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The Abyss
Home to demons, wellspring of evil, the Abyss is a cursed name in every tongue. The elves call it Cirith-Naik, the Chasm of a Thousand Needles; to the dwarves, it is Rorn Auraglor, the Sea of Devastation. To humans it is simply "the Abyss," for no name can express the myriad forms of misery held within its infinite compass.
Most mortals visit the Abyss only after death, when their souls are weighed on Luorre's scales and judged unworthy of remaining in the gray mists of Feindorn, much less ascension to the Vale of Stars. Those who were evil in life are cast down to the Abyss in death -- and, for the most part, they arrive as squirming, fat maggotlike things known as "larvae." While evil deities promise power in the afterlife to their loyal servants, most of those servants find their hopes dashed upon arriving there. Instead of being rewarded with immortality as an anti-saint, nearly all of them are transmuted to larvae: blind, mute, insensible to anything but the claustrophobic misery of their condition and whatever pain its handlers see fit to inflict upon it.
Those who arrive in the Abyss capable of observing their surroundings might envy the larvae, though. The Abyss is a vast wasteland of bleak, tortured landscapes, each more miserable than the last. From the steaming, fetid shallows of the Blood Marshes to the lacerating winds and splintery peaks of the Soulfrost Mountains, there is not an inch of the Abyss that promises anything better than corruption and agony. Even the notorious flesh-palaces of the Succubus Queen, Malcanthe, repel as much as they invite: that visitors must recognize the foulness of what they embrace, and yet be compelled to embrace it all the same, is the core of their horror.
At the center of the Abyss, surrounded on all sides by demonic chaos, is the devils' citadel of Pandemonium, a fortress walled by a circular range of mountains that hold an entire realm within their ring. The rocky walls of Pandemonium are constantly being assailed by tanar'ri and other invaders, and their massed armies move about the plains below like swarms of monstrous cockroaches. These are quick to seize upon easier targets wandering by; nothing breaks the monotony of a demon's eternal existence quite so agreeably as the torture of a mortal.
Wholly apart from the lethality of its environments and inhabitants, the Abyss itself seems to kill those who stumble in unprotected. Living creatures' souls are corroded with every breath they take and every step they pass in that hellish realm; goodly beings suffer the weight of that evil more heavily than others, but none are immune unless they are already as vile as fiends themselves. Those who succumb to the Abyss' corruptive influences arise as fiends or undead, forevermore a part of the plane that claimed them.
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