Shemeska
Adventurer
Haven't had the chance to read it yet, but...
The Great and Powerful Marauder is mildly amused nonetheless
Friend of mine doing MLP commissions over on DeviantArt. *chuckle*
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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)
- Thread starter Shemeska
- Start date
Haven't had the chance to read it yet, but...
The Great and Powerful Marauder is mildly amused nonetheless
Friend of mine doing MLP commissions over on DeviantArt. *chuckle*
Awesome job!
Shemeska
Adventurer
Update relatively soon.
However I also realized that at some point I accidentally changed the lilland's name from Larill Moonshadow (who we first met while she was on the Infinite Staircase being watched by the Wanderer) to Mellisan. Taking a year + break from writing the SH apparently will do that when you start writing without referencing notes and just go by memory. I have no idea how that happened, and since I can't search through the thread, it's going to take a while to go back through and change it to what it should be.
And the speculation on the killer's identity is awesome, and more hints and then a reveal in the next two updates.
However I also realized that at some point I accidentally changed the lilland's name from Larill Moonshadow (who we first met while she was on the Infinite Staircase being watched by the Wanderer) to Mellisan. Taking a year + break from writing the SH apparently will do that when you start writing without referencing notes and just go by memory. I have no idea how that happened, and since I can't search through the thread, it's going to take a while to go back through and change it to what it should be.
And the speculation on the killer's identity is awesome, and more hints and then a reveal in the next two updates.
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Shemeska
Adventurer
They’d been lucky. That certainty rang like a single, clear warning bell through all of their minds as they clustered together in the middle of the camp: staff, scholars, hired support, and mercenaries alike. Somehow they hadn’t suffered any losses in what seemed to have been a single charmed moment granted by Pandemonium’s fickle and too often cruel whimsy.
Around them the camp was a wreck. Several tents had collapsed and caught on fire, burning most of their contents to cinders. Several others sported holes in their coverings and snapped supports when one or another varangoin had tumbled from the black, howling vault that stretched out above, dead or dying.
They’d been lucky this time. The next time might not be so charmed.
Clueless looked out across the wrecked camp and cleaned Razor’s bloody length on a snarled length of tent fabric. “We can’t stay here anymore.”
Toras, Fyrehowl, and several others turned and nodded in the bladesinger’s direction. They were thinking the exact same thing.
“It’s too open and not defensible.” Clueless continued. “The past day alone should make that abundantly clear.”
“Where do you suggest we go?” Fyrehowl asked.
“Sigil?” Nisha quipped, somewhat genuine in a desire to leave.
Tristol ruffled her hair. “Soon enough.”
Nisha stuck out her tongue, but didn’t otherwise hamper the discussion about what they best ought to do in light of the current state of the camp, and likely future problems. As they talked, members of the expeditions began gathering around them, and more than anything else came repeated calls that they simply go home. Both Doran and Leobtav did their best to immediately shoot the idea down as untenable, especially as they were almost finished with their work, and besides, they hadn’t suffered any casualties in the varangoin attack.
“We can take shelter in some of the caves near the base of the Crag.”
“Say what?!” One of the cartographers shouted. “You want us to go where?! We haven’t explored a tenth of that honeycombed deathtrap! We don’t have a clue what’s lurking there!”
Toras spread his arms and motioned to tamp down the scholar’s protestations. “There won’t be anything much lurking around the caves where the bebeliths were lairing.”
As ludicrous as it sounded, Toras had a point.
“Excuse me?” The cartographer asked, knowing virtually nothing about the Abyssal spiders and what exactly they hunted and ate.
Nisha grinned and proceeded to pantomime the itsy-bitsy spider up Tristol’s arm, muttering the lyrics in Abyssal to be as ironic as possible. Tristol did his best not to laugh.
“No, he’s right.” Clueless nodded at the half-celestial. “Bebeliths eat demons, and they’ll have scared away anything from lairing near their caves.”
Toras continued his explanation to the gathering crowd. “We’ve already mapped that whole local cave system. We cleared out the webbing and we made certain to destroy any eggs that we found. There’s nothing left alive in there, and it only has a single entrance. We can defend it easily and we can monitor who goes in and out. It’s the safest place to be.”
Murmurs of discontent shifted to mild discomfort and then slowly to wary optimism.
Toras turned to the expedition’s leaders and looked for confirmation on the plan. Doran and Leobtav took a moment to converse between themselves, seemingly debating a few points of order. Eventually they reconciled on whatever worries or disagreements they had about the idea of moving the campsite and they both turned and nodded in agreement.
Everything seemed to be settled then, and word began to disseminate as to their plans as everyone gathered together in the center of the wrecked campsite. Everything seemed to be going as well as it could, given the current circumstances. That didn’t last long.
One of the support staff, a rather rotund arcadian dwarf who served as one of the camp porters, raised a hand. “We can’t find Hedra.”
“Hedra? Who the hell is Hedra?” Frollis mused with more than a little indifference as he emerged out of a patch of darkness, probably having been standing there, paradoxically unseen in plain view for the past few minutes.
Nisha gently kicked the shadowdander and glared at him somewhat uncharacteristically. He winced, waved her off, and rolled his eyes once he’d turned away and she couldn’t see his response. A scattering of various voices informed him of just who she was.
“One of the camp cooks.”
“Did she make that cured leomarsh stew the other day?”
“Yeah, that was Hedra’s.”
“Crap…”
“She’s missing, or she’s dead?”
“Don’t know. Her tent burned down along with a lot of supplies, but we didn’t find a body yet.”
Leobtav sighed and glanced out in the direction of the Crag. “One of the varangoins must have managed to get away. It might have snatched her as it flew off.”
Doran winced. “So much for no casualties. But I’ll look through her tent and see if there’s anything left with a decent enough personal connection to her. I’ll try to divine where her corpse is, if nothing else we’ll know with some certainty what happened.”
Up on Leobtav’s shoulder, Ficklebarb sulked. “Why did she have to die? She was really nice, and I really liked her stew.”
Leobtav rubbed the pseudodragon’s chin and turned to his colleage, “Please do, as soon as you have a free moment. And if you need help, I’m available once I can assign someone to pack up the contents of my tent for moving. Hopefully we won’t need to stay in the caves for very long.”
Ficklebarb fluttered off again, leaving the two leaders of the expedition to their own devices. Around them, their demoralized employees and hires trudged through the remains of their tents and stored supplies, gathering what was salvageable. Leobtav handled most of their direction, and letting the elf go about his divinations on their lost cook.
Over the next few hours, they managed to pack everything that was needed for a few more days of work, and small group by small group, they traveled to the base of the Crag and the cave that would be their home, albeit hopefully a temporary one. Under orders from Leobtav, none of the groups went without at least a two person escort from the group’s mercenaries, and groups were limited to one at a time lest the former main camp be entirely divested of protection.
Whispers and rumors filled the air with relatively quick succession, with many of the expedition’s scholars openly wondering if the cook had indeed been carried off by a varangoin, or if she’d been yet another victim of the killer that had been stalking the group from somewhere out in the dark.
Doran sighed as he gingerly made his way through the presumably deceased Hedra’s ruined tent. Half of it had burned to ashes and the rest lay beneath a tangled mess of broken tent supports and tangled canvas. Soot caked the diviner’s hands and patches of his robes as he searched for something like a hairbrush, a favored kitchen knife, or a personal memento that he could use to scry upon the woman or most likely, her corpse.
A movement in the corner of his eyes caused him to glance up as Ficklebarb landed on a stack of precariously balanced stewpots. The tiny dragon glanced around at the cook’s despoiled tent and lowered his head down, sulking in draconic fashion.
“We’re not going to be safe are we?”
Ficklebarb didn’t seem healthy, and it showed in more than just his worried question. The pseudodragon seemed thinner, his scales having lost a bit of their color. Rather than a vibrant red, they seemed pale, almost jaundiced, on his underbelly.
“We should be safe in the caves.” Doran said, pausing his search to address the dragon. “But you don’t look well.”
Ficklebarb didn’t respond.
“You know you can talk to me if you want.”
Ficklebarb looked away and nervously stepped side to side on the pot he perched atop. It almost seemed as if he wanted to talk, but couldn’t.
Doran stared at the familiar, silently urging him to talk. He’d avoided demanding that the dragon tell him what he’d seen. All he knew was that Ficklebarb had apparently witnessed one of the killings done by the “bad man”. Yet since then he’d never mentioned it except in extreme circumspection. Was the pseudodragon under some sort of magical compulsion? A geas?
“Doran!” A voice called out to the elf and drew his attention away.
Gingerly stepped across the remains of an adjacent tent, Settys the Thothite cleric raised his voice.
“You’re needed back at your tent. Leobtav wants everything packed up and ready to go, and we’ve got two porters waiting for you to tell them what should be packed and what left behind.”
Doran nodded and looked back at Ficklebarb. The dragon said nothing, and only have a cursory glance at Settys.
“I’m pretty much done here.” Doran called out to the priest. “Wait for me, I’ll be there in a moment.”
Settys waved and then smiled at Ficklebarb. No longer his normal self, the familiar looked away and continued his uncharacteristic silence.
Ficklebarb watched as the elf gathered together what he’d found in the tent and departed with Settys back to his own tent, one of the few that remained standing. The pseudodragon winced and frowned in obvious discomfort, inhaling in sharp, stunted movements. He needed to warn everyone, he needed to tell them to leave, to go away, but he couldn’t. It hurt when he tried.
“Help me Doran…” The pseudodragon whimpered just above a whisper. “You’ve always been my friend. Please help me.”
Several hours later, the camp was deserted. Anything vitally important had been moved to their new, hopefully temporary, camp in one of the smaller and easily defensible caves near the base of the Crag. Tristol and Fyrehowl stood outside, watching the perimeter and making sure that no one entered or left without their movements being tracked.
Ever so faintly a long, high-pitched howl carried on the wind, rising just barely above Pandemonium’s perpetual derecho. Several seconds later it repeated.
“What in the 9 Hells was that?” Tristol asked, glancing over at the lupinal.
Fyrehowl’s ears twitched and she squinted, looking into the distance. Slowly, emerging out of the darkness just on the edge of the limits of vision, she watched as drifting phosphor lights radiated and vanished, only to reappear elsewhere from the gloom. Cold, sickly, and greenish they emerged in time with the faint howling they’d heard, slowly gaining in volume but still at barely a whisper over the wind.
“You seeing that too Tristol?”
The aasimar nodded. Goosbumps covered his skin and next to him, Fyrehowl’s fur bristled with unease.
The howling continued, and though it might have been an artifact from the surrounding wind, it broke apart into a staccato pattern. If they didn’t know any better, the howling seemed almost like the eerie laughter of a mad ghost.
So intent upon staring at the ghostly lights drifting in the distance, emerging and sublimating into the darkness, neither Tristol nor Fyrehowl noticed Florian emerge from the cave behind them. The cleric glanced at them, and then into the black, featureless vault as well, studying it for a few seconds and then looking back at the two of them with a look of confusion playing across her face.
“Guys? You two alright?”
Tristol yelped and Fyrehowl briefly dropped into a crouched, defensive posture.
Florian backed up, surprised at their reaction. They’d been so transfixed on well, something, out there in the dark that neither of them had even noticed her approach. And they had ears easily five times the size of hers.
“Did you see that/Did you hear that?!” Both of them shouted a once with a garbled jumble of words and worries tumbling out of their mouths afterwards.
“Did I see what?” Florian asked. She gave them another odd look, and in return they glanced warily at each other. Clearly the cleric hadn’t seen anything out there in the darkness.
“Nothing...” Tristol said, his ears drooping. “We’ve been awake too long and we thought we saw something out there in the darkness. We probably fell asleep and you woke us up.”
“You both fell asleep? At once?”
Tristol shrugged, “Yeah.”
“…Fyrehowl doesn’t need to sleep.”
The guardinal and the mage nervously and awkwardly stared in silence at Florian.
“We’re just on edge from everything that’s been happening.” Fyrehowl said finally, trying to sound as honest and convincing as she could under the circumstances.
Tristol quickly glanced back into the darkness. Whatever had been there, or perhaps hadn’t been there, was gone. Nothing disturbed the entombed night, and no sounds rose above the wind.
Florian noticed the glance, and despite Fyrehowl’s attempted explanation, she still seemed unconvinced. “Either way, you too look spooked. Why don’t you get some sleep Tristol, and Fyrehowl you go sit down and have a drink. You could use it, and I can spell you on watch. Send someone else out to help me when you’re back inside. Ok?”
Tristol and Fyrehowl nodded and promised to send someone else back to join the cleric, but as they walked back into the cave, they kept exchanging worried glances. Florian hadn’t seen a thing out there, and so whatever it was, they’d been hallucinating and hearing things. The laughing howls hadn’t been out there in the night, they’d been firmly inside of their heads, and simultaneous for both of them…
Nearby, but caring not in the slightest for the three that stood guard over the cave mouth, a man stood above his most recent work. Standing in the darkness, reaching out with his psyche into his victim’s brain like a puppeteer to a living marionette, the man felt rather than saw his way. He needn’t see to find his way to the aorta, to nick the vessel walls and wash his hands in warm, living blood. A tiny bit of his conscience whimpered, pleading for him to stop but it was far too late for that. This needed to end before they knew too much.
Dragging fingers across the stone, he painted with his victim’s blood, painting glyphs in a tongue that caused the eyes to blur and ache, stressing the senses even in the absence of sight. So aberrant was it that the same small part of him pleading against the bloodshed wanted to run and hide. But he continued, painting the woman’s dying blood onto the walls in versus and prayers that warped the very fabric of the planes, distorting the tenuous connection between the Astral and the layer of Pandemonium that Howler’s Crag existed upon. He smiled as he felt that connection twist and then break, cutting off most any route of egress.
They were trapped. They were his.
Ensconced within the former bebelith hive, the expedition found shelter from the wind even more than the natural depression that served as their previous camp. Despite their worries and their fears, they did their best to make it seem comfortable and homey rather than cold and claustrophobic. In that at least they succeeded. Magical smokeless flames warmed their bodies and tales of their own, individual exploits and stories told both spoken and song by the bard, Larill, warmed their spirits.
They were warm and happy. Protected by walls of stone, wards cast by Doran and Leobtav, and watched over by guards posted at the only entrance in or out of their shelter, they thought themselves safe.
Their precautions were for naught.
The next morning they discovered the cook’s body. A dead varrangoin lay at her feet. The grotesque manner in which it had died made it obvious that the fiend hadn’t been responsible for her murder. Both corpses lay ten yards from the mouth of the group’s new base within the caves, just behind a boulder in view of the entrance. The killer had worked in broad view of his victims, leaving them yet another bloody, mocking present. Except it hadn’t been a bloody present. No exactly.
“We can’t let anyone out of the caves to see this.” Leobtav looked away in disgust.
Toras and Clueless nodded in unison.
The Professor glared off into the distance, sighed, and adjusted his glasses before turning back to them. “And no one on watch last night saw a thing? A little over two dozen feet away and nothing? Nothing heard and nothing seen?”
“Absolutely nothing.” Clueless admitted. “I already spoke with Fyrehowl and she didn’t smell anything either.”
“The wind wouldn’t have allowed for that,” Leobtav sighed. “So I can hardly blame her on that account. But this is beyond disturbing how they got away with this, and without our being aware.”
“Whoever it was has to have used magic to shield themselves from detection, and presumably they used a spell or some sort of item to leap in and out of the cave.”
Clueless almost added that he suspected some variety of shadow magic to perfectly fit the bill, but he held his tongue as Frollis, Tristol, and Nisha emerged from out of the cave to take their own turn on watch. If the shadowdancer was indeed the killer, they needn’t clue him in on their suspicions.
“Do what you can to clean this up.” Leobtav told them. “If you can find anything they might have left behind, or some damn purpose to all of this, let Doran or I know. Please take your time and try to make some sense of this. If you need me, I’ll either be in the cave with my notes, or back at the Gautish script, taking a second look. I need to try to finish our work as soon as possible. The sooner we can leave, the sooner this here will be behind us.”
They watched their employer leave, looking drained and tired, and then collectively they looked down at what the killer had left behind for them.
The varangoin had been reduced to a pulp, but rather than crushed or mashed as the result of a heavy fall from the sky –as had been the fate of its clanmates- this one had been rendered into hundred of pieces as if it had passed through a cleric’s bladestorm and then been telekinetically drawn back and forth across the line. Yet for all the violence its body had experienced, there wasn’t a stray drop of blood to be found spattered more than an inch or two from its mess of a corpse.
The cook’s body lay splayed on the ground in front of the boulder, motionless. In contrast to the state of the fiend at her feet, at first glance she could have simply been sleeping if not for the scene on the stone behind her, and the condition of her body once fully inspected. Her hands were covered in a sticky coating of blood, but otherwise, nothing was out of place on her hands and feet, nor her head. But underneath her clothing her skin was a mess of hundreds or thousands of tiny cuts and slashes, and one final one between the ribs atop the heart. Somehow, inexplicably, her clothing was itself unspoiled and hadn’t been removed at any point despite the horrors it covered.
“There isn’t a drop of blood left in her.” Tristol said, making a slow circuit around her corpse.
“Not with that mess behind her…” Frollis quipped, drawing a glare from the others.
The shadowdancer had a point though. The boulder was painted with Hedra’s bloody handprints, a horrific garble of twisting symbols and a tracing of legible words, seemingly by her hand as well. She had help however, or something. Clearly she couldn’t have painted herself, without a drop of blood despoiling her clothing, and with having been exsanguinated already by some outside power.
Not all of the handprints on the boulder were human. Some of them were larger, some smaller, others weirdly disproportionate, some like tentacles, others with hideous talons that scraped the stones where they’d left their bloody impression. Traced with the cook’s finger, but not at all in her handwriting –and she wasn’t fluent in celestial which is what the writing was penned in- were the words, “IT SPEAKS.”
Toras gave the text a confused, disdainful look. “What the hell speaks?”
Tristol ignored them and continued looking at the stone.
Nisha winced, “I don’t really care to know.”
Their eyes collectively drifted down the horrific painting to a second line of legible text. Again, written in celestial, a second and different hand picked up in a sort of hellish call and response, “AND I LISTEN.”
“Creeeeepy…” Nisha muttered.
Tristol rubbed the tiefling’s arm reassuringly and then looked uneasily at the other symbols painted onto the rock. The lines in celestial were a taunt, but nothing more. The other symbols were something else entirely. He didn’t recognize them, and he spoke a significant number of languages. That alone would be disturbing enough, but the letters themselves weren’t right. They weren’t normal. They hurt his eyes, and no matter how hard he squinted and tried to focus, they remained blurry, indistinct, and freakishly morphic, refusing any and all comprehension.
“Is it magical?” Toras said, squinting his eyes at the script.
“In my opinion?” Tristol asked. “Yes.”
“In your opinion?” Frollis gave a cough. “That should be a yes or a no. It’s not a subjective thing.”
Tristol’s ears lay back and his tail flicked side to side with confused annoyance. “That’s the thing. It doesn’t register as magical. Yet it moves and blurs and that’s not normal.”
Nisha glanced at the script, briefly crossed her eyes, and looked back at Tristol, “Anytime we’ve seen anything like this, it hasn’t been anything good or safe.”
She thought back to a circle of symbols they’d found miles below UnderSigil, somewhere that might or might not have actually still been within the City of Doors. But unless Her Serenity had gone psychopathic and moved to Pandemonium, they were safe from that being at all connected.
Tristol shivered at the same memory, “Thankfully this looks nothing like, well, those symbols.”
Frollis raised an eyebrow. “Something to share?”
Tristol waved it away. “Really old, unknown script we came across a sample of in Sigil. We didn’t mess around with it. But there’s no similarity here. Frankly, I’ve never seen any of these here.”
Conversation trailed off, and their investigation of the bodies began. But other than the gruesome details and unnerving evidence of non-magical magic still in place, they found nothing new, and certainly nothing to indicate the identity of the killer. An hour later they’d cleaned the area, scoured away the blood, and stuffed Hegra’s corpse into a bag of holding for an attempted raising once they were out of harm’s way. Ideally, no one outside of the expedition leadership or their mercenaries would know about what had happened.
The ideal did not happen.
Despite their attempts to keep quiet the fact that they’d found the cook’s body, and that she hadn’t been carried off by one of the varangoin, but by whatever demented killer stalked their group, word managed to spread. In light of that failure, the best that could be done for the moment was to continue posting active watches at the cave’s mouth.
Eager to finish their work and be done with their stay in Pandemonium, Doran and Leobtav set out for the Crag early in the day. Trying to strike a balance between protecting themselves and ensuring maximum security at the cave, they took along Larill, Tristol, Toras, and a select few scholars, heading back up to the cave with the sample of Gautish script. Everyone else stayed behind, closely under guard. Remarkably, blessedly, nothing awry occurred. With luck, the extra security and lack of any outside disturbances had stymied the killer.
Six hours later the group returned from the Crag. Tired from their trek up and down the artificial mountain, except for the lilland, they put away their things or simply dropped them on the floor, and retired to sleep. Larill remained awake, but retired to a smaller, side chamber to meditate away from the rest of the expedition and their noise.
As for the rest of the expedition, they passed away their time in the cave in various pursuits, ranging from cards, dice, drinking, smoking just inside the cave entrance –much to Frollis and Fyrehowl’s chagrin as that particular crowd expanded- and for a number of others, talking and storytelling around an illusory campfire.
One of the camp cooks went first, telling a story about his first job with the Institute, and how it was both an amazing adventure, a professional delight, and absolutely ten times worse than anything that they had experienced thus far in Pandemonium. He was one of the Institute’s longstanding employees, and as such, his tale was new to most of those gathered around the fire. His tale started out at the end of a branch of the World Ash where it dipped into the incarnate Chaos of Limbo.
“The Pinwheel?”
“The Pinwheel.” The cook confirmed. “Thirty of us went there looking for a parasitic plant, akin to mistletoe, that colonized that patch of Limbo from Yggdrasil. It didn’t stay the same after a few generations, and the Fraternity of Order was paying us good jink to bring back samples from closer to and further out from the Tree. If you ask me, they weren’t paying us nearly enough.”
The cook took a long drink from a silver flask of some variety of brandy and then offered it around for anyone else before he continued.
“So yes. They sent us to the damn Pinwheel.”
“That place is so damn fun!”
Heads turned to a beaming, suddenly excited Nisha as she fiddled with the cap on the cook’s brandy flask. She’d been to the Pinwheel before.
“Fun?” The cook shot the tiefling an incredulous expression.”You’ve been there?”
“Yep!” Nisha took a long sip. “A couple times actually.” She took another sip. “First time it was by accident actually and the portal was one way. But at least I got to visit the ratatosks.” Sip number three. “But then they marched me back to Limbo and I had to wait a few weeks for a portal to open to get back to Sigil. That was a really fun vacation.”
Sip number four.
“A fun vacation?” The cook looked at Nisha like she had a hole in her head. “When you’ve encountered chaos beasts, a drunken githzerai, a sky that randomly changes color and induces nausea if you look at it too long, weather that includes random substances falling from the sky, and an amorous green slaad, you…”
“Oh you met Brimblembumb!” Nisha quipped, suddenly much more chipper and jangling the bell at the end of her tail. Clearly she’d met the slaad in question.
Sip five.
“Brimbl… who?”
“The green slaad. You called him amorous. That’s probably an understatement, but yeah, you met him. How was he?”
Tristol deftly snatched the flask of booze before the tiefling took a sip number six. Xaositects were Xaositects, and so was Nisha, and a tipsy Nisha was liable to end nowhere good for anyone, especially when the words ‘amorous green slaad’ were part of her story.
The cook sputtered and rapidly regained his role as speaker, leaving it up to Tristol to handle the tiefling. True to form she ignored the cook and bothered the aasimar who took away the brandy, briefly doing her best ‘amorous slaad’ impression on his cheek. Tristol blushed furiously, but most of the crowd seemed to be following the cook’s continuing story.
Except for Florian and Clueless. They snickered and pointed for the remainder of the cook’s story.
“And that’s why I’m never ever going back to Limbo.” The cook exclaimed, wrapping up his story. “So called stable patch of the plane… hah!”
Another of the expedition associates coughed and gained everyone’s attention. No longer playing kissy slaad with Tristol’s cheek, Nisha wrinkled her face, having clearly wanted to be the next storyteller. The man who’d coughed, an elven-blooded aasimar –a historian by profession- wore a wry grin on his face.
“I was there at the Pinwheel, and yes it was annoying. But I’ve been here longer than you. I was there in Porphatys along with quite a few others here still now, and ten years before that I was there when we went to Gehenna searching after a tumble of ruins on one of the lower furnaces. Only a handful of people still with the Institute were there, but if you ask them, they’re tell you how bad it was. That is, if they’re willing to talk about it.”
“So how many people did you lose?” The cook asked, taking a sip of his own brandy as it made its way back.
“That’s the thing, we didn’t actually lose anyone, but there were some really, really close calls. We came damn close to losing most of us to ‘loths on the way in and the way out. For whatever reason they never ventured close to where we were going, but getting there and getting out… very close calls.”
Several faces around the fire twitched at the very mention of the word ‘loth. They’d had their fill of them in the past year and wanted precious little to ever do with them again.
“You say you didn’t lose anyone, so how was it worse than the Pinwheel?” Another associate asked, pulling a blanket over his shoulders. “Actually, for that matter, how is it any worse than where we are now?”
“Pandemonium on its own is bad. It’s dark, the wind can make you deaf, the tunnels can drive you insane, and things lurk around every hidden corner waiting to kill and devour you. Gehenna on its own just ups the open level of danger and the outright malevolence of the natives; it doesn’t want to drive you insane, it just wants to hurt and exploit you.” The historian brushed a strand of hair back from his eyes. “But where we went on Mungoth wasn’t like that. It was almost like someone had taken a patch of the Waste and vomited it up on the slopes of the third furnace. It drained off life and hope as much as the cold drained away warmth.”
“And I’ve been to the Waste too.” Another associate countered. “But what made this place special and worse than anything else in Gehenna or the Waste?”
“Well for starters the whole damn place was overrun by phiuls.” The aasimar let that sink in for a moment. Phiuls were an enigma because their origins weren’t known, they didn’t fit well into the cycle of souls on the lower planes, and precious little was known about their nature because of their aggression and life-draining touch. At least you could bargain with a ‘loth.
“We didn’t expect the phiuls, but we managed to avoid them somehow. I mentioned that we didn’t suffer any deaths, but that’s not entirely correct.”
“So what exactly happened.”
“No one died there, but several men and women came back completely mad in the head. One of them eventually came around, but he never spoke about it again or just what had happened when he touched one of the statues that he’d come across. Another one killed himself, or at least we think he did. The barmy threw himself over the edge of the torus in Sigil.”
Eyes around the fire went wide.
“Another one went to the madhouse.” The historian lamented. “Lasted a few years and then just stopped eating. He’s no longer with us either.”
He let it sink in and accepted the cook’s offered flask of brandy, toasting the dead and damaged before taking a long swig and offering it back. The flask made a circuit around the fire but was drained before it went halfway around.
“What were you there looking for?” Tristol asked.
“We went there hunting for some pretty damn obscure history,” He explained. “But we never actually found it. The ruins we found didn’t have a single damn connection to the particular would-be god who’d stolen a parcel of divinity from his former patron and then hoped to make it big on one of the Lower Planes. Absolutely no link.”
“So what was there?” Florian prompted as she passed around a bottle of her own.
“Ruins older than anything I’ve ever seen. Statues that looked like they’d all been actual people turned to stone. The whole place was bone-chillingly cold –colder than Krangath even- and utterly silent except for the crunch of ashes and frost under your boots.”
“Statues?” Several around the circle asked, puzzled, intrigued, and unnerved. The flickering shadows cast by their own forms and the firelight didn’t help.
“They were the damndest things, and they littered the place. There were some fiends, but the ones that I saw and really got a good look at as far as we bothered to venture into the place were celestials; and all kinds too. I saw everything from lantern archons to solars, leonals to coures, and everything in-between.”
Fyrehowl involuntarily whimpered. “Someone went mad from touching one of them?”
“He said they’d been whispering to him.”
The lupinal cocked her head sideways, confused and distinctly unnerved, “Whispering or not, you can’t petrify a celestial.”
“I didn’t say they were stone.” The historian explained, taking a drink from Florian’s bottle, now disturbed by his own memories and telling of them. “If you had to ask me, they’d been burned to ashes and frozen in place.”
Around them the camp was a wreck. Several tents had collapsed and caught on fire, burning most of their contents to cinders. Several others sported holes in their coverings and snapped supports when one or another varangoin had tumbled from the black, howling vault that stretched out above, dead or dying.
They’d been lucky this time. The next time might not be so charmed.
Clueless looked out across the wrecked camp and cleaned Razor’s bloody length on a snarled length of tent fabric. “We can’t stay here anymore.”
Toras, Fyrehowl, and several others turned and nodded in the bladesinger’s direction. They were thinking the exact same thing.
“It’s too open and not defensible.” Clueless continued. “The past day alone should make that abundantly clear.”
“Where do you suggest we go?” Fyrehowl asked.
“Sigil?” Nisha quipped, somewhat genuine in a desire to leave.
Tristol ruffled her hair. “Soon enough.”
Nisha stuck out her tongue, but didn’t otherwise hamper the discussion about what they best ought to do in light of the current state of the camp, and likely future problems. As they talked, members of the expeditions began gathering around them, and more than anything else came repeated calls that they simply go home. Both Doran and Leobtav did their best to immediately shoot the idea down as untenable, especially as they were almost finished with their work, and besides, they hadn’t suffered any casualties in the varangoin attack.
“We can take shelter in some of the caves near the base of the Crag.”
“Say what?!” One of the cartographers shouted. “You want us to go where?! We haven’t explored a tenth of that honeycombed deathtrap! We don’t have a clue what’s lurking there!”
Toras spread his arms and motioned to tamp down the scholar’s protestations. “There won’t be anything much lurking around the caves where the bebeliths were lairing.”
As ludicrous as it sounded, Toras had a point.
“Excuse me?” The cartographer asked, knowing virtually nothing about the Abyssal spiders and what exactly they hunted and ate.
Nisha grinned and proceeded to pantomime the itsy-bitsy spider up Tristol’s arm, muttering the lyrics in Abyssal to be as ironic as possible. Tristol did his best not to laugh.
“No, he’s right.” Clueless nodded at the half-celestial. “Bebeliths eat demons, and they’ll have scared away anything from lairing near their caves.”
Toras continued his explanation to the gathering crowd. “We’ve already mapped that whole local cave system. We cleared out the webbing and we made certain to destroy any eggs that we found. There’s nothing left alive in there, and it only has a single entrance. We can defend it easily and we can monitor who goes in and out. It’s the safest place to be.”
Murmurs of discontent shifted to mild discomfort and then slowly to wary optimism.
Toras turned to the expedition’s leaders and looked for confirmation on the plan. Doran and Leobtav took a moment to converse between themselves, seemingly debating a few points of order. Eventually they reconciled on whatever worries or disagreements they had about the idea of moving the campsite and they both turned and nodded in agreement.
Everything seemed to be settled then, and word began to disseminate as to their plans as everyone gathered together in the center of the wrecked campsite. Everything seemed to be going as well as it could, given the current circumstances. That didn’t last long.
One of the support staff, a rather rotund arcadian dwarf who served as one of the camp porters, raised a hand. “We can’t find Hedra.”
“Hedra? Who the hell is Hedra?” Frollis mused with more than a little indifference as he emerged out of a patch of darkness, probably having been standing there, paradoxically unseen in plain view for the past few minutes.
Nisha gently kicked the shadowdander and glared at him somewhat uncharacteristically. He winced, waved her off, and rolled his eyes once he’d turned away and she couldn’t see his response. A scattering of various voices informed him of just who she was.
“One of the camp cooks.”
“Did she make that cured leomarsh stew the other day?”
“Yeah, that was Hedra’s.”
“Crap…”
“She’s missing, or she’s dead?”
“Don’t know. Her tent burned down along with a lot of supplies, but we didn’t find a body yet.”
Leobtav sighed and glanced out in the direction of the Crag. “One of the varangoins must have managed to get away. It might have snatched her as it flew off.”
Doran winced. “So much for no casualties. But I’ll look through her tent and see if there’s anything left with a decent enough personal connection to her. I’ll try to divine where her corpse is, if nothing else we’ll know with some certainty what happened.”
Up on Leobtav’s shoulder, Ficklebarb sulked. “Why did she have to die? She was really nice, and I really liked her stew.”
Leobtav rubbed the pseudodragon’s chin and turned to his colleage, “Please do, as soon as you have a free moment. And if you need help, I’m available once I can assign someone to pack up the contents of my tent for moving. Hopefully we won’t need to stay in the caves for very long.”
Ficklebarb fluttered off again, leaving the two leaders of the expedition to their own devices. Around them, their demoralized employees and hires trudged through the remains of their tents and stored supplies, gathering what was salvageable. Leobtav handled most of their direction, and letting the elf go about his divinations on their lost cook.
Over the next few hours, they managed to pack everything that was needed for a few more days of work, and small group by small group, they traveled to the base of the Crag and the cave that would be their home, albeit hopefully a temporary one. Under orders from Leobtav, none of the groups went without at least a two person escort from the group’s mercenaries, and groups were limited to one at a time lest the former main camp be entirely divested of protection.
Whispers and rumors filled the air with relatively quick succession, with many of the expedition’s scholars openly wondering if the cook had indeed been carried off by a varangoin, or if she’d been yet another victim of the killer that had been stalking the group from somewhere out in the dark.
***
Doran sighed as he gingerly made his way through the presumably deceased Hedra’s ruined tent. Half of it had burned to ashes and the rest lay beneath a tangled mess of broken tent supports and tangled canvas. Soot caked the diviner’s hands and patches of his robes as he searched for something like a hairbrush, a favored kitchen knife, or a personal memento that he could use to scry upon the woman or most likely, her corpse.
A movement in the corner of his eyes caused him to glance up as Ficklebarb landed on a stack of precariously balanced stewpots. The tiny dragon glanced around at the cook’s despoiled tent and lowered his head down, sulking in draconic fashion.
“We’re not going to be safe are we?”
Ficklebarb didn’t seem healthy, and it showed in more than just his worried question. The pseudodragon seemed thinner, his scales having lost a bit of their color. Rather than a vibrant red, they seemed pale, almost jaundiced, on his underbelly.
“We should be safe in the caves.” Doran said, pausing his search to address the dragon. “But you don’t look well.”
Ficklebarb didn’t respond.
“You know you can talk to me if you want.”
Ficklebarb looked away and nervously stepped side to side on the pot he perched atop. It almost seemed as if he wanted to talk, but couldn’t.
Doran stared at the familiar, silently urging him to talk. He’d avoided demanding that the dragon tell him what he’d seen. All he knew was that Ficklebarb had apparently witnessed one of the killings done by the “bad man”. Yet since then he’d never mentioned it except in extreme circumspection. Was the pseudodragon under some sort of magical compulsion? A geas?
“Doran!” A voice called out to the elf and drew his attention away.
Gingerly stepped across the remains of an adjacent tent, Settys the Thothite cleric raised his voice.
“You’re needed back at your tent. Leobtav wants everything packed up and ready to go, and we’ve got two porters waiting for you to tell them what should be packed and what left behind.”
Doran nodded and looked back at Ficklebarb. The dragon said nothing, and only have a cursory glance at Settys.
“I’m pretty much done here.” Doran called out to the priest. “Wait for me, I’ll be there in a moment.”
Settys waved and then smiled at Ficklebarb. No longer his normal self, the familiar looked away and continued his uncharacteristic silence.
Ficklebarb watched as the elf gathered together what he’d found in the tent and departed with Settys back to his own tent, one of the few that remained standing. The pseudodragon winced and frowned in obvious discomfort, inhaling in sharp, stunted movements. He needed to warn everyone, he needed to tell them to leave, to go away, but he couldn’t. It hurt when he tried.
“Help me Doran…” The pseudodragon whimpered just above a whisper. “You’ve always been my friend. Please help me.”
***
Several hours later, the camp was deserted. Anything vitally important had been moved to their new, hopefully temporary, camp in one of the smaller and easily defensible caves near the base of the Crag. Tristol and Fyrehowl stood outside, watching the perimeter and making sure that no one entered or left without their movements being tracked.
Ever so faintly a long, high-pitched howl carried on the wind, rising just barely above Pandemonium’s perpetual derecho. Several seconds later it repeated.
“What in the 9 Hells was that?” Tristol asked, glancing over at the lupinal.
Fyrehowl’s ears twitched and she squinted, looking into the distance. Slowly, emerging out of the darkness just on the edge of the limits of vision, she watched as drifting phosphor lights radiated and vanished, only to reappear elsewhere from the gloom. Cold, sickly, and greenish they emerged in time with the faint howling they’d heard, slowly gaining in volume but still at barely a whisper over the wind.
“You seeing that too Tristol?”
The aasimar nodded. Goosbumps covered his skin and next to him, Fyrehowl’s fur bristled with unease.
The howling continued, and though it might have been an artifact from the surrounding wind, it broke apart into a staccato pattern. If they didn’t know any better, the howling seemed almost like the eerie laughter of a mad ghost.
So intent upon staring at the ghostly lights drifting in the distance, emerging and sublimating into the darkness, neither Tristol nor Fyrehowl noticed Florian emerge from the cave behind them. The cleric glanced at them, and then into the black, featureless vault as well, studying it for a few seconds and then looking back at the two of them with a look of confusion playing across her face.
“Guys? You two alright?”
Tristol yelped and Fyrehowl briefly dropped into a crouched, defensive posture.
Florian backed up, surprised at their reaction. They’d been so transfixed on well, something, out there in the dark that neither of them had even noticed her approach. And they had ears easily five times the size of hers.
“Did you see that/Did you hear that?!” Both of them shouted a once with a garbled jumble of words and worries tumbling out of their mouths afterwards.
“Did I see what?” Florian asked. She gave them another odd look, and in return they glanced warily at each other. Clearly the cleric hadn’t seen anything out there in the darkness.
“Nothing...” Tristol said, his ears drooping. “We’ve been awake too long and we thought we saw something out there in the darkness. We probably fell asleep and you woke us up.”
“You both fell asleep? At once?”
Tristol shrugged, “Yeah.”
“…Fyrehowl doesn’t need to sleep.”
The guardinal and the mage nervously and awkwardly stared in silence at Florian.
“We’re just on edge from everything that’s been happening.” Fyrehowl said finally, trying to sound as honest and convincing as she could under the circumstances.
Tristol quickly glanced back into the darkness. Whatever had been there, or perhaps hadn’t been there, was gone. Nothing disturbed the entombed night, and no sounds rose above the wind.
Florian noticed the glance, and despite Fyrehowl’s attempted explanation, she still seemed unconvinced. “Either way, you too look spooked. Why don’t you get some sleep Tristol, and Fyrehowl you go sit down and have a drink. You could use it, and I can spell you on watch. Send someone else out to help me when you’re back inside. Ok?”
Tristol and Fyrehowl nodded and promised to send someone else back to join the cleric, but as they walked back into the cave, they kept exchanging worried glances. Florian hadn’t seen a thing out there, and so whatever it was, they’d been hallucinating and hearing things. The laughing howls hadn’t been out there in the night, they’d been firmly inside of their heads, and simultaneous for both of them…
****
Nearby, but caring not in the slightest for the three that stood guard over the cave mouth, a man stood above his most recent work. Standing in the darkness, reaching out with his psyche into his victim’s brain like a puppeteer to a living marionette, the man felt rather than saw his way. He needn’t see to find his way to the aorta, to nick the vessel walls and wash his hands in warm, living blood. A tiny bit of his conscience whimpered, pleading for him to stop but it was far too late for that. This needed to end before they knew too much.
Dragging fingers across the stone, he painted with his victim’s blood, painting glyphs in a tongue that caused the eyes to blur and ache, stressing the senses even in the absence of sight. So aberrant was it that the same small part of him pleading against the bloodshed wanted to run and hide. But he continued, painting the woman’s dying blood onto the walls in versus and prayers that warped the very fabric of the planes, distorting the tenuous connection between the Astral and the layer of Pandemonium that Howler’s Crag existed upon. He smiled as he felt that connection twist and then break, cutting off most any route of egress.
They were trapped. They were his.
****
Ensconced within the former bebelith hive, the expedition found shelter from the wind even more than the natural depression that served as their previous camp. Despite their worries and their fears, they did their best to make it seem comfortable and homey rather than cold and claustrophobic. In that at least they succeeded. Magical smokeless flames warmed their bodies and tales of their own, individual exploits and stories told both spoken and song by the bard, Larill, warmed their spirits.
They were warm and happy. Protected by walls of stone, wards cast by Doran and Leobtav, and watched over by guards posted at the only entrance in or out of their shelter, they thought themselves safe.
Their precautions were for naught.
The next morning they discovered the cook’s body. A dead varrangoin lay at her feet. The grotesque manner in which it had died made it obvious that the fiend hadn’t been responsible for her murder. Both corpses lay ten yards from the mouth of the group’s new base within the caves, just behind a boulder in view of the entrance. The killer had worked in broad view of his victims, leaving them yet another bloody, mocking present. Except it hadn’t been a bloody present. No exactly.
“We can’t let anyone out of the caves to see this.” Leobtav looked away in disgust.
Toras and Clueless nodded in unison.
The Professor glared off into the distance, sighed, and adjusted his glasses before turning back to them. “And no one on watch last night saw a thing? A little over two dozen feet away and nothing? Nothing heard and nothing seen?”
“Absolutely nothing.” Clueless admitted. “I already spoke with Fyrehowl and she didn’t smell anything either.”
“The wind wouldn’t have allowed for that,” Leobtav sighed. “So I can hardly blame her on that account. But this is beyond disturbing how they got away with this, and without our being aware.”
“Whoever it was has to have used magic to shield themselves from detection, and presumably they used a spell or some sort of item to leap in and out of the cave.”
Clueless almost added that he suspected some variety of shadow magic to perfectly fit the bill, but he held his tongue as Frollis, Tristol, and Nisha emerged from out of the cave to take their own turn on watch. If the shadowdancer was indeed the killer, they needn’t clue him in on their suspicions.
“Do what you can to clean this up.” Leobtav told them. “If you can find anything they might have left behind, or some damn purpose to all of this, let Doran or I know. Please take your time and try to make some sense of this. If you need me, I’ll either be in the cave with my notes, or back at the Gautish script, taking a second look. I need to try to finish our work as soon as possible. The sooner we can leave, the sooner this here will be behind us.”
They watched their employer leave, looking drained and tired, and then collectively they looked down at what the killer had left behind for them.
The varangoin had been reduced to a pulp, but rather than crushed or mashed as the result of a heavy fall from the sky –as had been the fate of its clanmates- this one had been rendered into hundred of pieces as if it had passed through a cleric’s bladestorm and then been telekinetically drawn back and forth across the line. Yet for all the violence its body had experienced, there wasn’t a stray drop of blood to be found spattered more than an inch or two from its mess of a corpse.
The cook’s body lay splayed on the ground in front of the boulder, motionless. In contrast to the state of the fiend at her feet, at first glance she could have simply been sleeping if not for the scene on the stone behind her, and the condition of her body once fully inspected. Her hands were covered in a sticky coating of blood, but otherwise, nothing was out of place on her hands and feet, nor her head. But underneath her clothing her skin was a mess of hundreds or thousands of tiny cuts and slashes, and one final one between the ribs atop the heart. Somehow, inexplicably, her clothing was itself unspoiled and hadn’t been removed at any point despite the horrors it covered.
“There isn’t a drop of blood left in her.” Tristol said, making a slow circuit around her corpse.
“Not with that mess behind her…” Frollis quipped, drawing a glare from the others.
The shadowdancer had a point though. The boulder was painted with Hedra’s bloody handprints, a horrific garble of twisting symbols and a tracing of legible words, seemingly by her hand as well. She had help however, or something. Clearly she couldn’t have painted herself, without a drop of blood despoiling her clothing, and with having been exsanguinated already by some outside power.
Not all of the handprints on the boulder were human. Some of them were larger, some smaller, others weirdly disproportionate, some like tentacles, others with hideous talons that scraped the stones where they’d left their bloody impression. Traced with the cook’s finger, but not at all in her handwriting –and she wasn’t fluent in celestial which is what the writing was penned in- were the words, “IT SPEAKS.”
Toras gave the text a confused, disdainful look. “What the hell speaks?”
Tristol ignored them and continued looking at the stone.
Nisha winced, “I don’t really care to know.”
Their eyes collectively drifted down the horrific painting to a second line of legible text. Again, written in celestial, a second and different hand picked up in a sort of hellish call and response, “AND I LISTEN.”
“Creeeeepy…” Nisha muttered.
Tristol rubbed the tiefling’s arm reassuringly and then looked uneasily at the other symbols painted onto the rock. The lines in celestial were a taunt, but nothing more. The other symbols were something else entirely. He didn’t recognize them, and he spoke a significant number of languages. That alone would be disturbing enough, but the letters themselves weren’t right. They weren’t normal. They hurt his eyes, and no matter how hard he squinted and tried to focus, they remained blurry, indistinct, and freakishly morphic, refusing any and all comprehension.
“Is it magical?” Toras said, squinting his eyes at the script.
“In my opinion?” Tristol asked. “Yes.”
“In your opinion?” Frollis gave a cough. “That should be a yes or a no. It’s not a subjective thing.”
Tristol’s ears lay back and his tail flicked side to side with confused annoyance. “That’s the thing. It doesn’t register as magical. Yet it moves and blurs and that’s not normal.”
Nisha glanced at the script, briefly crossed her eyes, and looked back at Tristol, “Anytime we’ve seen anything like this, it hasn’t been anything good or safe.”
She thought back to a circle of symbols they’d found miles below UnderSigil, somewhere that might or might not have actually still been within the City of Doors. But unless Her Serenity had gone psychopathic and moved to Pandemonium, they were safe from that being at all connected.
Tristol shivered at the same memory, “Thankfully this looks nothing like, well, those symbols.”
Frollis raised an eyebrow. “Something to share?”
Tristol waved it away. “Really old, unknown script we came across a sample of in Sigil. We didn’t mess around with it. But there’s no similarity here. Frankly, I’ve never seen any of these here.”
Conversation trailed off, and their investigation of the bodies began. But other than the gruesome details and unnerving evidence of non-magical magic still in place, they found nothing new, and certainly nothing to indicate the identity of the killer. An hour later they’d cleaned the area, scoured away the blood, and stuffed Hegra’s corpse into a bag of holding for an attempted raising once they were out of harm’s way. Ideally, no one outside of the expedition leadership or their mercenaries would know about what had happened.
The ideal did not happen.
****
Despite their attempts to keep quiet the fact that they’d found the cook’s body, and that she hadn’t been carried off by one of the varangoin, but by whatever demented killer stalked their group, word managed to spread. In light of that failure, the best that could be done for the moment was to continue posting active watches at the cave’s mouth.
Eager to finish their work and be done with their stay in Pandemonium, Doran and Leobtav set out for the Crag early in the day. Trying to strike a balance between protecting themselves and ensuring maximum security at the cave, they took along Larill, Tristol, Toras, and a select few scholars, heading back up to the cave with the sample of Gautish script. Everyone else stayed behind, closely under guard. Remarkably, blessedly, nothing awry occurred. With luck, the extra security and lack of any outside disturbances had stymied the killer.
Six hours later the group returned from the Crag. Tired from their trek up and down the artificial mountain, except for the lilland, they put away their things or simply dropped them on the floor, and retired to sleep. Larill remained awake, but retired to a smaller, side chamber to meditate away from the rest of the expedition and their noise.
As for the rest of the expedition, they passed away their time in the cave in various pursuits, ranging from cards, dice, drinking, smoking just inside the cave entrance –much to Frollis and Fyrehowl’s chagrin as that particular crowd expanded- and for a number of others, talking and storytelling around an illusory campfire.
One of the camp cooks went first, telling a story about his first job with the Institute, and how it was both an amazing adventure, a professional delight, and absolutely ten times worse than anything that they had experienced thus far in Pandemonium. He was one of the Institute’s longstanding employees, and as such, his tale was new to most of those gathered around the fire. His tale started out at the end of a branch of the World Ash where it dipped into the incarnate Chaos of Limbo.
“The Pinwheel?”
“The Pinwheel.” The cook confirmed. “Thirty of us went there looking for a parasitic plant, akin to mistletoe, that colonized that patch of Limbo from Yggdrasil. It didn’t stay the same after a few generations, and the Fraternity of Order was paying us good jink to bring back samples from closer to and further out from the Tree. If you ask me, they weren’t paying us nearly enough.”
The cook took a long drink from a silver flask of some variety of brandy and then offered it around for anyone else before he continued.
“So yes. They sent us to the damn Pinwheel.”
“That place is so damn fun!”
Heads turned to a beaming, suddenly excited Nisha as she fiddled with the cap on the cook’s brandy flask. She’d been to the Pinwheel before.
“Fun?” The cook shot the tiefling an incredulous expression.”You’ve been there?”
“Yep!” Nisha took a long sip. “A couple times actually.” She took another sip. “First time it was by accident actually and the portal was one way. But at least I got to visit the ratatosks.” Sip number three. “But then they marched me back to Limbo and I had to wait a few weeks for a portal to open to get back to Sigil. That was a really fun vacation.”
Sip number four.
“A fun vacation?” The cook looked at Nisha like she had a hole in her head. “When you’ve encountered chaos beasts, a drunken githzerai, a sky that randomly changes color and induces nausea if you look at it too long, weather that includes random substances falling from the sky, and an amorous green slaad, you…”
“Oh you met Brimblembumb!” Nisha quipped, suddenly much more chipper and jangling the bell at the end of her tail. Clearly she’d met the slaad in question.
Sip five.
“Brimbl… who?”
“The green slaad. You called him amorous. That’s probably an understatement, but yeah, you met him. How was he?”
Tristol deftly snatched the flask of booze before the tiefling took a sip number six. Xaositects were Xaositects, and so was Nisha, and a tipsy Nisha was liable to end nowhere good for anyone, especially when the words ‘amorous green slaad’ were part of her story.
The cook sputtered and rapidly regained his role as speaker, leaving it up to Tristol to handle the tiefling. True to form she ignored the cook and bothered the aasimar who took away the brandy, briefly doing her best ‘amorous slaad’ impression on his cheek. Tristol blushed furiously, but most of the crowd seemed to be following the cook’s continuing story.
Except for Florian and Clueless. They snickered and pointed for the remainder of the cook’s story.
“And that’s why I’m never ever going back to Limbo.” The cook exclaimed, wrapping up his story. “So called stable patch of the plane… hah!”
Another of the expedition associates coughed and gained everyone’s attention. No longer playing kissy slaad with Tristol’s cheek, Nisha wrinkled her face, having clearly wanted to be the next storyteller. The man who’d coughed, an elven-blooded aasimar –a historian by profession- wore a wry grin on his face.
“I was there at the Pinwheel, and yes it was annoying. But I’ve been here longer than you. I was there in Porphatys along with quite a few others here still now, and ten years before that I was there when we went to Gehenna searching after a tumble of ruins on one of the lower furnaces. Only a handful of people still with the Institute were there, but if you ask them, they’re tell you how bad it was. That is, if they’re willing to talk about it.”
“So how many people did you lose?” The cook asked, taking a sip of his own brandy as it made its way back.
“That’s the thing, we didn’t actually lose anyone, but there were some really, really close calls. We came damn close to losing most of us to ‘loths on the way in and the way out. For whatever reason they never ventured close to where we were going, but getting there and getting out… very close calls.”
Several faces around the fire twitched at the very mention of the word ‘loth. They’d had their fill of them in the past year and wanted precious little to ever do with them again.
“You say you didn’t lose anyone, so how was it worse than the Pinwheel?” Another associate asked, pulling a blanket over his shoulders. “Actually, for that matter, how is it any worse than where we are now?”
“Pandemonium on its own is bad. It’s dark, the wind can make you deaf, the tunnels can drive you insane, and things lurk around every hidden corner waiting to kill and devour you. Gehenna on its own just ups the open level of danger and the outright malevolence of the natives; it doesn’t want to drive you insane, it just wants to hurt and exploit you.” The historian brushed a strand of hair back from his eyes. “But where we went on Mungoth wasn’t like that. It was almost like someone had taken a patch of the Waste and vomited it up on the slopes of the third furnace. It drained off life and hope as much as the cold drained away warmth.”
“And I’ve been to the Waste too.” Another associate countered. “But what made this place special and worse than anything else in Gehenna or the Waste?”
“Well for starters the whole damn place was overrun by phiuls.” The aasimar let that sink in for a moment. Phiuls were an enigma because their origins weren’t known, they didn’t fit well into the cycle of souls on the lower planes, and precious little was known about their nature because of their aggression and life-draining touch. At least you could bargain with a ‘loth.
“We didn’t expect the phiuls, but we managed to avoid them somehow. I mentioned that we didn’t suffer any deaths, but that’s not entirely correct.”
“So what exactly happened.”
“No one died there, but several men and women came back completely mad in the head. One of them eventually came around, but he never spoke about it again or just what had happened when he touched one of the statues that he’d come across. Another one killed himself, or at least we think he did. The barmy threw himself over the edge of the torus in Sigil.”
Eyes around the fire went wide.
“Another one went to the madhouse.” The historian lamented. “Lasted a few years and then just stopped eating. He’s no longer with us either.”
He let it sink in and accepted the cook’s offered flask of brandy, toasting the dead and damaged before taking a long swig and offering it back. The flask made a circuit around the fire but was drained before it went halfway around.
“What were you there looking for?” Tristol asked.
“We went there hunting for some pretty damn obscure history,” He explained. “But we never actually found it. The ruins we found didn’t have a single damn connection to the particular would-be god who’d stolen a parcel of divinity from his former patron and then hoped to make it big on one of the Lower Planes. Absolutely no link.”
“So what was there?” Florian prompted as she passed around a bottle of her own.
“Ruins older than anything I’ve ever seen. Statues that looked like they’d all been actual people turned to stone. The whole place was bone-chillingly cold –colder than Krangath even- and utterly silent except for the crunch of ashes and frost under your boots.”
“Statues?” Several around the circle asked, puzzled, intrigued, and unnerved. The flickering shadows cast by their own forms and the firelight didn’t help.
“They were the damndest things, and they littered the place. There were some fiends, but the ones that I saw and really got a good look at as far as we bothered to venture into the place were celestials; and all kinds too. I saw everything from lantern archons to solars, leonals to coures, and everything in-between.”
Fyrehowl involuntarily whimpered. “Someone went mad from touching one of them?”
“He said they’d been whispering to him.”
The lupinal cocked her head sideways, confused and distinctly unnerved, “Whispering or not, you can’t petrify a celestial.”
“I didn’t say they were stone.” The historian explained, taking a drink from Florian’s bottle, now disturbed by his own memories and telling of them. “If you had to ask me, they’d been burned to ashes and frozen in place.”
****
Memorable stuff, King of the Crosstrade. *tips hat* This storyhour just keeps getting better and better.
Shemeska
Adventurer
Thank you!
And since this storyhour has been to a lot of places, the place that was just talked about around the fire, the "Vale of Frozen Ashes" is the same location that was mentioned in a flashback just prior to the Pandemonium arc, and in the first post of the SH itself where the baernaloth 'The Chronicler' was. This will be connecting to the rest of the plot in a very large way.
I have not checked the storyhour in a while and when I do I see a couple of updates. They are great as always Shemeska. That inspired me to go back and reread your storyhour from the beginning. I am not that familiar with the planescape lore. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions as I progress through the storyhour?
I have to give credit to your players. They are a very ingenious group. Not just hack and slash to solve every problem. They have run from fights, bribed their opponent, used stealth to get pass others, and fought when they need to. Sounds like a fun group to game with.
The characters are interesting too. The first time through I was very interested in Clueless and Tristol. The second time I find myself following Toras and Fyrehowl closer. But I am still confused as to what Toras is. He is an aasimar that is half-quesar? I do not know what a quesar is. Also his class. He is called a fighter, not a paladin, but many of his abilities are similiar to a paladin's. Are they from a prestige class or are they racial abilities?
One last question, how far along in the campaign are we in pandemonium? Are we half way through?
I have to give credit to your players. They are a very ingenious group. Not just hack and slash to solve every problem. They have run from fights, bribed their opponent, used stealth to get pass others, and fought when they need to. Sounds like a fun group to game with.
The characters are interesting too. The first time through I was very interested in Clueless and Tristol. The second time I find myself following Toras and Fyrehowl closer. But I am still confused as to what Toras is. He is an aasimar that is half-quesar? I do not know what a quesar is. Also his class. He is called a fighter, not a paladin, but many of his abilities are similiar to a paladin's. Are they from a prestige class or are they racial abilities?
One last question, how far along in the campaign are we in pandemonium? Are we half way through?
Shemeska
Adventurer
Ask away
My players were and are awesome. I will admit to occasionally putting them in situations well beyond their capacity to fight, and they routinely thought up some pretty ingenious ways out of it, or way that had them come out on top.
Toras was a half-celestial, not an aasimar. And a quesar was an obscure 2e celestial. Most of his obscure abilities are from his template. He was a CG fighter with later some other stuff thrown in, but I'd need to look back to my notes.
Around the halfway point, yes.
And look for an update in the next week.
