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sonneillonv · 7 months ago

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@reucrion and @sonneillonv are proud to launch our Patreon! We are working on the first of our Tourist's Guide projects, which will be supplements exploring different realms in the gaming multiverse. Join to get project updates, free content, assets, and merch reviews, as well as access to a brand new serial by Sonneillon V!

Descent Into Avernus Do you enjoy Lets Plays? Would you like to explore the story behind game modules without actually having to play through them? Or maybe you don't have a consistent D&D group, but you still want a chance to experience the twists and turns of established in-universe stories. As a special bonus, even the lowest subscription tier can enjoy a serialized fic based on the popular D&D 5e Module "Descent Into Avernus", updated 2x monthly. Read a sample below!

(Refuge, Undersigil)

The deep, bass pounding of the drums shook the walls and floor. Ceiling too, if the intermittent rain of mortar was any indication. It rattled Hyx's organs, demanded his heart take on the beat, which was exactly how he liked it. The orcs in The Well were doing something really interesting with carefully pitched industrial grinding noises they made with rusted machine parts, chanting in dissonant harmony with the groaning cry of the war horn their tattooed tanarukk lead was blowing.

The other patrons seemed to like it as much as he did, crashing their bodies together on the cracked, silt-stained dance floor and crowding around the bar, a collection of salvage lashed together with hemp cord and nails, propped against a stack of re-used barrels. The drinks were swill, clouded with sediment, but they flowed fast and free, and they were strong enough to ignore the taste most of the time. Hyx was good with the trade - no one in The Refuge would expect better - but he wasn't a noob. He was alternating. The thirst that propelled him from the crowd, weaving between bodies in the wild strobe of colored magical light, demanded water.

Fiends were immune or resistant to a lot of things that hurt mortals, but suffering for one's excesses was half the purpose of hell, so hangovers weren't on the list.

The water was warm and the dented tin mug made it taste metallic, but it was clean enough. He guzzled it and considered stepping outside for a piss, extracting himself from the bar crowd and shifting toward the entrance so he could puff his feathers and get some air on his skin. As a result, he was standing in easy view when a three-tailed celestial fox demon with long, white hair pushed past the crowd at the door. Hyx ground his teeth on a sigh and made a token effort to look for an escape route, but he wasn't fast enough.

Siblings were another form of suffering fiends were allowed, nay, encouraged to experience.

Xien strode in his direction, eyes burning white in the darkness between strobes. His expression was anger, exasperation, concern... different colors highlighted different emotions. It would have been fascinating if Hyx hadn't been busy bracing for impact.

He opened with, "It's 2am," and Hyx scoffed because he never understood why normies bothered pointing that out to people like him. If he was out partying until 2am, it was clearly because he didn't give two shits.

"I know," he shouted over the music, favoring his brother with a toothy smile. "You're just in time - party just hit its stride!"

Exasperation took center stage. Xien knew when he was being annoying on purpose. "We have an early check-out."

"I'll sleep on the trip."

"You'll be hungover and puking on the trip," Xien shot back. "Come back to the inn and get it out of your system so I don't have to smell it all day."

Hyx grinned. "You're not going to fix it? Disrespectful. Am I not your favorite anymore?" He hooked an arm around Xien-di's neck and bonked their horns together clumsily, swaying a little. "Didi, breaking my heart. Respect your elders."

"Gege," Xien said as patiently as he could while shouting to be heard, "Don't just assume I'll restore you if you get excessively fucked up. That kind of spell takes effort, actually. Magic isn’t free."

"Of course it's not." He rolled his eyes and walked Xien over to a wall near the exit where it was a little easier to hear. "So what do you want?"

"You've had fun, you've gotten drunk, probably high. It's a good night, right?” Xien was clearly doing his best to sound reasonable. “So wrap it up, come back to the inn now, and when you start feeling like shit I'll restore you... as long as you go to bed, STAY in bed, and let ME sleep until you actually need help."

"You bargain like a fucking devil," Hyx sighed, but he couldn't help a lopsided smile.

"I bargain like I have two older brothers," Xien tossed back. "Agreed?"

He snorted and tugged one of A-Xien’s fluffy ears. "The little princess of Seven Springs Mountain doesn't get to talk. You should have grown up at Broken Stone, THEN you could bitch about siblings." But he extended his hand with an air of great affront, prepared to trade a few more hours of fun for a get-out-of-hangover-free card.

Then the floor dropped out from under them.

x-x-x

You see, once upon a time, there was a cistern.

In the beginning, there wasn't anything very remarkable about it. It was built of stone and rusting metal, a reservoir for rainwater and run-off from the streets above. It was dark and quiet and alone, except for the ever-growing collection of trash it accumulated as the water ebbed and flowed through it. A peaceful, forgotten place that caused no problems and earned no accolades. Well-behaved cisterns seldom make history.

One day, a creature came to dwell in its collected waters. Slimy and seditious, with grasping tentacles and rings of saw-like teeth, it nestled into the darkness under the streets and made its home there. It attracted no attention and bothered no one, because its focus was elsewhere - an entirely different world, far from the floating city that contained it, a true planet with mountains and seas and a molten core that spun it around its sun. In that world, the creature had enemies and it lusted for their destruction, plotting daily, weaving spells and wearing down the barriers between itself and its prize. After many years of effort, it made a tunnel that would allow it to prey on the people it hungered for and retreat back to its nest from any resistance, escaping across the worlds, across the planes, where no one would reach it. It thought itself very clever for this.

Unfortunately, monstrous behavior indicates the presence of a monster, and the presence of a monster attracts adventurers. The greatest plague in all the realms, relentlessly nosey do-gooders, incapable of minding their own business... the whole phenomenon of adventuring parties is roundly condemned by would-be tyrants everywhere. And sometimes they are versed in magic, though the creature would have considered them clumsy as children compared to itself, limited in their minds, incapable of even rudimentary telepathy and limited to communicating via disgusting sounds they made with their actual MOUTHS. They hammered at the Weave like a child hammers at a toy lute, but they hit the right notes and the creature found itself cut off from its retreat.

All its plans collapsed quickly after that.

But even as its cartilaginous mouth with its rings of serrated teeth was mounted, hung in the halls of its killers as a trophy, the tunnel remained. With no living creature to maintain it, it anchored itself to those teeth, yawning wide enough to swallow a man whole. Then it went to sleep.

Time passed.

The forgotten cistern was truly forgotten. The waterworks of the floating city changed: new cisterns were dug and old, crumbling ones closed off. All paths leading to our subject were closed, and over time the water drained away and left only the refuse.

Decades later, someone exploring the depths of the floating city broke through a crumbling wall and found a vast space full of gently-rotting trash. Then another wall was broken through, and another, as the desperate dwellers in the dark searched for the resources to prolong their miserable lives. The former cistern became a place where the poor and suffering gathered. They dug for valuables, traded them, and eventually dumped their own trash so the next seeker could rifle through it.

The large, round hole in the ceiling didn't concern any of them. No one had reason to explore it, and even if they had, the tunnel was sleeping.

Because it was hidden and secure, the cistern became a place to trade not only garbage, but also information. Soon there was a goblin spit-roasting rats for barter. Then an enterprising wight began rolling barrels of his hobby wine down on alternate days and making deals for a stiff drink.

They called it Refuse at first, painting the letters over the entrances in used whitewash. Then, after a raid on Undersigil, someone messily painted over the 's' with a mismatched 'g' and it became Refuge. Availability of food and alcohol expanded. Locals gathered to make music together in street-corner bands, attracting others. Regular vendors pooled resources to have magic lights installed. Foot traffic swelled. Refuge became a place, not just to find things, but to lose them - inhibitions, memories, responsibilities, cares. It was elysium. As long as you kept the peace, nobody cared who you were. Living refuse, drifting into the cistern and settling in to stay.

Still, the tunnel slept.

Worlds away, there was a catastrophe.

As it happens, the creature that had once resided in the cistern died not far from a tavern called Two Black Antlers, and its jaw was now displayed there amidst the remains of a dozen other monsters as an adventuring trophy. That tavern and its surroundings were being pulled across planar boundaries. Spikes were driven deep into the earth, chains rattling from Faerun to Avernus, reeling and ratcheting an entire city down to Hell. Dragged with it, the tunnel awoke screaming in the language of time and space and magic. It twisted, tearing, shrieking as the delicate threads of sympathy began to snap. But in the moment before it shattered forever, the tunnel opened and a portal bloomed between that old, crumbling cistern and a tavern sinking into Avernus. The ancient mortar gave - floors, ceiling, and walls all shattered. Screaming patrons and debris spun through the hole between worlds as if the dead aboleth itself exhaled them into Avernus, a last predatory act.

Then the portal shattered. The connection between planes dissolved into the nothingness between, and the place where the cistern had been was deathly quiet.

Casualty reports would change continually over the next few weeks as investigators in Faerun tried to tally the number of missing from the once-resplendent city of Elturel. Eventually the figure would crest 15,000.

The 73 victims from Undersigil went unmarked. No one even knew to look for them.

Like the rain trickling down the culverts of Sigil, they had disappeared into the dark.

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