A huge, damp, papery sac floated above the ground of Hell. Angel-like figures with feathered wings clung to its surface, their bodies struggling futilely beneath layers of sticky matter, like flies trapped in amber. Chains at the bottom anchored the structure to the hellish landscape.
They looked like angels.
But those angels had actually been dead for thousands upon thousands of years. During the fiercest years of the Blood War against the Abyss, millions of angels had attacked Baator. They had dealt devastating blows to the Nine Hells, but their victories were always short-lived. The corruption and depravity of this plane swiftly erased the angels' triumphs from its surface, replacing them with more corruption and depravity.
In the end, just as the Eladrin had failed in their all-out assault on the Abyss, only a few thousand of those millions of angels had escaped and withdrawn from Baator. The others had either become Baator's fallen angels and daemonettes, become trophies for devils-such as the belt of angel heads around Bael's waist-or become another kind of ruin on the surface.
What appeared before Aaron and the others, for example, was a remnant left by those angels. Avernus was littered with such remains.
These creatures had once been angels-or at least, these were angels' corpses. After they fell in the Blood War, however, creatures native to Avernus had taken over their bodies.
Throughout Avernus, aggressive colonies of Stygian Bees built enormous nests from the corpses of slain angels and other fallen Celestials. These structures possessed a magical buoyancy and had to be chained to the surface of Avernus. The cocooned angels writhed eerily as the larvae inside them squirmed, creating the illusion that they were still alive.
The Hellcar roared past as the angelic remains writhed in the distance. Strings of maggots crawled