The River of Tears
Location: Abyss / Layer 8—Skindjur / The Cauterising Plain
The River of Tears weaves its sorrowful path through the shattered hellscapes of Skindjur like a scar carved deep into the flesh of the plane. Its waters are thick, viscous, and shimmer with hues of oily black and deep, pulsating crimson.
The River of Tears is said to be born from anguish itself—a torrent formed from the collective agony of those who falter in Skindjur, their sorrow and despair pooling into this unnatural flow. Some claim the river’s waters are infused with the psychic residue of every scream, every moment of bitter regret, and every tear shed by victims who have succumbed to the plane’s harsh philosophies. The river does not cleanse or soothe; it corrupts, scalds, and feeds.
The River of Tears is a paradoxical phenomenon even by Abyssal standards. Unlike the rest of Skindjur’s jagged, slicing terrain—where everything is sharp, raw, and immediate—the river is subtle, slow-moving, and hypnotic. Its surface appears still, as though frozen under a sheen of black glass, but beneath, it churns with currents like veins pumping liquid despair.
The environment it occupies is equally bizarre: its banks are lined with flayed trees, their barkless surfaces dripping sap that smells faintly of burnt sugar and rot. Razor-shard pebbles dot the shores, biting into the flesh of anything foolish enough to tread upon them. The air above the river is thick with a damp, choking mist, heavy with the taste of iron and the faint scent of weeping flowers.
But the river’s most sinister quality is its gravitational pull. Something in its oily depths calls to travellers, whispering promises of absolution, of relief from the ceaseless torment of Skindjur. Those who lean in too close to peer at their own reflections will see not their faces, but their regrets gazing back at them—distorted, sharp-toothed spectres of sorrow that will reach out a hand, grab, and pull them under. Those drowned are consumed by the river, their essence becoming part of its eternal flow, their screams joining the chorus beneath its surface.
The Tanar’ri Fisherman: A Tale of Greed and Anguish
“Fishin’ the River o’ Tears ain’t fer the faint, cutter. Folk reckon it’s madness, tryin’ to take somethin’ from waters that’re more alive than half the bashers skulkin’ about this damned plane. But me? I know there’s riches in sorrow, and that river’s got plenty to spare.”
The tanar’ri fisherman, a grotesque figure answering to the name Blekhazzar the Maw (planar tanar’ri hezrou [he/him] / CE), makes his livelihood off the River of Tears. He cuts a hulking figure draped in sinew-stitch robes, his gangly frame crouched on the deck of his bone-skiff. The spikes of his tail twitch as he hurls his barbed bone hook into the water, the line made not of twine but of soul-thread—a material woven from shrieking shades harvested from the plane. Blekhazzar’s fishing tools are as cruel as his demeanor, but they suit his purpose well.
He isn’t fishing for food. No. The River of Tears offers a prize far more precious than sustenance. From its depths, Blekhazzar seeks Echoes of Despair, ghostly remnants of the souls who have drowned in the river’s cruel embrace. These echoes are spectral shards of pure agony, which drift beneath the surface like pale, flickering piraña fish with hollow eye sockets and mouths stretched into silent screams. They are treasures to the right buyer—and in the Abyss, suffering is a prime currency all its own.
Blekhazzar’s work doesn’t end when he hauls an echo from the river’s oily depths. Each catch must be dragged screaming onto the shore with a spray of black and crimson water. The echoes writhe in his claws as though still drowning, their phantasmal forms flickering in and out of solidity under the weight of their own despair. It is no easy task for Blekhazzar to bind them; their cries can drive even a tanar’ri mad if he listens too long. He uses chains of spite, forged from the angry magma of the Cauterising Plain, to tether them.
Once bound, the echoes are hauled to Decortocatoplis, to the flesh market of misery where Abyssal merchants—and sometimes yugoloth traders—gather to barter in suffering. Blekhazzar sells his echoes to buyers who know their worth. A broken echo can be distilled into magical inks that trap despair into written words, used to curse rivals with unshakable grief. A more intact echo might be dried and ground into powders that, when ingested, grant the user a glimpse into their own failures—sometimes enough to drive even the most hardened minds to madness.
Blekhazzar covets the pristine echoes above all. These rare treasures are said to come from the most utterly broken souls, their despair so profound that it radiates magical power all of its own. With the right ritual, a pristine echo can be forged into a Despair Engine, a device capable of amplifying anguish and spreading it to all who dare enter its vicinity. Wars on the Lower Planes have been fought over such devices, and Blekhazzar dreams of catching an echo big enough to secure his place among the Abyss’s most influential traders.
The Risks of Fishing the River of Tears
Blekhazzar knows—as all who work the River of Tears should—that the river does not give up its treasures lightly. The echoes fight back—not with strength, but with murmurs. As Blekhazzar pulls them from the depths, they whisper his own regrets to him. Voices of his failures, the battles lost, the betrayals that haunt him—every moment where he faltered or showed weakness. The more he listens, the deeper their hooks burrow into his mind. He has scars on his skin where the echoes’ teeth have bitten when he wasn’t quick enough to silence them.
The greatest danger, however, lies in the current of the river itself. It hates being robbed. The deeper Blekhazzar casts his line, the more the river seems to pull at him, seeking to drag him into its depths. Once, on a particularly ambitious job, he swears the river spoke to him. Not with voices, but with images: His worst failures, strung out before him like bait on a hook. He felt himself leaning forward, claws trembling, and only stopped when he ripped his own tail clean from his body and threw it into the river as an offering.
Still, the tanar’ri fisherman persists, half-mad, entirely consumed by his pursuit. He has no illusions about the river—he knows that one day, he will misstep, lean too far, or stay too long on the jetty. And when that day comes, the River of Tears will take him, and he will become another one of the echoes he’s spent his wretched afterlife fishing for. But for now? He casts his hook again.
“What’s a little sorrow,” he mutters to no one but the river, “If it lines me pockets, eh?”
Source: Jon Winter-Holt