The War-Slough in Avernus, site of the Great Fray,
was home to a devastating war between devils and
demons and what’s left is a nightmarish collection
of lost devil units, wandering demons, and corruption.
The Forever War
The War-Slough isn’t abandoned. To evacuate it
you’d have to master it, and the place is beyond even
Zariel’s dominion. It doesn’t matter what nebulous
period of time has passed since the Great Fray: the
combatants on both sides are immortal, and there
are plenty left in the Slough still trying to fight the dead battle. On the nominal side of the Nine Hells,
units of single-minded merregons (see Monsters of
the Multiverse) from the handfuls to the hundreds
slog endlessly through the mire, cut off from anyorders after too many usurpations and reappointments up the chain of command. Beyond any hope
of returning to the infernal hierarchy they attack
just about anything on sight, including each other.
Brutal, yet simultaneously pathetic and desperate,
they scream codewords and countersigns as though
hoping to hear some word of authority that they’re
past the point of ever recognizing.
A number of infernal generals were lost to the
Great Fray, and some are still in there. Fighting
the infinitely shifting hosts of the abyss broke them
one after another, leaving them unable to trust any
external authority for fear of falling for a demonic
trick. They maintain their camps and shrunken
domains in the ruins of fallen fortifications and tell
themselves that they continue the fight even as they
raid one another or make sham alliances that they
know will be broken in heartbeats.
Aside from the pathetic remnants of devil armies,
the War-Slough has developed an ecology of sorts.
There is always a meal to be had for an opportunistic scavenger. One-off mutated creations roam forlorn over its churned surface or slither through its
trenches. Demons stalk and worry at the ineffable
meat of fallen Fiends, growing fat and corrupt with
demonic taint. There are tentacled things in the lakes
of demon-ichor and vast corpse-worms that burrow
through the slimy soil. For every hideous monster
there is something worse still to prey upon it.
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