06/22/2026: Leaving Malbolge

"Which door leads us to Maladomini?" demands Vali. leaving malbolge

The first golem does not speak. It simply raises one iron hand and points — a slow, deliberate gesture toward the door on the right — and that is enough.

After their twenty minutes of argument, the answer arrives without ceremony. In unpacking the guards' declarations, the party determines it is the first guard who has never lied. The second has: it claimed only one question would be answered. The first guard has, to now, answered subsequent questions — many of them, but only about doors. Arman suspected this from the start, and Vali's logic, however belabored, leads to the same conclusion. The party files through without looking back.

⚔

The fissure yawns before them, presenting itself as the only path down: a rickety scaffolding clinging to the walls of sheer cliffs, a series of ledges and switchbacks descending into sulfurous gloom. The crumbling stone weeps thin rivulets of something foul-smelling and steaming. Far below, the chasm floor is invisible. The air is thick with biting flies that find the party efficiently and painfully.

Kiki, Thunk, and Vali peel off from the group and begin the long trek back toward the truck. They disappear into the maze without ceremony, leaving Arman, Reklaw, and Borark to press ahead toward the bridge.

The planks are rotted — not merely old, but possibly lacking any structural integrity. They span a sixty-foot drop over nothing reassuring. Arman goes first.

He makes it perhaps a third of the way across before a decayed board gives beneath him with a crack like a snapping bone. There is a moment — brief and vertiginous — and then he is falling.

Sixty feet is a long way down. Arman arrives at the bottom the hard way, sliding over the abrasive and nearly vertical surface, his hands clawing frantically for purchase lest he drop over the edge into whatever lies in the invisible gulf below. Who can say how far?

Reklaw follows, peering down to find Arman rolling to his knees on a ledge — scraped and bleeding from the havoc of his descent, but nothing broken. The monk drops through the hole in the scaffold Arman has made. His Slow Fall catches him, robes billowing against the updraft, and he lands with considerably more dignity than Arman.

Borark crosses what remains of the bridge and picks his way down the far side, peering at his comrades far below. Beneath him, the bridge sways in the strong, steady, foul-smelling wind.

Somewhere behind, in the deadly maze, Kiki and the others are still making their way toward the truck.

⚔

Beyond Reklaw and the bruised and bleeding Arman, the mine entrance is easy to miss — a dark and ragged fissure, half-choked with rubble.

And now it fills with cawing and flapping, creatures roused by the noise and tumble of Arman's fall.

Six cockatrices boil out of the dark in a flurry of feathers and outrage.

They are not large. They are not especially fearsome individually. But they are fast, numerous, and deeply committed to biting anything that moves. The narrow cliff ledge, already cramped, becomes significantly more so.

Reklaw goes down first. The bite catches him mid-movement and the petrification begins its slow work — a spreading heaviness climbing from his toes, the sensation of becoming something that no longer needs to move. By the time the third cockatrice lunges, he is stone from the waist down.

Arman lasts only a little longer. He resists for a time, but the bare cliff face offers nowhere useful to retreat, and he is quickly overwhelmed. One cockatrice connects, then another. The slow gray creep begins its climb. He, too, loses the ability to walk.

High above, Borark watches his friends turning to stone. This enrages the barbarian. He sprints forward and leaps toward the ledge below, hoping to take out a cockatrice rising toward him through the mist.

Mid-air, his boots find it. The crunch of bone is lost in the wind as Borark continues his descent through a cloud of feathers. The ledge rushes up, and he has no control over exactly where he lands. Lost in the red haze of fury, he might not be worried about coming down on top of Reklaw or Arman — but thankfully, he doesn't. Two boots land squarely on a cockatrice, which folds beneath them. One foot finds solid stone. The other wedges itself in a deep fissure bisecting the ledge, rooting him in place.

He looks up — and catches the bite of a cockatrice.

The petrification begins. Between the foot wedged in the crack and the creeping gray stiffness spreading from the wound, Borark is very thoroughly stopped. Three of the six birds are still alive and making their opinions known, coming at him with glaring orange eyes, screaming and flapping.

Borark reaches down, closes his hand around a piece of fissure wall that comes away in his fist, and throws it.

The stone catches one cockatrice clean. It does not survive the experience. Two remain. With loud crackling, both Reklaw and Arman become fully stone, frozen with arms thrown over their heads.

Borark, foot still wedged, still restrained, still very much in the fight, turns to face the two survivors.

Somewhere above, Kiki and the others are making their way toward their truck. They are as yet clueless about what they will find on the way into Maladomini.

But Borark knows. He is standing against three of them, who glare at him with hate. Their feather rustle and sharpened beaks snap, threateningly and move yet again to attack.