Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)

Dawn’s first light broke above the skyline of Plague-Mort. The siege of the past day was over but the battles in the streets had lasted all of the night. Through it all, the man who stood there upon the ramparts of the Arch-Lector’s palace at the heart of the gatetown had seen and directed every moment of it.

Flames still roared through a dozen buildings, most of them set by the retreating forces of Arch-Lector Byrri Yarmoril, eager to raze their own city rather than admit defeat and hand it over to its new rulers. The fires would be extinguished soon enough, the bodies cleared from the streets, and everything rebuilt by his people, his chosen ones, The Illuminated.

A shadow fell across the man as he gazed over the city below.

“Factol?” Nearly twice as tall as a man, the heavily armored minotaur bowed slightly as he address his leader. Flames licked from his armor’s joints and wherever ruddy flesh lay exposed to the air, pointed to some variety of efreet a branch or two down his family tree. “The last of the Arch-Lector’s lieutenants is dead. We cornered her in a storehouse at the edge of Merchant Row. She refused to surrender and died when the roof collapsed from the fire her own people had set at our approach.”

“Such a shame Koradus it came to that,” The man addressed as Factol sighed in resignation and turned.

Compared to the minotaur he was nothing special at all, not even a drop of outsider blood to grace his very much human frame with a halo, golden hair, horns, or some unique other feature. He dressed in white and gold, looking more like a cleric accidentally dropped into Plague-Mort rather than the leader of the force that had just conquered it.

Unlike a high priest, his clothing was completely plain. He wore no crown, no jewelry, no rich mantle, nor even a staff or crown of floating ioun stones to mark him as a wizard. One only had to stand in his presence however to realize why he led an army of followers: looking into his pale blue, unnaturally piercing eyes, you felt humbled and yet exhilarated at once, lucky to be there at his side and eager to know what he saw within you. There was nothing tangible to explain his following, yet he stood there at the center of a conquered gatetown.

Within their ranks, the Factol’s nature and power was the subject of rumor and wild speculation. Some claimed him to be an archmage, though none had ever actually seen him cast a spell or study a spell book. Others claimed him to be a high priest or even the proxy of one deity or another, though he’d never whispered a prayer and he wore no holy symbol. What he had however was the ability to inspire with his words and a virtually divine capacity to plan and foresee events. Koradus knew him as the only man worthy of his loyalty, whatever the nature of his insight.

“It doesn’t help to become a martyr when you no longer have a following of people to inspire.” He shook his head and smiled at Koradus, “Such a shame. She could have risen to greatness despite her place in the old order. I would have helped her, just as I have helped all of you.”

“We could not have done this without you to focus us.” Koradus’s eyes glittered with pride and the faintest hint of disbelief, “Everything here today is because of you.”

“I’m proud of you, I hope that you know that.” The Factol did not dispute his lieutenant’s laying of credit at his feet, but neither did he claim it like a crown. It wasn’t precisely humility, but after laying siege to a gatetown, it was perhaps the closest thing to it that might be found. “Have you taken care of what must be done with the Arch-Lector and his inner circle?”

“They were summarily executed after we confirmed their identity, with a minimum of damage to their corpses. Their bodies will hang for three days from the palace gates, no more and no less.” Koradus smiled with pride, “This is done, and it happened just as you predicted my Factol. The Arch-Lector’s words, they were just as you said they would be. Tell me then, what is next for us?”

The Factol smiled and slapped a hand upon the minotaur’s shoulder warmly, “We have a great task set before us yes? But we have a gathering of men and women destined for greatness, do we not? Plague-Mort suffered damage, but the task of rebuilding it pales in comparison to what we have already accomplished, and what will accomplish still. This is your story Koradus, your path to greatness in the songs of bards, and others in their own ways, each of whom carry a spark that I can see. I want to shepherd you all to that which you can be.”

The minotaur nodded and swelled with pride again. One day the Factol would tell him what exactly lay destined for him, but for the moment they had seized a gatetown!

“Indeed we have.” The man spoke as if reading the other’s mind, but if he had, he gave no indication of it, nor any magic use whatsoever. “We’ve taken a walled planar trade city with a minimum of bloodshed. We’ve navigated the politics of not just a gatetown, but one on the edge of the Abyss itself, and without an unwelcome occupation by either the Hag Countess’s army or the ‘loths that flocked to her like flies to a corpse. That my friend is an accomplishment.”

“Your accomplishment Factol.” Koradus insisted, “I am honored to be here in your presence today more than any other day. We all are.”

“Our accomplishment,” The man scoffed and waved away the praise, “Don’t dare put this on me Koradus; all of you have made me proud.”

Koradus once again suppressed his urge to bow. He didn’t feel worthy to stand in the Factol’s presence, let alone feel worthy of his pride.

“Was there anything else that you came to tell me?” Again the Factol’s prescience was unnerving as yes, the minotaur had one remaining thing to mention.

“Yes Factol,” Koradus frowned with distaste, “The fiends have sent representatives to the main hall, both an amnizu in Malagard’s service and some of the ‘loths in her employ. They requested your audience within the hour regarding payment. They’re impatient even though we haven’t even extinguished the fires or started clearing the corpses from the streets.”

If the human was at all concerned about dealing with the fiends representing the army situated just outside the walls of Plague-Mort, he showed none; his features remained as calm as ever. “They’ll have what we agreed to for their aid, no more and no less. You’ll note that they remain camped outside the walls and not as an occupying force? This city does not and never will belong to them. Tell them that I will be down to speak with them momentarily.”

Koradus nodded and suppressed a final bow, such was his admiration. The minotaur turned and descended the stairs into the palace, leaving his teacher on the ramparts.

Green Marvent, Factol of the Illuminated smiled. “One step complete.”




3 months later in Sigil:

The Portal Jammer’s taproom buzzed with the sounds of conversations, laughter, and clinking glasses. Business had never been better, and each week it seemed brought more and more positive word of mouth, and with that, more customers. The regulars which had always been locals to the Clerk’s Ward were still there, but with a bit of prestige the Jammer had gathered, more people were now visiting from other Wards.

Standing behind the bar and serving to pour drinks, chat with patrons, and enjoy being hit on by many of those same patrons, Clueless was all smiles. Nothing bad had befallen him or the others for what seemed weeks unending, even though it had only been three months since they’d returned to Sigil.

The others felt much the same way and they’d been enjoying the time to relax. There had been no assassins screaming for their blood, no ancient horrors rising from their tombs, the only yugoloth that they’d spoken with was the ever smiling owner of a curio shop, rather than a razorvine crowned narcissist, and with that lack of looming menace, now it seemed Skalliska’s eggs neared ready to hatch. The late troubles in Pandemonium and the Outlands were left far behind and things had for the moment returned to some semblance of normality, or at least normality in Sigil, inasmuch you could have when a Xaositect named Nisha was a part owner of the establishment.

As Clueless tended bar, Toras and Florian occupied a table inset in the wall and away from the main bustle of the room. Sitting and drinking over a plate of cheese and crackers, with a pile of letters and the latest newspapers, the fighter and cleric sat and enjoyed the absence of absolutely anything to do with the ‘loths. Everything seemed wonderful, calm, and fine.

“Toras?” Florian looked up and a confused frown crossed over her face.

“What’s up?” The half-celestial raised an eyebrow and put down his newspaper.

“Toras, I’m bored.”

The fighter put a finger to his mouth and fell silent, studying Florian’s face. For a moment the ambient sounds of the Portal Jammer filled the silence.

“I’m glad to be out of Pandemonium and back home but… yeah.” Toras strummed his fingers on the handle of his beer mug. “It feels like complacency to just sit here, waiting for something to happen or a certain fuzzy b*tch to make an a** of herself again. I hate to say this, but since we got back to Sigil things have died down and well…”

“Exactly,” Florian nodded, “Everything is safe, peaceful, and completely boring.”

“You have anything in mind?”

Florian sighed and reflexively thumbed her holy symbol. “I dare say that I’m not being a very good priest of the Foe Hammer if I’m sitting around not, you know…”

Toras chuckled, “Bashing someone’s head in with a smile on your face?”

“Exactly…” Florian finished her ale and placed it down on the table with a heavy thunk.

“So let’s go do something.” Toras smiled and tapped a finger on the table with as much force as the ale mug. “Let’s go do something of our own. Let’s make trouble on the side of good. Let’s be righteous and proactive rather than reactive.”

“Like what?”

“Let’s go find some trouble and fix it.” Toras put his hands out, palms up and chuckled, “I’m sure that we can find something, somewhere in Sigil that we can happily involve ourselves in.”

“Just the two of us?” Florian glanced over at the bar where Clueless was pouring drinks, and in passing she watched Fyrehowl climbing the stairs up to her room. Tristol was nowhere to be seen, and neither Nisha as well. Come to think of it, that pair had been almost inseparable since getting back from Pandemonium – things were getting quite serious between the two of them. “You don’t want to get anyone else involved?”

“Just the two of us.” Toras smiled and finished his drink. “Go grab a weapon and whatever else you need and then let’s go slumming.”




The darkness smothering Howler’s crag was thick and oppressive, metaphysically heavy and swirling with a thousand swirling, imagined shapes. Deeper in the darkness though, other things moved; living things not born from the evolution-shaped pattern recognition tendencies of the mind. These things in the darkness moved, sniffed for blood, scratched their claws on stone and ached to feast on blood and bone.

Tristol looked up into the darkness, terrified and on the edge of panic. He didn’t know where to run. His spells were failing, and out there in the interminable gloom they waited for him, watching and hungry.

“Get away! I’m an archmage, a servitor of Mystra herself!” He shouted, bluffing and not even sure of his own power now. His spells had all failed. He hadn’t found a gate and nothing seemed to touch the things out there. Surely they were laughing at him, toying with his sanity and laughing amongst themselves. “Come out into the light and face me!”

The darkness stirred and twitched, a living thing rising from its slumber and turning its eyes upon them both. Eyes opened casting a sickly yellow light, eyes the size of men, swirling with a multitude of other eyes in a furious, mad fractal. The darkness split and teeth emerged, then a swollen, phosphorescent tongue.

Lips were licked and the great primordial Howler spoke, “Do YoU HeAr ThE CoDe…?”

Everything was black.

The sound was at his side, the Howler’s tongue wet upon his ear, the howler’s eyes looking into his from only inches away.

The sound came from within his head.

“AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!” Tristol awoke screaming.

Abruptly a tail smacked him in the face, the silver bell at its tip rattling and focusing his attention as the nightmare faded from his mind. Stunned but grateful, he realized that he wasn’t in Pandemonium, but back in Sigil, in bed.

“You ok Tristol?” Laying next to him in bed, the covers pulled up to her chest, Nisha looked over at him with concern.

“Howlers were screaming at me. Chasing me.” Tristol’s ears drooped and below the sheets, Nisha could tell that his tail was bottlebrushed in fright.

“Do I look like a howler?” Nisha stuck out her tongue and made a face. “Rar!”

“You don’t look like a howler, no.” Tristol reached over and ruffled her hair, “You’re too cute to be a howler, and I don’t think howlers can get as bad a case of bedhead as you have right now.”

Nisha laughed and leaned in, giving him a tight squeeze around the waist.

“So why a howler nightmare?” Nisha tapped her tail against his head, gently ringing the silver bell in the process. “Is Pandemonium still bothering you?”

Tristol frowned and sighed with uncharacteristic heaviness and worry, “Fyrehowl and I both saw them in Pandemonium.”

“When was this?” Nisha tilted her head to the side.

“When she and I were taking watch outside the cave on Howler’s Crag.”

The tiefling narrowed her eyes, “I don’t remember seeing anything remotely like that, and I was behind you half the time you were on watch.”

Now it was Tristol’s turn to regard her with an askance look, “You were watching me?”

“Over you; watching that is.” Nisha blushed and shrugged, leaning into his shoulder once more and letting him stroke down her hair into some semblance of neatness. “I wanted to make sure nothing happened to you. So I hid and watched to make sure you didn’t end up dead and sacrificed to whatever.”

Tristol smiled and nearly shed a tear, “That’s really sweet.” He blinked, “It’s also disturbing that Fyrehowl never noticed you.”

“I’m sneaky when I want to be.” Nisha shrugged and tickled the aasimar on his ribs, “But that doesn’t answer my question. Stop being cute and cutely evasive. What was all this about seeing howlers, and how it connects to your nightmare and waking me up with your screaming.”

“We heard howlers and saw lights on the Crag, and I’m pretty sure that none of it was real.” Tristol sighed as he remembered standing there and mutually hallucinating with Fyrehowl, “And just now in the nightmare that I had, I saw that same thing again. On the Crag they called out to us both, and they screamed out the same thing in my dream. I feel like I’m going crazy here.”

“Don’t you go crazy on me now Tristol!” Nisha poked a finger at Tristol’s ribs, “I’ve got plenty of that already to cover the both of us as it is!”

“My kind of crazy though.” Tristol silenced her with a kiss on the lips. “I’ll try not to go crazy, and I’ll try to avoid having bad dreams. You being here is a good enough dream come true as it is.”

“Awww…” Nisha blushed and embraced her favorite wizard. After watching him smile one last time before closing her eyes to sleep again, she returned the expression and snapped her fingers, dismissing the conjured light and curling up under the sheets, tails entwined.




Baring her fangs and holding up her claws in a defensive posture, Fyrehowl snarled at whatever it was in the looming, formless sea of night that stretched out before her. She’d only seen their claws and glittering eyes in the darkness, a moving see of snarling, hungry mouths and snatching, snaring paws.

“What do you want from me?!” The lupinal screamed as she stood atop the Crag.

The liquid darkness lapped at the stones just beneath her feet, like the rising tide of a devouring ocean of madness and night.

Darkness snuffed out every source of light and Fyrehowl drifted in its suffocating embrace.

Floating.

Lost.

Luminous and manic, its eyes pulsing with each heartbeat, one pupil blown and the other a pinprick, the howler stood in front of her. Its reeking breath was in her face, its filthy paws upon her muzzle.

“dO YoU hEaR iT?”

Drenched in sweat, Fyrehowl awoke snarling, her sheets torn to ribbons by her own claws.

The beast from Pandemonium had somehow followed her. Somehow it had sniffed out her trail from the depths of its blighted plane all the way back to Sigil.

Shivering, the lupinal shook her head and smoothed down the fur on her neck and arms, realizing that before she’d awakened screaming, the howler’s voice had not been in front of her. It hadn’t spoken from the leering face that cupped her muzzle in its paws. The voice had echoed from within her own mind.




“I swear to you! I don’t know anything about any slaves!” Hazdrin Grolmer shouted in protest and alarm. Two of his men lay unconscious on the floor, and presumably from the moans from the other room, the other six of his employees were in a similar state, all at the hands of the armored mountain of a half-celestial that held him by his collar a foot off of the ground, and the smiling cleric at his side. “What are you doing?!”

With one hand on the doorknob, Toras smiled as he effortlessly slammed the slave merchant’s head through the wooden door.

“Feel like explaining what exactly you know now?” Toras walked around to the other side of the door and looked up into Hazdrin’s bruised, bloodied, and splinter studded face. The merchant dangled from where he’d been lodged, headfirst into the door, his feet kicking on the other side and causing the door to jostle back and forth a few inches each time.

“I just told you I don’t know anything!” Hazdrin shouted. “You’ll pay for this! I’ll have the Sodkillers at your door for this! The Sons of Mercy too!”

“Here’s the thing,” Toras clucked his tongue and picked a few splinters out of Hazdrin’s face in a faux show of sympathy, “I never mentioned anything about slaves. I only mentioned that I’d heard that you were going to be buying something tomorrow, something illicit, and your friends that I met earlier this evening were quite happy to be bragging about how much jink that you’d be making.”

Two hours earlier, Toras and Florian had passed along a few choice bits of jink and followed a trail of rumors from touts and street urchins. Ultimately they’d ended up in the Bottle & Jug where several of Hazdrin’s mercenary employees were already deep in their cups. Those men and women had given them quite a tale.

“What the f*ck did they tell you!?!” Hazdrin struggled aimlessly, going nowhere without any leverage and no easy way to extricate himself from the door.

Florian looked up at the slaver and smiled, “Pretty much everything!”

Toras stepped back a few steps and drew his blade, “They might be loyal and all normally, but they were preemptively celebrating and about six shots in once we sat down with them over at the Bottle & Jug.”

“Son of a whore! I’ll cut their tongues out when I get out of here!” Hazdrin blustered with genuine rage.

“You’re in no position to do anything to anyone.” Florian poked the man’s bruised nose, making him flinch.

“So where were you going to be buying this apparently very large number of slaves?” Toras swung his sword for intimidation. “Apparently you were going to be selling them off to some tanar’ri for quite a bit of profit.”

“I ‘aint telling you crap!” The slaver spat at Florian, then turned an inch and spat towards Toras.

Absolutely unimpressed, Toras clenched a fist around his greatsword’s grip, “Suit yourself. Florian, can you ask his corpse some questions when he’s dead?”

Without turning, Florian nodded the affirmative, “Sure thing.”

“What?!” Hazdrin’s eyes flicked from the cleric to the fighter, realizing what they were discussing.

“Tempus absolves you by the way Toras,” Florian smiled.” He’s cool with it.”

Toras backed up and readed himself to behead the man lodged in the door. Hazdrin’s eyes bugged out as he realized that yes indeed, they were casually discussing and preparing for his death.

Florian motioned to the man’s head, “Just do try to leave enough of his head intact. It’s harder if there isn’t a tongue, they don’t pronounce things right.”

Toras held his sword up to the ceiling and the lantern that hung there, letting the reflected light play across Hazdrin’s deathly pale face. Less than ten seconds later the merchant broke, screaming and pleading for his life as Toras’s blade swung down with a heavy whistle, stopping just an inch from the man’s exposed neck.

“In the Clerk’s Ward!” Hazdrin screamed, his left eye now clouded a deep crimson from a panic burst blood vessel.

Toras’s blade was cold as it played across the man’s flesh, just enough to feel, to remind him that execution was a moment away, but not enough to break the skin. No further threats were required however.

“Where in the Clerk’s Ward?” Toras demanded, his eyes narrow and deathly serious. “I want an address and a time.”

“Two before peak! Copperlane Road, one block past the Civic Festhall. They’re meeting in a kip above a bakery, Pelwrath’s or something like that; it has a blue sign or something similar. The stairs are around the back side leading up to the exterior door.”

“Names?” Florian demanded.

Hazdrin was shaking and trembling, his feet clattering against the door and a poor of urine spreading out from underneath the other side from where he’d voided his bladder, “I don’t have a clue! The primary buyer was coming here and I was buying part of their merchandise.”

“Part?” A concerned expression passed over Toras’s face. “I thought your group purchased anyone they could and then parceled them off as forced labor, slave-soldiers, or fiend-food. What part of their merchandise aren’t you buying?”

“I don’t have any use for the children, so I’m not paying for them.”

There was a long, pregnant pause as Toras glared daggers into Hazdrin. Behind him, Florian shook her head and let out a silent, whistling exhalation.


“You just saved your own life, remember that.” The half-celestial’s voice was unnaturally calm as he stepped back and opened the door, complete with Hazdrin still lodged head-first through the wood. There was a dull, muffled thud as the slaver’s skull connected with the stone wall and he slumped, knocked out cold.

Florian’s eyes were wide as she looked at Toras, “I didn’t expect to find something like that. Not in the middle of the Clerk’s Ward.”

“Nor did I,” Toras swallowed as he strode towards the exit, weaving between a half-dozen unconscious bodies with a renewed sense of valor and purpose. He was smiling like an avenging angel prepared to sing as it shed the blood of the unholy, “But Andros be praised, we’ll be making sure that it doesn’t happen again. We’ve got less than an hour to get there, let’s go and make an example of them.”

Huh, I coulda sworn Clueless was in on tat anti-slavery run. Given his 'dealing' later on... Though wasn't this about the same time when Tristol was asking permission to date Nisha too?

"So how do you want to do this?" Florian glanced up at Toras, then over to the stairwell across the street that ascended to the door indicated by a man still stuck, head-first in a door of his own a Ward away.

Toras pointed up to the door, "Well from what I understand they're certain of their safety, they have plenty of guards -inside- but none actually outside to watch the entry and raise an alarm."

"You want to kick the door in don't you?" Florian chuckled.

"Oh absolutely!" Toras beamed a smile. "Bursting into a room full of slavers to deliver righteous justice! The only way I might make it better is if I got to suckerpunch a 'loth on the way out!"

"So what's your plan beyond kicking the door in?"

"I don't need one." The half-celestial shrugged.

"There's times that I'm really glad that I'm not a cleric of the Red Knight." Florian shook her head. "I'd be spitting nails about strategy right now if I was."

"But you're not."

"No, I'm following you up a flight of stairs, not knowing what we'll find on the other side except that those on the other side deserve to be smote."

"It's liberating isn't it?" Toras hefted his blade and stretched his neck to first one side and then the next.

"Abso-f*cking-lutely." Florian motioned towards the stairs and they both crossed the street, continuing their banter even as they went.

"I think I'm finally starting to settle into this city!" Toras admitted as they stepped to the top of the first landing.

“Likewise.”

“And today, we make the city a little bit better.” He raised his eyebrows and stared at the door. Thick and heavy, it would withstand the force of most men’s attempt to burst it inwards. Thankfully however, a cliché statement or not, Toras was not most men. "On the count of three."

"I’ll raise you back if you get killed." Florian nodded and grasped her holy symbol in one hand and weapon in the other.




The door shattered with the force of Toras's kick, sailing inwards in a cloud of splinters as the hinges broke and a chunk of the doorframe followed them aloft. A dozen voices shouted in panic and outrage, men and women dove for cover and snatched for their weapons as the two intruders took in the scope of what they saw inside.

Two groups sat at a table in the room's center, one of them clearly the slavers mentioned by those who would have been buying from them later, and by their holy symbols, tattoos, and uniformly tanar’ri-blooded tiefling heritage, they held some associations with the Temple of the Abyss. The second group was not however a group of fiends or savage goblinoids fresh from raiding villages in the Outlands and eager to sell their chattel spoils.

"What is the meaning of this?!" A tall, bronze-skinned human stood, dressed in gleaming, exquisitely crafted armor. "How DARE YOU?!"

Along with the bellowing man, two others wore similar armor, an aasimar woman and a half-elven man. All of them bore scowls of anger and frustration, along with a certain obscene self-righteous self-assurance that bespoke of zealotry in their cause, whatever that cause might be.

Whatever it was however, it was nothing holy. Behind them, a series of cages contained twenty or thirty people, though that was only the ones visible; they were packed together to the point of having difficulty breathing in their confines. Half of them were children.

Ice ran through Toras’s veins and time seemed to slow to a crawl as he stepped over the remain of the door one step, then two steps, and swung his blade as the man screamed in fury and alarm, seeming almost to believe as if his words alone could blunt any attack.

"Close your eyes children, you don't want to see this!"

"Fool! We do as we please! We are destined for greatness! We…”

The mercury that filled the hollow chamber running the length of Toras’s rushed forward with a snap, weighting the blade. Plate resisted for but a split second before crumpling like tissue paper. Mail sheared in twain like a cracker snapped and dredged into a bowl of crimson foodstuffs. Flesh tore and bone snapped, spraying blood across Toras’s face even as the dying man screaming incoherently, not yet realizing that the blade had cleaved him nearly in half.

The room erupted in a burst of already alarmed voices now turned to screams of panic.

The screams of panic turned to screams of pain as Florian stepped from behind Toras. She raised her fist, invoking the name of Tempus, and with the sound of a raging battle, called into being a horizontal field of clashing, whirling, razor-sharp blades. Where both groups had stood before, blood and flesh rained down upon the floor.

Drenched in blood, Toras watched as the whirling field of blades butchered the slavers and their suppliers alike. A single figure stumbled free of the zone of death, staggered and confused, bleeding from a dozen wounds, only to come face to face with the half-celestial. The aasimar mumbled, tears streaming down her face, “You can’t do this! We carry the spark of greatness. We’re Illuminated.”

Toras gave no reply in words as he met her gaze with a scowl and a boot to her chest, sending the woman hurtling back into the thick of the blade barrier. She screamed only briefly, and then all was silent as Florian waved and cancelled her spell.

Spattered with a fine mist of their captors’ blood, the captive slaves whimpered and shuddered at the suddenness and horror of what they had just witnessed, but only a moment. Collectively they began to cheer.

“Roll the bodies and find out who the hell these idiots were in the first place.” Toras glanced down at the mangled remains strewn about the radius of where the blade barrier had been cast. “Well, what’s left of the bodies at least. I’ll see to letting these folks out of their chains and somewhere safe.”

Toras did just that as Florian sifted through the remains, trying to make sense of who the armored slavers were. Ultimately there wasn’t much left intact, and paperwork was shredded beyond recovery. What all of them had in common however was a medallion emblazoned with the symbol of The Illuminated, the recently self-proclaimed “faction” responsible for the sack of Plague-Mort. As to why they were selling slaves and why in Sigil, that much remained opaque at the moment, but not for long.




Fyrehowl's eyes were bloodshot and she actually stumbled, nearly losing her balance, as she closed the door to her room and made her way more or less on instinct over to Tristol's. She'd tossed and turned all evening, with what little sleep she'd gotten punctuated by horrific nightmares that kept repeating on the same theme: the whispering/screaming/laughing howlers that she and Tristol had both seen months earlier in Pandemonium. She meant to knock as she blinked, having momentarily fallen asleep in the moment between standing at the door and turning the doorknob, but she didn't knock or even clear her throat before walking into the wizard's bedroom unannounced.

"Tristol?" The lupinal's speech was slurred and groggy, but she didn't get out more than the aasimar's name before he replied with a similar tone.

Tristol didn't even look up from where he sat, half slumped over his spellbook, half leaning into a dead-asleep and lightly snoring Nisha, "I already looked at that envelope for you Clueless. It's not trapped or even magically alarmed to let whoever sent it know that you received it, so please just let me try to get some sleep..."

"I'm not Clueless."

"You're much fuzzier than him." Tristol squinted and sighed, "And carrying much less coffee than he brought up here a while ago. What do you want?"

"Can I sit down?" Fyrehowl asked, having already done so, again purely on instinct.

The celestial and the aasimar sat silently for several minutes, staring at each other. They noticed the equivalence of their state of rest, the bloodshot eyes looking back at their own, and a certain unmeasurable status of being unnerved and frankly scared at something otherwise unmeasurable and unnoticeable except for someone who had been through exactly the same experience.

"You dreamed about them too, didn't you?" Fyrehowl's hackles rose as she remembered the howler in her dreams.

Tristol bit his lower lip and shivered, but didn't respond in words. His expression however, when he met the lupinal's stare, it answered in the affirmative.

"What's going on Tristol?"

"Try not to wake Nisha." Tristol motioned to the snoring tiefling, "I kept her up all night with the dreams I was having. She didn't fall asleep until a little while ago."

"What did it say to you?" Fyrehowl lowered her voice.

Tristol started to reply but then stopped, sighed, and simply turned his spellbook around for her to look. There in the margins, flowing like spilled ink around the intricately penned spells in his normal hand was the same question from both of their dreams: "dO YoU hEaR ThE CoDe?"

"I wrote that in my sleep." The mage shook his head in disbelief at his own actions, "Apparently. At least as far as I can tell. The handwriting is mine, if sloppy and creepy as all hell. I tried to write something coherently, but each time I started to drift off to sleep I'd write that mess like someone trying their hand at automatic spirit writing."

Nisha twitched and opened her eyes, yawning with exaggerated expression and then turning to look at Fyrehowl curiously. "You had creepy dreams too?"

"You could call them that." The lupinal frowned. "Nothing like having a frighteningly realistic dream where you're back in Pandemonium and being chased howlers who keep trying to talk to you."

"What did they say?" Nisha tilted her head sideways, and somewhere below her chair, her tail flicked and rattled the bell at its tip.

Tristol leaned his head on his girlfriend's shoulder, "Absolute gibberish."

"That's totally not fair!" The tiefling protested, hugging Tristol and rubbing her cheek into the top of his head, "That's my schtick."

Both nightmare sufferer's chuckled as Nisha lapsed into several minutes of mind-jarring xaos-speak. But through it all they kept looking at each other, realizing that something from their trip to the depths of the Howling plane had followed them back.

Fyrehowl sighed, "So are we going crazy, is the a howler wandering the streets of Sigil, or is there something inside of our heads?"

Tristol shrugged, "I don't know. I honestly don't know. Like a song you can't get out of your head, I can't get the dream or whatever it tried to say out of my head either. I keep thinking that it said more than I remember though."

"Why do you say that?" The lupinal narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "I can't recall it doing much other than chasing me and saying gibberish."

"The more I think about the dream, and about what we saw in Pandemonium," Tristol shook his head in frustration, like a scholar on the verge of a breakthrough, "It's like there's a pattern that I can almost figure out, but not yet. I'll think about it when I have the time, and hopefully we can figure out what's going on sooner rather than later. I rather doubt that we have a howler stalking us in the streets. It's only one night of bad dreams."

Nisha ceased her own babbling and perked an eyebrow, "I'm not going to catch this too am I? I'm already weird enough without a howler in my head."

"You'll be fine Nisha," Tristol leaned over and gave her a kiss, "You've got too much crazy in your head already for anything else to fit, howler or otherwise."

"I'm crazy?" The xaositect's ears twitched and the bell on her tail rattled.

"Only the best kind of crazy." Tristol smiled, "The kind that I like."

Fyrehowl rolled her eyes and yawned, "Ok, that's about enough mushy lovely dovey for me for a while. I should probably go downstairs, get something to drink, and try to fully wake up. Hopefully tomorrow I can sleep better.

"Oh don't go!" Nisha giggled, "I promise that I won't do anything mushy... like this!" She leaned in and licked Tristol's nose. Tristol halfheartedly protested and giggled as Nisha started poking him in the ribs with her tail. The tiefling was laughing and smiling, almost with stars dancing in her eyes. She was probably happier now than she'd ever been in her life.

Fyrehowl was already at the door, leaving them alone for whatever new couples did in the phase where they did cute things that annoyed everyone else who happened to be single. Turning the door handle, she looked back at the two of them and shook her head with a smile, "Gods you two are too cute."




Several hours later the Portal Jammer was flush with traffic and where coffee had been sipped greedily from mugs, it was now replaced with spirits and livelier conversations than those grumbling awakenings from the early morning crowd. Conversation was even livelier than usual however due to the gossip and speculation regarding what some described as a "slaughter" barely seven blocks away while others referred to it as "fiends slacking their blood lust" or "sacrifices to a dark god". All of these conversations were of course interreupted and corrected by those proclaiming it to be "something that Sigil needed for far too long" and "a good stern hand of justice to show evildoers that sometimes they go too far, but not longer!". Absolutely none of the voices and viewpoints had a clue of course that the brigands/fiends/justicars/heroes responsible for the murder of seven in the Clerk's Ward and freeing dozens from slavery were in fact part owners of the Jammer currently sitting rather comfortably in the corner without a worry of consequences.

"Did you seriously go out and gank a half dozen people in the same Ward you live in?" Clueless sat down at the table with a slight frown, punctuating his question with the heavy *thunk!* of a trio of ale mugs that he quickly passed over to Toras and Florian, keeping one for himself.

"Not exactly." Toras took a swig of ale, smiled, wiped his mouth, and then smiled more. "It was actually seven people."

"Seriously?" Clueless put a hand to his forehead. "I've heard a dozen different versions of what happened just in the past few hours, so please, tell me what actually did."

"They were slavers." Florian put her hands on the table palm up, "They had it coming to them."

"And I've served fiends breakfast and coffee more than once this week." The bladesinger shrugged, "They're literally made of evil made flesh, but generally people don't go around trying to kill them here in Sigil. What made a group of slavers any different?"

"They were child slavers." Toras ceased smiling. "They deserved what we did to them."

"So I've heard," Clueless eyed the two of them askance, "Courtesy of several different touts in several different parts of the city, plus from more than a few customers here at the Portal Jammer."

"I don't mind people knowing what we did." Toras took a long drink from his mug and studied the half-fey's reaction.

"Listen, I'm not saying that I disapprove." Clueless shook his head, "Honestly I wish that I was there. Razor hasn't had enough practical use for a few months. But at the same time, I wish that you'd told the rest of us before going out and doing something crazy."

"Yet we live with Nisha." Florian deadpanned.

"Who is now openly dating Tristol." Toras gave a chuckle and shook his head. He hadn't really seen the two of them as a match given their disparity in temperament and training, but given what he'd seen, they'd fallen head over heels in love.

"Tristol actually asked me for permission to start dating her." Clueless chuckled, "After she and I spent a lot of time following up on the gem in my ankle a while back on our own, she's been like a little sister to me. Since she doesn't have any family that she's aware of unless you count the chance of there being a tanar'ri somewhere still extant from back in the upper leaves of her family tree, she's alone. Tristol said it was a Halruaan custom to ask a woman's parents or elder siblings for permission to begin a courtship, so he came to ask me."

"I assume you said yes?" Florian smiled with amusement.

"Oh absolutely." Clueless chuckled warmly, "But I spent some time laughing at the thought that he needed permission. I also find it funny to think that Nisha of all people needed anyone or anything looking out for her if she got herself into a situation, romantically or otherwise."

"She finds trouble on her own and trouble usually runs away and asks for help." The cleric swallowed another mouth of ale. "They make a cute couple."

"That they do." Clueless gave a satisfied sigh, happy to see the wizard and xaositect doing well, "But back to what I was going to say before about you going and killing a bunch of people and acting like a pair of freelance heroes that Sigil typically lacks."

Toras beamed a smile and clinked mugs with Florian, then with Clueless a moment later.

"Several of the people that you killed were members of The Illuminated." Clueless explained, letting the implication sink in to the other two.

"The berks that just pulled a coup over in Plague-Mort?" Florian raised an eyebrow.

Clueless nodded, "The same."

"And?" Toras put a single finger on the table and rolled his eyes. "If their 'faction'," he placed a questioning emphasis on the word, "Was involved as a whole, that raises issues but gives me someone new to hate that isn't a yugoloth. If the 'faction' wasn't involved as a whole, they've got egg on their face for the actions of a few of their people and they won't raise a finger because it would only embarrass them while they're still basking in the glory of conquering a sh*thole of a gatetown."

Clueless placed an envelope in the center of the table, "Well their self-proclaimed Factol took notice that you killed several of his people and sent you a letter today. It arrived a few minutes ago from the Runner's Guild. Addressed to both of you. He knows your names apparently."

Florian looked at it warily, "Before we open it, have you checked it?"

"I had Tristol look over it." Clueless tapped it with a finger, "He didn't sleep well and he was grumpy when I asked him, but he says that it's clean. Completely non-magical."

"Didn't sleep well..." Florian snickered, "I wouldn't wonder why..."

Clueless shrugged, "He actually looked under the weather. But regardless, it's not spell trapped as far as he could tell. I trust him on it."

Toras looked over the envelope before reaching out and picking it up. Crisp and white, a practiced and calm hand and black ink had addressed it, 'With apologies, to Toras of Andros and Florian the servant of the Foehammer'.

"This better not be more death threats." Toras sighed as he drew a knife and slit the envelope open. "I've had enough of those this year."

"Well, it doesn't look like it's from a 'loth, that's one good thing at least." Florian remarked with a smile.

Toras pulled the letter out, "Why do you say that?"

"Because what kind of self-respecting 'loth would send a letter with the words, 'With apologies'?"

Toras nodded, "You've got a point..."

"So what's it say?" Florian leaned over to glance past the warrior's shoulder.

"Well it most certainly isn't a death threat." Toras skimmed the letter with a look of genuine confusion. "Huh..."

Toras of Andros and Florian the servant of Tempus, please accept my deepest apologies for the actions against you -if however brief- and for the illegal and reprehensible activities of some of my faction members. I regret that among some of my faction, our creed is taken as an excuse to do as they will, as if the potential for greatness excuses ones actions as you move along the path I lay before them. It does not and you did right in bringing them to swift justice. If you have any level of guilt or regret for your actions in Sigil's Clerk's Ward, if my words have any meaning in the present instance, consider yourself absolved. I would not have desired to entangle you in the failings of some of my faction members, but yet it is funny how the multiverse operates in terms of things fated to occur.

There is potential in you both. You carry the spark of illumination that not all have. Please come and speak with me in Plague-Mort at your convenience.
Green Marvent - Factol of the Illuminated




The petrified countenance of Shylara the Manged, Overlord of Carceri and paramour of the Oinoloth snarled silently from its position in the corner of the highest chamber in the Tower Arcane: the office of Helekanalaith the Keeper of the Tower. Magical windows above looked out into the black void between the Furnaces, providing a dull red light and the occasional starburst of an exploding volcanic eruption in the distance. The imprisoned arch-loth said nothing as she stood there in rampant, having been molded and reshaped to fit the Keeper's mood again and again like some great trophy.

The Keeper of the Tower sat not at his desk, but hovered in the air with his back to Shylara's statue, his legs crossed and his ubiquitous notebook open in his lap. Without looking down at it, he penned a running transcript and compilation of notes, thoughts, and observations on his present meeting with the one who sat opposite him: the Oinoloth, Vorkannis the Ebon.

Like Helekanalaith, Vorkannis sat suspended in the air, legs crossed and posed almost leisurely so, as if he sat on a cushioned couch. Since entering the room an hour earlier, the Ebon hadn't seemed to care in the slightest that the petrified astral form of his consort stood there, the anchor keeping her catatonic and imprisoned within her own body back in Carceri. Far from deeply caring about the situation, he'd never so much as addressed the topic while there to discuss several topics involving the Tower's resources.

Listening intently, the Keeper wracked his brain trying to determine the implications of and subtle maneuvers of the Oinoloth's tone and expressions. All the while he scrawled his notes, all of them nearly automatic scrawls of text drawn into shapes to collectively paint a picture of words within words within a picture with a meaning all its own.

"I still want that one remaining annoyance captured, preferably pinned down like a butterfly, spreadeagled and displayed, fit to hang under glass upon a naturalist's wall, continually shifting and changing as she suffers. All of the others are dead or otherwise accounted for, except for her."

"You expect her to seek revenge for what we did to her motley collection of siblings?"

"Eventually yes, when she becomes reckless, absolutely. But she won't come after me, I give her more credit than that."

"She's canny, that one. It isn't a surprise though, given her status as a nycaloth prior to bargaining with the hags."

The Ebon cracked a smile, baring the faintest hints of ivory fangs. "A nycaloth you say?"

"Yes, a nycaloth." The Keeper adjusted the golden spectacles perched on his muzzle. "That's what the records on her life indicate."

"I'd always heard that she progressed from nycaloth to arcanaloth, that in fact she did so just prior to striking her deal with the hags."

"Yet there aren't any records to that effect, neither on herself, nor on any arcanaloth sponsor or group of ultroloths to oversee her promotion."

"Presumably because she killed them, or else managed to have the Tower's records altered or expunged." The Oinoloth stared at the Keeper, silent but for the low background noise of crackling crucible fires and more distantly, wailing petitioners. "Which do you think would be more likely?"

Helekanalaith narrowed his eyes, "It would not be the first individual for whom the Tower's archives present a paucity of information, or simply a complete absence of there very existence."

Vorkannis took a sip of his tea, smiling over the rim of the mug. The Keeper's insinuation was noted with silent amusement.

"Regardless," Helekanalaith paused to dip his pen into a pot of burning coals, ensuring the tip of the metal stylus was white hot once more. "I have my doubts that even she could alter the archive's records; I would be aware of her attempts. I have not always been Keeper however."

"Then perhaps we should ask Larsdana." The Ebon gestured towards Helekanalaith's desk, the same desk where Larsdana ap Neut had sat and ruled the Tower for ages beyond reckoning.

"This is the second time that you've seen fit to mention her in my presence my Oinoloth."

"That because," The Oinoloth smiled, "and I said so at that previous time, that you remind me of her."

"You knew Larsdana?" The Keeper leaned forward, genuine curiosity playing across his features. "You've mentioned her before, but you've never elaborated."

"In a manner of speaking." Vorkannis glanced at the glittering gem that hovered above the Keeper's desk, drifting there like an omnipresent Pole Star. "The two of you deserved one another, and for the record yes, I approve of what you did. So does she. I would have done nothing less. But you've been wondering about my current quandary, though you haven't directly asked my opinion on the situation. With you and Larsdana in mind, do I need to answer your unspoken question?"

"No my Oinoloth, your meaning is quite clear." Helekanalaith changed the subject, feeling distinctly uncomfortable with the ease with which the Ebon commented on his relationship with the Tower's designer and first Keeper. Their story was not a matter of record beyond the simple matter of predecessor and successor, teacher and apprentice. Their status as lovers was distinctly not a part of the Tower's records, nor the manner in which he imprisoned her and kept her still as a beloved possession. "Back to our original topic of conversation, do you have any suggestions for where I might direct our efforts to discover our soon to be pinned and displayed butterfly, so to speak?"

"None whatsoever." Vorkannis's reply was oddly flippant for a being so used to being in utter, prescient control.

"Pardon me my Oinoloth, but if you could please clarify your meaning.” Helekanalaith looked up at Vorkannis, eager to infer meaning from the other ‘loth’s facial features, “You have no specific ideas on where to direct my search, or you simply do not care?"

The melanistic 'loth with albino eyes smiled. Momentarily the chamber's lights dimmed, including the gemstone that bottled the spirit of Larsdana ap Neut, putting the Keeper and him in shadow, but for the puissant glow of his crimson-pink eyes.

"She was an arcanaloth before her self-debasement. She isn't stupid enough to strike at me directly. She'll hide and she'll observe from the periphery, marking a target and then striking out at those around me first." The Oinoloth's eyes burned into the Keeper's own, with a creeping implication, unblemished by care or concern. "Do be watchful Helekanalaith, because unlike the third member of our original triumvirate, you aren't bottled up in Sigil where our wayward butterfly cannot flutter her poisoned wings."

With that final piece of advice, the Oinoloth chuckled and vanished, transposing the gulf between Gehenna and the Waste like superimposed atoms, existing in both at once before his smile collapsed the wavefunction to a single location and returned him to the summit of Khin-Oin. Once again alone within the Tower, -his- Tower, with only his thoughts and the entrapped spirit of his former lover drifting above his desk, Helekanalaith felt a gnawing worry creep through his being for the first time in millennia.

"Larsdana, let us pray to the Ebon that you never gave that shapeshifting wretch a way into the Tower to work on your behalf, if you ever did strike a deal with her Larsdana." The Keeper plucked the glowing gemstone from the air, feeling in its cold surface a reflection of her face, the sulfur and perfume of her fur, the malice and potency of her heart and mind, and then the scream that followed as he focused and made her suffer, smiling with the dreamy-half smile of love as he did so. "I know you kept secrets from me Larsdana. I've barely scratched the surface of what you bottled away, and I respect that, I truly do. But if you bargained with her, I will make you suffer. I will not feel afraid and unsafe in my own Tower!"

The Keeper snarled like a trapped animal and slammed his notebook down upon his desk, causing the styling to fall to the floor and spin, trailing spirals of smoke as it cooled. Helekanalaith blinked and released Larsdana's gem as he stared dumbfounded at the notebook and the pages it had fallen open to.

Rather than the voluminous notes of his conversation with the Ebon over the past two hours, and rather than those notes forming a picture of the Ebon, or his office, or anything else, they formed an image of something that he'd never intended. Each page of his notes was the same, not that he remembered drawing it at the time: Shylara the Manged, Overlord of Carceri, her form bloody and broken, marred by open sores and bleeding, self-inflicted wounds, pounding on the surface of the page as if they were windows into a prison cell.

Weeping and pleading, each page was the same, and rather than the words of his notes as he'd chronicled his meeting with the Ebon, the letters spelled out only, "Please Vorkannis! Forgive me! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!" Over and over and over again.




"Do you suppose that we should finally make our grand, overdue return to the Tower and you know, actually do our job?" Alpthis ap Othrys casually glanced over at his brother, picking a fleck of raw and bloody flesh from between his canid fangs with a single polished and poisoned claw.

The two arcanaloths sat along the rim of the miles-wide crevasse that housed the Tower of Incarnate Pain, itself still under construction. They faced the Tower itself, and under their eyes they witnessed the gentle undulation of its spires and buttresses, the aggregate motion borne of each individual living, screaming, suffering brick. Behind them, the air shimmered with the great illusory wall that hid the tower from sight and magical divinations, as well as the additional wards that actually moved errant travelers from accidentally blundering their way into the Tower's sphere of influence and exposing the 'loths' great open secret.

In the prolonged absence of the Tower's mistress, Shylara the Manged, her underlings warred amongst themselves and against the spells protecting and isolating the Oinoloth's consort's sessile and comatose body. All of this was done under the vain pretense of normalcy of course. The day to day activities of the Tower went on without any obvious discontinuity. Only the occasional appearance of a corpse and the growing pool of ashes outside of the sealed doors to Shylara's private chambers laid low the illusion covering the organized assassinations and creeping civil war amongst her servitors and would-be successors.

The brothers, both acting as unofficial proxies but empowered with more than a minute fraction of the Overlord's newly gained power, had removed themselves from the game of politics and killings that had raged below the surface like a hungry parasite devouring its host for months. As a result of their own natures and the influence of Shylara's nature now running through their veins quite literally, rather than obediently defend the status quo and their mistress, they were quite content to sit, watch, f*ck, and enjoy the suffering that resulted from the Manged's absence.

A subtle ripple passed through the Tower's surface, like a stone dropped into a pond of souls and suffering, originating near to the Tower's heart at a door only a short walk away from the Reflective Chasm. A moment before the physical ripple appeared, the brothers both received a mental ping and understood precisely what had occurred.

"Well, that would be a signal that someone finally managed to break through the warding on the outer door to the Mistress's private chambers." Alpthis gave a delighted smirk and clapped his blood-covered hands together "Our previous conversation was most prescient then."

"Took them long enough." Apteris smirked and idly picked at a bit of blood on one of his claws. "An hour short of three month's time."

"A pity for all of these would-be usurpers." Alpthis laughed, "There being two more doors, more wards on them, and well, the -other- things keeping the Mistress safe."

"Technically that number of things keeping her safe includes us brother."

"Yes, I suppose that it does." The sorcerer reached into a golden bag filled with an assortment of candied treats, all of them brilliantly colored, all of them at unsettling contrast with the wriggling, moaning walls of the Tower of Incarnate Pain looming in the distance. "Up until now though, we've been superfluous."

"Unnecessary." Apteris shrugged and returned his brother's smirk.

"Unnecessary, yes." The sorcerer held out a pearly emerald sphere, something once alive and now covered in malt, caramel, arsenic, and glossed sugar. He never saw his brother actually move his hand, but the treat was gone from his and then only briefly held up before being popped into the sorcerer-monk's mouth.

"Perhaps we should go check on the depth of the ashes," Apteris paused to swallow, "make a tally of those fallen to the Mistress's layered wards, and see who next feels self-important."

"We also number among the ranks of the self-important."

"Yes, but we aren't stupid."

"No, we aren't. We're opportunistic, pragmatic, and both overly eager to get into her robes once she awakens." Alpthis licked his lips and watched as his brother mirrored the same expression. "Well, what passes for robes on her anyway."

"Alas, neither of us is Oinoloth."

"Give it time brother, give it time." Alpthis returned the bag of sweets to a dimensional pocket as he stood up, "Besides, she's hardly chaste. She just doesn't pick anyone with a chance of harming her, the Oinoloth excepted." He made a deft, nearly religious gesture at the mention, "But in that instance, I dare say that she's not the one making the choice."

"Have you noticed since she invested us with a portion of her power that we've taken to killing our lovers?"

Alpthis paused and glanced to his brother, staying silent for a few seconds before responding. "Yes, I have noticed that. I find myself wondering what exactly led to that preference on her part, since it seems to originate from her. We shared partners before and we certainly made them suffer when it pleased either of us to do so, but we didn't kill them just because... not without reason."

Apteris smirked, "At least we haven't killed each other yet. I think she likes us too much."

"So true, so true." Alpthis leaned in and stroked his sibling's cheek, grazing his claws along the other's lips, "Besides brother, you're far too sweet to kill."

"Flatterer." The sorcerer-monk licked the claw still tracing along his lower lip, "I just wonder if she'll mind you dressing as she does more than once in her absence."

"I'm sure she'll know, and I expect it'll tickle her rotten heart." Alpthis leaned forward and extended his own tongue, tapping the monk's nose, "Which is precisely as I intend. Besides, you rather seem to like it when I do."

"That I do..." Apteris snarled and once again moved his hands in a blur of motion that his sibling never saw in transit, but indeed felt, and indeed smiled as it tangled in his hair and pulled him into a fierce embrace, claws digging into his scalp. The kiss was deep and passionate, and one that they'd shared many, many times at the Overlord's urging, though not by any means first at her design. "The Overlord can wait another hour. We're her proxies, but we're not her only protectors."

"Amusing isn't it how we're both becoming more and more like her?" The sorcerer spoke into the monk's mind, presently unable to vocalize beyond gasps and swift inhalations. I like that. I like that very much.




Crackles of energies and expended spells flashed in the heights of the Tower of Incarnate Pain over the intervening hours, betraying the effects of the unraveling wards set upon Shylara's chambers. Slowly but surely the first layer of them were being peeled back in methodical fashion. Should they break it would spark another round of open violence, spilling yet more blood upon a location already permanently drenched in it.

Pausing only a moment to adjust his robes, Alpthis snapped his fingers and teleported himself and his brother of them into a small chamber on the periphery of the Overlord's private sanctum, only a few yards from the vast chamber that housed the Reflective Chasm. Despite being two of her most trusted servitors -and perhaps especially on account of that fact- the twins were unable to actually teleport into the immediate vicinity of where the first wards had been broken and some would-be usurper now sought to delve deeper, closer to where their Mistress lay catatonic and vulnerable.

The two floated above a layer of ashes that grew deeper as they approached the pair of broken, partially melted doors that had already claimed the lives of hundreds. It opened into another short passage, the walls shrouded in artificial darkness, with another glittering, monstrously warded door at the terminal end.

One hand shrouded in black flame, a single figure hovered before the door, not yet aware of the brothers' approach.

"Mellinara ap Cathrys," Alpthis quipped, recognizing the other arcanaloth as she whispered under her breath and moved her fingers gently, teasing apart and examining the furious mosaic of spells woven into the door and all around it.

The intruder's ears perked and she snarled, turning around face the pair. "I see how it is... you sit back and wait till I've broken down the wards for you, then you kill me once I've completed the job the two of you could not accomplish."

Mellinara's jackal head was all teeth and fury, silver fur and onyx earrings. Just barely visible at the neckline of her turquoise robe was a tracery of bleached-white scars that both the other two knew from personal and intimate experience covered most of her body as a 'gift' from the former Overlord, Bubonix many centuries earlier.

"I've slaved here for a thousand years, longer than either of you." The 'loth cursed, "I watched this Tower be razed to its foundation stones on three occasions and worked to raise it back up. I served under Bubonix, I served under Vorkannis, and then he raised up the current whelp to have his position and power when he became Oinoloth. He deserved this Tower and my respect, but the bitch beyond this door did not then, and does not now."

"Can my brother and I assume then that you do?" Alpthis asked with a mocking tone. "Shall we both bow down now preemptively?"

Mellinara snarled and the black fire in her left hand erupted to match her mood.

"You can indeed be rather persuasive." The sorcerer licked his lips and winked.

She snorted with derision but her manner relaxed ever so slightly, "So why haven't you tried to stop me from killing your bleeding whore of a Mistress?"

"Why would we?" Alpthis shrugged.

"It seems rather pointless." Apteris kicked half-heartedly at the ashes pooled upon the floor.

Mellinara narrowed her eyes, trying to discern the brothers' actual feelings. "I take it then that you desire her dead? Tired of serving and wish the throne yourselves? You're Shylara's proxies if I'm to understand the current state of things correctly. You've tasted her power. Help me kill her and you can taste more of her power and more than just her power."

Alpthis laughed and shook his head, "A very tempting offer, especially the latter, but please don't get us wrong. We're not going to try to break in and seize the throne. Not by ourselves and not with anyone else."

"Why not? Proxies or not, you both aren't loyal in the slightest." She laughed.

"Because three things," Alpthis held up a finger, "For starters, because we're not stupid."

"Not to imply that you're stupid." Apteris interjected with a wave of both hands.

"But we are of course." Alpthis gave a sh*t-eating grin. "Secondly, because despite the mange which we really shouldn't speak of..."

"But she's in no position to hear us of course." Apteris inclined his head towards the second sealed door.

"Of course," Alpthis continued, "neither of us have had the pleasure of serving her in that capacity so we can only speculate, but back to what I said before, from what we have seen, despite the mange, Shylara really is more pleasing to look at than you."

Mellinara snarled and spreads her arms, preparing to hurl a spell at them as a physical rebuke for their insult should a proper apology not be forthcoming. "And your third reason?"

"Oh, yes, there was that other thing." Alpthis snapped his finger as if to punctuate suddenly remembering something.

"The third one yes." Apteris chuckled as he slowly moved closer to his brother, glancing just over Mellinara's shoulder.

"Yes indeed." Alpthis gave a thin smile and glanced at the monk, seeing for himself the thing that Mellinara had not yet perceived. "The largest of the reasons in fact."

"Stop speaking in riddles you little sh*t." Mellinara sneered and spat, "What reason keeps you from doing precisely what I know you and every other 'loth in the tower desires to do if they were able to do so?"

"Being that when the Mistress wakes up, we truly don't want to end up like, well... them." Alpthis and Apteris bowed their heads and softly whispered the Overlord of Carceri's name like a prayer.

Already cloaked in dim half-light, a deeper shadow fell across the three of them and a footfall sent a ripple across the ashes. Mellinara blinked and turned, looking up into the snarling faces of two massive nycaloths as they stepped out of the walls. Not ordinary if physically massive, both were heavily surgically altered. Both possessed an additional pair of arms grafted onto their body and runes glowing from where the Overlord had cut sigils into their flesh with her own claws, yet the most obvious sign of her handiwork was not those appendages, but the glowing crystalline shard of crystal embedded into their foreheads swirling with inner light and ghostly symbols. Prisoners within their own agonized flesh, they reached out, carrying out their mistress's will without question; puppets without strings, but puppets nonetheless.

As Mellinara's attempt at teleportation failed and she began to scream, Alpthis smiled, watched, and casually retrieved his bag of candy.

Yeah, I think most of my issue with that was on the tactical side: "Guys. At least wear masks and something to counter divination next time. Or you know - follow up the chain for intel on the primary buyer??" I learned well from my Shadowrun days.

How does one survive to successfully climb the ladder of station in such a wretchedly back-stabby hierarchy? Unadulterated evil, indeed.

Tsuga C said:

How does one survive to successfully climb the ladder of station in such a wretchedly back-stabby hierarchy? Unadulterated evil, indeed.

Click to expand...

Unlike in the real world where you have a balance of people retiring from the upper ranks to make room for new people, with a relatively constant influx of entry level position hirings, for the 'loths, nobody retires of their own accord and they're perpetually creating a never-ending supply of mezzoloths that push their way up the ladder by promotion. Backstabbing, bribery, and every form of institutional corruption is the name of the game

The current state of affairs however is the largest amount of flux within the 'loth ranks since, well, ever.

The sense of timeless drifting and sudden, bitter cold that accompanied the transition between Sigil and the far end of its innumerable portals was there and then gone in the space of a heartbeat. The group stepped from a doorway in the Lower Ward only a few blocks distant from 'The Friendly Fiend' into the mouth of a cave roughly a mile Hinterward of Plague-Mort itself, bathed in flickering red and yellow light while the portal remained open. Smelling faintly of mineral-rich water dripping through the rock and the scattered ranks of mushrooms sprouting from the walls at uneven intervals, the floor was littered with the bones of rodents, other small animals, and several corpses picked clean by natural predators or fiends.

"Lovely place." Fyrehowl whined as her nose painted a picture of the previous few months of routine violence that marked the most obvious egress -out- of the abyssal gate-town.

"It only gets better as we get closer to the Abyss I'm sure." Tristol remarked as he peered down at the bones.

"You know, that's one place that I can't say that I've been." Toras shook his head as he looked at the bones that carpeted the ground. "I'm not in any particular rush either. Carceri and Pandemonium are about as close as I care to ever get if I can help it."

Eyes glowing in the dim light, tail flitting and fretting like a disapproving relative, Nisha frowned. "Hey now, the Abyss has issues, but as the only vaguely theoretically tanar'ri-blooded person in the room... err... cave thing, I have to defend it just a little bit."

Tristol gave her a hug, "You're the best thing to ever be associated -however distant- with the Abyss. You're much better than Plague-Mort."

"You're all good Nisha." Florian patted her on the shoulder, "What I don't get though is why the Illuminated decide to set up kip in Plague-Mort of all places?"

They talked as they moved away from the closing portal and out towards the blasted landscape that guarded the approach to the gatetown.

"Nobody cares who rules, so long as the portal remains open." Clueless shrugged. "Anywhere else you have to deal with entrenched and loyal groups already in power, a population that cares for the status quo, all that fun stuff. It's actually a smart thing to stake their claim here, especially if it's transitory."

"You think they want to move into Sigil once they're established here?" Toras mused, considering the group's pretensions of being a true faction.

"That's exactly what I'd figure." Clueless motioned to the landscape in view as they emerged from the cave. "This place isn't the sort of place I'd care to stay. I suspect they're of the same mind."

The broken landscape was littered with rubble and ruined walls, all the detritus of a thousand former gate-towns devoured by the Abyss piecemeal since time immemorial or abandoned by the population when the portal shifted location of its own cruel, fickle accord. A path worn into the ground by the passage of feet and wheels stretched out several miles ahead, winding through the barrens.

At first it was only a few scattered piles of bleached bones and occasionally a "fresh" corpse only a week or so bled out on the ruddy soil. Once the ruins and hills yielded an open view to Plague-Mort itself though, the broken piles of brick and stone yielded to a landscape of corpses and scavengers, both of the avian variety and isolated humans picking through the dead for anything of value.

The siege of the gatetown, the so-called "Tradegate of the Lower Planes" had been bloodless as far as an Abyssal coup was concerned, but before the Illuminated had risen up from within, Archlector Yamoril had vainly sent an army of mercenaries and his own citizens out into the field against the first wave of fiends. The bodies of the dead littered the landscape of the town and great flocks of vultures, ravens, and sympathetics darkened the skies as they circles and waited for larger, earthbound carrion-eaters to retreat, even now weeks after the slaughter.

"Welcome to Plague-Mort, the happiest place in the Outlands..." Florian's voice dripped sarcasm. "As evidenced by the field of corpses littering the approach to the city."

"Pay baatezu to fight and they fight but that's it." Toras shook his head. "Cleaning up after the fact apparently wasn't in their contract."

The gatetown's walls were high and oppressive, a testimony to the previous Archlector's brutal dance of merciless oppression and manic desire to build up the city into a citadel capable of overshadowing and eventually overtaking Broken reach when he eventually slide the city into the Abyss as a formality. Unlike during Byrri Yarmoril's rule, the current approach to the city wasn't subject to sanctioned gangs that "taxed" those approaching the city in greedy, haphazard fashion. In fact, it almost seemed ordered and peaceful, with a single contingent of guards at the open gate on the main approach, and colored flags flying above the adjacent towers, all bearing the symbol of the Illuminated.

"Nisha, what are you doing?" Florian glanced over at the Xaositect as the tiefling nibbled on something wrapped in wax paper, occasionally giggling as she did so, largely oblivious to the impressive vista before them.

"Hrmph?" Nisha looked up at the cleric, a smear of chocolate on her cheek. "Want some?" Talking with her mouth full, she held up a miniature, dark chocolate Factol Sarin, modeled after the late Harmonium Factol, assassinated in the opening days of the Faction War.

"Akin is selling candy now?" Fyrehowl tilted her head to the side, questioning. "That's why you had us make a detour to his shop before hitting the portal here? Not spell components or a wand or something else, but candy?"

The Xaositect nodded with a smile, just before she munched on the iconic Hardhead's left arm. "I also got a white chocolate Factol Zanzibar. It even came with a peppermint hourglass lodged in his head!"

Fyrehowl glanced sidelong at Nisha, "I'll try some of the chocolate Factol Sarin."

"Sigil, the lovely city where a smiling yugoloth sells candy for a tanar'ri blooded tiefling to share with a lupinal." Florian laughed as Nisha handed over some of the candy to Fyrehowl and then to Tristol and Clueless in turn. Apparently the Friendly Fiend had a surprisingly adept hand with sweets.

Chocolate-nomming tiefling ignoring it all aside, as they drew close to the city, they saw both its history and more subtly how the change in rule had impacted its appearance. The walls of Plague-Mort were an elaborate affair of flying buttresses, carved screaming faces, and ornamental blades clearly modeled on the same general style of stylized architecture as Sigil's. While the ruling forces of the gatetown had seen a change and subsequent purge of their supporters, the only visible difference in their passing was a change in the flags that flew from the unevenly spaced towers and that hung from the gates.

"At least it's a pretty flag." Fyrehowl had to give the yellow and orange banner credit for decent design. At the very least, the Illuminated had to be given credit for having thought out the details of their rule well prior to actually seizing power. Very little seemed to have been accomplished in a half-assed manner or a spur-of-the-moment decision.

Off to the side, Nisha continued to steadily devour chocolate Factol Sarin, now making voices for the late factol as she did so, "Noooo... not my other arm you dumb chaos person you! Noooooo! You'll face the justice of law and order! Ack not my shoulder! Noooo..."

"I suspect a few days ago they had corpses hanging from the gates." Clueless pointed to faded, rust-red smudges along the walls and clustered at the top of the gate. "They made their point to the populace, but keep them there and it starts to hurt trade."

Nisha giggled madly, joined shortly thereafter by Tristol joining in to ruffle her hair as his face beamed with the bright-eyed smile of a man in love.

"What does Plague-Mort even trade in the first place?" Florian asked.

"Tanar'ri?" Tristol chuckled and gave a shrug.

Collectively they shrugged and shook their heads in the absence of an answer. Clearly though, the city had grown fat on commerce to and from the Abyss over the past century, and the Illuminated seemed keen to do nothing to dissuade that trade. In fact they appeared eager to encourage it to their own benefit.

"Well, whatever they're trading, however they're intending to rule, and for what end, they're doing pretty well so far though." Clueless took note of the training and discipline clear in the gate guards' stance, as well as the quality of their weapons and armor.

"Why do you say that?" Tristol asked as Nisha licked an errant bit of chocolate from his nose.

"Simple," Clueless remarked, "Because Red Shroud hasn't marched an army from Broken Reach on the other side of the portal to the Abyss and butchered or enslaved every living thing in sight."

"Someone knows how to handle infernal politics like a master of the trade." Florian raised her eyebrows in respect. "Because otherwise there's no way that you'd get away with marching a Baatezu army to the gates of the city without risking the Abyss itself taking notice."

"The Abyss didn't take note, because the Hag Countess's army never stepped one diabolic foot in the city." The explanation came not from within the party, but from one of the guards standing at the gate. "We made very sure of that."

Towering even above Toras, Koradus inclined his horned head towards the group. The half-elemental minotaur was engulfed in a flickering halo of flames that licked the air from every portion of his flesh not covered by the elaborate red and orange platemail that he wore. Effortlessly cradled in his arms, a gleaming halberd stood balanced with the implication of a man eminently skilled in its use.

"Wow!" Toras muttered under his breath. "Self-cooking beef."

Florian elbowed the half-celestial even as Nisha giggled and Clueless and Fyrehowl quickly tried to stifled any laughter of their own.

The other guards at the gate were already occupied with a number of merchants and their horse-drawn carts loaded with all manner of trade goods, seemingly eager to profit in the immediate economic imbalance of the recently lifted siege. Only the minotaur, the captain of the city watch and factor of the Illuminated, remained free to see to the entry of the newest party to approach the gate.

"May I ask what your business is within Plague-Mort?" Koradus still hadn't moved, either his feet or his halberd, nor responded to Toras's joke, though his ears had swiveled forward to hear it. "If you're hoping for mercenary work, I'm afraid that our use for your kind is a week elapsed. On the other hand, if you're here to inquire about the Illuminated, you are welcome to be judged fit to join with the Elect. It is not my choice of course, and I can guarantee nothing."

"We're here by invitation actually." Toras held up the letter sent by the Illuminated factol. "Apparently your factol wants to meet with us."

Immediately Koradus's eyes subtly narrowed and he focused on Toras and next to him, Florian, precisely as a swordsman would measure an opponent before a duel. He'd heard of two people killing several Illuminated factioneers in Sigil, albeit members abusing their power and flaunting their destined status.

"Then consider yourselves lucky my friends." Koradus gave a short, respectful bow. "Factol Marvent is a great man, and we shine in his bright shadow. If he wishes to meet with you, I would not think of questioning your right to be here. Allow me then to escort you to his side."

"Much appreciated." Florian smiled and allowed the minotaur to lead them all past the other guards and into Plague-Mort.

The gatetown was split into four districts. The central portion of the city was one such distinct, and outside of its confines the remaining portions were more or less evening divided. The gate to the Abyss existed as part of the wall that divided the innermost quarter from the others, and in truth, very few people ever saw the gatetown's core, inclusive of both visitors and natives alike. That at least was the historical situation under the previous Archlector and all those before him. What the city looked like under its new leadership... that remained to be seen.

Moving by a clearly pre-planned route, Koradus led them through the gates and then quickly off of the major thoroughfares, passing through a maze of tangled streets that seemed built up without regards to any rationale sense of city planning. Rather, Plague-Mort obeyed the demands of ego when it came to each ruler of the gatetown tearing down whatever structures of the previous regime to replace them piecemeal with their own as it suited their aesthetics.

Eyes stared at them from windows and doorways, some of them dressed in the same colors as Koradus and clearly members of the new ruling order -a faction as it styled itself- and others in little more than rags or battered armor, the native population still adjusting to the change in rule. Plague-Mort's underclass seemed the least perturbed by the change in the ruling political structure. For them at least for the time being, nothing had changed in their daily lives.

X lead them through the gatetown's Residential Quarter, conveniently and purposefully avoiding the streets that would have crossed over into the Temple Quarter. Under Archlector Yarmoril, only Outlands gods were officially allowed a place for temples or shrines, but in practice the farcical rule ignored that the largest temples and the majority of the temples were those of Abyssal powers and even a myriad of demon lords. That was no longer the case, and the Illuminated were keen to avoid this being common knowledge until they finished the second of their purges.

Four blocks over, the temples of several Abyssal powers lay in smoldering ruins, their clergy dead and stripped of identifying symbols, distributed outside the city for the ravens to feast. There would be no rivals to the Illuminated within the city walls, and there would be no chance of the newly won city ever sliding into the Abyss. A certain amount of bloodthirsty rites would be ignored, but never anything reaching a critical mass of worshipers.

Eventually the hovels and tenements of the Residential Quarter -colloquially known as the "Slums"- grew less offensive to the eyes of any architect or engineer and then they ended altogether at the wide, open ring of a plaza that demarcated the border of the three other quarters of the city with the central area known simply as The Keep.

A city within a city, the black granite walls of the Keep rose two hundred feet up, taller than the gatetown's exterior walls so recently besieged from without. Not a true defensive wall, it was more an ideological one, serving to separate the interior courtyard with its merchants' fairs, public executions, and the homes of the city's most powerful -including the Palace of the Archlector- from the common residents of the city whose blood fed the parasites at the city's core, sometimes literally more so than just in metaphor. Though the Archlector was dead, the walls remained and for the moment so did the sense of separation they imposed of the high over the low, rich over poor, Elect over not.

"And there's the portal." Fyrehowl shivered as the portal's light washed out over the courtyard.

Thirty yards away, set within an archway in the wall, framed in a massive outgrowth of tangled razorvine, stood the gatetown's portal to the Abyss.

"It's pretty, kinda sorta," Nisha said as she balled up the wax paper that had wrapped her now finished. "In a doorway to certain horrific doom sort of way."

"More of the latter than the former." Koradus said as they passed within full view of the gaping, perpetually open wound in reality.

Beyond the rippling meniscus of adjacent realities, the Plane of Infinite Portals stretched out forever beneath the angry light of a bloody sky and ground soaked through with the same color and paved with bones and souls. Visible in the distance, more than one army of fiends could be seen either in transit across the layer, or in the midst of conflict with an opposing force of fiends.

"Whatever it looks like from here, that's not where it takes you." Koradus smirked. "Not that many people will tell you if you don't already know before you take the plunge through."

"Where does it actually go?" Florian raised an eyebrow. "I couldn't think it would be anywhere worse than that."

"Better or worse is an open question I suppose. It goes to a holding area below Broken Reach." Koradus frowned, an element of distaste and intimate familiarity with the topic playing across his features. "Malcanthet's daughter makes sure that anyone using the portal from this side pays her her cut in transit. Many don't find out about it until they're already on the other side. Those unable to pay end up working off their debts if they're lucky, having their property seized, or just sold off to the highest bidder be it tanar'ri or even 'loths doing the buying. Fiends..."

"No love lost for them?" Fyrehowl picked at the minotaur's commentary, hoping to measure him better, and by extension to measure his sect-come-faction.

"They're part of reality." Koradus shrugged as they approached the Palace of the Archlector, "Like the weather, it's something you don't have to like or even appreciate to know that you have to deal with it, even when it gets messy. Thankfully I don't have to be the one dealing with them unless it's on the end of a blade. I served in a mercenary company in the Blood War for a decade, mostly on Othrys and some time in Acheron; I've seen enough fiends for a lifetime."

The Palace seemed out of place in the gatetown that they'd seen up to that point. Far from being like the Keep's granite walls, the Palace wasn't imposing in the sense of fear, rather it was elaborate to the point of pomposity. Elegant spires glazed in silver, walls covered with intricate mosaics of green steel and gold, columns of pink and blue-green marble, and everywhere the same spikes and ornamental blades as the greatest mansions of Sigil's golden lords.

"There's only so much I can say about the Archlector's taste." Koradus snorted. "Lot of good his obnoxious display of wealth got him in the end when he ended up hanging from the gate to rot. Power doesn't need to show off. It doesn't need external validation."

"So what can you tell us about your Factol?" Tristol asked as they neared the doors of the Palace.

"He's a great man," Koradus answered with a pause, as if he were momentarily lost in a memory. His expression carried with it the dreamy, absolute conviction of a man saved from something by virtue of a religious experience. "But he doesn't need me to promote him with stories or boasts. Like I said before, power doesn't need to show off. He doesn't."

The great brass and green-steel doors of the Palace stood ajar, held open by adamantine chains and attended by only a pair of guards to either side. There was no sense that to intrude would invite death, no sense of the separation that the great Keep walls imposed upon the populace. Either the Faction was so self-assured of their own safety to the point of self-delusion, or their ruling figures genuinely felt no fear, and felt no fear for good reasons.

"Welcome to the palace of the Archlector, faction headquarters of the Illuminated." Koradus opened the doors and stepped to the side. "Factol Marvent will speak with you inside. When you are ready to depart, I will escort you out."

"Wait," Clueless looked at the minotaur. "You're not coming in with us?"

Koradus shook his head, "No need."

"How will we find the Factol?" Florian shot an incredulous look. "It's a big palace."

"He'll find you." Koradus shrugged as if the thought of them wandering about aimlessly within wasn't a concern.

"Oh come on," Toras frowned at the minotaur and then the other guards, "I don't have a clue what he looks like. How will I know it's him?"

"You'll know." Again, the look of awe passed over Koradus's face.

"What do you mean, we'll know?" Toras held his hands up in exasperation, "I don't even know what species he is."

Koradus locked eyes with the half-celestial, "I've looked a balor in the eyes beneath the mocking stars of Othrys. I was terrified and I fully expected to die as it roared to the fifty thousand fiends under its command. I knew fear in that moment, but I was never awed in another being's presence before I met Factol Marvent. When I say that you'll know him when you meet him, I'm quite serious."




Without escort and left to their own devices, they proceeded through the doors of the palace, hoping to find the Illuminated factol within. Unsure of what he looked like, where he would be within the sprawling, baroque confines of the former Palace of the Archlector, or if they weren't simply walking into a trap, they went as slowly as possible.

The walls were adorned with more mosaics panels where they weren't simply marble shot through with veins of precious metals, all produced by the labor of the exploited. Yarmoril had been a cruel, fiend of a man, but at least he had superficial taste, though his passing in recent days was still subtly visible on those very same walls. Clearly the Illuminated had done their utmost to remove all traces of the violence that had erupted during their coup, but here and there, there remained traces to see if you knew what to look for: a sword cut in a marble column, a bit of soot arranged in a faint ring to mark where a fireball had erupted, and the bubbling, discolored blotch on a stone wall to mark the passage of a lightning bolt.

Only a minute later as they walked into the main gallery of the Palace, Clueless paused. Down at his belt, the dagger that he'd taken from the Cathedral of the Chained God moved and tugged at its confinement. He pushed it down and tightened the belt, watching as the blade vibrated in place like an eager child.

"The hell...?" The bladesinger frowned as he continued to fuss with the blade.

"Problem?" Tristol glanced down at the black glass dagger.

"The dagger from the Outlands." He answered, "Yeah, -that- one. It's trying to move on its own. I didn't think that it was magical though."

"It isn't..." Tristol stared at the blade, whispered a cantrip and confirmed his earlier assessment. "It's not magical at all."

"Then why the hell is it trying to move on its own?" Clueless frowned as he tugged at a leather cord keeping his belt pouch secured shut, intending to lash the blade in place.

Clueless never had the chance to carry through with the idea.

"Greetings!" An average, plain-looking man that might easily be confused with a faction functionary or servant called out to them all as he stepped out from a stairwell. "Allow me to introduce myself and welcome you to Plague-Mort. My people..."

As Green Marvent of the Illuminated stepped into view, the obsidian blade tugging at Clueless's belt burst free of its constraints and flung itself through the air, aiming directly for the man's chest.

"Oh sh*t!" Clueless stumbled forward, grasping for the blade a second after it shot forward, hopelessly out of reach.

Marvent blinked and stepped back as the dagger used to sacrifice the divine patron of the tiere hurtled towards him, whistling as it did. Just as abruptly as the blade had acted of its own accord, the factol held up his right hand and plucked it out of the air with a nearly whimsical smile. More concerned with the dagger than with his guests, he cradled the still dancing blade in both hands, turning it over and examining it with awkward, startled curiosity.

Holding the blade firmly in his hands to keep it still, he looked up at the bladesinger. "That's not quite the entrance that I had planned..."

"Woah woah woah!" Toras shouted as he glared at Clueless and then much more apologetically at Marvent, "We didn't come here to try and kill you!"

Nisha cringed emphatically, holding her hands over her head, "Please don't throw us in a dungeon!"

No guards were immediately forthcoming, not even at the sounds of shouting. Marvent chuckled when several long moments later two guards did peer in. He dismissed them with a half-hearted wave, still holding the dagger tightly.

Clueless stepped forward with this arms out, palms up, eyes wide with shock, "I'm so so sorry, I don't know what just happened."

Marvent stared at the blade for a moment more before pinching it between two fingers and holding it out. Offering the cold, black glass handle first, he smiled at Clueless. "You've a dangerous thing here. It's an artifact if you didn't know that already." He traced his fingers over the cold glass, running them along the grooves where he felt runes should have been but had never been cut. It screamed inchoate rage, a litany of invectives, a harrowing depth of loss and despair. Marvent clicked his tongue at the blade, "It's seen so much death and misery that now permeates its heart. It feels vengeance and hatred, though it doesn't seem to know why or for whom. It reeks of betrayal and despair, even though it never pierced the one it was originally crafted to kill."

Marvent frowned, seeming almost sad by the blade's presence, smiling again once Clueless took the dagger back.

"I don't know what just happened." The bladesinger hastily wrapped the blade in multiple layers of cloth before stuffing it into a bag of holding. "My apologies sir."

"No need for titles, be it sir or anything even larger or more put on. No need for apologies either." Marvent smiled with a ludicrous sense of confidence and utter calm, despite what had just happened. "Simply know that you have a dangerous, powerful item there. Keep such a thing safe, because you may one day need it."

Having fully recovered from the accidental assassination attempt that the Factol of the Illuminated didn't seem so much as even rattled by, the others gathered around the man. Like his own faction members, despite his plain appearance and lack of ornamentation or physical presence, they felt his presence nonetheless. As he spoke, his blue eyes seemed all the more piercing, his voice all the more rich, warm, and calming. It was all like sitting before the greatest bard ever to walk the planes, but Marvent wasn't playing an instrument, nor was there any evidence of spellcasting as far as Tristol perceived.

"Well," Toras held up the letter of apology that Marvent had sent after he and Florian had killed a half-dozen of the man's faction members, "We received your letter. What all did you want to meet with us about, and what about me specifically?"

"Toras my son, you have a brilliant path laid out before you, if only you would reach for it. There is so much that you could accomplish above and beyond the concerns that most people in this world consider." Marvent smiled warmly and folded his hands in front of him, looking more a priest speaking to a child on the cusp of adulthood than the ruler of a faction, self-declared or not. "You don't need me to be happy, to be wealthy, to have friends and loved ones and to keep those around you safe. You're a skilled man with a good heart. You have a skilled sword arm and the blood of angels runs through your veins. Not everyone has these qualities nor these gifts, and many who do, they spoil them on selfish vanities rather than reaching for something greater."

Toras eyed the factol skeptically, "That sounds like a pitch you've made to most of the people in your faction."

"In a way, yes." Green Marvent chuckled and inclined his head towards the warrior. "In the general sense that's what we're about. Taking what you are and reaching for something greater. You might see elements of the Signers, Godsmen, or Fated here, but people see what they want to see very often. What I do is guide people to find their potential, to find their greatness, and then share that with the world. We are destined for something greater, and I've seen that you are a part of it."

As Marvent focused on Toras, Tristol moved to the side and gazed curiously at the self-titled Factol, activating the most common of divinations without words or motion. Where he expected to see the man wearing a wealth of magical items, protective talismans, contingencies, and even a lurking suspicion that he wasn't a human at all... what Tristol saw wasn't what he expected, nor was it anything that he genuinely understood.

Marvent literally radiated a magical aura that was nearly blinding in its potency, but under magical divination, he himself vanished in all but outline, existing as a hollow void within the glow itself. Tristol blinked against the potency of the magic, but also in abject confusion. He'd never seen anything remotely close to what he was now staring at, with his friends in conversation with the otherwise seemingly normal man who looked like nothing less than what an ambulatory magical artifact might appear as.

'What are you?' Tristol thought to himself as he continued to stare.

"I see the flow of future events," Marvent gave a self-effacing shrug. "It isn't the same as a diviner obtaining a specific event and specific details, but more of an intuitive grasp of how timelines flow, entwine, and interact. I can see potential, and I see it here in each of you."

"But you already knew that didn't you?" Nisha quipped with a whisper, followed by a giggle.

"As a matter of fact yes Nisha, I did." Marvent leaned to the side and peered at the tiefling with a smile that she returned with a slight blush, realizing that she'd never given him her name. "Don't get me wrong, I can't see the entire future clear as day. I'm not a Power of foresight or wisdom, but I can do my best to alter the flow of things for the better."

"So why in specific did you ask for us, all of us, to be here today?" Toras asked, "Was all of this planned out to bring us here?"

"I wanted to offer an apology for what some of my people did in Sigil." Marvent frowned and sighed. "I can't see everything, not even close to it. Obviously I didn't see what abuses that they'd commit, thinking themselves some sort of Elect and free of ethics or consequences. But when you stopped them, that's when I saw something about you. I also know something that you can do. Specifically you."

"Apology accepted." Toras offered his hand, joined next by Florian. Marvent gave a half bow and shook their hands firmly.

"In taking Plague-Mort, we employed mercenaries working under the banner of the Hag Countess. For a moment I saw something tangent to this all, and something that the six of you can take action upon, given the things that you've already done, people you've met, and creatures that you've interacted with and survived."

Marvent reached into the inner pocket of his robe and produced a folded parchment. "This map describes the route from Sigil to Baator's 7th layer of Maladomini. There in two days time, a mortal elf will be the guest of Duke Melikaros the Pale Winged, a minor baatezu noble in the court of Baalzebul. For the moment he is evil and largely inconsequential. But this meeting will put him on the path of future events wherein he will cause the future deaths of millions of innocents on his home world on the prime material plane. After this window of opportunity, he may well be lost to us."

"You want us to kill him?" Toras asked rhetorically, a shadow of doubt crossing his features.

Marvent nodded, "He cannot be allowed to live to do what he is otherwise destined for. I've seen what will happen when he looses the Blood War onto his world, turning a blue and green sphere in the darkness into a dead husk of ash and cinders."

The half-celestial looked down and his forehead creased with doubt, "I'm not sure how I feel about assassinating someone."

"I can't and won't force you into this. You ended the suffering of dozens when you killed twelve people in an ambush in Sigil. You didn't know their names or their associations, but you killed them nonetheless thinking you were doing good in the long run. This is one man and you would prevent the suffering of untold millions from ever happening." Marvent put the map into Toras's hand. "The choice is yours and you're free to go unimpeded. I wish you well on your journey back to Sigil. I know that you'll be back here though. That I've seen. Neither men, nor fiends, nor howling dreams will bar that potential future from solidifying into truth."

Meaningless words to the others, Tristol and Fyrehowl immediately stared at one another as Marvent alluded to the dreams that they'd both been having. It might have simply been poetic license, but the man -if that's what he was- knew things that he couldn't possibly know. Perhaps he was right about a single man in Baator, and what that man might do in the future.

"We'll think about it." Florian said with a measured tone, followed by a nervous swallow, "It's a lot to take in, and it's a lot to ask of us when we've only just met you."

"You have two, perhaps three days in total before this opportunity is lost. Please make your decision as swiftly as you can." Marvent smiled at each of them in turn, and each of them felt virtually transparent as he gazed into their eyes. For that short moment, they each felt paradoxically empowered and diminished under his gaze. "It was my pleasure meeting you all, but if you'll pardon me, I have other duties to attend to. Such is the busy life of running a faction. Tell next time we meet, be well."

Marvent smiled one last time and left by the stairwell he'd first come through, leaving the party behind to discuss things amongst themselves. He ascended the stairs and then stood quietly on a balcony, just out of view from below, watching them as they departed. He stood there for only a moment alone and by himself before Koradus opened an adjacent door and approached with a deft, almost automatic bow. Like he'd done with the party moments before, he brushed off the bow with a gesture as something unnecessary.

"Do you wish to have them followed Factol?"

"No need to do so." The blue of his eyes sparkled as he turned to look at the minotaur. "They've already made up their mind, more or less; the half-celestial has at least. The others have questions, but they'll go along with him simply to make sure he doesn't fall prey to a pack of devils. Some are curious and they want to see what happens. Things will happen. Timelines will shift and entwine. Pieces of a puzzle will fall into place. Destiny approaches my friend; for them, for me, for you, for all of us."




The walk from Plague-Mort back to the gate to Sigil was uneventful, but filled with discussion of both Marvent's proposal and about just who or what the Illuminated Factol was.

"I don't think he's human." Tristol bluntly stated and a shrug and a slight bottlebrush of his tail. "When you were talking to him, I looked at him under a number of divination spells and well... it was bizarre to say the least."

"What did you see?" Fyrehowl's tail bristled as well, both from Tristol's statement and from the factol's casual mention of the howler hunting through Tristol and her dreams.

"There was an almost blinding level of magic radiating from him, but absolutely nothing on him. It looked as if he wasn't there at all, just an outline that was as magic dead as an artifact; and I've looked at an artifact today and it wasn't nearly as unnerving and paradoxical as it was just looking at him." The aasimar shivered slightly. "I'm not scared; I'm just not used to being utterly unable to give an answer as to what I'm even looking at."

"What is he then?" Clueless asked, unconsciously glancing down at the dagger at his belt that had once killed a god.

"Mystra only knows..." Tristol shrugged with a genuine moment of confusion. "Maybe he's a proxy, maybe he's the avatar of an actual Power, something. But he's not just some human with a knack of influencing people, some magic, and some political saavy to make an upstart Faction."

"Whatever he is," Toras shrugged, "I think we should at the very least go to Baator and see if there's some substance to what he mentioned."

"You think he's telling the truth?" Florian asked, "He had some pretty extreme claims for us to accept at just face value."

"I do." Toras inhaled and mulled over his words, "I can't say exactly why I trust him, but I do. The self-immolating minotaur was right in what he talked about with just being around their factol."

"Mind if I go with you?" Clueless strummed his fingers on Razor's hilt. "I haven't had enough practice with this for a while."

"Very appreciated if you would. I can't say that I want to walk into a noble baatezu's mansion and kill his dinner guests with at least someone at my back." Toras glanced at the others. "Anyone else?"

"I'm not letting you go alone." Florian clenched one fist. "I'm absolutely up for some righteous justice."

Fyrehowl's ears went back as she nodded, baring fangs, "I'm rather fed up with fiends at the moment, but I'm in. I can't let the three of you have all the fun."

"Is there candy involved?" Nisha's tail curled into the shape of a question mark, with the bell at her tail-tip forming the dot at the bottom rather well. "Or at least a Tristol involved?"

"I'm going if you're going." Tristol smiled and curled his tail around the tiefling's.

And that was that, decided just before they stepped through the portal back to Sigil and into the oddly friendly, welcoming grey and verdigris colored gloom of the City of Doors. Collectively they agreed that they would spend one last night in Sigil, enjoying dinner and a well deserved rest. They'd enjoy a warm breakfast in the morning, and then venture off to a portal to Baator's 7th layer and whatever there they might find in the gothic hellscape of an infernal duke's estate in Grenpoli.

great to see you back in action shemmy! really love how the encounter with green marvent starts with a new layer of mystery right away

almost13 said:

great to see you back in action shemmy! really love how the encounter with green marvent starts with a new layer of mystery right away

Click to expand...

I've been working on this a lot lately. Expect another update today or tomorrow (with some serious additions of characters and layers of mystery/plot).

The most stable route to Grenpoli led via the permanent gate from Ribcage to Avernus. From there, through the great door adjacent to Tiamat's domain, the route followed a tightly regulated and brutally defended path designed to funnel the armies of Baator out and prevent the entry of those tanar'ri armies that dreamed of invading the 9 Hells. For single travelers or smaller groups however, those rarer and much more fickle portals in Sigil allowed for a complete circumvention of the conventional routes.

Adjacent to the Park of the Infernal and Divine, formed by the bounded space of an iron garden lattice and a breed of violet, hell-bred roses, one such portal stood wide and welcoming with a pale blue glow and the faintest smell of perfume and hot steel.

"And you're absolutely sure that you want to go to Grenpoli?" Skalliska stood next to the portal with a complex silver hoop in one hand and a triad of mewling kobold infants in the other. The ring was inscribed with the names of various planes and dangled with multiple metallic rods and crystalline lenses. A skilled portal-hunter could use them in combination to both find portals, determine their destinations and keys, and -at least outside of Sigil- temporarily force them open or closed.

The kobold gate-crasher had been largely absent from their lives ever since laying her clutch. Today however she'd taken a rare trip out into the city to help her former party members find a safer route into Grenpoli the so-called City of Diplomacy.

"So let me get this straight," Skalliska adjusted her hat to put its wide, ornamented brim outside of the range of one of her children's teeth. "You're going to Maladomini, to the city of Grenpoli, to visit the court of an infernal Duke to possibly kill one of his dinner guests because a person you just met in Plague-Mort of all places, asked you to trust him and do this, because the soon-to-be-corpse might do something terrible in the future?"

Silence fell over them all and the kobold raised one scaled brow-ridge to emphasize her incredulity.

"It's complicated." Florian protested, "You really had to be there. He was rather convincing to say the least."

Toras coughed, "Besides, we didn't commit to anything. We're going there sure. But if anything is off, we don't have to assassinate anyone if we're falling for a trap or anything of the sort."

Skalliska nodded, "Fair enough. Just watch yourself since it's Grenpoli. It has a reputation for leading mortals astray or just right into the service of the baatezu."

"I haven't actually been there before." Fyrehowl yawned, looking quite bleary eyed and exhausted. "What exactly should we expect in Grenpoli?"

"By reputation it's rather polite to mortals." Skalliska explained.

"-polite-" Toras provided air-quotes and a humorless, sarcastic chuckle.

"Compared to the rest of the layer, very much so." The kobold continued, "Sure it's all a creepy attempt to ensnare your souls and exert influence and control over people to serve in Baator's best interests out in the rest of the cosmos, but you won't find yourself attacked and enslaved just for walking around."

"So don't sign any contracts, try not to strike a conversation with a friendly erinyes or osyluth?"

"More or less. Just get in and get out." Skalliska nodded and went on to describe in detail the structure of the city, its history, and the route from the other side of the portal to the Duke's manor on the city's outskirts.

As the gate-crasher provided more information that might be of use to them all for their descent into Hell, Fyrehowl and Tristol exchanged worried glances. Both of them looked as if they hadn't slept a wink of sleep overnight. Despite hours of rest, they were both exhausted and mentally distracted.

The previous night had been the same for them both. All was black and silent, and then accompanied by the twitching of their eyes beneath slumbering lids, the howler had crawled into their somnambulant minds. Gibbering, whispering, and promising things, all coherent meaning was lost to memory with the first light of morning.

Whatever the grinning, mad thing from Pandemonium desired from them, sleep and sanity were apparently far from the gifts that it offered in their dreams. As yet however, they were no closer to finding any answer. Even as they stepped through the portal towards Grenpoli and transitioned between Sigil and the Hells, they felt it there within their skulls, prowling within the black and hidden interstices of the mind.

Do you hear the code?




The Gatehouse rose up within the heart of Sigil's Hive Ward, grim and fortresslike in appearance, looming atop a great rise in the landscape like the archetypal haunted castle. The great cage-like structure at its center bore the fantastic, bizarre hallmarks of a prison cell for a creature larger than the greatest of titans, and conspicuously missing any portcullis gate that might have once contained it. Whatever use and purpose it may have once filled however, for millennia the Gatehouse had served as a place of mercy and compassion, most recently by the Bleak Cabal.

The Bleakers no longer held any formal power and the faction had been formally disbanded. But the Bleakers remained in place nonetheless, serving food and tending the injuries and disease that ran through the poor and destitute of Sigil's poor and abandoned.

Beyond the ancient, forgotten prison-cell of the Gatehouse's earliest foundations, however rose one wing of the structure that few new much about nor cared about, and one which catered almost exclusively to the Bleakers and former Bleakers alike: the criminally and irretrievably insane wing.

There the Bleakers applied a different sort of mercy by imprisoning their own members who had fallen into the spiraling madness that lurked just below the surface of their own brutal, existential view of a meaningless, absolutely free cosmos. Their view allowed for either perfect freedom or a tidal wave to consume and swallow the mind with the sheer uselessness of it all.

Many of the imprisoned Bleakers survived and recovered, returning to their former lives not necessarily healed but at peace with themselves and their fate. Others though starved to death before finding themselves, though their compatriots provided them food and water each day. A third and exclusive group comprised only a few individuals - those deemed too dangerous in their madness to ever be released and whose shattered sanity removed any chance of recovery.

Buried in the heart of the structure, now only recently fully repaired from the explosion that had ripped through the structure less than a year earlier, three individuals sat within the cells. The three were imprisoned but most certainly not forgotten. All very much alive, and most disturbingly, it was not for lack of trying for the opposite on the part of their former faction members.

"Can't you feel it Bladed Queen? Can't you feel the end approaching? 295 days, 7 hours, 13 minutes, and 5 seconds until the clock in the Waste strikes midnight. I feel it, dragging like a dying, spinning star on the fabric of reality. It echoes forward and backward in time, but not an absolute outcome, not yet. Not ever…"

Tollysalmon's eyes glowed a puissant, featureless white in the darkness of her cell. Erratically so, a burning white corona of energy formed around her head, forming crackling loops of electrical, psionic force before discharging and grounding itself upon the floor or ceiling with the sharp smell of ozone. Dirty and dressed only in rags, she'd been imprisoned there for nearly two centuries, not having touched a bite of food or a drop of water during that time. Yet still she remained, eerily distant, self-assured, and by all appearances utterly, utterly mad.

During her tenure she'd ignored the Bleakers for the most part, speaking only to herself, invisible -and possibly nonexistent- creatures only she perceived, and voices only she could hear. She'd never once spoken to the Gehreleth whose death had peeled back the ceilings and obliterated the walls, at least not until she spoke its name, its actual name, with a wry, gloating smile when she looked it in the eyes the moment that death arrived for it courtesy of the Cheshire Fiend.

She had however spoken with the other two former Bleaker factols who occupied their own cells opposite hers. Both were already mad and consumed by their own flavors of existential grief and misery before they'd been forced from their positions and locked away. Years or decades of proximity to their githyanki predecessor had not by any measure improved their state.

Out of earshot of their terrified Bleaker caretakers, Tollysalmon stared, whispered, taught, and manipulated. Esmus had never possessed his own eerie psionic abilities prior to his incarceration, and while as of yet, Lhar had not manifested any similar powers, slowly his mind was bending and changing, all unlikely for the better.

Nine times since her imprisonment, githyanki warriors from Tu'narath had sought to capture her and drag her before the lich queen to have her soul devoured. Unable to do so, the next four attempts simply tried to kill her, but these attempts failed as well. Precisely what occurred during the attempts was unknown, as none of the assassins ever returned to tell the story of their failure, nor were any of their bodies ever found. Tu’narath ceased the attempts thereafter, and through it all, Tollysalmon remained in her cell, smiling in the darkness with the same eerie, supernatural self-assurance and contempt.

"Oh yes Bladed Queen, I feel your eyes upon me always. Never blinking, never speaking a word, nonetheless I know you've been watching over me for so very, very long. Perhaps you should have been paying attention to other threats." The githyanki chuckled and put her hands up in a display of indifference. "This assumes that you even care. Even if you don't, I in fact do. I wonder if that galls you, given what I want? The Oinoloth clearly has been working on his own designs for a very, very long time. Longer than most creatures can fathom. But of course, so have I. Longer than I can usually remember. Bitch..."

Tollysalmon snarled and the debris that littered the floor of her cell shifted and moved, orienting to the psionic wind from her mind like iron filings along the field lines of a magnetic field. For the briefest moment, the walls of the cell flickered and shifted from the inner light of hundreds of thousands of crystalline grains embedded into the stone: a coating of psi-crystal broken down into dust and painted there, invisible to anyone but her.

The cell returned to darkness except for the former factol's eyes, and there she brooded in silence. Only the soft, sporadic whimpering of Lhar across the hallway broke the still, until finally her successor spoke.

"A friend of my friends may be visiting us soon." Esmus whispered from his cell, a soft, barely discernible chuckle added to punctuate the statement. "Assuming that he survives whatever the baatezu have in store for him. I don't think he understands why he went to Maladomini in the first place."

"Alex, yes. The one that you’ve been sending dreams to." Tollysalmon looked up at the sound of Esmus's voice. "Maybe he'll come and tell us what his soon-to-be-companions are involved in. Things and places they visit have a tendency to hide themselves away."

"Such curious, interesting times." The human remarked, madness dancing in his eyes. "We so rarely have visitors, but you seem to draw them in like a tidal current. The important ones anyway."

"For longer than you can imagine." The githyanki sighed.

"Alex will be interesting to finally meet." Esmus tapped his fingers on his cell walls in a discordant rhythm. "He's powerful, if not at all subtle about it.”

“I doubt that he has any clue what he’s going to be involved in once he joins up with the others.” The githyanki’s voice was devoid of concern, “Sooner or later, he’s going to die you know.”

Esmus snorted, somewhere between a cough and a laugh, equally uncaring, “He doesn’t matter.”

In the darkness of her cell, Tollysalmon smiled a slender, transient yet malicious smirk, eyes glowing a cold, featureless white. "Neither do you puppet, neither do you…"




Flames licked at the air like thousands of infernal tongues from the city's spires. Dancing in reflections and refractions through the glass of the gothic architecture of Maladomini, they shed a hard, red glow across the tower roof where Agrefaz stood at his post. The barbazu yawned and ran a hand through his beard, the wriggling, prehensile mass likewise scratching at the intruding limb.

The Duke was up to something. As it was, his star was rising in the court of the Lord of the 7th, and there was talk of him being elevated in position, possibly even granted additional holdings and responsibilities. But this material, these details of the past and speculation upon the future meant little for the Duke's sentry, save that he was likely to be more harshly disciplined for any minute lapse in order and the smallest violation of stricture. But, on the other hand, success by his master would likely trickle down to him and the others in the Duke's service. A word here, a word there, a favorable notation upon a report discretely filed with the clerks and bureaucrats of the Ministry of Promotions - these things would oil the gears of Hell's bureaucracy with something sweeter than honey on the tongue.

Agrefaz smiled at the thought of earning another elevation through the ranks, possibly to cornugon or erinyes. It wouldn't be his choice, but that of his commanders, those who already had passed through the flames of Phlegethos before him and knew the way and how best to re-forge him, to temper the steel of the soul.

The Duke's affairs were not his concern, but only speculation for his own future indeed. Yet for all his prideful hope, those vain aspirations were collectively something that would never come to pass if he was not watchful in his current duties atop the northwestern wall, adjacent to the vineyards in the second tier of the Duke's estate.

Security had been increased most recently, only in the past two days, but no reasons were forthcoming, at least not overtly. Rumors though had filtered down through the ranks, rumors of a powerful guest soon to grace the estate for a period of time, supposedly an ambassador of one of the Lords of the 9. The rumors of course did not speculate precisely which one, or under what auspices the representative would be there under, just that they would be an honored guest and nothing -absolutely nothing- was to be amiss during the duration of their stay.

Lost in his musings, Agrefaz idly swatted at one of the myriad of insects flitting about with hungry idiocy, drunken on the bloated black flowers that grew at the base of the Duke's vines. The air was especially thick with them tonight, perhaps he thought, the vineyard slaves had poured the blood of innocents upon the soil to fertilize this year's harvest.

Below the wall, the air veritably whirled with the passage of those same insects, hellish variants of the bees that pollinated mortal flowers. Normal and mundane, at least to the barbazu above them, there was nothing to differentiate them from the thousands of their kind spread out across each and every acre of the Duke's estate.

Unnoticed by the baatezu above them, the insects began to congeal and melt away as they reached the walls of the estate. Seamlessly they merged with the shadows cast upon the ramparts by the flickering city lights, pooling and rising up towards the sentry like a wave of living shadow, perfectly camouflaged with its surroundings.

Agrefaz heard only the sudden and eerie cessation of the buzzing insects as he turned to look and then it was upon him. For all his hopes and aspirations about his future, his soul would never reach the lake of fire - only the fangs of something whose transfiguration was achieved two planes away.




Precisely five minutes later and not a second after, Agrefaz would have met and switched positions on the ramparts with one of the other sentries. The infernal clockwork of the Duke's sentries was a well oiled machine, and despite the doom that had befallen the barbazu only minutes before, at the appointed time a door unlocked with the turning of an iron key and the falling of heavy, magically reinforced tumblers.

Prepared for a twelve hour stint on this small portion of the eastern ramparts, the osyluth Celatszu stepped out of the manor and raised his glaive up to the dancing lights visible across the Grenpoli skyline.

"All hail to Duke Melikaros the Pale Winged, and eternal reign to Baalzebul the Lord of the..."

The osyluth's voice trailed off to a whisper as he beheld his barbazu compatriot. Agrefaz dangled in mid-air, suspended and impaled by a trio of barbed spikes, twitching and frothing at the mouth. The creature that held him aloft on its iridescent, oddly fluid claws was something from nightmare, itself bubbling up from a larger mass that flowed up and over the ramparts, its mass almost perfectly matching the color and texture of the stone below it, as well as the patterns of the ambient light.

An amalgamation of dozens of spiked tentacles, clawed hands and feet, and a trio of scorpion's tails, the entity changed its shape more so than moving to turn and look at the intruding baatezu. Its body rippled, gazing at him with a dozen newly formed eyes and a dozen smiles. The osyluth could barely form a cohesive thought in the moment beyond pure, stark horror, before the entity's mouths collectively intoned a single puissant word, splattering the ramparts with the lesser fiend's imploded remains.

Blood red eyes illuminated the darkness, shedding light on myriad rows of fangs as it glanced at the remains. The creature slipped out a pseudo-pod that became a hand. It extended a finger to touch the osyluth gore splashed upon the ramparts, slipping out a tongue from the mouth newly formed in its hand, tasting it, absorbing it, and morphologically usurping it. Within moments and all without a sound, an osyluth stepped through the door leading away from the ramparts, with nothing unique about it, save that it had never had that same unique shade of red to its eyes, sunken back into its skull.

Taba, the Infiltrator of the Planes, the sole surviving altraloth smiled and continued towards its prey.