Raise Dead (and other resurrection spells) all have a variant of this clause:
Raise Dead: If the creature's soul is both willing and at liberty to rejoin the body, the creature returns to life
Resurrection: If its soul is free and willing, the target returns to life
True Resurrection: If the creature's soul is free and willing, the creature is restored to life
(Emphasis added).
Night Hags bring souls to Hades in their soul bags. While in the bag, the soul is trapped, but what happens once the soul is released from the bag and ends up in Hades? Is it still trapped?
Is a character's soul free to be resurrected once it reaches Hades by way of a Night Hag's soul bag?
Best Answer
DM's Call
This answer is primarily based upon the information I have from the Player's Handbook (PHB), the Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG), and Mordenkainan's Tome of Foes (MToF). There may be additional sources that expand on this.
Given that this question focuses solely upon Hades, it's important to recognize that the soul has been taken to a plane which is NOT the Nine Hells nor the Abyss and thus the applicable lore associated with those planes is not relevant. If you look on page 302 of the PHB, there is a chart, which depicts all of the outer planes. Notably, Hades is situated squarely at the bottom equally between Law & Chaos, therefore, this plane as a whole is Neutral Evil. This is made further definitive by the table on page 58 of the DMG.
If you defer to page 63 of the DMG, there's a brief description of Hades which indicates that most of the souls that end up here are those which are unclaimed by the Upper Planes or other Lower Planes, eventually becoming larva. Furthermore, it goes on to say that night hags (along with other magically-oriented evil creatures) like to harvest the larvae for use in unspecified vile rituals and that other fiends like to feed on them.
Finally, throughout Chapter 1 of MToF, it details multiple elements of the Blood War including notably the risks of dying in the afterworld on the plane that a fiend is native to. If a devil dies in the Nine Hells, they are dead forever (with the notable exception of lemures); however, if they die in the Abyss they simply reform in the Nine Hells.
So to answer your question, is a character's soul free to be resurrected once it reaches Hades by way of a Night Hag's soul bag?
This DM would rule maybe.
While the soul is contained within the soul bag, it is not free to be resurrected per that item's description. However, the soul bag can specifically only contain one soul. Furthermore, per the lore above, the Night Hag is likely to want to remove the soul from the bag for the purpose of forcing it to become a larva which they can harvest for 'vile rituals'.
Given that Night Hags canonically delight in corrupting creatures, I am inclined to think that whatever 'vile ritual' they may want to perform upon a larva captured in this manner is not likely to be done in 10 minutes.
Thus, this DM would roll a d6 and whatever comes up would be the number of days that the night hag's going to spend performing vile rituals before the larva succumbs and the soul is utterly destroyed.