02/23/2026: Malbolge

The truck crests a ridge and the sixth layer of Hell opens before them, broken and uneven.

Malbolge is nothing like the levels that came before. Stygia had its vast tundras and its cold; Phlegethos its rivers of fire and its heat. But those were places with a kind of terrible logic to them, a landscape that obeyed some dark set of rules. Malbolge obeys nothing. The ground here is shattered, a chaos of jagged stone and fractured hillsides, unstable slopes that seem to lean at wrong angles. The air smells of rot and sulfur. The sky above is perpetually hazy, perpetually threatening.

Reklaw stands at the truck’s window, his expression one of rare unease.

“That over there,” he says, pointing toward the horizon where a shape rises from the broken ground, “looks like a skull because it likely is.”

He is not wrong. In the middle distance, a skull the size of a hill juts from the shattered terrain, its empty orbits staring blankly toward the amber sky. It is a landmark, and Reklaw knows it well enough to fear it. He explains what the party is looking at, his voice low and measured in the way it gets when the information is genuinely dangerous.

Malagard, Goddess of Hags, was given dominion over this land by Asmodeus himself — chosen over his own daughter, Glasya, who had long coveted Malbolge as her own. The insult was calculated. Glasya did not take it quietly. She poisoned Malagard, and whatever she fed the goddess did its work in the most spectacular and terrible fashion imaginable. The hag queen swelled to monstrous size, her hunger becoming something beyond appetite — a ravenous, consuming madness. She ate every devil in Malbolge. She ate everything that grew. She ate the rocks themselves, grinding stone to powder in jaws that could no longer stop. She ate and ate until she simply exploded, her remains scattered in every direction, fragments of bone and stone and flesh raining across the whole of the layer, reshaping its geography in an instant.

The massive skull on the horizon is hers.

As punishment for poisoning her father’s chosen ruler, Glasya was handed the ruins — this — and told to make something of it. The Realm of Decay, some call it, and the name is apt. The rot in the air is Malagard’s carcass, still decomposing across centuries, the stench permeating the entire landscape.

“Cheerful place,” someone mutters from inside the truck.

They discuss the route ahead. In the hazy distance, just barely visible through the amber murk, something protrudes from the broken landscape — a colossal, mummified hand, green-grey and reaching skyward, fingers spread wide. It is one of Malagard’s, preserved in the wreckage of her explosion, and beneath it sits the Hag’s Arm, a tavern that has survived in Malbolge through some combination of location, stubbornness, and the fact that even devils need somewhere to eat and drink. It is their landmark. They will navigate toward the hand.

The River Styx cuts through Malbolge somewhere nearby. Reklaw warns them to keep distance from it. This stretch is widely considered the most dangerous passage of the Styx in all nine layers — fast and furious through towering stone canyons, the current violent enough to shred a small boat, and acidic enough that the spray alone can etch stone. Anything wetted by its waters begins to dissolve. They will not be going near the river if they can help it.

For now, though, they rest. Reklaw volunteers to ride the roof once they’re moving, keeping watch from above. But the road can wait until morning.

⚔

The first watch falls to Doggo, the faithful robot standing motionless in the dark, sensors sweeping the hillside. The night in Malbolge is not quiet — there are distant rumbles, the occasional groan of shifting stone, the sound of something large moving in the hazy dark far away. Doggo processes all of it and flags one event as requiring attention.

A small landslide, barely worth the name, loosens part of the hillside nearby — and in the freshly exposed face of the earth, something gleams. The corner of a strongbox, iron-banded and dark, juts from the dirt.

Doggo alerts Kiki and Thunk, who peer from the truck. They sit, staring out into the acrid dark, debating in low voices. Leave it? Investigate? The box is half-buried and old, and Malbolge does not give things up easily.

The debate is still ongoing when Reklaw, scanning the sky from the truck’s roof, goes still.

Six shapes, winged and descending, growing larger with every second.

“Company,” he says, quietly.

The Erinyes drop out of the amber haze and touch down in a ring around the truck with the precise, choreographed ease of soldiers who have done this ten thousand times. They are tall, armored in dark plate, their wings folding against their back. Their leader steps forward without ceremony and raps a gauntlet against Kiki’s window — a single sharp knock.

Kiki rolls the window down.

The Erinye’s eyes are flat and professional. “Paperwork,” she says.

Kiki, with admirable composure, produces the makeshift key to the truck.

A beat of silence. The Erinye takes it. She turns it over. She passes it to the devil at her shoulder, who examines it with great seriousness. It goes down the line. There is a murmured consultation. The leader takes it back and looks at Kiki with an expression that is not quite convinced and not quite not convinced.

She hands it back. “Toll,” she says. “Twenty gold. Entry to Malbolge.”

“We already paid,” someone offers from inside the truck, with tremendous confidence.

The Erinye’s expression does not change. She has heard this before. She will hear it again. The toll is twenty gold.

They go back and forth — a tense, polite, grinding negotiation conducted through a truck window in the stinking dark of the sixth layer of Hell, six heavily armed devils arrayed in a ring, watching with professional boredom. Eventually the party counts out twenty gold. The Erinyes accept it with the satisfied efficiency of people who were always going to get what they came for. They rise, wings spreading, and disappear back into the amber haze.

The truck is quiet for a moment.

“Right,” someone says.

⚔

Borark is still resting when Reklaw’s patience for standing around runs out. He catches Arman’s eye. The strongbox is still sitting in the hillside, waiting.

The two of them head over. The digging doesn’t take long — the landslide loosened the earth around it considerably, and between them they work it free. Reklaw takes it under one arm, satisfied. Arman turns to head back.

The hillside moves.

Not slowly — not with any warning beyond a deep, resonant crack from somewhere above them. Then the whole face of the slope lets go, a rushing cascade of stone and soil that takes Arman off his feet immediately. Reklaw lunges upward, catching air, the strongbox tucked against his chest as he lifts clear of the slide. Below him, Arman tumbles, gone somewhere in the churning mass of earth.

He lands hard. The impact drives the breath from him, stones still skittering and settling around his body. He gets to his hands and knees, coughing, and then feels it — not another slide, something different. A vibration. A groaning from beneath the earth.

The ground opens.

It starts as a crack, then splits wide, a chasm tearing itself across the landscape like a seam coming undone — and it is moving, racing away from Arman toward the ridge where the truck sits, earth and stone tumbling into the void. Kiki, alerted by Reklaw, sees it coming and guns the engine, reversing hard, the truck lurching away as the chasm unzips itself toward the ridge. Arman is running, scrambling over broken ground, the gap spreading at his heels.

He is nearly there, nearly to the truck, when the earth behind him erupts.

Two massive clawed hands claw out of the split ground first — each one the size of a wagon, stone-grey and dripping soil. Then something like an elephant’s trunk, long and questing. Then the rest of it heaves itself upright: something enormous and ancient, shaking the earth from its body as it rises from the chasm with a bellow that rattles the truck’s windows in their frames.

It charges Arman without hesitation.

He goes for the truck, sprinting, reaches for the door — and a hand closes around his ankle. The grip is enormous, crushing, and the rogue’s momentum dies instantly as he is wrenched backward, dangling, the blood rushing to his head as the creature holds him up and squeezes.

From the truck’s roof, Reklaw swings the ion cannon around and fires.

The beam hits the creature somewhere critical. It spasms, and Arman drops, hitting the ground and scrambling. He is almost up, almost running again —

A second hand snaps out and catches him. The pressure is worse this time, a full-body crushing that squeezes the air from his lungs and greys the edges of his vision.

Kiki’s window comes down. The words of a spell come out, quick and certain.

Grease coats Arman from head to toe, and the creature’s grip finds it can hold on to nothing. The rogue squirts free, hits the ground running, and throws himself toward the truck.

The creature lunges after him and its feet catch the grease.

It goes down heavily, shaking the broken earth with an impact that sends a shockwave through the ground. It is enormous and it is helpless, lying on its back, limbs churning uselessly against the slicked stone. Reklaw, on the roof above, lines up the rail gun with calm efficiency and fires.

The creature’s bellow of pain is massive, shaking dust from the ridgeline. It rolls, thrashing, and finds the edge of the chasm. For a moment it teeters, hideously large, still trumpeting. Then it goes over, dropping back into the dark from which it came, the sound of its impact rising up a moment later from somewhere far below.

Then silence, except for the distant rumble that is constant in Malbolge.

Arman breathes. His ankle is a spectacular mess. Thunk applies healing.

Once the adrenaline fades, attention returns to the strongbox. Reklaw sets it down and examines the latch.

The dart catches him before he sees the mechanism — then the second one, both of them punching through the air with a quiet thwip. He removes them with an expression of profound irritation. Poison. Of course.

They get it open.

The contents are assessed with the care of people who have learned not to assume anything in Malbolge is what it first appears to be. Vali identifies a pair of ivory rings, matched and finely carved — communication rings, he explains, allowing paired wearers to speak mind to mind across any distance. Useful things in a dangerous place. He then tucks away his own choice to open later.

Thunk claims two glass eggs, blown thin and dark, swirling black smoke pressing against the glass from the inside like something that badly wants out — potential grenades, handled very carefully. Borark gets the Drunkard’s Cudgel, a weapon with the curious property of intoxicating whatever it strikes, which the party regards as either extremely useful or extremely dangerous depending on the target. Reklaw takes the last item: a set of pigments in small clay pots, with the remarkable property of manifesting whatever is painted with them in three dimensions, solid and real. Kiki chooses a box of what looks like teas leaves, but smells….powerful.

The strongbox has given up everything it has.

They pack the items away, return to the truck, and settle in to rest — the skull of Malagard visible on the horizon, the distant hand of the tavern somewhere in the haze ahead, and the whole ruined, rotting, earthquake-shaken sixth layer of Hell stretched out around them, waiting to see what it can think of next.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​