Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
Shemeska
Adventurer
The rooftop erupted in a chorus of shouts from a dozen pompously dressed Golden Lords and would-be Golden Lords: laments for their ruined evenings, laments for their ruined food, laments for their ruined outfits and finery, and above all else, laments for their ruined social reputations. Alone in being unbefouled by the explosive death of her received message’s courier, Shemeska gracefully stood as if nothing untoward had occurred. Turning to the guard nearest her, a lithe, silver-blond tiefling whose ears bled a thin trail of blood down his neck, she locked eyes and began to whisper.
With the first words that passed her lips, words that caused the layer of makeup that painted her lips to momentarily sizzle and char black, her tiefling groomer-guard’s gaze went black, as did the next of her guards sequentially, one by one, until the barbed touch of the spell lanced to the minds of each and every occupant there on the rooftop.
“You will remember none of this. Your evening proceeded without incident, the food was lovely, and you have no particular details of the evening which might later come to your mind if asked. Your clothing was befouled in-transit to your homes by a wandering group of Xaositects with buckets of blood because it happened to be just that kind of day in their addled bone boxes. I was not here. My employees were here in case I decided to attend, but I did not, and at the end of the evening they returned to their prior scheduled tasks.”
Her breath heavy, her black heart quickened and racing, and her chest -itself propped high for display by magic that took the place of a mundane gown’s whalebone- rising and falling with a mixture of feelings, the ‘loth blinked, waved a hand at the bloody aftermath on the tables and floor, and walked immediately to the exit. Before she reached the stairs, the mess was cleared and she herself vanished in the flicker-flash of a teleport.
Seconds later she appeared within a private room in the Azure Iris, her hand immediately pulling out the Shadow Sorcelled Key from below the heavy folds of her dress to feel its alien and predatory chill in her hands. The shadows licked at her flesh reassuringly as her head spun with consideration of just what the Oinoloth wanted, desired, and intended by his words. Every situation played out in her mind for twenty long minutes before she finally caught her breath and moved past the first blizzard of thoughts that ranged from the prosaic to the carnal.
Would this next encounter lay the groundwork for another part of her payment due? Was the Ebon, having newly released Shylara the Manged from her imprisonment now intending to strip her of her unearned power and office and replace her with a more suited occupant of that throne? Was the Ebon simply tired of his bleeding, mediocre wretch of a consort, and now, having tasted her student, ready for her embrace?
Subconsciously lifting the Key in her hands clasped almost in prayer to 13 uncaring entities older than gods or perhaps simply to one who sat atop Khin-Oin, she touched its length to her lips and kissed the artifact entrusted into her keeping. Whatever the Ebon’s desires and design, she would discover and she would seize the position, respect, and power that she deserved.
Fretting, the ‘loth paced back and forth. The Ebon was absolutely clear in that the Shadow Sorcelled Key could under no circumstances leave Sigil. Where then to leave it? How to keep it safe and secure?
Shemeska snarled and went to a mirror to wash and repaint her lips, her mind still racing. There were too many uncertainties in the Key’s effect and the manner in which it inconceivably broke the fundamental laws of Sigil. The Key was safe in her hands, but should it leave the touch of a conscious mind… no it could not simply be bound in spell traps and buried in the Slags like a vampire seeking millennia of uninterrupted sleep.
“Who the f*ck… who the f*ck…” She hissed, desperately wishing to have a mortal to torture and have their screaming sooth her worries, but there wasn’t the time.
Of course, she thought, it couldn’t be another ‘loth. That was the worst option imaginable, and the other examples of her kind within Sigil were the utter worst owing to the familiarity of centuries or longer which in almost all cases bred contempt beyond belief. Faces, names, pseudonyms, and even a true name sprang to her mind and she dismissed them all as options. None of them were worthy of her and none of them were worthy of holding what the Oinoloth had given to her and her alone.
No… she wouldn’t give it to any of them. But then, paused on the precipice of screaming in agonized desperation, she realized the answer to her conundrum. Smiling, she whispered a short phrase of magic and with her makeup once again perfect, she gestured and vanished.
The first teleport deposited her into a torture chamber below the Slags, and then another shunted her to an empty warehouse in the Lower Ward, and then another and another and another. The blizzard of teleports -some thirty eight in all- served to muddy her tracks from divinations beyond her standard repertoire of spells she wore to mask her location, and they continued until she emerged in a sealed room atop a centuries long established, respected, and absolutely inconsequential private attorney’s office in the Lady’s Ward.
“It has been some time, hasn’t it? At least a decade, if not more.” She laughed before glancing into a mundane mirror, shapeshifting into a wildly different guise, and gathering together the trappings of her momentary form’s station and professional. Where the King of the Crosstrade had been, there now stood a young, mostly androgynous tiefling woman of thoroughly mixed heritage dressed in the crisp and pressed outfit of an attorney, clasping a heavy ledger and bag, and bearing a very specific and very specifically enchanted badge of admission. The only noteworthy element was the bright length of violet running through her hair. Even in disguise, the Marauder still had some need to stand out as unique.
One more teleport and she would find herself back in a very familiar and comforting location she hadn’t been for far too many long years. That was where she would leave the Key. There in the proximity of a long beloved figure in a place where none would ever seek to look and especially to look there for her.
Two centuries earlier:
“What do you mean he won’t speak to me?!” Joseph Arnisikarion’s face was a lurid purple of frustrated, impotent rage and it took all of his composure as a man of station to not pound the table with his fists and demand satisfaction.
“As I’ve explained sirrah,” The lawyer looked up from her desk, her face entirely unphased by the nobleman’s anger, “Your uncle desires to remain to himself in his retirement. You’ve read the papers he presented to the Temple of Tyr and the instructions given to us as legal proxies to see to his wishes.”
“I’m his nephew! I’m his principal heir!” The half-elf nobleman’s left eye twitched as he bordered once again on losing his composure.
“You’re –one- of his heirs sirrah.” The lawyer corrected, “You have three younger siblings, two half-siblings, an aunt, and multiple cousins and their descendants. They count as heirs as well, and when my client either passes away or sees fit to distribute his wealth outside of his holding accounts with the Temple, then perhaps he will see fit to grant an audience, be it from a coffin or convalescent bed. But that it not my decision to make, nor is it yours.”
“I don’t want his money! I don’t want his title!” Joseph pleaded, lying through his teeth in a manner so transparent that the tiefling sitting opposite him could have discerned that fact even if she wasn’t capable of magically plumping the truth by virtue of the candle discretely burning in an obscured niche in her office. “I just want to speak with my uncle and know why he won’t see his family!”
“Again sirrah, that it not my place to decide, but only to see about the Golden Lord’s wishes in our capacity as legal proxies.”
The small law firm in Sigil’s Lady’s Ward was old and well respected within the circles of power and wealth, though to their credit they’d avoided entangling themselves in the power plays of guilds and Factions, preferring to remain out of the limelight and serving individual clients and occasionally some of the Ward’s temples. In the case of the Golden Lord Eustace Arnisikarion, they served as the only public face of the reclusive, elderly shut-in who’d locked his doors and withdrawn from public life a decade and a half earlier after liquidating his vast mercantile holdings to a number of private buyers of all types and interests, ranging from the Temple of the Abyss, the Planar Trade Consortium, a dozen individual Merkhants, and of course the King of the Crosstrade.
“How do I know that my uncle is even still alive?”
“Your uncle is very much still alive.” The lawyer frowned, “I have spoken with him myself, though his interactions with myself and other agents of this firm are few and far between. Your uncle for his own reasons that frankly I am neither privy too nor entitled to understand, simply wishes to remain in isolation. As you know he divested himself of his business holdings and land, with the exception of his mansion in the Lady’s Ward following the sudden death of his fiancé. Grief will do many things to a man, and I would assume that he wishes to live out his twilight years in peace.”
“And how can I trust you?”
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed.
“Not that I’m accusing you or your firm of lying.” The young heir held up his hands, though his derision was obvious.
“If you don’t wish to take our word regarding your uncle’s health, you are more than welcome to speak with the priests of the Temple of Tyr. Given the rarity of your uncle’s direct communication, they possess a drop his blood in safe, secure holding, and remain aware at all times if he is alive or dead. If that situation changes, our firm will be made aware, we will enter the estate and begin the distribution of his wealth and titles according to his will. Beyond that, and adjudication beyond the simple terms of the will are to be provided to us in writing no later than thirty days following the announcement of the Golden Lord’s passing and the priests of the Temple of Tyr will hear those claims and pass judgment.”
“But I…”
“The situation is just as out of my hands as it is yours sirrah.” The lawyer’s voice was calm and measured. “In the absence of your uncle desiring otherwise, you and your siblings will continue to receive your monthly allowance taken from the interest on his holdings in trust with the Temple, not a copper more or less.”
“He’s old.” The nobleman fully realized he was getting nowhere, and legally he had no recourse. “And he’s an elven aasimar for the Seldarine’s sake. I’m already middle-aged and only the gods know when he’ll finally die. I’ve been waiting for most of my life for him to expire and pass on his title and most of his wealth to me. The trickle each month isn’t enough. I need more! I –deserve– more! Let me speak with him! I can convince him to take pity and give me more! Please!!!”
Looking up and finally making direct eye contact, the lawyer sighed. An androgynous figure of a middle aged tiefling with long, pin-straight raven black hair, she was impeccably dressed in neat green and black dress robes. She wouldn’t have particularly stood out in court or walking the streets of the Lady’s Ward, but for the unique stripe of purple she affected in her hair.
“I’m sorry,” She said, “But that’s simply not possible. There’s nothing more to say, and you will receive your monthly allowance as standard upon the first of the month. Good day to you sirrah.”
Despondent but left without legal recourse, the young nobleman stared for several long moments before nodding and walking to the door. The lawyer’s business-like smile devoid of actual sincerity was nearly as damning as the heavy, dull sound of the door closing behind him and the metallic clunk of the latch.
Alone in the office, and briefly back in her native form, vivid emerald flame alight in her eyes, Shemeska the Marauder smiled.
Back in the present:
Two centuries earlier the Gold Lord Eustace Arnisikarion had been at the height of his power, influence, and fortune. Childless, the aasimar of clearly elven descent had abruptly withdrawn from public life and shut himself inside of his mansion following a period of ill health, the death of a bastard child, the death of his wife, an accident that left him disfigured… the rumors flew thick and swift for the better part of a week, and then the man was forgotten. Sigil had many Golden Lords, and among the extremely wealthy of their tier and rank, reclusive eccentricity was hardly rare. In short time the man was forgotten amidst the more important and ever-byzantine drama of the Factions and more prominent, more powerful, and wealthier powers in the City of Doors.
Eustace would become a historical footnote, with the occasional learned tout dropping his name as the recluse who dwelled in a particular mansion behind thick fences overgrown with razorvine and nothing more. History had passed him by, and with the passage of time his heirs aged and passed as well.
Several blocks distant from the Golden Lord’s estate, the Marauder stepped out of an alleyway that obscured the flicker-flash of her teleport and the young, largely forgettable tiefling lawyer stepped out into the street, a thick legal satchel at her side carrying papers for Eustace to see and approve, and a badge on her chest to serve as a key for the mansion’s magical wards.
“I’m here to see Lord Eustace Arnisikarion as legal representative and proxy, go-between for the Lord and the Temple of Tyr.”
“Well I’ll be… damn…” The bariaur guard captain at the gate glanced down at the “lawyer” and smiled. “What’s it been? A decade since I’ve seen you?”
“Nearly that, yes.” Shemeska returned the guard captain’s smile, “We have no regular schedule to see the old recluse, and only when he indicates by magic to the Temple of Tyr that he desires to give word to the outside world are we utilized as over-glorified couriers. It appears that it’s that time again.”
“So it is. Let our distant paymaster know that we hope that he remains in good health and we appreciate having some of the easiest and most lucrative positions of their kind in the City of Doors. We’ve had less than five attempts at trespassing this year.”
“The razorvine tends to dissuade the attempts I’m certain.” The Marauder smiled, knowing that the razorvine on the fences was a mercy compared to what anyone actually breaching the perimeter would find.
Pleasantries were made, introductions to the guards who’d yet to meet her, and then the gate’s locks were opened, the chains pulled, and the “lawyer” stepped beyond and walked through the estates abandoned, overgrown gardens towards the sprawling, monstrously baroque mansion at their center. She smiled as her feet swiftly carried her towards her goal, soft leather boots on onyx cobblestones much worse for wear since Eustace had vanished from public life. For all the twisted, tangled razorvine that chocked the estate grounds, for all the spattering of dried avian sh*t from flocks of executioner’s ravens roosting high above in the trees, the weathered, abandoned grounds and exterior of the mansion was a monstrous and planned and plotted sham.
Upon touching the exterior door, the badge she wore unlocked the layers upon layers of wards that kept the Golden Lord’s privacy absolutely sacrosanct. The door opened without so much as a creak upon the hinges, the Marauder slipped inside, and the door closed behind her.
The inside of the mansion was as she had left it two centuries earlier: spotless, decorated with the full wealth and prestige of one of Sigil’s Golden Lords, even one now long forgotten, though with the addition in those years wherein the Lord withdrew from public contact of a particular quirk of the walls. Every external wall had been meticulously covered in a thin layer of lead, painted over in gorgon’s blood, and marked with veritable murals of symbols: all to prevent scrying, extradimensional movement, and any magical prying into the affairs of a man lost to the world.
None of it of course had been by the designs of Eustace Arnisikarion, but by his would-be bride.
Shemeska smiled as she cast out her conscious mind to feel the wards that she’d penned and found them as immaculate as ever. All of the spells remained in place to keep, there to keep the mansion in immaculate condition, reknitting the foundations and strengthening the beams and stones and slate roofing tiles above them, but more so that any errant portal that might ever potentially open into the mansion’s -nearly- vacant interior would be met with immediate and lethal magical assault. She’d warded the mansion centuries before coming into possession of the Shadow Sorceled Key, and with that sole exception, there was no manner in which to conventionally stop the Lady’s portals from naturally forming in any bound space available. One simply had to ward the grounds to ensure that any such entry was imminently lethal.
Slowly walking through the grand mansion, smiling at the decorations she had selected, the art she had commissioned, the wealth on display to catch her attention and paid for by a man in wild, foolish love she found more than a few instances of her wards doing precisely what she had designed them for. Occasionally she would find piles of dust, ashen smears upon the hand-woven carpets, or the bloody, shambling tracks of those not completely and immediately incinerated. Of course the spells written into the mansion’s superstructure would tidy up such inconvenient messes in due time as well, and she remained utterly unconcerned as she neatly stepped over them.
Ascending the grand staircase towards the upper levels of the palatial mansion, Shemeska shed her guise as the Golden Lord’s lawyer and resumed her natural form. While tempted to wear her favorite and iconic dress, she instead chose something more fitting to the moment and her company that awaited her high above.
Eustace still lived, indeed he did, and his privacy was shrouded by the untended grounds run wild with razorvine, the wards on the mansion itself, layers of legal contracts, and a steady if all in all comparatively miniscule flow of gold from the accounts still nominally in his name. Gold greased the proper channels, hired guards, and provided his remaining and increasingly distant heirs -exiled and unwelcome as they were- an allowance each month and kept them from doing much beyond waiting for their primogenitor to die and legally cede the bulk of his wealth to them. Of course every few years one of them died, clearly by natural causes or an accident, slowly winnowing down the ranks of any capable of understanding the truth of the matter, and eventually they would all be gone with none the wiser as to the course of events.
Of course the Marauder had complete and total control of the situation and the entirety of the man’s assets now in the present, as she had since he’d withdrawn from the world two centuries previous.
Divinations by the Temple of Tyr would reveal precious little beyond, ‘He is alive and he yet dwells within his mansion. Until one of these situations changes, his heirs must patiently wait for his demise so long as he refuses to admit them.’
Standing at the sculpted marble entryway to the Master Bedroom, Shemeska slipped out a small velvet pouch from the satchel she carried, held out her left hand and neatly, with faux reverence, slipped a platinum and diamond ring upon her left ring finger, appreciating the irony of that particular bauble in the present moment.
Having already shed her temporary tiefling form, she briefly stretched her neck and flicked her tail side to side, mentally adjusting each and every physical detail to best suit that of a pristinely groomed arcanaloth. Gone was the lawyers simple, functional, and boringly formal court attire, now replaced with something well known to the place she now stood: a scandalously tight, formfitting gown of multiple layers of transparent white silk that left precious little to the imagination as she paused at the threshold and stepped into the sprawling, palatial bedroom.
“Hello my beloved…”
Licking her lips, the fiend closed her eyes and deeply inhaled, tasting the room’s saturated agony as much as the lingering perfume and flowers kept perpetually fresh for over two centuries. Everything was as it had been when she’d had her secret affair with the Golden Lord and brought about the love-stricken fool’s complete and utter doom, though over the years since she’d seen fit to occasionally add to the chamber’s decorations both to suit her own abounding narcissistic tastes and a yearning need to add to the man’s agony.
A gasping moan escaped parched lips and the figure that lay upon the massive bed that she’d provided for their brief and tumultuous affair, carved to her specifications from the then living bodies of four sister dryads. It was there upon the bed that the Golden Lord Eustace Arnisikarion still lay where she’d left him two centuries earlier, paralyzed, moaning incoherently in low and constant pain, and with his tongue removed, bitten off and swallowed by the fiend when he’d bedded her during an affair that had lasted a week at most before she’d grew tired of his mortal frailty and cast him aside for her own apprentice, newly arrived from Gehenna: Shylara.
Surrounding the mute and crippled Golden Lord were all the reminders of his folly and the creature he’d fatally fallen in love with. Scattered about him stood dozens of wood, marble, and metallic sculptures of the Marauder in all manner of poses from the carnal to the prosaic, all of them bereft of clothing, and hung upon the walls or set upon tables lay paintings of the Marauder passionately coupled with each of her consorts she’d taken and disposed of since her malignant use and breaking of the aasimar so many years ago. Dominating one of the walls was a massive mural of the two of them locked in a passionate, loving embrace, dressed in elegant, marital attire, including for Shemeska, the same dress that she now deliberately wore. The mural, painted before she’d betrayed and condemned Eustace to his fate of moribund living-death, was much the same as when the paint had dried, except for a late alteration to her face such that what once provided an image of her smiling and seemingly in love was forever after replaced with a malicious sneer upon her face and her eyes painted so as to always stare directly, mockingly at him.
The paralyzed man murmured and coughed, a tear rolling down his cheek as the Marauder approached, the muscles of his face the only thing that responded to his will as she produced a crystalline vial and held it up to the light before gazing down and smiling. Despite the passage of centuries, the man remained static at the same apparent physical age, of seemingly robust health, except for the tracery of scars that covered his form, all of them neatly fitting the pattern of the Marauder’s claws and teeth, and with the exception of one remaining finger upon his left hand, his limbs ended in raw, irritated stumps from where she’d personally sat atop his chest, held him down, and sawed them off.
As her former lover and would-be husband moaned in agony, she abruptly uncorked the vial and upended the contents into her mouth, appreciating the taste of the sparkling, ruby colored alchemical suspension without suffering any of its effects as it remained held in her mouth and unswallowed.
It was not for her. It was never for her.
Standing over him and gazing down at her hideous handiwork, Shemeska brushed a hand over his cheek to catch the tear upon a single manicured and purple painted claw before deftly placing it upon her tongue to taste of his misery. She smiled, deeply appreciative of the taste and what it represented as she proceeded –as was standard for every visit she made– to make sure that the ring of sustenance remained in place upon his left hand on the finger, nestled snug against the golden wedding band she’d given him as a token of false love.
Still smiling, she stroked her claws down his chest before leaning down and kissing him as passionately as they had each and every moment of their affair, slipping her tongue past his lips and releasing the contents of the vial held in her mouth forcibly down his throat, there to interact with his mortal biology and extend his life and prolong his torment.
“Did you miss me… my love?” Shemeska broke the kiss and lapped at his chin before pulling back and laughing until she was out of breath. As far as ex-lovers went, Shylara the Manged might have escaped relatively untormented by comparison to Eustace Arnisikarion. She at least was free.
Abject, apoplectic rage coursed through the living-dead man’s eyes. She did not grant him the pleasure of reading his thoughts and letting him speak to her. He would remain and suffer, and in suffering grant her pleasure beyond what he might have hoped for in bed or otherwise. At least now he had a purpose beyond simply existing and suffering for her pleasure, an original purpose for which he remained alive, if never whole.
“I’ve brought you a gift old fool.” Shemeska produced the key from where it had hung against the flesh of her thigh and unhooked the mithral chain from her waist. She actually hesitated as she let the chain hang free and prepared to place it at the foot of the bed, not wanting to let it slip beyond her grip and pass from her control. But set it down she did, following the Oinoloth’s instructions that it never leave Sigil, and set it down upon the silken sheets just beyond Eustace’s reach if he’d possessed hands or any mobility at all, but it was ever within his line of sight, swirling with cold, flickering shadows.
Sighing as she placed the artifact down and halfway expecting flaying shadows to come for her moments later, she finally relaxed and stroked her former lover’s flesh with idle malice before she departed to Khin-Oin.
“I’ll be back for you Eustace, not to worry my love, and at some point in the next decade I’ll make sure to come back and give you another kiss and your next dose.” She laughed and kissed his forehead, turning and walking away, gazing about for latent portals before turning back and adding, “And as a complete aside, you should know that the last of your surviving grand nephews is dead. Your line of inheritance ever dwindles my love and soon they will forget that you yet live or that you ever existed at all. But not to worry my dearest Eustace, I won’t forget you. My memory will never fade, and this immortal b*tch that broke you for her own amusement will make sure that regardless of your mortality, you’ll persist and suffer as long as I desire.”
With a horrific, delighted smirk upon her face, Shemeska turned and walked from the room, the man’s ragged moans music to her ears.
“I am almost there my Oinoloth, just as you requested…” She whispered, glancing about at each and every bound space for the swiftest egress from the City of Doors and then to the Waste, debating which route would be the swiftest.
She could have taken a portal to Hopeless and then through another permanent portal there in the courtyard of Mocking Thingol’s palace to Oinos, but that would have taken far too long for her liking. Instead the razorvine-crowned fiend simply activated the first portal she saw with a non-material key, opened it with a thought, and then before the cubes of Tintabulos were visible in the black vault of Acheron’s void, she effortlessly cast a gate and stepped through into Khin-Oin itself.
There would be no grand entry. There would be no arrival with pomp and an honor guard. The gates of the Wasting Tower would remain shut and her arrival unheralded and unnoticed. Only the Oinoloth mattered to her, and only he would see her, and he would see her soon.
“I am here for you my master…”
With the first words that passed her lips, words that caused the layer of makeup that painted her lips to momentarily sizzle and char black, her tiefling groomer-guard’s gaze went black, as did the next of her guards sequentially, one by one, until the barbed touch of the spell lanced to the minds of each and every occupant there on the rooftop.
“You will remember none of this. Your evening proceeded without incident, the food was lovely, and you have no particular details of the evening which might later come to your mind if asked. Your clothing was befouled in-transit to your homes by a wandering group of Xaositects with buckets of blood because it happened to be just that kind of day in their addled bone boxes. I was not here. My employees were here in case I decided to attend, but I did not, and at the end of the evening they returned to their prior scheduled tasks.”
Her breath heavy, her black heart quickened and racing, and her chest -itself propped high for display by magic that took the place of a mundane gown’s whalebone- rising and falling with a mixture of feelings, the ‘loth blinked, waved a hand at the bloody aftermath on the tables and floor, and walked immediately to the exit. Before she reached the stairs, the mess was cleared and she herself vanished in the flicker-flash of a teleport.
Seconds later she appeared within a private room in the Azure Iris, her hand immediately pulling out the Shadow Sorcelled Key from below the heavy folds of her dress to feel its alien and predatory chill in her hands. The shadows licked at her flesh reassuringly as her head spun with consideration of just what the Oinoloth wanted, desired, and intended by his words. Every situation played out in her mind for twenty long minutes before she finally caught her breath and moved past the first blizzard of thoughts that ranged from the prosaic to the carnal.
Would this next encounter lay the groundwork for another part of her payment due? Was the Ebon, having newly released Shylara the Manged from her imprisonment now intending to strip her of her unearned power and office and replace her with a more suited occupant of that throne? Was the Ebon simply tired of his bleeding, mediocre wretch of a consort, and now, having tasted her student, ready for her embrace?
Subconsciously lifting the Key in her hands clasped almost in prayer to 13 uncaring entities older than gods or perhaps simply to one who sat atop Khin-Oin, she touched its length to her lips and kissed the artifact entrusted into her keeping. Whatever the Ebon’s desires and design, she would discover and she would seize the position, respect, and power that she deserved.
Fretting, the ‘loth paced back and forth. The Ebon was absolutely clear in that the Shadow Sorcelled Key could under no circumstances leave Sigil. Where then to leave it? How to keep it safe and secure?
Shemeska snarled and went to a mirror to wash and repaint her lips, her mind still racing. There were too many uncertainties in the Key’s effect and the manner in which it inconceivably broke the fundamental laws of Sigil. The Key was safe in her hands, but should it leave the touch of a conscious mind… no it could not simply be bound in spell traps and buried in the Slags like a vampire seeking millennia of uninterrupted sleep.
“Who the f*ck… who the f*ck…” She hissed, desperately wishing to have a mortal to torture and have their screaming sooth her worries, but there wasn’t the time.
Of course, she thought, it couldn’t be another ‘loth. That was the worst option imaginable, and the other examples of her kind within Sigil were the utter worst owing to the familiarity of centuries or longer which in almost all cases bred contempt beyond belief. Faces, names, pseudonyms, and even a true name sprang to her mind and she dismissed them all as options. None of them were worthy of her and none of them were worthy of holding what the Oinoloth had given to her and her alone.
No… she wouldn’t give it to any of them. But then, paused on the precipice of screaming in agonized desperation, she realized the answer to her conundrum. Smiling, she whispered a short phrase of magic and with her makeup once again perfect, she gestured and vanished.
The first teleport deposited her into a torture chamber below the Slags, and then another shunted her to an empty warehouse in the Lower Ward, and then another and another and another. The blizzard of teleports -some thirty eight in all- served to muddy her tracks from divinations beyond her standard repertoire of spells she wore to mask her location, and they continued until she emerged in a sealed room atop a centuries long established, respected, and absolutely inconsequential private attorney’s office in the Lady’s Ward.
“It has been some time, hasn’t it? At least a decade, if not more.” She laughed before glancing into a mundane mirror, shapeshifting into a wildly different guise, and gathering together the trappings of her momentary form’s station and professional. Where the King of the Crosstrade had been, there now stood a young, mostly androgynous tiefling woman of thoroughly mixed heritage dressed in the crisp and pressed outfit of an attorney, clasping a heavy ledger and bag, and bearing a very specific and very specifically enchanted badge of admission. The only noteworthy element was the bright length of violet running through her hair. Even in disguise, the Marauder still had some need to stand out as unique.
One more teleport and she would find herself back in a very familiar and comforting location she hadn’t been for far too many long years. That was where she would leave the Key. There in the proximity of a long beloved figure in a place where none would ever seek to look and especially to look there for her.
*****
Two centuries earlier:
“What do you mean he won’t speak to me?!” Joseph Arnisikarion’s face was a lurid purple of frustrated, impotent rage and it took all of his composure as a man of station to not pound the table with his fists and demand satisfaction.
“As I’ve explained sirrah,” The lawyer looked up from her desk, her face entirely unphased by the nobleman’s anger, “Your uncle desires to remain to himself in his retirement. You’ve read the papers he presented to the Temple of Tyr and the instructions given to us as legal proxies to see to his wishes.”
“I’m his nephew! I’m his principal heir!” The half-elf nobleman’s left eye twitched as he bordered once again on losing his composure.
“You’re –one- of his heirs sirrah.” The lawyer corrected, “You have three younger siblings, two half-siblings, an aunt, and multiple cousins and their descendants. They count as heirs as well, and when my client either passes away or sees fit to distribute his wealth outside of his holding accounts with the Temple, then perhaps he will see fit to grant an audience, be it from a coffin or convalescent bed. But that it not my decision to make, nor is it yours.”
“I don’t want his money! I don’t want his title!” Joseph pleaded, lying through his teeth in a manner so transparent that the tiefling sitting opposite him could have discerned that fact even if she wasn’t capable of magically plumping the truth by virtue of the candle discretely burning in an obscured niche in her office. “I just want to speak with my uncle and know why he won’t see his family!”
“Again sirrah, that it not my place to decide, but only to see about the Golden Lord’s wishes in our capacity as legal proxies.”
The small law firm in Sigil’s Lady’s Ward was old and well respected within the circles of power and wealth, though to their credit they’d avoided entangling themselves in the power plays of guilds and Factions, preferring to remain out of the limelight and serving individual clients and occasionally some of the Ward’s temples. In the case of the Golden Lord Eustace Arnisikarion, they served as the only public face of the reclusive, elderly shut-in who’d locked his doors and withdrawn from public life a decade and a half earlier after liquidating his vast mercantile holdings to a number of private buyers of all types and interests, ranging from the Temple of the Abyss, the Planar Trade Consortium, a dozen individual Merkhants, and of course the King of the Crosstrade.
“How do I know that my uncle is even still alive?”
“Your uncle is very much still alive.” The lawyer frowned, “I have spoken with him myself, though his interactions with myself and other agents of this firm are few and far between. Your uncle for his own reasons that frankly I am neither privy too nor entitled to understand, simply wishes to remain in isolation. As you know he divested himself of his business holdings and land, with the exception of his mansion in the Lady’s Ward following the sudden death of his fiancé. Grief will do many things to a man, and I would assume that he wishes to live out his twilight years in peace.”
“And how can I trust you?”
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed.
“Not that I’m accusing you or your firm of lying.” The young heir held up his hands, though his derision was obvious.
“If you don’t wish to take our word regarding your uncle’s health, you are more than welcome to speak with the priests of the Temple of Tyr. Given the rarity of your uncle’s direct communication, they possess a drop his blood in safe, secure holding, and remain aware at all times if he is alive or dead. If that situation changes, our firm will be made aware, we will enter the estate and begin the distribution of his wealth and titles according to his will. Beyond that, and adjudication beyond the simple terms of the will are to be provided to us in writing no later than thirty days following the announcement of the Golden Lord’s passing and the priests of the Temple of Tyr will hear those claims and pass judgment.”
“But I…”
“The situation is just as out of my hands as it is yours sirrah.” The lawyer’s voice was calm and measured. “In the absence of your uncle desiring otherwise, you and your siblings will continue to receive your monthly allowance taken from the interest on his holdings in trust with the Temple, not a copper more or less.”
“He’s old.” The nobleman fully realized he was getting nowhere, and legally he had no recourse. “And he’s an elven aasimar for the Seldarine’s sake. I’m already middle-aged and only the gods know when he’ll finally die. I’ve been waiting for most of my life for him to expire and pass on his title and most of his wealth to me. The trickle each month isn’t enough. I need more! I –deserve– more! Let me speak with him! I can convince him to take pity and give me more! Please!!!”
Looking up and finally making direct eye contact, the lawyer sighed. An androgynous figure of a middle aged tiefling with long, pin-straight raven black hair, she was impeccably dressed in neat green and black dress robes. She wouldn’t have particularly stood out in court or walking the streets of the Lady’s Ward, but for the unique stripe of purple she affected in her hair.
“I’m sorry,” She said, “But that’s simply not possible. There’s nothing more to say, and you will receive your monthly allowance as standard upon the first of the month. Good day to you sirrah.”
Despondent but left without legal recourse, the young nobleman stared for several long moments before nodding and walking to the door. The lawyer’s business-like smile devoid of actual sincerity was nearly as damning as the heavy, dull sound of the door closing behind him and the metallic clunk of the latch.
Alone in the office, and briefly back in her native form, vivid emerald flame alight in her eyes, Shemeska the Marauder smiled.
****
Back in the present:
Two centuries earlier the Gold Lord Eustace Arnisikarion had been at the height of his power, influence, and fortune. Childless, the aasimar of clearly elven descent had abruptly withdrawn from public life and shut himself inside of his mansion following a period of ill health, the death of a bastard child, the death of his wife, an accident that left him disfigured… the rumors flew thick and swift for the better part of a week, and then the man was forgotten. Sigil had many Golden Lords, and among the extremely wealthy of their tier and rank, reclusive eccentricity was hardly rare. In short time the man was forgotten amidst the more important and ever-byzantine drama of the Factions and more prominent, more powerful, and wealthier powers in the City of Doors.
Eustace would become a historical footnote, with the occasional learned tout dropping his name as the recluse who dwelled in a particular mansion behind thick fences overgrown with razorvine and nothing more. History had passed him by, and with the passage of time his heirs aged and passed as well.
Several blocks distant from the Golden Lord’s estate, the Marauder stepped out of an alleyway that obscured the flicker-flash of her teleport and the young, largely forgettable tiefling lawyer stepped out into the street, a thick legal satchel at her side carrying papers for Eustace to see and approve, and a badge on her chest to serve as a key for the mansion’s magical wards.
“I’m here to see Lord Eustace Arnisikarion as legal representative and proxy, go-between for the Lord and the Temple of Tyr.”
“Well I’ll be… damn…” The bariaur guard captain at the gate glanced down at the “lawyer” and smiled. “What’s it been? A decade since I’ve seen you?”
“Nearly that, yes.” Shemeska returned the guard captain’s smile, “We have no regular schedule to see the old recluse, and only when he indicates by magic to the Temple of Tyr that he desires to give word to the outside world are we utilized as over-glorified couriers. It appears that it’s that time again.”
“So it is. Let our distant paymaster know that we hope that he remains in good health and we appreciate having some of the easiest and most lucrative positions of their kind in the City of Doors. We’ve had less than five attempts at trespassing this year.”
“The razorvine tends to dissuade the attempts I’m certain.” The Marauder smiled, knowing that the razorvine on the fences was a mercy compared to what anyone actually breaching the perimeter would find.
Pleasantries were made, introductions to the guards who’d yet to meet her, and then the gate’s locks were opened, the chains pulled, and the “lawyer” stepped beyond and walked through the estates abandoned, overgrown gardens towards the sprawling, monstrously baroque mansion at their center. She smiled as her feet swiftly carried her towards her goal, soft leather boots on onyx cobblestones much worse for wear since Eustace had vanished from public life. For all the twisted, tangled razorvine that chocked the estate grounds, for all the spattering of dried avian sh*t from flocks of executioner’s ravens roosting high above in the trees, the weathered, abandoned grounds and exterior of the mansion was a monstrous and planned and plotted sham.
Upon touching the exterior door, the badge she wore unlocked the layers upon layers of wards that kept the Golden Lord’s privacy absolutely sacrosanct. The door opened without so much as a creak upon the hinges, the Marauder slipped inside, and the door closed behind her.
The inside of the mansion was as she had left it two centuries earlier: spotless, decorated with the full wealth and prestige of one of Sigil’s Golden Lords, even one now long forgotten, though with the addition in those years wherein the Lord withdrew from public contact of a particular quirk of the walls. Every external wall had been meticulously covered in a thin layer of lead, painted over in gorgon’s blood, and marked with veritable murals of symbols: all to prevent scrying, extradimensional movement, and any magical prying into the affairs of a man lost to the world.
None of it of course had been by the designs of Eustace Arnisikarion, but by his would-be bride.
Shemeska smiled as she cast out her conscious mind to feel the wards that she’d penned and found them as immaculate as ever. All of the spells remained in place to keep, there to keep the mansion in immaculate condition, reknitting the foundations and strengthening the beams and stones and slate roofing tiles above them, but more so that any errant portal that might ever potentially open into the mansion’s -nearly- vacant interior would be met with immediate and lethal magical assault. She’d warded the mansion centuries before coming into possession of the Shadow Sorceled Key, and with that sole exception, there was no manner in which to conventionally stop the Lady’s portals from naturally forming in any bound space available. One simply had to ward the grounds to ensure that any such entry was imminently lethal.
Slowly walking through the grand mansion, smiling at the decorations she had selected, the art she had commissioned, the wealth on display to catch her attention and paid for by a man in wild, foolish love she found more than a few instances of her wards doing precisely what she had designed them for. Occasionally she would find piles of dust, ashen smears upon the hand-woven carpets, or the bloody, shambling tracks of those not completely and immediately incinerated. Of course the spells written into the mansion’s superstructure would tidy up such inconvenient messes in due time as well, and she remained utterly unconcerned as she neatly stepped over them.
Ascending the grand staircase towards the upper levels of the palatial mansion, Shemeska shed her guise as the Golden Lord’s lawyer and resumed her natural form. While tempted to wear her favorite and iconic dress, she instead chose something more fitting to the moment and her company that awaited her high above.
Eustace still lived, indeed he did, and his privacy was shrouded by the untended grounds run wild with razorvine, the wards on the mansion itself, layers of legal contracts, and a steady if all in all comparatively miniscule flow of gold from the accounts still nominally in his name. Gold greased the proper channels, hired guards, and provided his remaining and increasingly distant heirs -exiled and unwelcome as they were- an allowance each month and kept them from doing much beyond waiting for their primogenitor to die and legally cede the bulk of his wealth to them. Of course every few years one of them died, clearly by natural causes or an accident, slowly winnowing down the ranks of any capable of understanding the truth of the matter, and eventually they would all be gone with none the wiser as to the course of events.
Of course the Marauder had complete and total control of the situation and the entirety of the man’s assets now in the present, as she had since he’d withdrawn from the world two centuries previous.
Divinations by the Temple of Tyr would reveal precious little beyond, ‘He is alive and he yet dwells within his mansion. Until one of these situations changes, his heirs must patiently wait for his demise so long as he refuses to admit them.’
Standing at the sculpted marble entryway to the Master Bedroom, Shemeska slipped out a small velvet pouch from the satchel she carried, held out her left hand and neatly, with faux reverence, slipped a platinum and diamond ring upon her left ring finger, appreciating the irony of that particular bauble in the present moment.
Having already shed her temporary tiefling form, she briefly stretched her neck and flicked her tail side to side, mentally adjusting each and every physical detail to best suit that of a pristinely groomed arcanaloth. Gone was the lawyers simple, functional, and boringly formal court attire, now replaced with something well known to the place she now stood: a scandalously tight, formfitting gown of multiple layers of transparent white silk that left precious little to the imagination as she paused at the threshold and stepped into the sprawling, palatial bedroom.
“Hello my beloved…”
*****
Licking her lips, the fiend closed her eyes and deeply inhaled, tasting the room’s saturated agony as much as the lingering perfume and flowers kept perpetually fresh for over two centuries. Everything was as it had been when she’d had her secret affair with the Golden Lord and brought about the love-stricken fool’s complete and utter doom, though over the years since she’d seen fit to occasionally add to the chamber’s decorations both to suit her own abounding narcissistic tastes and a yearning need to add to the man’s agony.
A gasping moan escaped parched lips and the figure that lay upon the massive bed that she’d provided for their brief and tumultuous affair, carved to her specifications from the then living bodies of four sister dryads. It was there upon the bed that the Golden Lord Eustace Arnisikarion still lay where she’d left him two centuries earlier, paralyzed, moaning incoherently in low and constant pain, and with his tongue removed, bitten off and swallowed by the fiend when he’d bedded her during an affair that had lasted a week at most before she’d grew tired of his mortal frailty and cast him aside for her own apprentice, newly arrived from Gehenna: Shylara.
Surrounding the mute and crippled Golden Lord were all the reminders of his folly and the creature he’d fatally fallen in love with. Scattered about him stood dozens of wood, marble, and metallic sculptures of the Marauder in all manner of poses from the carnal to the prosaic, all of them bereft of clothing, and hung upon the walls or set upon tables lay paintings of the Marauder passionately coupled with each of her consorts she’d taken and disposed of since her malignant use and breaking of the aasimar so many years ago. Dominating one of the walls was a massive mural of the two of them locked in a passionate, loving embrace, dressed in elegant, marital attire, including for Shemeska, the same dress that she now deliberately wore. The mural, painted before she’d betrayed and condemned Eustace to his fate of moribund living-death, was much the same as when the paint had dried, except for a late alteration to her face such that what once provided an image of her smiling and seemingly in love was forever after replaced with a malicious sneer upon her face and her eyes painted so as to always stare directly, mockingly at him.
The paralyzed man murmured and coughed, a tear rolling down his cheek as the Marauder approached, the muscles of his face the only thing that responded to his will as she produced a crystalline vial and held it up to the light before gazing down and smiling. Despite the passage of centuries, the man remained static at the same apparent physical age, of seemingly robust health, except for the tracery of scars that covered his form, all of them neatly fitting the pattern of the Marauder’s claws and teeth, and with the exception of one remaining finger upon his left hand, his limbs ended in raw, irritated stumps from where she’d personally sat atop his chest, held him down, and sawed them off.
As her former lover and would-be husband moaned in agony, she abruptly uncorked the vial and upended the contents into her mouth, appreciating the taste of the sparkling, ruby colored alchemical suspension without suffering any of its effects as it remained held in her mouth and unswallowed.
It was not for her. It was never for her.
Standing over him and gazing down at her hideous handiwork, Shemeska brushed a hand over his cheek to catch the tear upon a single manicured and purple painted claw before deftly placing it upon her tongue to taste of his misery. She smiled, deeply appreciative of the taste and what it represented as she proceeded –as was standard for every visit she made– to make sure that the ring of sustenance remained in place upon his left hand on the finger, nestled snug against the golden wedding band she’d given him as a token of false love.
Still smiling, she stroked her claws down his chest before leaning down and kissing him as passionately as they had each and every moment of their affair, slipping her tongue past his lips and releasing the contents of the vial held in her mouth forcibly down his throat, there to interact with his mortal biology and extend his life and prolong his torment.
“Did you miss me… my love?” Shemeska broke the kiss and lapped at his chin before pulling back and laughing until she was out of breath. As far as ex-lovers went, Shylara the Manged might have escaped relatively untormented by comparison to Eustace Arnisikarion. She at least was free.
Abject, apoplectic rage coursed through the living-dead man’s eyes. She did not grant him the pleasure of reading his thoughts and letting him speak to her. He would remain and suffer, and in suffering grant her pleasure beyond what he might have hoped for in bed or otherwise. At least now he had a purpose beyond simply existing and suffering for her pleasure, an original purpose for which he remained alive, if never whole.
“I’ve brought you a gift old fool.” Shemeska produced the key from where it had hung against the flesh of her thigh and unhooked the mithral chain from her waist. She actually hesitated as she let the chain hang free and prepared to place it at the foot of the bed, not wanting to let it slip beyond her grip and pass from her control. But set it down she did, following the Oinoloth’s instructions that it never leave Sigil, and set it down upon the silken sheets just beyond Eustace’s reach if he’d possessed hands or any mobility at all, but it was ever within his line of sight, swirling with cold, flickering shadows.
Sighing as she placed the artifact down and halfway expecting flaying shadows to come for her moments later, she finally relaxed and stroked her former lover’s flesh with idle malice before she departed to Khin-Oin.
“I’ll be back for you Eustace, not to worry my love, and at some point in the next decade I’ll make sure to come back and give you another kiss and your next dose.” She laughed and kissed his forehead, turning and walking away, gazing about for latent portals before turning back and adding, “And as a complete aside, you should know that the last of your surviving grand nephews is dead. Your line of inheritance ever dwindles my love and soon they will forget that you yet live or that you ever existed at all. But not to worry my dearest Eustace, I won’t forget you. My memory will never fade, and this immortal b*tch that broke you for her own amusement will make sure that regardless of your mortality, you’ll persist and suffer as long as I desire.”
With a horrific, delighted smirk upon her face, Shemeska turned and walked from the room, the man’s ragged moans music to her ears.
“I am almost there my Oinoloth, just as you requested…” She whispered, glancing about at each and every bound space for the swiftest egress from the City of Doors and then to the Waste, debating which route would be the swiftest.
She could have taken a portal to Hopeless and then through another permanent portal there in the courtyard of Mocking Thingol’s palace to Oinos, but that would have taken far too long for her liking. Instead the razorvine-crowned fiend simply activated the first portal she saw with a non-material key, opened it with a thought, and then before the cubes of Tintabulos were visible in the black vault of Acheron’s void, she effortlessly cast a gate and stepped through into Khin-Oin itself.
There would be no grand entry. There would be no arrival with pomp and an honor guard. The gates of the Wasting Tower would remain shut and her arrival unheralded and unnoticed. Only the Oinoloth mattered to her, and only he would see her, and he would see her soon.
“I am here for you my master…”
****
Shemeska
Adventurer
The Marauder stood, gazing up at a great silver door, its face inset with decorative panels and handles carved from the bones of the archons who eons before had descended upon the Waste to intervene in the Blood War. They had learned a profound lesson then, and now their skeletal remains decorated the doors of a private chamber of the unquestioned ruler of the Waste.
That chamber however, the one whose precipice she presenting stood upon, should not have existed.
Her hand outstretched, Shemeska recalled the Wasting Tower’s layout in all its labyrinthine glory. She’d memorized each and every room carved out of the spine of a dead god, each and every chamber bolted and grafted onto its surface like calcified flesh and muscle regenerating at its killers’ whimsy to house its parasitic subjects. She’d memorized every horrific detail countless millennia ago during her servitude in Gehenna’s Tower Arcane, and later during her period of service within Khin-Oin itself. She’d never known the nature of each of those nearly uncountable rooms and galleries, but she knew how they set into place in the grand scheme of its blueprints. The present chamber though, it existed in violation of spatial constraints, as did the stairwell that had taken her to her present location, a stairwell seemingly untouched by the passage of feet, something willed into existence and spitting in the face of reality itself.
“He waits for you.”
Shemeska glanced at the two mutilated ultroloths who flanked the door; Lords of Khin-Oin reduced to mere doormen. She knew them both by name, purely by the intonation and palpable feel of their telepathy gracing her brain: Azgerath ap Center, and Fulmirinzia ap Pluton. For a thousand years she’d served the former as scribe and spy within the courts of Mydianchlarus prior to the latter’s ascension to Oinoloth. She’d conspired to and succeeded into bringing about the former Oinoloth’s fall from power and death at the Ebon’s hands, and now her former ultroloth master stood here before her, a hideously puppet robbed of both free will and dignity.
A sneer rose to the Marauder’s lips and without thinking she laughed, cupped a hand between her legs and gave both ultroloths a lewd display of her complete and utter contempt. Neither fiend responded in the slightest, reduced to virtual automatons as they were.
Jagged pieces of cobalt blue crystal had been thrust into their skulls, turning them into puppets and mouthpieces of the Oinoloth at any moment of his choosing. Of all the things that Vorkannis had done, his never explained antipathy towards the highest class of yugoloth and the things that he had done to select members of their caste was one which still terrified Shemeska to behold.
“He waits for you.” Both ultroloths repeated, devoid of inflection or emotion, jolting the Marauder from her mocking, carnal display.
Chuckling to herself one last time, she regained her composure. Remembering the explicit instructions she’d been given in Sigil, and uncaring for the ultroloths standing at mute, expressionless attention, Shemeska reached up to her head and began removing her jewelry. First the two dozen earrings that decorated her ears, then the necklace and bulbous star sapphire at her throat, then her ubiquitous razorvine crown. All of them she placed upon the floor before reaching behind her back and undoing the clasps that held her gown in place. Falling past her hips, it pooled at her ankles like a pile of emeralds before she gently removed several more piercings from below the neck-line and then stepped free of the puddle of glassy cloth, naked and humbled.
Cold as the still, sterile air of Khin-Oin licked at her exposed flesh and setting her fur to prickle and stand erect, she took a deep breath and readied herself. Reaching forward she opened the door, uncaring and unflinching as the silver backing of the handles burned into her palms as she swung the doors wide.
“I am here my Oinoloth.”
The room was dimly lit and it took the Marauder’s eyes several moments to adjust despite her fiendish nature, but even before the purple flame in her eyes took in the full scope and majesty of the room, her ears and flesh already told her that it was vast and that it was not in any sense of the word normal. A cool wind blew through the air to slither across her bare flesh, setting her fur alight with sensation and teasing her mind of what she hoped would be forthcoming, and each barren footfall and clatter of her claws on the stone below sent echoes up and about the chamber’s vaulted heights.
“Beautiful…” Shemeska whispered to herself as she gazed up and across the Ebon’s private chamber there at Khin-Oin’s hidden heart, every wall not stone but the exposed raw bone of the dead god whose spine formed the core of the Wasting Tower.
The first thing that the Marauder noticed was not the seeming absence of her master, but a seat at the chamber’s center seemingly coaxed and grown from the chamber’s bone substrate. Not a seat but a throne, it resembled nothing so much in basic form as the Seige Malicious high above at the Tower’s summit, but this one however was crafted to resemble a throne wrought of and decorated by the collected skulls of each and every former Oinoloth since the original, including all of those known to the Marauder, and dozens of others lost to history and the historical revisionism of her caste’s historians: hoarders and buriers of secrets all.
Surrounding the Oinoloth’s throne were tables upon tables of books, roughly divided into three distinct groups, each of which caused the King of the Crosstrade’s eyes to bulge and her mouth and elsewhere to grow wet with anticipation.
“How…?” She mumbled as her brain cataloged them all and tried to conceptualize their nature and what it meant for all of them to be there so casually placed out for use and examination.
The first group she recognized most keenly, all of which were precious volumes all, their words burned into the flesh of petitioners long-since blinded and their mouths stuffed with ash and stitched shut, imprisoning them in a black, silent eternity of unending agony. Those books she recognized the hand which had penned them as that of Larsdana Ap Neut, First Magistrix of the Fourfold Furnace, Architect and First Keeper of the Tower Arcane – Helekanalaith’s predecessor. Those tomes were amongst the rarest and most precious of treasures imaginable to any arcanaloth. They represented a pinnacle of what any representative of their caste might ever wish to achieve… prior perhaps to the Ebon’s ascension to Oinoloth that was.
Larsdana’s tomes were hoarded by ultroloths and altraloths, and yet those still extant were only the barest fraction of her original collection, most of which had inexplicably vanished when Helekanalaith betrayed and usurped her place within the Tower Arcane. He’d taken her position as Keeper, but she’d denied him the wealth accumulated during the bulk of her tenure, and here now a great many of them sat, collected together. Their presence however was secondary to what Shemeska noticed next: each and every open tome was crowded not only with Larsdana’s words, formulae, and intricate, brilliant mystical diagrams, but with equally intricate annotations and more often than not, corrections… mocking corrections… to the original text in the Ebon’s own hand, all penned in Baern.
The next were several dozen great black tomes written only in the Oinoloth’s own hand, penned with his claws carving his words into the surface of metal plates so thin as to be flexible and bound into his personal grimoires. The words Shemeska beheld were poetry in form and function, their malign power things of sickening beauty beyond anything that she’d ever experienced, and both now and once years before she’d briefly been able to read one of the private grimoires of Larsdana, the First Magistrix herself, but in only moments of comparison she understood that the Oinoloth’s spellcraft was yet an order of magnitude beyond that.
Finally there sat a quartet of massive, monstrous tomes, easily ten times the size of the other more or less conventional –to a ‘loth– books. Like the grimoires of giants, they hung suspended in the air, open to specific pages, with great bookmarks of yet wriggling flesh ripped from the tanned hides of petitioners marking hundreds of other points of interest. All of the last group were uniformly penned in Baernaloth, and based on the size and nature of the tomes themselves, they had been written by the hands of Baern themselves.
Curiously the thought passed through her mind that the Ebon’s work was virtually a hybrid of the style of those first and last tomes, though all the more similarly to those of the Baern, and exclusively in the Father/Mothers’ language. That fleeting thought transgressed into a genuine feeling of terror brought about in most ‘loths by even the mention of their progenitors, let alone contact with objects directly created and used by the proto-fiends themselves, and here of course lay several of their works.
Belatedly, Shemeska realized that she was drooling, though the effect had begun as she had stared at the Oinoloth’s work.
Stepping forward with a genuine mixture of fear, wonder, and rapt adoration –a rabbit gazing into the wonders of a wolf’s yawning gullet– Shemeska trembled and glanced at the works of her creators. Several of the great tomes were wrought of metal, less books than amalgamations of metal and moving gears, portions moving and rearranging themselves with an accompaniment of clicking and grinding clockwork, the words formed as patterns in the underlying mechanical parts, shadows cast by the spinning, whirring things, and impressions projected into her mind simply be standing in their proximity.
Spooked, she turned to the next: a monstrous thing crafted from a patchwork arrangement of withered, preserved flesh, each page and sheaf was formed from thousands of fractional portions of petitioners. Each and every page twitched and moved with the immortal agony of the petitioners embossed with a litany of profane secrets burned into their base substance.
The last of the baernaloth tomes was the strangest: one crafted from plates of black glass, each page seemingly absorbing the very light around it. Where it sat upon one of the Oinoloth’s tables, dust and soot gathered around its periphery like the accretion disk of some soul-devouring singularity.
Twirling a claw nervously about a length of her hair and wishing dearly that she’d still worn her razorvine crown, for the presence of its weight atop her head and otherwise, a presence she’d known for thousands of years, Shemeska realized as she looked about the room that the Oinoloth’s collections of tomes were not the only curiosities. Although the most obvious to her yugoloth blood, and baernaloth tomes were not the only source of agony, collected, implied, felt in the marrow, or audible.
A number of raised platforms held a chorus of twisted, warped creatures that had at one time perhaps, originally been mezzoloths. Now though, they seemed barely classified as yugoloths at all and only just barely clinging to their unholy lives. Drifting constellations and rings of floating runes swirled around them, all identical to the style and shape of the Ebon’s handwriting in his own books, all of them seeming both to constrain them to their platforms and to periodically force upon them currents of raw elemental force.
Shemeska sneered as the nearest of them turned to look at her and gave an agonized, painful gasp. Its eyes flickered with a rheumy mix of water, itself moving between phases of mist to liquid to solid each time the runes glowed and pulsed. Portions of the least yugoloth’s arms and legs seemed partially transformed into water only held in check by a thin carapace of ice. Somehow, inexplicably the creature remained alive.
“What are you doing?...” She openly whispered, dumbfounded by both the purpose of the experiments and likewise how it was even accomplished.
Looking across to the various mezzoloths, all contorting in their own personal agonies and personal constellations of swirling words, whatever the Ebon was doing to them, it seemed focused on physically merging them with a specific element, for reasons utterly inscrutable to the Marauder. The Ebon’s rabid obsession with yugoloth alignment purity seemed completely at odds with these experiments, if that’s what they were.
Her mind swirling to take in the totality of what she had seen, there was one other thing that the room contained, though it registered almost as an afterthought by comparison to the other wondrous horrors laid out before her. There in the room’s further corner and seemingly the deepest in shadow, the floor was covered by a thick pile of ashes that bore the Oinoloth’s footprints entering and exiting again and again and again. A thin veneer of ice crystals glittered faintly from the frozen, ashen surface.
The Ebon himself however was nowhere to be seen.
“My Oinoloth,” Shemeska’s voice trembled ever so slightly. Not with fear, but with expectation. Surely this would be the next stage of her exaltation, the next payment for her servitude where the Key had been the first. “My Oinoloth, I am here for you. I am ready for you.”
The carnal insinuation was deliberate and filled with pride. For all the Ebon had used his consort Shylara, Shemeska smiled inwardly because Shylara had once been –her– consort. In her ego, it seemed to Shemeska that everything the Manged possessed that made her valued and attractive to the Oinoloth was a direct result of her study as the Marauder’s apprentice and eventually more than just an apprentice hundreds of years earlier. She’d studied, learned, and ultimately been rejected oh so poetically with the personalized, flesh-ravaging curse that she still bore and which moment by moment still maddened her. It had been a parting poisoned kiss, and indeed transmitted by their last passionate kiss and dance of tongue upon tongue. Shylara’s present fury at her former teacher and lover only hid her overwhelming vanity and the puissant obsession that she still carried after all the years they’d been separated by the Marauder’s presence in Sigil and Shylara’s continued work in Carceri, first under Bubonix and then beneath the Ebon, in every meaning of the word.
A thought burning through her brain since she’d heard the Ebon’s message now rang through Shemeska’s mind as she thought of Shylara and Shylara’s status to that point. Being invited here now could only mean one thing. The Ebon had tired of the Marauder’s protégé and like she herself had done, he was ready to discard her. The Oinoloth had seen and tasted her student and now wished to possess the real thing.
“My master, I am here for you. Finally I am here for you.”
A sly, hungry smile graced the Marauder’s muzzle before she sank a fang into her lower lip. Soon. Breathing deeply, naked and surrounded by the Oinoloth’s private horrific wonders, she trembled. Soon…
“That you are my beautiful monster,” The Ebon’s voice precipitated out of the air like smoke from an unseen fire, “That you are…”
Twirling about to face the source of his voice, her ears swiveling to face him a fraction of a second before her eyes fell upon his form, Shemeska struggled to catch her breath as at first she saw only his sparkling, albino eyes and the reflections of his brilliant white fangs as if they were all that existed, the rest of his body manifesting belatedly by comparison.
“My master…” She whispered as her eyes took in the totality of his form, the cut of his robes, blue, black, and silver, the trio of twinkling ioun stones that drifted about his head, and the soft trail of ice and ashes left behind with each of his steps towards her.
Then she noticed it: the blade.
Held in his outstretched left hand was a dagger, razor sharp and crafted from Gehennan obsidian. The runes cut into its surface and floating in its umbral depths like bubbles in ice were oh so familiar to her. Shemeska knew the blade well. That specific blade. Such a bloody history they had together.
Suddenly standing before her without having traversed the intervening space, the Ebon touched her cheek with the blade’s flat, cold surface and he spoke, his gaze reflecting back in her own wide, trembling eyes.
“The last time you stood naked in the presence of this dagger Shemeska, you were filled with such terror, such desire, such eager need for it to be plunged into your heart. Zefendilar ap Othrys stood to your left, Vozrikirn ap Pluton in front of you, and Druscinderoth ap Khalas to your right watched over you with their glittering eyes and blank, featureless faces. They offered you this very same blade and your promotion from nycaloth to arcanaloth.”
“Yes…” She whispered back, involuntarily leaning forward on the tips of her toes, wishing, hoping for an embrace and a kiss.
“You begged for it.” The Oinoloth ran the blade’s flat down her check and along the line of her neck and collarbone.
“I do…” She licked her lips.
Vorkannis smirked, “I find it ever so ironic that the principal ultroloth who conducted your promotion and first plunged this knife into your chest was the very same one who oversaw the very same ceremony for your protégé Shylara.”
“Shylara…” Shemeska sneered, “I taught her well for you my master, but I am greater than her in every way as you well know and as I wish to show you…”
“Given your relationship with her,” Vorkannis smiled, “And likewise my relationship with her now, I appreciate the irony that the two of you are linked by your origins even now. But your promotion was first, tens of thousands of years before she would rise even to nycaloth status. Your promotion was a thing of beauty. You were beautiful then, just as you are to me now.”
The Marauder licked her lips and closed her eyes, remembering the moment in all of its vivid, horrific, exquisite pain and triumph. She trembled and whimpered as she felt the Oinoloth’s hand touch her cheek, somehow colder yet than the blade.
“They never knew the full story of how you gained your sponsor’s willingness to go before them and request your exaltation.” Vorkannis smirked and waited.
The response was swift and immediate.
Shemeska’s eyes went wide, and abruptly her soft, smug, needy smile turned to a sneer and snarl, “How do you know that?”
“That secret, that beautiful secret of yours is something only you and I know.” The Ebon’s albino eyes glittered with secrets and malice, “Your sponsor died within a year, by your hands about his throat, and you managed to arrange for the deaths of two of those three ultroloths within a century. Only Vozrikirn survived, dwelling in relative isolation in Carceri as one of Bubonix’s advisors in a position of little importance within the three planes as a whole while your star rose swift and shining within first one Tower and then another even before you chose Sigil to make a court of your own…” The Ebon flipped the blade to his other hand, licked his lips with seductive slowness and then gently ran his now free fingers down its length in an almost obscene gesture. “I was so very, very proud of you.”
The room’s light dimmed as the Ebon walked a circle around the Marauder, flowing more than walking, seeming to drag the darkest shadows along in his wake.
“I earned my promotion.” Shemeska whispered, bordering upon a hiss, “I seized it. I took it. It was mine. I remember each and every caress of that blade into my flesh.”
“They took their time with you.” Vorkannis stood before her again and held out the blade, pointing its tip at the Marauder’s naked form, moving his hands and mimicking the same exact motions that the trio of ultroloths had used when they’d held her down on the slopes of the second Furnace and tortured her to death, carving away her weakness, sculpting her flesh and spirit into something greater. The Ebon’s hands held the very same knife that they had used and somehow he knew the precise movements it had taken.
Unprompted by any present notion of carnal intimacy, the Marauder clenched her thighs and put both hands to her chest as she grew excited by the memories.
“From the first cut to the very last, you never screamed.” The Oinoloth smiled with admiration in his eyes. “In fact, you only said three words. Not to any of them. No not to them and not audibly. Not telepathically either. You only whispered it to yourself in the depths of your mind like a prayer to the only creature in the cosmos that mattered to you: yourself.”
“More. Please more.” The Marauder whispered to the Oinoloth, watching as his lips moved to mouth the same words before she said them herself.
The Ebon drew within reach and she held out her arms, expecting the Oinoloth to embrace her in a carnal recapitulation of that earlier transfiguration, taking her and giving her reason to scream those same three words she had just now whispered. Purple flame danced in her eyes and lit her flush, warm cheeks.
Abruptly he room plunged into complete and utter darkness, and even the mechanical clatter and moaning of the baernaloth tomes ceased. There was only the albino intensity of the Oinoloth’s eyes and the ivory of his teeth hovering there before her, so close and so ever closer.
“Please.” Shemeska whispered in the same tone as she had begged the ultroloths for her promotion. “I beg of you.”
*CLATTER*
The obsidian dagger abruptly dropped to the ground, cast down and released from the Ebon’s grip.
“When they carved you apart on the slopes of Krangath, they required a blade. I do not.” The albino eyes narrowed and the ivory fangs parted in a malicious smile and the wet sound of lips and tongue moving. “When they carved you apart on the slopes of Krangath you suffered in perfect silence. With your agony you felt exquisite pleasure such as you had never felt before.”
The fringes of the Ebon’s flickers of shadow touched the Marauder’s flesh and she trembled at his touch. The light of his eyes vanished and the image of his teeth as well, leaving her alone in the darkness.
“My Oinoloth?” She whispered, confused. “Please.”
Lips touched her ears and hands lay upon her neck as a hundred tendrils of living darkness flickered at the rest of her body like a hundred lovers’ tongue. She smiled and relaxed just before they turned to razored claws.
“How dare you abuse the power that I give to you!” The Oinoloth’s snarl was savage in her ear. “How –DARE— you use the Shadow Sorceled Key for your own petty amusement!?”
“GGGGAAAAHHH!!!!” Shemeska screamed as the Oinoloth’s claws sunk into both of her shoulders drawing blood, puncturing a dozen layers of sorcerous protection and ignoring the contingencies woven therein like lightning to tissue paper. The Marauder gasped as the claws drove deeper, unable to vocalize her horrified thoughts, breathless at the pain.
“I entrusted you with finding, recovering, and safeguarding an artifact beyond your comprehension.” The albino light of the Ebon’s eyes burned down on Shemeska’s flesh, almost as searing in its radiance as a hand held over an open flame, “And in smug, shallow arrogance you used it for your own purposes without the slightest regard for my intent in that gift. I have not done a single act without purpose. I did not drag Belarian from its moorings for nothing. I am not here now in Khin-Oin without a reason, and I will not have those plans disrupted by your callous vanities.”
“My Oinoloth, I…” The words died in her throat as the Ebon’s hand clamped across her windpipe and squeezed as he lifted her into the air, her feet dangling and twitching helplessly.
“I entrusted you with the Key as payment for your service. I gave you a position of increased power and authority because I respected your climb up the hierarchy from a mewling, chittering nothing of a mezzoloth belched forth from Oinos in the depths of this tower. I have watched you for a very, very long time with interest.”
Dangling in the air, the Marauder thrashed feebly, the words of spells to save herself dying on her lips and siphoning off into a hungry, pitiless void lurking behind the Ebon’s albino eyes. Gagging, with spots of darkness drifting across her vision, she telepathically rationalized her actions rather than beg for her life. The claws on her throat dug deeper, drawing blood.
“I could have given the Key to others in Sigil or to any that I sent there, but I did not.” The Ebon changed hands and licked at the Marauder’s blood on his claws and inhaled deeply at the lesser fiend’s dawning horror and desperation. “I could have given it to Helekanalaith’s whelp. I could have given it to the tiefling that shares your blood, or even the one who suspects she does. There have always been multiple servitors of the Tower inside of Sigil, and you know them all, though you have always stood above them.”
The hand around Shemeska’s throat opened and she crashed to the floor, gasping for breath, staring up at the Ebon with a mixed look of fear and worship.
“I am still worthy of your gift my Oinoloth!” Shemeska pleaded, crawling forward on her hands and knees, uncaring of the blood streaking her fur, no longer pristine. “I am still worthy of you. I have always been worthy of you! Me. Only me.”
“No, you aren’t.” The Oinloth sneered as tendrils of liquid shadow lifted the Marauder to her feet and dragged her forward, his condemnation crushing her worse than any physical blow and sending cracks through her ego. “None of you are…”
Confusion marred the Marauder’s face as the Oinoloth’s eyes shed a reddish-pink sheen across her features. Briefly he turned to glance to the chamber’s far corner, stared for but a moment and nodded before turning back to Shemeska’s cowering, bloodied form.
“You will remember nothing of our conversation here in this place, or any of what you saw.” The Ebon’s left hand caressed her chin and then stroked across her lips and cheek. His right hand touched her forehead, peeling away her mental protections without the slightest of efforts, and then he turned her head to glance at the obsidian dagger that still lay upon the floor, reminding her of their original discussion.
“Please my master…” Shemeska whimpered, gazing up with abject misery, “Please…”
“On Krangath you enjoyed your experience,” The Oinoloth hissed, speaking now in baernaloth, a language that he’d taught the basics of to the Marauder as part of her price to join his conspiracy, a fact that allowed her now to understand her folly and its cost. “But now, here, you will not enjoy this. No, you will not in any way. That was transfiguration, but this… this is punishment.”
Naked in the darkness of Khin-Oin, Shemeska the Marauder screamed.
That chamber however, the one whose precipice she presenting stood upon, should not have existed.
Her hand outstretched, Shemeska recalled the Wasting Tower’s layout in all its labyrinthine glory. She’d memorized each and every room carved out of the spine of a dead god, each and every chamber bolted and grafted onto its surface like calcified flesh and muscle regenerating at its killers’ whimsy to house its parasitic subjects. She’d memorized every horrific detail countless millennia ago during her servitude in Gehenna’s Tower Arcane, and later during her period of service within Khin-Oin itself. She’d never known the nature of each of those nearly uncountable rooms and galleries, but she knew how they set into place in the grand scheme of its blueprints. The present chamber though, it existed in violation of spatial constraints, as did the stairwell that had taken her to her present location, a stairwell seemingly untouched by the passage of feet, something willed into existence and spitting in the face of reality itself.
“He waits for you.”
Shemeska glanced at the two mutilated ultroloths who flanked the door; Lords of Khin-Oin reduced to mere doormen. She knew them both by name, purely by the intonation and palpable feel of their telepathy gracing her brain: Azgerath ap Center, and Fulmirinzia ap Pluton. For a thousand years she’d served the former as scribe and spy within the courts of Mydianchlarus prior to the latter’s ascension to Oinoloth. She’d conspired to and succeeded into bringing about the former Oinoloth’s fall from power and death at the Ebon’s hands, and now her former ultroloth master stood here before her, a hideously puppet robbed of both free will and dignity.
A sneer rose to the Marauder’s lips and without thinking she laughed, cupped a hand between her legs and gave both ultroloths a lewd display of her complete and utter contempt. Neither fiend responded in the slightest, reduced to virtual automatons as they were.
Jagged pieces of cobalt blue crystal had been thrust into their skulls, turning them into puppets and mouthpieces of the Oinoloth at any moment of his choosing. Of all the things that Vorkannis had done, his never explained antipathy towards the highest class of yugoloth and the things that he had done to select members of their caste was one which still terrified Shemeska to behold.
“He waits for you.” Both ultroloths repeated, devoid of inflection or emotion, jolting the Marauder from her mocking, carnal display.
Chuckling to herself one last time, she regained her composure. Remembering the explicit instructions she’d been given in Sigil, and uncaring for the ultroloths standing at mute, expressionless attention, Shemeska reached up to her head and began removing her jewelry. First the two dozen earrings that decorated her ears, then the necklace and bulbous star sapphire at her throat, then her ubiquitous razorvine crown. All of them she placed upon the floor before reaching behind her back and undoing the clasps that held her gown in place. Falling past her hips, it pooled at her ankles like a pile of emeralds before she gently removed several more piercings from below the neck-line and then stepped free of the puddle of glassy cloth, naked and humbled.
Cold as the still, sterile air of Khin-Oin licked at her exposed flesh and setting her fur to prickle and stand erect, she took a deep breath and readied herself. Reaching forward she opened the door, uncaring and unflinching as the silver backing of the handles burned into her palms as she swung the doors wide.
“I am here my Oinoloth.”
****
The room was dimly lit and it took the Marauder’s eyes several moments to adjust despite her fiendish nature, but even before the purple flame in her eyes took in the full scope and majesty of the room, her ears and flesh already told her that it was vast and that it was not in any sense of the word normal. A cool wind blew through the air to slither across her bare flesh, setting her fur alight with sensation and teasing her mind of what she hoped would be forthcoming, and each barren footfall and clatter of her claws on the stone below sent echoes up and about the chamber’s vaulted heights.
“Beautiful…” Shemeska whispered to herself as she gazed up and across the Ebon’s private chamber there at Khin-Oin’s hidden heart, every wall not stone but the exposed raw bone of the dead god whose spine formed the core of the Wasting Tower.
The first thing that the Marauder noticed was not the seeming absence of her master, but a seat at the chamber’s center seemingly coaxed and grown from the chamber’s bone substrate. Not a seat but a throne, it resembled nothing so much in basic form as the Seige Malicious high above at the Tower’s summit, but this one however was crafted to resemble a throne wrought of and decorated by the collected skulls of each and every former Oinoloth since the original, including all of those known to the Marauder, and dozens of others lost to history and the historical revisionism of her caste’s historians: hoarders and buriers of secrets all.
Surrounding the Oinoloth’s throne were tables upon tables of books, roughly divided into three distinct groups, each of which caused the King of the Crosstrade’s eyes to bulge and her mouth and elsewhere to grow wet with anticipation.
“How…?” She mumbled as her brain cataloged them all and tried to conceptualize their nature and what it meant for all of them to be there so casually placed out for use and examination.
The first group she recognized most keenly, all of which were precious volumes all, their words burned into the flesh of petitioners long-since blinded and their mouths stuffed with ash and stitched shut, imprisoning them in a black, silent eternity of unending agony. Those books she recognized the hand which had penned them as that of Larsdana Ap Neut, First Magistrix of the Fourfold Furnace, Architect and First Keeper of the Tower Arcane – Helekanalaith’s predecessor. Those tomes were amongst the rarest and most precious of treasures imaginable to any arcanaloth. They represented a pinnacle of what any representative of their caste might ever wish to achieve… prior perhaps to the Ebon’s ascension to Oinoloth that was.
Larsdana’s tomes were hoarded by ultroloths and altraloths, and yet those still extant were only the barest fraction of her original collection, most of which had inexplicably vanished when Helekanalaith betrayed and usurped her place within the Tower Arcane. He’d taken her position as Keeper, but she’d denied him the wealth accumulated during the bulk of her tenure, and here now a great many of them sat, collected together. Their presence however was secondary to what Shemeska noticed next: each and every open tome was crowded not only with Larsdana’s words, formulae, and intricate, brilliant mystical diagrams, but with equally intricate annotations and more often than not, corrections… mocking corrections… to the original text in the Ebon’s own hand, all penned in Baern.
The next were several dozen great black tomes written only in the Oinoloth’s own hand, penned with his claws carving his words into the surface of metal plates so thin as to be flexible and bound into his personal grimoires. The words Shemeska beheld were poetry in form and function, their malign power things of sickening beauty beyond anything that she’d ever experienced, and both now and once years before she’d briefly been able to read one of the private grimoires of Larsdana, the First Magistrix herself, but in only moments of comparison she understood that the Oinoloth’s spellcraft was yet an order of magnitude beyond that.
Finally there sat a quartet of massive, monstrous tomes, easily ten times the size of the other more or less conventional –to a ‘loth– books. Like the grimoires of giants, they hung suspended in the air, open to specific pages, with great bookmarks of yet wriggling flesh ripped from the tanned hides of petitioners marking hundreds of other points of interest. All of the last group were uniformly penned in Baernaloth, and based on the size and nature of the tomes themselves, they had been written by the hands of Baern themselves.
Curiously the thought passed through her mind that the Ebon’s work was virtually a hybrid of the style of those first and last tomes, though all the more similarly to those of the Baern, and exclusively in the Father/Mothers’ language. That fleeting thought transgressed into a genuine feeling of terror brought about in most ‘loths by even the mention of their progenitors, let alone contact with objects directly created and used by the proto-fiends themselves, and here of course lay several of their works.
Belatedly, Shemeska realized that she was drooling, though the effect had begun as she had stared at the Oinoloth’s work.
Stepping forward with a genuine mixture of fear, wonder, and rapt adoration –a rabbit gazing into the wonders of a wolf’s yawning gullet– Shemeska trembled and glanced at the works of her creators. Several of the great tomes were wrought of metal, less books than amalgamations of metal and moving gears, portions moving and rearranging themselves with an accompaniment of clicking and grinding clockwork, the words formed as patterns in the underlying mechanical parts, shadows cast by the spinning, whirring things, and impressions projected into her mind simply be standing in their proximity.
Spooked, she turned to the next: a monstrous thing crafted from a patchwork arrangement of withered, preserved flesh, each page and sheaf was formed from thousands of fractional portions of petitioners. Each and every page twitched and moved with the immortal agony of the petitioners embossed with a litany of profane secrets burned into their base substance.
The last of the baernaloth tomes was the strangest: one crafted from plates of black glass, each page seemingly absorbing the very light around it. Where it sat upon one of the Oinoloth’s tables, dust and soot gathered around its periphery like the accretion disk of some soul-devouring singularity.
Twirling a claw nervously about a length of her hair and wishing dearly that she’d still worn her razorvine crown, for the presence of its weight atop her head and otherwise, a presence she’d known for thousands of years, Shemeska realized as she looked about the room that the Oinoloth’s collections of tomes were not the only curiosities. Although the most obvious to her yugoloth blood, and baernaloth tomes were not the only source of agony, collected, implied, felt in the marrow, or audible.
A number of raised platforms held a chorus of twisted, warped creatures that had at one time perhaps, originally been mezzoloths. Now though, they seemed barely classified as yugoloths at all and only just barely clinging to their unholy lives. Drifting constellations and rings of floating runes swirled around them, all identical to the style and shape of the Ebon’s handwriting in his own books, all of them seeming both to constrain them to their platforms and to periodically force upon them currents of raw elemental force.
Shemeska sneered as the nearest of them turned to look at her and gave an agonized, painful gasp. Its eyes flickered with a rheumy mix of water, itself moving between phases of mist to liquid to solid each time the runes glowed and pulsed. Portions of the least yugoloth’s arms and legs seemed partially transformed into water only held in check by a thin carapace of ice. Somehow, inexplicably the creature remained alive.
“What are you doing?...” She openly whispered, dumbfounded by both the purpose of the experiments and likewise how it was even accomplished.
Looking across to the various mezzoloths, all contorting in their own personal agonies and personal constellations of swirling words, whatever the Ebon was doing to them, it seemed focused on physically merging them with a specific element, for reasons utterly inscrutable to the Marauder. The Ebon’s rabid obsession with yugoloth alignment purity seemed completely at odds with these experiments, if that’s what they were.
Her mind swirling to take in the totality of what she had seen, there was one other thing that the room contained, though it registered almost as an afterthought by comparison to the other wondrous horrors laid out before her. There in the room’s further corner and seemingly the deepest in shadow, the floor was covered by a thick pile of ashes that bore the Oinoloth’s footprints entering and exiting again and again and again. A thin veneer of ice crystals glittered faintly from the frozen, ashen surface.
The Ebon himself however was nowhere to be seen.
“My Oinoloth,” Shemeska’s voice trembled ever so slightly. Not with fear, but with expectation. Surely this would be the next stage of her exaltation, the next payment for her servitude where the Key had been the first. “My Oinoloth, I am here for you. I am ready for you.”
The carnal insinuation was deliberate and filled with pride. For all the Ebon had used his consort Shylara, Shemeska smiled inwardly because Shylara had once been –her– consort. In her ego, it seemed to Shemeska that everything the Manged possessed that made her valued and attractive to the Oinoloth was a direct result of her study as the Marauder’s apprentice and eventually more than just an apprentice hundreds of years earlier. She’d studied, learned, and ultimately been rejected oh so poetically with the personalized, flesh-ravaging curse that she still bore and which moment by moment still maddened her. It had been a parting poisoned kiss, and indeed transmitted by their last passionate kiss and dance of tongue upon tongue. Shylara’s present fury at her former teacher and lover only hid her overwhelming vanity and the puissant obsession that she still carried after all the years they’d been separated by the Marauder’s presence in Sigil and Shylara’s continued work in Carceri, first under Bubonix and then beneath the Ebon, in every meaning of the word.
A thought burning through her brain since she’d heard the Ebon’s message now rang through Shemeska’s mind as she thought of Shylara and Shylara’s status to that point. Being invited here now could only mean one thing. The Ebon had tired of the Marauder’s protégé and like she herself had done, he was ready to discard her. The Oinoloth had seen and tasted her student and now wished to possess the real thing.
“My master, I am here for you. Finally I am here for you.”
A sly, hungry smile graced the Marauder’s muzzle before she sank a fang into her lower lip. Soon. Breathing deeply, naked and surrounded by the Oinoloth’s private horrific wonders, she trembled. Soon…
“That you are my beautiful monster,” The Ebon’s voice precipitated out of the air like smoke from an unseen fire, “That you are…”
Twirling about to face the source of his voice, her ears swiveling to face him a fraction of a second before her eyes fell upon his form, Shemeska struggled to catch her breath as at first she saw only his sparkling, albino eyes and the reflections of his brilliant white fangs as if they were all that existed, the rest of his body manifesting belatedly by comparison.
“My master…” She whispered as her eyes took in the totality of his form, the cut of his robes, blue, black, and silver, the trio of twinkling ioun stones that drifted about his head, and the soft trail of ice and ashes left behind with each of his steps towards her.
Then she noticed it: the blade.
Held in his outstretched left hand was a dagger, razor sharp and crafted from Gehennan obsidian. The runes cut into its surface and floating in its umbral depths like bubbles in ice were oh so familiar to her. Shemeska knew the blade well. That specific blade. Such a bloody history they had together.
Suddenly standing before her without having traversed the intervening space, the Ebon touched her cheek with the blade’s flat, cold surface and he spoke, his gaze reflecting back in her own wide, trembling eyes.
“The last time you stood naked in the presence of this dagger Shemeska, you were filled with such terror, such desire, such eager need for it to be plunged into your heart. Zefendilar ap Othrys stood to your left, Vozrikirn ap Pluton in front of you, and Druscinderoth ap Khalas to your right watched over you with their glittering eyes and blank, featureless faces. They offered you this very same blade and your promotion from nycaloth to arcanaloth.”
“Yes…” She whispered back, involuntarily leaning forward on the tips of her toes, wishing, hoping for an embrace and a kiss.
“You begged for it.” The Oinoloth ran the blade’s flat down her check and along the line of her neck and collarbone.
“I do…” She licked her lips.
Vorkannis smirked, “I find it ever so ironic that the principal ultroloth who conducted your promotion and first plunged this knife into your chest was the very same one who oversaw the very same ceremony for your protégé Shylara.”
“Shylara…” Shemeska sneered, “I taught her well for you my master, but I am greater than her in every way as you well know and as I wish to show you…”
“Given your relationship with her,” Vorkannis smiled, “And likewise my relationship with her now, I appreciate the irony that the two of you are linked by your origins even now. But your promotion was first, tens of thousands of years before she would rise even to nycaloth status. Your promotion was a thing of beauty. You were beautiful then, just as you are to me now.”
The Marauder licked her lips and closed her eyes, remembering the moment in all of its vivid, horrific, exquisite pain and triumph. She trembled and whimpered as she felt the Oinoloth’s hand touch her cheek, somehow colder yet than the blade.
“They never knew the full story of how you gained your sponsor’s willingness to go before them and request your exaltation.” Vorkannis smirked and waited.
The response was swift and immediate.
Shemeska’s eyes went wide, and abruptly her soft, smug, needy smile turned to a sneer and snarl, “How do you know that?”
“That secret, that beautiful secret of yours is something only you and I know.” The Ebon’s albino eyes glittered with secrets and malice, “Your sponsor died within a year, by your hands about his throat, and you managed to arrange for the deaths of two of those three ultroloths within a century. Only Vozrikirn survived, dwelling in relative isolation in Carceri as one of Bubonix’s advisors in a position of little importance within the three planes as a whole while your star rose swift and shining within first one Tower and then another even before you chose Sigil to make a court of your own…” The Ebon flipped the blade to his other hand, licked his lips with seductive slowness and then gently ran his now free fingers down its length in an almost obscene gesture. “I was so very, very proud of you.”
The room’s light dimmed as the Ebon walked a circle around the Marauder, flowing more than walking, seeming to drag the darkest shadows along in his wake.
“I earned my promotion.” Shemeska whispered, bordering upon a hiss, “I seized it. I took it. It was mine. I remember each and every caress of that blade into my flesh.”
“They took their time with you.” Vorkannis stood before her again and held out the blade, pointing its tip at the Marauder’s naked form, moving his hands and mimicking the same exact motions that the trio of ultroloths had used when they’d held her down on the slopes of the second Furnace and tortured her to death, carving away her weakness, sculpting her flesh and spirit into something greater. The Ebon’s hands held the very same knife that they had used and somehow he knew the precise movements it had taken.
Unprompted by any present notion of carnal intimacy, the Marauder clenched her thighs and put both hands to her chest as she grew excited by the memories.
“From the first cut to the very last, you never screamed.” The Oinoloth smiled with admiration in his eyes. “In fact, you only said three words. Not to any of them. No not to them and not audibly. Not telepathically either. You only whispered it to yourself in the depths of your mind like a prayer to the only creature in the cosmos that mattered to you: yourself.”
“More. Please more.” The Marauder whispered to the Oinoloth, watching as his lips moved to mouth the same words before she said them herself.
The Ebon drew within reach and she held out her arms, expecting the Oinoloth to embrace her in a carnal recapitulation of that earlier transfiguration, taking her and giving her reason to scream those same three words she had just now whispered. Purple flame danced in her eyes and lit her flush, warm cheeks.
Abruptly he room plunged into complete and utter darkness, and even the mechanical clatter and moaning of the baernaloth tomes ceased. There was only the albino intensity of the Oinoloth’s eyes and the ivory of his teeth hovering there before her, so close and so ever closer.
“Please.” Shemeska whispered in the same tone as she had begged the ultroloths for her promotion. “I beg of you.”
*CLATTER*
The obsidian dagger abruptly dropped to the ground, cast down and released from the Ebon’s grip.
“When they carved you apart on the slopes of Krangath, they required a blade. I do not.” The albino eyes narrowed and the ivory fangs parted in a malicious smile and the wet sound of lips and tongue moving. “When they carved you apart on the slopes of Krangath you suffered in perfect silence. With your agony you felt exquisite pleasure such as you had never felt before.”
The fringes of the Ebon’s flickers of shadow touched the Marauder’s flesh and she trembled at his touch. The light of his eyes vanished and the image of his teeth as well, leaving her alone in the darkness.
“My Oinoloth?” She whispered, confused. “Please.”
Lips touched her ears and hands lay upon her neck as a hundred tendrils of living darkness flickered at the rest of her body like a hundred lovers’ tongue. She smiled and relaxed just before they turned to razored claws.
“How dare you abuse the power that I give to you!” The Oinoloth’s snarl was savage in her ear. “How –DARE— you use the Shadow Sorceled Key for your own petty amusement!?”
“GGGGAAAAHHH!!!!” Shemeska screamed as the Oinoloth’s claws sunk into both of her shoulders drawing blood, puncturing a dozen layers of sorcerous protection and ignoring the contingencies woven therein like lightning to tissue paper. The Marauder gasped as the claws drove deeper, unable to vocalize her horrified thoughts, breathless at the pain.
“I entrusted you with finding, recovering, and safeguarding an artifact beyond your comprehension.” The albino light of the Ebon’s eyes burned down on Shemeska’s flesh, almost as searing in its radiance as a hand held over an open flame, “And in smug, shallow arrogance you used it for your own purposes without the slightest regard for my intent in that gift. I have not done a single act without purpose. I did not drag Belarian from its moorings for nothing. I am not here now in Khin-Oin without a reason, and I will not have those plans disrupted by your callous vanities.”
“My Oinoloth, I…” The words died in her throat as the Ebon’s hand clamped across her windpipe and squeezed as he lifted her into the air, her feet dangling and twitching helplessly.
“I entrusted you with the Key as payment for your service. I gave you a position of increased power and authority because I respected your climb up the hierarchy from a mewling, chittering nothing of a mezzoloth belched forth from Oinos in the depths of this tower. I have watched you for a very, very long time with interest.”
Dangling in the air, the Marauder thrashed feebly, the words of spells to save herself dying on her lips and siphoning off into a hungry, pitiless void lurking behind the Ebon’s albino eyes. Gagging, with spots of darkness drifting across her vision, she telepathically rationalized her actions rather than beg for her life. The claws on her throat dug deeper, drawing blood.
“I could have given the Key to others in Sigil or to any that I sent there, but I did not.” The Ebon changed hands and licked at the Marauder’s blood on his claws and inhaled deeply at the lesser fiend’s dawning horror and desperation. “I could have given it to Helekanalaith’s whelp. I could have given it to the tiefling that shares your blood, or even the one who suspects she does. There have always been multiple servitors of the Tower inside of Sigil, and you know them all, though you have always stood above them.”
The hand around Shemeska’s throat opened and she crashed to the floor, gasping for breath, staring up at the Ebon with a mixed look of fear and worship.
“I am still worthy of your gift my Oinoloth!” Shemeska pleaded, crawling forward on her hands and knees, uncaring of the blood streaking her fur, no longer pristine. “I am still worthy of you. I have always been worthy of you! Me. Only me.”
“No, you aren’t.” The Oinloth sneered as tendrils of liquid shadow lifted the Marauder to her feet and dragged her forward, his condemnation crushing her worse than any physical blow and sending cracks through her ego. “None of you are…”
Confusion marred the Marauder’s face as the Oinoloth’s eyes shed a reddish-pink sheen across her features. Briefly he turned to glance to the chamber’s far corner, stared for but a moment and nodded before turning back to Shemeska’s cowering, bloodied form.
“You will remember nothing of our conversation here in this place, or any of what you saw.” The Ebon’s left hand caressed her chin and then stroked across her lips and cheek. His right hand touched her forehead, peeling away her mental protections without the slightest of efforts, and then he turned her head to glance at the obsidian dagger that still lay upon the floor, reminding her of their original discussion.
“Please my master…” Shemeska whimpered, gazing up with abject misery, “Please…”
“On Krangath you enjoyed your experience,” The Oinoloth hissed, speaking now in baernaloth, a language that he’d taught the basics of to the Marauder as part of her price to join his conspiracy, a fact that allowed her now to understand her folly and its cost. “But now, here, you will not enjoy this. No, you will not in any way. That was transfiguration, but this… this is punishment.”
Naked in the darkness of Khin-Oin, Shemeska the Marauder screamed.
****
Shemeska
Adventurer
And as a total tone shift from that update, it's worth noting that I've been running an in-character [@]AskShemeshka account on Twitter for a few weeks (note the spelling difference of the name follows the published spelling rather than the storyhour spelling, but as the Marauder would say, "Shemeska or Shemeshka, I'm still the b*tch with the razorvine crown who's better than you.")
Getting many hits on the account? If so, it's gratifying that many yet remember the glories of Planescape.
As an aside, charming music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PSFN2r6bXY
As an aside, charming music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PSFN2r6bXY
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DrHyperion
Villager
First time poster, and a long time fan from almost the very beginning of both of your story hours. Thank you, Shemeska for the hours of great entertainment. I can't wait for the next installment. I'm a weird one who is fascinated with Gehreleths. Any chance of having them appear more often, especially with all that is going on in Carceri? If you could do for them what you've done with the 'loths that would be awesome.
