Cania

Cania’s surface is a shifting maze of moving glaciers, colliding icebergs, and deadly crevasses. The constant grinding of the ice fills the air with thunderous groans. Snow avalanches can sweep away entire fortresses, and blizzards arrive without warning, reducing visibility to an arm’s length.   Its cold makes Stygia feel temperate by comparison. Temperatures plunge to -60°F or lower, capable of killing even Devils unprotected by infernal wards. Preserved corpses, archons locked in combat with unknown monstrosities, fallen Angels still clutching frozen weapons, lie embedded in the ice, eternal witnesses to Cania’s ancient wars.  

Notable Locations

Cania’s landscape is vast and merciless. The Canian Shelf stretches as a continent-thick calving front where cathedral-tall slabs of ice shear away into a frozen sea of ridges and floes. The Black Mirror Glacier gleams like polished obsidian, yet reflects not the face but the choices one never made, stare too long, and your resolve reshapes into someone else’s plan. The Rimewold sprawls in wind-sculpted badlands of hoarfrost spires, the air itself sharp enough to cut. Across the Basalt Vittae, locked lava scars bleed noiseless tongues of Hellfire through the permafrost.  

Mephistar

Dominating the layer is Mephistar, the City of Quiet Flame, a citadel of azure ice raised above a frozen caldera. Its streets glow with Hellfire braziers that give no warmth, while cloisters and laboratories within refine the rime-formulae that make Mephistopheles feared across the planes. Beneath the ice lie the Iron Archives, sealed stacks of black frost where contracts are etched by thought alone, reading aloud binds instantly, and even breath leaves signatures in vapor. Scholars and test subjects alike are drawn to the Pale University, a monastery-laboratory where Hellfire experiments are meticulously recorded, though not all participants are archived in the same fashion. Finally, the Devil’s Steps drop away toward Nessus itself, a perilous descent patrolled by devils who treat curiosity as conspiracy.   This is the seat of Mephistopheles’s power, a colossal heated fortress carved into the moving glacier Nargus, which the archdevil himself commands to shift and grind at his whim. Its vast libraries and laboratories are the envy of every devil-lord in Hell.  

The Shattered Sea

A buckling plain of pressure ridges and floes; beneath, drowned palaces drift in dark water that never thaws.  

The Red Weir

  Toll-gate and customs wall where Maladomini’s causeways end. Fees are paid in favors or heat credits.  

Kintyre

A vast, silent city of alien design entombed beneath layers of ancient ice. No one remembers who built it, though its halls are said to hold the corpses of celestial hosts and horrors from before mortal history.    

The Pit

A colossal shaft, howling with icy winds, that descends to a frozen lake. At its deepest point, beneath 1,001 fathoms of ice and slush, lies the most heavily guarded portal in the Hells—the primary passage into Nessus. It is defended by legions of gelugons who obey Mephistopheles’s orders without question.  

The Knowledge Hoard

Scattered across the layer are hidden citadels where devils labor over magical experiments in secrecy. These bastions house laboratories, summoning chambers, and vast libraries of forbidden lore. To Mephistopheles, Cania itself is not merely a layer of Hell, it is a repository, a prison for secrets, and a proving ground for magic that might one day unseat even Ashmedai himself.  

Inhabitants

Cania swarms with its master’s servants. Gelugons serve as prefects and field marshals; phistophilus handle contracts; erinyes prosecute; osyluths and hamatulas warden the prisons; cornugons and pit fiends wait as deterrents, never far from Mephistopheles’s call. Adjuncts include kyton envoys on loan for sensation-denial experiments, soul-sleds and bound constructs used for logistics. Mortals, too, appear, wizards with terrible ambitions, negotiators with hearts colder than the ice around them, and adventurers who underestimated the wind.  

Government

Cania is ruled by Mephistopheles, whose hunger for arcane mastery rivals even his lust for power. Obsessed with magic’s deepest laws and the nature of the planes, he presides over sprawling networks of laboratories, research halls, and forbidden libraries.   Day-to-day administration is handled by Hutijin, his trusted lieutenant, allowing Mephistopheles to devote himself entirely to experimentation, planar theory, and the crafting of infernal magic unlike any seen elsewhere.   The secrets buried in Cania’s citadels are shielded by an endless, disciplined patrol of gelugons and lesser servants. Arcane wards, sigils etched into glacier faces, and scrying spells layered upon one another ensure that no knowledge leaves without Mephistopheles’s will.   Agents from Dis are the most frequent trespassers, sent by Dispater to spy on his rival. They rarely succeed; the ice of Cania swallows intruders without leaving a trace.  

Access and Travel

Survival demands discipline. Travelers must carry cold-weather gear layered against the wind, crampons, pitons, climbing line, black-ink writs stamped with Mephistariate seals, and a heat source not reliant on flame. Movement is safest in roped teams, probing every drift, and speaking softly, sound carries too well, and the law is always listening. Above all, avoid open fire, for it broadcasts guilt; do not expose paperwork, for the hail will pierce it; and never rest upon ice that seems glass-still, for in Cania, stillness is often the breath of something waiting below.  

From Maladomini

Surveyor roads taper into frost-bitten causeways over administrative icefields and sealed contract-vaults.

Toward Nessus

The ice thins to star-black chasms—the Devil’s Steps—natural drop shafts toward the Ninth (barred unless you’ve paid for wings or favor).

Astral and River Styx

The River Styx does not cross Cania; However, there are astral ingress manifests as auroral “doors” that open only when the black wind falls silent.

Cania lies in perpetual twilight, the sky a deep, unbroken shade of night-blue. The air tastes like broken glass, sharp and cutting, and the winds do not simply abrade flesh but scrape thought itself, scouring clarity down to obedience.

The very laws of the Eighth reflect its master’s design. The Cold That Judges ensures that fire falter, every flame sputters to half-strength unless fueled by infernal pacts, while cold effects gain a brutal edge.
Hellfire Rime, Mephistopheles’s signature sorcery, burns with black-blue flames that are both fire and cold at once, sliding past ordinary resistances but exacting a price of fatigue, frostbite, or worse from the one who wields it. Even logic freezes here: Crevasse Logic ensures that paths, contracts, and conversations all collapse into the nearest hard conclusion. To waver is to invite punishment, often sometimes by ice shifting beneath your feet, sometimes by a sudden legal sanction.   The layer itself enforces its laws. Contract Frost etches nearby ice with the words of any pact written here, and if broken, the wall sloughs away in razor sheets aimed directly at the violator. Silent Combustion ignites mundane flames invisibly, consuming breath first and oxygen second. Speak a true name aloud, and Name-Ice will crystallize the syllables into frost, unmeltable until the one who spoke gains leverage over the named.

The sky itself is weaponized. Whiteout Courts are blizzards so total that sound vanishes and verdicts seem already rendered. Needle Hail rains glass pellets that puncture parchment, skin, and even contracts foolishly carried uncovered. At times, a Black Aurora ripples across the horizon, suppressing mundane flame while lending strength to spells of compulsion and binding.