneath reality — a necromantic underworld where ghosts drift, Lyctors fight, and the deepest current leads to a place called the Stoma that consumes everything.
The River is where death goes to be organized. Every soul passes through it. Necromancers can enter it, navigate it, and pull things out of it — but staying too long attracts attention from things that live in the deep. Lyctors fight Resurrection Beasts in the River's currents, ghosts of the dead drift through its shallows, and the Stoma sits at its nadir like a drain in the universe. For the storytelling AI, the River is the series' metaphysical basement — the place where the rules of reality get thin and the consequences of necromancy become visible. It's not hell. It's not purgatory. It's the plumbing of a universe built on death magic, and like all plumbing, it works until something goes catastrophically wrong.
An endless dark ocean with no sky and no shore. The water is not water — it's thanergetic current, the flow of death energy that powers all necromancy. The River has layers: shallow shallows where ghosts drift, deeper currents where revenants cluster, and the Stoma — a vast, consuming emptiness at the bottom that devours anything that enters it. The light is grey, the temperature is nothing, and the silence is absolute except for the sound of things moving in the deep.
Also known as: The River, The Death Current