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Story Hour
Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
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<blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 7103560" data-attributes="member: 11697"><p>The climb up the red stone butte was long and slow, complicated by a lack of natural handholds in places, flickers of wild magic precipitating out of the stone, and the presence of carbonized mezzoloth corpses that clung tight to the stone, only to crumble to ashes when touched, defying any climbers a firm and safe grip. All the while, Taba waited below like a lazy, idle, sadistic cat lounging in a dragon’s flesh below, seemingly divided on whether she wanted them to successfully ascend and see what she intended for them to see, or else slip and fall to their screaming deaths.</p><p></p><p>Half of their attempts to scale a given stretch ended up in failure and a panicked backtrack to a lower point. Each moment was split, with one half spent glancing down towards the ground and the amused, watching altraloth below, and the other frantically clinging to the stone or a lowered rope, the wind blowing sharp and cold in their face as they drew closer and closer to the peak.</p><p></p><p>Finally they reached the summit, somewhere atop what would have once been Karsus’s shoulder. Gasping for air, her claws grasping for sure purchase on the blood red rock below her feet, Fyrehowl reached the summit first followed shortly after by Toras, and the two of them lowered a rope for the rest of the party to follow suit.</p><p></p><p>Situated there atop the shoulder of the failed god, at the highest point of elevation for a hundred miles or more, they gazed out at the ruins of Karse, the magical wastes of the Dire Wood, and the wilds of the High Forest beyond that point. Occupying that spot was something distinctly out of place: a black stone pyramid, some hundred feet high and partially sunk into the godisle like an erupting tumor.</p><p></p><p>“What the hell is this thing?” Toras asked, glancing at the magical flickering that meandered across the stone. A large crater dotted its left side, the hollow crackling with random energies, but otherwise the stones showed no signs of weathering over the centuries that they’d stood there.</p><p></p><p>“It’s Netherese.” Tristol remarked as he carefully studied the High Netherese runes embossed in low relief across the surface. “Presumably it’s what the older Wulgreth set up as his home… tomb… whatever you want to call it I suppose.”</p><p></p><p>“I don’t see an entrance.” Florian smirked, “But I don’t think I want to touch the magically sparkling deathtrap wrought in artistically carved black stone either.”</p><p></p><p>“Hold on one moment…” Tristol muttered as he translated the particular Netherese dialect, looking for the phrase to call forth an entrance. Twice as his eyes scoured the stone, he reached out and pushed away Nisha’s far too overly inquisitive hands, “…and please don’t touch the hideous magical traps Nisha. That crater was formerly one of them.”</p><p></p><p>“No touchy?” The tiefling frowned.</p><p></p><p>“No touchy.” Tristol smiled, just before he tapped a series of runes and spoke a phrase, invoking a door to form in the stone. “Except for that touchy I suppose. In we go!”</p><p></p><p>Several of the group immediately invoked magical lights upon their head, their blade, or to bob and follow them around as they warily stepped into the black, featureless passage into the demilich’s lair. The passage proceeded for a dozen yards at a slight descent before it opened up into a single, dimly lit chamber which had once served as Wulgreth’s laboratory.</p><p></p><p>“Wow!” Fyrehowl’s eyes went wide as she gazed upon a chamber filled with abandoned wealth in chests and barrels long since fallen to rot and decay as their former owner had lived on unchanged as around him time and entropy had marched on unheeded by his necromancy.</p><p></p><p>“Apparently demilich is a lucrative career choice!” Toras laughed as they gazed upon the broken remnants of an alchemical laboratory, wizard’s library, and a storehouse of wealth.</p><p></p><p>“Now touchy?” Nisha’s tail pointed first at a scattering of gemstones and then at a stack of ornately decorated tomes. “It seems like a good time for the rogue to go touchy touchy grabby looty.”</p><p></p><p>It didn’t take long for Tristol to object to each and every notion of looting.</p><p></p><p>“Woah! Nobody move!” The wizard held up both hands as his tail bottlebrushed with alarm, “Nobody touch anything! And Nisha I really seriously mean everything! This entire room is trapped all to hell and back. This is meant for thieves.”</p><p></p><p>Looking up from where he’d crouched to scoop up a pair of gems, Clueless closed his hand and glanced warily about.</p><p></p><p>“The gems are trapped to ensnare souls. The books are covered in paralytic runes… except when they’re covered in explosive ones. There’s what looks like a few symbols tucked away in various places, and there’s a hidden door on the north side of the room… with a disintegration field right behind it.”</p><p></p><p>“I was about to tell everyone about all of that.” Nisha nodded with a smile and a rattle of her tail’s silver bell.</p><p></p><p>“Ok, so maybe demilich isn’t quite so lucrative as I thought, but it certainly seems to make you into a murderous son of a bitch.” Toras worked his way around the room, virtually on his tiptoes to avoid so much as jostling any of the trapped objects.</p><p></p><p>Several long minutes later and Tristol and Nisha had opened the false wall and dispelled the flickering green field of death that lurked behind it, revealing another passage, and beyond it Wulgreth’s actual laboratory. Virtually untouched by time and absolutely untouched by dust, it seemed as if the demilich had never truly ceased his life’s work. Dozens of bookcases held texts both prosaic and magical, including those from his own era and even more penned since from a dozen different cultures.</p><p></p><p>At the western corner of the room, a marble column sat conspicuously as the location where Wulgreth’s mortal remains would have stood, glittered and bejeweled if the demilich had remained intact and not indisposed.</p><p></p><p>“Someone’s been here.” Nisha blurted out, her eyes dancing to specific spots where she noticed not objects worthy of theft, but empty spaces where those objects had been taken.</p><p></p><p>“Hmm?” Tristol turned to her, his ears perked with curiosity.</p><p></p><p>“About six spell books are missing, and a few objects are missing from their spots on shelves.” The xoasitect pointed them out with a thief’s trained eyes, “Pretty subtle job of it too, whoever it was. Most looters would have just dumped it all into a bag and hauled it all off… Toras…”</p><p></p><p>Wait, what?” Toras looked at Nisha, “What did I do?”</p><p></p><p>“You’re like a hungry puppy with an open bag of food on the floor when it comes to looting a place.” She rolled her eyes, “Sloppy but enthusiastic. It’s cute for a puppy, an actual puppy I suppose, but totally not my preferred style.”</p><p></p><p>Toras winced, “Is this about what I did to that group of slavers outside of Ribcage?”</p><p></p><p>“Is that what you think it’s about?” Nisha glanced back and him and shrugged, much to the confusion of literally every other person in the room as they carried on their own conversation without giving much details as to what incident they were even talking about.</p><p></p><p>“Probably,” Toras gave a guilty chuckle, “But are we really going to have this conversation right now?”</p><p></p><p>As Toras and Nisha talked, Clueless and Fyrehowl walked over to a deep and yawning pit in the center of the room. There a perfectly circular hole in the black stone revealed the underlying blood red substrate of the godisle itself, and a passage descending down into the stony flesh of the failed god himself.</p><p></p><p>“Uhh…” Tristol glanced at Nisha and then to Toras, “What group of slavers outside of Ribcage? This is the first that I’ve heard about this.”</p><p></p><p>“Well technically they aren’t slavers anymore.” Toras bobbed his head side to side with a smile, “Not once I got done with them.”</p><p></p><p>“Sloppy sloppy,” Nisha pantomimed someone clearing a table with their arm and dumping things into a sack.</p><p></p><p>“Really? I free a bunch of captured people from hellish slavery and you pick at my method of looting the bodies?”</p><p></p><p>Nisha laughed and walked off towards the hole in the room’s center with a shrug and a soft clip clop of her hooves on the stone.</p><p></p><p>Tristol continued to look askance at Nisha before finally, she giggled and leaned in, whispering to him, “Yeah, I have no idea what we’re talking about either. I was just making stuff up and letting him fill things in.”</p><p></p><p>“Before we get too focused on what might have been here before it got pilfered, let’s focus on what might –still– be here. Tristol? Nisha? And also,” Fyrehowl sniffed at the air, “More than one group came through here: fiends and then another group that I can’t honestly place.”</p><p></p><p>Nodding, Tristol studied the room for any latent magical auras before shaking his head, “There isn’t anything left around, either as a trap or any sort of alarm spells either. Feel free to rifle through anything if you want.”</p><p></p><p>They spent a short while picking through the demilich’s belongings, picking out a number of spellbooks, wands, a considerable amount of gold and gemstones, and a number of unique objects that they’d identify later. One item however was left behind: A delicately filigreed ivory circlet.</p><p></p><p>“What’s this one do?” Nisha asked Tristol as she held the object up, letting Tristol examine its magical auras for a clue as to its purpose.</p><p></p><p>“It’s Netherese, that’s for certain.” Tristol explained, pointing to the Netherese script carved into the object, “But the runes on the side are a bit fuzzy in their translation. It either means ‘Song or the Teu-Tel’Quessir’ or ‘Scream of the Teu-Tel’Quessir’. I’m actually going to dig a little deeper on this one just to make sure that it isn’t cursed.”</p><p></p><p>“Good idea!” Nisha smiled far too widely as she paused from trying the circlet on and handed it to her fiancé.</p><p></p><p>Tristol whispered the words of an incantation as he rattled off the objects properties, “It seems like it’s designed to provide elven specific traits to its wearer, including low light vision, and immunity to sleep spells, a resistance to enchantments, and to qualify as an elf when using magical items and specifically high magic items that would normally be barred from use by any non elves.”</p><p></p><p>“Hey that sounds awesome!” Nisha tried to snatch the item back, but then Tristol’s eyes went wide and he tightened his grip on the circlet.</p><p></p><p>“And in no way do you want to ever actually wear this…” He turned the circlet to the side, finally noticing that it wasn’t a perfect circle, and that the shape confirmed what the magic had informed him of: it wasn’t ivory, but bone. The circlet was a horizontal section of an elven high mage’s skull sawed open when they were still alive. “It gives you things, but the circlet bleeds when you wear it, and it screams, hearable by any high mages within several miles around. Yeah, this was something the Netherese would create all right. I think we’ll be leaving this behind…”</p><p></p><p>Reluctantly, Nisha left the unsavory object behind and joined the others at the hole descending down into the godisle. Curious as ever, as she made her way down the rope, she rapped her knuckles across the stone, noting with a single quirked eyebrow that the rock was oddly soft and warm, as if the corpse itself was still cooling from its moment of death many centuries earlier.</p><p></p><p>“Where’s it go?” The tiefling asked. “You have to admit that it’s weirdly and disconcertingly natural. But far be it from me to be this group’s voice of reason. Heaven forbid.”</p><p></p><p>“There’s nothing heavenly about this place,” Fyrehowl shook her head, “Nor you for that matter; more croaking in your case.”</p><p></p><p>Nisha beamed a smile but said nothing in reply.</p><p></p><p>“As for this tunnel? I looks like the demilich carved out part of it,” Clueless explained, “But below a point it looks like a natural tunnel, almost like a giant vein in a gigantic petrified body. It looks like it quite literally leads to the heart.”</p><p></p><p><em>“Indeed it is mortals”</em> Taba’s voice rung through their minds like a sudden, unexpected drizzle of cold, greasy runoff from a roof in the Hive. <em>“The way is not far now. Carry on towards the heart.”</em></p><p></p><p>They paused and waited for further explanation from the altraloth, but nothing further was forthcoming. The fiend gave away her secrets sparingly, and seemed intent on leading them along with a morsel of facts towards a promised treasure simply to lay claim to having been the one leading and controlling them in the first place.</p><p></p><p>“Why can’t she just tell us what she knows?” Florian sighed as she continued down the passage. “Why lead us on this merry little goose chase across Toril?”</p><p></p><p>“Because she’s a yugoloth,” Fyrehowl grimaced. “That’s how all of them have acted. Every single one of them.”</p><p></p><p>“A’kin has never led me anywhere with beguiling words.” Nisha quipped, “He’s even given me free chocolate!”</p><p></p><p>“Ok, so maybe there’s an exception.” The lupinal shrugged, “One singular exception perhaps. He must piss the rest of his kind off something fierce. Can’t tell you what I’d pay to know what the history between him and the rest of his kind is.”</p><p></p><p>“You think he’s outcast from his kind?” Clueless glanced across at her, a dubious look playing across his face, “Or he’s just a hell of a lot more subtle than the rest.”</p><p></p><p>“Seriously, there has to be something going on between him and the Marauder,” Toras looked at the lupinal, “I swear to you they have to be a good inquisitor, bad inquisitor sort of deal going on.”</p><p></p><p>“I don’t think so.” She shrugged, “I genuinely don’t think so. There’s something there in terms of shared history I bet, but I don’t think it’s how you suspect it.”</p><p></p><p>“Have you been talking to him?” Nisha quirked an eyebrow, “Because I have, but he won’t talk about his past history or where exactly he stands as far as being a ‘loth goes. He mostly wants to talk about whoever happens to be talking to him, other people in Sigil, or his shop, and trust me that he’s got a story behind pretty much every item that he has in stock. He just doesn’t talk about himself.”</p><p></p><p>“We’ve talked a bit,” Fyrehowl said, thinking back to her conversation with the fiend, “After he landed a spot on the counsel and I was pissed off that I lost out to the Marauder for the other open seat.”</p><p></p><p>“What did he say?” Clueless asked, “I’m seriously curious.”</p><p></p><p>“Mostly,” She put a claw to her chin, “mostly, just advice in dealing with Shemeska in the aftermath of losing out to her in the voting. He had quite a bit to say on that issue. He’s been there in his shop for a few centuries at least, and she’s been in Sigil just as long. He almost opened up about it.”</p><p></p><p>“Seriously?” Clueless’s eyes went wide.</p><p></p><p>“He started to say something about dealing with her and about his own status as a ‘loth, but he caught himself.” Fyrehowl nodded, “It seemed genuine. He wanted to say something but held himself back, even if he really wanted to talk about it.”</p><p></p><p>“Fyrehowl?” Florian looked long and hard at the lupinal, “Keep talking to him. Seriously.”</p><p></p><p>The conversation about that conversation would have continued for some time, but at that point they arrived at the location Taba had wished for them to find.</p><p></p><p>“Oh what the hell…” Tristol blurted out, having been silent through their descent through the godisle up to that point. His eyes bulged at what they saw.</p><p></p><p>“What the hell happened here…” Florian whispered as her hand went to her holy symbol.</p><p></p><p>They stood in a high, vaulted cavern, resembling nothing less than space of a great petrified heart if drawn by a sculptor granting artistic license to render Netheril’s fall in blood red stone. A bright and cold silvery light banished every shadow and a faint lapping of liquid reached the ears, but aside from the light and the soft ambient noise, something was terribly off. </p><p></p><p>The air in the very center of the room was warped, twisting the light that passed through it, like the shimmer of heat above rocks in a desert’s sun, though nothing hovered there. If anything it seemed as if what had once been there, the Karse Stone, was by its conspicuous absence the source of the warped space, with its metaphysical weight in place there for so many centuries responsible for a permanent deformation in the fabric of space.</p><p></p><p>Their conjured sources of light immediately dimmed upon entering the room, and the walls themselves seemed leeched of color. The reddish rock of the godisle was pale and sickly as it approached the depression in the room’s center, almost as if it were rotting from the inside out. What has once been there as a pool of heavy magic pouring out from and then returning to the Karse Stone, the literal heart of Karsus the Accidental God, was present but… changed… a transparent, diaphanous reflection of its former deadly puissance.</p><p></p><p>Nearly tangible on the air itself, a sense of grieving regret saturated the space there at the godisle’s heart.</p><p></p><p>“Someone had a rather large fight in here…” Toras whispered as his eyes adjusted to the dimmed light and noticed the humanoid corpses strewn across the ground and the broken remnants of five separate golems of ancient Netherese manufacture.</p><p></p><p>“Those are relatively fresh, not ancient,” Clueless pointed to three bodies on the floor, “And they aren’t human corpses either.”</p><p></p><p>Tristol stared at the bodies and every other disturbing aspect of the chamber, including the fact that Jingleshod had told them the truth: the ‘loths had come for the Karse Stone. They’d come for it and they’d taken it. But why?</p><p></p><p>“What the hell are they?” Toras motioned to how the humanoid corpses seemed to blur into any adjacent shadows, as if they weren’t entirely corporeal.</p><p></p><p>“They’re shadovari.” Tristol finally explained, stepping over to one of them and reaching down to examine its armor. “Shades. Humans who’ve traded part of their souls for shadow-stuff and received extended life and power in exchange.”</p><p></p><p>“Ok and that means absolutely nothing to me other than presumably they were evil.” Toras shrugged. “Who are they? What were they doing here? Why did the ‘loths kill them?”</p><p></p><p>“Remember what I said about the Netherese enclave of Shade?” Tristol shook his head at each corpse in turn. “Prior to Karsus casting his spell, they shifted their city and its entire population to the Plane of Shadow. Either they stayed there intentionally, or the changes to the Weave in their absence prevented their return. They apparently returned in the past year, and clearly they were interested in finding out what had become of the empire that they’d once been a part of.”</p><p></p><p>“So they’re working with the ‘loths?” Florian rolled her eyes, “Great.”</p><p></p><p>“I very much doubt that.” Tristol frowned. “They seem to have uniformly embraced the worship of Shar during their centuries in Shadow. The ‘loths would have absolutely nothing to do with them. Frankly it seems as if they were either here when the ‘loths arrived, or more likely the ‘loth presence here drew their attention and Shade dispatched them here to find out what was going on, much to their doom.”</p><p></p><p>Over the next few minutes they explored the room and tried to piece together what had occurred, though without touching the pool and the space where the Karse Stone had been. As far as they could tell, the ‘loths had come first and destroyed the golems set in place by one of the Wulgreths to guard the chamber, and in their wake the shadovar had followed and paid a terrible price for their intrusion. The corpse of one shadovari fighter lay partially submerged in the pool of greasy, translucent liquid, the man having apparently been roasted alive in his armor. Two other armored fighters lay dismembered by mezzoloth claws, one of them with a broken trident still impaled through her chest and into the blood red stone of the wall behind her.</p><p></p><p>In the process of piecing together the fate of the shades and collecting a number of weapons and magical objects left behind on their corpses, they discovered one other salient piece of information as to what the ‘loths had done. Situated at the closest point from solid ground to where the Karse Stone had once stood were the faint impressions of a heavy tripod and two cylindrical objects: the Divinity Leech.</p><p></p><p>“They took it you see. They were jealous. They were always jealous of me and the machine that I’d created…” Tristol whispered to himself, recalling the words of Ghyris Vast, the creator of the machine they’d seen and seen used in the Astral atop more than one drifting godisle, there to siphon, extract, or to mine… something… from the drifting bodies of dead gods.</p><p></p><p>Tristol knelt down at the edge of the pool of heavy magic and traced his bare fingertips across the stone where the device had once stood. Lapping against the stone but seemingly drained of whatever essence it had once held, the pool of heavy magic was thin, ash grey, and translucent.</p><p></p><p>“This was where they came to test the Divinity Leech.” Tristol turned and looked at his companions. “This is where they came to use it first before they dared make the attempt on the Astral.”</p><p></p><p>“F***…” Clueless gritted his teeth, his mind spinning to make sense of it all and what the yugoloths intended.</p><p></p><p>“Why do it here on Toril though?” Florian asked, “Why here and not one of a dozen worlds with dead gods? Why not just start on the Astral? Starting here and you’d be likely to provoke one of Toril’s gods to step in.”</p><p></p><p>“I don’t know…” Tristol stammered, trying to wrap his brain around the intersection of his own people’s origin with the fall of Netheril at Karsus’s hands and both the use of the Divinity Leech and the theft of the Karse Stone.</p><p></p><p>Tristol’s confusion was lifted by the unsettling caress of Taba’s telepathic voice in his ears and his ears alone, <em>“If you have the capacity to ensorcelle the pool with a legend lore dweomer, do so and you will see what I wished for you to see.”</em></p><p></p><p>“Taba wants me to legend lore the pool.”</p><p></p><p>“She wants you to legend lore a pool of heavy magic?” Clueless asked, raising an eyebrow and having very conspicuously both eyed and kept his distance from the pool, even in its altered state, given his own prior experience with the substance, and especially given Tristol’s lecture on how Karsus had toyed with the material and caused the original Wulgreth’s transformation into a lich purely by accident. “Are you crazy?”</p><p></p><p>“I need to know what happened here.” Tristol furrowed his brow and stood up, staring into the warped and empty hollow where the Karse Stone had hovered. “So you might want to step back.”</p><p></p><p>Collectively the group edged back as Tristol began to cast, though Nisha did so reluctantly. The effect was much more profound than any other time they’d seen the spell cast as the pool of depleted heavy magic shimmered. Sparks of magical energy erupted from its surface like flaming oil cast into a white hot metal pan. Runes in the yugoloth tongue scratched into the rock below the pool in a swirling, drain-like spiral glowed with a sudden sickly greenish light. The ‘loths had been utterly methodical in their testing of the device, leaving nothing to chance, but whatever their original purpose, they posed no danger as Tristol looked into the past.</p><p></p><p>Slowly an image formed within the pool, acting almost like a monstrous scry focus. Then without warning an audible scream shook the room as the image of Karsus himself, swollen with the divine might of Mystryl turned to stone and plummeted forth into the Dire Wood. They watched and listened as the ground rumbled in concert with his titanic red stone form falling to earth. An utter sense of regret reached out and filled their minds with a near divine sense of ache and sorrow for what his arrogance had done to him and his own people when he’d only been seeking to be their savior.</p><p></p><p>And then with a subtle ringing sound and a tremble within the liquid at their feet, the image vanished from the pool of depleted heavy magic and the legend lore spell jerked and rewound the clock even further, tumbling backwards at a rapid pace before providing a view of past events leading up to that first and terrible moment in time. Only Tristol saw it all, and as he watched those events in real time in his mind’s eye as only seconds elapsed in the outside world, his eyes went huge, his face turned ashen, he dropped to his knees trembling, braced his hands on the floor and vomited before he screamed in horror.</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">****</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Shemeska, post: 7103560, member: 11697"] The climb up the red stone butte was long and slow, complicated by a lack of natural handholds in places, flickers of wild magic precipitating out of the stone, and the presence of carbonized mezzoloth corpses that clung tight to the stone, only to crumble to ashes when touched, defying any climbers a firm and safe grip. All the while, Taba waited below like a lazy, idle, sadistic cat lounging in a dragon’s flesh below, seemingly divided on whether she wanted them to successfully ascend and see what she intended for them to see, or else slip and fall to their screaming deaths. Half of their attempts to scale a given stretch ended up in failure and a panicked backtrack to a lower point. Each moment was split, with one half spent glancing down towards the ground and the amused, watching altraloth below, and the other frantically clinging to the stone or a lowered rope, the wind blowing sharp and cold in their face as they drew closer and closer to the peak. Finally they reached the summit, somewhere atop what would have once been Karsus’s shoulder. Gasping for air, her claws grasping for sure purchase on the blood red rock below her feet, Fyrehowl reached the summit first followed shortly after by Toras, and the two of them lowered a rope for the rest of the party to follow suit. Situated there atop the shoulder of the failed god, at the highest point of elevation for a hundred miles or more, they gazed out at the ruins of Karse, the magical wastes of the Dire Wood, and the wilds of the High Forest beyond that point. Occupying that spot was something distinctly out of place: a black stone pyramid, some hundred feet high and partially sunk into the godisle like an erupting tumor. “What the hell is this thing?” Toras asked, glancing at the magical flickering that meandered across the stone. A large crater dotted its left side, the hollow crackling with random energies, but otherwise the stones showed no signs of weathering over the centuries that they’d stood there. “It’s Netherese.” Tristol remarked as he carefully studied the High Netherese runes embossed in low relief across the surface. “Presumably it’s what the older Wulgreth set up as his home… tomb… whatever you want to call it I suppose.” “I don’t see an entrance.” Florian smirked, “But I don’t think I want to touch the magically sparkling deathtrap wrought in artistically carved black stone either.” “Hold on one moment…” Tristol muttered as he translated the particular Netherese dialect, looking for the phrase to call forth an entrance. Twice as his eyes scoured the stone, he reached out and pushed away Nisha’s far too overly inquisitive hands, “…and please don’t touch the hideous magical traps Nisha. That crater was formerly one of them.” “No touchy?” The tiefling frowned. “No touchy.” Tristol smiled, just before he tapped a series of runes and spoke a phrase, invoking a door to form in the stone. “Except for that touchy I suppose. In we go!” Several of the group immediately invoked magical lights upon their head, their blade, or to bob and follow them around as they warily stepped into the black, featureless passage into the demilich’s lair. The passage proceeded for a dozen yards at a slight descent before it opened up into a single, dimly lit chamber which had once served as Wulgreth’s laboratory. “Wow!” Fyrehowl’s eyes went wide as she gazed upon a chamber filled with abandoned wealth in chests and barrels long since fallen to rot and decay as their former owner had lived on unchanged as around him time and entropy had marched on unheeded by his necromancy. “Apparently demilich is a lucrative career choice!” Toras laughed as they gazed upon the broken remnants of an alchemical laboratory, wizard’s library, and a storehouse of wealth. “Now touchy?” Nisha’s tail pointed first at a scattering of gemstones and then at a stack of ornately decorated tomes. “It seems like a good time for the rogue to go touchy touchy grabby looty.” It didn’t take long for Tristol to object to each and every notion of looting. “Woah! Nobody move!” The wizard held up both hands as his tail bottlebrushed with alarm, “Nobody touch anything! And Nisha I really seriously mean everything! This entire room is trapped all to hell and back. This is meant for thieves.” Looking up from where he’d crouched to scoop up a pair of gems, Clueless closed his hand and glanced warily about. “The gems are trapped to ensnare souls. The books are covered in paralytic runes… except when they’re covered in explosive ones. There’s what looks like a few symbols tucked away in various places, and there’s a hidden door on the north side of the room… with a disintegration field right behind it.” “I was about to tell everyone about all of that.” Nisha nodded with a smile and a rattle of her tail’s silver bell. “Ok, so maybe demilich isn’t quite so lucrative as I thought, but it certainly seems to make you into a murderous son of a bitch.” Toras worked his way around the room, virtually on his tiptoes to avoid so much as jostling any of the trapped objects. Several long minutes later and Tristol and Nisha had opened the false wall and dispelled the flickering green field of death that lurked behind it, revealing another passage, and beyond it Wulgreth’s actual laboratory. Virtually untouched by time and absolutely untouched by dust, it seemed as if the demilich had never truly ceased his life’s work. Dozens of bookcases held texts both prosaic and magical, including those from his own era and even more penned since from a dozen different cultures. At the western corner of the room, a marble column sat conspicuously as the location where Wulgreth’s mortal remains would have stood, glittered and bejeweled if the demilich had remained intact and not indisposed. “Someone’s been here.” Nisha blurted out, her eyes dancing to specific spots where she noticed not objects worthy of theft, but empty spaces where those objects had been taken. “Hmm?” Tristol turned to her, his ears perked with curiosity. “About six spell books are missing, and a few objects are missing from their spots on shelves.” The xoasitect pointed them out with a thief’s trained eyes, “Pretty subtle job of it too, whoever it was. Most looters would have just dumped it all into a bag and hauled it all off… Toras…” Wait, what?” Toras looked at Nisha, “What did I do?” “You’re like a hungry puppy with an open bag of food on the floor when it comes to looting a place.” She rolled her eyes, “Sloppy but enthusiastic. It’s cute for a puppy, an actual puppy I suppose, but totally not my preferred style.” Toras winced, “Is this about what I did to that group of slavers outside of Ribcage?” “Is that what you think it’s about?” Nisha glanced back and him and shrugged, much to the confusion of literally every other person in the room as they carried on their own conversation without giving much details as to what incident they were even talking about. “Probably,” Toras gave a guilty chuckle, “But are we really going to have this conversation right now?” As Toras and Nisha talked, Clueless and Fyrehowl walked over to a deep and yawning pit in the center of the room. There a perfectly circular hole in the black stone revealed the underlying blood red substrate of the godisle itself, and a passage descending down into the stony flesh of the failed god himself. “Uhh…” Tristol glanced at Nisha and then to Toras, “What group of slavers outside of Ribcage? This is the first that I’ve heard about this.” “Well technically they aren’t slavers anymore.” Toras bobbed his head side to side with a smile, “Not once I got done with them.” “Sloppy sloppy,” Nisha pantomimed someone clearing a table with their arm and dumping things into a sack. “Really? I free a bunch of captured people from hellish slavery and you pick at my method of looting the bodies?” Nisha laughed and walked off towards the hole in the room’s center with a shrug and a soft clip clop of her hooves on the stone. Tristol continued to look askance at Nisha before finally, she giggled and leaned in, whispering to him, “Yeah, I have no idea what we’re talking about either. I was just making stuff up and letting him fill things in.” “Before we get too focused on what might have been here before it got pilfered, let’s focus on what might –still– be here. Tristol? Nisha? And also,” Fyrehowl sniffed at the air, “More than one group came through here: fiends and then another group that I can’t honestly place.” Nodding, Tristol studied the room for any latent magical auras before shaking his head, “There isn’t anything left around, either as a trap or any sort of alarm spells either. Feel free to rifle through anything if you want.” They spent a short while picking through the demilich’s belongings, picking out a number of spellbooks, wands, a considerable amount of gold and gemstones, and a number of unique objects that they’d identify later. One item however was left behind: A delicately filigreed ivory circlet. “What’s this one do?” Nisha asked Tristol as she held the object up, letting Tristol examine its magical auras for a clue as to its purpose. “It’s Netherese, that’s for certain.” Tristol explained, pointing to the Netherese script carved into the object, “But the runes on the side are a bit fuzzy in their translation. It either means ‘Song or the Teu-Tel’Quessir’ or ‘Scream of the Teu-Tel’Quessir’. I’m actually going to dig a little deeper on this one just to make sure that it isn’t cursed.” “Good idea!” Nisha smiled far too widely as she paused from trying the circlet on and handed it to her fiancé. Tristol whispered the words of an incantation as he rattled off the objects properties, “It seems like it’s designed to provide elven specific traits to its wearer, including low light vision, and immunity to sleep spells, a resistance to enchantments, and to qualify as an elf when using magical items and specifically high magic items that would normally be barred from use by any non elves.” “Hey that sounds awesome!” Nisha tried to snatch the item back, but then Tristol’s eyes went wide and he tightened his grip on the circlet. “And in no way do you want to ever actually wear this…” He turned the circlet to the side, finally noticing that it wasn’t a perfect circle, and that the shape confirmed what the magic had informed him of: it wasn’t ivory, but bone. The circlet was a horizontal section of an elven high mage’s skull sawed open when they were still alive. “It gives you things, but the circlet bleeds when you wear it, and it screams, hearable by any high mages within several miles around. Yeah, this was something the Netherese would create all right. I think we’ll be leaving this behind…” Reluctantly, Nisha left the unsavory object behind and joined the others at the hole descending down into the godisle. Curious as ever, as she made her way down the rope, she rapped her knuckles across the stone, noting with a single quirked eyebrow that the rock was oddly soft and warm, as if the corpse itself was still cooling from its moment of death many centuries earlier. “Where’s it go?” The tiefling asked. “You have to admit that it’s weirdly and disconcertingly natural. But far be it from me to be this group’s voice of reason. Heaven forbid.” “There’s nothing heavenly about this place,” Fyrehowl shook her head, “Nor you for that matter; more croaking in your case.” Nisha beamed a smile but said nothing in reply. “As for this tunnel? I looks like the demilich carved out part of it,” Clueless explained, “But below a point it looks like a natural tunnel, almost like a giant vein in a gigantic petrified body. It looks like it quite literally leads to the heart.” [i]“Indeed it is mortals”[/i] Taba’s voice rung through their minds like a sudden, unexpected drizzle of cold, greasy runoff from a roof in the Hive. [i]“The way is not far now. Carry on towards the heart.”[/i] They paused and waited for further explanation from the altraloth, but nothing further was forthcoming. The fiend gave away her secrets sparingly, and seemed intent on leading them along with a morsel of facts towards a promised treasure simply to lay claim to having been the one leading and controlling them in the first place. “Why can’t she just tell us what she knows?” Florian sighed as she continued down the passage. “Why lead us on this merry little goose chase across Toril?” “Because she’s a yugoloth,” Fyrehowl grimaced. “That’s how all of them have acted. Every single one of them.” “A’kin has never led me anywhere with beguiling words.” Nisha quipped, “He’s even given me free chocolate!” “Ok, so maybe there’s an exception.” The lupinal shrugged, “One singular exception perhaps. He must piss the rest of his kind off something fierce. Can’t tell you what I’d pay to know what the history between him and the rest of his kind is.” “You think he’s outcast from his kind?” Clueless glanced across at her, a dubious look playing across his face, “Or he’s just a hell of a lot more subtle than the rest.” “Seriously, there has to be something going on between him and the Marauder,” Toras looked at the lupinal, “I swear to you they have to be a good inquisitor, bad inquisitor sort of deal going on.” “I don’t think so.” She shrugged, “I genuinely don’t think so. There’s something there in terms of shared history I bet, but I don’t think it’s how you suspect it.” “Have you been talking to him?” Nisha quirked an eyebrow, “Because I have, but he won’t talk about his past history or where exactly he stands as far as being a ‘loth goes. He mostly wants to talk about whoever happens to be talking to him, other people in Sigil, or his shop, and trust me that he’s got a story behind pretty much every item that he has in stock. He just doesn’t talk about himself.” “We’ve talked a bit,” Fyrehowl said, thinking back to her conversation with the fiend, “After he landed a spot on the counsel and I was pissed off that I lost out to the Marauder for the other open seat.” “What did he say?” Clueless asked, “I’m seriously curious.” “Mostly,” She put a claw to her chin, “mostly, just advice in dealing with Shemeska in the aftermath of losing out to her in the voting. He had quite a bit to say on that issue. He’s been there in his shop for a few centuries at least, and she’s been in Sigil just as long. He almost opened up about it.” “Seriously?” Clueless’s eyes went wide. “He started to say something about dealing with her and about his own status as a ‘loth, but he caught himself.” Fyrehowl nodded, “It seemed genuine. He wanted to say something but held himself back, even if he really wanted to talk about it.” “Fyrehowl?” Florian looked long and hard at the lupinal, “Keep talking to him. Seriously.” The conversation about that conversation would have continued for some time, but at that point they arrived at the location Taba had wished for them to find. “Oh what the hell…” Tristol blurted out, having been silent through their descent through the godisle up to that point. His eyes bulged at what they saw. “What the hell happened here…” Florian whispered as her hand went to her holy symbol. They stood in a high, vaulted cavern, resembling nothing less than space of a great petrified heart if drawn by a sculptor granting artistic license to render Netheril’s fall in blood red stone. A bright and cold silvery light banished every shadow and a faint lapping of liquid reached the ears, but aside from the light and the soft ambient noise, something was terribly off. The air in the very center of the room was warped, twisting the light that passed through it, like the shimmer of heat above rocks in a desert’s sun, though nothing hovered there. If anything it seemed as if what had once been there, the Karse Stone, was by its conspicuous absence the source of the warped space, with its metaphysical weight in place there for so many centuries responsible for a permanent deformation in the fabric of space. Their conjured sources of light immediately dimmed upon entering the room, and the walls themselves seemed leeched of color. The reddish rock of the godisle was pale and sickly as it approached the depression in the room’s center, almost as if it were rotting from the inside out. What has once been there as a pool of heavy magic pouring out from and then returning to the Karse Stone, the literal heart of Karsus the Accidental God, was present but… changed… a transparent, diaphanous reflection of its former deadly puissance. Nearly tangible on the air itself, a sense of grieving regret saturated the space there at the godisle’s heart. “Someone had a rather large fight in here…” Toras whispered as his eyes adjusted to the dimmed light and noticed the humanoid corpses strewn across the ground and the broken remnants of five separate golems of ancient Netherese manufacture. “Those are relatively fresh, not ancient,” Clueless pointed to three bodies on the floor, “And they aren’t human corpses either.” Tristol stared at the bodies and every other disturbing aspect of the chamber, including the fact that Jingleshod had told them the truth: the ‘loths had come for the Karse Stone. They’d come for it and they’d taken it. But why? “What the hell are they?” Toras motioned to how the humanoid corpses seemed to blur into any adjacent shadows, as if they weren’t entirely corporeal. “They’re shadovari.” Tristol finally explained, stepping over to one of them and reaching down to examine its armor. “Shades. Humans who’ve traded part of their souls for shadow-stuff and received extended life and power in exchange.” “Ok and that means absolutely nothing to me other than presumably they were evil.” Toras shrugged. “Who are they? What were they doing here? Why did the ‘loths kill them?” “Remember what I said about the Netherese enclave of Shade?” Tristol shook his head at each corpse in turn. “Prior to Karsus casting his spell, they shifted their city and its entire population to the Plane of Shadow. Either they stayed there intentionally, or the changes to the Weave in their absence prevented their return. They apparently returned in the past year, and clearly they were interested in finding out what had become of the empire that they’d once been a part of.” “So they’re working with the ‘loths?” Florian rolled her eyes, “Great.” “I very much doubt that.” Tristol frowned. “They seem to have uniformly embraced the worship of Shar during their centuries in Shadow. The ‘loths would have absolutely nothing to do with them. Frankly it seems as if they were either here when the ‘loths arrived, or more likely the ‘loth presence here drew their attention and Shade dispatched them here to find out what was going on, much to their doom.” Over the next few minutes they explored the room and tried to piece together what had occurred, though without touching the pool and the space where the Karse Stone had been. As far as they could tell, the ‘loths had come first and destroyed the golems set in place by one of the Wulgreths to guard the chamber, and in their wake the shadovar had followed and paid a terrible price for their intrusion. The corpse of one shadovari fighter lay partially submerged in the pool of greasy, translucent liquid, the man having apparently been roasted alive in his armor. Two other armored fighters lay dismembered by mezzoloth claws, one of them with a broken trident still impaled through her chest and into the blood red stone of the wall behind her. In the process of piecing together the fate of the shades and collecting a number of weapons and magical objects left behind on their corpses, they discovered one other salient piece of information as to what the ‘loths had done. Situated at the closest point from solid ground to where the Karse Stone had once stood were the faint impressions of a heavy tripod and two cylindrical objects: the Divinity Leech. “They took it you see. They were jealous. They were always jealous of me and the machine that I’d created…” Tristol whispered to himself, recalling the words of Ghyris Vast, the creator of the machine they’d seen and seen used in the Astral atop more than one drifting godisle, there to siphon, extract, or to mine… something… from the drifting bodies of dead gods. Tristol knelt down at the edge of the pool of heavy magic and traced his bare fingertips across the stone where the device had once stood. Lapping against the stone but seemingly drained of whatever essence it had once held, the pool of heavy magic was thin, ash grey, and translucent. “This was where they came to test the Divinity Leech.” Tristol turned and looked at his companions. “This is where they came to use it first before they dared make the attempt on the Astral.” “F***…” Clueless gritted his teeth, his mind spinning to make sense of it all and what the yugoloths intended. “Why do it here on Toril though?” Florian asked, “Why here and not one of a dozen worlds with dead gods? Why not just start on the Astral? Starting here and you’d be likely to provoke one of Toril’s gods to step in.” “I don’t know…” Tristol stammered, trying to wrap his brain around the intersection of his own people’s origin with the fall of Netheril at Karsus’s hands and both the use of the Divinity Leech and the theft of the Karse Stone. Tristol’s confusion was lifted by the unsettling caress of Taba’s telepathic voice in his ears and his ears alone, [i]“If you have the capacity to ensorcelle the pool with a legend lore dweomer, do so and you will see what I wished for you to see.”[/i] “Taba wants me to legend lore the pool.” “She wants you to legend lore a pool of heavy magic?” Clueless asked, raising an eyebrow and having very conspicuously both eyed and kept his distance from the pool, even in its altered state, given his own prior experience with the substance, and especially given Tristol’s lecture on how Karsus had toyed with the material and caused the original Wulgreth’s transformation into a lich purely by accident. “Are you crazy?” “I need to know what happened here.” Tristol furrowed his brow and stood up, staring into the warped and empty hollow where the Karse Stone had hovered. “So you might want to step back.” Collectively the group edged back as Tristol began to cast, though Nisha did so reluctantly. The effect was much more profound than any other time they’d seen the spell cast as the pool of depleted heavy magic shimmered. Sparks of magical energy erupted from its surface like flaming oil cast into a white hot metal pan. Runes in the yugoloth tongue scratched into the rock below the pool in a swirling, drain-like spiral glowed with a sudden sickly greenish light. The ‘loths had been utterly methodical in their testing of the device, leaving nothing to chance, but whatever their original purpose, they posed no danger as Tristol looked into the past. Slowly an image formed within the pool, acting almost like a monstrous scry focus. Then without warning an audible scream shook the room as the image of Karsus himself, swollen with the divine might of Mystryl turned to stone and plummeted forth into the Dire Wood. They watched and listened as the ground rumbled in concert with his titanic red stone form falling to earth. An utter sense of regret reached out and filled their minds with a near divine sense of ache and sorrow for what his arrogance had done to him and his own people when he’d only been seeking to be their savior. And then with a subtle ringing sound and a tremble within the liquid at their feet, the image vanished from the pool of depleted heavy magic and the legend lore spell jerked and rewound the clock even further, tumbling backwards at a rapid pace before providing a view of past events leading up to that first and terrible moment in time. Only Tristol saw it all, and as he watched those events in real time in his mind’s eye as only seconds elapsed in the outside world, his eyes went huge, his face turned ashen, he dropped to his knees trembling, braced his hands on the floor and vomited before he screamed in horror. [center]****[/center] [/QUOTE]
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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
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