Slave Mines
Ah, the tanar’ri slave markets (or ’slave mines’ as some of ‘em call them), are the kind of places where a body wishes they could scrub their peepers clean with lye after setting sight on them, I tell ya. Now, I’ve been to some rotters of places in me time, but nothin’ quite compares to the vulgar display of cruelty and utter lack of decency in the Pazunian slave markets.
You gotta picture this, right, the markets are a sprawlin’ mass of misery, a chaotic sprawl of pens and cages, all held together with corroded iron and the suffering of the poor sods trapped within. The ground underfoot, it’s a swampy morass of muck and bodily fluids, churned to a sludge with the incessant tramping of buyers and sellers. The air is ripe, I mean proper ripe, with the stench of desperation and decay, hanging heavy and clotting in yer throat as you move about.
Now, at the heart of this macabre marketplace stand the pens, where lemurs, manes, and larvae are held before being sold to the highest bidder. Them cages, they are nothin’ short of purgatories, cramped spaces where the damned are piled atop one another, writhing masses of flesh awaitin’ their fate.
Them tanar’ri, they are proper craftsmen of misery, they are. They get to work on their ‘livestock’ with an artist’s eye for agony, twistin’ and warpin’ these poor buggers to create new forms of tanar’ri, each more grotesque than the last. Imagine a sculptor, only instead of chiselling away at marble, they’re rearranging flesh and bone, melding body parts into grotesque parodies of life, a veritable parade of horrors, it is. Creatures like the kastighur tanar’ri are created by this process, twisting multiple dretches into a single monstrous form using tanar’ric alchemy. They fetch a good price here, but are notoriously difficult to construct.
But it ain’t just about creating new soldiers for their never-ending wars, oh no. There’s a cottage industry, so to speak, in the slaughter of these poor wretches, a harvesting of life force that is as brutal as it is efficient. Picture massive abattoirs where lemurs and the like meet their end, drained of every last ounce of vital energy, reduced to nothing but husks, a grotesque end to a miserable existence, it is.
They say the air vibrates with the screams, a symphony of agony that’s music to the ears of them buyers, a bunch of sick and twisted individuals, each one lookin’ for the next big thing in sufferin’, a perverse kind of connoisseur, it is.
Now, I’m not one to judge, but I gotta say, this place, it’s the pits, a proper nasty bit of the multiverse where no one with a shred of decency would dare tread. It’s a warnin’ to all who venture too deep into the planes, a brutal reminder of the depths of cruelty and depravity that exists in the corners of existence. It’s a warning to mortal sods who are detestable in life too, because this place is where you’re headed for in your afterlife. It’s a lesson in misery, it is, a brutal, unyielding lesson in the darkest aspects of the multiverse. It’s a place where hope goes to die, cutter, and a place I wouldn’t wish on me worst enemy, so I wouldn’t.
Source: Jon Winter-Holt, mimir.net
