Dis

A horizon of iron towers and ramparts fused into an endless city-mountain. Streets glint like blades. Windows are black mirrors. Every surface feels like an ear.   Dis has Superheated iron everywhere and even the air tastes metallic. Many accounts tell that if a creature touches the walls long enough and they’ll remember your prints. The air here is a constant haze of smoke and scorched metal, while the ground beneath one’s feet radiates a searing heat that can blister skin through boots. The entire city is forged from red-hot iron, burning to the touch, and every wall, tower, and cobblestone hums faintly with the pulse of infernal industry. There is no horizon, only a skyline of perpetual fortifications, shifting streets, and infernal construction that changes the city’s layout daily at the will of its ruler.      

Notable Locations

The Iron Tower

Dispater’s spire and the city’s axis. Inside: courts of precedent, the Archive of Rings (soul-binding signets, each a silence), and the Listening Vaults, rooms that repeat any lie ever told within Dis.  

Red Labyrinth

A living district whose streets hinge and pivot under infernal command. Warrants move walls; trespassers discover cul-de-sacs that didn’t exist yesterday.  

Crucible Courts

Open-air tribunals over grates of radiant iron. Trials are swift, appeals swifter. Verdicts arrive embossed on hot steel.  

The Market of Veils

Covered bazaar where disguises, assumed names, and forged pasts are bought like spices. Every deal is observed by at least three parties you didn’t notice.  

Mirror Mile

A boulevard of black-glass façades that reflect only intent. Thieves look like thieves here, paladins like paladins, useful, inconvenient.  

The Smolderworks

Foundries that pour soul-ink and hellsteel. Kyton embassies maintain “galleries of sensation” (consent waivers required, and also meaningless).  

The Garden of Delights

A gilded den of temptation where the wealthy and the damned alike can purchase any vice, indulgence, or fantasy, at a price that often costs more than coin. Many emerge with gilded memories, but fewer with their souls intact.  

Mentiri

Arguably the most feared prison in the Nine Hells. Here, those who break infernal law are not merely punished... they are remade. Prisoners are subjected to endless temptations, slowly shaped into obedient agents of Hell. Those who resist are condemned to eternity as mindless lemures.  

Inhabitants

AAAGH! AAAGH! AAAAAAAAA…

— A petitioner in the Iron City of Dis

The streets of Dis swarm with devils of all ranks. Abishai, imps, and spinagons carry out menial work, lemures and nupperibos toil as expendable labor, and infernal nobles parade in armor forged from living souls. The city also plays host to planar merchants, disguised mortal agents, and shadowy emissaries from other planes, all drawn by its markets and contracts.   There are also many Kytons that live under treaty, night-hag brokers with escrow stalls, the occasional inevitable auditing extraditions, while mortals usually serve as advocates, fixers, debtors and 'temporary residents'awaiting processing. The clever thrive, the honest burn out.   Beneath the city lies a sprawling underworld of dungeons and oubliettes, where prisoners of The Blood War, captured mortals, and unfortunate petitioners languish. Their screams are carried on the hot wind, echoing through the iron streets.

Access and Travel

The Iron Causeway descends into Dis through a sink-gate of red steel from Avernus. You don’t “arrive” so much as “are admitted”. In order to reach Minauros, there are many freight elevators the size of districts, Subsumed gates, lower bonded cargo (and the unfortunate) into the swamps below.   Another way, is the River Styx, which main channe; bypass Dis deep underground, but siphons feed sealed cistern within the city for ritual, transport, and.... interrogations. Passage requies three samps and a memory tithe.  

Ferric Resonance

Spoken lies make a faint clang only officials can hear. Rehearsed lies squeal.  

Heat of Compliance

Nonmagical metal carried without a permit slowly scorches its owner; licensed gear stays merely uncomfortable.  

Paranoid Geometry

Unpermitted routes lengthen, signs reverse, doors misremember you. Proper paperwork tames the maze.  

Whisper Conduction

Gossip travels along iron like current. Say a true name into a railing and expect company.

Dis is procedural horror with a razor-edged smile. It’s less about surviving the wasteland and more about beating the system without the system noticing. Success tastes like stamped parchment and cold sweat. Failure comes embossed.   Despite its oppressive nature, Dis is a hub of interplanar trade. Its bazaars and markets deal in goods and services few dare to name aloud, artifacts of forbidden magic, bound souls, cursed relics, and infernal contracts promising power for a price. Every transaction is watched, recorded, and stored in the archives of the Iron Tower, for in Dis, every debt is remembered and every bargain enforced.