07/13/2026: Gratchis

The bloated devil calling itself Gratchis looms over the battered rogue, robes stiff as sheet metal, a tall orange feather quill coiled at the ready above one pudgy hand.

"On the authority vested by the Grace of his Excellent Excellency, Lord Baalzebub, on behalf of the Kingdom of Maladomini," the amnizu intones, "you are required to present Fissure Crossing Permit J54-T, completed in triplicate and signed by the responsible party or parties."

Arman rolls stiffly to his feet. The fall has left him bloodied, lightheaded, and coated in a fine gray dust that tastes of chalk and brimstone. "As I said," he mutters, brushing at his sleeves, "the form was completed and filled out." A beat. "By your replacement."

Gratchis blinks his small wet eyes. Once. Twice. Many times.

"My — replacement?" The devil pauses. Then, impossibly, he brightens. "It's finally come through," he whispers to himself.

The rogue slows his tidying. "Uh. What do you mean?" 

The tubby devil spins in place, stiff robes flaring out around him like a startled bell. "Finally! Gratchis's promotion! As Gratchis knew it would!"

"Your promotion?" Arman ventures. "What promotion?"

"Gratchis has been Acting Third Assistant Undersecretary of Ingress and Egress of the Maladomini Eastern Fissure Crossing for six hundred and fifty-seven years." The word Acting drips from him like something painful. "Forty-three decades ago, Gratchis submitted an application for promotion — the position is not anything Gratchis can share with a nosy one such as you — and now it must have been approved, if Gratchis's replacement is expected imminently and is already accepting paperwork from those entering Maladomini via the Eastern Fissure." The beady eyes fix on Arman with terrible intensity.

Arman decides this is an excellent moment to be elsewhere. He makes it perhaps ten steps before a kyton — a chain devil, all rasping links and hooked barbs — slides into his path and gestures him, with a metallic clatter that requires no translation, back toward the checkpoint. Gratchis is waiting, quill poised.

"Form J54-T," the devil repeats. "In triplicate."

"I'll just — check with my companions," Arman says, jerking a thumb at the cliff face above, where the rest of the party remains stranded on the rotting scaffold. "They have the paperwork. Probably."

He climbs cautiously, congratulating himself on spotting a weak board in the decking and stepping neatly around it. He has no wish to fall again.

He then tumbles directly into the hole he made crashing through the deck thirty minutes ago.

⚔

Above, Kiki strains against the petrified Reklaw, still fused to the truck's wheel in an attitude of eternal, stony concentration. The stone will not budge, and Reklaw's petrified hands are wrapped around the steering wheel. The mapach calls up Gearloose, and together the two of them finally manage — with much grunting and at least one muttered gnomish curse — to lever the monk gently to one side. Kiki bolts a hastily artificed, makeshift wheel into place and points the massive truck down the rickety stairs.

The Horseshoes of the Zephyr deliver exactly as promised: the truck floats a few inches above the rotted timbers, drifting down the scaffolding like a very heavy and well-armed soap bubble.

The loading of the wounded proceeds with grim efficiency. They move Lula, the fallen angel, who has slipped into a coma. Their breathing is shallow and slow, their lips blue. Clunk shelters nearby in the rear of the truck bed, the tiny griffin chick tucked against his chest. Vali, wholly petrified, is laid in the tailgate with as much dignity as a life-sized statue permits. Borark — stone from the waist down but loudly opinionated from the waist up — is propped beside him. Kiki casts Mending on Thunk's leg, which snapped clean off when the mapach dropped her down the stairs, and the limb knits back to the stone body with a sound like grinding millstones. He slides the bugbear in near Reklaw, placing bedrolls to keep them from battering one another into powder.

⚔

At the bottom of the fissure, Kiki guns the engine.

The plan, insofar as there is one, is to go around Gratchis and his helpers. The lemures — shapeless, moaning lumps of the damned — do not move quickly enough, and are run down with a series of wet, unpleasant sounds. One sounds as if it has been pulled into a wheel well of the truck. Gratchis, his tubby form belying an astonishing dexterity, flings himself behind a stack of barrels. One of the chain devils is struck full-on and disappears beneath the horseshoed tires.

It is not enough. The kytons sprout chains from their own bodies, links and hooks whipping out to seize the back of the truck, anchoring it in place with a shriek of strained metal. Kiki throws the vehicle into reverse and runs both chain devils down a second time. Stubbornly — insultingly — they hold on.

From behind the barrels comes a shriek: "Gratchis's promotion relies upon this!"

Kiki guns the engine again. With a groan of tortured chain and a spray of kyton parts, the truck surges free, dragging lengths of hooked links and portions of their former owners rattling behind it.

⚔

The magical horseshoes carry them right out onto the River Styx itself, the truck skimming inches above the oily, foul-smelling black water.

Maladomini unrolls before them, and it is unlike any layer of Hell they have crossed. Where the other levels were desolate, this one is paved — paved over entirely, horizon to horizon, not one growing thing to be seen, living or dead. Along the decaying shores, work details of the damned labor at vast stone structures, though whether they are building them up or tearing them down is impossible to say. Perhaps it is both. Perhaps, in Baalzebub's kingdom, that is the point.

The River smells of waste — of every sewer in every city that ever emptied into it — and it is on that fragrant shore that they spot the crate. Inside: three unbroken vials, carefully packed. Potions of Lesser Restoration, upon inspection.

Kiki tiips the dark orange fluid onto the head of each of the fully petrified. The stoneskin recedes slowly, painfully — stone graying back to flesh inch by aching inch — as Vali, Thunk, and Reklaw are, at last, free to move. For now, impatiently, Borark waits.