JollyDoc's Kingmaker-Updated 7/4/2011
carborundum
Adventurer
Can't wait to read the finale... and the one-shot... and the Serpent's Skull SH 
There will be a Story Hour, right? I mean, will there be a Story Hour good sir? Who's playing what character this time? I'm looking forward to what you guys make of the Summoner and Magus. I made a few Skinwalker Magi for my STAP campaign using the Super Genius Games feat pdf. Absolutely ass-kicking class!
There will be a Story Hour, right? I mean, will there be a Story Hour good sir? Who's playing what character this time? I'm looking forward to what you guys make of the Summoner and Magus. I made a few Skinwalker Magi for my STAP campaign using the Super Genius Games feat pdf. Absolutely ass-kicking class!
Joachim
First Post
Current Serpent's Skull PC's and their Kingmaker characters:
Master Summoner - Velox (me)
Undead Lord Cleric - Davrim
Barbarian - Selena
Alchemist - Tungdill
Arcane Duelist Bard - Stevhan
Hexblade Magus - Mox
I really like the summoning aspect of the summoner, and have never really liked the Eidolon mechanics and how making one turned into an exercise of 'how many natural attacks can I give this guy'. When I saw the details on the Master Summoner archetype I was 100% sold (I was already planning on having a non-combat eidolon anyway, and the ability to have multiple summons on the field was too enticing).
Master Summoner - Velox (me)
Undead Lord Cleric - Davrim
Barbarian - Selena
Alchemist - Tungdill
Arcane Duelist Bard - Stevhan
Hexblade Magus - Mox
I really like the summoning aspect of the summoner, and have never really liked the Eidolon mechanics and how making one turned into an exercise of 'how many natural attacks can I give this guy'. When I saw the details on the Master Summoner archetype I was 100% sold (I was already planning on having a non-combat eidolon anyway, and the ability to have multiple summons on the field was too enticing).
JollyDoc
Explorer
QUEEN OF THE NIGHTTIME WORLD
“Is it over?” a small voice squeaked from behind the throne.
“You have one chance to show yourself,” Mox snarled, “before I melt that chair to slag and you with it!”
Cautiously, a small figure emerged from the shadows. It had thin, leathery wings, small horns, and seemed to be made of solidified water.
“What in the Hells are you supposed to be?” Tungdill growled.
“It’s a mephit,” Selena explained. “A water mephit, to be exact.”
“Who are you?” Mox demanded.
“Pludock,” the mephit chirped.
“Do you serve Nyrissa?” Mox asked.
Pludock looked around nervously.
“Shhhh!” he shushed. “She can hear us!”
“Where…is…she!?” Mox all but screamed.
Pludock gulped. “The Fable,” he whispered.
“And where would that be?” Mox pressed.
“I’d better not say,” the mephit gulped. Apparently he saw death waiting in Mox’s eyes, for he started babbling a moment later. “It’s a chamber high above that allows her to control everything in the House, and watch over every room! Oops!”
Pludock clamped his hands over his mouth, and his eyes grew wide. An instant later, he simply exploded.
“Guess he was tellin’ the truth,” Tungdill shrugged.
“Come on,” Mox snapped. “Let’s keep moving. He said she’s above. We’ll keep going up.”
________________________________________________________________
The companions made their way up the huge spiral staircase, and emerged into a huge and ornate chamber that had fallen into terrible decay. The ceiling was vaulted, with supports carved to resemble serpentine dragons holding great beams aloft. Seven statues of a beautiful woman holding a sword or posing in a seductive way stood against the walls, along with several chairs and tables. Two long tables with benches sat in the middle of the room astride a large marble statue of a snakelike dragon. No sooner had the group set foot in the room, however, than they were set upon by a pair of enormous two-legged dragons. They were wyverns, but their tongues were long and barbed. Their initial glee at seeing new prey literally walk into their lair was quickly replaced by panic when Mox assumed the form of a great red dragon. The battle didn’t last long once Stevhan added his bow, and Davrim and Velox flew into the air to engage the wyverns face-to-face.
___________________________________________________________
After that, Mox decided it was best if they split up to cover more territory. There were two exits from the great hall. Velox and Tungdill took one, while Davrim and Stevhan took the other. Selena and Mox stayed in the hall, to better assist whomever would inevitably get into trouble first. The oracle and the druid only found a series of empty guestrooms. The ranger and the inquisitor, however, found more than they bargained for. The door they chose gave onto a walkway overlooking the throne room below. A second door on the far side led to a suite of what seemed like private chambers. A beautiful woman stood with her back to the first door they opened. At first, Davrim thought they’d somehow stumbled directly into Nyrissa herself, but then the woman turned around. Her beauty was horribly marred by the fact that there were two gaping holes where her eyes should have been. Then, all of the other doors in the suite opened simultaneously, and seven more of the defaced women strode out into the hall. Nyrissa once counted these nymphs, for that was what they were, as her sisters and friends. Their beauty rivaled her own, but when Nyrissa suffered at the hands of the eldest, those eight did as well. Nyrissa had the Nightmare Rook pluck out their eyes.
Despite that fact, the beauty of the nymphs was still such that those who gazed upon them ran the risk of being struck blind. Add to that the devastating magic the fey had at their command, and Nyrissa had chosen her personal bodyguards well. Before Davrim and Stevhan knew what was happening, the nymphs unleashed blast after blast of unholy fire. The warriors were driven back onto the bridge under the power of the onslaught, but then the draconic head of Mox drove through the far door and unleashed her own fiery apocalypse. Within moments, Selena, Velox and Tungdill had reunited with their allies, and the battle was joined in full. However, when Selena, Stevhan and Tungdill were all blinded by the nymphs’ beauty, all seemed lost. Tungdill quickly managed to heal his own affliction, and Velox blanketed the area in a fog cloud so that no one else would be afflicted, while Selena and Stevhan retreated to safety. Then Davrim and Velox went to work. The fey were not equal to the inquisitor and the oracle hand-to-hand, and in short order, several of them lay dead or dying. The rest fell to the combined power of Mox and Selena, once Tungdill had healed her as well, and a barrage of fire and lightning.
__________________________________________________________
After Tungdill dealt with Stevhan’s blindness, the companions set about exploring the suite of rooms the nymphs had been guarding. After all, if Nyrissa had left the chambers that well protected, there must be something there she didn’t want found. Tungdill and Selena walked from room to room searching for magical auras, only to be nearly overwhelmed by the power radiating from, of all things, a simple looking bed.
“This is some powerful conjuration,” Tungdill muttered. “Strongest I’ve ever seen. I think it’s a portal of some kind, or the link to one. Seems like…,” he bent to examine the bed more closely, “…ya have to picture…something…in yer head in order to activate it.”
“Picture what?” Mox asked.
“Umm…,” the dwarf actually blushed. “Ya know…doin’ somethin’ that ya would normally do…in a bed…with somebody else…ya know?”
“Yes, I think we get it,” Mox said. “Everyone gather around. Now focus the image in your minds…,”
A dizzying moment later, the companions found themselves somewhere else. It was another bedchamber, well appointed, and lit by ever burning torches. There was no way out.
“Where are we?” Davrim asked.
“Somewhere else,” Selena replied. “If I had to guess, I’d say we’re in some sort of pocket dimension. The mephit said that Nyrissa was ‘above.’ Perhaps this Fable he spoke of is not literally above, in an upper layer of the house, but figuratively.”
“Then where is Nyrissa?” Mox asked, exasperated.
The witch shrugged. “Not here, obviously, but pocket dimensions don’t work like normal space. This may be but one part of it. There may be others. I sense that we can return back to the original bedchamber by merely picturing it. I recommend we do so, and continue our search. Perhaps we can find another port key.”
_____________________________________________________________
The companions returned to the private suite, and from there, continued deeper into the house. They found another stairwell which led to a third floor. The series of rooms they discovered there, however, were a tangle of rubble, stones and thick, creeping vines and plants that had grown riotously throughout. A large number of damaged or destroyed statues of all manner of creatures lay strewn about the place as well.
As they began making their way through the shambles, a figure suddenly appeared at the far end of one hallway. It looked to be a woman in form, but her skin was gray and scaled like that of a reptile, and a nest of snakes grew from her head where her hair should have been. Two particularly large serpents hung down from either side of her skull like a pair of tentacles. This was Phomandala, once a medusa who was a former ally of Nyrissa’s. When the great tane, the Jabberwock, came for Nyrissa, she miraculously survived the attack, and also managed to collect some of the creature’s blood. She ultimately used that blood to create a lesser version of the creature, the self-same that she sent to attack Veritas, but her first attempts at creation were less than successful. All but one of her experiments died…Phomandala. Now the tane-infused medusa had become a powerful sorceress in her own right, and had been tasked by her mistress to defend this run with her life if necessary.
It seemed, however, that Nyrissa had failed to warn her minion just who, exactly, she was dealing with. No sooner had Phomandala stepped from cover, than Velox appeared in a flash of light behind her, his helm glowing like a small sun. The medusa was nothing if not resourceful, however. She spun, serpent-quick, and hurled scorching blasts of fire at the oracle. She then turned and filled the hallway where the rest of the companions were advancing, with a blast of arctic cold. A moment later, she darted through a door into a side chamber. Mox rushed after her, and just as the medusa was about to flee through a second door, the sorceress fired an emerald beam into her back. In an instant, Phomandala was reduced to a pile of ash.
___________________________________________________________
It soon became obvious just what Phomandala was protecting, when the companions found a well-lit room beyond the ruined chambers that was something between a laboratory and a library. Numerous large tomes sat upon sagging shelves along the walls, and several tables were covered with notes and strange schematics. Scattered among the papers were several fragmentary notes which seemed to have been written by Nyrissa herself. The truths revealed therein shocked the heroes to their core. When Nyrissa survived the attack by the Jabberwock, she did not escape the wrath of the Eldest. Instead, she fell right into their hands. Their judgment was swift. They tore from her mind and spirit her capacity to love, coalesced these powerful and deadly emotions into physical reality in the shape of the blade now known as Briar, and then cast the sword into the Material Plane where the nature of reality would hide it forever beyond Nyrissa’s sight. As the ages past, Nyrissa became more and more obsessed wither her loss of love, or perhaps it was this loss that caused her to become more violent and obsessed. In her early attempts to discover Briar’s location, she received visions and prophecies that Briar would be returned to her, but only as an instrument of her own death, wielded in the hands of a mortal hero.
Subsequently, Nyrissa began the long task of shaping Thousandbreaths and wearing down the boundaries between it and the Material Plane, so that someday the boundary between realities would crack, and the region known as the Stolen Lands would bloom with life as it and Thousandbreaths merged. The war between Pitax and Kardashia was but one step towards this goal. By weakening the kingdoms that occupied the land she wished to claim, she weakened the opposition to her goal. With both kingdoms reeling in the aftermath of the war, Nyrissa would be able to draw the Stolen Lands into her realm and bottle it, leaving a wasteland on the Material Plane, and giving her the perfect gift to present to the Eldest and repair the damage done to her reputation in their eyes.
One final piece of information the heroes found confirmed their suspicions about the Fable. There were indeed other port keys, including the throne in the throne room. According to the notes, this would take them to the chamber within the Fable from which Nyrissa could see and hear everything that transpired in her home.
All of this Nyrissa witnessed and heard. She knew that the prophecies were drawing nigh, and that if her former glory was to be reclaimed, she would have to alter the very fates themselves. She sent out her thoughts to all her remaining minions, calling them to the throne room. Yes, the hour was upon her, and she would show the Eldest that she was truly worthy of being numbered among their order.
__________________________________________________________
When the companions reached the throne room again, they found that they were expected. A dozen more of the ghostly elven guards they’d encountered at the gatehouse stood around the perimeter of the chamber. Then, four enormous shadows seemingly detached themselves from the walls. Cloaked by wings of darkness, the horrific, skeletal aliens appeared to be burning from within, a flaming glow shining through their emaciated chests. Among the gaunt beings’ most prominent features were shimmering black wings, sharp talons, and yellow eyes that radiated a lambent malice. These were the ankou, the torturers and executioners of the most powerful nobles of the First World. In a place where death was often a mere inconvenience, the ankous’ duty was not merely to kill…it was to terrify and torture, to wring every iota of suffering out of their target in a pageant of cruelty before the final act, the bloody murder itself. Mox knew this the moment she recognized the creatures…and she didn’t care. She raised her hands above her head, and as she did so, a large cauldron erupted out of the floor of the throne room. From it burst a geyser of flesh-eating acid. One of the ankous was caught in the brunt of the blast, and was reduced to bones within a matter of seconds. Then, Velox conjured a roaring fire wall that ran the length of the room. A second ankou, one that had already been badly burned by the caustic eruption, was immediately consumed in the blaze. The remaining two horrors suddenly lit up like rainbows, as prismatic sprays of light emanated from their bodies. Where the light beams struck the companions, they were burned by acid or fire, charred by electricity, or simply momentarily confused by the dizzying display. Davrim was one of the latter, but fortunately, his muddled mind perceived the source of the blast as the target of his wrath. He rushed the ankou, and his devastating swordsmanship carved the fiend to pieces. He turned towards the final one, his senses returning, but before he could attack, Stevhan filled the ankou full of arrows, and if folded in on itself. As for the ghosts, Tungdill unleashed a massive firestorm upon the throne room, and Selena followed it up with a barrage of storm bolts. These, combined with Mox’s still-spewing acidic cauldron spelled a quick demise for the uneasy spirits. The way cleared, the heroes slowly approached the throne. The picture that came into their minds was one of holding court before thousands. Mox smiled to herself as reality faded.
_____________________________________________________________
The chamber they found themselves in was a plain, circular room with stone walls, floor and ceiling, lit by several dancing lights that floated near the ceiling. A statue of Nyrissa stood in the center of the room, one arm held out as if in greeting. At the base of the statue stood Nyrissa herself. She was a creature of unearthly beauty and grace, yet she was obviously far from human. Her body bore numerous thorns and ridges, as if aspects of the natural world were trying to form out of her flesh. As Mox and her companions gazed upon her, they saw only madness in her eyes. There would be no rational conversation, no hope of diplomacy. There would be only death.
Nyrissa’s eyes immediately locked upon Stevhan and the glowing blade Briar which he held in his hand. She smiled insanely, waved one delicate hand, and the ranger simply vanished. The nymph queen had imprisoned him inside a maze of his own mind. It was only temporary, she was certain. A mortal of his power and resolve should be able to free himself of the maze within a matter of moments, but Nyrissa was certain it would be plenty of time to destroy his allies, and then she would kill the bearer of Briar himself.
“Noooo!” Tungdill cried, misunderstanding what had happened to his friend. The dwarf pointed one finger at the nymph, and a bolt of black energy stabbed out at her chest. Nyrissa flinched, but nothing more. Tungdill was dumbfounded. She should have been struck dead! Instead she began weaving her own spell. Mox sensed what was coming. It was going to be a prismatic spray, much like the one the ankous used, only much more powerful. She had to stop the nymph from completing it. She quickly countered with her own magic, attempting to suffocate the breath right out of her. Nyrissa reeled backwards from the force of the spell, but she still breathed, and she still spoke the words to her spell. The light exploded among the companions in a torrent of elemental energy. Both Selena and Tungdill were struck blind by the brilliant beams. In the space of seconds, Nyrissa had neutralized half of her foes.
Davrim saw his chance with Nyrissa momentarily staggered by Mox’s counterattack. He rushed forward, and with one powerful swipe of his blade, opened the nymph queen’s abdomen. Her eyes went wide as she took a step backwards, one hand dropping down to keep her bowels inside her belly. Then, if possible, her eyes grew wider still when Stevhan abruptly reappeared. She managed to hurl another prismatic blast just as Davrim and Stevhan, now joined by Velox, charged her en masse. Though acid and lightning raced across their skin, the three warriors struck in unison, and as Briar tasted the flesh of its former mistress, Nyrissa howled in agony, the sword draining her of her very vitality. Mox knew that it was now or never. She spoke a single Word of power, and the resulting surge hurled the nymph into the wall, where she slid to the floor, stunned. Stevhan stood over her, Briar gripped in both hands. He raised it above Nyrissa, and then solemnly drove it through her heart.
_____________________________________________________________
The moment of Nyrissa’s death triggered a strange and violent transformation that rippled through the First World. The whole of Thousandbreaths was instantly uprooted and cast into the Material Plane. The House at the Edge of Time immediately crumbled and suffered thousands of years of erosion at once as if inflicted by constricting vegetation, rainfall, lightning strikes, and subsidence…effectively transforming it into the ruins of the Castle of Knives. The six companions floated gently to the ground in the midst of the devastation, as Nyrissa’s body rose up on a pyre of black lightning. A terrible gale ripped through all of Thousandbreaths with the Queen’s body acting as the center of this maelstrom. Within moments, it vanished in a black pall of madness. Just like that, it was over…
INTERLUDE
As she lunged forward sitting up in bed, Mox emitted a nightmarish scream. Her body glistening with sweat and her nails elongated into razor-edged claws, she slowly regained her composure. She brushed her long, curling black hair out of her face as she turned to embrace Stevhan, the Duke of Pitax.
"Another nightmare, my darling?" asked the Duke.
Curling herself around the muscular ranger, Mox replied, "This was more than just a dream... I know it was a glimpse of the future."
A grim frown spreading over his face, Stevhan said, "Perhaps... What did you see?"
As the Queen ran her hand over her husband’s chest, she began to describe her dream...
"It wasn't like the others, Stevhan. In the previous dreams, I felt a deep dread... an impending doom, but the source was vague and unknown to me. I could feel that someone wanted to take my crown and rule Kardashia for themselves. This time everything was much more clear to me. A fierce human mistress confronted me, wielding a grand sword and a resplendent shield. She was clad in magnificent, full battle armor and she hunted me endlessly."
"Why? What did she want?" asked Stevhan.
"She hunts my crown and she sends her agents to take what she wants," Mox continued.
"Her agents?" Stevhan asked again.
"Yes. She is Iomedae. I have seen it clearly and I am quite certain," Mox stated.
Shaking his head, the Duke replied, "I feel certain your wrong, Mox. I think it's just another bad dream, my sweet."
"Promise me, Stevhan... Promise me that you'll protect me and the children from whatever is coming. Will you protect me, my Duke?" Mox asked.
“Is it over?” a small voice squeaked from behind the throne.
“You have one chance to show yourself,” Mox snarled, “before I melt that chair to slag and you with it!”
Cautiously, a small figure emerged from the shadows. It had thin, leathery wings, small horns, and seemed to be made of solidified water.
“What in the Hells are you supposed to be?” Tungdill growled.
“It’s a mephit,” Selena explained. “A water mephit, to be exact.”
“Who are you?” Mox demanded.
“Pludock,” the mephit chirped.
“Do you serve Nyrissa?” Mox asked.
Pludock looked around nervously.
“Shhhh!” he shushed. “She can hear us!”
“Where…is…she!?” Mox all but screamed.
Pludock gulped. “The Fable,” he whispered.
“And where would that be?” Mox pressed.
“I’d better not say,” the mephit gulped. Apparently he saw death waiting in Mox’s eyes, for he started babbling a moment later. “It’s a chamber high above that allows her to control everything in the House, and watch over every room! Oops!”
Pludock clamped his hands over his mouth, and his eyes grew wide. An instant later, he simply exploded.
“Guess he was tellin’ the truth,” Tungdill shrugged.
“Come on,” Mox snapped. “Let’s keep moving. He said she’s above. We’ll keep going up.”
________________________________________________________________
The companions made their way up the huge spiral staircase, and emerged into a huge and ornate chamber that had fallen into terrible decay. The ceiling was vaulted, with supports carved to resemble serpentine dragons holding great beams aloft. Seven statues of a beautiful woman holding a sword or posing in a seductive way stood against the walls, along with several chairs and tables. Two long tables with benches sat in the middle of the room astride a large marble statue of a snakelike dragon. No sooner had the group set foot in the room, however, than they were set upon by a pair of enormous two-legged dragons. They were wyverns, but their tongues were long and barbed. Their initial glee at seeing new prey literally walk into their lair was quickly replaced by panic when Mox assumed the form of a great red dragon. The battle didn’t last long once Stevhan added his bow, and Davrim and Velox flew into the air to engage the wyverns face-to-face.
___________________________________________________________
After that, Mox decided it was best if they split up to cover more territory. There were two exits from the great hall. Velox and Tungdill took one, while Davrim and Stevhan took the other. Selena and Mox stayed in the hall, to better assist whomever would inevitably get into trouble first. The oracle and the druid only found a series of empty guestrooms. The ranger and the inquisitor, however, found more than they bargained for. The door they chose gave onto a walkway overlooking the throne room below. A second door on the far side led to a suite of what seemed like private chambers. A beautiful woman stood with her back to the first door they opened. At first, Davrim thought they’d somehow stumbled directly into Nyrissa herself, but then the woman turned around. Her beauty was horribly marred by the fact that there were two gaping holes where her eyes should have been. Then, all of the other doors in the suite opened simultaneously, and seven more of the defaced women strode out into the hall. Nyrissa once counted these nymphs, for that was what they were, as her sisters and friends. Their beauty rivaled her own, but when Nyrissa suffered at the hands of the eldest, those eight did as well. Nyrissa had the Nightmare Rook pluck out their eyes.
Despite that fact, the beauty of the nymphs was still such that those who gazed upon them ran the risk of being struck blind. Add to that the devastating magic the fey had at their command, and Nyrissa had chosen her personal bodyguards well. Before Davrim and Stevhan knew what was happening, the nymphs unleashed blast after blast of unholy fire. The warriors were driven back onto the bridge under the power of the onslaught, but then the draconic head of Mox drove through the far door and unleashed her own fiery apocalypse. Within moments, Selena, Velox and Tungdill had reunited with their allies, and the battle was joined in full. However, when Selena, Stevhan and Tungdill were all blinded by the nymphs’ beauty, all seemed lost. Tungdill quickly managed to heal his own affliction, and Velox blanketed the area in a fog cloud so that no one else would be afflicted, while Selena and Stevhan retreated to safety. Then Davrim and Velox went to work. The fey were not equal to the inquisitor and the oracle hand-to-hand, and in short order, several of them lay dead or dying. The rest fell to the combined power of Mox and Selena, once Tungdill had healed her as well, and a barrage of fire and lightning.
__________________________________________________________
After Tungdill dealt with Stevhan’s blindness, the companions set about exploring the suite of rooms the nymphs had been guarding. After all, if Nyrissa had left the chambers that well protected, there must be something there she didn’t want found. Tungdill and Selena walked from room to room searching for magical auras, only to be nearly overwhelmed by the power radiating from, of all things, a simple looking bed.
“This is some powerful conjuration,” Tungdill muttered. “Strongest I’ve ever seen. I think it’s a portal of some kind, or the link to one. Seems like…,” he bent to examine the bed more closely, “…ya have to picture…something…in yer head in order to activate it.”
“Picture what?” Mox asked.
“Umm…,” the dwarf actually blushed. “Ya know…doin’ somethin’ that ya would normally do…in a bed…with somebody else…ya know?”
“Yes, I think we get it,” Mox said. “Everyone gather around. Now focus the image in your minds…,”
A dizzying moment later, the companions found themselves somewhere else. It was another bedchamber, well appointed, and lit by ever burning torches. There was no way out.
“Where are we?” Davrim asked.
“Somewhere else,” Selena replied. “If I had to guess, I’d say we’re in some sort of pocket dimension. The mephit said that Nyrissa was ‘above.’ Perhaps this Fable he spoke of is not literally above, in an upper layer of the house, but figuratively.”
“Then where is Nyrissa?” Mox asked, exasperated.
The witch shrugged. “Not here, obviously, but pocket dimensions don’t work like normal space. This may be but one part of it. There may be others. I sense that we can return back to the original bedchamber by merely picturing it. I recommend we do so, and continue our search. Perhaps we can find another port key.”
_____________________________________________________________
The companions returned to the private suite, and from there, continued deeper into the house. They found another stairwell which led to a third floor. The series of rooms they discovered there, however, were a tangle of rubble, stones and thick, creeping vines and plants that had grown riotously throughout. A large number of damaged or destroyed statues of all manner of creatures lay strewn about the place as well.
As they began making their way through the shambles, a figure suddenly appeared at the far end of one hallway. It looked to be a woman in form, but her skin was gray and scaled like that of a reptile, and a nest of snakes grew from her head where her hair should have been. Two particularly large serpents hung down from either side of her skull like a pair of tentacles. This was Phomandala, once a medusa who was a former ally of Nyrissa’s. When the great tane, the Jabberwock, came for Nyrissa, she miraculously survived the attack, and also managed to collect some of the creature’s blood. She ultimately used that blood to create a lesser version of the creature, the self-same that she sent to attack Veritas, but her first attempts at creation were less than successful. All but one of her experiments died…Phomandala. Now the tane-infused medusa had become a powerful sorceress in her own right, and had been tasked by her mistress to defend this run with her life if necessary.
It seemed, however, that Nyrissa had failed to warn her minion just who, exactly, she was dealing with. No sooner had Phomandala stepped from cover, than Velox appeared in a flash of light behind her, his helm glowing like a small sun. The medusa was nothing if not resourceful, however. She spun, serpent-quick, and hurled scorching blasts of fire at the oracle. She then turned and filled the hallway where the rest of the companions were advancing, with a blast of arctic cold. A moment later, she darted through a door into a side chamber. Mox rushed after her, and just as the medusa was about to flee through a second door, the sorceress fired an emerald beam into her back. In an instant, Phomandala was reduced to a pile of ash.
___________________________________________________________
It soon became obvious just what Phomandala was protecting, when the companions found a well-lit room beyond the ruined chambers that was something between a laboratory and a library. Numerous large tomes sat upon sagging shelves along the walls, and several tables were covered with notes and strange schematics. Scattered among the papers were several fragmentary notes which seemed to have been written by Nyrissa herself. The truths revealed therein shocked the heroes to their core. When Nyrissa survived the attack by the Jabberwock, she did not escape the wrath of the Eldest. Instead, she fell right into their hands. Their judgment was swift. They tore from her mind and spirit her capacity to love, coalesced these powerful and deadly emotions into physical reality in the shape of the blade now known as Briar, and then cast the sword into the Material Plane where the nature of reality would hide it forever beyond Nyrissa’s sight. As the ages past, Nyrissa became more and more obsessed wither her loss of love, or perhaps it was this loss that caused her to become more violent and obsessed. In her early attempts to discover Briar’s location, she received visions and prophecies that Briar would be returned to her, but only as an instrument of her own death, wielded in the hands of a mortal hero.
Subsequently, Nyrissa began the long task of shaping Thousandbreaths and wearing down the boundaries between it and the Material Plane, so that someday the boundary between realities would crack, and the region known as the Stolen Lands would bloom with life as it and Thousandbreaths merged. The war between Pitax and Kardashia was but one step towards this goal. By weakening the kingdoms that occupied the land she wished to claim, she weakened the opposition to her goal. With both kingdoms reeling in the aftermath of the war, Nyrissa would be able to draw the Stolen Lands into her realm and bottle it, leaving a wasteland on the Material Plane, and giving her the perfect gift to present to the Eldest and repair the damage done to her reputation in their eyes.
One final piece of information the heroes found confirmed their suspicions about the Fable. There were indeed other port keys, including the throne in the throne room. According to the notes, this would take them to the chamber within the Fable from which Nyrissa could see and hear everything that transpired in her home.
All of this Nyrissa witnessed and heard. She knew that the prophecies were drawing nigh, and that if her former glory was to be reclaimed, she would have to alter the very fates themselves. She sent out her thoughts to all her remaining minions, calling them to the throne room. Yes, the hour was upon her, and she would show the Eldest that she was truly worthy of being numbered among their order.
__________________________________________________________
When the companions reached the throne room again, they found that they were expected. A dozen more of the ghostly elven guards they’d encountered at the gatehouse stood around the perimeter of the chamber. Then, four enormous shadows seemingly detached themselves from the walls. Cloaked by wings of darkness, the horrific, skeletal aliens appeared to be burning from within, a flaming glow shining through their emaciated chests. Among the gaunt beings’ most prominent features were shimmering black wings, sharp talons, and yellow eyes that radiated a lambent malice. These were the ankou, the torturers and executioners of the most powerful nobles of the First World. In a place where death was often a mere inconvenience, the ankous’ duty was not merely to kill…it was to terrify and torture, to wring every iota of suffering out of their target in a pageant of cruelty before the final act, the bloody murder itself. Mox knew this the moment she recognized the creatures…and she didn’t care. She raised her hands above her head, and as she did so, a large cauldron erupted out of the floor of the throne room. From it burst a geyser of flesh-eating acid. One of the ankous was caught in the brunt of the blast, and was reduced to bones within a matter of seconds. Then, Velox conjured a roaring fire wall that ran the length of the room. A second ankou, one that had already been badly burned by the caustic eruption, was immediately consumed in the blaze. The remaining two horrors suddenly lit up like rainbows, as prismatic sprays of light emanated from their bodies. Where the light beams struck the companions, they were burned by acid or fire, charred by electricity, or simply momentarily confused by the dizzying display. Davrim was one of the latter, but fortunately, his muddled mind perceived the source of the blast as the target of his wrath. He rushed the ankou, and his devastating swordsmanship carved the fiend to pieces. He turned towards the final one, his senses returning, but before he could attack, Stevhan filled the ankou full of arrows, and if folded in on itself. As for the ghosts, Tungdill unleashed a massive firestorm upon the throne room, and Selena followed it up with a barrage of storm bolts. These, combined with Mox’s still-spewing acidic cauldron spelled a quick demise for the uneasy spirits. The way cleared, the heroes slowly approached the throne. The picture that came into their minds was one of holding court before thousands. Mox smiled to herself as reality faded.
_____________________________________________________________
The chamber they found themselves in was a plain, circular room with stone walls, floor and ceiling, lit by several dancing lights that floated near the ceiling. A statue of Nyrissa stood in the center of the room, one arm held out as if in greeting. At the base of the statue stood Nyrissa herself. She was a creature of unearthly beauty and grace, yet she was obviously far from human. Her body bore numerous thorns and ridges, as if aspects of the natural world were trying to form out of her flesh. As Mox and her companions gazed upon her, they saw only madness in her eyes. There would be no rational conversation, no hope of diplomacy. There would be only death.
Nyrissa’s eyes immediately locked upon Stevhan and the glowing blade Briar which he held in his hand. She smiled insanely, waved one delicate hand, and the ranger simply vanished. The nymph queen had imprisoned him inside a maze of his own mind. It was only temporary, she was certain. A mortal of his power and resolve should be able to free himself of the maze within a matter of moments, but Nyrissa was certain it would be plenty of time to destroy his allies, and then she would kill the bearer of Briar himself.
“Noooo!” Tungdill cried, misunderstanding what had happened to his friend. The dwarf pointed one finger at the nymph, and a bolt of black energy stabbed out at her chest. Nyrissa flinched, but nothing more. Tungdill was dumbfounded. She should have been struck dead! Instead she began weaving her own spell. Mox sensed what was coming. It was going to be a prismatic spray, much like the one the ankous used, only much more powerful. She had to stop the nymph from completing it. She quickly countered with her own magic, attempting to suffocate the breath right out of her. Nyrissa reeled backwards from the force of the spell, but she still breathed, and she still spoke the words to her spell. The light exploded among the companions in a torrent of elemental energy. Both Selena and Tungdill were struck blind by the brilliant beams. In the space of seconds, Nyrissa had neutralized half of her foes.
Davrim saw his chance with Nyrissa momentarily staggered by Mox’s counterattack. He rushed forward, and with one powerful swipe of his blade, opened the nymph queen’s abdomen. Her eyes went wide as she took a step backwards, one hand dropping down to keep her bowels inside her belly. Then, if possible, her eyes grew wider still when Stevhan abruptly reappeared. She managed to hurl another prismatic blast just as Davrim and Stevhan, now joined by Velox, charged her en masse. Though acid and lightning raced across their skin, the three warriors struck in unison, and as Briar tasted the flesh of its former mistress, Nyrissa howled in agony, the sword draining her of her very vitality. Mox knew that it was now or never. She spoke a single Word of power, and the resulting surge hurled the nymph into the wall, where she slid to the floor, stunned. Stevhan stood over her, Briar gripped in both hands. He raised it above Nyrissa, and then solemnly drove it through her heart.
_____________________________________________________________
The moment of Nyrissa’s death triggered a strange and violent transformation that rippled through the First World. The whole of Thousandbreaths was instantly uprooted and cast into the Material Plane. The House at the Edge of Time immediately crumbled and suffered thousands of years of erosion at once as if inflicted by constricting vegetation, rainfall, lightning strikes, and subsidence…effectively transforming it into the ruins of the Castle of Knives. The six companions floated gently to the ground in the midst of the devastation, as Nyrissa’s body rose up on a pyre of black lightning. A terrible gale ripped through all of Thousandbreaths with the Queen’s body acting as the center of this maelstrom. Within moments, it vanished in a black pall of madness. Just like that, it was over…
INTERLUDE
As she lunged forward sitting up in bed, Mox emitted a nightmarish scream. Her body glistening with sweat and her nails elongated into razor-edged claws, she slowly regained her composure. She brushed her long, curling black hair out of her face as she turned to embrace Stevhan, the Duke of Pitax.
"Another nightmare, my darling?" asked the Duke.
Curling herself around the muscular ranger, Mox replied, "This was more than just a dream... I know it was a glimpse of the future."
A grim frown spreading over his face, Stevhan said, "Perhaps... What did you see?"
As the Queen ran her hand over her husband’s chest, she began to describe her dream...
"It wasn't like the others, Stevhan. In the previous dreams, I felt a deep dread... an impending doom, but the source was vague and unknown to me. I could feel that someone wanted to take my crown and rule Kardashia for themselves. This time everything was much more clear to me. A fierce human mistress confronted me, wielding a grand sword and a resplendent shield. She was clad in magnificent, full battle armor and she hunted me endlessly."
"Why? What did she want?" asked Stevhan.
"She hunts my crown and she sends her agents to take what she wants," Mox continued.
"Her agents?" Stevhan asked again.
"Yes. She is Iomedae. I have seen it clearly and I am quite certain," Mox stated.
Shaking his head, the Duke replied, "I feel certain your wrong, Mox. I think it's just another bad dream, my sweet."
"Promise me, Stevhan... Promise me that you'll protect me and the children from whatever is coming. Will you protect me, my Duke?" Mox asked.
JollyDoc
Explorer
Me to! I'm glad to be (almost) caught up! I plan to post the final installment sometime this week, followed be some brief epilogues. Again, I think you will be stunned and amazed at what is to come.
carborundum
Adventurer
JollyDoc
Explorer
I'm still stunned and amazed that they won
Davrim scored a critical hit, disembowel, followed by a hit by Briar, which staggered Nyrissa, followed by Mox's Power Word Stun...lethal combo.
JollyDoc
Explorer
THE WITCHWAR LEGACY
It had been five years since the death of Nyrissa and Kardashia’s return to peace and prosperity. The kingdom had thrived under Mox’s rule, and in the process had managed to avoid being drawn into the civil war in Brevoy, despite the original intentions of the Sword Lords. Mox remained in Veritas, along with Selena as her Magister, while Stevhan divided his time between the capitol and his duties in Pitax. Velox had made his home in Fort Drelev, and Davrim spent most of his time there, presiding over the new church of Iomedae which had thrived in the intervening years. As for Tungdill, the dwarf preferred the wilds of Kardashia to any of the more civilized areas. He still visited his companions from time to time, but through the years, he’d managed to cultivate quite a following among the indigenous creatures of the wild. Yes, all in all, things had turned out quite well for the nearest of the River Kingdoms…
___________________________________________________________
Selena sat in the high room of her tower that served as both her study and laboratory. She was pouring over the latest tome she’d procured that contained information, no matter how small, about the Eye of Abaddon and the lost cyclops empire. The subjects had become something of an obsession for the witch. Suddenly, her head snapped up, and the artifact glowed crimson in her left eye socket. She sensed magic nearby.
“Hello, granddaughter,” a voice said from behind her.
Selena sighed. “I knew this day would come,” she said. “Mother said we couldn’t hide forever.”
“You’ve never been hidden from me,” her visitor chuckled. “I’ve always known where to find you. I’ve watched your career with great interest.”
“And now you’ve come to claim me,” Selena stated as she turned to face her guest.
The woman who stood in the center of chamber was statuesque and youthful, despite her snow white hair. No one looking upon her would guess that she was over one-hundred years old. Selena allowed no emotion to show upon her face, but she could scarcely believe that Queen Elvanna of Irrisen, Fourteenth Daughter of Baba Yaga, was actually here in her home.
“You misread my intentions, child,” Elvanna smiled. “I have actually come to offer you freedom. Your mother was mistaken when she thought she could outrun her destiny, and she paid for it with her life. I would not see you suffer the same fate. I proffer this one-time accord to you. If you hear my words, and you agree, then you have my solemn word that I will forget that you ever existed.”
“It seems I have no choice,” Selena replied. “I’m listening.”
“Have you heard of the Witchwar?” Elvanna began.
“No,” Selena said. “Should I have?”
“Half a millennium ago,” Elvanna continued, “the reign of our ancestor, Queen Tashanna, drew near its end, as all of our reigns must, and the time approached for her to abdicate the throne and abandon Irrisen. She chose a different course. Rather than give up her crown, she sought to depose her mother, Baba Yaga. She managed to locate the Torc of Kostchtchie, an artifact which contained the mortal soul of the Demon Lord of Giants and Cold. Knowing Kostchtchie’s hatred for Baba Yaga, Tashanna used her possession of the torc to convince him to ally with her in rebellion. This was the Witchwar, although in retrospect, ‘war’ might be too generous a term.”
“Tashanna underestimated Baba Yaga, as many have before and since, for the Old Crone had actually created both Kostchtchie and the torc, and so possessed the means to undo them both. Baba Yaga faced Kostchtchie and savaged him with her magic, sending him fleeing to Iobaria to lick his wounds while her loyalists decimated his giant forces. The Queen of Witches then turned her attention to Tashanna and quickly defeated her rebel forces as well, capturing her daughter and ignobly parading her before her own demoralized troops. Baba Yaga executed every one of Tashanna’s followers and created a huge magical necropolis wherein she interred the defeated army and, purportedly, the deposed witch queen herself, along with the magical torc that led to her downfall. Known as the Veil of Frozen Tears, this hidden necropolis, filled with traps of Baba Yaga’s devising and foul guardian spirits, remained inviolate for five centuries…until now.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand,” Selena smirked.
“Do not presume,” Elvanna chided. “True, I have discovered the location of the Veil, but I have no intention of defying my mother and repeating the mistakes of Tashanna.”
“Then why do you want the torc?” Selena asked.
“That is my concern, child,” Elvanna’s voice grew cold. “Suffice it to say that I do want it. I have sent mercenaries already to retrieve it. None have returned. The last of these groups was dispatched ten days ago. They were led by my daughter, your cousin, Ilivorr.”
“The so-called White Witch?” Selena asked incredulously.
“Watch your tongue,” Elvanna warned. “She easily rivals you in power. Do not doubt it. So the fact that she has not returned should give you pause…especially if you intend on undertaking the same venture yourself, and taking your friends with you as I assume you will.”
Selena was silent and pensive for several moments.
“Your word,” she said at length. “If I do this for you, you will leave me in peace, and my companions as well.”
“Given,” Elvanna nodded. “Be forewarned, in addition to any of the guards and wards left by the Old Crone, I’m certain by now that Kostchtchie himself has become aware of the rediscovery of the Veil, and will have sent agents of his own to regain the torc.”
With that, she simply vanished.
__________________________________________________________
“So let me see if I understand,” Velox said. “You want us to undertake a journey to a tomb/prison created by Baba Yaga to retrieve an artifact that contains the soul of a demon lord, so that we may in turn give this artifact to Baba Yaga’s daughter.”
“In so many words,” Selena nodded.
The companions sat in Mox’s throne room, the first time they’d gathered as a group in over a year, at Selena’s behest.
Velox glanced aside at Davrim. “Selena,” he said, “you are my dear and true friend, and I respect and trust you, but why would you think that I would ever do such a thing?”
“For all the reasons you just mentioned,” Mox snapped. “She is your friend, and has laid her life on the line for you time and again. Your trust should be implicit. She would not ask you to do this if she was not sure of her own motives.”
The Queen looked to her husband for affirmation, but the Duke of Pitax remained silent.
“You have my word on this at least,” Selena replied to Velox, “if I have any doubt about Queen Elvanna’s true motives, I will not hand the torc over to her. You have my word on this. I will sacrifice my own life first.”
Velox nodded once. “That is good enough for me. When do we depart?”
“I’m getting’ too old fer this,” Tungdill grumbled.
________________________________________________________
Selena didn’t know how she knew it, but she was aware that the Veil of Frozen Tears lay at the northernmost edge of Irrisen in an isolated area where the cold plain abutted the mountainous glaciers of the Crown of the World. She had a clear enough picture in her mind, that she could transport herself and her allies across the hundreds of intervening miles between Kardashia and Irrisen. They found themselves at the mouth of a narrow valley, where an unbelievable sight greeted them. A massive waterfall once plunged the seven-hundred feet to the valley floor, but it was now frozen solid, leaving a braided column of unimaginable proportions that extended from the lip of the cliff above to its base of jagged ice boulders and frozen hillocks at the bottom. A fortification of some sort, apparently carved from the ice itself, protruded from the ice sheet halfway up, with both a turret and wall pierced with arrow slits. Above this, a hollow had been carved out of the ice, forming a great shelf upon which appeared to sit some sort of village. A fissure marked the ice flow’s lower reaches and possibly provided entrance. A hundred yards away from the base of the icefall was a camp occupied by a number of large brutes.
“I guess my grandmother was right,” Selena said. “The giants are already here.”
“Then I say we get a jump on them,” Mox smiled. “They’ve obviously started at the bottom. Why don’t we start at the top?”
She nodded towards the top of the fall to where the village sat.
Selena shrugged. “I don’t have a better plan.”
The companions locked hands, and then Mox transported them across time and space in the blink of an eye.
They appeared within a vast hollow that opened in the face of the frozen waterfall, forming a high-ceilinged ice cave. There, out of the same ubiquitous ice, had been constructed a traditional Irrisen village of multilevel cottages topped with steep, gabled roofs. Many were built directly into the jagged ice walls that formed the cave-like hollow. The tinkling of water could be faintly heard above the moaning of the wind from somewhere in the cluster of buildings. Near the lip of the ice cliff stood a larger structure that appeared to be surrounded by a ring of statues.
“I recognize this,” Selena said as she took in the diorama. “It’s a type of necropolis. It was common to the North people several centuries ago. It’s supposed to represent an imitation of the ordinary life that the deceased left behind.”
“Wouldn’t it be odd for Baba Yaga to build something like this honoring her enemies?” Mox asked.
“I suspect it was built for her own forces that died in the war,” Selena replied. “She may be evil incarnate, but that doesn’t make her heartless.”
The companions made their way through the dead village towards the large structure near the edge of the cliff. The building resembled a large, two-story cottage with wide double doors at its front and rear. Above the southern doors was a giant clock face, ten feet in diameter. It bore strange arcane symbols instead of traditional numbers, and had four hands…one short, one long, one forked, and one wavy…that appeared to be keeping time in no recognizable system. Rows of identical white marble statues depicting a bent old crone holding a scythe with a blade of dull gray metal stood at the building’s base. These statues appeared to be on railed tracks of ice that looped around the sides of the clock building, from one set of double doors to the set on the opposite side. No sooner had the group drawn near to the structure, than a bell tolled from somewhere inside. As it did so, the southern doors opened and two new statues emerged upon the tracks, while on the northern side, two other statues disappeared inside the doors there. The two that emerged suddenly ripped themselves loose from their respective tracks and began stalking towards the companions, scythes raised.
Davrim, Stevhan and Velox moved to intercept the animate statues before they could reach Mox and the others. Davrim swung at one, but when his blade connected, it was as if he’s struck a stone wall. A few marble chips flew off, but there was little actual damage. However, when Stevhan stepped forward and swung Briar, the enchanted metal cut through the marble statue like butter, and it shattered into a thousand pieces. However, as he turned towards the second golem, it swung its scythe, and opened a gaping gash across the ranger’s belly. Velox shoved Stevhan out of the way, and stepped in forward, his sword flashing. Bits and pieces of debris were hacked off of the golem, but it showed no signs of slowing.
Mox was preparing to bring her magic to bear upon the golem, even though she knew that the very nature of such constructs made them immune to most spells, when something odd caught her eye. Scratched into the ice on the ground before the double doors was a short message:
‘A stitch in time.’
Before Mox could make more of it, however, the bell tolled again and two more statues emerged from inside the great clock, animating as they stepped off the tracks. Velox and Davrim already had their hands full with the remaining first golem, while Tungdill hurried to deal with Stevhan’s wounds.
“Selena!” Mox called. “A stitch in time! What does it mean?”
“Is now really the appropriate time for trivia questions?” Selena asked as she hurled lightning at one of the golems.
“Just answer the question!” Mox snapped.
“Fine!” the witch retorted. “A stitch in time saves nine! Are you happy?”
“Nine?” Mox said to herself. “What does that have to do with…?”
Her eyes were drawn to the clock face, and then to the position where the numeral 9 would normally be. Instead, there was some sort of arcane symbol, but as Mox peered at it more closely, she saw that it was actually composed of tiny, tightly graven script giving it its shape.
“Everyone!” she called out. “We have to get out of here! Now!”
The bell tolled again, but as the doors opened once more to eject another pair of the killer statues, Mox conjured an extradimensional pit of acid in front of them. Both of the golems immediately tumbled in.
“Fall back!” she commanded again.
The companions heeded Mox’s words, and made a fighting retreat from the clock tower. The statues did not follow. Instead, they moved back to the track and resumed their former, inanimate positions.
“Now,” Selena said as she and the others struggled to catch their breath, “what in the Hells is going on?”
Mox explained what she’d seen on the ground, and on the clock face itself.
“So what did the writing say?” Mox asked.
“It makes no sense,” Mox replied. “ ‘A stitch in time saves nine, but what loop will the Witch Queen heed? In pointless slaughter, the Old Crone’s daughter, a hapless mob did lead. Now she sits in tomb that’s frozen, the traitors’ blood all spilled, upon the path that she had chosen, enthroned with collar gild. Ringed in steel, three loops times nine, prized from the luckless seat. Supplicants kneel, of porcelain fine, the banished Queen to meet. It matter’s not who’s dared to come, the demon’s soul to claim. The weak shall die, the strongest live, and forever more remain.’”
“The second line obviously refers to Tashanna,” Selena said, “and I would assume ‘collar gild’ refers to the torc. As for the rest, I’m not certain, but it’s probably a clue as to how to find where Tashanna, and the torc, are entombed. The writing you saw scratched in the ice, Mox…maybe Ilivorr left it, sort of like a bread crumb to follow.”
“So at least we’re in the right place,” Velox said. “Maybe we should keep looking around to see if she left any more clues.”
They made their way deeper into the dead village, coming eventually to the town square. An elegantly sculpted ice fountain sat in the middle, depicting a flock of winter geese taking flight. A jet of water sprang from the top, tumbling down into the basin below. Miraculously, the water remained unfrozen despite the frigid temperature, and oddly enough, seemed to radiate a deeper chill than the glacier itself. No sooner had the companions stepped into the square, than a savage roar echoed from a side street to their left. Charging down the lane was a massive, deformed giant. He might once have been a frost giant, but was now hunched and knotted, with corded muscles and awkwardly formed limbs. His thickened skin seemed more like animal hide than flesh, and his eyes glowed red like flames. Davrim, bow in hand, quickly loosed two arrows at the oncoming brute, but the shafts bounced harmlessly off the creature’s skin. Mox sent a disintegrating blast of magic at it, but the giant barely slowed, though his skin smoked and hissed. Tungdill even managed to drop a column of fire on the giant’s head, but on it came, burned, bleeding, but obviously insane. Stevhan drew Briar and stepped into the brute’s path, but the giant lowered its shoulder and slammed into the ranger, hurling him into the fountain. The supernaturally cold water burned like fire, and Stevhan instantly found his limbs encased in ice. Davrim and Velox drew their swords and rushed forward. The gnarled giant hefted a massive battle axe as they approached, the edges of which flickered with blue fire. The axe came down, but Velox caught it on his own blade, twisted and rolled his arms, and sent the axe flying out of the giant’s hands and across the square. Then Davrim laid into the deformed brute, and Velox joined him from the flank. Within moments, they cut the giant down, though the creature fought tooth and nail until its last breath.
“W…w…what w…w…was that?” Stevhan stammered, his teeth chattering as Tungdill helped him from the fountain and worked to defrost him.
“Among giants,” Selena explained, such deformities are considered to be a ‘blessing’ from Kostchtchie. I think we can assume the demon lord’s minions are already well ahead of us. We should keep moving.”
At the far end of the cavern that held the necropolis, the companions found an alley-like cave that had been cut through the ice between two of the tombs. It lead deeper into the ice to a stair that wound deeper into the glacier.
___________________________________________________________
The tunnel the companions followed wound downward for several dozen yards before ending at a set of double doors. They were unlocked and opened effortlessly despite their enormous size. An eerie sight greeted their eyes as they saw the chamber beyond. Row upon row of identical, life-size ice sculptures depicting a bent-backed old crone with a skull-like face stood in perfect ranks. A sense of woe seemed to radiate from each statue, and dark arcs of power crackled across their surfaces and leaped from sculpture to sculpture. Nearby, at the end of the nearest row, on statue lay shattered, and shards of ice littered the floor around its base.
“Well this looks menacing enough,” Mox sighed. “How about we just circumvent this obvious death trap?”
Mox took Davrim’s hand in one of hers and Stevhan’s in the other, closed her eyes and spoke the words to a spell. She opened them a moment later, expecting the three of them to be safely on the far side of the room. They hadn’t moved an inch. Instead, a wave of black energy coruscated through the chamber, washing over the companions, sending stabbing pains into their souls as it penetrated their bodies. Velox recovered first, hefted his sword and smashed it down on the nearest statue, thinking to destroy it as the other one had been. His blade rebounded off the statue, leaving not a mark on it.
“This is negative energy!” Selena cried through gritted teeth, pain still wracking her body. “Counter it!”
Through his battle haze, Velox heard and understood. He called upon his birth right, given by Iomedae, and sent a wave of healing power through the room. As it touched the statues, chips and pieces exploded off of them, as if they were being eroded away. The others saw this, and joined his assault. Tungdill and Davrim cast curative spells, Selena used healing hexes, and even Stevhan pulled out a minor healing wand that he kept for emergencies. Gradually, they made progress, despite the fact that the horrible negative energy wave exploded around them every few seconds. It was going to be a battle of attrition. One by one, as the statues continued to erode, they began to crumble to dust. As they did so, each one was revealed to contain an exquisitely carved, tiny porcelain doll that depicted a gnarled old woman. Finally, the last statue was destroyed, and the energy field dissipated.
The companions regained their composure, using their remaining curative magics to restore their own health, and then Selena bent to pick up one of the dolls.
“ ‘Supplicants kneel, of porcelain fine,’” she repeated the line from the poem. “I think we’ve discovered another clue. It would seem someone else has as well.” She gestured towards the statue that had already been destroyed when they entered, noting that its remains contained no doll.
The group made their way across the room, gathering up the dolls as they went. At the far side of the room was a second set of doors, massive and composed of two white stone portals. Their surfaces bore a scene of craggy, snow-clad peaks in relief beneath the cavorting forms of unidentifiable creatures. The lintel above the door bore an inscription in ancient runes. There was no visible way to open the doors. The companions began trying every means, magical and mundane, at their disposal to open the barrier. Nothing. Finally, Mox’s attention was drawn to the runes above.
“ ‘Only by the Power of Faith shall ye pass Beyond,’” she read. “Whatever that means.”
She sighed, closed her eyes and thought of the one thing she had the most faith in…herself. When she opened her eyes again, the doors had become hazy and insubstantial.
“Aha!” she turned to her friends, beaming. “That was easy!”
She turned back to the doors and simply stepped through them. She failed to notice that her friends did not follow. To them the portals were just as solid and impassable as they had ever been…
________________________________________________________
Mox blinked once as she entered the antechamber, then her eyes looked up…and up. She was surrounded by giants of all sizes. Three frost giant warriors stood to her right, while a gnarled, deformed creature like the one they’d met in the necropolis square flanked her on the left. A large, white-furred, blue-eyed wolf crouched snarling near the giants, its breath frosting the already frigid air. Yet all of these creatures barely warranted a glance from the queen, for her attention was riveted on the truly massive…thing…that stood directly before her. The ebon-skinned monstrosity stood over fifty-feet in height, and it had a huge, gaping maw with boar-like tusks. A wide nose sat beneath a furrowed brow that lacked any sort of eyes or visible visual organs. Its corded muscles twisted and writhed beneath its smooth, hairless jet hide, giving its frame a gnarled, unbalanced asymmetry. It moved with a loping gait, however, and wore its armor, composed of thick, welded plates, effortlessly. This was an abyssal gigant, one of a race spawned from titans who took refuge in the rifts of the Abyss, and now served powerful demon lords, such as Kostchtchie. The gargantuan brute raised a maul the size of an elephant above its head, and brought it smashing down towards Mox. At the last instant, the sorceress erected a cage of pure force around her, and the hammer struck with enough impact to crack the floor beneath her.
“What did she do before she disappeared?” Davrim asked. “Where did she go?”
“She said something about faith,” Velox replied. “That could be interpreted as trust in a higher power, but which one? It could also be thought of as trust in one’s self. Concentrate, my friends. Focus your minds on nothing else save passing these doors.”
When the oracle did this himself, he saw the doors as Mox had. Quickly, he stepped through. Davrim followed behind him a moment later.
Mox breathed an audible sigh of relief when she saw the two warriors step into the room. The pair did not blink at the foes arrayed before them. They simply acted. The gigant’s massive head swung towards them, and it prepared to raise its maul again. Before it could, however, Velox leaped towards it and severed one of its hands at the wrist. The behemoth roared and swatted the oracle aside. One of the frost giants leaped after him, hacking at Velox’s arm before he could regain his feet. He rolled to one side, and the giant’s axe merely grazed him as he rolled back to standing…only to come up against the gnarled giant. The oracle in full battle fury, however, was not a foe to be taken lightly. He spun his sword like a dervish, and cut through the deformed monster in a matter of seconds. Across the room, Davrim had maneuvered behind the gigant, and with one massive swing, severed the tendon of its right heel. It collapsed heavily to one knee, bleeding profusely, and in that moment, the inquisitor leaped upwards and drove his sword through its spine, sending it crumpling to the floor. Mox chose that moment to dispel her force cage, and as the winter wolf leaped towards her, she disintegrated it in mid-air. That left only the three frost giant warriors against the queen, the oracle and the inquisitor. They giants should have brought ten times their number…
___________________________________________________________
Ultimately, the others were able to discern the nature of the portal and pass through. A set of stairs on the far side of the room led downwards again, this time to an icy room that looked to have been turned into a campsite of some sort. A number of water barrels, wrapped in furs to insulate them from the cold, stood in the center of the chamber. Scattered around them were a number of giant-sized bedrolls composed of various mangy furs from arctic and mountain beasts. Against one wall sat a mound of massive cuts of frozen, raw meat. Velox and Davrim entered the chamber first, and as they did so, another gnarled, deformed giant leaped from behind a wall towards them. The warriors darted to either side, flanking the giant, and with a coordinated series of strikes, took it down quickly.
As Stevhan made his way across the chamber, a subtle glint caught his eye. A small ice sculpture of a beautiful maiden lay discarded among the giant bedrolls. Though he couldn’t explain why, the ranger felt strangely drawn to it. He leaned down to pick it up, and in that instant, an overwhelming compulsion came over him. He glanced towards a blank section of wall, and saw there a large bloody handprint. His hand dropped to his side, the statue still clutched there, and he walked over to the wall and placed his other palm against the handprint. Abruptly, the wall swung aside revealing a stairway leading down into darkness.
“Stevhan?” Mox called after him. “What are you doing?”
Her husband ignored her, and started down the stairs.
“Velox!” Mox cried. “Something’s wrong with Stevhan!”
The oracle looked at the ranger and realized immediately that Stevhan was not in his right mind. He lunged across the room and knocked the statue from the duke’s hand. It clattered to the floor, but remained whole. Stevhan seemed not to notice. He continued down the stairs…until he suddenly collapsed in a heap, sound asleep.
“That should hold him for a moment,” Selena said, “but no one disturb him, or he’ll wake immediately.”
“Do you think it’s the statue?” Davrim asked Velox.
“Let’s find out,” the oracle said.
He lifted his sword and brought it down solidly on the sculpture. Not a mark.
“I would say that’s a good guess,” he replied to Davrim.
“It’s made of ice, right?” Tungdill asked.
“Seems to be,” Velox said, “but I’m not willing to touch it to find out.”
“Well, let’s see how a little fireworks then,” the druid shrugged.
He waved his hand, and a pillar of flame consumed the statue. When the fire died, the sculpture was little more than a puddle of water.
“Wake’im up now,” Tungdill pointed to Stevhan
Velox used the toe of his boot to nudge the ranger.
“Huh?” Stevhan grunted as he opened his eyes. “What’s going on?
“You tell us,” Davrim said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Um…,” Stevhan rubbed his head, “we killed a giant?”
“Several, actually,” Velox smiled. “You don’t recall picking up a statue, or why you were going down those stairs?”
“What are you talking about?” the ranger asked as he got to his feet. “Where do these stairs lead?”
“Good question,” the oracle replied. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
The stairs were perfectly transparent crystal, without any visible means of support. They descended some forty feet to a circular chamber. A narrow arrow slit in one wall allowed a gust of cold wind to enter and stir the many hide and stick fetishes that had been arrayed around an altar of black stone on a short dais at one end of the room. A massive, blue-skinned troll knelt before the altar, but his craggy face bore a look of utter confusion.
“You!” he bellowed when he saw the intruders enter the room. “Did you destroy the statue? You did didn’t you! Now I can’t hear her anymore! I’ll kill you all!”
“Not if I kill you first,” Mox grinned as she breathed a cloud of acid at the troll.
He shrieked, beating at his skin as the caustic liquid burned through to the bone. His red eyes bulged as he glared at the sorceress, and then he began chanting in a guttural tongue. A ray of black fire shot from a medallion around his neck, and where it hit Mox, she felt her body go completely numb. For a moment, her breath caught in the throat, and her heart skipped a beat. He vision blurred briefly, but he awareness snapped back into focus as the pain suddenly hit her. Velox, Stevhan and Davrim rushed the troll, striking in unison. Velox went high, Stevhan went low, and when Davrim struck, he separated the giant’s head from its shoulders. The inquisitor picked up the severed head and tossed it out the window.
“Regenerate from that,” he muttered.
“Something doesn’t seem right about all this,” Mox said as she quickly quaffed a healing draught.
“You’ll have to clarify that statement,” Selena replied snarkily. “The part about us hunting down a piece of a demon lord’s soul for my grandmother so that she doesn’t turn me over to my great-grandmother Baba Yaga…or was there something else you were thinking of?”
“I mean the way we’re going about this,” the queen snipped. “We started out at the summit of the falls, and that’s where we found the poem, as well as that scrawled note in the ice. Then, in the hall of statues…those giants were trying to get INTO that room. It was obvious they hadn’t already been there, but someone had. Someone had taken one of the dolls…possibly the same someone who left that note by the clock tower. The lower down we go, the more giants we find. I think we’re going the wrong way. I suggest we head back to the necropolis and search again for more clues. Agreed?”
_________________________________________________________
“Here,” Stevhan said as he squatted down in the snow near the clock tower, but still far enough away that the statues remained inert. “One set of footprints, about a week old, give or take. They came from that direction.” He nodded over his shoulder towards one of the buildings on the far side of the necropolis.
The others followed the ranger to a two-story sepulcher that stood near the back wall of the cavern. There, in a small snowdrift that had gathered, was the unmistakable print of a boot.
“The seal’s been broken,” Stevhan said as he pushed open the door to the tomb.
Inside was a single plain chamber with two ice biers upon which lay the frozen remains of Irrisen warriors, still clad in their arms and armor. A single door stood at the far side of the room, against a wall which should have abutted the cavern wall outside. When Stevhan opened it, however, there was a narrow staircase carved into the ice that led down into darkness.
The stairs emerged into a dank room in which a battle appeared to have recently taken place. A number of charred humanoid skeletons lay strewn about, and a lifelike stone statue of an ogre pointed at one wall with an arm that ended in a broken stump…the hand and the barbed falchion it held lay on the floor near the base of the stairs. A second statue stood on the far side of the chamber, this one intact and depicting a bestial, demonic figure. Then, its head turned towards the companions, and one hand whipped out, hurling a ball of fire into their midst. It exploded an instant later, scattering the heroes like cord wood. Tungdill’s breath woofed out of his chest as he came up hard against a wall. Still, it wasn’t pain that turned his face beet red…it was rage. He pointed one stubby finger at the demon, and the black bolt of energy that struck the fiend slammed it so hard into the opposite wall that the ice cracked. By then, Velox was on his feet and across the room. As the demon was extricating himself, the oracle slashed its throat cleanly, sending its soul gurgling back to the Abyss.
“I think we can safely assume this is the way your cousin went,” Mox told Selena.
_____________________________________________________________
The tracks they’d been following led to a large round room with a domed ceiling rising high overhead. Bars of ice blocked their entrance into the room, in which an elaborate throne sat within a raised alcove to one side, surveying the chamber. Heavy manacles were inset into the throne’s arms, back and legs. Several more sets of manacles were spaced about the room’s walls, interspersed with various diabolical instruments of torture. A large cage of ice bars that extended from floor to ceiling dominated the center of the chamber, and floating within it was a huge sphere of crackling, gray energy. Dispersed around the perimeter of the ice cage were a half-dozen living corpses dressed in archaic breastplate, and as still as the grave. However, as soon as they saw the intruders on the other side of the bars, they lurched into motion.
Velox and Mox began their spells simultaneously. A wall of orange fire burst into the center of the room, consuming a pair of the spirit warriors in the conflagration. An instant later, a crater of acid erupted, boiling away the ice bars. Suddenly, the sphere imprisoned within the cage pulsed with dark energy, and the companions felt the cold touch of death wash over them, while the remaining undead warriors seemed to draw strength from the wave. One of them stepped forward, raised its hand and a blast of ice and snow blew down the hall like an arctic storm. Tungdill countered with a storm of fire that engulfed the entire room, roasting every one of the undead warriors to ash, and causing the dark elemental to collapse into nothingness within its cage.
Selena walked slowly over to the throne, and knelt down beside it. One of the foot manacles had been removed.
“Look,” she said. “The links in the chains. There are 27 of them.”
“So?” Mox asked.
“ ‘Ringed in steel, three loops times nine, prized from the luckless seat.’ I don’t know about you, but I’d say this seat qualifies as luckless, and someone has already pried loose one chain…a chain with 27 links…three times nine.”
“The tracks end here,” Stevhan said.
__________________________________________________________
Selena laid the manacle and chain in a circle on the ground in front of the clock tower.
“Now,” she said, “I think we should each place one of the dolls inside.”
“Are you sure this is the way this works?” Mox asked.
“Of course not!” the witch snapped. “If any of you have any better ideas, I’m all ears.”
“Just asking,” Mox shrugged as she laid the first doll in the ring.
One by one the others followed suit. Suddenly, the hand on the clock face that had been pointing unerringly at the numeral 9 began to spin wildly, and the clock began to glow with friction, and became blindingly bright. When the light faded a moment later, the companions found themselves transported.
The chamber had featureless white stone walls and flooring beneath an equally plain high ceiling. A dark smudge of ash, humanoid in shape, marred one wall. Directly ahead was a throne of the same white stone with an inscription on its base. A life-size figure of a beautiful woman carved from ice, with a twisted, rune-scribed golden collar around her neck, sat upon the throne. Before her, a crystalline sphere stood on a white stone pedestal. Opposite her was a wide circle on the wall that displayed a blurry image of the cliff outside the Witch Clock. A starkly beautiful woman stood beside the throne. Her skin was so pale and translucent that she seemed carved from ice herself…until she spoke.
“Welcome, cousin,” Ilivorr Karanasi said as she nodded to Selena. “I’ve been watching you, and I must admit, I’m impressed that you solved the puzzle and found your way here. It’s a pity that now you have to die.”
The White Witch opened her mouth and began to wail, a sound that pierced the air like the shriek of a banshee. Before the horrified eyes of her friends, Selena simply collapsed.
After that, chaos erupted. Velox hurled destruction at Ilivorr, but the witch countered, and the spell merely scorched her flesh. At the same moment, Mox raced across the chamber to the throne, and ripped the torc from the neck of the statue seated there. In that instant, she felt the dark energy that was Kostchtchie’s soul touch her own. Meanwhile, Tungdill rushed to Selena’s side. He felt a faint pulse at her neck. She was alive, but just barely. Quickly, the druid poured all of the healing power at his command into his friend. Her breathing slowly returned to normal, and her eyes opened wide.
“Get up girl!” the dwarf growled. “Between yer crazy kin and our queen, I’m not sure which one’s gonna get us killed first!”
Selena took Tungdill’s hand and got to her feet, just as Stevhan charged Ilivorr and sliced deep into her side with Briar. She reeled back against the throne, momentarily stunned.
“My turn, bitch!” Selena hissed as she hurled fire and lightning at her cousin.
Ilivorr screamed as her skin charred, and then Mox hammered her with the same spell that she finished Nyrissa with…a Word of power. The White Witch’s eyes rolled back into her head, and as she slid towards the floor, Velox reached out and laid a hand upon her chest, sucking the remaining life out of her. As she died, however, something strange happened. The oracle’s eyes did not lose their battle glaze. Instead, he lifted his head and turned towards his companions. In that moment, he knew that he must kill them all. The Frozen Cenotaph had to be preserved. He could not allow their continued presence to desecrate it.
Velox stood and calmly walked towards Mox, whose back was to him. He raised his sword and, his pulse never even quickening, thrust it into her back. Mox screamed as her draconic wings sprouted from her shoulders and she reflexively to the air, trying to distance herself from her unknown assailant. When she turned and looked down, and saw Velox standing there, his blade dripping, something inside her snapped.
“I knew it!” she shrieked. “I told you, Stevhan! He was waiting for this all along!”
Her hands crackled with emerald energy, and she blasted the oracle with enough power to disintegrate a lesser soul. As it was, Velox was hurled backwards, his skin smoking and cratered. He waved his hand, and a cloud of fog arose around him, concealing him from view. He climbed slowly and quietly to his feet, sensing the others near. A shadow loomed in front of him and he struck without hesitation. He heard Stevhan grunt in surprise and pain, and then a strong wind rose out of nowhere, tearing the fog bank away.
“There he is!” Tungdill shouted. “Take’im down! He’s outta his mind!”
The last thing Velox saw was Stevhan coming towards him, the pommel of Briar upraised. Then, only darkness.
“Good work, my love!” Mox cried. “Now is our chance! Stand back!”
“Mox! No!” Stevhan called, but it was too late. His wife sent a barrage of arcane bolts at Velox’s unconscious form. He was killed instantly.
“Ya crazy bitch!” Tungdill roared. “What’ve ya done! Is everybody here crazy?”
The druid sent a bolt of black fire at the queen, not trying to kill her, but hoping to bring her back down to the ground. Mox deflected the spell with a casual wave of her hand.
“You see?” she snapped, her eyes finding Stevhan and Selena. “They’ve been biding their time all along! It’s now or never!”
Stevhan, however, wasn’t listening to her…only to the voice speaking in his head. The one that told him to defend the Cenotaph and the torc with his life. Dimly, he heard Briar’s voice in his mind as well, telling him this wasn’t right. He didn’t care. He swung the enchanted blade at Davrim’s neck, but at the last instant, the sword twisted in his hand, and only the flat struck the inquisitor, but still hard enough to whiplash the half-orc’s spine. Davrim’s head spun, but he managed to focus his gaze on Mox and Stevhan. He could detect no evil in them, yet they were both maddened just the same. Backing away from the ranger, he bent down and picked up Velox’s body. Then, as Stevhan rushed him again, the inquisitor leaped for the blurry wall of the clock face and vanished.
“Not so fast, my ‘friends’!” Mox whispered.
She flapped her wings and dove towards the wall, vanishing after Davrim.
“Selena!” Tungdill shouted. “I don’t know who’s side yer on here, but I ain’t hangin’ around t’find out! If you wanna stay with the ranger, suit yerself. Yer on yer own!”
With that, the dwarf darted through the wall himself.
“Stevhan, it’s me,” Selena said calmly, her hands empty as she faced the duke. “You have to come with me. Something’s possessed your mind. You know this isn’t right. Come with me now. Please!”
But she could see in the ranger’s eyes that her words were having no effect. She wove a spell, hoping to entrap him in the ice that grew on the floor, but he nimbly dodged aside. As he charged towards her, Briar humming with power, she had no choice. She spoke the words to another spell and vanished.
No sooner had Davrim stepped outside, than a flash of fire and a puff of brimstone ignited in front of him. A creature slithered out of the mist, with the upper torso of a naked, six-armed woman, each hand clutching a wicked looking scimitar, and the lower body of a serpent.
“I am Nazalimora, mortal,” she said. “I serve the Lord Kostchtchie, and I have come to claim what is his.
At that moment, Mox appeared behind the inquisitor.
“There it is,” Davrim nodded. “You can have it for all I care!”
Then Tungdill was there. He saw the demon on one side of Davrim, and Mox on the other. With no time to figure out just what exactly was going on, he chose to shoot first and ask questions later. From out of thin air, he conjured two enormous boulders. The great rocks clashed together, smashing Mox and Nazalimora between them. When the stones vanished, both of them lay prone on the ground. Davrim stood over Mox, the tip of his blade pointed at her throat.
“I should kill you now for what you did!” he snarled. “Give me one reason not to!”
“You self-righteous, sanctimonious pig!” Mox spat. “Like you need a reason to kill! I know you and Velox had this planned all along! You were just waiting for the right time to take my throne! Over my dead body!”
She spoke a word and disappeared in a flash of light, reappearing a moment later near the roof of the ice cavern of the necropolis.
“Help me claim the torc, mortal,” Nazalimora said as she climbed upright. “If you do so, all is forgiven. My Lord will not hunt you.”
Before Davrim had a chance to answer, Tungdill cast another spell, summoning a sirocco of hot wind and fire to force Mox to the ground. The vortex caught the sorceress, but before it could pull her down, she cast again and vanished.
“Fools!” the marilith cried. “You’ve let her escape! You’ll pay for that mistake with your lives!”
“Shut up,” Davrim said coldly. “I think I’ve heard enough from you.”
He let Velox’s body slide to the ground as he squared off against the demoness. Her sword spun like a whirlwind of steel, but the inquisitor danced among them like a dervish, slashing and stabbing like a man possessed. When he finally pierced the marilith’s heart, she disappeared in a flash of black fire.
“Boy,” Tungdill said, “I don’t know what in the Hells just happened here, but I do know there’s gonna be Hell t’pay when I catch up to that crazy bitch. Get the oracle and hang on t’me. We’re goin’ home.”
It had been five years since the death of Nyrissa and Kardashia’s return to peace and prosperity. The kingdom had thrived under Mox’s rule, and in the process had managed to avoid being drawn into the civil war in Brevoy, despite the original intentions of the Sword Lords. Mox remained in Veritas, along with Selena as her Magister, while Stevhan divided his time between the capitol and his duties in Pitax. Velox had made his home in Fort Drelev, and Davrim spent most of his time there, presiding over the new church of Iomedae which had thrived in the intervening years. As for Tungdill, the dwarf preferred the wilds of Kardashia to any of the more civilized areas. He still visited his companions from time to time, but through the years, he’d managed to cultivate quite a following among the indigenous creatures of the wild. Yes, all in all, things had turned out quite well for the nearest of the River Kingdoms…
___________________________________________________________
Selena sat in the high room of her tower that served as both her study and laboratory. She was pouring over the latest tome she’d procured that contained information, no matter how small, about the Eye of Abaddon and the lost cyclops empire. The subjects had become something of an obsession for the witch. Suddenly, her head snapped up, and the artifact glowed crimson in her left eye socket. She sensed magic nearby.
“Hello, granddaughter,” a voice said from behind her.
Selena sighed. “I knew this day would come,” she said. “Mother said we couldn’t hide forever.”
“You’ve never been hidden from me,” her visitor chuckled. “I’ve always known where to find you. I’ve watched your career with great interest.”
“And now you’ve come to claim me,” Selena stated as she turned to face her guest.
The woman who stood in the center of chamber was statuesque and youthful, despite her snow white hair. No one looking upon her would guess that she was over one-hundred years old. Selena allowed no emotion to show upon her face, but she could scarcely believe that Queen Elvanna of Irrisen, Fourteenth Daughter of Baba Yaga, was actually here in her home.
“You misread my intentions, child,” Elvanna smiled. “I have actually come to offer you freedom. Your mother was mistaken when she thought she could outrun her destiny, and she paid for it with her life. I would not see you suffer the same fate. I proffer this one-time accord to you. If you hear my words, and you agree, then you have my solemn word that I will forget that you ever existed.”
“It seems I have no choice,” Selena replied. “I’m listening.”
“Have you heard of the Witchwar?” Elvanna began.
“No,” Selena said. “Should I have?”
“Half a millennium ago,” Elvanna continued, “the reign of our ancestor, Queen Tashanna, drew near its end, as all of our reigns must, and the time approached for her to abdicate the throne and abandon Irrisen. She chose a different course. Rather than give up her crown, she sought to depose her mother, Baba Yaga. She managed to locate the Torc of Kostchtchie, an artifact which contained the mortal soul of the Demon Lord of Giants and Cold. Knowing Kostchtchie’s hatred for Baba Yaga, Tashanna used her possession of the torc to convince him to ally with her in rebellion. This was the Witchwar, although in retrospect, ‘war’ might be too generous a term.”
“Tashanna underestimated Baba Yaga, as many have before and since, for the Old Crone had actually created both Kostchtchie and the torc, and so possessed the means to undo them both. Baba Yaga faced Kostchtchie and savaged him with her magic, sending him fleeing to Iobaria to lick his wounds while her loyalists decimated his giant forces. The Queen of Witches then turned her attention to Tashanna and quickly defeated her rebel forces as well, capturing her daughter and ignobly parading her before her own demoralized troops. Baba Yaga executed every one of Tashanna’s followers and created a huge magical necropolis wherein she interred the defeated army and, purportedly, the deposed witch queen herself, along with the magical torc that led to her downfall. Known as the Veil of Frozen Tears, this hidden necropolis, filled with traps of Baba Yaga’s devising and foul guardian spirits, remained inviolate for five centuries…until now.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand,” Selena smirked.
“Do not presume,” Elvanna chided. “True, I have discovered the location of the Veil, but I have no intention of defying my mother and repeating the mistakes of Tashanna.”
“Then why do you want the torc?” Selena asked.
“That is my concern, child,” Elvanna’s voice grew cold. “Suffice it to say that I do want it. I have sent mercenaries already to retrieve it. None have returned. The last of these groups was dispatched ten days ago. They were led by my daughter, your cousin, Ilivorr.”
“The so-called White Witch?” Selena asked incredulously.
“Watch your tongue,” Elvanna warned. “She easily rivals you in power. Do not doubt it. So the fact that she has not returned should give you pause…especially if you intend on undertaking the same venture yourself, and taking your friends with you as I assume you will.”
Selena was silent and pensive for several moments.
“Your word,” she said at length. “If I do this for you, you will leave me in peace, and my companions as well.”
“Given,” Elvanna nodded. “Be forewarned, in addition to any of the guards and wards left by the Old Crone, I’m certain by now that Kostchtchie himself has become aware of the rediscovery of the Veil, and will have sent agents of his own to regain the torc.”
With that, she simply vanished.
__________________________________________________________
“So let me see if I understand,” Velox said. “You want us to undertake a journey to a tomb/prison created by Baba Yaga to retrieve an artifact that contains the soul of a demon lord, so that we may in turn give this artifact to Baba Yaga’s daughter.”
“In so many words,” Selena nodded.
The companions sat in Mox’s throne room, the first time they’d gathered as a group in over a year, at Selena’s behest.
Velox glanced aside at Davrim. “Selena,” he said, “you are my dear and true friend, and I respect and trust you, but why would you think that I would ever do such a thing?”
“For all the reasons you just mentioned,” Mox snapped. “She is your friend, and has laid her life on the line for you time and again. Your trust should be implicit. She would not ask you to do this if she was not sure of her own motives.”
The Queen looked to her husband for affirmation, but the Duke of Pitax remained silent.
“You have my word on this at least,” Selena replied to Velox, “if I have any doubt about Queen Elvanna’s true motives, I will not hand the torc over to her. You have my word on this. I will sacrifice my own life first.”
Velox nodded once. “That is good enough for me. When do we depart?”
“I’m getting’ too old fer this,” Tungdill grumbled.
________________________________________________________
Selena didn’t know how she knew it, but she was aware that the Veil of Frozen Tears lay at the northernmost edge of Irrisen in an isolated area where the cold plain abutted the mountainous glaciers of the Crown of the World. She had a clear enough picture in her mind, that she could transport herself and her allies across the hundreds of intervening miles between Kardashia and Irrisen. They found themselves at the mouth of a narrow valley, where an unbelievable sight greeted them. A massive waterfall once plunged the seven-hundred feet to the valley floor, but it was now frozen solid, leaving a braided column of unimaginable proportions that extended from the lip of the cliff above to its base of jagged ice boulders and frozen hillocks at the bottom. A fortification of some sort, apparently carved from the ice itself, protruded from the ice sheet halfway up, with both a turret and wall pierced with arrow slits. Above this, a hollow had been carved out of the ice, forming a great shelf upon which appeared to sit some sort of village. A fissure marked the ice flow’s lower reaches and possibly provided entrance. A hundred yards away from the base of the icefall was a camp occupied by a number of large brutes.
“I guess my grandmother was right,” Selena said. “The giants are already here.”
“Then I say we get a jump on them,” Mox smiled. “They’ve obviously started at the bottom. Why don’t we start at the top?”
She nodded towards the top of the fall to where the village sat.
Selena shrugged. “I don’t have a better plan.”
The companions locked hands, and then Mox transported them across time and space in the blink of an eye.
They appeared within a vast hollow that opened in the face of the frozen waterfall, forming a high-ceilinged ice cave. There, out of the same ubiquitous ice, had been constructed a traditional Irrisen village of multilevel cottages topped with steep, gabled roofs. Many were built directly into the jagged ice walls that formed the cave-like hollow. The tinkling of water could be faintly heard above the moaning of the wind from somewhere in the cluster of buildings. Near the lip of the ice cliff stood a larger structure that appeared to be surrounded by a ring of statues.
“I recognize this,” Selena said as she took in the diorama. “It’s a type of necropolis. It was common to the North people several centuries ago. It’s supposed to represent an imitation of the ordinary life that the deceased left behind.”
“Wouldn’t it be odd for Baba Yaga to build something like this honoring her enemies?” Mox asked.
“I suspect it was built for her own forces that died in the war,” Selena replied. “She may be evil incarnate, but that doesn’t make her heartless.”
The companions made their way through the dead village towards the large structure near the edge of the cliff. The building resembled a large, two-story cottage with wide double doors at its front and rear. Above the southern doors was a giant clock face, ten feet in diameter. It bore strange arcane symbols instead of traditional numbers, and had four hands…one short, one long, one forked, and one wavy…that appeared to be keeping time in no recognizable system. Rows of identical white marble statues depicting a bent old crone holding a scythe with a blade of dull gray metal stood at the building’s base. These statues appeared to be on railed tracks of ice that looped around the sides of the clock building, from one set of double doors to the set on the opposite side. No sooner had the group drawn near to the structure, than a bell tolled from somewhere inside. As it did so, the southern doors opened and two new statues emerged upon the tracks, while on the northern side, two other statues disappeared inside the doors there. The two that emerged suddenly ripped themselves loose from their respective tracks and began stalking towards the companions, scythes raised.
Davrim, Stevhan and Velox moved to intercept the animate statues before they could reach Mox and the others. Davrim swung at one, but when his blade connected, it was as if he’s struck a stone wall. A few marble chips flew off, but there was little actual damage. However, when Stevhan stepped forward and swung Briar, the enchanted metal cut through the marble statue like butter, and it shattered into a thousand pieces. However, as he turned towards the second golem, it swung its scythe, and opened a gaping gash across the ranger’s belly. Velox shoved Stevhan out of the way, and stepped in forward, his sword flashing. Bits and pieces of debris were hacked off of the golem, but it showed no signs of slowing.
Mox was preparing to bring her magic to bear upon the golem, even though she knew that the very nature of such constructs made them immune to most spells, when something odd caught her eye. Scratched into the ice on the ground before the double doors was a short message:
‘A stitch in time.’
Before Mox could make more of it, however, the bell tolled again and two more statues emerged from inside the great clock, animating as they stepped off the tracks. Velox and Davrim already had their hands full with the remaining first golem, while Tungdill hurried to deal with Stevhan’s wounds.
“Selena!” Mox called. “A stitch in time! What does it mean?”
“Is now really the appropriate time for trivia questions?” Selena asked as she hurled lightning at one of the golems.
“Just answer the question!” Mox snapped.
“Fine!” the witch retorted. “A stitch in time saves nine! Are you happy?”
“Nine?” Mox said to herself. “What does that have to do with…?”
Her eyes were drawn to the clock face, and then to the position where the numeral 9 would normally be. Instead, there was some sort of arcane symbol, but as Mox peered at it more closely, she saw that it was actually composed of tiny, tightly graven script giving it its shape.
“Everyone!” she called out. “We have to get out of here! Now!”
The bell tolled again, but as the doors opened once more to eject another pair of the killer statues, Mox conjured an extradimensional pit of acid in front of them. Both of the golems immediately tumbled in.
“Fall back!” she commanded again.
The companions heeded Mox’s words, and made a fighting retreat from the clock tower. The statues did not follow. Instead, they moved back to the track and resumed their former, inanimate positions.
“Now,” Selena said as she and the others struggled to catch their breath, “what in the Hells is going on?”
Mox explained what she’d seen on the ground, and on the clock face itself.
“So what did the writing say?” Mox asked.
“It makes no sense,” Mox replied. “ ‘A stitch in time saves nine, but what loop will the Witch Queen heed? In pointless slaughter, the Old Crone’s daughter, a hapless mob did lead. Now she sits in tomb that’s frozen, the traitors’ blood all spilled, upon the path that she had chosen, enthroned with collar gild. Ringed in steel, three loops times nine, prized from the luckless seat. Supplicants kneel, of porcelain fine, the banished Queen to meet. It matter’s not who’s dared to come, the demon’s soul to claim. The weak shall die, the strongest live, and forever more remain.’”
“The second line obviously refers to Tashanna,” Selena said, “and I would assume ‘collar gild’ refers to the torc. As for the rest, I’m not certain, but it’s probably a clue as to how to find where Tashanna, and the torc, are entombed. The writing you saw scratched in the ice, Mox…maybe Ilivorr left it, sort of like a bread crumb to follow.”
“So at least we’re in the right place,” Velox said. “Maybe we should keep looking around to see if she left any more clues.”
They made their way deeper into the dead village, coming eventually to the town square. An elegantly sculpted ice fountain sat in the middle, depicting a flock of winter geese taking flight. A jet of water sprang from the top, tumbling down into the basin below. Miraculously, the water remained unfrozen despite the frigid temperature, and oddly enough, seemed to radiate a deeper chill than the glacier itself. No sooner had the companions stepped into the square, than a savage roar echoed from a side street to their left. Charging down the lane was a massive, deformed giant. He might once have been a frost giant, but was now hunched and knotted, with corded muscles and awkwardly formed limbs. His thickened skin seemed more like animal hide than flesh, and his eyes glowed red like flames. Davrim, bow in hand, quickly loosed two arrows at the oncoming brute, but the shafts bounced harmlessly off the creature’s skin. Mox sent a disintegrating blast of magic at it, but the giant barely slowed, though his skin smoked and hissed. Tungdill even managed to drop a column of fire on the giant’s head, but on it came, burned, bleeding, but obviously insane. Stevhan drew Briar and stepped into the brute’s path, but the giant lowered its shoulder and slammed into the ranger, hurling him into the fountain. The supernaturally cold water burned like fire, and Stevhan instantly found his limbs encased in ice. Davrim and Velox drew their swords and rushed forward. The gnarled giant hefted a massive battle axe as they approached, the edges of which flickered with blue fire. The axe came down, but Velox caught it on his own blade, twisted and rolled his arms, and sent the axe flying out of the giant’s hands and across the square. Then Davrim laid into the deformed brute, and Velox joined him from the flank. Within moments, they cut the giant down, though the creature fought tooth and nail until its last breath.
“W…w…what w…w…was that?” Stevhan stammered, his teeth chattering as Tungdill helped him from the fountain and worked to defrost him.
“Among giants,” Selena explained, such deformities are considered to be a ‘blessing’ from Kostchtchie. I think we can assume the demon lord’s minions are already well ahead of us. We should keep moving.”
At the far end of the cavern that held the necropolis, the companions found an alley-like cave that had been cut through the ice between two of the tombs. It lead deeper into the ice to a stair that wound deeper into the glacier.
___________________________________________________________
The tunnel the companions followed wound downward for several dozen yards before ending at a set of double doors. They were unlocked and opened effortlessly despite their enormous size. An eerie sight greeted their eyes as they saw the chamber beyond. Row upon row of identical, life-size ice sculptures depicting a bent-backed old crone with a skull-like face stood in perfect ranks. A sense of woe seemed to radiate from each statue, and dark arcs of power crackled across their surfaces and leaped from sculpture to sculpture. Nearby, at the end of the nearest row, on statue lay shattered, and shards of ice littered the floor around its base.
“Well this looks menacing enough,” Mox sighed. “How about we just circumvent this obvious death trap?”
Mox took Davrim’s hand in one of hers and Stevhan’s in the other, closed her eyes and spoke the words to a spell. She opened them a moment later, expecting the three of them to be safely on the far side of the room. They hadn’t moved an inch. Instead, a wave of black energy coruscated through the chamber, washing over the companions, sending stabbing pains into their souls as it penetrated their bodies. Velox recovered first, hefted his sword and smashed it down on the nearest statue, thinking to destroy it as the other one had been. His blade rebounded off the statue, leaving not a mark on it.
“This is negative energy!” Selena cried through gritted teeth, pain still wracking her body. “Counter it!”
Through his battle haze, Velox heard and understood. He called upon his birth right, given by Iomedae, and sent a wave of healing power through the room. As it touched the statues, chips and pieces exploded off of them, as if they were being eroded away. The others saw this, and joined his assault. Tungdill and Davrim cast curative spells, Selena used healing hexes, and even Stevhan pulled out a minor healing wand that he kept for emergencies. Gradually, they made progress, despite the fact that the horrible negative energy wave exploded around them every few seconds. It was going to be a battle of attrition. One by one, as the statues continued to erode, they began to crumble to dust. As they did so, each one was revealed to contain an exquisitely carved, tiny porcelain doll that depicted a gnarled old woman. Finally, the last statue was destroyed, and the energy field dissipated.
The companions regained their composure, using their remaining curative magics to restore their own health, and then Selena bent to pick up one of the dolls.
“ ‘Supplicants kneel, of porcelain fine,’” she repeated the line from the poem. “I think we’ve discovered another clue. It would seem someone else has as well.” She gestured towards the statue that had already been destroyed when they entered, noting that its remains contained no doll.
The group made their way across the room, gathering up the dolls as they went. At the far side of the room was a second set of doors, massive and composed of two white stone portals. Their surfaces bore a scene of craggy, snow-clad peaks in relief beneath the cavorting forms of unidentifiable creatures. The lintel above the door bore an inscription in ancient runes. There was no visible way to open the doors. The companions began trying every means, magical and mundane, at their disposal to open the barrier. Nothing. Finally, Mox’s attention was drawn to the runes above.
“ ‘Only by the Power of Faith shall ye pass Beyond,’” she read. “Whatever that means.”
She sighed, closed her eyes and thought of the one thing she had the most faith in…herself. When she opened her eyes again, the doors had become hazy and insubstantial.
“Aha!” she turned to her friends, beaming. “That was easy!”
She turned back to the doors and simply stepped through them. She failed to notice that her friends did not follow. To them the portals were just as solid and impassable as they had ever been…
________________________________________________________
Mox blinked once as she entered the antechamber, then her eyes looked up…and up. She was surrounded by giants of all sizes. Three frost giant warriors stood to her right, while a gnarled, deformed creature like the one they’d met in the necropolis square flanked her on the left. A large, white-furred, blue-eyed wolf crouched snarling near the giants, its breath frosting the already frigid air. Yet all of these creatures barely warranted a glance from the queen, for her attention was riveted on the truly massive…thing…that stood directly before her. The ebon-skinned monstrosity stood over fifty-feet in height, and it had a huge, gaping maw with boar-like tusks. A wide nose sat beneath a furrowed brow that lacked any sort of eyes or visible visual organs. Its corded muscles twisted and writhed beneath its smooth, hairless jet hide, giving its frame a gnarled, unbalanced asymmetry. It moved with a loping gait, however, and wore its armor, composed of thick, welded plates, effortlessly. This was an abyssal gigant, one of a race spawned from titans who took refuge in the rifts of the Abyss, and now served powerful demon lords, such as Kostchtchie. The gargantuan brute raised a maul the size of an elephant above its head, and brought it smashing down towards Mox. At the last instant, the sorceress erected a cage of pure force around her, and the hammer struck with enough impact to crack the floor beneath her.
“What did she do before she disappeared?” Davrim asked. “Where did she go?”
“She said something about faith,” Velox replied. “That could be interpreted as trust in a higher power, but which one? It could also be thought of as trust in one’s self. Concentrate, my friends. Focus your minds on nothing else save passing these doors.”
When the oracle did this himself, he saw the doors as Mox had. Quickly, he stepped through. Davrim followed behind him a moment later.
Mox breathed an audible sigh of relief when she saw the two warriors step into the room. The pair did not blink at the foes arrayed before them. They simply acted. The gigant’s massive head swung towards them, and it prepared to raise its maul again. Before it could, however, Velox leaped towards it and severed one of its hands at the wrist. The behemoth roared and swatted the oracle aside. One of the frost giants leaped after him, hacking at Velox’s arm before he could regain his feet. He rolled to one side, and the giant’s axe merely grazed him as he rolled back to standing…only to come up against the gnarled giant. The oracle in full battle fury, however, was not a foe to be taken lightly. He spun his sword like a dervish, and cut through the deformed monster in a matter of seconds. Across the room, Davrim had maneuvered behind the gigant, and with one massive swing, severed the tendon of its right heel. It collapsed heavily to one knee, bleeding profusely, and in that moment, the inquisitor leaped upwards and drove his sword through its spine, sending it crumpling to the floor. Mox chose that moment to dispel her force cage, and as the winter wolf leaped towards her, she disintegrated it in mid-air. That left only the three frost giant warriors against the queen, the oracle and the inquisitor. They giants should have brought ten times their number…
___________________________________________________________
Ultimately, the others were able to discern the nature of the portal and pass through. A set of stairs on the far side of the room led downwards again, this time to an icy room that looked to have been turned into a campsite of some sort. A number of water barrels, wrapped in furs to insulate them from the cold, stood in the center of the chamber. Scattered around them were a number of giant-sized bedrolls composed of various mangy furs from arctic and mountain beasts. Against one wall sat a mound of massive cuts of frozen, raw meat. Velox and Davrim entered the chamber first, and as they did so, another gnarled, deformed giant leaped from behind a wall towards them. The warriors darted to either side, flanking the giant, and with a coordinated series of strikes, took it down quickly.
As Stevhan made his way across the chamber, a subtle glint caught his eye. A small ice sculpture of a beautiful maiden lay discarded among the giant bedrolls. Though he couldn’t explain why, the ranger felt strangely drawn to it. He leaned down to pick it up, and in that instant, an overwhelming compulsion came over him. He glanced towards a blank section of wall, and saw there a large bloody handprint. His hand dropped to his side, the statue still clutched there, and he walked over to the wall and placed his other palm against the handprint. Abruptly, the wall swung aside revealing a stairway leading down into darkness.
“Stevhan?” Mox called after him. “What are you doing?”
Her husband ignored her, and started down the stairs.
“Velox!” Mox cried. “Something’s wrong with Stevhan!”
The oracle looked at the ranger and realized immediately that Stevhan was not in his right mind. He lunged across the room and knocked the statue from the duke’s hand. It clattered to the floor, but remained whole. Stevhan seemed not to notice. He continued down the stairs…until he suddenly collapsed in a heap, sound asleep.
“That should hold him for a moment,” Selena said, “but no one disturb him, or he’ll wake immediately.”
“Do you think it’s the statue?” Davrim asked Velox.
“Let’s find out,” the oracle said.
He lifted his sword and brought it down solidly on the sculpture. Not a mark.
“I would say that’s a good guess,” he replied to Davrim.
“It’s made of ice, right?” Tungdill asked.
“Seems to be,” Velox said, “but I’m not willing to touch it to find out.”
“Well, let’s see how a little fireworks then,” the druid shrugged.
He waved his hand, and a pillar of flame consumed the statue. When the fire died, the sculpture was little more than a puddle of water.
“Wake’im up now,” Tungdill pointed to Stevhan
Velox used the toe of his boot to nudge the ranger.
“Huh?” Stevhan grunted as he opened his eyes. “What’s going on?
“You tell us,” Davrim said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Um…,” Stevhan rubbed his head, “we killed a giant?”
“Several, actually,” Velox smiled. “You don’t recall picking up a statue, or why you were going down those stairs?”
“What are you talking about?” the ranger asked as he got to his feet. “Where do these stairs lead?”
“Good question,” the oracle replied. “Let’s find out, shall we?”
The stairs were perfectly transparent crystal, without any visible means of support. They descended some forty feet to a circular chamber. A narrow arrow slit in one wall allowed a gust of cold wind to enter and stir the many hide and stick fetishes that had been arrayed around an altar of black stone on a short dais at one end of the room. A massive, blue-skinned troll knelt before the altar, but his craggy face bore a look of utter confusion.
“You!” he bellowed when he saw the intruders enter the room. “Did you destroy the statue? You did didn’t you! Now I can’t hear her anymore! I’ll kill you all!”
“Not if I kill you first,” Mox grinned as she breathed a cloud of acid at the troll.
He shrieked, beating at his skin as the caustic liquid burned through to the bone. His red eyes bulged as he glared at the sorceress, and then he began chanting in a guttural tongue. A ray of black fire shot from a medallion around his neck, and where it hit Mox, she felt her body go completely numb. For a moment, her breath caught in the throat, and her heart skipped a beat. He vision blurred briefly, but he awareness snapped back into focus as the pain suddenly hit her. Velox, Stevhan and Davrim rushed the troll, striking in unison. Velox went high, Stevhan went low, and when Davrim struck, he separated the giant’s head from its shoulders. The inquisitor picked up the severed head and tossed it out the window.
“Regenerate from that,” he muttered.
“Something doesn’t seem right about all this,” Mox said as she quickly quaffed a healing draught.
“You’ll have to clarify that statement,” Selena replied snarkily. “The part about us hunting down a piece of a demon lord’s soul for my grandmother so that she doesn’t turn me over to my great-grandmother Baba Yaga…or was there something else you were thinking of?”
“I mean the way we’re going about this,” the queen snipped. “We started out at the summit of the falls, and that’s where we found the poem, as well as that scrawled note in the ice. Then, in the hall of statues…those giants were trying to get INTO that room. It was obvious they hadn’t already been there, but someone had. Someone had taken one of the dolls…possibly the same someone who left that note by the clock tower. The lower down we go, the more giants we find. I think we’re going the wrong way. I suggest we head back to the necropolis and search again for more clues. Agreed?”
_________________________________________________________
“Here,” Stevhan said as he squatted down in the snow near the clock tower, but still far enough away that the statues remained inert. “One set of footprints, about a week old, give or take. They came from that direction.” He nodded over his shoulder towards one of the buildings on the far side of the necropolis.
The others followed the ranger to a two-story sepulcher that stood near the back wall of the cavern. There, in a small snowdrift that had gathered, was the unmistakable print of a boot.
“The seal’s been broken,” Stevhan said as he pushed open the door to the tomb.
Inside was a single plain chamber with two ice biers upon which lay the frozen remains of Irrisen warriors, still clad in their arms and armor. A single door stood at the far side of the room, against a wall which should have abutted the cavern wall outside. When Stevhan opened it, however, there was a narrow staircase carved into the ice that led down into darkness.
The stairs emerged into a dank room in which a battle appeared to have recently taken place. A number of charred humanoid skeletons lay strewn about, and a lifelike stone statue of an ogre pointed at one wall with an arm that ended in a broken stump…the hand and the barbed falchion it held lay on the floor near the base of the stairs. A second statue stood on the far side of the chamber, this one intact and depicting a bestial, demonic figure. Then, its head turned towards the companions, and one hand whipped out, hurling a ball of fire into their midst. It exploded an instant later, scattering the heroes like cord wood. Tungdill’s breath woofed out of his chest as he came up hard against a wall. Still, it wasn’t pain that turned his face beet red…it was rage. He pointed one stubby finger at the demon, and the black bolt of energy that struck the fiend slammed it so hard into the opposite wall that the ice cracked. By then, Velox was on his feet and across the room. As the demon was extricating himself, the oracle slashed its throat cleanly, sending its soul gurgling back to the Abyss.
“I think we can safely assume this is the way your cousin went,” Mox told Selena.
_____________________________________________________________
The tracks they’d been following led to a large round room with a domed ceiling rising high overhead. Bars of ice blocked their entrance into the room, in which an elaborate throne sat within a raised alcove to one side, surveying the chamber. Heavy manacles were inset into the throne’s arms, back and legs. Several more sets of manacles were spaced about the room’s walls, interspersed with various diabolical instruments of torture. A large cage of ice bars that extended from floor to ceiling dominated the center of the chamber, and floating within it was a huge sphere of crackling, gray energy. Dispersed around the perimeter of the ice cage were a half-dozen living corpses dressed in archaic breastplate, and as still as the grave. However, as soon as they saw the intruders on the other side of the bars, they lurched into motion.
Velox and Mox began their spells simultaneously. A wall of orange fire burst into the center of the room, consuming a pair of the spirit warriors in the conflagration. An instant later, a crater of acid erupted, boiling away the ice bars. Suddenly, the sphere imprisoned within the cage pulsed with dark energy, and the companions felt the cold touch of death wash over them, while the remaining undead warriors seemed to draw strength from the wave. One of them stepped forward, raised its hand and a blast of ice and snow blew down the hall like an arctic storm. Tungdill countered with a storm of fire that engulfed the entire room, roasting every one of the undead warriors to ash, and causing the dark elemental to collapse into nothingness within its cage.
Selena walked slowly over to the throne, and knelt down beside it. One of the foot manacles had been removed.
“Look,” she said. “The links in the chains. There are 27 of them.”
“So?” Mox asked.
“ ‘Ringed in steel, three loops times nine, prized from the luckless seat.’ I don’t know about you, but I’d say this seat qualifies as luckless, and someone has already pried loose one chain…a chain with 27 links…three times nine.”
“The tracks end here,” Stevhan said.
__________________________________________________________
Selena laid the manacle and chain in a circle on the ground in front of the clock tower.
“Now,” she said, “I think we should each place one of the dolls inside.”
“Are you sure this is the way this works?” Mox asked.
“Of course not!” the witch snapped. “If any of you have any better ideas, I’m all ears.”
“Just asking,” Mox shrugged as she laid the first doll in the ring.
One by one the others followed suit. Suddenly, the hand on the clock face that had been pointing unerringly at the numeral 9 began to spin wildly, and the clock began to glow with friction, and became blindingly bright. When the light faded a moment later, the companions found themselves transported.
The chamber had featureless white stone walls and flooring beneath an equally plain high ceiling. A dark smudge of ash, humanoid in shape, marred one wall. Directly ahead was a throne of the same white stone with an inscription on its base. A life-size figure of a beautiful woman carved from ice, with a twisted, rune-scribed golden collar around her neck, sat upon the throne. Before her, a crystalline sphere stood on a white stone pedestal. Opposite her was a wide circle on the wall that displayed a blurry image of the cliff outside the Witch Clock. A starkly beautiful woman stood beside the throne. Her skin was so pale and translucent that she seemed carved from ice herself…until she spoke.
“Welcome, cousin,” Ilivorr Karanasi said as she nodded to Selena. “I’ve been watching you, and I must admit, I’m impressed that you solved the puzzle and found your way here. It’s a pity that now you have to die.”
The White Witch opened her mouth and began to wail, a sound that pierced the air like the shriek of a banshee. Before the horrified eyes of her friends, Selena simply collapsed.
After that, chaos erupted. Velox hurled destruction at Ilivorr, but the witch countered, and the spell merely scorched her flesh. At the same moment, Mox raced across the chamber to the throne, and ripped the torc from the neck of the statue seated there. In that instant, she felt the dark energy that was Kostchtchie’s soul touch her own. Meanwhile, Tungdill rushed to Selena’s side. He felt a faint pulse at her neck. She was alive, but just barely. Quickly, the druid poured all of the healing power at his command into his friend. Her breathing slowly returned to normal, and her eyes opened wide.
“Get up girl!” the dwarf growled. “Between yer crazy kin and our queen, I’m not sure which one’s gonna get us killed first!”
Selena took Tungdill’s hand and got to her feet, just as Stevhan charged Ilivorr and sliced deep into her side with Briar. She reeled back against the throne, momentarily stunned.
“My turn, bitch!” Selena hissed as she hurled fire and lightning at her cousin.
Ilivorr screamed as her skin charred, and then Mox hammered her with the same spell that she finished Nyrissa with…a Word of power. The White Witch’s eyes rolled back into her head, and as she slid towards the floor, Velox reached out and laid a hand upon her chest, sucking the remaining life out of her. As she died, however, something strange happened. The oracle’s eyes did not lose their battle glaze. Instead, he lifted his head and turned towards his companions. In that moment, he knew that he must kill them all. The Frozen Cenotaph had to be preserved. He could not allow their continued presence to desecrate it.
Velox stood and calmly walked towards Mox, whose back was to him. He raised his sword and, his pulse never even quickening, thrust it into her back. Mox screamed as her draconic wings sprouted from her shoulders and she reflexively to the air, trying to distance herself from her unknown assailant. When she turned and looked down, and saw Velox standing there, his blade dripping, something inside her snapped.
“I knew it!” she shrieked. “I told you, Stevhan! He was waiting for this all along!”
Her hands crackled with emerald energy, and she blasted the oracle with enough power to disintegrate a lesser soul. As it was, Velox was hurled backwards, his skin smoking and cratered. He waved his hand, and a cloud of fog arose around him, concealing him from view. He climbed slowly and quietly to his feet, sensing the others near. A shadow loomed in front of him and he struck without hesitation. He heard Stevhan grunt in surprise and pain, and then a strong wind rose out of nowhere, tearing the fog bank away.
“There he is!” Tungdill shouted. “Take’im down! He’s outta his mind!”
The last thing Velox saw was Stevhan coming towards him, the pommel of Briar upraised. Then, only darkness.
“Good work, my love!” Mox cried. “Now is our chance! Stand back!”
“Mox! No!” Stevhan called, but it was too late. His wife sent a barrage of arcane bolts at Velox’s unconscious form. He was killed instantly.
“Ya crazy bitch!” Tungdill roared. “What’ve ya done! Is everybody here crazy?”
The druid sent a bolt of black fire at the queen, not trying to kill her, but hoping to bring her back down to the ground. Mox deflected the spell with a casual wave of her hand.
“You see?” she snapped, her eyes finding Stevhan and Selena. “They’ve been biding their time all along! It’s now or never!”
Stevhan, however, wasn’t listening to her…only to the voice speaking in his head. The one that told him to defend the Cenotaph and the torc with his life. Dimly, he heard Briar’s voice in his mind as well, telling him this wasn’t right. He didn’t care. He swung the enchanted blade at Davrim’s neck, but at the last instant, the sword twisted in his hand, and only the flat struck the inquisitor, but still hard enough to whiplash the half-orc’s spine. Davrim’s head spun, but he managed to focus his gaze on Mox and Stevhan. He could detect no evil in them, yet they were both maddened just the same. Backing away from the ranger, he bent down and picked up Velox’s body. Then, as Stevhan rushed him again, the inquisitor leaped for the blurry wall of the clock face and vanished.
“Not so fast, my ‘friends’!” Mox whispered.
She flapped her wings and dove towards the wall, vanishing after Davrim.
“Selena!” Tungdill shouted. “I don’t know who’s side yer on here, but I ain’t hangin’ around t’find out! If you wanna stay with the ranger, suit yerself. Yer on yer own!”
With that, the dwarf darted through the wall himself.
“Stevhan, it’s me,” Selena said calmly, her hands empty as she faced the duke. “You have to come with me. Something’s possessed your mind. You know this isn’t right. Come with me now. Please!”
But she could see in the ranger’s eyes that her words were having no effect. She wove a spell, hoping to entrap him in the ice that grew on the floor, but he nimbly dodged aside. As he charged towards her, Briar humming with power, she had no choice. She spoke the words to another spell and vanished.
No sooner had Davrim stepped outside, than a flash of fire and a puff of brimstone ignited in front of him. A creature slithered out of the mist, with the upper torso of a naked, six-armed woman, each hand clutching a wicked looking scimitar, and the lower body of a serpent.
“I am Nazalimora, mortal,” she said. “I serve the Lord Kostchtchie, and I have come to claim what is his.
At that moment, Mox appeared behind the inquisitor.
“There it is,” Davrim nodded. “You can have it for all I care!”
Then Tungdill was there. He saw the demon on one side of Davrim, and Mox on the other. With no time to figure out just what exactly was going on, he chose to shoot first and ask questions later. From out of thin air, he conjured two enormous boulders. The great rocks clashed together, smashing Mox and Nazalimora between them. When the stones vanished, both of them lay prone on the ground. Davrim stood over Mox, the tip of his blade pointed at her throat.
“I should kill you now for what you did!” he snarled. “Give me one reason not to!”
“You self-righteous, sanctimonious pig!” Mox spat. “Like you need a reason to kill! I know you and Velox had this planned all along! You were just waiting for the right time to take my throne! Over my dead body!”
She spoke a word and disappeared in a flash of light, reappearing a moment later near the roof of the ice cavern of the necropolis.
“Help me claim the torc, mortal,” Nazalimora said as she climbed upright. “If you do so, all is forgiven. My Lord will not hunt you.”
Before Davrim had a chance to answer, Tungdill cast another spell, summoning a sirocco of hot wind and fire to force Mox to the ground. The vortex caught the sorceress, but before it could pull her down, she cast again and vanished.
“Fools!” the marilith cried. “You’ve let her escape! You’ll pay for that mistake with your lives!”
“Shut up,” Davrim said coldly. “I think I’ve heard enough from you.”
He let Velox’s body slide to the ground as he squared off against the demoness. Her sword spun like a whirlwind of steel, but the inquisitor danced among them like a dervish, slashing and stabbing like a man possessed. When he finally pierced the marilith’s heart, she disappeared in a flash of black fire.
“Boy,” Tungdill said, “I don’t know what in the Hells just happened here, but I do know there’s gonna be Hell t’pay when I catch up to that crazy bitch. Get the oracle and hang on t’me. We’re goin’ home.”
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