[ Layer the Ninth ] [ Bestiary | Addanc | Locations | Stinking Pearl ]
Stinking Pearl
Location: Abyss / Layer 9—Burningwater
Planewalkers who have come back from the Ninth describe Stinking Pearl with a particular expression: They weep while they talk about it, and their tears are not just from grief but also from awe. See, the burg is surely one of the most beautiful settlements on the planes. Delicate spires of coral rise from its streets. The roads are inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The buildings are carved from conch shells of improbable size, shaped with craft and evident love into something that deserves to be seen. It is, in every aesthetic particular, a wonder of the planes.
And it is dying. And it stinks. And it was stolen.
Stinking Pearl sits in the shallows of the Sea of Eosvotti like a jewel dropped by a careless power—which, in a sense, is almost what happened. You might not be surprised to learn that Stinking Pearl is not originally of the Abyss—it was not built for this place. It was once known as Shining Pearl, a magnificent mer-burg on the seafloor of Thalasia. Every facet of its architecture sings of Elysium: The perfect curves of the conch-shell houses, the delicate branching of the coral spires, the mother-of-pearl streets that still, even now, catch the pink light of Messaqqio’s sun and throw it back in soft iridescent arcs. It is the most heartbreaking place many planewalkers will ever see, because one can still appreciate, in every detail, what it was meant to be.
The chant holds that Addanc reached across the planes using the Thalastrom, a sea-storm of terrible and apparently interplanar intensity. The Thalastrom descended upon Shining Pearl and engulfed it for days and nights, and when it moved on, nothing remained on the floor of Thalasia but a gaping wound in the rock and the stench of evil rising through the pure water like oil. At a similar time, more or less, there were cataclysmic seaquakes in Burningwater, and then suddenly Stinking Pearl simply was, where before there had been only acidic sea.
And now, the acid is eating it. Slowly, with the infinite patience of the Abyss, the sea is reclaiming the beauty of Shining Pearl and turning it into something worse. The streets are losing their gloss. The coral spires are cracked at their bases, and several of the taller ones have collapsed into the shallows, where the lobster-things pick them apart with methodical indifference. The conch houses pit and flake at their edges. Everything here is still beautiful, but it is the beauty of a thing in the process of being destroyed, which the tanar’ri find more satisfying than the original by some margin.
What became of the residents of Shining Pearl is dark. It was likely unpleasant.
I wept, when I first saw it.
I was already in some pain at the time, which did not help
— but I would like to believe I would have wept regardless.
The Wards
The Nacre Quarter — the oldest and most intact part of the burg, where the streets are widest and the mother-of-pearl inlay still shimmers underfoot. This was presumably the civic heart of Shining Pearl; grand archways of woven coral connect the major buildings, and the proportions of everything speak of a people who were tall, graceful, and grandiose. Now it is the prime real estate of Stinking Pearl, and the nastiest tanar’ri fight over its crumbling townhouses. The acid staining on the lower walls is worst here, a dark brownish high-tide-mark from storms that climbs higher every season. It’s best not to think about what the other residues left in the streets and smeared on the walls here might be.
The Spiral District — the residential towers, each one a single enormous coiling spire of living coral that perhaps once housed dozens of families. Most are cracked or listing now, and three have fallen entirely. The remaining spires are occupied, crammed with quasits who nest in the chambers like aggressive, quarrelsome birds. The groaning and settling of the damaged spires at night—and the occasional catastrophic collapse punctuated by the screams of its inhabitants—provides an ambient soundtrack of doom that tanar’ri seem to find homely.
The Foundering Market — the old trading quarter, now largely submerged at high tide, where the acid sea washes in across the lower stalls twice daily. What is traded here is best not discussed in polite company. The stalls are made from salvaged wreckage and the carapaces of dead glass-lobsters, and the merchants are the sort of tanar’ri who have nowhere else better to be. Larvae change hands here. So do the occasional still-(barely)-living prisoners from Addanc’s Prime raids, bedraggled and burning, before they are put to whatever grim fate awaits them.
The Shell Gardens — were once, presumably, an area of cultivated beauty: the remains of enormous decorative shells arranged in patterns that suggest intentional design. The tanar’ri have converted it to a fighting pit. The shell walls make excellent barriers and the acoustics carry screams very well, which is appreciated by the fiends who come here to wager on the gruesome outcome of fights, which are always to the death—of the combatants certainly, but often of spectators too.
Notable Residents
The Unctuous Court (planar babau tanar’ri / CE) — a loose confederation of babau who have staked out the Nacre Quarter and maintain a kind of territorial dominance over it through stealth, assassination, and occasional displays of coordinated violence. Their oily-slick hides means they take the ambient corrosion better than most; they consider Stinking Pearl practically comfortable. They operate as Addanc’s intelligence network within the burg, reporting on newcomers, dissidents, and anyone who seems to be asking too many questions.
Sorathix the Undrowned (planar wastrilith tanar’ri [she/her] / CE) — a wastrilith of unusual age and disposition who has taken up residence in the flooded lower levels beneath the Foundering Market, in what was probably once a subterranean bathhouse or cistern of extraordinary elegance. Sorathix has been slowly corrupting the waters around Stinking Pearl, turning the already-caustic sea around the burg into something even worse, black with pungent pollution of some unspeakable kind. She and Addanc have an arrangement—she keeps the burg’s shallows hostile to visitors; and in return he does not ask what she is cultivating in the cistern’s deepest chambers.
The Congregation of the Dissolving (planar hezrou tanar’ri / CE) — a clutch of approximately thirty entropy-worshipping hezrou who’ve built a crude theology around the decay of the burg itself. They believe that when Stinking Pearl finally finishes dissolving, whatever ascends from the ruins will be a perfect expression of Abyssal truth—beauty fully consumed by corruption, completion through destruction. They perform ritual observances at the collapse of each tower, daubing themselves in the acid-softened paste of what used to be walls or inhabitants and singing in their horrible wet voices. Even other tanar’ri find them unsettling, which is a significant achievement.
Ilgreth One-Claw (planar marilith tanar’ri [she/her] / CE) — a marilith exile who washed up in Stinking Pearl some decades ago after losing badly in a political struggle in another layer. She lost an arm—or rather, an arm lost her—to the acid sea during her arrival, and has replaced it with a prosthetic lobster claw that she maintains with meticulous, slightly obsessive care. She runs what passes for a garrison in the Spire District, commanding a motley force of dretches, rutterkin, and the occasional more capable tanar’ri who owes her a debt. She is pragmatic, intelligent, and wholly untrustworthy, but she keeps enough order in the district that Addanc tolerates her continued existence.
I have seen the slopes of Mount Celestia.
— Omar al-Djibou, dictated from the Order’s hospice
I have seen the Library of Mechanus at full operation.
I have gazed upon the Spire itself from the Outlands.
None of it prepared me for Stinking Pearl.
Nothing beautiful should be in the Abyss.
The contrast alone is a kind of cruelty.
The Crack’ed Shell
Addanc does not, strictly speaking, live in Stinking Pearl. His true seat is the Drowned Throne on the layer’s deepest floor, far below in the cold acid dark. But he maintains a residence in the burg that is impossible to mistake for anything other than a statement of dominance and deliberate desecration.
The original structure at the burg’s heart was almost certainly its most beautiful building—a great hall or temple of some kind, its walls constructed from a single species of enormous ridged shell, each panel selected for its colour and fitted together with joints so fine they are nearly invisible. The proportions are vast, the ceilings high enough to accommodate something as large as a dragon perhaps, and the inner walls were once inlaid with scenes in mother-of-pearl that depicted, if you look carefully beneath the damage, a great calm ocean full of gentle light and drifting silver fish.
Addanc has improved it.
The entrance is now flanked by twin pillars of Prime-world ship anchors, chained together and crusted in acid-salt and the shed carapaces of glass lobsters. The inner walls still bear their inlaid ocean scenes, but Addanc has had his soldiers scratch new figures into them—drowning men, capsizing ships, the Thalastrom rendered in crude gouged lines above the original delicate work. The throne itself is a massive thing of rusted iron and broken bones, deliberately ugly, positioned on a raised dais where the original altar or focal point of the room presumably stood. Around its base, the acid seeping through the damaged floor has been encouraged rather than repaired, and a shallow corrosive moat now rings the throne.
The ceiling is the most disturbing element. The original shell-panel roof has partially collapsed, and the holes have been stuffed with the preserved bodies of creatures Addanc has drowned—sailors, fishermen, the occasional planewalker who came too close—suspended in a hardened resin that his lobster-creatures produce and that the acid does not eat. They hang there overhead, a forest of the drowned dead, looking down at whoever stands before the throne with blank patience. The tanar’ri who attend Addanc in his palace do not speak unless spoken to. The silent architecture, it seems, does enough talking.
Canonical References
- Planes of Chaos [2e] Chaos Adventures poster
Source: Jon Winter-Holt. Only the vaguest of information is available in the canon for this layer—the interdicted nature of the layer, the acidic ocean and the danger—all the rest of the entires for this layer are unpleasant speculation and disturbing homebrew…[‡]