Pedestrian
Explorer
Hello all,
What follows is a short story write-up of a one-off adventure DM'd by my younger brother for my birthday, inspired by the PC game Planescape: Torment. In this game, I took the role of the Nameless (a Revenant Fighter), my partner plays Kat (a human Cleric) and our friend Hope (Tiefling Wizard). The write up is entirely in prose format, but all events occurred at the table. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed playing and composing into a story. Thanks go to my brother for running the game, and the others for playing and putting up my idiosyncratic style. Without further ado, the story.
Planescape:Torment
I awoke on a trolley slab being pushed by some animate dead towards a furnace composed of planar portals opened to a churning ocean of fire. I had, and have, no recollection of how I came to be there. As I pulled my consciousness from the obliviate abyss over which it had hung, there came an arcane flash and a spill of chaotic energy as doorways to other worlds disgorged their passengers – or rather abductees – into this chamber.
The animate porters rose to ensorcelled fury at this intrusion, the collars on their necks, simple things marked only by the symbols of the keepers of this place the Dustmen, shifting from dull grey to vivid, angry crimson. The two travellers, sensing danger all too familiarly present for them, lashed out. The first to act was the tiefling wizardess. Raised by goblins and raised to serve their grim god Bane on the endless battlefields of his contested dominion, Hope – perhaps so named out of dark irony by her adoptive family – was a master of fear, and of fire. Raising an orb chained to her wrist, she summoned up roiling sheets of flame to consume the mass of rotting hulks that swarmed her. Kat, a human worshipper of the Stone God Moradin, held her symbol aloft and invoked his aid, blasting the dead horde with holy radiance. We three were all adrift from our heritage, I would learn, born – or reborn, in my case – amidst strange faces unlike our own.
Such philosophical ramblings were beyond me at this point, however, as I was beset by fragmentary recollections. A chasm. A flaming sword. A man’s face twisted in fear. A smile full of sharpened teeth, the only thing visible in the dark. I have come to know these snatches as images from past lives, but freshly resurrected into a battlefield I had no way of knowing this. Instead, I thrashed about wildly with the axe that had been place upon my bier, blindly cleaving the head from my berserk porter. And when I saw that smile flash in my mind’s eye, I took up my shield with its symbol so old and cowered behind it, whimpering like a child. Was that smile death that waited for me beyond whatever power had recalled me to life? The fear of it gripped me.
The flash of magic and thunder of arms recalled me to my senses. I was armed and accoutred as a warrior, and I would not shirk my place, nor the duty I felt towards the pair I took to be my rescuers. They had already cleared much of the dross by the time I gained my feet, but with ready axe and shield I ploughed forward, the vitality of this new life quick in my veins. The only exit from this room other than the fire’s embrace was a sturdy, grim door flanked by two of the undead. Unlike their fellows, some of life’s vigour yet clung to them. With eyes opened by death, I assayed them as the greater foe and lay into them with fierce blows. The blade of my axe flashed violet, and the haft under my touch glowed hot and cold, but what pain it sent me it doubled unto my enemy. My fresh birth lent me great heart, so I cared not for my hurts so long as it injured me foe.
As I held the gate, my boon companions finished the lesser foes. Kat came to my side with her great battle star and prayers for Moradin’s guidance, while Hope lashed out with tongues of fire and tormenting whispers that tugged at the vestigial minds, terrorising them with the fragments of the life they once held. From beyond the doors thundered an ominous rumbling, the herald of some looming, doomful presence. We redoubled our efforts and with a triumphant strike we felled one of the zombies. In death is struck out at us one last time, the necromancy within it igniting and showering us with its rotten viscera. My sturdy shield proved a true ally, shielding me from the blast.
And not a moment too soon! The roaring hulk made its appearance. The doors buckled and burst before its rotten bulk, revealing a slobbering composite beast stitched together from putrefied giant corpses. In the grip of the battle I raised my shield and charged the brute, ignoring the fists of the lesser animate as they bounced ineffectually from my bulwark. I was confident my allies could finish it while I held off this new threat. They were more than equal to the task and so sudden was their slaying that I had no time to raise my shield, and I was left blinded by the shuddering necrotic eruption of the reslain corpse. I staggered in a feint, just able to make out the shapes of my friends and foe about me. Instincts I did not know I possessed kept me in the fray with a savage blow to dissuade the monster as it tried to assault Kat. My axe blade ignited a bane placed upon it by the cleric, and it flashed with radiance. As my eyes cleared of the filth of the dead, the monster slumped forward, broken by the assault, but as I watched a second zombie began to crawl forth from its broken chest. I was struck by the sickening thought of how this death-birth recalled my own, but fortunately my allies were hardened to the task. Before this new threat could tear itself free, it found itself beneath hammer and flame.
The fight was done. My allies had questions for me, which they asked as they recovered their breath. Their eyes were suspicious, questioning. They wanted to know how I had brought them here. We stood in the wreckage of our battle, the shattered cadavers stinking in the wretched heat pulsing from the portal-furnaces. Only Kat felt the flame, Hope’s infernal heritage and my withered flesh proof against the heat. I had no answers, only questions of my own. I shared what little I knew, and they gave me their own stories. I had taken their appearance not as serendipity but rather a rescue attempt. They held no clue to the identity that was obscured from me and our meeting was no more than Fate’s vague hand.
Trusting to that heedless force’s agency, we ventured past the broken doorway through which the hideous hulk had shambled. Beyond was a poorly illuminated corridor. Here and there the walls were blemished and stained with scraped flesh and ichor, traces of the passage of our dispatched foe. Without other clue to our best course, we followed this spoor. Yet as we walked those lonely halls I found myself drawing ahead, pulled along by a thread of emerging memory, spiralling up from below he horizon of my conscious mind, a chthonic extrusion every bit as divorced from my life as those animates had been from theirs, yet just the same these foreign thoughts were as part of me as the bones beneath my flesh. I saw figures hidden by dark robes and knew their cowled faces were those of my brothers and sisters in dissolution. I followed their illusory tread, no longer seeing this life but rather looking out into another through eyes that were and were not my own.
We came to another door and I pushed it aside to open upon the top of a stairwell. It was well made of some dark material, its name already slipping from my mind as soon as I grasped it. The elegantly simple lines of it, the cloaked figures walking in pairs in sedate contemplation of the void. It was then I knew we walked the halls of the Mortuary. I shivered at this revelation, and I dimly assumed the cries of my comrades were signal of the same understanding in them, but I saw as if through a body of water Kat readying her mace and rushing forward at Dustmen who I had taken to be phantoms, their hoods already thrown back, faces twisted under Hope’s psychic anguishes. The inhabitants of the complex were shocked by our emergence from whence only the dead dwelled, but recovered quickly for it.
I was too consumed in my introspective reverie to respond in timely fashion, but the initial exchanges of the melee were a series of feints and false moves as we tested one another’s defences. Hope scored the first decisive blow, twisting those horrors that lurk nestled in the recesses of the mind to spring forth, causing one of the robed fanatics to hurl himself over the balcony, grappling with a foe only he saw. The careful training of those who waited for death took over and saved him from a broken neck, but fists and feet would avail him nothing from there. However, two others of the cult revealed themselves as magi, flinging bolts of black lightning and spheres of concussive force at our position. Kat and I staggered forward and down the steps to try and engage them, while Hope maintained her precarious vantage point to twist the foe with shadow and flame.
Kat took the lead, trying to force one of the cultists back with a bullish shove, sending him tumbling. I followed, building my strength with savage blows. Hope continued her bedevilling assault, clearing the way for us by sending my opponent screaming over the edge. By now I was recovered from the worst of the concussive assault of the magi and thundered forward into one of them with the force of a rampaging beast. The pugilists were rushing to try and regain the stairway. One of the magic called out, summoning or shaping a concentrated coil of unbeing to serve. The tentacle writhed and wrapped about me, trying to feast on what cold vitality stirred in my limbs. Kat made her move. With a shout and upraised hammer, she called down the anger of her god, bringing his wrath against the nihilists. As the radiant arms of heaven slammed down amongst them, the cleric was encircled by bands of translucent iron. I fought off the agonised conjuration but, viper quick, it raced from my reach to attack Hope, who was still trading spells with and suffering the worst of the magi. Undaunted, she rained fire down amongst her foes, taunting them with distracting lights as she drew from a deep reservoir of focus.
Kat and I advanced, slamming our weapons in unison into one of the magi, who crumpled under our blows. Kat passed Moradin’s protective bands to Hope, warding her against the tenebrous extrusion trying to crush her. Two more went over the balcony, one from spell and one from my shield. As I pummelled a foe trying to slip past, Kat launched herself at the last magi, the one trying to crush Hope. With a prayer she descended upon him as an avenging angel, crushing the wizard and breaking his magic.
We took a moment to collect ourselves, and formulate a plan. It was likely that there were more faction members nearby, and we could not be certain when they might come looking for their comrades. We could try force or guile to escape the Mortuary. All three of us swiftly concluded that deception was our best option against uncertain numbers. We stripped the bodies – the robes were bloody, but the strange fabric seemed to drink in the humour, leaving the colour unchanged – and dumped them at the top of the stairs through the doorway. Our rough disguise complete, we walked on and into the Mortuary proper.
We moved quickly at first through the winding passages and twisted, vaulted halls, the hems of our robes brushing aside the dust of long years, detritus of little disturbed eternity that languished behind us and would no doubt linger long after our passage. As we made our careful procession our paths met those of other Dustmen. Wrapped in solipsistic contemplation unbecoming of their philosophy, they paid us little mind and, at first, those that did stop to question us Kat disarmed with easy charm, evening managing to wheedle directions from the heart of the complex. In places there were doors barred to us by old and weary magic, at which point Hope would draw forth a battered codex and speak words of power to unweave the ancient spells. All this I saw, but always memories of this place clouded my vision. I had come before, and many times, and not always as guest of brother. I attempted to perform the same delicate system of pass phrases and incantations I knew would open the doorways, but my recollection was imperfect and soon drew the attention of the faction. They crowded about us and Kat and Hope attempted to diffuse the mob but the pain of memory wracked my head, and there was no dispelling the look of my face, my flesh. As they pressed in on us, I felt myself borne away on a tide of chaotic memory, chattering conflicting fragments of too many live trying to swamp me, pull me under into a morass of former selves. As I was so lost in mind, we were dragged through the Mortuary to be held in a blank room without windows or light. We were kept and questioned then by a dark, cold presence that chilled me through the blanketing haze of my mind. I do not recall what my accomplices told this presence, how long it questioned us, or what truths or lies were revealed to or by that chill thing but eventually we were allowed to go, ejected into the night.
Outside, the tortured streets of the hive seethed breathed gasped wept their thousand thousand petty lives that guttered and died as we collected ourselves. The currents of my mind threatened to once more pull me under but I steadied myself from the delicious hints of a past that swam before me, forcing myself into the now, to perceive only what was there, not phantasms of the parted. Overhead the city swung in its lazy orbit, the torus encircling the currently starry-night dim weirdness of the other-light that lit Sigil. Something twisted in the gloom before us and I risked plucking a useful memory from the churning soup I held at bay through force of will. The ground ahead of us was pocked and marred by coiling oozes, invisible to the untrained eye, a hazardous trip to a place of churning squamous horror. From her quick intake of breath I knew Hope saw as I did. I muttered a quick warning to Kat, who lacked the skill to see but took my meaning, but the words died softly upon my lips.
A flame kindled in the dark, climbing up the length of a blade, illuminating a dark, muscular silhouette. Powerful witched stretched out behind it, and infernal fire to match the sword ignited in its eyes. But it was the wicked smile that seized me, those narrow sharp fangs behind curling cruel lips. I shook myself, fighting away a hundred deaths, a thousand times that hateful smile had leered over me as I lay bleeding.
“I see you have returned to life once more. This time, perhaps, you will think better of it.”
I did not succumb to the fear and horror born out of all my death at the Cambion’s blade and talons, nor let memory sweep me away and down into blissful darkness as I had before. My shield up and my axe bare, a foreign name to my experience spilled from my mouth and I leapt forward and to the left, around the bubbling murk of ooze and the burning blade of my foe. Kat took the right flank and we met in the middle, crashing against the Cambion. His skill was supernatural, and we traded ineffectual blows, the column of volcanic steel in his grip dancing back and forward to strike and parry. With a simultaneous curse and blessing, Kat transformed my axe into a weapon of the gods setting it alight with righteous fire and placed a doom upon the hell-reaver. The Cambion set about with fierce blows, but our assault was unbroken. From her perch on the mortuary steps Hope bedevilled the foes mind while Kat and I hammered him step by bloody step back towards the ooze. He tried a desperate gamble to launch himself into the air, but my axe rose and put paid to that, slashing his wings and bringing him to ground, spoiling his escape and his aim.
It was then Hope chose to produce her moth terrible spell. Kat and I could not see what visions of avarice she worked against the Cambion, but desire and loathing waged across that cruel face as he staggered, stupefied, into the ooze’s embrace. Swiftly, I followed up and was upon him, putting my axe to his wings, his legs, to prevent his escape from the spell and from the grim fate beyond that chaotic portal. Transparent pseudopods lashed out from the thrashing mess to grapple him, seeking out his wounds and rent flesh. His arms were seized, pulled back, his sword useless.
Panic flashed across his monstrous face and for a breath he looked at me with what must have been the same fear I had looked up at him so many time. Then he attempted to wrench himself from the voracious ooze that was swallowing alive. With a bestial roar, he shook of Hope’s illusions and battered aside my axe, pulling forward, but he could not do all this and avoid Kat’s descending mace, blazing with the righteous brand of Moradin to end his life. The ooze began to drawn in his corpse, but even as we watched it was consumed first in Kat’s sacred fire.
I breathed out a long sigh, putting to rest all those lives the Cambion had extinguished, and let the axe and shield I had inherited from myself drop. Kat offered quiet thanks to her god, and Hope descended the steps, carefully picking her path around the churning ooze. She froze, staring upwards, her mouth open. Unwilling but unable to restrain the morbid fascination that gripped me, I turned to follow her gaze.
Hanging, not quite flying, but rather suspended as if stood upon different earth, in the too still too quiet night of Sigil, she was there. It was too dark to make out anything beyond the outline of her robe, her magnificent halo of blades, but I know that if I could have seen her face it would bear that impassive gaze that should never fix on you, those eyes that saw all within her city. The world turned, but we did not turn with it.
I leave this writing for you, for I. I have eked out my life in this maze, the maze that was made for me, for I don’t know how long now. Of Kat and Hope, I have no knowledge of their fates, whether they were defiant or fearful or even if they escaped their cages. I leave this record so that you might know my fate, your fate, how it is you will come to be born into this bounded little world when I should die and finally that you know you must find a path out from here. There are other worlds than this, and perhaps one hold the answer I see, that you will seek, of how we came to be.
What follows is a short story write-up of a one-off adventure DM'd by my younger brother for my birthday, inspired by the PC game Planescape: Torment. In this game, I took the role of the Nameless (a Revenant Fighter), my partner plays Kat (a human Cleric) and our friend Hope (Tiefling Wizard). The write up is entirely in prose format, but all events occurred at the table. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed playing and composing into a story. Thanks go to my brother for running the game, and the others for playing and putting up my idiosyncratic style. Without further ado, the story.
Planescape:Torment
I awoke on a trolley slab being pushed by some animate dead towards a furnace composed of planar portals opened to a churning ocean of fire. I had, and have, no recollection of how I came to be there. As I pulled my consciousness from the obliviate abyss over which it had hung, there came an arcane flash and a spill of chaotic energy as doorways to other worlds disgorged their passengers – or rather abductees – into this chamber.
The animate porters rose to ensorcelled fury at this intrusion, the collars on their necks, simple things marked only by the symbols of the keepers of this place the Dustmen, shifting from dull grey to vivid, angry crimson. The two travellers, sensing danger all too familiarly present for them, lashed out. The first to act was the tiefling wizardess. Raised by goblins and raised to serve their grim god Bane on the endless battlefields of his contested dominion, Hope – perhaps so named out of dark irony by her adoptive family – was a master of fear, and of fire. Raising an orb chained to her wrist, she summoned up roiling sheets of flame to consume the mass of rotting hulks that swarmed her. Kat, a human worshipper of the Stone God Moradin, held her symbol aloft and invoked his aid, blasting the dead horde with holy radiance. We three were all adrift from our heritage, I would learn, born – or reborn, in my case – amidst strange faces unlike our own.
Such philosophical ramblings were beyond me at this point, however, as I was beset by fragmentary recollections. A chasm. A flaming sword. A man’s face twisted in fear. A smile full of sharpened teeth, the only thing visible in the dark. I have come to know these snatches as images from past lives, but freshly resurrected into a battlefield I had no way of knowing this. Instead, I thrashed about wildly with the axe that had been place upon my bier, blindly cleaving the head from my berserk porter. And when I saw that smile flash in my mind’s eye, I took up my shield with its symbol so old and cowered behind it, whimpering like a child. Was that smile death that waited for me beyond whatever power had recalled me to life? The fear of it gripped me.
The flash of magic and thunder of arms recalled me to my senses. I was armed and accoutred as a warrior, and I would not shirk my place, nor the duty I felt towards the pair I took to be my rescuers. They had already cleared much of the dross by the time I gained my feet, but with ready axe and shield I ploughed forward, the vitality of this new life quick in my veins. The only exit from this room other than the fire’s embrace was a sturdy, grim door flanked by two of the undead. Unlike their fellows, some of life’s vigour yet clung to them. With eyes opened by death, I assayed them as the greater foe and lay into them with fierce blows. The blade of my axe flashed violet, and the haft under my touch glowed hot and cold, but what pain it sent me it doubled unto my enemy. My fresh birth lent me great heart, so I cared not for my hurts so long as it injured me foe.
As I held the gate, my boon companions finished the lesser foes. Kat came to my side with her great battle star and prayers for Moradin’s guidance, while Hope lashed out with tongues of fire and tormenting whispers that tugged at the vestigial minds, terrorising them with the fragments of the life they once held. From beyond the doors thundered an ominous rumbling, the herald of some looming, doomful presence. We redoubled our efforts and with a triumphant strike we felled one of the zombies. In death is struck out at us one last time, the necromancy within it igniting and showering us with its rotten viscera. My sturdy shield proved a true ally, shielding me from the blast.
And not a moment too soon! The roaring hulk made its appearance. The doors buckled and burst before its rotten bulk, revealing a slobbering composite beast stitched together from putrefied giant corpses. In the grip of the battle I raised my shield and charged the brute, ignoring the fists of the lesser animate as they bounced ineffectually from my bulwark. I was confident my allies could finish it while I held off this new threat. They were more than equal to the task and so sudden was their slaying that I had no time to raise my shield, and I was left blinded by the shuddering necrotic eruption of the reslain corpse. I staggered in a feint, just able to make out the shapes of my friends and foe about me. Instincts I did not know I possessed kept me in the fray with a savage blow to dissuade the monster as it tried to assault Kat. My axe blade ignited a bane placed upon it by the cleric, and it flashed with radiance. As my eyes cleared of the filth of the dead, the monster slumped forward, broken by the assault, but as I watched a second zombie began to crawl forth from its broken chest. I was struck by the sickening thought of how this death-birth recalled my own, but fortunately my allies were hardened to the task. Before this new threat could tear itself free, it found itself beneath hammer and flame.
The fight was done. My allies had questions for me, which they asked as they recovered their breath. Their eyes were suspicious, questioning. They wanted to know how I had brought them here. We stood in the wreckage of our battle, the shattered cadavers stinking in the wretched heat pulsing from the portal-furnaces. Only Kat felt the flame, Hope’s infernal heritage and my withered flesh proof against the heat. I had no answers, only questions of my own. I shared what little I knew, and they gave me their own stories. I had taken their appearance not as serendipity but rather a rescue attempt. They held no clue to the identity that was obscured from me and our meeting was no more than Fate’s vague hand.
Trusting to that heedless force’s agency, we ventured past the broken doorway through which the hideous hulk had shambled. Beyond was a poorly illuminated corridor. Here and there the walls were blemished and stained with scraped flesh and ichor, traces of the passage of our dispatched foe. Without other clue to our best course, we followed this spoor. Yet as we walked those lonely halls I found myself drawing ahead, pulled along by a thread of emerging memory, spiralling up from below he horizon of my conscious mind, a chthonic extrusion every bit as divorced from my life as those animates had been from theirs, yet just the same these foreign thoughts were as part of me as the bones beneath my flesh. I saw figures hidden by dark robes and knew their cowled faces were those of my brothers and sisters in dissolution. I followed their illusory tread, no longer seeing this life but rather looking out into another through eyes that were and were not my own.
We came to another door and I pushed it aside to open upon the top of a stairwell. It was well made of some dark material, its name already slipping from my mind as soon as I grasped it. The elegantly simple lines of it, the cloaked figures walking in pairs in sedate contemplation of the void. It was then I knew we walked the halls of the Mortuary. I shivered at this revelation, and I dimly assumed the cries of my comrades were signal of the same understanding in them, but I saw as if through a body of water Kat readying her mace and rushing forward at Dustmen who I had taken to be phantoms, their hoods already thrown back, faces twisted under Hope’s psychic anguishes. The inhabitants of the complex were shocked by our emergence from whence only the dead dwelled, but recovered quickly for it.
I was too consumed in my introspective reverie to respond in timely fashion, but the initial exchanges of the melee were a series of feints and false moves as we tested one another’s defences. Hope scored the first decisive blow, twisting those horrors that lurk nestled in the recesses of the mind to spring forth, causing one of the robed fanatics to hurl himself over the balcony, grappling with a foe only he saw. The careful training of those who waited for death took over and saved him from a broken neck, but fists and feet would avail him nothing from there. However, two others of the cult revealed themselves as magi, flinging bolts of black lightning and spheres of concussive force at our position. Kat and I staggered forward and down the steps to try and engage them, while Hope maintained her precarious vantage point to twist the foe with shadow and flame.
Kat took the lead, trying to force one of the cultists back with a bullish shove, sending him tumbling. I followed, building my strength with savage blows. Hope continued her bedevilling assault, clearing the way for us by sending my opponent screaming over the edge. By now I was recovered from the worst of the concussive assault of the magi and thundered forward into one of them with the force of a rampaging beast. The pugilists were rushing to try and regain the stairway. One of the magic called out, summoning or shaping a concentrated coil of unbeing to serve. The tentacle writhed and wrapped about me, trying to feast on what cold vitality stirred in my limbs. Kat made her move. With a shout and upraised hammer, she called down the anger of her god, bringing his wrath against the nihilists. As the radiant arms of heaven slammed down amongst them, the cleric was encircled by bands of translucent iron. I fought off the agonised conjuration but, viper quick, it raced from my reach to attack Hope, who was still trading spells with and suffering the worst of the magi. Undaunted, she rained fire down amongst her foes, taunting them with distracting lights as she drew from a deep reservoir of focus.
Kat and I advanced, slamming our weapons in unison into one of the magi, who crumpled under our blows. Kat passed Moradin’s protective bands to Hope, warding her against the tenebrous extrusion trying to crush her. Two more went over the balcony, one from spell and one from my shield. As I pummelled a foe trying to slip past, Kat launched herself at the last magi, the one trying to crush Hope. With a prayer she descended upon him as an avenging angel, crushing the wizard and breaking his magic.
We took a moment to collect ourselves, and formulate a plan. It was likely that there were more faction members nearby, and we could not be certain when they might come looking for their comrades. We could try force or guile to escape the Mortuary. All three of us swiftly concluded that deception was our best option against uncertain numbers. We stripped the bodies – the robes were bloody, but the strange fabric seemed to drink in the humour, leaving the colour unchanged – and dumped them at the top of the stairs through the doorway. Our rough disguise complete, we walked on and into the Mortuary proper.
We moved quickly at first through the winding passages and twisted, vaulted halls, the hems of our robes brushing aside the dust of long years, detritus of little disturbed eternity that languished behind us and would no doubt linger long after our passage. As we made our careful procession our paths met those of other Dustmen. Wrapped in solipsistic contemplation unbecoming of their philosophy, they paid us little mind and, at first, those that did stop to question us Kat disarmed with easy charm, evening managing to wheedle directions from the heart of the complex. In places there were doors barred to us by old and weary magic, at which point Hope would draw forth a battered codex and speak words of power to unweave the ancient spells. All this I saw, but always memories of this place clouded my vision. I had come before, and many times, and not always as guest of brother. I attempted to perform the same delicate system of pass phrases and incantations I knew would open the doorways, but my recollection was imperfect and soon drew the attention of the faction. They crowded about us and Kat and Hope attempted to diffuse the mob but the pain of memory wracked my head, and there was no dispelling the look of my face, my flesh. As they pressed in on us, I felt myself borne away on a tide of chaotic memory, chattering conflicting fragments of too many live trying to swamp me, pull me under into a morass of former selves. As I was so lost in mind, we were dragged through the Mortuary to be held in a blank room without windows or light. We were kept and questioned then by a dark, cold presence that chilled me through the blanketing haze of my mind. I do not recall what my accomplices told this presence, how long it questioned us, or what truths or lies were revealed to or by that chill thing but eventually we were allowed to go, ejected into the night.
Outside, the tortured streets of the hive seethed breathed gasped wept their thousand thousand petty lives that guttered and died as we collected ourselves. The currents of my mind threatened to once more pull me under but I steadied myself from the delicious hints of a past that swam before me, forcing myself into the now, to perceive only what was there, not phantasms of the parted. Overhead the city swung in its lazy orbit, the torus encircling the currently starry-night dim weirdness of the other-light that lit Sigil. Something twisted in the gloom before us and I risked plucking a useful memory from the churning soup I held at bay through force of will. The ground ahead of us was pocked and marred by coiling oozes, invisible to the untrained eye, a hazardous trip to a place of churning squamous horror. From her quick intake of breath I knew Hope saw as I did. I muttered a quick warning to Kat, who lacked the skill to see but took my meaning, but the words died softly upon my lips.
A flame kindled in the dark, climbing up the length of a blade, illuminating a dark, muscular silhouette. Powerful witched stretched out behind it, and infernal fire to match the sword ignited in its eyes. But it was the wicked smile that seized me, those narrow sharp fangs behind curling cruel lips. I shook myself, fighting away a hundred deaths, a thousand times that hateful smile had leered over me as I lay bleeding.
“I see you have returned to life once more. This time, perhaps, you will think better of it.”
I did not succumb to the fear and horror born out of all my death at the Cambion’s blade and talons, nor let memory sweep me away and down into blissful darkness as I had before. My shield up and my axe bare, a foreign name to my experience spilled from my mouth and I leapt forward and to the left, around the bubbling murk of ooze and the burning blade of my foe. Kat took the right flank and we met in the middle, crashing against the Cambion. His skill was supernatural, and we traded ineffectual blows, the column of volcanic steel in his grip dancing back and forward to strike and parry. With a simultaneous curse and blessing, Kat transformed my axe into a weapon of the gods setting it alight with righteous fire and placed a doom upon the hell-reaver. The Cambion set about with fierce blows, but our assault was unbroken. From her perch on the mortuary steps Hope bedevilled the foes mind while Kat and I hammered him step by bloody step back towards the ooze. He tried a desperate gamble to launch himself into the air, but my axe rose and put paid to that, slashing his wings and bringing him to ground, spoiling his escape and his aim.
It was then Hope chose to produce her moth terrible spell. Kat and I could not see what visions of avarice she worked against the Cambion, but desire and loathing waged across that cruel face as he staggered, stupefied, into the ooze’s embrace. Swiftly, I followed up and was upon him, putting my axe to his wings, his legs, to prevent his escape from the spell and from the grim fate beyond that chaotic portal. Transparent pseudopods lashed out from the thrashing mess to grapple him, seeking out his wounds and rent flesh. His arms were seized, pulled back, his sword useless.
Panic flashed across his monstrous face and for a breath he looked at me with what must have been the same fear I had looked up at him so many time. Then he attempted to wrench himself from the voracious ooze that was swallowing alive. With a bestial roar, he shook of Hope’s illusions and battered aside my axe, pulling forward, but he could not do all this and avoid Kat’s descending mace, blazing with the righteous brand of Moradin to end his life. The ooze began to drawn in his corpse, but even as we watched it was consumed first in Kat’s sacred fire.
I breathed out a long sigh, putting to rest all those lives the Cambion had extinguished, and let the axe and shield I had inherited from myself drop. Kat offered quiet thanks to her god, and Hope descended the steps, carefully picking her path around the churning ooze. She froze, staring upwards, her mouth open. Unwilling but unable to restrain the morbid fascination that gripped me, I turned to follow her gaze.
Hanging, not quite flying, but rather suspended as if stood upon different earth, in the too still too quiet night of Sigil, she was there. It was too dark to make out anything beyond the outline of her robe, her magnificent halo of blades, but I know that if I could have seen her face it would bear that impassive gaze that should never fix on you, those eyes that saw all within her city. The world turned, but we did not turn with it.
I leave this writing for you, for I. I have eked out my life in this maze, the maze that was made for me, for I don’t know how long now. Of Kat and Hope, I have no knowledge of their fates, whether they were defiant or fearful or even if they escaped their cages. I leave this record so that you might know my fate, your fate, how it is you will come to be born into this bounded little world when I should die and finally that you know you must find a path out from here. There are other worlds than this, and perhaps one hold the answer I see, that you will seek, of how we came to be.
