[ Planes of Cordance > Sheol ]
Be’er Shahat
The Maw of Destruction (creature/site)
Location: Splinterlands / Sheol ‡
At the absolute nadir of the plane of Sheol, just beneath the lowest of the hanging Drone tier platforms, at the point where the cavern walls meet, is Be’er Shahat [beh-EHR shah-HAHT], the Maw. It’s a gaping aperture roughly one hundred feet wide, circular, with concentric rows of flat grinding teeth made of the same dense grey stone as the walls, and ringed with ever-writhing black tentacles. The maw never speaks, growls, or roars, instead producing—softly and continuously—an unsettling sound like a vast and patient exhalation.
What happens after a sod falls into the Mouth is unknown. The Institution does not file records for souls consumed by it—something that causes ongoing administrative anxiety. Some planewalkers theorise that after enough souls have been consumed they are reborn as a dumah—blank-faced and nameless, and are then put to work erasing others as they themselves were erased. Others say that the consumed souls become the mountain: that the stone walls are not stone at all, that Sheol is built from compacted forgotten selves, that everything petitioners touch in this place is someone who used to have a name. And a minority sect among the some of the upper-level petitioners—circulating unsigned memoranda through interdepartmental post—reckons sods are expelled downward into Somewhere Worse, for which the entire Institution is merely providing orientation and pre-processing. The Institution has reviewed this theory. It has been filed under Unsubstantiated. No Further Action Required.
Similarly unknown is the nature of the beast itself. Or in fact whether it is even a creature at all like a kaiju or some other gargantuan extra-planar horror, a manifestation of the plane itself, or even something to do with Mot. Petitioners who ask questions tend to end up investigating the Maw a very close quarters, at a terminal velocity you might say.
Source: SGreen, Jon Winter-Holt. Inspired by Jewish and Greek mythology. Canonwatch: ‡ Homebrew. All of the Planes of Cordance and the concept of the Splinterlands are homebrew and non-canonical. If you don’t want to add additional planes to the cosmology then I suggest you could incorporate Sheol as the realm of Mot somewhere underground in Gehenna. Expanded from Greg Jensen’s original conception, more information on his Planes of Cordance can be found here.
