04/27/2026: Last Call at the Hag’s Arm

The fireball has already done its work.

Where the common room of the Hag’s Arms once hosted the ambient misery of Hell’s traveling public — the low murmur of deals being struck, the clink of vessels containing things better left unexamined, the plaintive notes of Bayleaf the Bard doing his level best against an indifferent audience — there is now smoke, rubble, and an impressive number of dead fiends.

Fork stands in the wreckage with the particular satisfaction of someone who has significantly improved a room’s atmosphere. Shovel, his companion, says nothing about this. The undead goat, likewise, is silent. It has no opinion about the chaos.

⚔

Not all of the Hag’s Arms’ clientele had the decency to die in the fireball. The survivors drag themselves from the smoking wreckage and take stock.

Two horned devils emerge from the debris with the slow, deliberate movements of creatures who are angry enough to be careful about it. A bone devil unfolds from under a defenestrated door like bad news arriving by mail. And somewhere beneath a cairn of scorched imp corpses, something stirs — a cambion, apparently having decided that the floor was the safest place to be, which, given current events, was not an unreasonable assessment.

The hags themselves are nowhere the victims of the fireball can see. Morda, Vetch, and Scratch have not fled, exactly. They have transitioned — slipped sideways into the ethereal plane, their favored sanctuary. They have survived considerably worse than one fireball and intend to survive this one too. Somewhere just adjacent to visible reality, three night hags are watching their establishment being destroyed and composing, one imagines, a truly comprehensive list of grievances. Particularly against Fork.

⚔

The solar, for its part, is in the bathroom. The leak from a shattered porcelain fixture is wetting its sandals.

It has been there for some time. The wall of blades it summoned continues its patient, terrible rotation in the common room — a celestial set-it-and-forget-it — while the solar itself occupies the ruined bathroom, trying not to think about the source of the water its feet are currently submerged in. It is, by any measure, the most powerful entity in the building. It is also sulking.

⚔

Arman is in the bathroom too, which is its own problem.

He is currently wearing the face of Lawrence — and has been wearing it long enough that the nightmare shepherd lurking in the bathroom’s shadows has accepted this Lawrence as real, as present, as the specific person it frequently socializes with.

This is useful to Arman. It is also a situation that requires careful management, because the nightmare shepherd is right there, and Arman is running out of time before he must depart with his comrades, who have already fled out into the bar.

He turns on the nightmare shepherd.

Whatever Lawrence would have done in this moment — whatever the real Lawrence’s instincts might have been — Arman makes his own calculation and acts. The bathroom, already ruined, becomes briefly more so.

⚔

In the common room, Reklaw has found a horned devil and decided that this is a fight worth having.

He is wrong, technically. The horned devil is enormous — all mass and contempt, its hide still smoking faintly from the fireball it walked out of. Reklaw’s attack connects. The horned devil looks down at him. “You’ve made a mistake,” it says, “my short friend.”

Reklaw is an orc. He is not short. The horned devil is simply very, very large. This is, objectively, a poor moment for taxonomic distinctions.

What happens next happens fast. The bathroom door opens. The solar emerges — not dramatically, not with any particular announcement. It simply arrives, the way a force of nature arrives, and looks at the horned devil the way one looks at someone who has just threatened the wrong person.

The horned devil does not finish its thought.

⚔

Borark has another devil in mind.

The contract devil has been attempting, throughout all of this, to remain uninjured. This is difficult in a building that is on fire and contains a rotating tornado of celestial blades. But the contract devil is nothing if not committed to process. It knows the rules of Hell. It has principles.

Borark picks it up and throws it into the wall of blades.

The wall of blades makes a soft chitter as it greets this newest opportunity.

⚔

Outside the building, the situation is different in that it is worse.

Kiki and Vali have been pursuing a parallel operation, which began as a tactical flanking maneuver and evolved into something considerably more ambitious. The ion cannon had seemed, briefly, like it might be useful for excavating a path through the floor of Malbolge to the layer below. This is not a plan that most people would form. Vali is not most people.

The truck — an infernal vehicle of truly staggering mass — sits at the edge of the clifftop overlooking the Hag’s Arms below. Kiki retrieves the Immovable Rod from where she’d planted it, insurance against the truck rolling anywhere inconvenient, and climbs into the cab.

Vali is already in the truck. He has been in the truck. He has tired of tapping the horn and simply leans on it, the sound echoing out through the canyons and fissures ahead of them. First sand, then gravel, sifts downward into the darkness.

Neither of them notices the fracture.

It is spreading rapidly across the unstable ground of Malbolge — a great jagged crack racing toward the truck from behind, a geological opinion about what happens when you park ten thousand pounds of vehicle on a cliff in the sixth layer of Hell and point an ion cannon at the floor. The cliff is not stable. The cliff has never been stable. The cliff has been making its position on this matter increasingly clear, and Kiki and Vali are about to become intimately familiar with the consequences.

But that is a problem for the next moment.

This moment: Kiki puts the truck in gear. Vali, who has been ready for this since before Kiki thought of it, is already braced. Below them, through smoke and rubble and the patient geometry of the solar’s wall of blades, the surviving devils of the Hag’s Arms are making their various calculations about the future.

The cambion claws the last dead imp off his face and takes his first free breath.

Bayleaf the Bard, formerly of the Hag’s Arms, is being carried like a bride across the threshold by Thunk. Bayleaf has identified that the smart play is to wait inside for the chaos to resolve and then loot what remains. Thunk, to his credit, sees the logic. They cross back into the building together, Thunk ducking through the ruined doorway, Bayleaf tucked against his chest.

Many yards away, the truck goes over the edge.

It is, in the moment of its departure, a magnificent thing — ten thousand pounds of infernal engineering, airborne, descending toward the Hag’s Arms with unhurried certainty. Forty feet below, the building waits. The wall of blades rotates. The solar stands in the bathroom doorway, watching over the grateful Reklaw and the puddle that had been a horned devil. Somewhere in the ethereal plane, three night hags are about to receive some very bad visuals of their property.

The truck falls.