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A man trudges through a vast expanse of ice, huddling in his fur-lined cloak, trying to protect himself from the wind. It's almost pointless, the biting wind doesn't work like ordinary biting wind. Veron has survived many a cold winter, but winter winds don't cut through all layers like a hot knife through butter and chill you to your bone. The warmest clothes barely do anything to stave it off. But 'barely anything' is better than 'nothing at all,' so he huddles near-uselessly in his cloak and mutters biting curses at the cold under his breath.
Screams echo across the tundra. That just sort of happens, here. Maybe someone's caught under a glacier. Maybe someone's getting tortured. Maybe someone's just chopped their own frostbitten foot off and are screaming their rage to the universe. Maybe the Blood Wars are scootching over in this direction. He doesn't know. He hopes not, that sounds terrible.
He's exhausted, but he doesn't let himself collapse just yet. The plan had been to rent a room at the tavern with the dragon bartender, but that had not gone quite as he'd hoped. Devils don't really like humans, and he'd be both in danger and was bad for business, so the dragon wasn't willing to rent him a room and he wasn't willing to stay. Which is just as well, really, the tavern wasn't much warmer than anywhere else in this cursed place, and the entire place smelled like brimstone and blood. He'd probably be driven to sneezing if he tried to stay there for long periods of time. The beds probably had weird Hell bed bugs, anyway. Mephistopheles had seemed like that kind of prick. The kind that would make evil hellish bed bugs to infest all of the beds in the realm, nibbling at your squishy bits while you slept. It's likely that he's rationalizing, but he's been through kind of a lot today. He's allowed to make ridiculous rationalizations after getting banished and bound to literal Hell. Whatever works to help him cope, keep himself walking forward instead of sliding to the ground in an exhausted heap.
That's how you die, in weather like this. Collapse, say you're just going to rest for a little while, never wake up again. He's not really sure how that'd interact with being in an afterlife, but he really doesn't want to find out. It'd probably do something terrible, like destroy his immortal soul forever, or some shit. Freezing to death isn't the worst way to go, but that really doesn't matter if Tymora wouldn't get him after all. Besides, he has things to do. There's an Archdevil on the loose, and he'll be damned if he doesn't put him back. Rather literally.
The cliffs are further away than they appeared. Which figures, really. Maybe they move. The secondary plan had been to try to find a cave in the ice cliff, but that's looking less viable now. He might need a plan C. Maybe he should get to working on that while he can still think coherent thoughts. He stops, considers what he has on him. He glances at the flat expanse of nothing that surrounds him on all sides, and notes how quickly the snow is piling up. He runs through worst case scenarios, decides that he doesn't give a shit, and that if this goes terribly he can probably think his way out of it. The key is to be able to think properly.
Then he unrolls his portable hole and carefully climbs down the ladder. He snakes a hand up to the edge, and after a couple of false starts, successfully rolls the portable hole shut behind him. The six foot wide hole is plunged into absolute darkness, but the unceasing wind is cut off, quieted. It's still a bit cold, but not unnaturally so. He's a bit exposed, out in the middle of fucking nowhere, but the hole will get covered with snow soon enough. And if someone comes to bother him about it, well. They will regret bothering him about it.
He slides to the floor, leaning on a pile of junk and letting his breath out in a sigh.
"How did I get here?" he says, to no one in particular. Sort of a pointless question, really. He knows what happened to lead to this situation, mechanically. It's just so unbelievable and insane that he's having trouble believing it, even after having lived through it.
