The Harmonica

Most of Pandemonium's layers are composed of passages that're apparently natural in origin. But the plane's second layer is unusual in that its caverns and tunnels all bear the marks of chisels, as if they'd all been hand carved from solid rock in some ancient millennium. lt's chilling to think of all those endless miles of tunnel carved by beings long since extinct, for some unknown purpose.    Now, normally a soul can ignore those ancient chisel marks and just go about its business. Over the ages, the winds have smoothed them a bit, giving the tunnels a more natural look. But there are places where the ancient laborers' handiwork just can't be ignored. One such is a site that travelers have taken to calling the Harmonica.    There've been a lot of theories put forth as to the original purpose of the enormous cavern called the Harmonica. Some souls believe that it's a sort of amphitheater, built for demigods to look down on arena competitions on the floors far below. Others think it's nothing more than an artwork done on a stupendous scale. Still others believe it to be a place for invoking dark powers. A few believe it to be Pand-monium's physical heart, driving the constant winds throughout the plane like lifeblood through monumental arteries of stone.    There are all sorts of rumors as to the site's magical powers. There are those who believe that a cutter who finds its very center will receive immortality. Others say that it can grant a soul's fondest desires. But for every story of the site granting a boon, there's at least one dark legend of harm it gives. Curses, lycanthropy, disintegration, disease, mutation, and having one's spirit torn to pieces and eaten by dark powers, all these have been attributed to the site at one time or another.    Basically. the site is a huge, spherical cavern about ten miles in diameter, filled with hundreds upon hundreds of stupendous columns. But given the site's size and the plane's darkness. it's virtually impossible for a cutter to see enough of the cavern to truly appreciate its gargantuan scale.    Keep in mind that gravity is toward the walls on this layer of the plane, which means that a cutter can walk completely around the sphere in any direction. Between the columns, the walls are pierced by multiple hundreds of tunnel entrances, which means the site can he accessed from all sides. It also means that the site is a meeting place for winds from all comers of Cocytus. (It reverberates with a sound so powerful, the vibrations can be felt in tunnels up to 20 miles away, like the tremors of an earthquake.) Stairways spiral up-ward around each of the columns in the cavern, ostensibly to provide for climbing. There are several problems with this, however. For one thing, the stairsteps are all waist-high on a human, which makes for exhausting climbing, especially considering that the columns are each literally miles high. For another thing, the columns are also pierced with holes of all sizes, and the wind filling the cavern rushes through them unexpectedly, making any perch treacherous, to say the least. The wailing set up by the wind rushing through these holes runs from one end of the scale to the other. and beyond. At the lowest end. the sound re-verberates below the threshold of human hearing, setting up a painful vibration in a being's bones, and making the rocky steps seem slippery from their shivering. But it rises from there discordantly, eventually to reach tones so shrill they shatter glass and crystal and make the brain feel as if it were afire. Few souls have ever made their way more than partway up a column before either giving up and turning back or being blown off and dashed against a cavern wall. But some who have made it to the lop of a column have learned a final cruel jest of the site's designers: Apparently only a very few of the columns actually reach to the center of the cavern. The vast majority peter out less than halfway there. Unfortunately. given the scale of the site and the darkness, there's no good way to tell if a column reaches all the way, other than climbing it.   Anyone hoping to visit the Harmonica should be advised that, because of the wind, it's virtually impossible to cast any spell that uses somatic or material components.