Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
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Shemeska
Adventurer
Yep, my horrific engine of PC-killing doom from my home game, the astraloth, ultimately became Pathfinder's astradaemon, and it's the sole monster on the cover of the forthcoming Planar Adventures. Previews should start up sometime after PaizoCon is finished. I'm really proud of the book itself and the cover is just amazing. I'm humbled and flattered that a critter that I created is front and center on a hardcover.
Shemeska
Adventurer
****
Toras stared at Shemeska’s mangled flesh with shock. The single most vain and arguably most untouchable being that he’d ever met now wept openly, fresh blood leaking from the empty socket of her left eye.
“What the f*ck happened to you?” The half-celestial blurted out, a tone of sincere horror and sympathy in his voice at total odds with his normal opinion of the ‘loth sitting across from him.
Shemeska shuddered, her lone hand trembling as she fumbled to light a cigarette, with the act only serving to remind her of her missing arm. Toras stared, utterly aghast at her state and bewildered as to who could do such a thing to her. He’d seen fiends injured before, and he’d been the one responsible for causing those injuries most of the time. He’d buried his blade into a fiend’s chest and severed their heads while laying them low, but in every instance one thing was constant: injured fiendish flesh would unerringly seek to stitch itself back together, with the most powerful of fiends openly regenerating their wounds in seconds if left to recover, with most physical attacks simply doing no damage at all once pulled from their flesh.
Shemeska’s wounds were not healing as they should have. In fact they weren’t healing at all.
“He is punishing me…” Shemeska whispered, the focus of her remaining eye distant, staring past Toras as her brain remained fixated upon the one moment of her experience that she remembered: the Oinoloth’s gaze into her eyes and his admonition of her callous, self-serving vanity over his desires.
“Who?”
“He was beautiful Toras,” She quivered, grimacing in agony with her remaining eye bulging, biting through her own lower lip and slamming her lone hand into the tabletop as the pain threatened to overwhelm her. Unlike her missing eye and missing arm, the self-inflicted injury from her teeth healed almost immediately. “He was so very beautiful…”
Toras could only stare, slack jawed, as Shemeska smiled while she described the Oinoloth holding her aloft by her neck, describing in worshipful terms a moment of horror that focused only on herself and the Oinoloth and utterly devoid of surrounding content. As she spoke, Toras realized that her razorvine crown was in a greater state of disarray than normal, and he realized that it was because at some point it had been removed, unwound, and used to flog her. The Marauder’s crown was soaked in her own blood and strung with bits of her own ragged flesh and fur, flayed from her body repeatedly and then thrust back atop her head.
“I disobeyed him and he is showing me the error of my ways. I am nothing Toras. I am nothing compared to the Oinoloth. I’m not worthy of him. Not yet. I know that now.”
Shemeska continued to ramble, consumed with self-pity and physical agony. Her only solace was the cold agony of the Shadow Sorcelled Key as it hung by its chain around her neck, nestled against her flesh and out of view, but never out of her thoughts. It would never again leave her person. It was too important to the Oinoloth. Far too important to ever abuse again, even if she remained ignorant of what it truly was and what role it would play in the future. She was not yet worthy of that. But she would be. She would be worthy of him.
“What did he do to you?” Toras asked, breaking her from her thoughts.
“I don’t know…” A look of religious ecstasy washed over the Marauder’s face, the look of a woman beaten again and again and convinced of her own worthiness for the abuse, the look of woman naked and flogging herself in a public square while begging the gods for absolution.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Toras motioned to her arm, “You’re missing a limb!”
A snarl formed on the fiend’s features and Toras realized his mistake in pointing out the arch-narcissist’s injury. Her next words began with a hiss.
“The threats against yourself, Florian, and Fyrehowl will cease. You will have no further trouble from me over this matter.” Then came the conditional portion of her statement as she looked up at Toras, her ears perked and her lone eye laser focused on him even as she vainly sought to apply makeup with her remaining hand and telekinesis. “I will eventually heal however, however long that takes, and when I do, if any… ANY… word of my condition reaches ears of the public or press…”
Shemeska’s threat petered out short of her detailing what she would do to him however as fresh blood began trickling out of the fiend’s ruined eye socket, muddying her attempts to applying makeup to somehow beautify herself where her own innate healing and shapechanging magic had uniformly failed.
“What did he do to you?” Toras repeated, far more keen on gleaning a dark from the fiend in her moment of weakness than anything else.
“Whatever he wished to do to me: Correction… punishment… He was so very, very beautiful.” She smiled, her lone eye taking upon a far-off gaze for a moment as she motioned her hands in an idle gesture and turned back to the fighter. “Please, leave Toras. I will not ask again politely.”
Toras swallowed hard, his eyes wide as he watched the fiend slump forward, snarling as she endured another wave of agony. She moved to rest her head in her hands and hide her face, only to remember belatedly that she no longer possessed one of her arms. Shaking, she wept.
Inexplicably, Toras felt sorry for her.
****
At the border between the Market and Guildhall Wards, a bound space was formed by a circular series of concentric rings formed of aged and faded paint on the side of a three story, brick building once a factory, then a temple, and now a series of workshops and above them the dwellings of their workers and salesmen. Once the frame of an advertisement, at some point one of the Ward’s artists or more likely one of the Xaositects had turned the circular outline into a wanted poster of one of the former pre-Hashkar Guvner factols, and years later another had stenciled in a flying hourglass; apparently one Lawful Factol looked just like another as far as the Chaosmen were concerned.
But the cosmos was beloved of irony it seemed as the outer periphery of the ring flickered into an active, swirling portal, shedding blue and orange light across the street as a single figure stepped through. The man stood there for only a moment, gazing about to orient himself within the City of Door’s unique geography before he turned on his heels and set out towards the Clerks’ Ward and a specific location therein.
Dressed in neat, gold trimmed, but otherwise unremarkable robes, Sigil’s muted light shined down on a man whose apparent youth belied an age of centuries belied by magic and many long years spent dwelling within the Astral. He’d hoped not to stand out, and within Sigil’s streets he didn’t, especially as he’d pointedly eschewed any markings of rank or Faction allegiance.
He could have arrived with dozens of bodyguards and attendants. But no, this required discretion and he’d never been overly concerned with the shellac of pomp that came with station and rank. So long as the gears of Law carried on, that was all that mattered, not so much any particular mortal that catalogued their progress and hum. Had he first arrived in Sigil’s Hive or Lower Ward, he might have encountered difficulties as a long, slight man dressed as such, but any creature actually capable of doing him harm would have been capable of noticing the protective spells worn like a dozen invisible cloaks, and those not capable were warned away by an aura of subtle discomfort that was of course particularly effective against the Chaotic.
One foot and then the other, the man lamented that he hadn’t the time to simply wander about in wonder. He hadn’t stepped foot in the City of Doors since before Hashkar’s reign, and it was unfortunate events that drew him back. His itinerary was strict and time-sensitive, and there were dozens of witnesses to the events regarding his arrival that he would need to interview, but the first and most important of those witnesses were first on his list and ideally they would be more allies than anything else. Time would tell, and thirty minutes later he stood upon the threshold of his destination, soon to discover some answers for himself.
Looking up at the Portal Jammer, Nathanial the Inescapable, the presumptive but not-yet-formally appointed Factol of the Fraternity of Order smiled and stepped through the door.
****
The ashen soil of the Waste was not soil in the traditional sense. It, like the raw, physical substance of the various Outer Planes, was a metaphysical construct, an abstract made real and physically concrete. Unlike the raw substance of most planes however, the Waste was paved not only its own accreted substance wrought of belief and absorbed spiritual energies of its own petitioners, but also in eons worth of spilt blood and fallen corpses of Blood War soldiers fallen and subsequently eaten and degraded by the Waste’s ravenous, leaching hunger. Everything was ground to dust: physical substance, spiritual energy, desire, motivation, and above all else, hope.
The yugoloth fortress was of recent construction, less than a decade old, and like the City at the Center, it existed at a metaphysical tangent point of all three layers of the Waste: Oinos, Niffleheim, and Pluton. The location was not in any way of natural prominence, but somehow artificially constructed. The arcanaloths tasked to construct the obelisks surrounding the fortress, like miniature Loadstones of Misery, and who’d enacted the rituals necessary to bind the location in place, protected and secure, had done so yelping and whining in disbelief and frustration. The barking wizards did all of their tasks without understanding how they worked, even at the slightest, most base level. The material was beyond them, and they had followed their instructions to the letter, all of them personally designed and written by the Oinoloth himself.
Within a pocket of the Waste drawn out and sutured in place, safe from the prying eyes of gods and any others, the Oinoloth kept something in place, treasured and useful. There were other such locations of course, each with their own bottled treasures, all similar in nature to the archives and vaults that studded the slopes of Gehenna’s mountains put in place by Larsdana Ap Neut eons before, but the Oinoloth’s present activities were done without the presence of a baernaloth whispering and instructing as the 1st Magistrix of the Fourfold Furnaces had had.
As for Larsdana, the Oinoloth had equal parts respect and disdain, a similar spread of feelings as played across his features as he stood there, surrounded by pale magical lights in the vault at the center of the fortress. Unlike his feelings for Larsdana though, the respect that played across his muzzle at present was entirely false.
Vorkannis stood within a vault of black stone, warded to an extent that rivaled the deepest reaches of Khin-Oin itself, his eyes glowing a lurid, sickly albino pink, cutting the gloom like a pair of knives into fallow, eager flesh.
“We gathered the tomes in Sigil that you requested.”
“From both locations you specified.”
“And from Hashkar’s vault in Mechanus.”
The Oinoloth nodded, holding out his hands to accept the items pillaged from Sigil and the Fortress of Enlightened Discipline, the books still smudged with soot and marked by blood. Concurrently his brain reached out and sifted through not only the surface thoughts of the figures surrounding him, but of the other occupant that dwelled there in the room. Effortlessly the archfiend sifted and then dipped deeper, wrenching open their minds and shining a light on places they might not have been consciously aware of themselves.
Finding nothing beyond what he expected, the Oinoloth smiled, even as the figures whimpered from the mental onslaught and struggled to regain their footing. A soft susurrus that mirrored the figures own anguish filled the air from the surrounding darkness, and at the Oinoloth’s feet, the darkness stirred beyond the drifting shadows that leapt from the Oinoloth’s form that resembled an artist’s cloud of drifting plague spores.
Pseudopods of gray flesh crept from out of the surrounding gloom, tentatively crawling forward like the tongues of myriad, abused puppies, aching for love and approval. Softly the Oinoloth reached down and caressed the nearest such creeping limb as the others brushed at the fringes of his cobalt robes.
“Father is proud of you.”
Masking his utter and complete derision, the Ebon smiled and stroked the pseudopods, petting the thing in the darkness as the trio of figures smiled their own identical, rapturous smiles.
“There will be more for you to do in the future.” The Ebon whispered, gently and seductively, “More ways to show your love and in turn to earn my pride in you, my dearest child. But for the moment rest, recover, and learn from your experiences. When you are ready, you will be fed.”
The thing in the darkness whispered a soft chorus of adoration, purring in its own fluid way before another voice cut the air from a dozen yards behind the Oinoloth, from a cell at the other end of the vault.
“I WILL NOT ENDURE THIS INJUSTICE FOREVER! I WILL…”
Alisohn Nilesia’s voice broke as the Oinoloth glanced and a burst of telekinetic force hurled her against the stone wall of her cell, knocking her senseless to then slump against the floor, whimpering and crying, desperate but yet not having succumbed to the ever-present leaching of the Waste. Madness and fanaticism yet staved away the hunger of the Threefold Gloom. Inexplicably hope remained.
Vorkannis only sneered as he glanced back, “I was not speaking to you wretch.”
****
Shemeska
Adventurer
Shemmy does not deserve your sympathy. Trust me here.
And here's the Paizo Blog giving a preview of Planar Adventures (I wrote this particular blog entry)
Todd's Top 5
Shemeska
Adventurer
I interpreted the three figures, each speaking different parts of the same sentence as gehreleths enthralled by Vorkannis. I read somewhere that one of the ways Apomps manifested himself was as three gehreleths, one of each subtype, that speak the way you described here. If they are just gehreleths, they would immediately attack Vorkannis on sight (and get shredded in quick succession). Were they separated from their Triangle medalliions? Otherwise they'd 'know' if father was pleased with them, wouldn't they? But maybe they aren't gehreleths at all. In any case, I can't wait to read on.
Shemeska
Adventurer
I interpreted the three figures, each speaking different parts of the same sentence as gehreleths enthralled by Vorkannis. I read somewhere that one of the ways Apomps manifested himself was as three gehreleths, one of each subtype, that speak the way you described here. If they are just gehreleths, they would immediately attack Vorkannis on sight (and get shredded in quick succession). Were they separated from their Triangle medalliions? Otherwise they'd 'know' if father was pleased with them, wouldn't they? But maybe they aren't gehreleths at all. In any case, I can't wait to read on.
The three figures talking to Vorkannis are the ones responsible for stealing those books in Sigil in two different places, and in murdering the Factol of the Fraternity of Order and stealing some stuff in Mechanus - all at the same time. They all look like Nilesia. Mostly. And then there was Nilesia who screamed out. Given that Nilesia was seen to have been flayed by Her Serenity waaaaaaay back near the start of the storyhour, there's explanation forthcoming as to what's going on. But there's significant hints here.
The flavor about Apomps manifesting as three gehreleths, one of each subtype, is I'm pretty sure something I came up with. At the very least I use that imagery later on in the storyhour when Apomps ends up showing up (spoilers yes, but I think that everyone could see that coming).
Vorkannis was referring to himself when he said, "Father is pleased."
Thank you for clarifying. From the earlier chapter, when Vorkannis said hello to Apomps, I thought this scene was in some way connected to him. Now Nilesia's showing up and confusing everyone makes more sense to me. Rereading the scene, I think I now know what those Nilesia figures really are. Can't wait to read more!
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