Hellmouths: There Goes the Neighborhood

The Hellmouth. It is something that sounds impossible, but every culture that has recorded history reports their presence. They start as blemishes or miscolorings in the surrounding environment, unnatural but easily dismissed. They grow into tumorous growths on solid rock or metal, or strange cracks in the ground. Where they appear life quickly fades--crops became sickly and failed, forests blighted and died, rivers filled with dead fish. These were terrible enough--a single Hellmouth is blamed for starting the blight of 1306, which ended in thousands of deaths due to starvation and plague.

If a Hellmouth is left to linger too long, then the true horror becomes apparent as demons from the Darkness emerge, laying waste to the countryside and destroying everything they can. Hellmouths are bridges, corridors between the impossible physics of the darkness and the stable reality of our own world. The twisting impossible corridors are known as gauntlets, and with good reason--not only are they filled with an oncoming army of nightmarish beasts, but the strange geometries can be just as lethal, with shifting gravity, deadly traps, and strange warps of energy and matter. The fall of Librosa, the assination of Culehec, the Bloody Winter, all manner of attrocities and doom can be pointed to as starting due to a Hellmouth's appearance.

There are two silver linings to a Hellmouth's appearance. First, historically these have been quite rare--only one would normally appear once a century (the fact that three arrived during the reign of Laurence of Haldorth was enough to lead to the 1090 Revolution, which caused a brief period of anarchy in Roque based on religious fervor). The second was that the Clergy had found a method of ritually clensing a Hellmouth, disrupting the bleak energies that kept them stable and causing them to collapse. For most of history, a Hellmouth was akin to a natural disaster like a volcano or earthquake--certainly dire but not exactly something to consonantly worry about.

Then the Impact came.

No one knows for sure why--the natural philosophers believe it may be due to the mega death and climate change, the Clergy argues that it is obviously a Sign of the Times of Strife due to our hubris and wickedness, and the Anarchists and Democratics rally it as a divine sign of the noble's failure, but there is only one truth--in the past two centuries since the Tower was build, there have been over 60 reported Hellmouths. They open faster and appear more frequently, and the military has had to respond to a number of demonic incursions. It has poisoned the communities of the Tower, keeping the masses in fear and mistrusting their neighbors. Even worse, rumors spread of cults and mysteries that have betrayed the way of the Archangels and now worship the Fallen gods of the Dragon and other Dark Masters. Since there are so many places that are rarely patrolled or noticed in the Tower--miles of mine tunnels and unused corridor and lonely room--Hellmouths get time to grow and mature, becoming large enough for demonic incursion. If anyone had doubt that now is a dark time for humanity, the Hellmouths have silenced that doubt--somewhere, hiding in the shadows and secret hallways of the Tower, right now, there could be a breech into the Darkness that holds all manner of terrible monsters, ready to pour out...

If a Hellmouth becomes too stable, the clergic rites become useless. At that point, there is only one option--for a team of knighted hell-divers to breech the Hellmouth, to enter the dimensional gauntlet that exists inside, a bridge between our world and Hell itself, and to find the Heart--the  meta-natural core of the gauntlet. If it is destroyed, the mouth falls just as surely as an arch loosing its keystone. Once broken, the warriors must flee as quick as they can, lest they be caught in the gauntlet before the Mouth closes and they are lost forever in Darkness.

It is terrifying work, and those that do it rarely live long to rest on their laurels, but a band of brave souls can dive into the boundaries of hell and protect the masses for one more day from Apocalypse.