Chamada
| Gehenna Layer | |
|---|---|
| Order: | Second |
| Realms: | Thraotor Palace of Deception Bastion of Hate Rictus The town of Nimicri The Crawling City Tower Arcane |
The second mount of Gehenna is the most savage. The slopes burn with constantly flowing magma so thick that solid, cool ground is rare, and so bright that the glare blots out the sky itself. Cascading lava rivers sometimes harden and briefly dam the fiery flow, only to explosively burst forth in new directions. Vents unexpectedly open, spewing fresh ejecta, and miniature volcanoes are common. The air itself is usually filled with feather-soft gray ash, which falls everywhere like dread snow, often dropping visibility to zero.
The Crawling City
A great metropolis of obsidian and ash, the Crawling City moves across Gehenna, moving from layer to layer at the will of the its master, the general of Gehenna. The Crawling City moves by virtue of thousands of fiendish, fire-immune legs grafted under the massive lower deck of the city, allowing the metropolis to cling to the steepest cliff face on Gehenna and slowly ford the broadest river of lava. The general is an ultroloth whose power is said to approach that of a demideity. In theory, all yugoloths answer to the general, although the yugoloths' proclivity for plots and webs of deception means that many have divided loyalties. The city has low barracks for devilish, demonic, and other assorted elite mercenaries, and siege towers housing potent war magic. There's also a war academy where brilliant fiendish strategists teach their lore to up-and-coming officers bound for the Blood War, and massive factories where smithies constantly turn out the latest in fiendish military hardware. The Crawling City itself, in all the millennia of its existence, has never directly entered the Blood War. Ancient prophecies tell that should it ever do so, the Blood War will finally reach a decisive conclusion in an apocalyptic final battle.
Nimicri
From the slopes of Chamada, Nimicri appears as a small moon about 2,000 feet in diameter. It floats in splendid isolation above the burning mount, covered with spires, steeples, and less dramatic structures connected by a weblike network of streets. Everything is clean, the buildings are comfortable and in excellent repair, and every citizen of Nimicri is quite polite. Excellent goods of all sons can be had at the trading post, and Nimicri is an established stop along several trading routes that crisscross the Outer Planes. What most visitors never realize is that Nimicri— buildings, people, and all—is one vast creature that mimics a town. Sometimes Nimicri absorbs a visitor into itself completely, but other times it allows visitors to leave completely unharmed. If even a single drop of a visitor's blood spills onto any surface in the city, Nimicri is able to duplicate that visitor exactly, including memories up to the point when the blood was spilled. If a “citizen” of Nimicri is ever forcibly removed from the town, it immediately dies like a limb severed from a body.
Tower Arcane
This tower rises high above the lava flows and ash clouds of Chamada, decorated with blades and spikes that promise pain and death to unwelcome visitors. Yugoloth wizards control the tower, which functions as the record vault for the yugoloth race. The history of the yugoloths can be found here, though the information is well protected and heavily encrypted with glyphs of warding, symbols, and other protective spells. The interior halls of the Tower Arcane support the bodies of flayed petitioners dangling from chains. The wizards use the blood of these petitioners (and the occasional unwelcome visitor) to pen their history. Torture paraphernalia line any walls not given over to bookshelves and sealed archives. Deep below the tower lies a vast library of particularly ghastly contracts with mortals, extending for miles. The most potent protective spells in the wizards' arsenal protect the sanctity of the library from encroachment by molten rock or extraplanar thieves. Each contract is inscribed on the living skin of a petitioner, burned in with magic and branding irons. Petitioners are strung on chains like popcorn on a string for miles in parallel lines of agony. The only thing on the mind of any given petitioner is its own particular contract and its personal pain.
| Gehenna Layers |