Shemeska
Adventurer
Previously:
She wasn’t sure how long she’d lay there in the darkness, chained to the wall, periodically fed starvation rations, and in turn periodically fed upon by the wriggling, newborn mimic-moon that the Oinoloth had ripped free of its mother and stolen away.
She was a means to an end, and once the mimic-moon had tasted of her, the ‘loths had virtually ignored her, except of course, for their master the Oinoloth. He had never forgotten about her there in the darkness, and his indoctrination of the wriggling thing he treated like a child of his own, he made sure that she heard all of it and understood that somehow the absence of Justice for his crime, it was her failure.
“Obedience brings comfort.” The whispers came, whispering as much into her mind as into the air as the Oinoloth or a spell aping his voice called out like some abusive education of his pet.
“You will learn to listen, or you will suffer.”
“Do as you are told, and I will be proud, I your Father will be proud.” The Oinoloth had sat on the edge of the great stone basin and spoken down to his pet abomination, and she’d witnessed his personal education of it, in those rare moments that she was taken out of the cell and mockingly allowed to walk in the ‘sun’ of that pocket plane wrought of the Waste
She wasn’t certain if he was talking always to the mimic-moon or the ‘loths that whimpered in his presence and hearkened to his every word. He cared as much for the mimic as he did for them, which was to say, not at all: tools, all of them.
Other times, the Oinoloth had seemingly spoken across the void between the planes, whispering into the aching, wounded ears of Nimicri herself, intentionally again so that Nilesia could hear it mocking a suffering mother.
“It would not be this way had you given to me what I requested.” The Oinoloth had whispered into the darkness, his telepathic whispers reaching Nimicri herself, unable to stop his mockery. “You have only yourself to blame for your misery. Admit your sins and beg for my forgiveness and in my infinite grace I will ease your torment. Perhaps I will allow you to see her. She is beautiful, much like you. And she is mine. Atone or you will never know her.”
The Oinoloth himself was barely visible in the gloom, his form bleeding over into the shadows, and at the best of times all that she could see were his albino eyes and his gleaming white fangs somehow glowing like a moon of their own, drifting in the dark.
“She learns well. She listens. Beg and she will be spared the agony of your recalcitrance.”
And so Nilesia heard, again and again. It was worse when the copies of her were there, their very presence and their near worship of the Oinoloth sickening her and leading to violent, screaming outbursts… to which they only laughed at her. And it wasn’t only the Oinoloth who mocked her. Once, in the darkness, assuming that she hadn’t gone entirely mad, a massive creature, spindly and sickly had crouched their next to her, its luminous, moon-like eyes turning to her as it sneered. It whispered to her, told her that it was indeed her fault, but one day she might be free, and then she would have her chance to take her revenge. Then she would have her opportunity to serve once again as the living hand of Justice. The Oinoloth had sinned against the multiverse, had sinned against it, the creature that whispered to her in her delusions there in the darkness.
“You have sinned against us.” It whispered, over and over, referring to the Oinoloth, stopping only to pause as it spasmodically coughed and wretched. It turned, it smiled with it leering, sickly caprine head, starving in its countenance, and then it was gone and she was alone again in the darkness, alone and abandoned, a meal for the mimic-moon or for the Waste, one way or the other…
“Justice…Justice… JUSTICE!” She screamed at them, at the multiverse as a whole if it could hear her. “Let me free and I will give it to you. I’ll rip out your throat and feed it to you. You have sinned against me. You have sinned against the multiverse. You have sinned against your brethren. You are irredeemable! They told me so! I will see you fall Vorkannis! If death claims me first, I will punish it as well and return for you!”
For half a minute the group simply stared at Nilesia as she screamed and shouted, uncertain if she was mad and delusional, or simply enraged at her state of isolated imprisonment, still coming to grips as they were with the ex-Factol’s status: alive. The ramifications were huge and even worse, they involved the ‘loths.
“Hurry and release me!” Nilesia shouted, emphatically rattling her bindings.
Clueless and Toras took the lead, both of them drawing their blades and hacking at the enchanted lengths of chain, even as a slow gurgling noise filled the room, emanating from the channels on the other side of the chamber.
“Uh, what the hell is that?” Florian asked, glancing over to the multiple of open-ended pipes in the far wall.
“The Oinoloth’s pet infant mimic-moon.” Nilesia snarled. “It knows that you’re here.”
“Are we about to be fighting a dozen eeeeeevil copies of her?” Nisha asked.
Nilesia narrowed her eyes and glared.
“Ok ok, too soon…” Nisha glanced away from the cold fury playing across the Factol’s face.
“Annnnnd, there!” Toras exclaimed as the final blow from his sword’s pommel finally shattered the link that held the manacle about Nilesia’s right wrist and the last of her chains fell to the floor.
Nilesia’s now free hand immediately went up, her hand open, finger’s wriggling in the air for several moments. When nothing came into her hand she glared and explained, furious that she even had to say anything in words, as if it were to be expected.
“A blade! Now!” She demanded.
Fyrehowl and Clueless stared back at her.
“You’re welcome…” Toras muttered, stepping in front of Florian as the cleric rolled her eyes.
No, the Factol hadn’t changed in the slightest from when they’d first met her.
“Guys, that gurgling is getting louder!” Tristol warned, glancing over towards the wall and its pipe openings, his ears perked and swiveled to the noise that heralded the imminent arrival of Nimicri’s child.
In Tristol’s hand, the piece of Nimicri’s umbilicus to her child that the mimic moon had given them began to twitch, shifting from undefined protoplasm to broken cobblestone to decorative lamp head and back to nearly liquid goo. It sensed the approaching child it had once supped into existence, feeding piecemeal on the spilt blood of travelers to the markets of its mother.
“Father will make you suffer…” The eerie, gurgling voice emerged from the pipes before it had yet to physically arrive.
“Sh*t sh*t sh*t!” Toras panicked, glancing from the pipes back to his companions, “How are we going to do this? It’s been f*cking brainwashed!”
Nilesia for her part, had no designs on repatriation and reconciliation for the creature that had fed upon her for months. Had it been months? Years? She shook her head, uncertain of the duration of her captivity. Full of righteous fury, she was already mouthing the words to spells no longer prepared in her mind, her fingers reaching for spell components at her waist she no longer possessed.
“Factol!” Tristol harshly whispered to her, immediately noticing the virility of the spells she was picking, even if she lacked the ability to actual finish them at the moment, “We didn’t come here to kill it!”
Nilesia blinked and turned to face the wizard, her glare staggeringly intense.
“I’m pretty sure it’s about to try and kill us!” Florian shouted as the sound of thick, sludge-like liquid pouring through the pipes grew louder by the moment.
“Father will reward me…” The infant mimic-moon’s alien, gurgling voice rattled through the pipes.
“We’re not killing it!” Toras shouted right back.
That was when she realized something and she stopped her reflexive casting.
Confusion washed over Nilesia’s expression, “You didn’t come here for me, did you?”
Several of them stared back at her awkwardly.
“We didn’t have a clue that you were even alive, much less come here for you.” Tristol explained.
“That was a happy little extra surprise!” Nisha chipped in, grinning as she peeked at the Factol from behind Tristol.
“Nimicri begged us to rescue her stolen child.” Tristol explained, leaving out the fact that they’d been led to Nimicri by a trail of metaphorical breadcrumbs set down for them by the Altraloth Taba.
“And rescue it is exactly what we’re going to do!” Toras said, his eyes momentarily burning with as much intensity as Nilesia’s.
“Eat you… make little puppets of you for Father…” The voice was staggeringly close and the pipe openings themselves began to physically rattle. It would be there, emerging, in moments.
The Factol’s face contorted at the mention of the mimic-moon making puppets for the Oinoloth, the precise thing it had done to her. Her mind swirled with her desires for revenge, for retribution against her torturer, but it was at odds with her burgeoning knowledge that the mimic she wanted to slaughter was itself a victim. Cosmic Justice sought two things, but it first demanded a stolen child be returned. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, suppressing tears of frustrated rage. Then and only then could she then seek revenge, and the revenge would not be against the mimic, but at its abusive captor and master the Oinoloth.
“You will never leave this place!” The infant mimic-moon screamed as it finally arrived, a dozen iridescent black fountains spraying out from the pipes and immediately flowing together mid-air and merging, forming into an enormous, grotesque mockery of a leering, jagged maw. Moments after forming, its liquid teeth shuddered and solidified into ivory white fangs, clearly modeling itself upon the Oinoloth’s jackal’s smile.
But what could have been a terrible and bloody battle never occurred.
In an instant, the chunk of protoplasm in Tristol’s hand suddenly sprung into action, physically leaping free of his grasp and hurtling through the air towards the oncoming semi-solid mass the moment it emerged from the pipes. The group could only watch, their hands already reaching for blades or spell components as that separated portion of Nimicri itself or its umbilicus once connected to its child connected with its wayward child.
It entered with a dull, heavy splash, like a large stone dropped awkwardly into a lake, the ripples reverberating about the monstrous grin that faced them in mid-air.
“We will…” The infant mimic-moon abruptly stopped, its speech trailing off… “Mother?”
The sludge-like mass that emerged from the pipes hung there, frozen in place, quivering… remembering. It suddenly recalled everything that had been taken from it, remembering all that had been stripped from it during its abduction and its captivity, during its abuse, during its torture and brainwashing from the yugoloths and by the Oinoloth himself. But it wasn’t alone. Mother was still out there. Mother still loved it. Her voice was distant but it could hear her, and her voice said one thing: You are loved. Come home.
Tristol didn’t need any more of an invitation and moments later he reached out to gently touch one of the mimic-moon’s suddenly lethargic extrusions, focus his mind upon the void between Nimicri and Chamada, and cast.
And with that, they, the Oinoloth’s prisoner Nilesia, and his pet mimic-moon were gone in the sudden flicker flash of Tristol’s planeshift. Only a short time later and their lives would have taken a dramatically different and much more painful turn.
With an eruption of darkness upon the face of the pocket realm he’d woven into the fabric of the Waste, Vorkannis the Ebon appeared, not embodied in one of his ultroloth puppets, nor a projected illusion, nor an astral color pool duplicate, but physically, in the flesh.
The Oinoloth’s pink, albino eyes glanced at the stone basin that had, moments before, held the bulk of his prize, seeing only the empty stone and a slick, greasy residue. Tension radiated through every muscle in his frame, his eyes widened, and his black lips peeled back to reveal pink gums and ivory white fangs as a low snarl began to build in the back of his throat.
Spinning one direction and then the other, Vorkannis surveyed the outpost, looking for survivors and looking for answers. Around him, the landscape was littered with the corpses of a dozen mezzoloths and several other lesser yugoloths he’d placed there, never expecting to have to physically defend it from intrusion.
And with that, the Oinoloth SCREAMED. The dusty, ashen soil of the Waste danced a dozen feet around him, animated by his abject fury as he raised his hands in the air and clenched and relaxed his fists, his claws flexing in and out as he looked for answers.
Around him, the surrounding soil bubbled and vitrified with his fury.
To his left, sound drew his gaze as the door to one of the hollow’s buildings cautiously opened and a pair of eyes gazed out, followed by a clawed hand at the door, and then a jackal’s snout emerging a moment before one of the surviving arcanaloths stepped out, their head already bowed, their voice unsteady and shaking.
“My Oinoloth…”
It wasn’t an answer, but it would make the speaker the object of his building, god-like rage.
“Master, we were taken by surprise! I…” Sivtrellius ap Niflheim emerged, trembling, drawing every ounce of courage he could fathom, and made eye contact with his doom.
The moment that the arcanaloth drew the Oinoloth’s gaze it froze in place, a sudden look of abject terror upon its face before it began to scream and corrode, a ghastly, horrific sound emerging from a creature that embodied suffering suddenly learning a level of the same it had little capacity to fathom. The sorcerer stumbled and grasped at nothing in particular as the Oinoloth fixed them in his gaze. Over the next three minutes the arcanaloth’s horrific screams echoed across the hollow as it was sequentially demoted into each and every caste it had ever occupied on its way up from mezzoloth, suffering, screaming, and corroding from one form back into the next until finally it lay there on the ground in the original state in which it had entered existence: a dull black insect-like grub of a twitching, chittering proto-mezzoloth that should have still been forming in the furnaces of Gehenna or the spawning pools deep within the underground marrow of Khin-Oin.
Without a word, the Oinoloth stood over the subject of his rage, raised his bare foot, and stepped upon the screaming creature with a dull wet crunch as his heel extinguished its existence.
“Useless unfit wretch!” Vorkannis snarled, “YOU WERE NEVER WORTHY TO STAND IN MY SHADOW!”
Several more times the Oinoloth screamed in fury, venting his anger within a bubble of his own creation where no other being who would ever leave it would ever hear him, before finally taking a deep breath and settling himself and searching for answers. He snapped his fingers, sifting through the memories of each and every yugoloth stationed there, both the dead and the few still, for the moment, living and in hiding, horrified of suffering the same fate as Sivtrellius. Sifting and searching, the Oinoloth watched the last three hours of memories from each, viewing the hollow from a dozen different perspectives to see what had happened and understand what had gone wrong as it had.
The hollow’s wardings were intact. No Power had assaulted it and wrenched open the seams and intruded. No wizard-king or messianic cleric had divined the location and forcibly gated in with the sacrifice of a hundred-thousand sacrificed or willing souls. No, nothing of the sort. The intruders had simply walked in, slain the lackadaisical defenders, sprung Nilesia from her chains, and left with Nimicri’s whelp.
‘Them,’ he thought to himself, scoffing in disbelief as he immediately recognized them. ‘Shemeska’s once-pet and the others in tow, Shylara’s bane, all of them little nothings nipping at our heels without the slightest understanding of what they intrude upon…’
He snarled, considering an immediate and personal pursuit into Gehenna after them. He reached out his mind once again, beyond the hollow, beyond the Waste, in a capacity he had rarely utilized, and one which made Larsdana’s and later Helekanalaith’s ability to sense use of the Tower Arcane’s library a parlor trick.
Flying high above Gehenna’s second Furnace of Chamada, the leader of one of Nimicri’s yugoloth squadrons in place to blockade the mimic moon of Nimicri blinked and the Oinoloth looked out through his eyes. Zirineth ap Krangath smiled as the wind out of the void blew against his fur, cold and unforgiving, utterly unaware as another looked out through his eyes, felt the same sensations, and sorted through his memories to note the flash of a planeshift alighting near Nimicri’s surface twelve minutes earlier, and then minutes after that the subtle open and close of one of Sigil’s damnable portals on the mimic moon’s surface, something Zirineth himself had not comprehended.
No.
The Oinoloth’s presence departed from Zirineth’s mind and there, back in the hollow, Vorkannis shook his head. There would be no pursuit.
It was too late for that, and had they not already vanished into Sigil and beyond the scope of his immediate and personal reach, it would have served as nothing but a worthless satisfaction for petty revenge. No, the truth behind the blockade of Nimicri would filter out and there was no saving that from occurring. Nilesia’s fate would follow afterwards, but the stories would be so muddled unless the listener saw and heard from her personally, that it would be long in coming for any to piece together even a partial truth of the situation and its meaning.
“It doesn’t matter.” Vorkannis sneered, reaching up with his fingers and slowly pulling out the stitches of the magics that made the hollow its own distinct place, the claws of his left foot tracing a crude, mocking caricature of the Lady of Pain’s face in the dirt that he then stared down at. “Whatever you are, I made my point to you, Your Serenity.” The words were mocking. “I’ve no idea if you can even hear me. Oh, but I hope you can. Truly, I hope you can…”
She wasn’t sure how long she’d lay there in the darkness, chained to the wall, periodically fed starvation rations, and in turn periodically fed upon by the wriggling, newborn mimic-moon that the Oinoloth had ripped free of its mother and stolen away.
She was a means to an end, and once the mimic-moon had tasted of her, the ‘loths had virtually ignored her, except of course, for their master the Oinoloth. He had never forgotten about her there in the darkness, and his indoctrination of the wriggling thing he treated like a child of his own, he made sure that she heard all of it and understood that somehow the absence of Justice for his crime, it was her failure.
“Obedience brings comfort.” The whispers came, whispering as much into her mind as into the air as the Oinoloth or a spell aping his voice called out like some abusive education of his pet.
“You will learn to listen, or you will suffer.”
“Do as you are told, and I will be proud, I your Father will be proud.” The Oinoloth had sat on the edge of the great stone basin and spoken down to his pet abomination, and she’d witnessed his personal education of it, in those rare moments that she was taken out of the cell and mockingly allowed to walk in the ‘sun’ of that pocket plane wrought of the Waste
She wasn’t certain if he was talking always to the mimic-moon or the ‘loths that whimpered in his presence and hearkened to his every word. He cared as much for the mimic as he did for them, which was to say, not at all: tools, all of them.
Other times, the Oinoloth had seemingly spoken across the void between the planes, whispering into the aching, wounded ears of Nimicri herself, intentionally again so that Nilesia could hear it mocking a suffering mother.
“It would not be this way had you given to me what I requested.” The Oinoloth had whispered into the darkness, his telepathic whispers reaching Nimicri herself, unable to stop his mockery. “You have only yourself to blame for your misery. Admit your sins and beg for my forgiveness and in my infinite grace I will ease your torment. Perhaps I will allow you to see her. She is beautiful, much like you. And she is mine. Atone or you will never know her.”
The Oinoloth himself was barely visible in the gloom, his form bleeding over into the shadows, and at the best of times all that she could see were his albino eyes and his gleaming white fangs somehow glowing like a moon of their own, drifting in the dark.
“She learns well. She listens. Beg and she will be spared the agony of your recalcitrance.”
And so Nilesia heard, again and again. It was worse when the copies of her were there, their very presence and their near worship of the Oinoloth sickening her and leading to violent, screaming outbursts… to which they only laughed at her. And it wasn’t only the Oinoloth who mocked her. Once, in the darkness, assuming that she hadn’t gone entirely mad, a massive creature, spindly and sickly had crouched their next to her, its luminous, moon-like eyes turning to her as it sneered. It whispered to her, told her that it was indeed her fault, but one day she might be free, and then she would have her chance to take her revenge. Then she would have her opportunity to serve once again as the living hand of Justice. The Oinoloth had sinned against the multiverse, had sinned against it, the creature that whispered to her in her delusions there in the darkness.
“You have sinned against us.” It whispered, over and over, referring to the Oinoloth, stopping only to pause as it spasmodically coughed and wretched. It turned, it smiled with it leering, sickly caprine head, starving in its countenance, and then it was gone and she was alone again in the darkness, alone and abandoned, a meal for the mimic-moon or for the Waste, one way or the other…
***
“Justice…Justice… JUSTICE!” She screamed at them, at the multiverse as a whole if it could hear her. “Let me free and I will give it to you. I’ll rip out your throat and feed it to you. You have sinned against me. You have sinned against the multiverse. You have sinned against your brethren. You are irredeemable! They told me so! I will see you fall Vorkannis! If death claims me first, I will punish it as well and return for you!”
For half a minute the group simply stared at Nilesia as she screamed and shouted, uncertain if she was mad and delusional, or simply enraged at her state of isolated imprisonment, still coming to grips as they were with the ex-Factol’s status: alive. The ramifications were huge and even worse, they involved the ‘loths.
“Hurry and release me!” Nilesia shouted, emphatically rattling her bindings.
Clueless and Toras took the lead, both of them drawing their blades and hacking at the enchanted lengths of chain, even as a slow gurgling noise filled the room, emanating from the channels on the other side of the chamber.
“Uh, what the hell is that?” Florian asked, glancing over to the multiple of open-ended pipes in the far wall.
“The Oinoloth’s pet infant mimic-moon.” Nilesia snarled. “It knows that you’re here.”
“Are we about to be fighting a dozen eeeeeevil copies of her?” Nisha asked.
Nilesia narrowed her eyes and glared.
“Ok ok, too soon…” Nisha glanced away from the cold fury playing across the Factol’s face.
“Annnnnd, there!” Toras exclaimed as the final blow from his sword’s pommel finally shattered the link that held the manacle about Nilesia’s right wrist and the last of her chains fell to the floor.
Nilesia’s now free hand immediately went up, her hand open, finger’s wriggling in the air for several moments. When nothing came into her hand she glared and explained, furious that she even had to say anything in words, as if it were to be expected.
“A blade! Now!” She demanded.
Fyrehowl and Clueless stared back at her.
“You’re welcome…” Toras muttered, stepping in front of Florian as the cleric rolled her eyes.
No, the Factol hadn’t changed in the slightest from when they’d first met her.
“Guys, that gurgling is getting louder!” Tristol warned, glancing over towards the wall and its pipe openings, his ears perked and swiveled to the noise that heralded the imminent arrival of Nimicri’s child.
In Tristol’s hand, the piece of Nimicri’s umbilicus to her child that the mimic moon had given them began to twitch, shifting from undefined protoplasm to broken cobblestone to decorative lamp head and back to nearly liquid goo. It sensed the approaching child it had once supped into existence, feeding piecemeal on the spilt blood of travelers to the markets of its mother.
“Father will make you suffer…” The eerie, gurgling voice emerged from the pipes before it had yet to physically arrive.
“Sh*t sh*t sh*t!” Toras panicked, glancing from the pipes back to his companions, “How are we going to do this? It’s been f*cking brainwashed!”
Nilesia for her part, had no designs on repatriation and reconciliation for the creature that had fed upon her for months. Had it been months? Years? She shook her head, uncertain of the duration of her captivity. Full of righteous fury, she was already mouthing the words to spells no longer prepared in her mind, her fingers reaching for spell components at her waist she no longer possessed.
“Factol!” Tristol harshly whispered to her, immediately noticing the virility of the spells she was picking, even if she lacked the ability to actual finish them at the moment, “We didn’t come here to kill it!”
Nilesia blinked and turned to face the wizard, her glare staggeringly intense.
“I’m pretty sure it’s about to try and kill us!” Florian shouted as the sound of thick, sludge-like liquid pouring through the pipes grew louder by the moment.
“Father will reward me…” The infant mimic-moon’s alien, gurgling voice rattled through the pipes.
“We’re not killing it!” Toras shouted right back.
That was when she realized something and she stopped her reflexive casting.
Confusion washed over Nilesia’s expression, “You didn’t come here for me, did you?”
Several of them stared back at her awkwardly.
“We didn’t have a clue that you were even alive, much less come here for you.” Tristol explained.
“That was a happy little extra surprise!” Nisha chipped in, grinning as she peeked at the Factol from behind Tristol.
“Nimicri begged us to rescue her stolen child.” Tristol explained, leaving out the fact that they’d been led to Nimicri by a trail of metaphorical breadcrumbs set down for them by the Altraloth Taba.
“And rescue it is exactly what we’re going to do!” Toras said, his eyes momentarily burning with as much intensity as Nilesia’s.
“Eat you… make little puppets of you for Father…” The voice was staggeringly close and the pipe openings themselves began to physically rattle. It would be there, emerging, in moments.
The Factol’s face contorted at the mention of the mimic-moon making puppets for the Oinoloth, the precise thing it had done to her. Her mind swirled with her desires for revenge, for retribution against her torturer, but it was at odds with her burgeoning knowledge that the mimic she wanted to slaughter was itself a victim. Cosmic Justice sought two things, but it first demanded a stolen child be returned. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, suppressing tears of frustrated rage. Then and only then could she then seek revenge, and the revenge would not be against the mimic, but at its abusive captor and master the Oinoloth.
“You will never leave this place!” The infant mimic-moon screamed as it finally arrived, a dozen iridescent black fountains spraying out from the pipes and immediately flowing together mid-air and merging, forming into an enormous, grotesque mockery of a leering, jagged maw. Moments after forming, its liquid teeth shuddered and solidified into ivory white fangs, clearly modeling itself upon the Oinoloth’s jackal’s smile.
But what could have been a terrible and bloody battle never occurred.
In an instant, the chunk of protoplasm in Tristol’s hand suddenly sprung into action, physically leaping free of his grasp and hurtling through the air towards the oncoming semi-solid mass the moment it emerged from the pipes. The group could only watch, their hands already reaching for blades or spell components as that separated portion of Nimicri itself or its umbilicus once connected to its child connected with its wayward child.
It entered with a dull, heavy splash, like a large stone dropped awkwardly into a lake, the ripples reverberating about the monstrous grin that faced them in mid-air.
“We will…” The infant mimic-moon abruptly stopped, its speech trailing off… “Mother?”
The sludge-like mass that emerged from the pipes hung there, frozen in place, quivering… remembering. It suddenly recalled everything that had been taken from it, remembering all that had been stripped from it during its abduction and its captivity, during its abuse, during its torture and brainwashing from the yugoloths and by the Oinoloth himself. But it wasn’t alone. Mother was still out there. Mother still loved it. Her voice was distant but it could hear her, and her voice said one thing: You are loved. Come home.
Tristol didn’t need any more of an invitation and moments later he reached out to gently touch one of the mimic-moon’s suddenly lethargic extrusions, focus his mind upon the void between Nimicri and Chamada, and cast.
And with that, they, the Oinoloth’s prisoner Nilesia, and his pet mimic-moon were gone in the sudden flicker flash of Tristol’s planeshift. Only a short time later and their lives would have taken a dramatically different and much more painful turn.
****
With an eruption of darkness upon the face of the pocket realm he’d woven into the fabric of the Waste, Vorkannis the Ebon appeared, not embodied in one of his ultroloth puppets, nor a projected illusion, nor an astral color pool duplicate, but physically, in the flesh.
The Oinoloth’s pink, albino eyes glanced at the stone basin that had, moments before, held the bulk of his prize, seeing only the empty stone and a slick, greasy residue. Tension radiated through every muscle in his frame, his eyes widened, and his black lips peeled back to reveal pink gums and ivory white fangs as a low snarl began to build in the back of his throat.
Spinning one direction and then the other, Vorkannis surveyed the outpost, looking for survivors and looking for answers. Around him, the landscape was littered with the corpses of a dozen mezzoloths and several other lesser yugoloths he’d placed there, never expecting to have to physically defend it from intrusion.
And with that, the Oinoloth SCREAMED. The dusty, ashen soil of the Waste danced a dozen feet around him, animated by his abject fury as he raised his hands in the air and clenched and relaxed his fists, his claws flexing in and out as he looked for answers.
Around him, the surrounding soil bubbled and vitrified with his fury.
To his left, sound drew his gaze as the door to one of the hollow’s buildings cautiously opened and a pair of eyes gazed out, followed by a clawed hand at the door, and then a jackal’s snout emerging a moment before one of the surviving arcanaloths stepped out, their head already bowed, their voice unsteady and shaking.
“My Oinoloth…”
It wasn’t an answer, but it would make the speaker the object of his building, god-like rage.
“Master, we were taken by surprise! I…” Sivtrellius ap Niflheim emerged, trembling, drawing every ounce of courage he could fathom, and made eye contact with his doom.
The moment that the arcanaloth drew the Oinoloth’s gaze it froze in place, a sudden look of abject terror upon its face before it began to scream and corrode, a ghastly, horrific sound emerging from a creature that embodied suffering suddenly learning a level of the same it had little capacity to fathom. The sorcerer stumbled and grasped at nothing in particular as the Oinoloth fixed them in his gaze. Over the next three minutes the arcanaloth’s horrific screams echoed across the hollow as it was sequentially demoted into each and every caste it had ever occupied on its way up from mezzoloth, suffering, screaming, and corroding from one form back into the next until finally it lay there on the ground in the original state in which it had entered existence: a dull black insect-like grub of a twitching, chittering proto-mezzoloth that should have still been forming in the furnaces of Gehenna or the spawning pools deep within the underground marrow of Khin-Oin.
Without a word, the Oinoloth stood over the subject of his rage, raised his bare foot, and stepped upon the screaming creature with a dull wet crunch as his heel extinguished its existence.
“Useless unfit wretch!” Vorkannis snarled, “YOU WERE NEVER WORTHY TO STAND IN MY SHADOW!”
Several more times the Oinoloth screamed in fury, venting his anger within a bubble of his own creation where no other being who would ever leave it would ever hear him, before finally taking a deep breath and settling himself and searching for answers. He snapped his fingers, sifting through the memories of each and every yugoloth stationed there, both the dead and the few still, for the moment, living and in hiding, horrified of suffering the same fate as Sivtrellius. Sifting and searching, the Oinoloth watched the last three hours of memories from each, viewing the hollow from a dozen different perspectives to see what had happened and understand what had gone wrong as it had.
The hollow’s wardings were intact. No Power had assaulted it and wrenched open the seams and intruded. No wizard-king or messianic cleric had divined the location and forcibly gated in with the sacrifice of a hundred-thousand sacrificed or willing souls. No, nothing of the sort. The intruders had simply walked in, slain the lackadaisical defenders, sprung Nilesia from her chains, and left with Nimicri’s whelp.
‘Them,’ he thought to himself, scoffing in disbelief as he immediately recognized them. ‘Shemeska’s once-pet and the others in tow, Shylara’s bane, all of them little nothings nipping at our heels without the slightest understanding of what they intrude upon…’
He snarled, considering an immediate and personal pursuit into Gehenna after them. He reached out his mind once again, beyond the hollow, beyond the Waste, in a capacity he had rarely utilized, and one which made Larsdana’s and later Helekanalaith’s ability to sense use of the Tower Arcane’s library a parlor trick.
Flying high above Gehenna’s second Furnace of Chamada, the leader of one of Nimicri’s yugoloth squadrons in place to blockade the mimic moon of Nimicri blinked and the Oinoloth looked out through his eyes. Zirineth ap Krangath smiled as the wind out of the void blew against his fur, cold and unforgiving, utterly unaware as another looked out through his eyes, felt the same sensations, and sorted through his memories to note the flash of a planeshift alighting near Nimicri’s surface twelve minutes earlier, and then minutes after that the subtle open and close of one of Sigil’s damnable portals on the mimic moon’s surface, something Zirineth himself had not comprehended.
No.
The Oinoloth’s presence departed from Zirineth’s mind and there, back in the hollow, Vorkannis shook his head. There would be no pursuit.
It was too late for that, and had they not already vanished into Sigil and beyond the scope of his immediate and personal reach, it would have served as nothing but a worthless satisfaction for petty revenge. No, the truth behind the blockade of Nimicri would filter out and there was no saving that from occurring. Nilesia’s fate would follow afterwards, but the stories would be so muddled unless the listener saw and heard from her personally, that it would be long in coming for any to piece together even a partial truth of the situation and its meaning.
“It doesn’t matter.” Vorkannis sneered, reaching up with his fingers and slowly pulling out the stitches of the magics that made the hollow its own distinct place, the claws of his left foot tracing a crude, mocking caricature of the Lady of Pain’s face in the dirt that he then stared down at. “Whatever you are, I made my point to you, Your Serenity.” The words were mocking. “I’ve no idea if you can even hear me. Oh, but I hope you can. Truly, I hope you can…”
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