Scoriae

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[edit] General Description

Scoriae, or "Island of the Lengthening Shadows", is one of 25 islands of Abarat, the fictional archipelago from the books Abarat and Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War by Clive Barker. In the series, each island is permanently at a different time of the day. On Scoriae it is always 7:00 pm.

"[T]he Island of the Lengthening Shadows, Scoriae. You will forgive me if I don't linger over the details of that ashen place overmuch. Scoriae depresses the soul. Scoraie is not, of course, the only island of the Abarat that can so readily overshadow a man's natural capacity for joy. So, as I've said elsewhere, does Midnight. So too, for different reasons (which I'll come to later) does the Isle of the Black Egg, which stands at Four in the Morning; and even Speckle Frew, which stands at Five. But there is much about Scoriae which invites a particular mournfulness. It is bleak, of course: a sprawling mass of laval rock and black dust, with the open wound of the volcano, Mount Galigali at its center. Galigali's spewings and ragings have, over the ages, claimed three magnificent cities: Gosh, Divinium and Mycassius. To wander in the ruins of any of the three is a melancholy business. All were noble cities, filled with fine and loving souls. Not one of these souls, to my knowledge, survived Galigali's tantrums. Only the signs of their lives remain to us, clotted in volcanic ash: their temples, their racetracks, their nurseries."

-excerpted from Klepp's Almenak by Samuel Hastrim Klepp (from Abarat by Clive Barker)

In this excerpt from Abarat, Samuel Hastrim Klepp goes on to explain that he met a ghost in the city of Gosh that he thought at first was being rude, and thus drove him from its city. Moments after climbing into his boat, Mount Galigali began to erupt, implying that the ghost was most likely saving his life.

In Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War, Candy Quackenbush travels there on the back of a Zethek (a flying, predatory creature from Gorgossium) and is deposited on the shore near a mist shrouded forest. The forest later turns out to be home to the old Twilight Palace that once belonged to King Claus of Day. Here, Candy encounters Filth, the monkeylike jester to King Claus, who reveals the story explaining the death of Princess Boa (Candy's alter-ego). She later releases the mysterious "Totemix" from their imprisonment in the King's Cabinet of Wonders, killing the hunter Otto Houlihan in the process.