The Nine Hells
The Nine Hells, as they are known to the post-human races, could not help but earn such an epithet, so reminiscent they are of the inhospitable realms of the afterlife (for those whose evil deeds in life earned such an eternal punishment) that formed an integral part of nearly every human belief system.
These worlds are, in the multiverse of Anuwai, nine distinct terrestrial planets that orbit the star Quyosh, or Eayan Alshaytan, Eye of Satan in Arabic, as it was named by human astronomers. From the outermost, these planets are Bitta (Avernus), Ikki (Dis), Uch (Minauros), To'rtta (Phlegethos), Beshta (Stygia), Olti (Malboge), Yetti (Maladomini), Sakkiz (Cania), and the innermost, To'qqiz (Nessus). Each of these worlds is governed by an Archduke (Gertsog), with Asmodeus, Archduke of Nessus, the ruler over all of the others and every creature, fiend or otherwise, within the Nine Hells.
The history of the Nine Hells is mired in mystery and misinformation. It is known that most, if not all, of the creatures known as Devils, or Qahrli as they call themselves, are what has evolved from the native inhabitants of these worlds. What is not known, however, is how the strict structure of law and order that pervades every aspect of civilization in the Nine Hells came into effect. While the Archdukes sit at the very top of the hierarchy, the ways in which they differ from one another indicates that these tyrants may not be of the same race as those over which they hold dominion. Some suspect that the dukes of the Hells are actually Celestials who were cast out after using their vast power in perverse ways that were unacceptable in their own plane. Others believe these lords to be Demon Princes of the Abyss who escaped that infinite source of black chaos to leverage their power over the creatures of the Quyosh system. Still others believe that they are, in fact, natives of that system, who simply mastered and embraced technomancy and their own version of "transhumanism" to such an extent that they no longer resembled whatever species they originated from. The truth of the matter may never be known outside the innermost circles of the Hells themselves, for the truth of their origins is now forever entangled with the greatest fiendish innovation in universe-spanning magic: True Naming.
While the Archfey of the Feywild similarly dapple in the power of True Naming, it was the Devils of the Hells who first truly tapped into its possibilities. As part of the creation of Okàn (the Soul), a unique bit of "code" was inserted into the quantum matrix that makes up each individual's "soul" as an identifier, connected at the time of Okàn (the Soul)'s creation to the name of each person in the universe (and, subsequently, for each new "soul" created ever after). Without extremely powerful access to this code, something typically only available to the most powerful among the Celestials and similar entities, most never even become aware of this identifier, or True Name. However, Asmodeus and the other Archdevils found a way to make each of themselves (as well as those serving under them) aware of their own True Names. Knowing the True Name of a creature allows a sort of compulsion and control that, to say the least, is quite dangerous under normal circumstances. The devils, however, use this to maintain the tightly controlled caste system that they have created for themselves.
This caste system has ancient roots. As the archdevils first marched across the Nine Hells with their army of pit fiends (those powerful devils whose ambitions cause them to constantly pine after control of one of the Hells themselves, making them at once the most loyal, trustworthy, and treacherous of servants - some believe them to be natives of Nessus), they conquered and subjugated the various creatures of the solar system, evaluating their potential usefulness and forcing them to comply with a rigid race-based caste system. Only rarely were exceptional individuals raised to a higher caste, though it was not uncommon for those deemed failures to be demoted to lower ranks. When the devils learned how to harness Okàn (the Soul) and developed True Naming, they built this into their caste system. After a certain ritual was performed, a fiend of the Nine Hells is either reborn into a new body within the same cast, forced into a body of a lower-caste devil, or promoted to a higher caste. This system has resulted in a society based around strictly enforced laws and contracts. Subordinates simultaneously resent their masters, jockey for position to replace them, and yet stick to the letter of the law (if not the spirit of it, certainly) else they face demotion.
With further advancements in technomancy and faster-than-light travel, the Archdevils sought to not only protect their way of life from outside influence but also to prevent their subordinates from escaping the Hells to colonize other worlds as they saw fit. The solution was to erect a sort of system-engulfing Wall (Devor), a thin barrier which actually serves as a gateway to the hottest depths of the Elemental Plane of Fire, in a vast spherical shape beyond Avernus. Crossing this barrier using any normal means would obliterate any creature or object, and even technomancical teleportation is unable to traverse this sphere without incinerating the would-be traveler in the process. Only trans-dimensional gateways or plane shifting serve as reliable means of transport outside of the Hells, and Asmodeus has been extremely careful to limit this capability to only himself and his most trusted lieutenants. And trust is in short supply in the Hells.
For countless millennia, civilization as it were continued unabated in the Hells. Engulfed in their own politics and shielded from invasion or discovery by outsiders, Devilkind continued to shape themselves into a brutal culture of law, dominance, and submission, beholden to a strict order. However, when the Celestials tore a hole through reality in their first attempt at creating extraplanar dimensions, they accidentally created The Abyss, a howling void of pure chaos tunneling through existence in an infinite, sprawling pit. In the infinite chaos of the Abyss, the matter and energy that come into and wink out of existence in this multiverse-within-a-multiverse often enough (read: infinitely often) generates living forms from its pure chaos-stuff. As one might imagine, these are typically nearly formless masses of animated matter, but in a fraction of cases (read again: infinitely often) they take shapes such that they might actually live. After the further creation of the Okàn (the Soul), these new forms, upon their generation from the stuff of the Abyss, gained souls, and then consciousness. As there are also infinite forms of destruction, conquest, misanthropy and nihilism, many of these creatures desire nothing more and nothing less than: free reign to kill any and everything in existence, the utter domination and subjugation of all life, to consume every living thing, to forever end Okàn (the Soul) and replace all life with unlife, or the absolute destruction of reality itself. These creatures, living engines of destruction, were called demons.
The hole in space that is The Abyss, unfortunately for the Devils (and perhaps fortunately for the rest of the universe's life), happened to open relatively close to the Quyosh system. As untold numbers of the demon horde spilled out into space, most, predictably, died in the cold vacuum of space, but others were unaffected and hurtled embedded in colossal, convulsing pieces of the Abyss itself spewed into reality, and some of these horrifyingly careened right through the barrier surrounding the Hells and onto the surface of Avernus. Immediately, the denizens of that world took up arms and fought back. The battle raged for hundreds of years, the devils eventually gaining the upper hand and clearing out the last of the demons from Avernus. The scale of the incursion became known, and word of the invasion of reality by the demons eventually passed among all of Devilkind. The entire structure of society in the Hells was quickly reordered by the Archdukes, who refocused all of the politics and infighting toward the defense of the Hells from the demons.
The wiser demons, meanwhile, found a way to harness the chaos of Pandemonium to their advantage, redirecting its mightiest river right through the barriers between planes so that it inexplicably flooded through multiple layers of the Abyss itself before pouring out in space by way of the Tarterian Depths of Carceri, The Grey Waste of Hades, spilling out onto the surface of the planet Gehenna before reaching out into space itself in a twisted, chaotic perversion of the concept of a Krasnikov Tube before tearing through the barrier to the Hells and onto the surface of Avernus. So great was the magic of the Styx, as this river through realities was called, that it flowed throughout the Hells across every one of its worlds to Nessus itself. The Archdevils reacted by building barriers similar to the outermost between each of the worlds of the Quyosh system, hoping to protect themselves, but the river tore through them all nonetheless. And so the onslaught commenced, the Devils only just able to withstand it through their ferocious combat prowess being harnessed by their strict military hierarchy.
But, seeing his empire trapped in a desperate struggle that could only have one outcome, the obliteration of his world and then of the universe itself, Asmodeus knew that he had no choice but to plead for help from the only ones he knew capable of helping him. He went to Coelum, the plane of the Celestials, and presented evidence of the incursion of the demons. The Celestials, wracked by guilt, admitted their role in the very creation of the Abyss, and offered their help in defending against the demon onslaught while they considered ways of putting their finger in the dike, as it were. Asmodeus, clever as he was, convinced them that it would be better to allow his forces to maintain the defense while the great minds of the Celestials worked on the solution to the Problem of the Abyss. To do so, however, he would need to bolster his forces; Okàn (the Soul) and the way it had been incorporated into devil society meant that there were a finite number of individual devils, while the demons seemed infinite. Not to mention that, after being killed outside the Hells, it still took some time for a devil's soul to transition to a new body, and for that body to mature until it was capable of serving in the Armies of Hell. And finally, with the shifting front, devils would inevitably die within the borders of the Hells themselves, annihilating that soul forever, and devils simply could not breed fast enough to replace their ranks. A new source of souls would have to be supplied. The Celestials agreed, and granted to Asmodeus dominion over the souls of those who died under certain circumstances: outside of a society with their own control over their souls, without their souls being committed to the care of some other being or set of beings, and which could be judged by a neutral party to fall significantly short of the moral norms of the society in which that creature had lived. To the Celestials, this didn't seem like much of a commitment; to their knowledge few individuals fell under this purview, but perhaps enough to make a difference in the war. And besides, what better use for the souls of evildoers than to fight in defense of the universe itself?
So, Asmodeus left Coelum with dominion over the souls of evildoers across most of the universe. With the steady flow of new souls into the Hells, these were shunted directly into lumps of animated flesh known as lemures, where they could be tortured and prodded until any traces of humanity (or whatever it might be) had left the soul entirely, and it was utterly committed to the hierarchy of the Hells and the defense of them from the demons. And so the ranks of devilkind swelled, and they were able to push the front to the source of the Styx in the Prime Material Plane: the planet Gehenna, where wages an eternal war for the fate of the universe, the Fiendstrife.
Prior to this move of Asmodeus', the demons that poured out of the Abyss simply bore a general animosity toward all of creation. By their very nature, they were utterly disorganized hordes of violent death, who only slaughtered and consumed the devils with greater ferocity than each other because the law and order of devilkind was such an affront to the ethos of the demons. However, once the devils' forces were bolstered by this massive new influx of souls that allowed for the creation of more footsoldiers in the armies of Hell, several of the Demon Princes, lords of their very own layers within the boundless Abyss, began to see the conquering of the Hells as a unique and interesting challenge, especially since the presence of devil forces on Gehenna was thwarting the destructive ambitions of the Abyssal horde. Whipping their vast, terrified minions into a frothing rage, the Demon Princes drove through the opening of the Styx on Gehenna with renewed bloodlust.
In order to combat the increased flow of demons from the Abyss, Asmodeus knew that the supply of souls providing devils for his frontlines had to increase somehow. So, in all of his cleverness, he ordered the Archdevils (who in turn ordered their own lieutenants) to make targeted efforts to corrupt mortal souls so that they might fall under the purview of the Hells upon death. The purer the soul, the stronger a minion it might become after being broken. So a great many devils went forth through the barrier around the Hells, with Asmodeus' blessing, to the many mortal worlds, and began to sew their fiendish seeds. In many cases, the righteous were led to temptation, the scorned offered tools of vengeance, and those left behind in their societies were drawn toward devilish cults. When none of these would suffice, the devils made use of their expertise in legalese to make mortals party to contracts that, if broken, would commit their souls to the fires of the Hells.
And so the schemes go on, and the reach of devilkind has spread across the universe. The increase in souls destined for the Hells has given Asmodeus and the other Archdevils the forces they need to keep the assaults of the demons at bay, and so the Fiendstrife has raged in a violent stalemate for countless generations, mostly on the surface of Gehenna, although sometimes the demons push back the devil forces along the Styx back to the surface of Avernus, and sometimes the devils rally and push into the Abyss itself, but not since the war has stabilized has one side ever come close to complete domination of the other. Society across the Nine Hells has been completely restructured to maintain this unending massive war, and due to the increased presence of devils across the universe (in their efforts to send more souls to the war effort), cultures everywhere have similar stories (and similar fears) about devils and their machinations, and yet cults to Azmodeus and the more powerful devils find new recruits every single day nearly everywhere in Anuwai.
Geography
The outermost planet is Bitta (called Avernus), a cratered, blasted ruin of a world. It contains very little water or vegetation; the sky is dominated by the glowing fire of the Devor (the great fiery Wall that surrounds all of To'qqiz Shar). This side, having witnessed massive-scale warfare for longer than most worlds have even contained intelligent life, is a scarred, barren wasteland, dotted only by the continually rebuilt barracks and fortifications of the devils, at the center of which is a massive mountain (rivaling Everest, but built up on an otherwise flat plain, making it even more astonishingly huge) made entirely of the skulls of slain demons, known as Boshsuyagi Tog'i. This planet is now tidally locked to the Styx, which rips a hole through the Devor, flows down through the sky along bloody shores, and pours onto and across the blasted red plains of Avernus' rocky surface. The river flows halfway along the surface to the "dark" side of the planet, itself illuminated (if somewhat more dimly) by the red giant of Quyosh. From there it leaps again up a mountainside in a reverse-waterfall and into space, where it twists and turns weirdly through space and pours on to the next world, Dis. From the Ta'sir, the point where the Styx impacts the surface of Bitta, a River of Blood from the countless slaughtered combatants flows wide and slow across the planet, forming a vast Blood Ocean on the "dark" side, surrounded by the jagged Avernal Peaks. On a reclaimed island in the center of the Blood Ocean lies the only remaining city on Avernus, The Bronze Citadel, from which the Archduchess Zariel (a former Celestial, it is said) and her pit-fiend advisor Bel command the front lines of the devilish forces in the Fiendstrife.
The Styx then crashes onto the burning peak of a massive mountain of iron ore in what could be generously described as a city park, the Daryo Bog'i (also home to the Garden of Delights), in the Iron City of Dis, which covers the entire surface of the next planet, Dis. From there the Styx actually forms innumerable branches that twist and turn throughout the infinite city, like perverse versions of the canals of Venice. Dis is a planet made almost exclusively from rich iron ore, so nearly every building here is constructed of the stuff while the streets are paved with the slag left over from the smelting process. The proximity to the Wall of Devor and the molten iron core of the planet make every part of Dis stiflingly hot, indeed enough to burn most mortals should their bare skin come in contact with anything there for too long. Here, most of the business of the Hells is conducted, and in its endless winding streets can be found an impressively diverse array of devils and those mortals foolish enough to deal with them. There are also uncountable courts filled with uncountable devilish lawyers, as well as untold numbers of petitioners come to attempt to negotiate the terms of the contracts they were often misled into signing. From any single vantage point on the surface of Dis, travelers there can see the Iron Tower of Dispater, Archduke of Dis, whose watchful eye from his ever-present tower seeks to know every last bit of gossip which passes from mouth to ear within his infinite metropolis. Below the surface and above the molten core can be found the Qamoqxona (Mentiri), an endless prison designed for the torture and demotion of devils who have failed in their commands or otherwise broken the laws of the Hells, along with demonic prisoners from the Fiendstrife and kidnapped mortals having every last ounce of goodness scoured from their living souls. Elsewhere in the city, at a point which no one seems to have ever found, the various branches of the Styx converge once more and rocket away from the surface of the planet toward the third from the outside, Minauros.
After splashing on the surface of Minauros, the Styx spreads out to cover the entire surface of the nearly flat, featureless planet, which only has a few jagged ridges rising a few hundred meters above the fetid swamp. The result is that the entire planet surface is one massive bog. In ancient times, it was quite lush, as the sunlight of Quyosh allowed the plant life here to flourish. However, since the erection of the inner barriers cut off light from the red giant, the plant life here relies on the dim light of the Devor that filters through the perpetual fog of the planet for sustenance. And so, much of the life here is in a state of near constant decay, rotting trees and plants slumped over algae-choked waters, everything at once fed by the waters of the Styx and yet magically lulled into a lazy stupor by its enchantment. The rotation of the planet is quite slow, so the dark side away from Devor nearly freezes over each "night" while the side closest to the Burning Wall comes to a near-boil. Mammon, the gluttonous Archduke of Minauros and financier of the Hells, rules from his City of Minauros at the northern pole, which is constantly sinking into the swamp and an angle and needs to be reinforced by the labor of countless slaves. As there isn't much of an economy (apart from contracts and the souls tied to them) within the Hells, the vast coffers of Mammon (in no small part responsible for the city sinking into the swamp) are filled mainly through cult activities and used to fund the Yuggoloth mercenaries who currently bolster the devil armies on Gehenna. The slow and rot-choked Styx then meanders off the surface of Minauros to the next planets, Phlegethos and Stygia.
The Styx flows through space between the planets Otash (Phlegethos) and Ayoz (Stygia), two worlds that are starkly different, and branches of it spiral off toward both in this binary planetary system. The planets orbit one another, each serving as the other's moon. They are both quite far from Devor (the Flame Wall) and yet blocked from the red giant at the center of the system by further interior walls of darkness, but their differing geology results in two very different climates. Phlegethos is extremely volcanically active, and has an atmosphere choked with ash and smoke from the constant volcanic eruptions. Where the Styx reaches down out of the sky to meet the surface, it actually boils in the superheated atmosphere and rains down as acid rain to feet a vast, bubbling shallow sea, really more like a huge array of multicolored steaming pools and geysers. Elsewhere, the terrain is much less flat, full of huge formations of giant volcanoes and hills of jagged slag jutting up from the valleys, carved by rivers and lakes of magma. In the caldera of a massive sunken volcano is the Pit of Flame, which is a wide sea of roiling magma and flame that serves as the incinerator for all of the Hells. The Archdevils Belial and Lady Fierna reside within the city of Abriymoch, built around the lip of a huge, dying volcano, much less prone to violent eruptions than most others on Phlegethos. While the rabble of the city live in heaps of slag formed into makeshift houses, the wealthier devils live in more lavish homes of bricks carved from red lava rock. The highest ranking servants of the Archdevils have elegant palaces of crystal, and Lady Fierna and Belial live in a many-towered castle of pure obsidian. Stygia, however, is much different; it is a geologically dead world, and the thinner atmosphere doesn't retain much heat. This means that the surface is uniform and cold, and so it is covered with a world-spanning frozen ocean. Stygia is tidally locked to Phlegethos, and the side that faces it receives the branch waters of the Styx, which spread out into a slushy marsh-like surface dotted with strange tree-like structures of ice crystals reaching up out of the rime. The further one goes from where the waters meet the surface, the further one gets from the slight warmth provided by the "moon" of burning Phlegethos, a dull red glow forever in one position in the sky. A hard layer of pack-ice covers the oceans, with vast icebergs trapped here and there in the perpetual sea ice, ancient remnants from when the sun still reached this world. In this frozen waste, it is perpetually night. In the marshlands is a city built of ice called Muz-Shatar, which sits at the edge of a lake of the gathered waters of the Styx and serves as a harbor. Within the harbor, the Archduke Levistus remains trapped, frozen within a huge iceberg, though he continues to be conscious, forever scheming on how to escape this punishment inflicted by Asmodeus.
From this binary planetary system, the Styx flows over Jasad Goyasi (Malboge), the bizarre testing ground of the devils. In ancient times, the rocky wastes of Malboge, freezing cold and dry yet devoid of any useful resources, were simply ignored by Asmodeus and the Archdevils, but after the discovery of technomancy by devilkind, it was used to test large-scale, dangerous magical effects. One such experiment was to alter the gravity of a location to make it more suitable for life; the result of this experiment was that Malboge has a distorted gravitational field that pulls everything at a 45-degree angle, instead of perpendicular to the surface. The effect is that, no matter where one stands on the surface, it seems as though you are walking on an incredibly steep slope. Rocks are constantly rolling "down" the surface and causing avalanches. Later, the planet was used as a testing ground for trans-"humanism" fueled by technomancy; the devils wished to make themselves more powerful, and built a giant of such enormous size that she could not be kept alive, and after growing to a size nearly as big as the planet itself, the massive devil collapsed and died of hunger. In addition to the rocky surface, now much of Malboge is covered in thick layers of her slowly decaying flesh, her bones forming massive structures jutting out from the surface. The heat generated by the decaying flesh keeps the air on Malboge warm and humid. Glasya, daughter of Asmodeus, rules over this layer from a monumental fortress within the clean-picked skull of the massive devil-titan. The Styx pours over Malboge and falls off of it in a mighty waterfall into the void of space, before it reaches Maladomini, the center of treachery and covert operations within the Hells.
Xarobalar (Maladomini) resembles an apocalyptic wasteland. It once served as the urbanized capital of the Hells, vibrant and crawling with innumerable devils. However, after devil society turned away from itself and toward the swarming threat of the demon incursion into the Prime Material Plane, the cities were largely abandoned as most of the populace moved outward toward the endless city of Dis, or to the barracks and war-camps of Avernus. Now, the surface of Maldomini is mostly a vast ruin of ancient crumbling buildings. The mountains are still huge scars, torn open by mining operations of a bygone era. Looming factories stand silent next to lakes of pollution, and what were once wide oceans teeming with life are now pits of sludge as far as the eye can see. Natural life was long ago extinguished by the greed and industry of the devils; now only those fiends able to withstand such miserable conditions reside here. The atmosphere is choked with the greenhouse gases of long-dead industry, and considering it is still blocked from Quyosh and so distant from the Devor, the net effect is that the climate on Maladomini is quite temperate. The Archduke of Maladomini is Baalzebul, believes that once the Fiendstrife comes to an end, the population will return to his domain to live in comfort, and so he commands his gargantuan armies of slaves to build new cities, yet is never satisfied with the results and so abandons every construction project partway through its completion, adding to the endless ruins. He rules from Malagard, but elsewhere in the ruined cities a leviathan web of devils plot their incursions into other societies. These are among the most conniving of all devils - they know that, should their actions be fruitful (such as by founding a popular cult, or by corrupting once noble, heroic souls) they will be especially rewarded. So, while essentially all of these individuals and sects are working toward the same goal - to increase the flow of souls into the Hells - they constantly spy on one another, play double or triple agent, and try to get the upper hand over other factions. A constant game of espionage and treachery is at play in the ruins of Maladomini. By the time the Styx has wound its way through the ruins, its flow has slowed to a near-crawl, before it drips from the surface of Maladomini to the next world in the Hells, Cania.
Sovuq (Cania) is shielded by the innermost barrier within the Hells from the unimaginable heat of the star Quyosh, and is so extremely distant from the heat that escapes the Devor that it is the coldest of all of the Hells, even surpassing frozen Stygia. Like Maladomini, Cania was once heavily populated and highly urbanized; being the closest world to Nessus, it served as a home to high-ranking devils who were not quite so trustworthy that they could be allowed to live on Nessus itself. But, after the barriers were built and the temperature dropped, the wealthier devils fled elsewhere while their slaves flash froze and died. Then, as the waters of the Styx began dribbling onto the planet, they accumulated as layer after layer of ice all over the entire surface. Now, Cania is nothing but a ball of ice, complete with huge peaks and ridges of rock hard compressed ice, with glaciers of lighter ice sliding unbelievably fast across the surface. The grinding action sprays water and flakes of ice high into the atmosphere, which rain back down as hail and snow across the planet's surface. The Archdevil Mephistopheles rules from his icy citadel Mephistar. Asmodeus has tasked him with being the last line of defense against a demonic incursion, and so fortresses of ice have been built all along the snaking Styx as it flows down onto, then away from, the surface of Cania. Mephistopheles is at once Asmodeus' most capable and trusted lieutenant and his greatest threat, for more than any others among the Archdukes, Mephistopheles wishes to take Asmodeus' throne and position for himself.
And so we come to Markazi, called Nessus, the ninth and final world within the Hells. The trickle of the Styx seeps through the innermost black barrier in space and onto the surface of this rocky world, crisscrossed by endless chasms. One side of the planet faces this barrier and falls into the deepest, chillest night (there is virtually no atmosphere on the surface of Nessus), while the other faces the incredible burning heat of the Eye of Satan itself, the red giant Quyosh, which dominates the majority of the sky during the day, baking the surface. The extreme shifts in temperature cause the planet's surface to crack and splinter into impossibly deep canyons and chasms that reach to the planet's core. The Styx falls thousands of miles to the planet core in a series of incredible waterfalls, and the canyon walls are fortified and garrisoned by some of the most powerful forces in all the Hells. Protected from the extreme temperatures at the surface, an atmosphere actually exists deeper into the planet. At the bottom of a thousand-mile waterfall, the Styx finally meets its demise at the molten lava core of the planet, on which floats an island of obsidian topped with the mighty citadel of Malsheem, the fortress-palace from which Asmodeus himself rules over not only Nessus but all of the Hells.
Fauna & Flora
The flora and fauna of the Hells varies greatly by planet, though the fiendish devils have usurped the vast majority of life found on any of them.
Natural Resources
Varies by planet.
Alternative Name(s)
To'qqiz Shar (The Nine Spheres in Infernal)
Type
Solar System
Location under
Owner/Ruler
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