ken the door-darkening was a mortal, once, a very long time ago. they spoke common, draconic, and gnomish. they had a lover named providence. people did not like ken very much. no, they did not like ken at all. no one beloved would be titled for their tendency to make a room worse simply by entering it.
ken the door-darkening was damned upon their death. they were sent to the infernal plane, where they were to be imprisoned and tortured for eternity. after all, people hated the very sight of ken, didn't they? they hadn't earned a peaceful afterlife, no, no.
ken the door-darkening was told they would never get out of hell. nobody ever gets out of hell. not the souls that are damned there, at least. perhaps some auspicious others may come and go, but the damned and the claimed will stay put. a soul getting out— can you imagine? preposterous, they said. no one ever gets out.
ken the door-darkening tried anyway. they tried in all the conventional ways: slipping through a portal, following a mortal visitor who had genuine recourse to leave, sneaking away on the back of a devil who decided to take a trip to the material plane. none of these worked, obviously. hell is prepared for attempts such as these. if ken wanted to get out, first they'd have to get clever, and then they'd have to get creative.
ken the door-darkening realized that the borders between the planes are porous in both directions. the barriers between the material plane and other planes vary in thickness— some places, by consequence, will see increased influence in the magic, the environment, the population from the plane with the thinnest edge. in some places it is child's play to access the elemental planes, or the celestial plane, or faerie... or, indeed, the infernal plane.
ken the door-darkening began pressing at the edges. if they worked tirelessly enough perhaps they could squeeze themself through the barrier at its thinnest point and wind up on the other side. have you ever tried to push your hand through fine mesh netting without tearing a hole in the material? oh, but a hole would be noticeable. a hole would get ken caught. they would have to face the consequences for tearing a hole. so they simply pressed. and they pressed. they pressed until the facsimile of a body they were given upon entering (their true body was buried on the material plane when they died, as most are) rotted and fell away, until in their isolation they lost all sense of themself— yes, they must have been alone, for their efforts must have been secret, for anyone who might have known of ken's intentions would surely have been rewarded for exposing such a scheme, for it wouldn't be possible to take anyone with them. they pressed and they pressed until all that remained was their soul— their soul which had been damned for eternity, their soul which could never cease to be until the full term of their damnation had been paid. they pressed. and, eventually, millennia in the making, they pushed through.
ken the door-darkening thought perhaps for a moment they'd wound up on the elemental plane of earth. they weren't sure what they would do on the elemental plane of earth. what would happen to them there? would there be anything for them to inhabit? were they to be stuck there for eternity, too? well, an eternity on the elemental plane of earth was certainly more agreeable than an eternity in hell, so if that were to be their fate they would cleave to it as tightly as they could.
ken the door-darkening was not on the elemental plane of earth. ken had succeeded: ken was on the material plane. ken was simply encased in earth— specifically, in the stone wall of an underground mine. and, oh, what a relief it was to realize that they were contained within a wall! a soul must be contained, you see. a loose soul floating about would be noticed right away, would see them immediately recalled to hell and surely punished for their transgression. they would be safe in the wall, for a time. they simply needed someone to pass by the wall with some other container to put them in— perhaps a jar or a bottle or something— and from there they could find their way into an unoccupied body. that would be the easy part, they were certain of it. but to get to the bottle and then the body first they had to wait.
ken the door-darkening waited in the wall for, oh, two months? three? very difficult to tell, within the wall, even without the temporal strangeness instilled in one by some hundreds of years in hell and some thousands of years escaping hell. yes, ken could have left the wall at any time— the wall and ken had built a rapport, see, and if ken had asked politely then the wall would have been so very eager to assist ken in creating a hole through which they could leave the wall. but, well, if they left the wall they'd have to go back. better to stay in the wall, better by far.
ken the door-darkening sensed people— people! for the first time, people! oh, but, no— where— the wrong way, they were going the wrong way, they were going to keep right along the path where ken was encased along the left-hand turn, and if they passed by perhaps they'd never come back, perhaps no one would ever come for ken. now, that simply wouldn't do. so ken politely asked the wall to politely ask the floor to create some sort of hazard that would force the people this direction. and the wall, a good friend of ken's by now, acquiesced, and the floor, a good friend of the wall's, acquiesced, and a hole opened up in front of the people, splitting open like a creature widening its jaws, too far across to leap. so the people turned back. three of them, three of them turned back: an elf, and a tiefling, and a fire genasi. and the elf had flasks, so many flasks. ken could fit very nicely inside a flask, and they said as much. ken begged and pleaded as best they knew how, whining so prettily. if they'd had a face perhaps they'd have pouted, batted their eyes. and the people wanted to leave at first, they continued walking right past, but ken followed as far as they could and, eventually, kindness won the day. imagine that! kindness! kindness from people! the elf pressed the mouth of a flask against the wall and the wall opened a hole exactly that width and ken slipped right into the flask, easy as anything. they asked ken's pronouns and ken's name. ken had no memory of either— they'd had them, once, long ago, so very long— and, well, ken wasn't much bothered by whatever their new friends deigned to call them, so delighted to be called anything at all. the elf suggested they call the soul in the flask "myrtle." ken saw no problem with this. they would answer to myrtle. they would answer to anything. they were out of the wall.
