Shemeska
Adventurer
***
Siddhartha was standing again.
“What the hell…” Florian sputtered breathlessly as all color drained from her face.
Siddhartha chuckled as he brushed at his clothing from where he had fallen, and then glanced down at the crossbow bolt buried in his chest like it was a splinter. The blood was gone, vanished, evaporated, and a moment later the fiend plucked the bolt from the wound without so much as a wince and it sealed like it had never been there.
“What the bloody hell…” Florian sputtered again, absolutely deflated from her exuberance of seconds prior.
The fiend laughed, and tossed the crossbow bolt to the side like a piece of trash, a contemptuous, gloating smirk playing across his face.
“You have absolutely no idea what it is that you blundered into.” Siddhartha said, his tail twitching erratically like a demon’s metronome. “All because of that idiot Baatezu on behalf of the f*cking Lord of the 5th. Their curiosity, all on behalf of Tiamat by way of Vlaakith, that rotting mortal’s corpse too long awaiting a grave… it has become a problem.”
Siddhartha’s voice was changing as he spoke. The mellifluous, cultured, nearly poetic tones of the exiled Rakshasa were bleeding away, leaving only the hatred behind, a slick and sickening tone like drops of acid on the mind.
“A f*cking deity.” The fiend said with utter contempt. “Her stupid prodding of the Baatezu was trouble enough, but they could be easily manipulated from other directions. You though have proven unfortunate.”
His lips were no longer moving, but he was still speaking to them, his voice simply resonating in their heads, seeping like an infection into their brains, and coiling around their neurons like a clutch of vipers.
“Oh sh*t…” Clueless blurted out as he realized that he had felt the same mental intrusion before, or rather one very much like it, in the city of Center.
Siddhartha’s eyes: they were glowing a harsh and angry red, shifting to orange, fading to violet, dancing between colors. There was a single final smirk upon the Rakshasa’s face before his features melted away, running like hot wax as he dropped all pretensions of being what he had claimed and appeared to be.
Gone was the elegantly dressed, tiger headed fiend from Acheron. Gone was the lawful but bloodthirsty tyrant wrapped in the guise of nobility. All that remained was a tall, gaunt figure in a flowing black robe with its featureless, elongated cranium, without mouth, without nose, with only the burning eyes of an Ultroloth.
Elation at striking what had seemed a mortal blow on Siddhartha was replaced by shock and fear. An Ultroloth. That changed everything. Every inconsistency from before fell into place as everything else was screaming ‘you’re f*cked’.
Of all of them, only Kiro showed no horrified shock or surprise. In fact, his feelings were more along the lines of calm, measured confirmation of something already suspected. What he’d been told was correct, though that should have come as no surprise in and of itself either; it was rare for them to be wrong before dispatching one of his kind. More thought and more confirmation would come later though.
“I cannot suffer yet another setback at your hands!” The words exploded in their minds with white-hot ferocity, a fraction of the Ultroloth’s own experience in failure translating in the words spoken as tiny white motes of light erupting across their vision.
Somewhere behind them, where it had been lurking for some time awaiting the command of its master, something swam through the stone of the palace foundations, and the floor silently rippled like water.
“I will not open myself to that misery once more!” The yugoloth screamed into their minds. “You have no idea what – agony - you caused me! You cannot understand what she did to me because of you!”
There was virtually no warning to what happened next as the Ultroloth gestured with an outstretched hand and a chaotic stream of color burst from his palm. As the streams of acid, flame, crackling lightning, and other effects swallowed the group, the ‘loth’s defensive contingencies triggered.
The prismatic spray had done its damage, with Skalliska, Florian, and Clueless burned and singed to one degree or another, but they had managed to avoid any of the spell’s more deadly potential effects. However, just as they managed to recover from that first sudden wave of magic, the ‘loth prepared to cast again, and its lurking watchdog of a creation burst from the ground.
Fyrehowl barely managed to evade the creature as its head and serpentine body broke the surface of the stone floor like a sea-serpent cresting to attack a merchant ship. The creature was a construct, and obviously so. The ‘loth had already shown itself to be fond of such unthinking servants, and this one was no different, if significantly larger than the others.
The beast was constructed of segments of gleaming steel, each sculpted and articulated as individual scales on a true serpent or drake, or at least that was the creature’s initial appearance as it lunged at the lupinal and belatedly slapped its tail into Toras’s chest. The Cipher dove and tumbled out of the way, but the edges of her fur briefly caught fire as the flank of the creature’s body rushed past her and back into the stone like the floor was some calcified ocean.
As it happened, the construct wasn’t made out of steel, even if its surface gleamed with the appearance of such. No, the metallic skin of the creature was simply white hot, and as it ripped free from the stone a second time, there were clearly visible bursts of flame erupting from between its scales, where major portions of its body had been engraved with arcane symbols, and also glowing in the depths of its maw like some hellish vault.
Burned by the last pass of the construct, Skalliska hissed and tossed a crackling arc of lightning at the ‘loth from the tip of a wand. Rakshasas were immune to such magic, but Ultroloths were not, at least not by default. Unfortunately the ‘loth had defensive measures in place, they’d been required for posing as a largely magic immune Rakshasa, and the bolt of electricity was snuffed out several feet before it would have struck its target.
“He’s got a globe of invulnerability of some sort!” Tristol shouted out in warning as he hurled a cone of cold onto the face of the oncoming serpentine construct as it launched itself from below in a rapid succession of passes.
Clueless nodded in response to the mage’s observation. It explained why their spells hadn’t affected the fiend in their encounter on the Astral: they’d been nullified by just such a ward, or they’d been swallowed by its own resistance to spells, giving the appearance of a true Rakshasa’s magic immunities.
So few spells the bladesinger possessed would directly affect the Ultroloth, but then the one he had presently called into his mind wasn’t going to be cast directly against the fiend anyways.
Meanwhile, as the bladesinger hurled his own spell, Tristol was madly diving out of the path of the ‘loth’s construct and struggling to keep a hand steady enough to discharge a second spell: a dimensional anchor. Moments later, by pure luck, the spell hit the Ultroloth and appeared to penetrate its wards, though the ‘loth seemed entirely unconcerned.
The fiendish construct meanwhile hadn’t been so much as slowed by the burst of ice thrown at its head. Whatever its unique form classified it as, it appeared to have a whole host of standard golem magic immunities. That left the aasimar wizard largely useless against it, but he’d known what spell Clueless was preparing to hurl at the Ultroloth, and he’d known something to compliment it.
Magic immunities did not however make the burning metallic serpent immune to raw physical damage, and it had taken several blows to its face and midsection each of the times that it had burst up from below to attack them. It would have taken considerably more, but the creature was obscenely quick, and it was approaching from different positions and different angles each and every time it surfaced. Consequently, only Kiro, and to a lesser extent, Fyrehowl, had managed to react quickly enough to land any solid blows.
And then there was the Ultroloth whose mental laughter and mocking commentary echoed through their heads as they futilely stabbed at its construct and made largely ineffective attacks against it. Already the ‘loth had simply shrugged off a flamestrike from Florian, and moments later it tossed another spell at them, causing Florian and Toras to stagger and gasp as it seemed to threaten every drop of water in their bodies with evaporation.
As they struggled to resist the fiend’s spell, or at least cope with its horrid damage, Clueless’ spell was completed, though to no visible or immediately obvious effect. Still, it would be noticed when the ‘loth moved, and the irony was that he’d learned it from a fire genasi who’d been handed it by a yugoloth. And oh, what a useful spell it had proven to be.
“You’ve already caused me too much disruption in what I have been tasked to do.” The Ultroloth broadcast, rattling their skulls. “At least you will die with less prolonged agony at my hands than by my… sister’s.”
That last word, referring to Brampandra as his sibling, there was an almost amused inflection given to it. Yethmiil very clearly didn’t have any siblings, and whatever his so-called sister was in actuality, she was not, and never had been his sister.
“… interesting…” The fiend then muttered as it stepped forward and into the wall of the invisible bubble of force that Clueless had conjured into place over it, confining it to a space only a few feet across.
“Still, it is irrelevant.” He said as he raised a gray, elongated hand to cast once more.
Florian was healing Nisha, Tristol was casting a spell of Haste on Toras, and Kiro was dislodging one his two swords from the serpentine construct’s back when the Ultroloth’s spell manifested as a living wave of minute imp-like beings composed of flame.
The wave broke on them just as Kiro and Toras landed killing blows upon the fiendish construct. Kiro leapt over the oncoming tide of living flame and Toras wildly dove for cover next to the rapidly cooling construct, though the former escaped with considerably less harm, and the others were spared the worst of it by a moment of prescient action when Fyrehowl hurled a cone of cold directly into the flames, extinguishing a swathe of the tiny creatures.
As the spell faded there was a moment of calm, brief though it was, as the ‘loth surveyed the damage. It hadn’t done nearly enough, and though several of them were terribly injured, with Nisha and Skalliska wincing against burns and slashes inflicted by the serpent, the pain only galvanized them for what came next.
The Ultroloth was trapped under a bubble of force, overconfident in the extreme, and wholly unprepared for the fact that it was confined in an enclosed space and unable to teleport out. Too late it realized its error, and just what sort of unique variation on a typical wall of force spell had been thrown over him when Clueless stabbed through the wall and into the fiend’s chest.
A raw crash of anger and pain washed over them all as the fiend’s mind projected a mental impression of its wounds, and a sudden desperation that was so violently atypical for the cold, calm and always prepared aura that surrounded Ultroloths almost by default.
It had been a horrid mistake to fight them against such numerical odds, doubly so in that he’d expended his most powerful spells earlier in the day with a pair of Gates. The thought kept intruding into his mind over and over again of how much of a mockery his existence had become under that subcreature he called a mistress. And now because of her in no small way, Yethmiil was trapped, a point only reinforced by a flurry of rapid stabs into his back by Kiro, who like always, just seemed to be in the right place at the right time, normal space and normal speed being no issue.
A rapid stream of poisonous invectives and a sequence of perverse, disturbing images pumped into their minds as the Ultroloth flooded their minds with his anger, and what amounted to telepathic swearing. His swearing though was less of concern than the necromantic spell he tossed a second later, exploding in a circle of darkness that momentarily threatening to snuff out their lives.
Sadly though, Florian had already granted them all some measure of protection, and though that protective ward buckled and failed against the ‘loth’s spell, the circle of death was likewise nullified. Another spell might have been forthcoming from its seemingly endless well of destructive incantations, but it never had the chance as Toras and Clueless both drove their swords through the wall of force and into the fiend.
Already bleeding from a dozen wounds, the Ultroloth’s eyes flared violet with pain and disbelief. It had been a mistake to be so completely unprepared, and all of it was because of the b*tch who held him in thrall in the first place. Going to and from her residence upon the Astral had drained him of his most powerful spells, and it was necessity that had pulled him back to die. He’d never had a chance as depleted as he’d been; the battlefield had not been one of his choosing, either in locations physical or temporal.
“What the hell is this all about?!” Clueless demanded angrily.
The sword slipped an inch deeper, but it was really unnecessary, and wouldn’t have made a difference. She’d geased him, geased an Ultroloth; he couldn’t have told them any relevant, critical information even if he had been willing to, which he wasn’t. But even as their crude, tentative application of pain embedded itself further into his mind, he could already feel something else fraying at the edges of his sense of self, invading… his vision was fading, not to black, but to crimson.
“No… not again….” The telepathic outburst was panicked.
Carceri was feeding on him. The Red Prison was sucking his essence into itself. The ‘loths had not yet linked themselves to the plane, not fully, and so while the plane might hunger for him, it could not keep him long. But regardless, he was dying then and there for the second time in his existence. He recognized this not with anger and rage, but with fear. The first time had been different, long ago and in Gehenna, but this time, She would never let the plane itself claim him, locking him into the centuries long process that it would take for him to reform and coalesce as a distinct being once more.
No, his fate would be much worse.
“Kill him and be done with it.” Skalliska said bluntly as she sat on the wreckage of the ‘loth’s construct, still bleeding from several wounds.
“Not yet.” Clueless said without turning away from the fiend. “I’ll enjoy it when we do, but I want to know what all the hell is going on here. They’ve f*cked me over before and I’ll be damned if I’ll just drop this without some information.”
The fiend’s mental emanations were growing sluggish like coagulating blood, or the Styx grown clogged on a thousand bloated corpses. It was getting slower by the moment, and his robes were drenched in his own blood. He was dying.
“You have no idea what she’ll do to you...” Yethmiil whispered in their minds, both as a final exclamation to them, and a harrowed, foreboding statement of what would be awaiting him.
And with that, he began to blur at the edges, merging with the red light of the plane for a few brief moments before imploding like a bloated star, trailing motes of his essence, sparkling pinpricks of light, up towards some unseen point high above on the surface. They watched him die, but they also watched him being called back by something else, snatched up, summoned.
“What in Tempus’ name are we involved in here?” Florian asked as the last bits of the fiend’s essence spiraled away into nothing.
There was no easy answer of course, and the ‘loth hadn’t given them anything else to work on, save for the fact that he had never been a Rakshasa. Siddhartha was an assumed identity, and there might have never been a fiend by that name. Or, if there had, he’d been long dead and his identity assumed out of convenience by the Ultroloth.
No easy answers, but plenty of questions. If Siddhartha, or rather Yethmiil, as the Gehreleth had called him, had been an Ultroloth, and very obviously been a lesser to his ‘sister’, the Lady Brampandra, another so-called Rakshasa, then who or what was she? The bloody poetry written into the wardings in the Astral, and there in Carceri, she’d penned them it would seem, and they had never seemed to be something a true Rakshasa would have created. Not ordered enough, not structured and proper, too grotesque and wild despite the layers of organization that was there beneath the crimson spattered chaos.
If she wasn’t a Rakshasa, just what the hell was she? What had they been doing on the Astral? Where was she? And what would happen now?
Things were terribly, horribly different from what they had so far assumed about their enemy. And as they stood there in the depths of a fake Rakshasa’s palace in Cathrys, the silence of uncertainty was deafening.
***
The crimson glow of Cathrys faded from his eyes as his corporeal form dissolved. For a moment Yethmiil kal’Suth was suspended between layers of Carceri, a cold and bitter void, a place that might have existed before the formation of the orbs, or might not have existed beyond the abstract. But then there was a touch, a summons, a burst of anger. The moment was over and in an instant he was siphoned through a hole in reality, not entirely unlike the touch of the Maeldur, but guided and initiated by a force altogether more malevolent.
The transition was harsh and abrupt, but indeed he had felt it before, eons ago. That first instance he had been killed by a Balor, Argrazoth of the Brine Flats, in a particularly key battle on the slopes of Mungoth. It had taken him two centuries to fully reform, but for what it was worth, he still had the soul of that Tanar’ri entrapped in a gem buried a mile deep, still conscious in its imprisonment.
But this time was different. That had been during an earlier time, an earlier era when Anthraxus still held the Siege Malicious, and under the regime of that prior Oinoloth, he had held considerable sway as far as the lawful evil planes were concerned. Death at the hands of Argrazoth, especially when that being of chaos was so far removed from its native element, had been a disaster. In his absence during the time his scattered essence gathered itself and reformed on the Waste, his fellow Ultroloths had carved apart his holdings in Gehenna and the Waste so that when he returned his prestige was solid, but his actual power was a drop of what it had been at his height.
He had eventually recovered from that death. Almost. He’d tortured Argrazoth to death, and the Tanar’ri’s agony had proven to be a succor to his own losses, even as the Waste sapped at the less tangible joys of the act itself. It had been a horrible execution leading up to the imprisonment, even by the standards of Ultroloths, and one that he was certain his current overseer and mistress would at once find both brilliant and blasphemous. He’d birthed a quartet of arcanaloths in full view of Argrazoth, instructing the newborn ‘loths in the subtleties of applied pain, slowly letting them feed upon the Balor piece by piece as it was flensed and dissected. A bit of flesh on their lips, marrow to fight amongst one another over, a ligament to strip free of muscle and bone to gnaw upon in the room’s corner like an infinitely more intelligent version of some Night Hag’s pet Yeth Hound.
That had satisfied him. The rhythms of pain, the vibration of twitching muscles and thundering arteries, vocal chords screaming and compressing the air, raw psionic tremors of the Balor’s brain playing the aether like a madman’s lute. Satisfaction, if not joy. The Waste denied pleasure, true pleasure, to its chosen.
It had taken him millennia to recoup his fall from dark grace, and in the end he had crawled into a position of power in the court of Mydianchlarus. And it was in that position that he had first met The Ebon, and during his late tenure there in the Wasting Tower, he had heard rumors of the Wheels Within Wheels, and their spinning had brought him close like some metaphysical centripetal force of fate. He had once been mighty, and they would offer him that prestige once more.
But they had demanded loyalty, and they seemed, somehow, to be capable of enforcing such.
In true yugoloth fashion he had wavered back and forth between the offers of power that they had whispered to him from a dozen different speakers, and then later when Anthraxus began to muster his army at the Hill of Bone, he’d danced with the altraloth’s promises and entreaties as well. Mydianchlarus, Anthraxus, The Wheels… he’d played with the three of them and never given his loyalty till it was far too late. He’d meant to throw his support to Mydianchlarus at the last moment, but something in the back of his mind had stopped him. Whatever it was, if anything but whimsy, it had prevented him from decorating the spires of the Wasting Tower with his corpse, but it had not placed him among those Ultroloths counted as loyal to the new order.
He wasn’t willing to place himself under the authority of a lesser entity. He served The Ebon out of respect for power, service at the point of a sword, but there was always a loathing for such an abject, wanton disruption in the roles, rank, and caste of their race. Even with what he had become, Anthraxus had been an Ultroloth before his transition and his attainment of the throne of Khin-Oin. The Ebon was an arcanaloth, a lesser being, a subcreature by comparison, though in his presence that never felt like the case. In that one’s presence, there was something that simply did not feel right, or perhaps something maddeningly familiar that he could never appropriately quantify.
And the newly crowned Oinoloth had been well aware of those feelings it seemed, and so had she. She had played her cards correctly, she had danced with the Ebon from the start, and with his rise in status, she too had gained prestige and power commensurate to her loyalty.
She’d requested his subservience. She’d fixed her eyes on his, a wild miasma of colors reflected back between them both, a single commonality bridging the gulf between them. He was an Ultroloth, the apex of purity. She was an abomination, a mockery of transcendence.
Why? Why had she requested him? She reveled in her newfound power, and in fact she was still holding the severed head of Palinarius, her former master, when she made her request. He was simply another middling symbol of her triumph, a trophy of her sick gloating that made him and the others under her command into objects.
Of course, he’d have done much the same, even if his reasons were different, and even if his mind simply worked different from hers. His was a razor, cold, unadorned and sterile; he would never have abased himself on his knees before the Oinoloth, any Oinoloth, begging and bleeding on the floor.
She’d pleaded for power and influence, and an Ultroloth as a puppet.
And in the end, the Oinoloth had acquiesced to her demand.
The thoughts of those events were not pleasant ones, and they grew worse as he mulled over the evolution of their master and servant relationship, the farce of assumed identities only barely changing that dynamic.
The first time that he had failed her she had tortured him for several days. It had impressed him on one level, but it was different from what he would have done. She enjoyed it; she was capable of emotional involvement in the act, while he would have done the same even without the capacity for such unrefined thoughts.
Again, those thoughts of her as an abomination, thoughts that she knew fully well he harbored, and for which she punished him with manic, sadistic glee. There was something wrong with her brain, or perhaps it simply had to do with her origin. She might have been birthed as a mezzoloth by Carceri, one of the rare few of that kind, still influenced by the marginal chaos the Red Prison clutched to its withered breast. Irony more, how fitting might it have been had she been one of those four that he himself had created several thousand years ago, birthed as momentary executioner’s tools. He’d dismissed those newborns to the Tower Arcane and never given them a moment’s attention afterwards.
Had he forged his own shackles? He’d likely never know, truth be told.
And now he would find himself at her mercy for a second time, though in a broader sense of things, taking into account that the Oinoloth had probably intended to execute him eventually had he not been placed under the bitch’s authority, it was the third time that his continued existence relied upon her acidic whimsy.
***
That momentary transition was over, and with it his recollections of what had brought him to that point and to that place. The glow of Carceri was still present, but brighter, of a different tone and texture to his senses. She had not plucked him away to the Astral, nor the demiplane that she had forcibly tethered to the towers built at the heart of the storm there on that godisle, that particular godisle…
He was still in Carceri, and she would not have brought him there unless she was present as well. She was actually there, physically present, not simply projecting. There was a flicker of magic and she was in the room, wrapped in the darkness. Even enraged and filled with homicidal intent, she was self-conscious of her physical condition, likely having allowed it to fester during her long periods of projection to various places outside of Carceri.
The air was alive with the mental presence of something that simply dwarfed his own, something to put all of his pretensions of inferior and superior beings into a shallow grave. Likewise the air was pungent with a fierce contrast of perfume and open wounds. A pity he would remember that.
Yethmiil closed his eyes and locked those last few moments of freedom into his memory, hoping to dwell on them for what was to come.
Emerald eyes lit the darkness, slowly shifting colors, and a feral snarl cut the air.
The Tower would soon welcome yet one more living, screaming brick.
***
