03/09/2026: Trouble With Devils

The truck’s engine idles with a low, greasy rumble as the group clocks the malephant.

Seven eyes. All of them pointed at the vehicle. Several of them narrowed in a way that suggests memory.

It recognizes us, Arman thinks, reading the creature’s posture the way one reads a weather front — with the uncomfortable certainty that something unpleasant is coming.

Inside the cab, the options are laid out with the brisk pragmatism of people who have survived this long by thinking fast and committing faster. The ion cannon is floated. Leaving is floated. A brief, crowded silence follows, during which everyone arrives at the same conclusion simultaneously: the nightmare shepherd’s hat sits on the seat between Kiki and Borark, the badge catches what passes for light in Malbolge, and the crook leans against the door.

Arman picks up the crook.

He steps out of the truck wearing Lawrence’s face, Lawrence’s bearing, Lawrence’s faintly put-upon expression of a functionary who has seen too much and expects to see more. The malephant watches him approach. All seven eyes are wet, brimming with something that resolves, as Arman gets closer, into barely-contained fury.

“Hey — Lawrence.” The malephant’s voice is thick, strained. It jabs one massive finger toward the truck, toward the general vicinity of where Reklaw sits. “Pass me that orcish monk. I owe him. Big.” A pause that carries the weight of genuine grievance. “And I want my revenge.”

Seven eyes full of tears. Tears of rage, Arman decides, are somehow worse than the regular kind.

‘Lawrence’ shakes his head slowly, lending it the particular quality of sorrowful regret. “No can do,” he says, and his voice is Lawrence’s voice, all flat bureaucratic finality. “I need him for now. We’re running him up to the Hag’s Arms.”

Something in the malephant’s expression shifts. The seven eyes, still damp, brighten at the edges. “The Hag’s Arm? I’m headed that way myself — couple of hours.” It squares its shoulders with the air of someone proposing a reasonable business arrangement. “Pass him to me when you’re done. I’ll meet you out front.”

“You bet,” Arman says.

He turns and walks back to the truck. The cab door closes behind him. The truck rolls.

An hour later, the shifting sands of Malbolge give up another chest of treasure. This one yields its contents with only minor difficulty.

Reklaw claims an iron acorn, smooth and dark, that hums faintly when he rolls it across his palm — protection against lightning, which in Hell is the sort of insurance worth carrying. Vali finds a holy symbol of Helm worked in dulled silver; the moment his fingers close around it, his reflexes sharpen, the world resolving into something fractionally crisper at the edges. Kiki extracts a slim volume from the chest’s depths — seventeen short stories, the cover announces, each one annotated in a cramped hand. They discover quickly that reading one aloud produces a warmth behind the sternum, a gentle mending of small hurts. 

Thunk finds a Sun Sphere, no larger than a ball, that produces a steady warm light on command. He pockets it.

Borark receives a small stone raven. It sits on his palm, inert, then blinks, ruffles feathers that had been stone a moment ago, and fixes him with an eye of extraordinary intelligence. The raven, it becomes clear, can count — one, two, three, and more — tapping the distinction out with one claw against Borark’s gauntlet. The party regards this with the enthusiasm of people who understand exactly how useful a small reconnaissance asset can be.

Arman’s gift is a ring. A plain ring, unassuming, gold. The group take turns examining it before someone reads the inscription inside the band. A ring that turns willing wearers to stone.

There is a pause.

“Willing,” Arman repeats, and smiles in the particular way that means he is already thinking of applications.

⚔

The cliff face that rises from the broken plain is honeycombed with cave mouths, each one dark, each one dripping. From inside — from several inside — comes the sound of chains.

The truck slows. Twelve lemures, chained together, crouch at the mouth of one of the caves, bound to the rock face with heavy iron links, their shapeless bodies pressing toward the vehicle. There is no guard in evidence. There is, in fact, no sign that anyone has checked on them recently.

The party debates this for approximately as long as it takes Arman to locate a lockpick.

The locks give way. The chains drop. The lemures spill forward, shapeless and blinking, and the proposition is put to them plainly: accept 

transformation back into their original forms, accept whatever weapons can be spared, and in exchange, spread chaos through the devil ranks at every opportunity. Drive them, as Vali puts it with cheerful confidence, absolutely nuts.

The lemures confer.

One of them fixes Reklaw with an expression that communicates skepticism across the substantial barrier of having no recognizable face. It wants proof.

Reklaw produces the wand — the one he has carried since Avernus, worn smooth from handling, its magic still bright at the core. He touches the tip to what might generously be called the lemure’s arm.

The light, when it comes, is sudden and total. Where the slug-thing crouched a moment ago, a figure unfolds — tall, shaggy, a bugbear with matted hair and bright black eyes that blink against the glare with the expression of someone emerging from a very long and very bad dream.

“Thunk,” the figure says, voice cracking at the edges. “It’s me. Thurk.”

The reunion that follows is, necessarily, brief. There is a truck. There are eleven more lemures awaiting transformation. There is still a significant amount of Malbolge between here and the Hag’s Arm.

But for a moment, the infernal wind drops, and no one says anything.

They help the lemures into the back of the truck. The engine turns over. The truck rolls.

In the cargo bed, Reklaw opens his pigments and begins painting weapons.

⚔

The ice devils materialize from nothing, the way ice devils prefer to, directly in the path of the vehicle. They are tall, pale, blue-white at the edges, and they want papers.

Kiki passes them through the window. One of the ice devils examines the documents with an unreadable expression. The other extends his palm, upward, in the universal gesture of someone who would like to be compensated for overlooking a transgression.

Thunk reaches through the window and takes the offered hand warmly.

The ice devil freezes — metaphorically, for once — locked in an extremely unwilling handshake with a bugbear who appears to have mistaken an invitation to bribery for a greeting. The moment stretches, surreal, while the devil processes what is happening.

Then Lawrence appears at the window, and the ice devil’s posture shifts from frozen confusion to something more like professional embarrassment. The two devils exchange complaints about the nightmare shepherd — always taking all the prisoners, never leaving any for anyone else, do you know what it’s like to work a checkpoint in this layer when Lawrence has been through — while Arman listens to all of it behind Lawrence’s patient face and files it away for later.

Vali passes ten platinum pieces through the window.

The ice devils disappear.

⚔

The tower appears in the middle distance, then — through some property of the terrain or the tower’s own inclination — appears to be closer than it was a moment ago. Then closer still.

“It’s moving,” Kiki observes, with the tone of someone who has accepted that this is the kind of thing that happens now.

The tower is small. Castle-adjacent, really — a single tower on a single tower’s worth of foundation, squatting in the road with a stubbornness that suggests it has been doing this for some time. Discussion breaks out in the cab about whether to drive around it or through it. Kiki, who is the one who would have to do either, is unenthused about both options, particularly the through-it option, on the grounds that a tower on top of the truck would be suboptimal.

Vali produces a Mage Hand. He produces, also, his Lead Balloon. The hand attaches the balloon to the tower’s uppermost parapet with the careful precision of someone who has done stranger things and is choosing not to think about it too hard. The tower strains, strains — and holds. Pinned in place, bobbing slightly, while the truck rolls past.

From somewhere inside the tower, the sound of frustrated shouting follows them down the road and fades.

The bearded devils come in pairs, the way trouble usually does.

“Give us the mapach.”

They say it like it’s reasonable.

Arman, still wearing Lawrence, steps forward and makes a good-faith effort to persuade them. He can be, genuinely, quite persuasive.

It is not, on this occasion, enough.

The first blast from the railgun is Reklaw’s contribution to the theoretical question of whether bearded devils respond to overwhelming force. The answer is that they respond primarily with anger, specifically directed at Reklaw, specifically immediately.

Combat, as it so often does in Malbolge, resolves itself through a combination of violence and misfortune. One devil swings wide and catches his companion across the face with something that should not have connected at that angle. The companion staggers, hands pressed to his eyes, suddenly blind in the middle of a fight he had been confident about sixty seconds ago.

The party takes turns.

The blind devil swings. Misses. Swings again. Each traveler who steps in deals their blow with the unhurried efficiency of people with every positional advantage and nothing left to prove. Eventually the devil’s stance shifts from belligerent to something quieter, its hands dropping, its sword dipping toward the cracked earth.

Please, it says.

Arman drops Lawrence entirely. His own face surfaces, the changeling’s features settling back into place, and the psychic staff finds the gap with the precision of someone who knows exactly where it will hurt most.

The other devil, the one still possessed of its vision and its dignity and very little else, watches Arman warily. 

A violent blow destroys the devil. Little is left of the creature.

It is still watching when Borark uses the Drunkard’s Cudgel and brings it around in a short, efficient arc. The smell of ale blooms into the hot air.

The blinded devil sits down heavily. Then it lies down. Then it begins, very quietly, to snore.

“Right,” someone says.

The truck rolls.

The Hag’s Arm resolves out of the murk ahead — and it is, as advertised, both a tavern and a landmark of the anatomical variety. An enormous limb, disembodied and ancient, arches over the structure like a natural formation. Below it, the building squats. Light leaks from the windows. The sound of something that might charitably be called music drifts through the thick air.

They have arrived.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​