Avernus

The sky is a permanent bruise-smog-black with a dull crimson glare. The ground is all jagged plate, broken glassy lava, and fused iron dunes. Eruptions and “starfalls” (fiery meteors pulled in by infernal engines) randomly crater the wastes. Many “hills” are actually the slagged carcasses of war machines or the buried ribs of something that died very big and very angry.

  Avernus is a blasted infernal wasteland—volcanic plains broken by barren hills and low, jagged mountains whose black slopes bristle with obsidian and quartz spires sharp enough to cut steel. The ground is carpeted in ash, strewn with rubble, and littered with the bones of centuries of fallen combatants, devil and demon alike.   The sky burns crimson, lit not by sun or stars but by a constant, blood-red haze. Roiling clouds of black and deep scarlet flash with inner fire. From these skies, fireballs streak down, seemingly random, yet eerily precise, striking travelers who linger in the open. Impact craters smoke with fresh kills, and any journey across the plains requires frequent shelter in ruined battlements, basalt caves, or shattered siegeworks.   The air is acrid, thick with volcanic ash and pumice from choking fumaroles, and alive with swarms of infernal flies.   Avernus operates like a militarized customs zone: legions muster, contracts are notarized in hell-ink, and every portal, ferry, and fortress pays tithe upward.  

Notable Locations

The Bronze Citadel

A sprawling, ever-expanding fortress-city of heated metal walls and siege yards—the administrative heart of the layer. Barracks for a hundred legions, foundries for hellfire engines, vaults of confiscated soul-notes, and courts where contracts are argued in High Infernal. Visitors are “welcomed” to wait.  

Pillar of Skulls

A tumorous cairn of fused, whispering heads jutting from a blasted valley. It answers questions—for a price measured in names you shouldn’t say aloud. Sages, traitors, and contract-dodgers sometimes end up entombed here as “new citations.”  

The Iron Causeway

A miles-wide, riveted bridge-continent that crawls toward the sink-gate into Dis. The causeway is a gauntlet of checkpoints, oaths, and bribes; step off its plates and the slag-sea will happily swallow you.  

Tiamat’s Maw

A god-warded chasm whose caverns house the Dragon Queen’s infernal annex. Her fivefold clergy barter dragon-oaths, soul-gems, and mercenary flights. The portal keys change with the Sehaine cycle, on purpose.  

Ash Markets of the Styx

Rope-haunted piers on the riverbanks where contract devils (phistophili), erinyes factors, and mortal cutouts trade permits, safe-conducts, and memory-wards for Styx travel.  

The Starfall Barrens

Impact plains where infernal artillery calls meteors out of the void to deny airspace. Salvagers pick through steaming craters for cold-iron shards and soul-fused alloys (good luck).  

The River Styx

The river enters Avernus in a black gorge, runs as a broad, oil-dark channel, then dives away toward Stygia. Charonadaemons (Stygian boatmen) ferry the bold and the desperate, at a price that’s never just coin. Memory loss from Styx-spray is a feature, not a bug.  

Portals and Access

Armored causeways and hidden chasms connect Avernus to Dis below; military portals open (sparingly) toward Acheron and Gehenna for raids and “mutual logistical arrangements.”  

Governance

Avernus is ruled directly under Ashmedai’s authority - meaning, Zariel in fact, though its day-to-day command is a patchwork of infernal military orders and contingents from other layers. Because the layer is the primary ingress, it is also crowded with the servants of other archdukes—barbazus, imps, spinagons, tasked with gathering newly damned souls and forwarding them to their masters.   The garrison here is immense: endless cohorts of devils, all in readiness for the next assault from the Abyss.  

Inhabitants

Avernus teems with abishai, lemures, nupperibos, and spinagons, with imps darting between war camps as messengers and spies. Kobolds and goblins serve here in large numbers, often enslaved or bound by pact. Dragons, both infernal and corrupted, sometimes dwell in the shadow of Tiamat’s influence.

Superheated air, ashfalls, cinder squalls, and sporadic hellfire storms (unholy fire that scalds flesh and soul).