Towers of Black Iron
Layer the One Hundred and Twenty-Ninth
Nature of Evil: When you’re as powerful as this, other berks are your playthings. Do what you will with them to amuse yourself, from breaking their spirits, to mutilating their bodies, to toying with their fates.
Ruler: Tulchulcha
This grim place is named after the pair of impossibly colossal towers at the heart of the layer that dominate it politically and demonically. The Towers of Black Iron are polished black and buffed up to a mirror-finish shine. Unfortunately they mostly reflect the sky, which is black and ominous. The towers taper precariously toward their tops, terminating in points sharp enough to slice holes in the sky, and the sky weeps black ichor that falls as evil rain which does nothing but sizzle and stain the parched land.
The Abyssal lord who dwells in the towers, and controls almost all of the layer too, is an Etruscan demon named Tuchulcha. They’re an ancient creature with a personality as ugly as their body, which is to say, thoroughly vile. The Abyssal lord of torture and torment, Tuchulcha is awful to everyone around them—at least every one who is weaken than them—and the sods are far too fearful to do anything about it. Few things seem to interest this Abyssal lord these days, and their spend their time making impossible demands from their minions, or roaming the l27th in their bizarre dragon-carriage contraption hunting for souls.
You see, the Towers of Black Iron are not, in fact, made from iron at all, but the distilled anguish of souls. Mostly the souls of petitioners unlucky enough to end up on the layer, but occasionally Tuchulcha gets their snakey-limbs on a fresh planewalker—and then it’s down to the dungeons for them to spend some quality time amusing the bored Abyssal lord.
Outside the Tower of Black Iron is a petrified forest of blackened trees, mostly used for charcoal to power the dragon-carriage or stoke the fires in the torture chambers. Beyond the forest, the layer degenerates into arid badlands of cracked dusty earth, incapable of supporting life. The only liquid is a river of rust, home to hydroloths who have been known to swim it on occasion. They are probably here keeping an eye on the half-barmy Abyssal lord. There seems to be no native life.
There is only one other large structure known to planewalkers, many days march across the hostile mudflats. It is an even more enormous tower of black mirrored metal, except this one is permanently aflame and has been so for as long as anyone can remember.
The Burning Tower
Abandoned site
Khayal devotees of Eblitis recount hushed legends of the Burning Tower, and those who have returned from its summit utterly changed. Chronomancers, truenamers, chaos incarnates and alienists sometimes quest for this site too, hoping to uncover truths about the deeper nature of the Abyss itself and the Age before Ages. Some say that the Burning Tower marks Eblitis’s first point of contact with the Abyss, while others suggest it is in some inexplicable way a physical aspect of the demon’s psyche. The most insistent whispers even claim the tower to be a vessel containing an essential part of his being, rather like a colossal phylactery.
The dark is that both of these structures are parasitic thorns in the Abyss, and that their masters use them to power local operations directly from usurped planar essence. Tuchulcha is likely doing something awful for their own amusement, but what Eblitis’ motives are, now that’s probably unknowable.
The khayal believe that the Burning Tower radiates its perpetual inertial fire as it resists the plane around it, cutting and abrading the Abyss itself for all eternity. Devotees of Eblitis believe that those strong enough to ascend the Burning Tower undergo a metamorphosis into a form more pleasing to the Speaker in the Void, into so-called Muta-Araqil. Tulchulcha is rumoured to have unlocked secrets from the Burning Tower too, and has copied its design in miniature; allowing them to rise in power to control the surrounding layer as its Lord.
Sources: Rip Van Wormer (article rescued from defunct Geocities archive); Dalmoth (article rescued from defunct Planewalker.com archive); adapted by Jon Winter-Holt and brought more into line with historical details of the Etruscan demon Tulchulcha