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Story Hour
Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
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<blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 6275864" data-attributes="member: 11697"><p>It began as a flash of swift and searing white light from the east, in the direction of the Cathedral of the Chained God. Then, like the thunder in the aftermath of a bolt of lightning reaching skyward, they heard the sound itself. It washed over them like a wave, profound and wrathful, but then the strangest thing happened as they felt a swift breeze blowing not away from the sound, but towards it.</p><p></p><p>"What in Andros' name was that?" Toras exclaimed.</p><p></p><p>"That sounded like a scream." Florian looked at the horizon with unease. "Or maybe less a scream than a roar?"</p><p></p><p>Clueless nodded in agreement, "I haven't heard anything like that since the 'loths tamed the Mother of Serpents."</p><p></p><p>Fyrehowl scowled at the mention of the 'loths, and the mention of the Oinoloth's chained beast elicited a snarl. "Let's not even bring them into this. But it was neither. That was an explosion."</p><p></p><p>"That rush of air." Tristol nodded at the lupinal. "If the gautiere deity was sealed somewhere, I think we just heard the door being forced open."</p><p></p><p>Collectively they paused and looked at one another. Leobtav could not be allowed to do what he wished, whatever in fact that was. They had to hurry.</p><p></p><p>"We should get moving." Florian rubbed her holy symbol of Tempus like a gilded worry-stone, but then she smiled. "Otherwise the battle might be over before we get there, and we can't have that."</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">****</p><p></p><p></p><p>Making their way through the shifting, unmappable terrain of the Hinterlands, for the next four hours, silence reigned. The sounds of battle faded and where the horizon had burned and flashed, now it smoldered with what few fires remained in the aftermath. But as they approached the site of the battles they had heard, the site that Leobtav had spent years searching for, the Cathedral of the Chained God, they would find that not all was silent in Leobtav's wake.</p><p></p><p>"We should probably stop flying and do this on foot." Clueless remarked. "We won't have any cover up here."</p><p></p><p>"But flying is fun!" Nisha put her arms out, flapping them twice and then pantomiming a dragon breathing flame on some hapless village. "Besides I..." The tiefling's eyes crossed and her face wrinkled as a smell drifted across her nose, carried by the wind. She spat out a burst of Xaos-speak and shook her head, "Ok, yeah I'm fine with landing and going on hoof, foot, whatever. The smell of death on the winds says we should land."</p><p></p><p>The wind blew quicker, filling the air with the reek of death, suggesting a recent and obscene death toll only miles away now. Though it would slow them down in their pursuit, the oppressive smell was enough to force them to land and walk the remaining distance. </p><p></p><p>They were silent for the next two miles, noting that the landscape was trampled by the passage of thousands of feet, marked by the footprints of boots and the clawed feet of the rilmanis' mounts as well. They had come across battles between the rilmani and Leobtav already, but the sheer number of individuals that had passed this way suggested that those battles had been mere skirmishes compared to what loomed ahead.</p><p></p><p>"Can you feel that?" Fyrehowl shivered and her hackles rose.</p><p></p><p>"Feel what?" Florian glanced back at the lupinal.</p><p></p><p>"The air feels, I dunno... heavy." She shrugged and tried to shrug off the disquieting sensation she felt as they approached the rise of a tall natural hill, earthwork, or -given its size- the lip of an eroded crater.</p><p></p><p>"I feel it too." Toras narrowed his eyes as he began the ascent. "I can't place it though. It just feels wrong. Terribly wrong."</p><p></p><p>"Foehammer watch over us." Florian whispered, touching her holy symbol to her lips.</p><p></p><p>Gathering themselves for whatever might await over the top of the rise, they pushed ahead, but no amount of preparation could truly prepare them for what they saw.</p><p></p><p>Tristol gazed in a mixture of fascination and horror at the landscape as they stood atop a circular rim surrounding a deep, heavy depression, "Mystra preserve..."</p><p></p><p>Stretching perhaps five miles in diameter, the crater-like bowl in the surface of the Hinterlands centered on a massive, circular cathedral at its center. Built of purest white marble and decorated with innumerable gleaming gemstones, it radiated a brilliant white light, and where that light touched, it evoked emotions of purity, glory, and devotion. That however was all the purity and glory that had existed in that place for eons. Stretching out from the base of the cathedral, the land was warped, looking like huge ripples in the surface of a lake as if an angry titan had dropped a stone in a lake and then frozen it in some unmoving snapshot of time. Though ground itself seemed sick. Everything was stained a sickly reddish black, darker and deeper the closer to the cathedral, extending outwards like a leeching stain of blood.</p><p></p><p>"The ground," Fyrehowl's fur bristled and her ears lay back, "It's actually bloody."</p><p></p><p>Toras daubed two fingers on the ground, wincing from something and averting his exposed face as his fingertips came back smeared red and slightly sticky. "It's also hot."</p><p></p><p>Florian made a face as she looked at the blood saturating the ground, "What the hell happened back then to make it this way?"</p><p></p><p>"We might as well be in a deific domain." Clueless mused, "What happens is what happens really. What I'm keener to know is what the hell happened here just recently?"</p><p></p><p>Nisha glanced down across the depression and the carnage that covered much of it, with a distinct path laid out before them around which most of the devastation clustered. "We can follow Leobtav's path and find out. Not that I really want to."</p><p></p><p>"That's probably the best way to go actually." Toras mused. If he fought his way through any guardians in place, he'll have sprung any traps or wards as he went."</p><p></p><p>"Like wandering through the woods and being the second person on the trail." Nisha quipped.</p><p></p><p>"Huh?" Tristol looked at her, and the mischievous, knowing grin playing across her face. "Last time we were in Sylvania we went on a walk and you insisted that I go first..."</p><p></p><p>"Because the first person tends to walk into the spiderwebs first." The tiefling stuck her tongue out and smiled.</p><p></p><p>Tristol chuckled and shook his head. "I should cast web on you."</p><p></p><p>The two of them continued to banter between themselves while the others looked down, following Leobtav's path of destruction.</p><p></p><p>"He won't have left anything behind." All eyes looked down to Ficklebarb's thin, shivering voice. "He's so close to what he wants to find; so sure of himself that he won't even consider that you're coming after him. He isn't looking back."</p><p></p><p>“We’ll do whatever we can.” Toras put a finger on Ficklebarb’s side. “We’ll do whatever we have to do. Whatever happens to Leobtav, we’ll do what you want and need us to do.”</p><p></p><p>"He isn't looking back at all." The tiny not-familiar shed a tear. It fell, sparkling to the ground, sizzling as it contacted the earth. Purity had no place on the unhallowed earth. “Thank you, Toras and all of you.”</p><p></p><p>Tentatively they descended, winding their way down the slope of the depression and towards the looming cathedral. All the way they passed the ruin and detritus of Leobtav's passage. Rubble littered the ground: an amalgamation of destroyed constructs, dead rilmani, and butchered gautiere. The constructs were ancient, apparently placed there as guardians eons before, but the neutral exemplars and the gautiere were newly put to the slaughter.</p><p></p><p>They all turned and looked at a destroyed golem as they passed it, and then two more, both of them reduced to twisted hulks of still smoking metal. Dozens more were scattered about in pieces, having been physically torn apart, with sections of their armored bodies shredded and gouged as if by great claws.</p><p></p><p>"Those aren't of rilmani manufacture." Tristol remarked, looking at the vast difference in style between them and the rilmani remains hurled about like broken dolls across the landscape.</p><p></p><p>Most of the fighting had taken place further out from the cathedral itself, and past a certain point the land retained its original state, but even there it showed the signs of terrible, horrific things long in the past. The ground was still sticky with blood, and still radiated a dull heat that only increased with each passing step, but eventually it began to elicit a crunch.</p><p></p><p>"What are we walking on?" Nisha grimaced and glanced down at her hooves. "Because I really really want some horseshoes of levitation right about now."</p><p></p><p>Collectively they paused and looked down. The earth was no longer soil, but a mixture of bones of the ancient dead and fragments of wood burned to charcoal and metal long since rusted into powder. Ground down by the ravages of time were the fragments of utterly ancient siege engines, devices of war, chariots, wagons, and bodies of their riders and beasts of burden.</p><p></p><p>"These were tiere." Ficklebarb explained. "He had such contempt for them."</p><p></p><p>They stared at the familiar, wondering if he was referring to Leobtav or to the gautiere's imprisoned god. But regardless of which, he was correct about the remains they trod upon beneath their footfalls. They were tiere. They were the ones who had been there to seal and lock the doors of the Cathdral, the inner circle of their race killed in the throes of a betrayed power and the concomitant damnation of their entire race.</p><p></p><p>Fyrehowl's ears twitched. "Stop."</p><p></p><p>"What is it?" Clueless gripped Razor's pommel.</p><p></p><p>Tristol's ears did the same motion and he glanced at the lupinal with a look of odd, uneasy worry. "I can hear it too. That's... hideous..."</p><p></p><p>"What is?" Nisha glanced about, ignoring for the moment her sticky, bloody hooves.</p><p></p><p>Not immediately answering the xaositect, Fyrehowl whimpered. "Powers above..."</p><p></p><p>"Sh*t..." Toras didn't need to hear them in order to see them.</p><p></p><p>Ahead, beyond the point where there were no longer any of the original guardians and no more rilmani, there was one final group of beings: the gautiere. They wandered about aimlessly, confused and enraged, howling and screaming in absolutely, abject, irrational fury. They dug claws into their own flesh as they wept, shrieking till their voices dulled and broke, hands beating themselves in misery. How dare someone intrude upon this place! How dare he threaten to grant their creator and betrayer the peace of death! Their world, their reality, their self-identity was breaking apart.</p><p></p><p>So absorbed in their misery were they however, that they paid little attention to the group following in Leobtav's footsteps. While it would have been tempting to give them at least a glance of misery, the sheer malice of the gaitiere's wailing disabused them of the notion - all but Ficklebarb. In a very real way he, or at least another part of him, was responsible for their misery.</p><p></p><p>"Forgive me..." Ficklebarb silently mouthed to each and every one of them as they passed by.</p><p></p><p>Beyond them, the gates of the Cathedral stood wide, torn asunder as if by giant claws. Wrenched wide, the gleaming white gates were tarnished, scorched by flame or spark, and a rime of frost covered the remainder of their surface, radiating a palpable chill even at dozens of yards distance</p><p></p><p>"We may be too late..." Florian mumbled, but the thought was there already, haunting their minds as they listened to the gautiere lament echo across the landscape.</p><p></p><p>"Let's not get ahead of ourselves." Toras spoke with affected confidence. "I don't think that..." He abruptly stopped and grabbed his sword to the ready as a lone figure shimmered into view atop the steps before the yawning entrance.</p><p></p><p>"Hold it, that's not Leobtav." Fyrehowl barked out a warning before Toras and her companions could overreact.</p><p></p><p>The silvery figure held up a hand in greeting.</p><p></p><p>"That's a rilmani." Clueless smiled. "Haven't seen one of them before."</p><p></p><p>"Only seen one rilmani ever really: one of the coppery kind." Nisha flicked her tail, causing the bell at its tip to ring once. "I rather miss him."</p><p></p><p>Putting away their weapons and much more at ease than when they first walked through the wasteland surrounding the Cathedral, they approached the lone argenach. The solitary argenarch smiled as best she could as they approached. She was covered in blood, much of it her own, and very likely she was one of the few survivors from Leobtav's passage.</p><p></p><p>"Greetings." The argenach's voice was weary and tired, and as they approached her, she slumped down and sat upon the steps rather than remain standing.</p><p></p><p>"Who are you?" Clueless asked, looking at her face and then to her injuries.</p><p></p><p>"There is not much time, nor is my name important." She waved away Clueless's concern. "You must enter and stop him."</p><p></p><p>Beyond where the argenach sat, the entrance to the Cathedral was smeared with blood, ash, and a pile of gautiere corpses where the damned race had literally tried to barricade the door with their own flesh to prevent Leobtav entry.</p><p></p><p>"Forgive me, but do you know why he's here, Leobtav that is?" Tristol looked past the rilmani and into the darkened interior of the Cathedral.</p><p></p><p>"No, we do not." The argenach shook her head and frowned. "What he intends and what empowers him is a mystery to us. But this place cannot be opened. Not now. Not yet. It was for the gautiere themselves to one day return and rectify their grand mistake, but not now, not like this. This was not supposed to be."</p><p></p><p>"We passed by a half dozen battlefields." Clueless explained, looking back Spireward. "You certainly tried to stop him."</p><p></p><p>"We tried, but we failed and now it may be too late. Alas we cannot enter beyond the gates, but you can. The Balance must be kept. The traitorous god must remain imprisoned until the day when the tiere return to open the door themselves, release him from his chains and forgive him, redeeming them both.” </p><p></p><p>"How do you know that?" Fyrehowl tilted her head to the side. "You seem convinced of the gautiere opportunity to redeem themselves from their fall. Altruism isn't normally something that I associate with your kind, you're more complex normally."</p><p></p><p>"Altruism is meaningless without equivalent malice. The gautiere began this, and they should end this by restoring that Balance." The argenach's voice was calm and convinced. "We would disrupt the process if we intervened. We only desire to provide the chance to them. But we knew it would occur. We thought so..." Her voice trailed off with a tone of worry and uncertainty. "Long ago the aurumachs watched the tiere fall, imprisoning their divine patron and damning themselves. They cast great divinations and saw that a time would come when the gautiere would wander from Carceri and loose the shackles from their deity, and from themselves. Knowing this, we watched and protected this place, knowing that it was the gautiere and the gautiere alone who would decide what would one day happen. The Balance would be preserved and they would one day right the scales of their own souls."</p><p></p><p>"That isn't what happened though." Toras frowned.</p><p></p><p>"No, it isn't." The argenach blinked back tears of grief and confusion. "This was not to be. The aurumach prophecies have come crashing down. Fate has been twisted and perverted and I cannot see how. Please, you must stop this from going further."</p><p></p><p>"They can." Ficklebarb smiled at the rilmani. She looked into the familiar's eyes, and there saw something. Something subtle and unspoken, but it seemed to calm her worry.</p><p></p><p>"What the little one said." Toras placed the dragon on his shoulder, hefting his sword and glancing to the Cathdral's doorway. "Come on. We have to end this and put things right."</p><p></p><p>"We'll see you on our way out." Clueless nodded to the argenach and followed Toras along with the others.</p><p></p><p>They crossed over the threshold and into the gloom within, when the rilmani stood, turned and called out to them, finally smiling, “Kiro sends his regards. Good luck.”</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">****</p><p></p><p></p><p>"Finally I am here. Finally after all of these years of searching." Cilret Leobtav smiled and looked down at the preparations that he had made for what would come next. </p><p></p><p>Decades of his life had been spent in toil leading up to this. He had given himself to the Ash Singer, body, mind, and soul. There was nothing left of the man who had found the darkness in that forsaken patch of ground in Gehenna, there was only this blessed, hollow vessel through which his master interacted with this reality, so distant and so unprepared.</p><p></p><p>"Poetic in a way that I began my journey in a ruined cathedral in Gehenna's frozen depths, and now I stand in a cathedral paradoxically both younger and older than that one, prepared for the next stage of my journey."</p><p></p><p>The figure of the tiere deity made no response - the gautiere had seen to that in their own way eons before. Leobtav had simply embellished upon their sacrilege in his own horrific, profane way. Upon entry into the central, holy sanctum he'd gone swiftly to work, carving symbols into the ground whispered into his ear by the figure seated upon his shoulder, symbols spelling out words that burned his eyes and more than once caused his nose and mouth to bleed simply by exposure. Concentric intertwined rings he'd carved round and round the tiere god, along with a single word: a name, a description, a title of the entity, the smallest fragment of which perched like some black imp upon his shoulder, digging its claws into flesh and other, subtler and much more precious things as the time drew close to finish this portion of as Leobtav would phrase it, 'what had to occur for it all to happen once again.'</p><p></p><p>"I am ready." He whispered, trembling slightly as his vision blurred and his head pounded from the strength of the magic that he had carved into the floor - a channel, a siphon, a godtrap, a macerating, devouring maw. He was exhausted from the sheer physical labor and from the blood loss. But he was nearly done. "Everything that you told me in Gehenna will come to pass as it did once before. But this time perfect. This time as it should be. This time without their interference."</p><p></p><p>The thing upon his shoulder snickered and a voice flooded into Leobtav's mind.</p><p></p><p>"THE PUPPETMASTERS OF THE WASTE THINK THEMSELVES IN CONTROL. ANCIENT FOOLS. THEY HASTEN THEIR OWN OBLIVION. IGNORANT AND FULL OF NAUGHT BUT HUBRIS. THE IRONY..."</p><p></p><p>Leobtav whimpered as the darkness flexed its claws and dug into his shoulder once more.</p><p></p><p>"I am ready master. Please let this task finally be finished."</p><p></p><p>Leobtav cradled his hands together and felt them filled with a weight. Looking down he smiled at the dagger now present, having not been there a moment before. Made of crudely sculpted and chipped obsidian of a type familiar to any scholar of the lower planes of Conflict, it was new, as if it had been prepared for its sole task but then never used. Though it was not the intent of the design, it would be used for something thematically similar, but wholly elevated by comparison. Only not for the one whose deific heart it would be plunged into.</p><p></p><p>"IT IS TIME."</p><p></p><p>Leobtav smiled, closed his eyes, stepped forward and raised the blade.</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">****</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Shemeska, post: 6275864, member: 11697"] It began as a flash of swift and searing white light from the east, in the direction of the Cathedral of the Chained God. Then, like the thunder in the aftermath of a bolt of lightning reaching skyward, they heard the sound itself. It washed over them like a wave, profound and wrathful, but then the strangest thing happened as they felt a swift breeze blowing not away from the sound, but towards it. "What in Andros' name was that?" Toras exclaimed. "That sounded like a scream." Florian looked at the horizon with unease. "Or maybe less a scream than a roar?" Clueless nodded in agreement, "I haven't heard anything like that since the 'loths tamed the Mother of Serpents." Fyrehowl scowled at the mention of the 'loths, and the mention of the Oinoloth's chained beast elicited a snarl. "Let's not even bring them into this. But it was neither. That was an explosion." "That rush of air." Tristol nodded at the lupinal. "If the gautiere deity was sealed somewhere, I think we just heard the door being forced open." Collectively they paused and looked at one another. Leobtav could not be allowed to do what he wished, whatever in fact that was. They had to hurry. "We should get moving." Florian rubbed her holy symbol of Tempus like a gilded worry-stone, but then she smiled. "Otherwise the battle might be over before we get there, and we can't have that." [center]****[/center] Making their way through the shifting, unmappable terrain of the Hinterlands, for the next four hours, silence reigned. The sounds of battle faded and where the horizon had burned and flashed, now it smoldered with what few fires remained in the aftermath. But as they approached the site of the battles they had heard, the site that Leobtav had spent years searching for, the Cathedral of the Chained God, they would find that not all was silent in Leobtav's wake. "We should probably stop flying and do this on foot." Clueless remarked. "We won't have any cover up here." "But flying is fun!" Nisha put her arms out, flapping them twice and then pantomiming a dragon breathing flame on some hapless village. "Besides I..." The tiefling's eyes crossed and her face wrinkled as a smell drifted across her nose, carried by the wind. She spat out a burst of Xaos-speak and shook her head, "Ok, yeah I'm fine with landing and going on hoof, foot, whatever. The smell of death on the winds says we should land." The wind blew quicker, filling the air with the reek of death, suggesting a recent and obscene death toll only miles away now. Though it would slow them down in their pursuit, the oppressive smell was enough to force them to land and walk the remaining distance. They were silent for the next two miles, noting that the landscape was trampled by the passage of thousands of feet, marked by the footprints of boots and the clawed feet of the rilmanis' mounts as well. They had come across battles between the rilmani and Leobtav already, but the sheer number of individuals that had passed this way suggested that those battles had been mere skirmishes compared to what loomed ahead. "Can you feel that?" Fyrehowl shivered and her hackles rose. "Feel what?" Florian glanced back at the lupinal. "The air feels, I dunno... heavy." She shrugged and tried to shrug off the disquieting sensation she felt as they approached the rise of a tall natural hill, earthwork, or -given its size- the lip of an eroded crater. "I feel it too." Toras narrowed his eyes as he began the ascent. "I can't place it though. It just feels wrong. Terribly wrong." "Foehammer watch over us." Florian whispered, touching her holy symbol to her lips. Gathering themselves for whatever might await over the top of the rise, they pushed ahead, but no amount of preparation could truly prepare them for what they saw. Tristol gazed in a mixture of fascination and horror at the landscape as they stood atop a circular rim surrounding a deep, heavy depression, "Mystra preserve..." Stretching perhaps five miles in diameter, the crater-like bowl in the surface of the Hinterlands centered on a massive, circular cathedral at its center. Built of purest white marble and decorated with innumerable gleaming gemstones, it radiated a brilliant white light, and where that light touched, it evoked emotions of purity, glory, and devotion. That however was all the purity and glory that had existed in that place for eons. Stretching out from the base of the cathedral, the land was warped, looking like huge ripples in the surface of a lake as if an angry titan had dropped a stone in a lake and then frozen it in some unmoving snapshot of time. Though ground itself seemed sick. Everything was stained a sickly reddish black, darker and deeper the closer to the cathedral, extending outwards like a leeching stain of blood. "The ground," Fyrehowl's fur bristled and her ears lay back, "It's actually bloody." Toras daubed two fingers on the ground, wincing from something and averting his exposed face as his fingertips came back smeared red and slightly sticky. "It's also hot." Florian made a face as she looked at the blood saturating the ground, "What the hell happened back then to make it this way?" "We might as well be in a deific domain." Clueless mused, "What happens is what happens really. What I'm keener to know is what the hell happened here just recently?" Nisha glanced down across the depression and the carnage that covered much of it, with a distinct path laid out before them around which most of the devastation clustered. "We can follow Leobtav's path and find out. Not that I really want to." "That's probably the best way to go actually." Toras mused. If he fought his way through any guardians in place, he'll have sprung any traps or wards as he went." "Like wandering through the woods and being the second person on the trail." Nisha quipped. "Huh?" Tristol looked at her, and the mischievous, knowing grin playing across her face. "Last time we were in Sylvania we went on a walk and you insisted that I go first..." "Because the first person tends to walk into the spiderwebs first." The tiefling stuck her tongue out and smiled. Tristol chuckled and shook his head. "I should cast web on you." The two of them continued to banter between themselves while the others looked down, following Leobtav's path of destruction. "He won't have left anything behind." All eyes looked down to Ficklebarb's thin, shivering voice. "He's so close to what he wants to find; so sure of himself that he won't even consider that you're coming after him. He isn't looking back." “We’ll do whatever we can.” Toras put a finger on Ficklebarb’s side. “We’ll do whatever we have to do. Whatever happens to Leobtav, we’ll do what you want and need us to do.” "He isn't looking back at all." The tiny not-familiar shed a tear. It fell, sparkling to the ground, sizzling as it contacted the earth. Purity had no place on the unhallowed earth. “Thank you, Toras and all of you.” Tentatively they descended, winding their way down the slope of the depression and towards the looming cathedral. All the way they passed the ruin and detritus of Leobtav's passage. Rubble littered the ground: an amalgamation of destroyed constructs, dead rilmani, and butchered gautiere. The constructs were ancient, apparently placed there as guardians eons before, but the neutral exemplars and the gautiere were newly put to the slaughter. They all turned and looked at a destroyed golem as they passed it, and then two more, both of them reduced to twisted hulks of still smoking metal. Dozens more were scattered about in pieces, having been physically torn apart, with sections of their armored bodies shredded and gouged as if by great claws. "Those aren't of rilmani manufacture." Tristol remarked, looking at the vast difference in style between them and the rilmani remains hurled about like broken dolls across the landscape. Most of the fighting had taken place further out from the cathedral itself, and past a certain point the land retained its original state, but even there it showed the signs of terrible, horrific things long in the past. The ground was still sticky with blood, and still radiated a dull heat that only increased with each passing step, but eventually it began to elicit a crunch. "What are we walking on?" Nisha grimaced and glanced down at her hooves. "Because I really really want some horseshoes of levitation right about now." Collectively they paused and looked down. The earth was no longer soil, but a mixture of bones of the ancient dead and fragments of wood burned to charcoal and metal long since rusted into powder. Ground down by the ravages of time were the fragments of utterly ancient siege engines, devices of war, chariots, wagons, and bodies of their riders and beasts of burden. "These were tiere." Ficklebarb explained. "He had such contempt for them." They stared at the familiar, wondering if he was referring to Leobtav or to the gautiere's imprisoned god. But regardless of which, he was correct about the remains they trod upon beneath their footfalls. They were tiere. They were the ones who had been there to seal and lock the doors of the Cathdral, the inner circle of their race killed in the throes of a betrayed power and the concomitant damnation of their entire race. Fyrehowl's ears twitched. "Stop." "What is it?" Clueless gripped Razor's pommel. Tristol's ears did the same motion and he glanced at the lupinal with a look of odd, uneasy worry. "I can hear it too. That's... hideous..." "What is?" Nisha glanced about, ignoring for the moment her sticky, bloody hooves. Not immediately answering the xaositect, Fyrehowl whimpered. "Powers above..." "Sh*t..." Toras didn't need to hear them in order to see them. Ahead, beyond the point where there were no longer any of the original guardians and no more rilmani, there was one final group of beings: the gautiere. They wandered about aimlessly, confused and enraged, howling and screaming in absolutely, abject, irrational fury. They dug claws into their own flesh as they wept, shrieking till their voices dulled and broke, hands beating themselves in misery. How dare someone intrude upon this place! How dare he threaten to grant their creator and betrayer the peace of death! Their world, their reality, their self-identity was breaking apart. So absorbed in their misery were they however, that they paid little attention to the group following in Leobtav's footsteps. While it would have been tempting to give them at least a glance of misery, the sheer malice of the gaitiere's wailing disabused them of the notion - all but Ficklebarb. In a very real way he, or at least another part of him, was responsible for their misery. "Forgive me..." Ficklebarb silently mouthed to each and every one of them as they passed by. Beyond them, the gates of the Cathedral stood wide, torn asunder as if by giant claws. Wrenched wide, the gleaming white gates were tarnished, scorched by flame or spark, and a rime of frost covered the remainder of their surface, radiating a palpable chill even at dozens of yards distance "We may be too late..." Florian mumbled, but the thought was there already, haunting their minds as they listened to the gautiere lament echo across the landscape. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves." Toras spoke with affected confidence. "I don't think that..." He abruptly stopped and grabbed his sword to the ready as a lone figure shimmered into view atop the steps before the yawning entrance. "Hold it, that's not Leobtav." Fyrehowl barked out a warning before Toras and her companions could overreact. The silvery figure held up a hand in greeting. "That's a rilmani." Clueless smiled. "Haven't seen one of them before." "Only seen one rilmani ever really: one of the coppery kind." Nisha flicked her tail, causing the bell at its tip to ring once. "I rather miss him." Putting away their weapons and much more at ease than when they first walked through the wasteland surrounding the Cathedral, they approached the lone argenach. The solitary argenarch smiled as best she could as they approached. She was covered in blood, much of it her own, and very likely she was one of the few survivors from Leobtav's passage. "Greetings." The argenach's voice was weary and tired, and as they approached her, she slumped down and sat upon the steps rather than remain standing. "Who are you?" Clueless asked, looking at her face and then to her injuries. "There is not much time, nor is my name important." She waved away Clueless's concern. "You must enter and stop him." Beyond where the argenach sat, the entrance to the Cathedral was smeared with blood, ash, and a pile of gautiere corpses where the damned race had literally tried to barricade the door with their own flesh to prevent Leobtav entry. "Forgive me, but do you know why he's here, Leobtav that is?" Tristol looked past the rilmani and into the darkened interior of the Cathedral. "No, we do not." The argenach shook her head and frowned. "What he intends and what empowers him is a mystery to us. But this place cannot be opened. Not now. Not yet. It was for the gautiere themselves to one day return and rectify their grand mistake, but not now, not like this. This was not supposed to be." "We passed by a half dozen battlefields." Clueless explained, looking back Spireward. "You certainly tried to stop him." "We tried, but we failed and now it may be too late. Alas we cannot enter beyond the gates, but you can. The Balance must be kept. The traitorous god must remain imprisoned until the day when the tiere return to open the door themselves, release him from his chains and forgive him, redeeming them both.” "How do you know that?" Fyrehowl tilted her head to the side. "You seem convinced of the gautiere opportunity to redeem themselves from their fall. Altruism isn't normally something that I associate with your kind, you're more complex normally." "Altruism is meaningless without equivalent malice. The gautiere began this, and they should end this by restoring that Balance." The argenach's voice was calm and convinced. "We would disrupt the process if we intervened. We only desire to provide the chance to them. But we knew it would occur. We thought so..." Her voice trailed off with a tone of worry and uncertainty. "Long ago the aurumachs watched the tiere fall, imprisoning their divine patron and damning themselves. They cast great divinations and saw that a time would come when the gautiere would wander from Carceri and loose the shackles from their deity, and from themselves. Knowing this, we watched and protected this place, knowing that it was the gautiere and the gautiere alone who would decide what would one day happen. The Balance would be preserved and they would one day right the scales of their own souls." "That isn't what happened though." Toras frowned. "No, it isn't." The argenach blinked back tears of grief and confusion. "This was not to be. The aurumach prophecies have come crashing down. Fate has been twisted and perverted and I cannot see how. Please, you must stop this from going further." "They can." Ficklebarb smiled at the rilmani. She looked into the familiar's eyes, and there saw something. Something subtle and unspoken, but it seemed to calm her worry. "What the little one said." Toras placed the dragon on his shoulder, hefting his sword and glancing to the Cathdral's doorway. "Come on. We have to end this and put things right." "We'll see you on our way out." Clueless nodded to the argenach and followed Toras along with the others. They crossed over the threshold and into the gloom within, when the rilmani stood, turned and called out to them, finally smiling, “Kiro sends his regards. Good luck.” [center]****[/center] "Finally I am here. Finally after all of these years of searching." Cilret Leobtav smiled and looked down at the preparations that he had made for what would come next. Decades of his life had been spent in toil leading up to this. He had given himself to the Ash Singer, body, mind, and soul. There was nothing left of the man who had found the darkness in that forsaken patch of ground in Gehenna, there was only this blessed, hollow vessel through which his master interacted with this reality, so distant and so unprepared. "Poetic in a way that I began my journey in a ruined cathedral in Gehenna's frozen depths, and now I stand in a cathedral paradoxically both younger and older than that one, prepared for the next stage of my journey." The figure of the tiere deity made no response - the gautiere had seen to that in their own way eons before. Leobtav had simply embellished upon their sacrilege in his own horrific, profane way. Upon entry into the central, holy sanctum he'd gone swiftly to work, carving symbols into the ground whispered into his ear by the figure seated upon his shoulder, symbols spelling out words that burned his eyes and more than once caused his nose and mouth to bleed simply by exposure. Concentric intertwined rings he'd carved round and round the tiere god, along with a single word: a name, a description, a title of the entity, the smallest fragment of which perched like some black imp upon his shoulder, digging its claws into flesh and other, subtler and much more precious things as the time drew close to finish this portion of as Leobtav would phrase it, 'what had to occur for it all to happen once again.' "I am ready." He whispered, trembling slightly as his vision blurred and his head pounded from the strength of the magic that he had carved into the floor - a channel, a siphon, a godtrap, a macerating, devouring maw. He was exhausted from the sheer physical labor and from the blood loss. But he was nearly done. "Everything that you told me in Gehenna will come to pass as it did once before. But this time perfect. This time as it should be. This time without their interference." The thing upon his shoulder snickered and a voice flooded into Leobtav's mind. "THE PUPPETMASTERS OF THE WASTE THINK THEMSELVES IN CONTROL. ANCIENT FOOLS. THEY HASTEN THEIR OWN OBLIVION. IGNORANT AND FULL OF NAUGHT BUT HUBRIS. THE IRONY..." Leobtav whimpered as the darkness flexed its claws and dug into his shoulder once more. "I am ready master. Please let this task finally be finished." Leobtav cradled his hands together and felt them filled with a weight. Looking down he smiled at the dagger now present, having not been there a moment before. Made of crudely sculpted and chipped obsidian of a type familiar to any scholar of the lower planes of Conflict, it was new, as if it had been prepared for its sole task but then never used. Though it was not the intent of the design, it would be used for something thematically similar, but wholly elevated by comparison. Only not for the one whose deific heart it would be plunged into. "IT IS TIME." Leobtav smiled, closed his eyes, stepped forward and raised the blade. [center]****[/center] [/QUOTE]
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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
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