Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)

[Shemeska]

I appreciate your Citadel of Shattered Faith even though I like the theory that nobody can logically complete the tower of Carceri. Oh, and I like the Magnus Jester as well.

The next update will show the Citadel of Shattered Faith. And as far as completing the Tower or Incarnate Pain, the new Oinoloth has tended to do things on a very large scale, in a very rapid manner, moving away from the slower (and he would say 'apathetic') approach of his predecessors. But it still remains to be seen if the 'loths will end up finishing that tower, or if finishing the tower is even their primary goal with the dead gods on the Astral.

 

[Shemeska]

Fyrehowl paused and tilted her head as a thought bubbled up in the back of her mind. It wasn't that she'd noticed something, no; it was more something that they hadn't found.

"Poetry." She said.

Nisha frowned, "Poetry?"

"The wardings on the first godisle, and on the palace in Carceri." The lupinal explained, brushing a hand against the wall like she was painting with her fingertips. "That poetry."

She gave a shudder at the recollection, both the imagery in her mind’s eye, the smell when they had found it, and the horror that must have been its creation. Though she had no way of knowing, the githyanki who'd served as paint and pallet on Maanzicorian's godisle, they'd been alive when the walls were decorated with their wardings. One by one they'd been killed, piece by piece at times, forced to watch as their killer wove her spells wearing nothing but a sticky coating of their blood. Their agony had been prolonged as much as possible, and the emotional taint that had hung over the place like the blessing of a dark power still haunted the lupinal.

But while their current location was just as warded and concealed as the earlier locales had been, they'd yet to see any hint of the same frescoes of blood, bile, and pulped viscera. That didn't make sense. What was serving to produce the same type of wardings?

"We've been through every room in this prison." Fyrehowl said. "And we've even searched the ship and its moorings, but we haven't found anything making the warding."

“That’s not something you easily hide…” Skalliska said, repressing a shudder of her own.

Clueless gave a smirk, “Not like they even tried to hide it the last few times. Hell, they enjoyed it.”

“They made a spectacle of it.” Toras said, shaking his head. “They only put it out of the way just to avoid it getting messed with.”

The fiend that had painted those wardings had treated it as much an art as she had spellcasting. Grisly, perverse art, adjoined with brilliant, frightening spellcraft.

“I don’t think it’s here then.” Fyrehowl said. “Tristol, do you think they could have anchored the spells somewhere else and still had them effect this prison all the way out here?”

Tristol blinked. “Well…”

It was a frightening thought. Magic was boosted on the Astral plane yes, but as it was, the wardings themselves -from what he’d experienced of them- were hideously powerful spells as it was. They seemed to have been cast as rituals, anchored to a location, which would allow a spellcaster to create more powerful effects if they put time and sacrifice -of one form or another- into the casting process. But still, he didn’t honestly want to meet anyone capable of working that sort of magic, given how they’d cast it.

“It’s possible.” He reluctantly admitted, a double-edged mixture of worry and respect in his voice. “But I’m not sure I want to really think about how powerful you’d have to be to create that sort of effect. And from what we saw before with the painting, I really don’t want to see what the place where they cast it looks like.”

***​

Tristol’s thoughts weighed heavily upon them when they left the prison complex and plunged back into the storm, leaving the godisle’s bloodied and bewildered defenders –those that were left- to lick their wounds and ponder how they’d explain the loss of their prisoners. But while it was unintended, those same defenders wouldn’t have anyone to explain themselves to in short order if all went according to plan.

But protected against the storm as much as was possible, the group hurtled through the currents ever deeper towards its heart, towards the eye of the tempest, and towards the waiting corpse of Aoskar.

Though the astral winds screamed in their ears and pulsed against their flesh with random sensations, they were silent as they passed through the constellation of warded godisles that they knew also haunted the storm as bleeding, desecrated companions to the godisle of the Portal Father. They paid them no attention though, avoiding them as much as they could from their vague awareness of where they were from the map they’d found among the half-blooded githyanki warlock’s chambers.

They passed by a half dozen warded godisles in their line of transit, each of them sealed safe and invisible inside their own bubble of wardings. They passed them by without a second thought, without the guilty aftermath of curiosity’s ever-present war versus pragmatism.

The first to be left behind unmolested and untouched was the drifting and severed head of an unknown, unnamed god whose rocky flesh sprouted thirty iron pillars, each of them serving to tether a githyanki carrack. Shelter against the storm and a marshalling point for the fiends’ githyanki servants, virtually none of whom had a clue who they actually served. Over two hundred of them stared up at the winds swirling against the magical bubble like a skein of oil on a soap bubble’s surface, and they were passed by like so many inanimate objects.

Every portal key is sacred to me. Every bounded space is a window into my heart. Every portal is a piece of me.

Miles deeper into the storm and they passed the strip-mined corpse of a long dead elven power mutually ignorant of the githyanki defenders encamped upon its surface. They drifted past without a second thought while far below, a githyanki warlock sat and barked orders to his troops while his familiar, a hordeling that looked like a stunted, twisted, insectile human infant drooled and chattered upon his shoulder.

The swirling, raging currents of Aoskar's storm only increased, but they didn't pause or seek shelter from the screaming metaphysical wind. Even when it threatened to push inside their heads with the agony of a dead god's last screams and stillborn hopes, they continued on, deeper towards the center.

Sigil flocks to me, and my name is synonymous with the very act of planewalking itself. This is right, this is proper, and this is only the beginning.

"How much further do we still have to go?" Nisha asked.

Her words fell on deafened ears. None of the others seemed to have even noticed her ask the question, and given the howling metaphysical wind in their ears and their minds, they could hardly be blamed.

The Xaositect said it again, shouting the second time, “I said how much further till we reach the center!"

She frowned and drifted closer to Tristol. Another shout and another lack of a response, and at that point there was only one thing to do: she pulled his tail.

"Hey!" Tristol shouted, not even hearing his own words over the storm.

The mage turned around and looked into Nisha's face, watching her lips move but not hearing a thing.

"What?!" He shouted in reply as she let go of his tail and shouted something back.

Same result. None of them were hearing anything, so deep were they within the storm.

That in mind, Tristol paused and whispered a relatively weak spell, but one that hopefully would let them talk to one another despite the storm. The spell went off, and oddly enough, despite the howl of the storm and the discomfort the psionic winds had been up to that point, he suddenly felt incredibly happy.

That was a pretty nifty spell; Tristol thought to himself, it was really fun to cast. It’s not all that bad out here either.

“Is this working?” Tristol said in an unusually cheerful voice, telepathically speaking into the minds of his companions.

“Working like a charm.” Toras replied, thinking the words rather than speaking them.

Skalliska mentally nodded. “Don’t have to worry about sending stones or anything else.”

“Is anyone else having weird thoughts getting inside their head?” Florian asked.

“Always.” Nisha replied without a pause. “But that’s normal. But yeah, the whispering, I know what you mean.”

Clueless nodded, “As if it wasn’t already feeling crowded up here, I’m feeling it too. Not just little stray thoughts either, it’s entire memories and bits of perception. It doesn’t make much sense out of context though.”

Tristol found himself pondering what sort of spell he could cast that might tell him more about it. But to his frustration he couldn’t think of one; but the frustration came more from the lack of an excuse to cast a spell than from any inability to help relieve some of their confusion about what the storm was bringing them.

“Well at least I know I’m not going crazy.” Florian said. “At least not yet. This is getting pretty bad as we go deeper, and I’m half expecting some yugoloth jellyfish… things… to come flying out of the storm at us.”

Fyrehowl grimaced as they plunged through a glistening barrage of filamentous, silvery astral wind, “I’m still worried about that last part.”

But worries or not, deeper still they continued, past the forest covered corpse of a god of raw and bloody nature, unseen from the surface by the packs of fiendish gnolls who kept watch under the eyes of their leader, a half-fiend gnoll cleric whose holy symbol of a snarling crimson canid head in profile his followers foolishly thought to be Yeenoghu.

"This is my will Imendor. This is my vision of what is to come. Already they view me in their hearts as master of Sigil. All that remains to be done is to solidify their perceptions into reality. Go now, speak to the Dabus, and spread my will among them. The Lady does nothing; she dares not. I am not some mortal wizard seeking to claim the City, so go and influence the belief of her servants, bring them to me, welcome them, reveal to them the mysteries that I have shown to you. They will listen. Surely they will listen."

Closer still, and nearly at the heart of the storm, they passed a dead power of fire, forges and craftsmanship, blissfully ignorant that the flaming glow that licked up from the open cavity beneath the arches of its ribcage was an open portal to Gehenna that had been constructed there by the fiends. Not everything to be mined was for the use of the Overlord of Carceri, and in fact her intentions were a secondary objective when all was said and done.

But all of that was gone and past them in an instant as they broke through a nearly physical wall of multicolored astral wind and into the hollow beyond.

Suddenly the storm was calm and all was silent.

"What the hell..." Toras whispered, his voice standing out once again.

They hung in the eye of the storm, a massive hollow almost a hundred miles across lit by the electric crackle of the swirling, rotating eyewall that encompassed its boundaries. They hung there alone in the silence, suspended in the silvery and unnatural calm amid, drifting in the vast emptiness where Aoskar's godisle should have been.

"Where the hell is it?" The fighter asked.

"It's here." Kiro replied. "Right in front of us."

Fyrehowl blinked. She felt something, something that felt wrong, something that screamed to her to flee, but she couldn't see it.

“Right in front of us where?” Florian asked. “I’m not seeing anything.”

Kiro turned and looked at her and the others. “Move forward about a dozen feet.”

Clueless hesitated. “They warded they entire eye of the storm?”

Tristol whispered a minor spell to see the auras of magic and smiled, “…wow…”

The bubble was massive. Not only did it encompass the entirety of the eye of the storm, but also it seemed to agitate the natural rotation of the maelstrom, turning it, twisting it further and faster than it would have otherwise. It wasn’t enough to hide themselves; the fiends had made the environment even more hellish and turbulent.

“Warded or not.” Clueless said, holding back from breaking the boundary. “We haven’t seen anyone yet. That worries me.”

Kiro nodded, “Same here.”

Somewhere in the back of his mind he honestly worried that the fiends and their ignorant servitors might have been well aware of the intruders in the heart of their storm. Was it a trap just waiting to be sprung? Or were they so worried about betraying their presence for what they actually were, and so secure in the idea that their wards and the storm would keep them safe, that most of their forces were still encamped on the dozen other godisles hurtling along with the current?

Whispering a silent prayer, already able to see the godisle at the storm’s heart, he hoped that it was the latter.

“Lets not worry about that though.” Clueless said as he and the others neared the boundary of the wardings. “They might be able to sense when we go through, so let’s go in as fast as we can before they can react, and then do as much damage as possible.”

Fyrehowl nodded. “But the first fiend we see is mine.”

Worried and tentative, but as headstrong and confident as they could be, with a round of prayers, chanted spells, and pleading, hoping whispers to powers and planes alike, they burst through the bubble and into the eye of the storm. The wardings rippled at their combined passage, something they hadn’t done when Kiro had breached them, subtle enchantments reacting to thoughts and life more so than movement.

The cascade of magic built and reached threshold, collapsing and screaming a single message across the planes to the ears of its creator:

Someone has discovered us.

***​

Xolikarth Fem’at nodded. "As you requested mistress, the scaffolding above the third Spoke of Torment will proceed, followed by the others. Aoskar's flesh will be reserved for the Crown of Agony."

The ultroloth's eyes flickered with their own malignant glow, but that particular quality was barely perceptible over the cold, sapping corona of light that washed over him and the rest of the chamber he stood within. Behind him, his own underlings, a trio of arcanaloth sorcerer-scribes, stood cringing back ever so slightly in the face of the frigid, burning touch of the light their mistress delighted in. Whatever she had become, she was no longer one of them.

A dozen yards ahead -he had no desire to approach any closer- the darkened outline of her figure stood with her back to him, like a spot against the sun, before a pair of open doors and the source of the indescribable light. She enjoyed it he figured, awash in emotions he had shed millennia before her birth, and at first there was little sign that she'd even heard his statement as she basked like a drowsy lizard sunning itself upon a rock in the euphoric/masochistic glow that spilled forth from the Reflective Chasm.

By intent or as a side effect of the heart of the Tower’s proximity, his mistress’s layers of illusions were absent, and only scattered patches of fur stood on end, bristling from the static amid the occasional crackles of purple lightning; most of her exposed flesh was raw and bloody, manged as much as her name would indicate. However there in the hellish light of the Chasm, any self-consciousness on her part was lost, or only an afterthought.

A reptile might sun itself upon a rock, and even a great wyrm might enjoy such an opportunity to indulge itself in a moment of vain, lazy relaxation. But she was hardly a reptile, she was hardly mortal in any way, and no reptile would have shivered with arms spread wide, listening to the deluge of screams that erupted from the Chasm like music.

Was she even listening? The ultroloth stepped forward, his robes brushing against the obsidian floor, casting shadows over the screaming visages of the petitioners locked beneath the glass like tormented insects in amber.

Four steps forward and the floor rippled, losing the glassy consistency it had held a moment before to rise up like a fleshy wave, prompting the greater yugoloth to stop and reminding all present of the true nature of the Tower. Whatever bits of the structure seemed like rock, obsidian, or steel, they were only illusions and affectations, soulstuff forged into the likeness of physical materials. The Tower was a living thing, a gestalt of billions of souls cobbled together and fused into a single massive construct; an edifice wrought of endless suffering.

“Good.” Was all she said in reply, not turning to her underling even to acknowledge him with eye contact, but for the briefest moment the agonized faces locked in the floor below the ultroloth smiled up at him with the same flickering, multicolored eyes as hers.

She was absorbed in the sensations of the chasm, and though Xolikarth knew that he was looking at her actual physical body, her mind was probably dispersed through the entirety of the Tower, to say nothing about any avatars she might have manifested and cast out across Carceri or the other planes. She wasn’t the Oinoloth, she was young, but she was learning more and more to use the powers and abilities that her predecessors had possessed.

“Additionally, the first shipments of godsblood have been received and accepted at the Wasting Tower. The…”

The ultroloth continued on with the details, confidant that at least some fraction of the Overlord of Carceri’s mind was listening to him, despite being more intent on listening to the deafening screams of the Tower’s living bricks and watching the patterns in the chasm. He spoke and she listened, mixing his positive reports with the narcotic rush of the agony that was channeled, funneled, amplified, and purified by the hollow spine of her tower.

Twenty minutes passed by and he was midway through his report when a ripple passed through the chamber and the archfiend’s ears flattened against her head.

“…What?” She whispered softly, speaking to herself as the words were simultaneously mouthed by tens of thousands of wriggling petitioners accreted into the walls.

Obediently, Xolikarth and his retinue remained quiet as their mistress tilted her head to the side and ignored him.

Something had gathered her attention.

“Remain here.” She said abruptly as hands formed and reached up from the floor to ensnare their ankles. “I will hear the remainder of your report when I return. Matters elsewhere require my attention.”

***​

Aoskar's petrified corpse hung within the void, nestled within the relative calm of the eye of the storm that its presence generated within the Astral. The former god of portals and planewalkers had died in an instant of horror, a fate recorded in Sigilian legend, but a fate that history did not elaborate upon the nature of, such was the shock of those long past events. But there in the silvery void, free of the wind of the storm, free of the whispers and free of the screams, the Portal Father's death was laid bare, stark and harrowing for all to see.

Several miles of slate colored stone were twisted into the rough, weathered shape of a tall and bearded man of indeterminate age. The dead god's face was young, but his eyes and the weight of the lines upon his features bespoke of ancient age, and the weariness that accompanied the elderly after a hard and distraught lifetime.

Virtually all of the dead powers that littered the Astral had a sort of austere grace about them. They hung in the void with an air of former glory that still gathered respect and a certain amount of awe at the lingering presence of what they had once been. But Aoskar's corpse presented not any sense of grace, but one of absolute, chilling horror.

The Portal Father's petrified mouth was frozen in a permanent expression of terror and shock, one massive stone limb held up as if to ward off an attack. The godisle was like a man's death mask as he looked down at the blade in his stomach, simply writ large, a concept taken to its extremes and solidified as an example for each and every god in the multiverse.

"Holy..." Florian whispered as she focused on the corpse.

Clueless went pale as he noticed the details, noticed the light reflecting back from the corpse.

In no fewer than twenty places, Aoskar's corpse was pierced through by massive, building sized, perfectly formed blades of a shape and style that made them instantly recognizable. Where they pierced the god's flesh, the rock was discolored and a dull hum filled the air, seeming to visibly disrupt the very fabric of the astral, while the light that glinted off of their mirrored surface couldn't have been colder than the feelings they invoked simply by their presence, and by their implication.

"Mystra preserve..." Tristol whispered, a noticeable tremor in his voice.

But the horror of millennia past was not the only indignity that Aoskar had felt, no, it was only the first. Death had not spared him of anything further. Carefully avoiding the area around the blades, great clefts and furrows crisscrossed the isle where lengths of petrified godflesh had been ripped from the corpse across virtually 60% of its surface. The 'loths had treated the godisle like a freshly buried corpse in a shallow grave still fresh and fit to drag to the surface and repeatedly rape as one more act of pointless rage against the divine.

But the blades were not the only things to defile the would-be lord of Sigil.

Like a spear piercing the breast of the recently deceased, a gnarled tree tapped for its sap by an iron spike, or a mocking, defiling monument in place of a headstone, a tower, or rather a conjoined trio of towers, rose up from the center of the godisle. Sunk down into the rock, very much like a tower whose memory lurked in the back of Clueless's mind, a trio of towers rose up to half the overall structure's height. The towers were linked by dozens of crosswalks, passages and connecting walls like spittle stretched between teeth, before the smaller towers merging and fused together into a twisted, almost organic upper spire.

Light, like immaterial blood leaking from the corpse, erupted up at the tower's base and flooding the hollow, reflecting dimly upon the otherwise invisible walls of force that seemed to fill the gaps between the towers. It wasn't normal light either, it was a mixture of cold, gray light centered about halfway up the tower's height, and a multicolored, shifting halo of light erupting from the stone itself.

"That's not originally fiendish." Fyrehowl said.

Indeed it hadn't been, and those familiar with fiendish architecture, or the styles of Sigil over the past several centuries would have immediately noticed that the towers were rebuilt from an earlier, original structure.

Skalliska took immediate notice of its original architecture. "That was an Athar building..."

"...which was originally in orbit." Tristol said, remembering in some small measure the floating castles and buildings of old Netheril. "The fiends drove it into the corpse like a knife."

And like a sacrificial victim improperly restrained, Aoskar's lingering divine presence was reacting violently to the intruding presence, while somewhere in the back of their minds, the connection was made between the light rising from the godisle, and Vast's Divinity Leach. While the fiends bled the dead power dry, random flashes of light and burst of crackling energy erupted from the stone and raced along the rocky flesh of the godisle, leaping up as multicolored bolts of lightning and arcing towards the spires and cornices of the tower.

But outside of the presence of the tower, the hollow at the heart of the storm seemed almost desolate, a sterile blasphemy, a mocking silence around a desecrated tomb.

"I like the guards they've got." Toras said.

Skalliska looked at him, "There aren't any guards. Not a single one."

"Exactly." They replied.

"Not that they really need them." Clueless said as another burst of lightning erupted out into the void before curling back and grounding on the tower's top spire.

“So what now?” Nisha asked. “We make a mad dash inside and make like Slaadi during the Modron March? Because I’m fine with that you realize.”

“Well…” Clueless said, glancing at the blades embedded in the corpse. “That’s the only place on top of the corpse I’m frankly willing to go. And it’s not like the entryways are guarded.”

“They don’t have any doors either.” Florian remarked, pointing to the open archways at the base of each lower tower portion.

“Hold on.” Fyrehowl said abruptly, a fraction of a second before Kiro put his hand on Nisha’s shoulder to hold back the oft impulsive tiefling.

Following the lupinal’s line of sight, and what Kiro had likewise seen, was a translucent figure high above the tower. Glistening and ghostly, it flitted about the boundary of the storm, leaping out and drawing bolts of the crackling lightning before then diving back into the eyewall once again. Almost as if it were playing, like a mad sea dragon cavorting at the base of a waterspout, it didn't seem to notice them in the slightest.

Not yet at least.

“Yeah…” Clueless said as they all came to the same rapid conclusion. “We make a mad dash for the door.”

***​

Someone had found Aoskar's godisle? Impossible; at least anyone finding it intentionally. Certainly some creatures, and more often their corpses, had drifted blindly through the storm and pierced the protective, obscuring bubbles that she'd sealed each of her godisles in like treasured trinkets under glass, promised little heirlooms as part of a bride's dowry.

But someone intentionally seeking out and finding the godisle where she'd found so many wonderful, wonderful treasures to give to the Oinoloth? It seemed impossible. The storm waylaid most, the Dreadnaughts were blind to their presence, the psurlons and githyanki had no reason to intrude, and the astraloths were keen to devour anything that they smelled upon the currents. Perhaps it was a false alarm, a false positive upon her contingent divinations.

Surely that was it.

The Overlord of Carceri shrugged and closed the door to her private chambers, shedding her illusions as soon as the physical closure was made, and as soon as the layered, overlapping wards sealed her inside from less prosaic avenues.

"I wonder if it's her... it..." She pondered to herself as she unconsciously began to itch at an open sore. "We never did manage to find you Taba, errant little ghost of a thing that you are. You're a fleeting little abomination that should never have been born."

It was a possibility, but she doubted it. The Infiltrator of the Planes was better than that, and probably would have gotten deeper into the godisle's defenses before she'd been noticed. So no, unlikely that the altraloth was responsible for the intrusion.

"So who indeed might you be?" The archfiend whispered as she leaned forward and perched over a golden bowl filled to the brim with Styx water.

Momentarily remembering to stop her violent worrying of her affliction, she reached forward one hand and dipped a claw into the surface as she whispered a few sibilant words in a language that vastly predated her own existence. A drop of puss on the tip of the claw contacted the liquid surface, diluting immediately into a gossamer membrane across the already polluted pool, and a moment later betraying an image of several mortals.

Now that was interesting. And unexpected. Especially that one. She remembered him from a chance encounter in Center.

Though the chamber was filled with the screams of petitioners that composed the walls, there was the distinct and subtle sound of spreading spittle and parting lips as Shylara smiled with a moment of entirely inappropriate glee. Licking her teeth with a raw and bloody tongue, she cancelled the spell and turned to one side to stare at the wall.

"And there you have it." She said, looking into the wide eyes of the ultroloth embedded into the writhing mass of conjoined petitioners. "I know you can still hear me, even through everything else. A pity you couldn't kill them in the first place, little gnats that they are. Consider it a gift from me to you, because very shortly they'll be joining you Yethmiil."

***​

 

[carrot]

Awesome....

 

[Burningspear]

jup

Absolutely wicked beyond believe... we want more of it!!!!!.........

 

[Tal Rasha]

Looking forward to Kiro's meeting with the Arcanaloth with great impatience...

 

[The Forsaken One]

Finally finished all 1200 pages of your stuff .

gogo new stuffszz!!

 

[Shemeska]

Finally finished all 1200 pages of your stuff .

gogo new stuffszz!!

Update to be posted on Saturday.

 

[Shemeska]

Have yourself a 'lothy little Christmas

"Ok," Nisha said, peering through the door of the tower. "They're not so much for doors, and not so much for normal architecture either."

"Not so much for guards either." Toras muttered with more surprise than anything else, not that he lowered his guard for a minute though.

Clueless looked through the door as well, then leaned back and gazed up at the rising exterior of the building to compare. They didn't seem to match, not entirely, but extradimensional spaces weren't normally possible on the Astral, so it had to be some bizarre trick of design and optical trickery on the part of the interior; on the astral or not, geometry brooked no violations.

Abruptly, a crackling bolt of lightning erupted from the pitted, rocky flesh of the godisle and launched up into the sky to ground against the tower's summit, rebounding a moment later and striking back at the ground in a dozen places. Any guards left outside of the tower would eventually draw the bolts simply by accidental discharge, or sooner if the tortured and enraged essence of the dead god of portals could direct his rage anything more than blindly.

"Guys," Tristol said. "I really think we should get outside before one of those takes us out. As pretty looking as it might be, and as amazing as the magic behind it might be to me, we need to move."

Fyrehowl nodded her head, "Lightning or not, we need to get inside before the bloody jellyfish 'loth notices!"

They took her advice and stepped inside, onto the lowest level of the bizarre structure. True to what Nisha and Clueless had ascertained before, the interior of the tower was spacious but contorted, like the twists of some petrified esophagus or spinal chord, with most of its interior space being dominated by a juxtaposition of curling stairwells, open space, and elaborate interior buttressing rather than rooms, chambers, or anything functional one might expect inside of such a large structure. The tower was more decorative than anything else, a monument rather than a living building.

"Maybe they've got rooms elsewhere." Florian mused as she approached the bottom of the stairs.

Kiro shrugged, "Maybe there aren't any rooms at all."

They slowly made their way up the wide steps of the stairwell, inching their way towards the first landing

Florian looked back at Kiro. "What do you mean maybe there aren't any rooms at all?"

Kiro turned to Tristol for a deeper explanation.

"Portals, extraplanar spaces, that sort of thing." The mage explained. "Now while it’s probably just an optical illusion, it does look bigger in here than I might have expected from the outside."

"Even though it’s not possible to do that here." Clueless said.

Tristol gave a troubled look. "Lets not think about that."

They didn't give too much thought to it, though it was certainly lurking there in the back of their minds as they started to ascend the stairs.

"There's normal gravity in here." Clueless said, twitching one of his wings against the air.

Kiro nodded. "I've noticed that. It explains why they built stairs rather than just having an open space and a shaft to ascend up like in githyanki buildings."

"Maybe." Fyrehowl said. "If they cobbled this place together from an older, original building that the Athar had made, it might just be that the gravity is a lingering effect that they kept in place."

"And hey," Skalliska said, turning around to look at her chattering companions. "Let's just keep loudly talking and alert whatever guards they might have lurking around here, especially when we can't fly away if they do find us."

Having said that, Skalliska turned back around, and coming around a blind twist in the stairs, nearly fell backwards as she found herself at eye level with the grimacing face of a githyanki. Almost instantly there was a wand in her hand and the sounds of steel being drawn preemptively from behind her as all concern for their earlier discussion, and her rebuke to it, was put firmly out of mine and forgotten.

But the weapons and wands were an unnecessary precaution. The githyanki wasn't a githyanki, not entirely, not anymore. But it was a familiar face nonetheless.

"Wow." Fyrehowl said. "Nice touch in decorations they've got here..."

Situated in the center of the landing, arranged like any other statue taking up space, collecting dust, and providing a bit of ambiance, there was a stone githyanki cradling its own severed stone head in its arms.

"So that's what happened to that son of a b*tch." Skalliska said as her wand hand relaxed.

Staring up at her with a shocked expression was the petrified face of the githyanki warlock who had attacked them during their fight with his faux-rakshasa master, the ultroloth Yethmiil, when they'd first ventured onto the Astral. The last they'd seen of him had been the fading flash of a contingent planeshift spell. They hadn't known at the time where he'd gone, or what had transpired to him after his master's inglorious defeat.

Florian chuckled, "Isn't that the...?"

"That's him alright." Toras answered, sharing the mood.

The statue was pristine, immune to anything but deliberate damage while on the Astral, but it was covered in slashes and obvious claw marks in places, all of which had been inflicted prior to petrification. Mercifully though, the head had been cracked off -after- the mage had been transmuted to stone, rather than before or during. But regardless, his killer's point was clear, and an example had been made for her other servants to see.

Decoratively carved into the floor, transmuted by magic rather than cut by tools, a single phrase in Infernal repeated itself in a winding circuit around the statue: “The Price of Failure”.

They weren't able to spend time pondering who had killed the warlock, as a shout of alarm rang out from the stairs above them.

"We've got company..." Fyrehowl said as she raised her hand and sent a cone of cold swirling over a trio of githyanki soldiers on patrol.

"No time to gawk at the poor sense of style!" Clueless shouted. "Up the stairs!"

Running up from the landing, they barreled past the githyanki patrol still stunned and injured by Fyrehowl's spell, pausing only long enough to send another, uninjured gith, flying off of the stairs and plummeting to the floor far below. But whether it was his death scream as he fell, or the shouts of his companions a moment earlier, or something else, the seemingly vacant expanse of the tower exploded into a flurry of activity.

Alerted to the presence of intruders, githyanki soldiers swarmed up the stairs from below, apparently teleporting from elsewhere to give chase.

The githyanki, although handicapped by fighting within a gravity well, were intimately familiar with the layout of the building and the turn of its winding stairs. A short time later, the first group of guards caught up with the invaders, and the fighting began.

Toras readied himself and parried the first blow, using his size to block any of the approaching githyanki from getting around him and threatening the less heavily protected members of his party. Steel clashed against steel, and the fighter blocked another strike against the flat of his sword, giving his more spellcasting oriented companions the moment they needed to take an action of their own.

Tristol hurled a bolt of lightning and Clueless did the same, each of them catching one or two soldiers in the path of their blue-white bolts. Florian was busily casting a number of defensive spells, and apparently feeling that clerical niche already filled, Kiro pointed at the githyanki in combat with Toras and launched a sizzling bolt of acid that caught it full across the face and chest.

"What the hell?!" Toras said as the githyanki simply brushed the bubbling acid off of its face like it was sweat and nothing more.

The gith's actions took him off guard, and before he could recover, the knight turned a blade under his guard and stabbed his shoulder. Toras grunted and stabbed back, striking the soldier but seemingly doing no damage despite having felt his blade slide into flesh.

Something wasn't right.

Again he parried a blow, and again his companions hurled their spells. Nisha and Skalliska both sent a flurry of magic missiles into the soldiers further down the stairs, and Clueless hurled a fireball into the midst of a newly arrived group of gith who'd just burst through the main doors at the tower's base. Tristol however, didn't use a directly offensive spell, and after he spoke the last words of his spell, the githyanki on the stairs shuddered and began to move sluggishly, fighting as if they were numbed by cold or fighting a constant watery current.

That was all that Toras needed, and his next strike caught his opponent completely open.

The githyanki shuddered as his sword pierced its breastplate and sunk into its chest, nearly lodging in its spine. It exhaled in a single ragged breath, spilling the remaining air in his punctured lungs like so much blood as his last abortive moments of life flickered briefly. With no breath left to use, he couldn't scream as he died, it wasn't physically possible, but he did anyway.

Even as Toras wrenched his blade free and turned to meet the advance of the next knight, the air was split by an inhuman, insectile shriek issued forth by the one he'd just skewered.

"F*ck!" He shouted in surprise as the githyanki underwent a sudden, hideous change.

Red blood turned milky green and sap-like before it hit the ground, half of it boiling off on the air and the rest erupting in a burst of flame as the corpse of the githyanki erupted through a monstrous transformation into something wholly inhuman, and not even mortal in the first place.

Rather than a dead githyanki bleeding out upon the floor in front of him, Toras looked down at the twitching, chitinous corpse of a full-blooded mezzoloth. In the middle of their innermost sanctum, even if they'd never expected invaders, the yugoloths had tasked their own kind for defense alongside their duped mortal pawns.

Toras took several steps back, and for a moment his sword dipped from its ready stance purely out of shock, and he wasn't the only one to have such a reaction. Standing behind the fallen fiend, several githyanki stood dumbfounded as well, apparently ignorant of the true nature of their own masters.

“Run!” Toras shouted as he clenched his fist and a pulse of golden, celestially empowered light enveloped the stunned githyanki and the true fiends embedded in their midst.

Some of the githyanki staggered in pain and confusion, while a scattered handful of them -the glimmered or shapechanged yugoloths- roared in agony from the holy power of the spell. Below them, already blocked by corpses and living but stunned soldiers, further reinforcements faced a bottleneck and were and unable to immediately give chase.

Given the opportunity, Toras took his own advice and turned and ran, him and his companions all using the moment to gain ground on the tower’s defenders.

A minute or so later, and several hundred feet of stairs higher in the tower, Clueless turned around and pointed Razor. The bladesinger chanted and hurled a bolt of lightning to ensnarl the first three githyanki that had recovered and were rushing up the stairs at them, still a number of flights and turns below still. They screamed in pain, and one of them fell backwards, either dead or badly injured, but either way their fall would slow the progress of their fellows that would follow behind them.

"You've got to be kidding me!" Toras shouted, catching Clueless's attention as he turned back around.

The bladesinger stopped in his tracks as he saw the two figures standing at the top of the stairs: two figures dressed in richly appointed robes, two figures covered in striped fur, with backwards oriented forepaws, and the heads of snarling tigers. Rakshasas, but Rakshasas that looked to have died and been raised from their graves years before, slowly rotting despite the timelessness of the Astral, shambling on in some state of quasi-undeath or magical compulsion that cared nothing for the limitations of life or death.

"What the f*ck are they?" Skalliska asked, feeling the chill of undeath radiate off of the Acheronian fiends, and knowing the contradiction that they represented. Undeath normally couldn't claim true outsiders since they had no body to animate, yet the fiends were moving along with the periodic crackle of emerald energy flickering from their joints.

"They're our old pals!" Toras shouted, feeling almost like clapping. "The original ones!"

Still dressed in the clothes that they'd been executed in, both fiends still wore jewelry emblazoned with their family emblem of a withered silhouette of a black tigers paw. One male, and one female, they were the original Lady Brampandra and Lord Siddhartha who had been the late allies and guardians of Ghyris Vast, the fiends whose identities had been usurped by fiends of an altogether different sort.

Kiro inwardly smiled. That answered some questions of what had actually happened to the original pair. It had been possible that the female had escaped, or played some actual role in all of these events, but her walking corpse standing in front of him seemed to put those possibilities into the grave as much as she was. The yugoloths had slaughtered them both at the same time, probably within hours of seizing Vast and his device.

The undead rakshasas opened their mouths and snarled, dry and hollow death rattles only amplified in volume.

Florian grinned and raised her hand, taking aim with a crossbow. "And just like the last time, this time I'm ready for you bastards, and this time it's for real and not some bloody Yugoloth impersonating you. Enjoy becoming rug material."

Neither tiger-headed fiend responded; they didn't even seem to notice that the cleric had said anything at all as they both raised their hands and began a stiff, disjointed, unnatural series of spellcasting movements. Florian didn't seem to care that they were casting either, and she didn't move an inch for cover after pulling the trigger and letting the blessed bolt fly.

It should have slammed into the fiend and buried itself to the fletching. I should have slain it without pause. But it did nothing of the sort as if the multiverse, or just perhaps Ravenna himself, were mocking Florian in the worst possible way.

"Sons of b*tchs!" Florian shouted as the bolt embedded itself in the rakshasa's chest but didn't seem to cause any major injury, though a web of emerald energy was leeching out of its skin and crackling around the offending missile.

The fiend didn't seem to notice, and the impact's damage was marginal and irrelevant as the corpse raised its hand to cast, joined a split second later by its sibling. Stiffened, rotting lips moving without sounds, desiccated finger bones moving in arcane gestures, both rakshasas hurled their spells.

Tristol was quick to counterspell one of the undead fiends, shouting out a series of arcane phrases causing the hands of the female to crackle with the abortive magics of a failed casting. Her male counterpart, the original Siddhartha, didn't seem to notice however and a cone of frigid air burst from his outstretched fingers to engulf the group.

It would have caused much more damage, but thankfully they'd already wrapped themselves in protective spells earlier, and it at least abrogated the worst of it.

"Son of a....!" Florian growled as she clenched ice-coated fingers around her holy symbol, unable to feel the object through the icy numbness as she incanted a prayer to her god.

Injured and frostbitten though she might have been, her god's fury lashed out nonetheless and wrapped the long-dead fiend in a column of holy flames. But a moment later, the fiend emerged from the fires without a singe upon its flesh.

"Stupid! Stupid!" Florian snarled at herself. "They're still immune to most magic. The bastards gained the benefits of not exactly being alive anymore, without losing the benefits they had before they died."

Kiro nodded and dove into melee, wildly slashing at the female from a crouched position off to one side and almost behind her as Toras hacked at her directly from the front. Being undead, or something to the same effect, she didn't seem to care at the damage she took by the moment, but the alternating blows to the front and the back made it impossible for her to remain steady enough to cast, and unable to defend herself even had she tried.

The original Brampandra was reduced to a fiendish rag doll, batted back and forth by the enemies of her killer, and alive or dead, oblivion was swift to reach up and find her, while her brother faced a similar situation as he fought Fyrehowl and Clueless.

The lupinal's strikes were being blunted by a defensive spell that absorbed most of the damage, and though Clueless's strikes were able to pierce the wardings, he had much less force behind his than did Fyrehowl, leaving the fiend able to manage to cast. Before it was over, they both were twice enveloped in fireballs that the former Siddhartha cast directly on himself, and a lesser variety of energy drain, but ultimately the fiend was defeated by raw numbers and what seemed to be a necromantic compulsion to fight till he was literally dismembered.

"Anyone have a healing potion?" Clueless asked as he winced at the burns that he'd taken from the fiend's spells.

Skalliska uncorked one and tossed it in his direction, "Here you go."

Florian could have healed her companions more quickly, but for the time being she was a bit preoccupied. She smiled triumphantly as she looked down at the mangled rakshasa corpses, both of them finally dead in permanent fashion, though it might have been arguable that they'd died months or even years earlier. That felt good. That felt incredibly good. Justice that even the Mercykillers couldn't have supplied any better, even if it was only the start of what justice needed to be given.

"Glory be to the Foehammer." Florian said. "That felt good."

Toras grinned. "Anyone up for the makings of a nice rug?"

"I'm not sure even Seamus could do anything with that pair." Skalliska replied, noting the advanced stage of dry rot that the two fiends were in. "They're pretty far gone."

"F*cking mephit."

"Well, I take that back." The kobold said, nudging the first corpse with her toe. "I'm sure he could do something with them, just not making rugs that you'd want to use."

Nisha stuck her tongue out at the very idea of the Mephit crawling around through the bodies collecting the next daily special for his shop.

But surely there had to be more.

"Something doesn't feel right." Fyrehowl said, glancing around in vain, itching a notion in the back of her mind that felt like someone was about to jump out at them in ambush. Rarely were such feelings just a mundane bit of paranoia.

Clueless looked down at the corpses and whispered a minor spell to examine any lingering bits of magic on the corpses, because for all he knew, they might behave in the same undying capacity as had the mortal assassins the fiends had sent into Sigil, and beyond that whatever animated the tiger-headed fiends hadn't been something normal, because normally such beings had no true physical body to animate. The magic had to have been something that shackled their essence into a quasi-physical existence rather than dispersing back to Acheron upon their original death.

He'd hoped to find something to clue him in on what the case with the "undead" Rakshasas might have been, but instead as the spell went off, he found something else entirely, and not a moment too soon. Clueless's eyes went wide immediately as he recognized the burgeoning glow of a contingent spell on each of the corpses rapidly ticking its way down to detonation.

"Oh sh*t!" He cursed as he made an immediate grab for the nearest corpse. "Get 'em over the side! Now!"

Fyrehowl looked at the bodies and realized that her worries hadn't been unfounded, and she and Kiro both dashed to help the bladesinger as the bodies began to leak bits of crimson light from their eyes and their wounds.

Increasingly swollen with the glow of triggered spells, they dumped the bodies over the side of the railing and watched them drop, just seconds before their magic triggered. Then, with a roar of flame and the startled screams of githyanki soldiers caught on the stairs, both contingencies triggered and the inside of the tower was momentarily painted in orange and yellow. It hadn't been simple fireballs either, nor relatively conventional delayed versions of the same spell; the spells entrapped upon the dead rakshasas had been grossly amplified to the absolute height of their capacity, and the disturbing lack of pained groans from below attested to their death-dealing efficacy.

Kiro looked over the side at the spherical scorch patterns on the stairs and walls below, and at the charred remains of a dozen githyanki knights. That didn't much concern him honestly, but the eight other figures standing on the stairs in the middle of the carnage, all of them seemingly unharmed, they did. Yugoloths were typically resistant to flame, but whatever exact subtype the pseudo-githyanki were, either they'd been bred more resilient than the norm, carried magical protections, or by some virtue of the source of the flames, they'd been spared its fury.

Florian looked back up from where she'd ducked down for cover. "Yes sir, overkill, I'm very pleased to meet you..."

Kiro shook his head, "Don't say that quite yet. It didn't get them all."

Then, as if to punctuate his statement, the first flashes of teleporting fiends flickered across the interior walls of the tower. The 'loths had abandoned any pretense of being something other than what they were.

"And now is when we run!" Clueless shouted, his wings already starting to beat at the air.

And so they ran, bolting towards the top of the tower in a breakneck spiral as more and more fiends gave chase. Higher and higher they went, following the twisting, contorting stairs that wound their way up the interior hollow, but to their confusion they didn't encounter any resistance on the upwards ascent: the fiends were only appearing at ground level, and from there giving chase. Something seemed to be preventing open access into the tower through magic, affecting both defenders and intruders alike.

The respite didn't last forever though, as soon enough the stairs intersected with the openings to the various connecting passages that ran between the tower and its two adjacent neighbors. At the first such passage they were caught unaware, ambushed by a trio of mezzoloths and misshapen, insectile half-fiend githyanki warlock. The 'loths hadn't just gained the loyalty of duped, misguided githyanki renegades on the run from the lich-queen, nor had they just brought in their own resources from the lower planes, no, they'd also bred soldiers from the unholy union between them.

Fyrehowl and Toras absorbed most of the assault, and replied with a deadly mixture of attacks of their own, forcing the fiends to retreat and leaving two of their own behind, writhing and missing limbs. Reinforced by troops in the next tower over, the fiends would have surged back, but they never had the chance as Tristol abruptly stopped on the landing and passed his hand over the passage's entrance.

"What are you doing?" Nisha asked, hastily tugging on the mage's tail. "Come on!"

Tristol mumbled something that didn't seem to her to be an answer, if he'd ever heard her in the first place. She trotting in place for three random, noncommittal paces before grimacing and gesturing down the stairs towards a group of approaching fiends as they came into view three turns of the spiral below.

Their spells went off more or less simultaneously, with a colored hailstorm of flashing nonsensical colors washing over the mezzoloths below, and a solid, crystalline wall of force sealing off the passage in front of Tristol just in time for a charging fiend to slam into its surface.

"I have no idea how I did that. But damn that was fun!" Nisha grinned at the disoriented roars from down below, and the sound of several fiends losing their balance and crashing into still more of their kind rising up from below.

"We can find out how later!" Florian shouted a flight of stairs above. "Grab Tristol and get up here!"

The cleric would have phrased it differently, but Tristol was still somewhat oblivious. In fact the wizard was standing in front of his freshly created wall of force with a wide, inappropriate grin on his face, admiring the spell and watching the last flickers of magic fade from his hands. It was only a single spell, and there was a snarling mezzoloth only inches away behind the wall, but nonetheless Tristol was still admiring his handiwork.

Nisha didn't stop to think why, though she did make a face at the mezzoloth trapped behind the magical barrier, before she grabbed her boyfriend's hand, getting his attention and yanking him up the stairs after her.

Nearing the top of the tower where the three lower structures merged and joined, there were more cross connections, but already clued in by Tristol's earlier idea, Clueless had sealed a pair of them and blocked off any further attacks.

Finally, the stairs ended at an open, unguarded archway and a dimly lit passage that snaked off into the interior of the top tower. Tristol paused as they prepared to dash down the corridor, then whispered a spell and simply sat down.

Something had caught the wizard’s attention.

"Umm... what are you waiting for?" Toras asked as the shrieking of mezzoloths grew louder and louder in his ears.

Clueless and Kiro looked back at the fighter and gave nervous chuckles.

"What?" Toras asked again, not liking the bewildered tone in their voices and carried on their faces.

The bladesinger pursed his lips and took a deep breath as Tristol continued to just sit in the middle of the hallway and stare into space.

"We're not going anywhere right now." Clueless said, jerking his head back towards the seemingly vacant corridor. "It's... well..."

Tristol answered for him. "The magic is giving me a headache."

"F*ck." Florian said as she looked down the stairs and gripped her holy symbol, preparing to cast. "What sort of headache are we talking about Tristol? The "This will take some time but it's well within my capacity to handle?" or "I have no idea what I'm looking at, but it's deadly and unstable?""

Nisha raised her eyebrows for the peanut gallery, "I know that feeling a lot..."

"Someone warded this place all to hell." Tristol explained. "It's like I'm looking at a spider's web made of magic, and half of the threads are coated in poison and woven into one another. It's made to collapse and trigger if you try to pick apart the individual spells that are set up as wards."

Florian grimaced and held her holy symbol high, calling forth a wall of blades into existence at the top of the stairs, catching several fiends in its path and turning them into paste and bloody mist within seconds. Enraged screams and telepathic taunts rung out as the wave of lesser fiends was, for the moment, held at bay.

"That won't last forever guys. Can you or can you not take down those wards?"

Tristol's tail bristled at the pressure, "I'll try, but damn it... I'm out of my league against some of these spells. Some of them I don't know how to cast, some I've never seen before, and some of them you're not supposed to able to hang on contingent triggers like this. Some of them look like they’re just dummy wards meant to trigger more deadly spells when they drop, and frankly the whole thing looks like it’s intended to just toy with anyone who has skill in magic. It’s taunting me to just slip up once and make a mistake. But I’ll try.”

Clueless looked back at the blade barrier and the pack of mezzoloths behind it, one hand moving up towards the captive bead of heavy magic at his neck. If it came to that, he'd invoke it and try to brute force his way through the wardings in front of them, but he didn't have any idea if it would act differently here on the Astral, much less atop the body of a dead god.

Tristol began to cast, visualizing the act as trying to unravel and untangle a series of knots without having any of the individual clusters of thread touch one another. It was maddeningly complex as each tug of metaphorical string revealed the details of the things woven beneath them. Geysers of acid, fireballs, lightning storms, antimagic effects, curses, chained petrification spells, and death effects upon death effects were layered and sandwiched like a tapestry of perverted magic, and Tristol was having to pick them apart one by one.

Time passed and Tristol was oblivious to the outside world as first one and then another spell unraveled and vanished from the webbing. But for each few moments of success he had, there was the inevitable failure to spot effects hinged to detonate upon the dispelling of other spells that bore their metaphysical weight, and several spells went off inside the hallway, but thankfully none of them proved instantly lethal and beyond the ability of Florian to heal.

"Florian?" Tristol said. "This next bit has about a half dozen death effects, so if you or anyone else has anything to protect us from it, I'd rather not repeat the time we met some bodaks."

He was vaguely aware of the spell being cast, but thankfully for everyone involved he never took his eyes off of the task, even when Toras was struck by an energy drain effect, and when something triggered and sent Clueless and Kiro both diving to the side to avoid a burst of crimson colored lightning.

An uncertain period of time later, Tristol was white as a ghost as the last ward dropped and nothing else triggered. His hands were shaking from worry even as his head swam with a combination of giddy pleasure from the act of spellcasting on the Astral, and the boost to his ego from the success against the spells of a more powerful caster.

Kiro tugged on the mage's sleeve, "Sutekh's wisdom suggests that we go."

The cleric's suggestion, divinely inspired or not, was a wide one, and the group rapidly sprinted down the hallway. Clueless let the others go first, and as he prepared to follow, he tapped his finger to the collar at his neck and willed a spell effect into place in the middle of the hallway, setting a wall of force in place to block the fiends' pursuit.

Moments later when the bladesinger caught up with his companions, they stood in the center point of the upper portion of the tower, crowded around the chamber that stood at the connection point of the lower three. They were all variously looking straight up, straight down, or at the center of the room, all of them framed by the harsh shadows cast by a flashing array of light that shown through the floor.

Fyrehowl stared straight up, looking at the unlit stretch of space that spiraled up above them all. The upper portion of the tower was nothing but a shell, a single unoccupied space, a vault above the platform between the three lower towers.

Florian was looking down through a number of clear crystalline sections of the floor, windows down into the interior hollow bounded by the lower towers. Perched upon the rock far below, the Ghyris Vast's Divinity Leach issued forth a cold and surreal light that washed up and over her, highlighting the graven, artistic spirals of fiendish runes that had been hand carved into the frozen flesh of the godisle; flesh that was bleeding. The spirals were an open, weeping wound on the dead god’s flesh, wounds filled with silvery blood that seemed tinged with scarlet, leaking reddish light like the orbs of Carceri did. The carved designs and runes were where the wards that protected the other godisles in the storm were anchored, it was a power drawn up from and powered by the torment and desecration of Aoskar's corpse.

Kiro was looking at the floor itself, and the mosaics that covered the floor in a unique and disturbing iconography. There were nine crimson spheres set in a circular motif, each of them composed of a smaller, recursive spiral of nestled orbs; all symbols of Carceri, and each of them was marked and discolored by tarnish, verdigris, and unpolished sections as if the orbs were diseased or rotting. The yugoloth dream of a conquered Carceri bent to their will, infected by their kind just like they'd done to Gehenna when they'd bubbled out of the Waste into that adjacent plane.

But regardless of what individual things caught their attention, eventually all eyes turned to the center of the room where a sparkling portal hovered several inches above the floor like a bleeding wound wrenched open in the flesh of the Astral.

"So who wants to go first?" Toras asked.

"Umm..." Florian replied, "This isn't what I expected truth be told."

Nisha asked the obvious question, "Where's it go?"

"Please not the lower planes..." Fyrehowl said, glancing back down towards another portal far below that shed the light of the Waste onto the godisle and Vast's device alike.

"No, it doesn't." Tristol said, casting a minor divination spell. "It's a keyed portal to multiple places."

"Where's it go now?" Clueless asked. "And where else can it go?"

He shrugged, "It's hard to tell, but the keys appear to be the whim of whoever made it. And right now it's going to the ethereal, but it can also go to Othrys."

"A demiplane." Kiro said. The ethereal was the spawning ground of such creations.

"Carceri..." Clueless muttered. Othrys was its first layer, and he'd been there before, and never in pleasant circumstances.

"Are we ready then?" Florian asked. "Now or never."

They inhaled, readied their weapons for whatever they might find on the other side, and tried to ignore the idea that wherever they went, they might not all survive. Kiro more than the others knew this was a possibility, but he wasn't as worried, not so long as the Balance was served, and with that in mind he was the first person through the portal, followed closely afterwards by Clueless who was also trying to ignore a familiar itch in his ankle.

***​

"Do come in..."

 

[shilsen]

"Do come in..."

That was just beautiful, Shemmie!

 

[bluegodjanus]

I'll consider this a Christmas present from you to all of us. And it's quite a wonderful present, at that.