Whispers arose among the baker's dozen cultists as they descended deeper into the inland wood on the Sword Coast. Their red robes concealed their myriad forms as they marched onward, though they were most assuredly a motley crew: refugees, unemployed city guards, casualties of war, and a pair of outcast goblins filled their ranks. At the front of the line, leading the remainder in a single file in between the mist-laden trees, strode two half-elves.

Normanir Chandler, a particularly well-dressed member of the cult, walked with a bowed head while addressing his comptriot. "The rank and file grow restless," he whispered in the Infernal language, pulling his hood over his curly-haired head to avoid being heard.

The cult's leader, another half-elf named Shamys, trained her eyes forward without looking directly at him. Despite her short stature, she projected a coldness with her glare which caused even the forest critters to part ways as she marched. "Let them. They'll fight harder." 

For a few moments, the pair continued to march, the only sounds in the air being the whispers of their flock and the rustling of the canopy in the breeze. Though patient and indirect, Norm eventually prodded her on the matter. "If these marauders sacked a whole village, they're likely formidable; a sneak attack would succeed resoundingly against such miscreants."

"That's why you're here," Shamys responded, swiftly and bluntly. "If you're up to the challenge, that is." 

Incensed, Norm looked away from her as they walked and refrained from challenging the cult's leader. Minutes ticked by in relative silence before the lot of them heard the sound. A crude and almost insulting imitation of music, a drum beat and fiddle shrieked in the late afternoon alongside the piercing howls of ununified voices. The cult's rank and file slowed down in their advance, walking more closely together and clutching their improvised weapons. Shamys raised her pallid fist in a sign for everyone to halt. The cultists all huddled, and she allowed them to hang close while speaking. 

"Well?" she said in Common to her fellow half-elf expectantly. "What do you see?" 

Without another word, Norm removed one of his gloves and wiped his face with his bare hand. His fingertips passed over his eyelids and closed them momentarily, and he could feel the acrid taste of Avernus in his mouth when he opened his eyes again. His sight was altered, blinding him to his immediate surroundings, starting his field of vision far ahead of them and focusing in specifically on the filthy camp set up around a rotting shack far ahead of them. He could only maintain the vision for a few seconds, and he blinked when his sight returned to normal 20/20 vision in front of him.

Shamys didn't give his eyes time to adjust. "What do you see?" she asked more pointedly.

"A rotting shack in a clearing, and a stone altar in front. They outnumber us two to one, but we can overtake them. They're celebrating the upcoming sacrifice of the villagers-" 

"I'll seek your counsel when I'm interested in your planning skills," Shamys said sharply, enunciating her words in a performative manner for the sake of the other cultists. Norm kept his eyes closed while donning his glove again, though his ire at her disrespect festered. "You all heard: the hyena-worshippers are distracted. We'll strike with overwhelming force.” 

Norm switched to Infernal again as the junior cultists prepared their assorted tools and scrap fashioned into weapons and shields. "What's the plan?"

In a show of dominance, Shamys responded in Common, in earshot of the rank and file. "The Archduchess favors strength over subterfuge, Chandler. You'd do well to honor her teachings." 

A few of the other cultists peered at Norm judgmentally from beneath their hoods as they walked by, but none of them lingered for long lest he return their gazes. He stayed quiet, yet another show of deference for the chain of command which seemed lost on Shamys, and followed behind as the sounds of the marauder camp grew louder.

The mist provided a measure of visual cover, and the horrendous two-man band playing on a tree stump near the stone altar obscured the diabolical cultists' footsteps. Regardless, the trees parted just enough as they entered the glade for the two groups to spot each other at roughly the same time. Up close, their task appeared more daunting than when Norm had been viewing their targets from afar.

Barely clothed savages, mostly humans, danced like apes among an open refuse pile which had apparently been their campsite. Dotted with a few mangy gnolls and half-orcs, the marauders stank as bad as they looked, and they looked absolutely awful: malnourished, underslept, intoxicated, and mad on religious fervor. Their bare feet stamped offal and bone dust into the dirt and grass around the altar, and a few of the wretches sat and drank moonshine on the porch of the barely-standing shack in the center. Carousing and swaying, most of the marauders were late to notice the creeping cultists wearing matching red robes as uniforms until the two groups were practically on top of each other.

One of the gnolls, an old soldier with one withered paw, noticed the cult first and gave a shrill warning cry. The bulk of the marauders stumbled and fumbled while turning to face the thread, ceding initiative to the poorly planned assault on their campsite. Cultists dashed past Norm and Shamys both, their gardening hoes and lumberjack axes raised before the mangy savages could even reach for their crude stolen weapons. One of the humans raised a tattered banner bearing the standard of Yeenoghu near the altar, a stark contrast to the symbol of Zariel on the red robes of the cult. Both groups at a disadvantage, a sorry excuse for a fight ensued, still shocking in its violence when the first heads began to roll.

Normanir remained silent while watching the melee in the polluted glade. Hands folded behind him, he observed - with dismay - his fellow cult members fall upon the unsuspecting marauders with an astounding lack of precision. By the time his companions had reached their quarry near the shack, a few of the marauders had properly taken up arms to meet them. Both sides wielded improvised weapons and farm tools to horribly maim each other without striking killing blows, swinging wildly in wide arcs which prevented any of them from proper group tactics. The banner of Yeenoghu faced the symbol of Zariel, pushing the entire mess of scrabbling miscreants into a frothing frenzy. 

The cultists of refugee origins fought the hardest. They charged the marauders with pitchforks and a woodcutter’s axe and felled a large, bow-legged gnoll before it could even mount a defense. They screamed their rage at people who had no hand in their disenfranchisement, garnering a perplexed askew glance from Norm as they ranted and raved. They soon fell all the same, and Norm grimaced at their confounding deaths almost as much as he did at the resounding success of the cult's weakest members killing the highest number of the marauders. All throughout the very brief and very nasty carnage, the hooded warlock made no attempt whatsoever to assist, merely observing the folly of his fellow cult members squandering what could have been an excellent ambush.

Incompetence. Disorder. Chaos. Norm lowered his head in an ashamed sense of disgust at his colleagues. An interloper wouldn't have noticed any differences in the behavior of the two sides.

Amid the trampled refuse piles, toppled totems, and rolling heads, the voice of Shamys reached his ears. "Get in there, you lout!" she yelled at him while pushing a human marauder off the tip of her spear. "We're losing!"

After a long, drawn out sigh, Normanir unfolded his arms and waded into the scrabbling mass of unprofessional soldiers. "I hadn't noticed," he said in a deadpan tone. From his sheathe, he pulled a hellfire longsword, an infernal weapon he'd been granted as payment for a terrible act, and walked directly in the middle of the dashing and swinging bodies in front of the old shack.

In a single stroke, he executed his first target, a half-orc marauder who didn't even notice him passing by. The unsuspecting marauder croaked and fell, his soul being transported directly to the Nine Hells by the sword's curse. When Norm pulled the sword from the carcass, he continued the movement in a long sweep until his blade struck down a marauding human on his other side, with the same result as the man's soul was transported directly to the River Styx to emerge without memory. When a third marauder pointed a crossbow at him from ten yards away, a halfling of all people, Norm raised his free hand as embers crackled in between his fingers.

"Zariel," he said noncommittally, casting eldritch blast by announcing his patron's name out loud. He was convinced that Zariel had bound him to that component to mock him.

The crimson energy beam drilled a burning hole in the halfling, and by the time the small humanoid had fallen, the marauders had begun to fall back toward the old shack. Corpses from both sides littered the damp ground of mixed grass and dirt, and Norm slowed his approach when the remaining ten marauders formed a perimeter around their moldy, decrepit shack. Shamys and half a dozen cultists moved next to him, exchanging insults with their enemies in an immature display which caused Norm to wince while he tried to focus. 

Invoking Zariel again, he squinted while watching the shack, now defended by the marauders who weren't advancing, and detected a spell being cast inside. He sensed a pull, like a swirling drain, as evil as his own heart was, within that shack. There was something…awry about the magic, however, and he 'felt' the nature of the spell as erratic, asymmetric, and disorganized in a manner similar to the skirmish he was a part of. 

Norm's eyes stopped glowing as they flew open as wide as saucers, and he backed away from the marauders worriedly. "Shamys, they've opened a gate," he whispered to the cult leader standing next to him.

Without truly listening to him, Shamys raised her spear in the air and waved it menacingly at the increasingly agitated marauders. "There's no escape!" she yelled, both at Norm and the marauders, and the cult members began banging their crude weapons against the cut planks of wood they were carrying as shields. Norm continued backing away.

"It's not a gate to escape, it's a gate to-"

An explosion rocked the entire glade with such force that the rotting plywood forming the shack's roof flew off. Tongues of flame leapt from the windows, and wood chips hit the ground like hailstones all around them. While most of the marauders held their ground against the cultists, a few of them turned to watch the door of the shack as it was broken by growling, screeching beings inside. Thick smoke blew out of the door along with the first wave of scrabbling, grubby hands on the dirt, and the marauders were knocked prone by a multitude of braying dretches. The remaining cultists began to back away with Norm. 

"It's a gate to the Abyss!"

Mangy dretches poured out of the collapsing shack in droves, hooting and hollering as they trampled each other to break out. Hyena-faced and deformed, the small demons snapped at one another’s heels in their escape from the gate - a hole in the ground barely visible among the collapsing walls and smoke plumes - and their drive toward mortal souls. One of the marauders, a human wearing leather armor, raised the banner of Yeenoghu to herald the opening of the Abyssal fissure. Just as quickly as he raised the banner was he struck down himself.

“All hail the destroy-argh!” the bannerman gurgled as he was swept beneath a tidal wave of nasty, dung-stained fur.

Like the irrational animals they were, the dretches swarmed over the worshipper bearing their own god’s banner and began to eat him alive. The marauder thrashed and screamed with such force that the others were scared into fleeing, and the marauders forgot all about the less numerous cultists who they’d been trading insults with. The marauders were quickly overtaken, pulled down by the wave of hairy demons nipping at their ankles. All they could do was avoid falling, for they held the advantage over multiple dretches so long as they could still swing their axes and adzes at the dretches.

Shamys grit her teeth and glared at the devoted of Yeenoghu, mortal and demon alike, with all the hubris of a doomed battlefield commander. “Now! Slaughter them all!” she screeched while pumping her spear in the air.

Like a bad ruck in a bitter war, the subsequent melee was vicious, frantic, and exhausting despite none of the combatants displaying any particular skill. The dretches bit and scratched the marauders, the cultists, and even each other as more and more of them crawled out of the dark gate in the shack. Their little bodies fell and stained the dirt and wood with their innards, yet more of them climbed out of their hole alongside the chanting of a strained voice within the shack. One of the gnolls, fed up of the senseless fighting against its own deity’s minions, broke out from the fight and attempted to escape the glade. It didn’t get far before Norm leapt out from behind their stone altar and ambushed it.

“I need your life,” Norm said while swinging his hellfire sword at the gnoll’s legs. The creature shrieked and fell as its knees were cut, and Norm didn't even grant it the dignity of looking him in the eye as he executed it.

With the ruck raging behind him, he dipped the tip of his sword in the gnoll's blood, grimacing as he did so from the foreign odor of its carcass. Cutting a pentagram into the ground using the gnoll's liquid life, Norm uttered an Infernal incantation and gripped a ruby focus from his belt. The blood boiled and bubbled, hissing as the pentagram glowed and sparked, yet ignored by the various mortals and demons killing each other. Faint tongues of flame leapt up from the pentagram, floating in the air according to their own will; dark eyes blinked at Norm, watching as he waved the ruby in a series of profane motions around the fiendish spirits he'd summoned. The four spirits sparked and crackled, embers from the burnt soil floating up and sticking to them in the unstable husks of generic, obedient winged devils. Slightly shorter than him and more shifty in appearance than fierce, the summoned fiends stood around the warlock of Zariel eagerly.

"Burn the demons - all of them. Don't concern yourselves with collateral damage. Do this, and you may be reformed as lemures rather than larvae when you return to Avernus."

The winged devils chattered their excited affirmation in raspy voices and took flight, wasting no time to prove their worth in response to Norm's baseless conjecture. Soaring above the fray, the corporeal fiends began to pelt anything that moved with fire bolts, singing the skin and leaving second-degree burns, even on the hide of the dretches. The demons were inconsolable, howling their rage at their devilish rivals and leaping into the air in futile attempts to catch the devils flying above them. The remaining handful of cultists regrouped, hacking the dretches to pieces while the small demons didn't seem to notice, such was foul creatures' fury at the mere sight of their diabolical archenemies. More of them crawled from the shack, but even as Norm walked past the entire rowdy group, none of them noticed his movement amid the desperate fight.

Knocking over a few planks of burnt wood which had once been the shack's walls, he walked in a wide circle around the Abyssal gate opened up in the floor of what had once been some sort of an outlaw's hideout. As he'd expected, the gate led down into the bowels of the planet, devoid of light yet visible to him with his devil's sight. The tsunami of dretches had dwindled to a trickle, though the sounds of the melee behind him grew louder and higher in pitch, signaling that it was far from over. Standing on top of an overturned dresser, arms outstretched and decked out in horse leather, was a high elf, of all people. Older yet wide-eyed and mad, the full-blooded elf continued babbling whatever gutter chant was necessary in Abyssal before turning to regard the half-elf who'd entered what remained of the shack. Smartly, the high elf stopped, lowering his hands to receive the unseen foe who'd tracked them there. 

The high elf spoke with nervous energy amid jittering motions with his hands. "Welcome to the army without end," he said with a performative bow. "I'm Elatoris, the leader of this collective you've so foolishly attacked, in case you were wondering-"

Norm didn't waste time and launched himself at his senior. "I didn't ask," he said coolly while unsheathing his longsword. In midair, he swung directly for the head of Elatoris, instead meeting steel as the high elf pulled a blade of his own. The two struggled briefly, pushing back and forth until they both fell away.

Elatoris began to circle, content to play a long game, but Norm lunged for him again. Norm was stronger, but he lacked the high elf's fine movements and experience, and he cut nothing but air as Elatoris dodged and shoved him into a wall. He spun around to find himself on the defensive, blocking incoming strikes which threatened to twist his weapon from his hands. He reeled, backtracking around the gate until he tripped over one of the last dretches to climb out. The demon grabbed him by the foot and jostled with the limb, attempting to bite him while he kicked. Elatoris followed, thrusting downward and narrowly missing Norm, who could do nothing but defensively parry the swift attacks.

A shrill screech granted both men pause as a whoosh of red robes, both from dye and blood, fluttered in front of them. Shamys impaled the dretch and continued running, slamming into Elatoris in the process. She was lighter than him, but he'd been caught off-guard and stumbled to the ground. Norm shrimped away leaned against a wall to stand up, knocking over the planks in the process. Shamys forced their enemy back with a series of short, quick thrusts of her spear, but the high elf wasn't fooled by the stalling tactic. Elatoris fell back and threw a dagger directly into Shamys' shoulder. Disabled, she dropped her spear and screeched again, shrinking away from the high elf and, incidentally, providing an excellent distraction. 

"Zariel," Norm whispered, evoking a modest blast of red energy from his outstretched hand.

Elatoris shrieked himself as his legs were blown off below the knee. He collapsed to the ground in a high-pitched heap, taken by surprise and unaware of what had even happened to him. Norm wasted no time, running to the body and driving his sword into the full-elf's heart.

"Go to hell," he said as he pulled the sword out, inadvertently triggering a seal on Elatoris' belt which flashed with Abyssal runes. 

The deep, dark hole leading to the demonic plane rumbled, and both half-elves stared at the unstable gate much as a stranger would gawk at an alchemical experiment gone wrong. Enraptured, both of them failed to act in time, and they couldn't avoid the temporal right which briefly exploded from a single particle above the gate. A large, shaggy hezrou burst into the Prime Material Plane from Elatoris' belt buckle, tossing Norm and Shamys twenty feet through the air.