Footsteps on Oinos

This was originally part of a larger piece that gave an overview of the Waste as a whole, but I'm not sure if that will ever see light, so here's the opening flavor text/fiction for it.

“Oy, yer a new one dearie. Strug’lin mightily, a fat price ye’ll fetch from the Baatezu, or the Tanar’ri, whot ee’r getcha firs’…”

The wriggling, wormlike Larva twisted and bit as the Hag reached to pick it up.

“Quite new then… still full o’ anger, the Waste hadn’t sapped it out’ya. Not’chet anyways…”

The Hag wrapped thin fingers around the bloated midsection of the petitioner, digging her claws into the twitching underbelly and drawing out a trickle of ichor and a shriek of rage.

The Hag walked forwards, looking out over a bluff littered with slowly decaying corpses and rusting weapons, the remnants of some inconsequential Blood War battle, epic in scope. All of them were by any measuring of the word, but like everything else on the plane, none of it really mattered.

She cradled the still squirming and howling larva in her arms and continued to walk, cresting the bluff, letting its painful wails fall on uncaring ears. She stroked its head idly with one hand, “Out there, see it all? Op’n yer eyes and look’t it.”

The Hag looked out at the plane stretching out infinitely before her, ashen colored and largely featureless except where the progress of the Blood War had torn open rifts in the ground or piled bodies and engines of war high like funeral pyres, or scorched the earth with spells.

On the horizon two massive armies of Baatezu and Tanar’ri moved inexorably towards one another, most of those there wouldn’t survive the day, such was the nature of the plane itself. Will meant nothing, things happened because they did, so no use fighting the inevitable. The fiend armies would obliterate each other, but others of their kind would step free of Baator and the Abyss to march again to slay the others in their eternal genocide. It would always happen just as it always had, there was no hope for an end in sight. No hope for those involved for anything else. Hope was a hollow concept, devoid of meaning, devoid of expression, just like everything upon the Waste.

“Bound for that ‘cher are. Ye’ll make a fine lamp to heap upon that altar ya see out there. Unless o’course they burn ya’ to power a’spell or device, or eat’cher as food. That is o’course assuming that I don’t before ya get sold…resign yer self to it. Give up hope, yer squirmen wretch…sooner the better.”

The Hag cackled and squeezed the damned soul another time, simply because she could, inured as she was to its pain, or any emotion at all, a victim of the Waste just as much as the larva cradled in her arms like a perverse babe of Hades. She walked on into inevitability, looking out at the horizon and the looming shadow of the Wasting Tower of Khin-Oin as it rose into the sky and out of sight, visible even here hundreds of miles distant, a twenty two mile high rocky spire looking nothing so much as a spinal column torn from some titanic beast, as it eternally presided over the war torn planes of Oinos. Not that it mattered…