The Cauterising Plain
Location: Abyss / Layer 8—Skindjur
Beyond the grotesque, ever-shifting walls of Beauty Is Only Skin Deep, the land stretches out into a vast, nightmarish flat known as the Cauterising Plain. This bad-tempered wasteland is as desolate as they come, a chaotic expanse forged by malevolence. The plain seems to enjoy punishing those who dare to brave its anger, throwing hazard after misfortune at them. These inflict grievous damage, while simultaneously numbing pain and sealing wounds in flesh—just enough to keep any unfortunate wanderer alive just a little bit longer to prolong their suffering. The Cauterising Plain is a place where survival feels more like eternal punishment than a triumph. Crossing it is avoided at all costs by the inhabitants of Skindjur, save for the most desperate or foolhardy—or those exiled from the relative safety of the burg. Far better to use a portal or gate, even if those are hard to find and require steep garnishes to access.
A Realm of Unrelenting Extremes
The Cauterising Plain is not bound by any one element—it is an amalgamation of extremes, where the delicate balance of pain and survival blends into a grim tableau:
Lava Rifts and Volcanic Plains: Jagged fissures tear across the land seemingly at random, spewing molten rivers of lava that glow with unnatural hues—greens, blues, and whites that burn hotter than the red magma of mortal realms. It’s likely they are not molten rock at all, but boiling bile, hatred and anger issuing directly from the Abyss itself. It doesn’t really matter though; the molten flows carve ever-shifting pathways across the landscape, making it impossible to map and treacherous to traverse. The lava here is laced with sinister magic; it does more than burn. Should it touch you, the heat devours sensation itself, leaving the affected limb both deadened to feeling and disturbingly pristine, as though the flesh had been reborn without knowledge of pain.
To linger near the lava is to invite madness. The furious heat seems to burrow into your thoughts, whispering promises of renewal through destruction, urging you to strip away your fears—and your flesh.
The Lightning Fields: Above the plains, the sky churns with blackened iron clouds that unleash near-constant lightning storms. These are no ordinary electrical lightning strikes; they are bolts of Keratunos, a horrible phenomenon unique to the Cauterising Plane. When it strikes, it strips away layers of skin and flesh with surgical precision, leaving the exposed tissue cauterised and strangely numb. The feeling of the searing, slicing impact lingers in the mind long after the physical pain fades. A side effect is to harden the skin surrounding the strike, leaving a body with scales, or spines or horns. The more times a sod gets struck, the more their bodies are transformed into something entirely mutated, something truly Abyssal.
The lightning does not behave randomly. It seems alive, hunting those who traverse the wasteland with an almost sentient malice. Some claim that once Keratunos strikes you, you’re marked, ensuring repeated attacks until you are left raw and unrecognisable.
Cruel Wastes: In violent opposition to the molten rivers, vast stretches of the Cauterising Plane are blanketed in a numbing, soul-freezing cold. Here, blackened ice sheets reflect the constant lightning overhead, creating dazzling, disorienting displays of light. The cold doesn’t just freeze—it invades the body, dulling thoughts and slowing motion, forcing travellers to stumble as their minds become locked in a haze of torpor. Breath freezes in the lungs, and skin exposed to the frigid air becomes brittle and cracks like porcelain. Oddly, the Cruel Wastes are riddled with vents of searing heat, which erupt sporadically, blasting scalding steam that melts ice and flesh alike. These steam eruptions are the Abyss’ cruel joke; they offer painful warmth to those freezing to death, only to leave them blistered and choking.
The Shifting Salts: Beyond the lava flows, lightning fields, and frozen wastes lie the Shifting Salts, an unending sea of finely powdered salt that shifts like dunes under the ceaseless, stinging winds. The air here is suffused with salt particles that cut into exposed skin, and the ground is so saturated with brine that every step sinks you knee-deep into the caustic sludge. Worse still, the flats are alive, in a crude sense. The ground occasionally hardens into sharp-edged crystals that sprout like jagged coral, or it might collapse without warning into bottomless pits of brine that consume sods whole. If you survive the salt winds and cutting crystals, you won’t survive long without shelter—the salt corrodes everything, from armour to exposed flesh, leaving victims agonised and stripped of their protective layers.
The Dangers: Why It Should Not Be Traversed
The Cauterising Plane is not simply inhospitable; it is actively hostile to life. What makes them so dangerous is the way the plain teeters on the line between life and death, sustaining its victims just enough to prolong their torment.
The Plain is a sensory nightmare. The unbearable heat of the lava rifts, the icy stillness of the Cruel Wastes, and the sharp, stinging winds of the Shifting Salts create a constant barrage of opposing extremes. And that’s before you consider the lightning. No mortal body, no matter how resilient, can endure the assault for long. The environment does not kill outright; it wears you down piece by piece, carving away your strength as surely as the lightning sears away your skin.
There are no stable landmarks on the Cauterising Plane. The molten rivers shift constantly, the ice sheets crack and reform, and the Shifting Salts churn like a living sea of corrosive powder. This makes navigation impossible. Every attempt to map the terrain is thwarted by its chaotic, ever-changing nature. However, like many infinite planes, distance and direction travelled are less important than intention. It turns out that the way to cross the Cauterising Plane is not to fight the elements, but to submit to them. Only when a berk has given up and is on the verge of death—only then does their destination appear. The Abyss is nothing if not a taunting tormentor. For being in sight of your destination is the most dangerous part of the journey. It’s at the Abyss dangles the slightest hope that it will also do its best to betray you. The ring of bodies that lies within the last mile around each burg or stronghold in Skindjur attests to this. The Abyss enjoys nothing more than snatching away victory, and life, at the very last moment.
There are even tales of false shelters that a sod might stumble across in the wilds, places like the Needles. Thought to be some kind of divine fragment from a power that the Abyss put into the dead-book, this accursed place might seem safe at first but is probably even more dangerous than braving the elements.
The Numbness: Pain’s Cruel Escape
For all its unrelenting hostility, the Cauterising Plane has one unnatural feature that separates it from the simple brutality of other Abyssal landscapes: the Numbness. No matter what level of agony the environment inflicts, the land itself works to seal your wounds and dull the pain, ensuring that you survive just long enough to endure more torment.
- The lava seals your burns, leaving you raw but alive.
- The lightning cauterises every wound it creates, carving away your flesh but never allowing you to bleed out.
- The cold chills you and shatters your skin, but the frostbite stops the bleeding.
- Even the salt stings and strips you raw, but the sheer intensity of the pain leaves you in a haze of numb acceptance.
This perverse cycle of injury and numbness makes escape nearly impossible. The longer you remain on the Plain, the more your body adapts to the numbness, until you can no longer tell if you are alive or dead.
Survivors and Legends
Few ever venture into the Cauterising Plane willingly, and fewer still return. Those who survive the experience describe varying horrors. Some survivors speak of walking shadows on the horizon, humanoid figures that seem to guide planewalkers only to vanish at the moment of salvation. Others mention the Sundered Choir, a haunting, discordant melody carried on the winds, as though the Plain itself were mocking their suffering. There are even rumours of refugees from the towns, those who have been exiled or have fled from burgs like Beauty Is Only Skin Deep, carving out desperate, tortured existences somewhere in the shifting wastes. These figures are said to be monstrous, their bodies warped and half-consumed by the Plane’s numbing touch.
The Cauterising Plane is not a landscape to conquer; it is a torment to endure. It is a place of extremes, designed to unmake body and mind alike while forcing its victims to survive just long enough to feel every inch of their unraveling. To step beyond the walls of settlements in Skindjur is to gamble with your very existence—and the Plain rarely loses.
Sources: Jon Winter-Holt