Population: Anywhere between 1,200 to 24,380
Social Class: Lower
Character: Empty, distraught tenement buildings haunt the empty, winding streets.
District Type: Slums
Buildings: Poor residences, poor lodgings, poor services
First Impressions: The walls of the buildings in this district are covered in graffiti of varying talents. People tumble around going from place to place, mostly from nameless tavern to nameless tavern, in an attempt to forget their bleak existence.
The Slags, even more so than the devastation surrounding the Shattered Temple within the Lower Ward, is a literal blighted wasteland within Sigil. Untold millennia ago a portal to Sigil opened into the heart of a Blood War battlefield upon the Grey Waste, and for whatever reason the Tanar’ri forces seemed to think the portal a purposeful gift to them leading to either a sanctuary for their forces or a depository of weapons and supplies. And so, utilizing typical Tanar’ri logic, they led their forces en masse through this unknown and uncalled for portal, directly into the heart of Sigil. The Baatezu involved in the battle, not to be denied a victory over their eternal foes, followed suit and both armies spilled out into the Cage. Thousands of fiends spilled over into the cities like a tide of blood, fire, and iron, and fell to butchering each other, as well as the horrified residents of the ward, and tearing apart the city in search of the weapons or other supposed stashed supplies.
The fighting raged for nearly a week before Her Serenity, in logic as elusive as that which allowed them within Sigil to begin with, ejected the warring armies back to the Lower Planes. Still, the district was all but leveled, strewn with bodies, the twisted wrecks of fiendish siege engines, and the remnants of the armies that were not sent back for whatever reason, some of which linger to this day. The district has yet to be rebuilt in all that time, between the frequent cagequakes that make any attempted building repairs an exercise in futility, and the infestations of dretches, manes, vargoulles, cranium rats, and a mystery called Kadyx.
Kadyx, or The Kadyx, has existed in the Slags as something of a blood soaked enigma, given credit for infrequent and typically unique murders within the Slags. A body might enter the Slags and be found later with his bones picked clean and arranged into a play on words of his own name, or dressed in his own entrails, stitched together in a mockery of finery as if he were late for an evening dinner party. Thing is, none have seen Kadyx enough to give a reliable description other than fangs, claws, perhaps some ebony black scales, the scent of cinnamon, and that it appears to be able to burrow into the earth. It is also somehow capable of avoiding all manner of magical scrying and other such divinations. It might simply not exist, and be a legend used to mask the killings of criminals within the Hive and Lower Ward, perhaps the Garianis family even. Like many such tales, the answer is likely to remain dark. [More horrors beyond imagining have arisen in the midst of the Blood War, but when one is abandoned by its makers… – The Editor]
Of recent note is an upswing in the numbers of cranium rats seen in and around the Slags, and even more so, fights between small groups of them have been rumored as well. Inevitably, the original sources of such rumors never seem to be found. It is not uncommon to find the bodies of beggars or criminals found at the edges of the district, nearly drained of blood from a thousand tiny cuts and slashes as if from the bites of a swarm of vermin. Oddly enough are the fights between such groups of vermin as the beasts are said to share a common hivemind, linked to some unseen master. [Odd to think what this might bode within a house divided. – The Editor]
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