There are always extremes. The heat of the desert, the brightness and cold on a glacier. Either people don't live in these areas, or they know how to survive there. Travellers to these areas might think of it otherwise, but there is nothing truly dangerous about it for the natives. Dangerous extremes are within the hearts of men. Some call them guided and driven, most call them fools (and rightly so). When goodness and religion team up to form a paladin, you either have a champion for good, or a fool who quickly dies.
We will follow the young paladin Antaia Dawngazer, follower of the Morninglord, the god Lathander. She was one of those, who were harder to convince giving a single step of ground against darkness than a dwarf to give a mountain of gold to a red dragon or a goblin as a birthday present. How she came to follow the path of the Morninglord and her previous live are tales for another day.
She had just followed rumours and traced down her foe, a wizard of evil, into a small town. As evil wizards like to do, he had set himself up as tyrant of this town. She had entered his tower, the way shown to her by a few fearsome townsfolk. Penetrating into his inner chambers, bypassing or overcoming many traps and undead servants on the way, she saw that he was chanting the runes of a powerful incantation. Knowing it was too late to stop it, she watched to see, what was going to happen. Experience told her that she wasn't facing a killing dweomer.
A swirl of mist appeared in the middle of some type of runed circle engraved into the ground. Slowly it increased in size, swirling and moving as though it was alive. It filled out almost all of the availible space within the circle from the floor to the ceiling. The mist began to condense and the paladin could feel the power of evil emanating from the circle, far more intense than any she had ever felt before.
Antaia had to force herself to let go of her god-given ability to detect evil, knowing her head would burst if she continued to concentrate. The mist was now almost solid, resembling a female with too many arms. The first thing the creature said was: "I feel the stench of good." The wizard replied: "Remove it." The fiend said: "With pleasure." Wondering what a demon might considere pleasurable and having no desire to know, the holy sword swished out of its sheath almost of its own accord. Antaia barely rembered to pray to Lathander for assistance.
She charged past the circle and clove the unprepared mage into two halves. While the remains dropped to the ground, spilling blood and gore. The runes within the twin concentric circles faded away and the fiend charged into battle. It tried to take advantage of the slippery ground, where its snake-like body would be of advantage where her opponent had to be careful not to slip and fall. Fiends don't fight fairly, they fight to win.
Six arms, each holding a weapon seemed like an unfair proposition anyway when fighting a human warrior armed with sword and shield. The paladin carefully circled, leaving the slippery ground. The fiend was soon tired of this game and attacked. Three of the weapons hit the shield, while the sword moved with impossible speed to intercept the other three weapons and even strike once.
The fiend screeched in agony. The wound burned like fluid acid and seemed to fester, the holy enchantment overiding her incredible regenerative powers. Normal wounds woud heal as fast as her opponents inflicted them, but this wasn't a normal wound. The fiend allowed itself a moment of hesitation and was rewarded by two other strikes. Being far more precise they disabled two of her arms. No-one should hesitate when facing an opponent as powerful as Antaia.
The demon flew into a rage and attacked with extreme fury. The paladin had to use all her energy to parry and was hit several times, until the fiend made another mistake in its fury. Again the holy sword struck and this time the wound was deep and extremely painful. A demonic scream shook the very foundations of the sturdy tower and seemed to make the paladin's ears burst. Paralysed for a moment, the snake-like tail of the fiend curled itself around the paladins body and started to constrict her.
With a mighty effort of will and strength she forced her sword to pierce through the tail. The fiend howled again, except that it sounded like a banshee this time. For some reason the paladin had suddenly gone and the tanar'ri was thankful for it. She circled into the fiends field of sight to attack again. There was still much she had to learn about fighting these creatures. A flurry of weapons and several wounds of both combatants later the paladin slipped on the ground and crashed to the floor, the hall echoing the ringing noise of her heavy armour.
The fiend slithered after her to finish its opponent once and for all, hindered by the lack of a part of her tail and three non-functional arms. While the creature gathered strength the paladin stabbed her opponent with one last final and desperate burst of strength. The sword easily passed though the demonic body and burst out of its back. The fiend paused a moment and the paladin pulled the shield in front of her, not knowing what else to do.
The fiendish body convulsed and finally it started to drop to the floor. "Damn you", the demon said in a voice deeper and more resonant with wicked and depraved power than that of any human could ever be. Antaia felt something rebound of her enchantenend shield. As the fiend started to dissolve into mist, she realized that she had just barely escaped some diabolic curse. Sometimes death was the sweetest of fates.
She shed her broken gauntlets and gently touched her hands to let the healing power run through her body. The pain came somewhere closer to a bearable level. With a groan of agony she picked up and sheathed her sword. Then she knelt again to get a staff. Struggling to stand again she left the room, heavily leaning on her support, not realizing that it had been one of the fiend's weapons.
Back in the room green blood mingled with red. A sickly yellowish liquid drained between the stones and left the tower forever stained...
She managed to go to the next inn, not kowing if there was a temple of or shrine to Lathander within this town, and even if it had been, it had most likely been desecrated. She stumbled through the door, managed to make it to the bar and started to fumble with her pouches. Finally she dropped a bloody platinum piece on the counter and said: "One night with breakfast." The innkeeper wondered silently: "Only one night?" Aloud he said: "Room number 15. It's on the first floor. Good luck."
The paladin had already turned to go and struggled into the room. She managed to shed her armour and cast two of the tree healing spells left for that day, before she collapsed from exhaustion. In the taproom someone said: "What happened? Why did he let her escape?" Later that day someone entered the room and said: "The wizard is dead and she has defeated something that bleeds green, though there are no traces of the creature." Someone with an oddly greenish tinge to his skin said: "A fiend, a powerful fiend."
Another newly arrived explorer said: "There where five weapons in that room." The man with the oddly colored skin looked at the items the man had put on the table. He touched one of them carefully and quickly withdrew his hand. "Do you think its going to bite." The man, a tiefling, said: "You never know with tanar'ri work. You better have these checked by some archmage. You have a good number of them on your world. "I think the fiend wants to have them back", someone said. "As long as you don't entere the planes, you aren't going to see this particular marilith in a hundered years.
Before anyone could ask more questions, the tiefling was gone. While Torilans where more aware of the multiverse that surrounded them, most of them didn't know much else except that other places existed. This female had to be powerful indeed. Defeating a marilith in single combat. Many experienced planewalkers dreamt of that all of their lives without ever getting close. On the other hand powerful fiends got cocky when dealing with simple mortals and even primes at that. Maybe she had just been lucky...
The next morning she finished her healing and replenished her spells in silent meditation and prayer. When she was done, she left the town and called upon her faithful companion, the silver dragon Tiranduar'Gnoar. On her way home, she wondered about the battle again. She should have perished, but she didn't. There had to be something special about her. Maybe Lathander had more in mind for her then just staying on this world. She had to take the battle to the creature's home.
Honestly she just felt cheated for victory, knowing that the fiend wasn't gone, only banished to its home to return one day and plague the people of this or another world again. "Damn, why not rid the world of all of them", she muttered. The dragon's regular movement stopped for a moment, but the silvery reptilian kept silent, being used not to interrupt the paladin's inner struggles. A voice inside Antaia warned her, that she was sliding down a dangerous path, one that might lead to her untimely end or fates far worse.
She had never been one to listen a lot to her inner voice, so it was a surprise that she was neither facing into the sky beneath a few feet of ground adorned by a stone with her name engraved into it, nor walking the world, complaining about her fate and telling everyone she had been cheated by Lathander. Antaia had to do something about the fiends, even if it was the last thing she did in her life.
It was time to take the battle to the planes. She started to prepare as soon as she arrived at her home temple, ignoring warnings of both the high priest and the dragon. She was a paladin, the incarnation of goodness and virtue. What could happen to her? The minions of evil could not even touch her. She had survived a battle that should have meant her end. She had been choosen by Lathander.
Little did she know about cosmology and the lower planes. Far away from her home and her god, her powers would be diminished and many of them would fail. Had she taken care to go to Waterdeep, Candlekeep, Silverymoon, Shadowdale or any of the other learned places in the Realms, she had known to stay home and do what she always did, but she had always been more stubborn than an angry dwarf. Antaia could have learned mich about the planes, but she was as clueless as they come.
When the gate was opened, she passed through it, riding her dragon companion as usual. She didn't hear the high priest say: "May the Morninglord forgive her. She doesn't know what she is doing." He still bore the scars of an findish encounter in the relatively save environment of Sigil, the city of doors. None of the priests even knew where the gate led, but most had a bad feeling about it, and felt as though they where never going to see the charming paladin again.
For a moment Antaia felt as though she was falling through nothingness, as the gate violently hurled her through the fabric of the multiverse. She blinked and all she saw was gray. As far as she could see, everything was gray, the mountains, the jagged cliffs, the spires, the cracks, even the twisted and dried plants. In the distance a sickly band of oil wormed its way through the landscape, slowly moving at some places, quickly at others without any logic or discernible pattern. It had to be some type of river, but none like any she knew.
The laws of nature were switched out here anyway. For several moments she just stared at the incredibly mighty landmarks. Cliffs higher then dragons could fly, mountains large as continents and inimaginably high. She could almost have enjoyed this view, if there weren't...
What the...?
She felt as though she had stepped into tropical heat, but it wasn't warm, quite the opposite. She had to move soon or risk freezing. It was as though she didn't belong here. Antaia never felt as lonely and lost as she did now. The paladin sighed and looked around. "I thought this was the place of all evil, but I don't see a single fiend here." She was terrified, how empty her voice sounded, as though she already was an empty shell, not a living being.
Being as clueless as she was, she wasn't even aware, that there was more than one type of fiend, something that many adventures of Toril where aware of, even if they knew little else about the outer planes. The dragon and the paladin followed a cloud of dust. There was a fiendish horde running somewhere. "What are they running from?", the paladin asked in a whisper, afraid that her voice might carry to far. "They aren't running away", the dragon said, "They are going to a battle." Antaia asked: "With angels?"
The dragon sighed and said: "With other fiends. There are several types of fiends and the hate each other even more than they hate others of their own type. Well at least some do. Every fiend fights every other fiend really, but when they gang up it gets nasty." They had overtaken the horde and saw another group approaching. Tight formations and rank and file marching order made up the second army. Soon they met in a mighty clash and the fight went on and on and became ever more confusing, until it seemed everyone had lost overview between the battling hordes and the tight units that decresed in size like rock eroded by water. If not for their sheer number, the horde had already perished, but the battle still went on.
The pladin ordered her companion to attack. "Good luck resisting findish torture", the dragon said. "I have heard that they can wring screams from throats too dry to even whisper and wring you so badly that you forget who you are." The paladin asked: "Why don't you worry about it?" The dragon said: "I am born of goodness, so they will just tear me to pieces. Good-bye my friend." The human muttered: "I thought I had a bad day."
The pair burst into the midst of the fighting armies and the dragon breathed ice, causing a yugoloth company to shatter. Since it had been working for the baatezu, the tanar'ri soon overwhelmed their remainig enemies, including the silver dragon and the paladin. While the dragon was torn to pieces, screaming in agony, while it was eaten alive, as it had predicted, Antaia was oddly spared so far, something she didn't like at all, but for some reason she could not muster the energy to attack the fiends and find at least death.
The warning signs came back to her mind, the warinings of both the dragon and the high priest returned to her. The overcast dawn, the broken phoenix statue in her room. Tears of regret, but also helpless rage flowed down her cheeks. "Rest with Bahamut", she whispered in an almost toneless voice. She realized the folly of her attempt and knew it was to late. She reached for her dagger.
She wanted to cheat evil of its final victory and find death, even if it had to be by her own hand. There wasn't another choice left. She took hold of the blade's hilt, but suddenly her hand felt heavy as lead. Try as she might, she was unable to lift it. She concentrated on her arm on every fibre of muscle flesh, ever sinew, every bone to make it move, but it didn't. Sweat pearled on her forehead and she sighed, wondering what she could do now.
Slowly she looked over the battlefield, looking for a weapon that had been dropped while fighting. There where always weapons strewn on the field after a great battle, many of them broken. It didn't matter as long as it was something sharp. Antaia found what she was looking for only three steps away. As a last act of defiance she leapt, streching out her arm to reach for the blade.
The air seemed to turn into gelantine and instead of flying she was almost hovering in midair without moving. She barely felt herself touching the ground as emptiness crept into her soul, where strength, faith and the power of defiance had been only heartbeats before. Even more terrifying, she was incapable of despairing about it. She felt just empty - nothing.
She was at the centerpoint, the cornerstone of all the lower planes, the place that resembled the true nature of evil like no other. It drained all of a being away. It didn't just cause depression or despair, it leaked everything out of people. For the true nature of evil wasn't the tanar'ri way of emotion or the way of the eternal enemies, the baatezu, the way of law. It was the loss of everything, of cares, of emotions and in the end complete loss of self, of identity.
The lower planes being the place their are, fate took an even darker teist here. For reasons only known to himself the demon lord Graz'zt had watched the battle. Not that he really minded the loss of the few fiends she and her dragon companion had killed, but pro forma he choose to say that he had to punish her for transgressions against the tanar'ri race. Not that it made any sense. Tanar'ri go at each others throuts as often as they fight anyone else, but tanar'ri aren't supposed to make any sense, except -maybe- in a very wicked way.
In truth he wanted a pleasure slave and even more amusingly one, who served a power of the upper planes. He took her to his home in the Abyss and already raped her on the way there. Each time she was near fainting or dying, he found some way to rejuvenate her body and continue. Sometimes he left her to recover, when he had other business to mind, but he never let her fully regain her physical strength, not to speak of her mental strength.
When he tried to finally break her faith, by teasing her with many things. Would a good (He always stumbled over the word, not becaue he couldn't speak it, but he considered himself the only being in the multiverse, that was right, who knew goodness) god allow his followers to fall into the claws of the likes of his. Her true destiny was as his slave. If he were so high and mighty, why wouldn't he save her from the Abyss? Why wouldn't... ad infinitum. During this time Antaia realized that the mental dumbness of the Gray Waste was gone.
While time couldn't be measured beneath the eternally burning skies tainted in an unhealthy crimson, the paladin prayed to Lathander as regularily as she managed to. She asked for forgiveness for her folly and maybe, just maybe a way out here. Antaia knew her fate was her own blame and no-one else's.
Somehow the demon lord managed to keep her pleasurable and even young for almost fifty years. Then he stopped raping her on as regular a base as you can expect from a tanar'ri, because he knew that she bore his child. Hours, or were it days or months, later he left her alone, just before she thought she really couldn't bear his cynical humour and evil ways any longer and she was finally going to find a way to impale herself on his claws, he left.
Either it had been months or fiendish children grew faster than mortal offspring. The contractions almost started at the point when the fiend slammed the door after him. Wondering what the thing within her womb might become, she lay down on her back, waiting for it to leave her, at the same time knowing it had defiled her from within.
Pain like none she had ever felt before surged through her body, centered at her womb shockwaves rippled through her and she screamed in uncontrolled agony. With a shower of blood, gore and flesh the creature burst out of her and landed on the ground, looking at her with strangely innocent eyes. With an inexplicable surge of motherly love she hugged the child and gently spoke a blessing of Lathander and all other gods of good into her son's ear, while her lifeblood slowly seeped into the unforgiving harsh soil of the Abyss.
Finally her prayers had been heard and her soul made its way directly through the outlands into the plane of Elysium, the home of her god. It is said that a planewalking priest of Lathander, who knew her in youth met a proxy of his lord, resembling the paladin, who had passed the portal to dread.