The armored truck grinds to a halt before the gates at the threshold of Stygia, its engine ticking in the oppressive heat. The vehicle sits angled toward the entrance, its metal hull still radiating warmth from their passage through Phlegethos. Four horned devils slouch near the checkpoint, their scaled hides gleaming dully in the hellish light. They carry themselves with the dangerous indifference of bored predators—surly, restless, looking for any excuse to break the monotony of their posting.
One devil straightens as the truck approaches, his eyes narrowing to slits. "Papers," he snarls, the word barely more than a growl. The sound cuts through the crackling air like a blade.
From within the truck, disguised forms shift uneasily. Transformed into lemures by necessity—the only way to survive Phlegethos's burning landscape—the party slides their documentation through the narrow opening. The devils snatch the papers with clawed hands, scanning them with practiced disinterest.
Then one devil's attention fixes on something else. Without warning, he reaches past the documents and drags the miserable Lula from the truck's relative protection. The angel tumbles onto the scorched ground, his bare feet making contact with stone that burns like the surface of a dying star. Immediately, blisters rise and burst across his skin. Lula's moan begins low and builds—a sound of pure, involuntary agony that echoes across the checkpoint.
The devils watch with casual cruelty, their lips curling in what might be amusement. After a long moment—far longer than necessary—the lead devil waves a dismissive hand. "Get back in," he mutters, already bored again with his entertainment.
Lula crawls desperately toward the truck, his movements frantic and graceless. The party hauls him back inside, where he collapses, trembling and gasping.
The same devil produces a stack of forms, shoving them through the opening. "Fill these out. All of you. If you want your real bodies back." His tone suggests he doesn't particularly care whether they comply or not.
But the party cares. They are profoundly, bone-deep tired of existing as lemures—those pitiful, blob-like forms that represent the lowest rung of infernal existence. They accept the forms gratefully, their transformed fingers struggling with the unfamiliar task of holding writing implements.
One by one, a horned devil wielding a twisted wand approaches each party member. The wand glows with sickly light as it touches each lemure form, and the Polymorph spell that has kept them safe unravels. Reklaw returns first, his monk's frame suddenly occupying space where formless flesh had been. Then Vali, then Kiki, each transformation accompanied by gasps of relief. As soon as they regain their true forms, they scramble back into the truck—without the lemure disguise, the heat of Phlegethos would cook them alive in moments.
Arman steps forward for his turn, but the process stutters. The wand sparks against his lemure form, but nothing happens. The devil tries again, muttering under his breath. Again, nothing. The bureaucratic magic refuses to take hold.
"Form's incomplete," the devil announces flatly. "Can't process it. Next."
"Wait," Vali interrupts, his voice taking on a persuasive quality. He steps closer to the horned devil, attempting to reason, to cajole, to convince. "Look again at the paperwork. Everything is in order. You can see that, can't you?"
The devil's eyes remain flat and cold as a serpent's. "No."
The word hangs in the air like a death sentence. Arman will have to remain a lemure, vulnerable and diminished, for their passage through Stygia.
As Vali argues futilely with the immovable bureaucrat, Reklaw moves with the silence that defines his training. His hand darts out, fingers closing around the wand with practiced precision. The horned devil doesn't even notice as the monk pockets the magical implement, his movements concealed in the general chaos of the checkpoint.
Later, inside the truck and away from observing eyes, Reklaw produces the stolen wand. The magical implement pulses once in his hand, and Arman's lemure form ripples and reforms. The changeling gasps as his true nature reasserts itself—or at least, the nature he chooses to wear today.
The truck rumbles forward, carrying them away from Phlegethos toward the border of Stygia.
⚔
At the threshold between fire and ice, where the scorching winds of Phlegethos meet the howling blizzards of Stygia, stands Toranos—a colossus whose very existence defies mortal comprehension. Five hundred feet of corded muscle and divine wrath, he towers through the mists like a living mountain. His skin crackles with perpetual electrical current, arcs of lightning dancing across his bare chest and arms in chaotic patterns that never cease, never pause. When he moves, the air itself tears, ionized particles creating aurora-like displays of blue and violet light that ripple across his form in waves of barely-contained power.
In one massive fist, Toranos grips a morning star the size of a fortress tower. Its spiked head glows white-hot where it isn't encrusted with ice—a weapon forged in the transition between realms, simultaneously burning and freezing, a perfect embodiment of the border he guards. The chain that connects head to handle thrums with contained thunder, each link inscribed with runes of binding older than the Hells themselves.
His eyes swirl like twin hurricanes, tracking the approaching truck with predatory focus. When he speaks, his voice resonates like thunder rolling across endless plains, felt in the chest before it reaches the ears. Lightning strikes the ground with each footfall, leaving glass-smooth craters of fused earth and ice.
Within the truck, the allies feel the change immediately. The hairs rise on the backs of their necks. The taste of ozone floods their mouths, metallic and sharp. The very air around them becomes charged, humming with potential violence.
"We can't fight this," Vali gasps, his voice tight with barely-controlled terror. His hands move before conscious thought kicks in. "Let me drive." He slides into the driver's seat, shouldering the previous driver aside. His knuckles whiten around the steering wheel as he stamps down on the accelerator.
The engine roars. The truck lurches forward.
And Toranos moves.
The colossus takes a single step, and the world shakes. His morning star rises, ascending through layers of atmosphere like a meteor in reverse. For one frozen heartbeat, the weapon hangs at the apex of its arc—tons of enchanted metal suspended six hundred feet on a chain with links each the size of mammoths. Seeming to float high above the tundra, it blots out the grey sky.
Then it falls.
The descent creates a sound like reality tearing. The air ahead of the truck compresses into a visible wall of force. A tremendous push of damp, icy wind slams into the vehicle's side, making the metal frame groan and buckle. The windshield frosts over instantly, crystalline patterns spreading across the glass like grasping fingers.
"HOLD ON!" Vali barks, wrenching the wheel hard to the right.
The truck tilts. Physics and desperation war for control. Passengers slam against their harnesses, bodies thrown like ragdolls as the vehicle tips up onto two wheels. Kiki's scream cuts through the chaos. Equipment tears free from its moorings and crashes through the cargo space. The world outside the windows becomes a nauseating blur of grey and white.
The morning star impacts where the truck was less than a second before. The ground doesn't just shatter—it evaporates. A crater sixty feet across appears instantaneously, ice and stone converted to superheated plasma. The shockwave catches the truck's undercarriage, lifting it like a toy.
For a terrifying moment, they are airborne. The engine screams. Time stretches. Through the frosted windshield, Vali can see the flat expanse of Stygia rushing up to meet them—or they're rushing down to meet it. The distinction hardly matters.
The impact when it comes is catastrophic. The truck lands hard on its passenger side, metal shrieking as it grinds across the ice. Sparks shower into the frozen air. The vehicle tips further, threatening to roll completely, to tumble end over end across the tundra. Inside, bodies crash against restraints. Blood flecks the interior. Someone—maybe Arman, maybe Vali—is praying in a language older than the Hells.
Then momentum shifts. The truck teeters on its edge, balanced impossibly on two wheels, suspended between disaster and survival.
With a final, shuddering crash, it slams back down onto all four wheels. The chassis groans. Something in the suspension breaks with an audible snap. But they're down. They're stopped.
Behind them, Toranos watches. His hurricane eyes track their trajectory with interest, perhaps curiosity, perhaps hunger. Lightning plays across his shoulders, illuminating the border between fire and ice.
He doesn't pursue. The colossus has made his point. They may pass—but only because he allows it.
⚔
The truck rests at an angle on the ice, listing slightly to one side from damaged suspension. Overhead, the sky stretches grey and featureless, devoid of sun or stars—just an endless, oppressive ceiling of clouds. The engine has stalled. All becomes still in the frozen air. Even the wind seems to hold its breath.
Vali turns the key. The starter grinds, coughs. Nothing. He tries again. The engine turns over once, twice, sputters...
While he works, the others scan their surroundings through cracked windows and the spider-webbed windshield. An arctic expanse stretches in every direction save one. The landscape is utterly flat, utterly featureless—a white void broken only by the occasional upthrust of black stone or pressure ridge of ice. It's the kind of emptiness that drives mortals mad, a nothingness so complete it seems to have weight.
To the west, the River Styx cuts through the edge of the tundra like a wound that refuses to heal. Floes of ice move upon its black surface, sluggish and thick, drifting southward with the current. Even from this distance, the party can feel it—the river's pull, its hunger, its promise of absolute forgetting. The Styx flows through all the layers of Hell, and those who drink from it lose everything: memory, identity, self. They become less than blank slates. They become nothing.
The engine coughs. Catches. Roars back to life with a sound that seems almost defiant in the stillness.
"Thank the—" Vali begins.
"We have company," Reklaw interrupts, his voice low and tight. The monk has gone perfectly still, his eyes fixed on something ahead.
Every head turns.
A tall figure stands perhaps a hundred yards away, leaning casually against a guard house that absolutely, definitively was not there moments before. The structure appears suddenly in their vision, as if it had always existed but their minds simply hadn't processed it until now. It's a small building, barely more than a shack, sitting in the middle of absolutely nowhere—no roads leading to it, no other structures in sight, nothing to indicate why it exists or what it guards.
The figure is clearly a fiend. Even at this distance, the wrongness of its silhouette is apparent—proportions that are almost but not quite humanoid, a stance that suggests both leisure and coiled violence. It watches them with evident interest, making no move to approach.
It simply waits.
The engine idles. Inside the truck, nobody moves. The guard house and its lone occupant seem to shimmer slightly in the grey light, as if they exist only partially in this reality—or perhaps as if Stygia itself is deciding whether they should be real.
"Well," Kiki finally says, her voice carefully neutral, "I suppose we should say hello."
The frozen wind picks up again, carrying with it the distant sound of ice grinding against ice, and perhaps—though it might be imagination—the faintest echo of thunder from the border they've left behind.
