[ Layer the Ninth ] [ Bestiary | Addanc | Locations | Stinking Pearl ]
*INTERDICTED*
by Decree of the Fraternity of Order
Messaqqio, also called Burningwater
Abyss — Layer the Ninth
Formal Designation: Layer the Ninth, as Catalogued by the Fraternity of Order
Also called: Messaqqio, by those unfortunate enough to know it well
Status: INTERDICTED by order of the Factol. Members of the Order are barred from visiting this layer until further notice.
You will forgive me, I hope, if my account of the Ninth is less than entirely clinical. I am a marid. Water is my blood, my home, and my birthright. My kind swam the Deep Waters before the Fraternity had learned to count on its fingers. And when I tell you what that sodding layer did to me, you will perhaps understand why I have asked you to bar your members from going there. And I am gratified—if somewhat surprised—that the Factol saw fit to agree.
I will tell you what I found. I will tell you everything. But cutter, do not mistake this report for an invitation.
The Nature of Evil: Natural is weak. Change things. Tamper, tinker, experiment, corrupt. The weak will die; the strong will adapt and thrive—or at least, survive.
The Chant: Burningwater—known in the local tongue of its wretched inhabitants as Messaqqio—at first look seems one of the more inviting layers a planewalker might stumble across in the Abyss. And that, cutters, is precisely why it’s so dangerous. From a distance, and even up fairly close, it looks like nothing so much as a warm tropical sea on some backwater Prime world. The water runs blue-green and clear. A pink sun hangs in a yellow sky, above cyan clouds. Islands dot the horizon in their hundreds—lush, warm, humid little things, each one seemingly more welcoming than the last. The haze of the Ethereal haze lies close to this layer too, for reasons I never quite understood. It’s close enough that magics requiring contact with that distant plane function normally here. And also close enough that a careless Ethereal planewalker who comes across a swirling cyan and pink curtain might stumble through, and fine themselves taking a dip in the ocean.
The true danger of Messaqqio is in the water. No, not in the water like a shark, it is the water. Actually, that inviting, crystalline, blue-green sea is not really water at all. It is acid — a cloying, caustic, brew that eats through magical protections with patience and through unprotected flesh with rather more enthusiasm. A marid swimming in Burningwater does not remain a marid for very long. I speak from experience. The acid starts its work long before you realise what is happening, and by the time you realise, the caustic sea has already done considerable damage.
“The Abyss never just kills you clean.
— Omar al-Djibou, dictated from the Order’s hospice, his third month of recovery
It finds the thing you love most about yourself,
turns it into a weapon, and lunges for your throat with it.”
The Lay of the Land — or Rather, the Lack of It
I mentioned that there are islands here—countless thousands of them in fact—warm, humid, and tropical in character, scattered across a sea called the Sea of Eosvotti. Most are small, atolls or crags. To my knowledge, there are no large land masses worthy of the name. The islands are not safe havens. They are breathing spaces—places to drag yourself out of the acid long enough to take stock of your wounds, re-cast your protective spells. The air is warm and wet and carries the abrasive reek of the sea beneath, which is to say, the acrid tang of corroding metal and scoured flesh.
The layer looks, in theory, a Prime-like plane. In a kinder multiverse, it might have been called beautiful. A pink sun is not, in itself, a terrible thing. The yellow sky has a certain quality to it at dusk, I am told—my eyes nby that point were in no condition to appreciate it. The cyan clouds are real clouds. But everything here is a lie wearing a pleasant mask, and the sea beneath it all is trying to consume you. Do not let the pastoral sky fool you into complacency. The Abyss placed that sky there specifically because it is the sort of sky that might make a berk relax.
Mark my words too, cutter, relaxing here is the very last thing you should do. For the layer wishes only to lull a berk into a false sense of security. To me it seemed like it was waiting for me to let my guard down before striking, because the coincidence was too great. After escaping from the caustic sea with my life barely intact and my skin less than intact, I rested a while on an island atoll. Once out of that deadly water, the pink sunset and gentle breeze calmed my nerves, almost preternaturally, causing me to almost forget the narrow escape I’d just had. No sooner had I finished applying a healing ointment though, then out of nowhere the mother of all barmy storms erupted with absolutely no warning. With hurricane-force winds, horizontal rain of sulfuric acid, and caustic tsunamis whipped up by the storm crashing onto the island, I once again barely escaped with my life. Where it not for the enormous shell I crawled into for shelter, I would have been dead-booked for sure. It’s a shame for the inhabitant of said shell, a snivelling manes, that I was able to overpower and evict it. The awful noises it made as it was dissolved by the storm still haunt me to this day.
And then, just as suddenly as it has erupted, the acid storm blew itself out, and almost instantly, the plane returned itself to its usual deceptive beauty. Jagged razor palm trees and rocks alike were all scoured clean and pristine, what was left of the unfortunate tanar’ri washed away, and once the pungent fumes had evaporated off, all was once again colourful and serene.
The layer has one notable burg, Stinking Pearl, which I shall address in full later. Beyond that, there is also the city of Ciccarone, a substantial settlement in the Sea of Eosvotti, though I was in no condition to investigate it personally and can offer only second-hand accounts.
The Hazards
I’ve mentioned the treacherous sea of this layer already, but believe me when I say it’s not just water with some acid in it—the entire ocean is corrosively caustic. Skin, eyes, claws and teeth are all attacked by the stuff. So too is anything you’re wearing or carrying. Leather, wood, cloth, parchment and unprotected metal all deteriorate rapidly. The best defence of course is not to be addled enough to take a dip in the first place! But if you fall in—or let’s face, get pushed by a tanar’ri, a cutter needs to know what’s what.
AD&D 2e Rules
Each round a character is fully submerged, they take 2d6 acid damage—and unless they can swim or breathe liquids, they also start to drown. If they’re only splashed or partly submerged, it’s 1d6 acid damage per round. Every round a character spends submerged, one worn or carried nonmagical item must save vs. acid or be ruined; metal items may instead be cosmetically damaged on the first failed save and destroyed on the second. The 5th-level wizard spell protection from acid is one way to save yourself the scar tissue, although its duration is less than you’d like.
D&D 5e Rules
Each round a character is fully submerged, they take 4d6 acid damage at the start of their turn—and unless they can swim or breathe liquids, they also start to drown. If they’re only splashed or partly submerged, it’s 2d6 acid damage per round. Damage in both situations is halved on a successful DC15 Constitution saving throw. Every round a character spends submerged, one worn or carried nonmagical item is ruined; metal items may instead be cosmetically damaged on the first failed save and destroyed on the second. The 3th-level wizard spell protection from energy reduces acid damage, but does not completely mitigate it.
Pathfinder 2e Rules
Total immersion deals 6d6 acid damage per round, with a standard DC20 Fortitude saving throw, and the character starts to drown if they cannot breathe liquids. Apply acid damage to equipment using the usual damage rules factoring in hardness. Weapons and armour may rapidly become broken before being destroyed. The 2nd-rank spell resist energy can be used to reduce acid damage, and casters are recommended to upcast it as high as thry are able to for additional protection.
The Locals
I should note, for the benefit of the Order’s cataloguers, that the fauna of the Ninth answered a question I had long considered merely philosophical: What does being bathed in pure evil do to a fish? Now I know.
Few tanar’ri make their kips in Burningwater. Even fiends, it seems, have their limits, and most are sensitive enough to acid that Messaqqio offers them little comfort. The creatures that do thrive here have done so by abandoning anything soft about themselves. The burning waters teem with what I can only describe as the notion of sea creatures—but ones corrupted and made wrong. Obsidian-shelled things that move like lobsters but are not lobsters. Crustaceans of some dark variety with too many joints, too many eyes, and far too many teeth. Fiendish sharks with more than one mouth, and more teeth than should be possible.
These creatures have adapted to the acid the way the Abyss adapts to everything: by becoming harder, stranger, and meaner. Their shells are glassy obsidian, and the acid slides off them the way clean water once slid off me. Some of them have humanoid limbs, but more on that later. They are not intelligent, precisely, but they are organised in that way that a pack of hungry things can be organised, and under certain circumstances that is enough.
Under the direction of Addanc, these vicious beasts have been militarised. In places, the sea-floor is three deep in lobster-shaped warriors standing their silent watch. Whatever they are waiting for, they have the patience of things that do not need to breathe.
Addanc, Lord of the Corrupted Deep
If any one creature can be said to rule Burningwater, it is Addanc—though “vying for control” might be the more accurate phrase, since the layer has no formal sovereign and Addanc rules it the way a storm rules the sea: Through overwhelming force rather than any recognised claim.
He’s a fearsome tanar’ri lord of considerable power, although not it seems quite an Abyssal Lord…yet. Chant goes he’s the fault of the Celts, created by the myths and fears of countless Primes. His form is a grotesque amalgamation: a human torso married to the tail of a pike and the claws of a crayfish, enormous and wrong in the way that only the Abyss can make a thing wrong. But unlike his minions, he is not mindless. That is the dangerous part. Addanc is a planner.
The chant circulating among those few berks who’ve come back from the Ninth is that Addanc is building an army—not for domination of the layer, which he already has in all practical senses, but for something larger. The word is that he intends some kind of assault, although whether that’s on the baatezu, or even on Dagon, is difficult to say. Where, when, and with what strategy remains dark, but the evidence of his intentions is literal and visible: those massed formations of glass-shelled warriors on the sea floor, quiet and waiting. One does not breed that many soldiers for defensive purposes.
Addanc also sends agents to the Prime, dispatching minions to terrorise fisherfolk and sailors on worlds with coasts worth haunting. Those primes who drown in these raids are not wasted—the bodies are dragged back to the Abyss to be broken down into parts and grafted onto soldiers in his growing army, or else rendered down to feed the larvae pits. He is, in short, the sort of tanar’ri who combines ambition with economy. The Fraternity would do well to monitor his activities with some attention.
Stinking Pearl
I wept, when I first saw it. I was already in some pain at the time, which did not help — but I would like to believe I would have wept regardless.
Planewalkers who have come back from the Ninth describe Stinking Pearl with a particular expression: They weep while they talk about it, and the tears are not entirely grief. The burg is surely one of the most beautiful settlements on the planes. Delicate spires of coral rise from its streets. The roads are inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The buildings are carved from conch shells of improbable size, shaped with craft and evident love into something that deserves to be seen. It is, in every aesthetic particular, a wonder.
And it is dying. And it stinks. And it was stolen.
You might not be surprised to learn that Stinking Pearl is not originally of the Abyss. It was once known as Shining Pearl, a burg on the seafloor of Thalasia, the great sea that comprises one of Elysium’s layers—a place of peace and beauty and the gentle, good death of those who deserved their rest. The chant holds that Addanc reached across the planes using the Thalastrom, a sea-storm of terrible and apparently interplanar intensity. The Thalastrom descended upon Shining Pearl and engulfed it for days and nights, and when it moved on, nothing remained on the floor of Thalasia but a gaping wound in the rock and the stench of evil rising through the pure water like oil. At a similar time, more or less, there were cataclysmic seaquakes in Burningwater, and then suddenly Stinking Pearl simply was, where before there had been only acidic sea.
The name “Stinking” is in the acid water, literally. The sea is eating the burg alive. The mother-of-pearl streets have lost some of their shine. The coral spires have hairline fractures that widen by the cycle. The conch-shell houses are pitting and crumbling at the edges, dissolving grain by grain into the caustic sea that surrounds them. The burg is still beautiful—genuinely, achingly beautiful—in the way that beautiful things are at their most beautiful when you can see they are ending. But the sadness is ingrained in the shells now, and the tanar’ri who’ve made the place their own, naturally, love it there.
Final Notes
I have been honest with the Fraternity, as I contracted to be. I found the layer, I named it, I mapped what I could before the acid rendered me incapable of further mapping. I stand—or rather, at present, I lie—by my account.
But I will say this plainly: there is nothing in Burningwater worth the price of finding it. It is a beautiful trap. The sky is a lie, the water is a weapon, and the most beautiful thing in it was stolen from somewhere good and is being consumed. The only creatures that thrive there are the ones that made themselves into glass to survive.
I have asked the Order to keep your members away from the Ninth. The Factol agreed. I would ask you, reader, to take that interdiction seriously. The Abyss has many layers, and most of them will kill you in ways that at least have the decency to be honestly ugly from the start.
But Burningwater will smile at you first, and that is so much worse.
— Omar al-Djibou, Marid of the Elemental Plane of Water, Planewalker and Reluctant Discoverer of Layer the Ninth
Dictated from the Fraternity of Order’s hospice. His hopes of full recovery remain uncertain.
Locations in Messaqqio
- Altar of the Unbowed Sun, the (site) ‡
- Bleached Archipelago (site) ‡
- Ciccarone (burg) ‡
- Drowned Throne, the (realm of Addanc) ‡
- Falseharbour (site) ‡
- Ilmurrax’s Grotto (site) ‡
- Larval Bore, the (site) ‡
- Mustering Reef (site) ‡
- Oily Isle (site) ‡
- Olhado (burg) ‡
- Reef of Ssythorex, the (site) ‡
- Sea of Eosvotti, the (site) ‡
- Shimmergate (gate) ‡
- Stinking Pearl (burg) ‡
- Vents of Vitriol, the (site) ‡
- Weeping Wound, the (site) ‡
Bestiary of Messaqqio
- Chuul
- Ixitxachitl
- Skulvyn
- Tanar’ri, True—Alkilith
- Tanar’ri, Greater—Babau
- Tanar’ri, Lesser—Derakni †
- Tanar’ri, True—Hezrou
- Tanar’ri, Greater—Kazrith
- Tanar’ri, Greater—Wastrilith
- Vescavor †
Canonical References
- Planes of Chaos [2e] Chaos Adventures poster
- Non-canonical details (I think) on the layer at Fandom here and here
Source: Jon Winter-Holt. Only the vaguest of information is available in the canon for this layer—the interdicted nature of the layer, the acidic ocean and the danger. † Denotes material from the Pathfinder setting. All the rest of the entires for this layer are speculation and homebrew…[‡]