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I second that.....Merry Christmas, Shemmy et. al.
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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)
- Thread starter Shemeska
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Shemeska
Adventurer
Have a very 'lothy New Year!
The voice was syrupy, thick with amusement and clotted with malice. "As I said, do come in, the quicker to get this over with."
They stood in an open air chamber at the peak of a high tower, a vaulted stone cupola whose arched terraces overlooked a dark, perpetually twilight landscape of thick forest bathed in the light of a full moon. The air was cool and carried the scent of wood smoke and tiny particulate ash, hinting at the some hellish forest fire just beyond the edge of the dusky horizon. The portal that had deposited them there was gone, apparently having been one way, and from where it had dropped them in the middle of the demiplane, they stood looking up into the face of a fiend.
Playing with a crystalline scrying globe in one backwards oriented paw, a tiger-headed rakshasa looking down at them from where she lounged in a padded chair, a look of petulant amusement across her face. Her form being what it was, they already knew that whatever her true identity, she had killed the Lady Brampandra and it was that other fiend's form that cloaked her as much as the blue and silver robe that she wore.
The faux-rakshasa cupped the scry globe in both hands and grinned at her guests with a wide tigerish smile. She didn't seem concerned at the group of eight standing less than twenty feet from her with weapons drawn; in fact she looked to be perched somewhere on the line between petty amusement and uncaring brutality. So full of herself, so self-assured, she might be goaded into violence with a single wrong statement.
The gem in Clueless's ankle was itching. Beyond the point of distraction, it was almost painful. Fyrehowl had the urge to run, except that there was no apparent exit, and the demiplane's visual appearance didn't seem to translate into its actual physical dimensions. Tristol's tail was fluffed out like the brush of a Sigilian chimneysweep, and he felt an almost static ripple when the fiend's eyes passed over him, such was the intensity of magic that seemed present on her person.
Kiro however... Kiro didn't seem worried in the same way. Somewhere between confident and calm resignation, his gaze hadn't left the fiend's eyes once.
"I’ve grown tired of you pin pricking at me and mine," She said, snarling softly. "And likewise I haven't appreciated you sending Yethmiil back to me a bloodied husk on two separate occasions now. But I can assure you that he suffered more at my hands than yours. It speaks well of your competence, but as much as that is an admirable quality, I can’t have you disrupting my activities here anymore than you have already. With everything you’ve done, you haven’t changed ANYTHING."
"Just what the f*ck are you?" Toras asked.
“What am I?" She asked in reply, looking down at one of her own backwards paws.
"I already know -what- you are." Kiro explained. "It's who exactly you are that I don't."
Something in the cleric's tone was odd. Even for a Settite, there was too much cold confidence there.
"We know that you're a 'loth." Clueless said. "You can drop the pretense."
"Agreed," She said, tossing the globe off to one side where it hung in mid-air. "This ruse is tiring, but necessary I will admit. My Love does not desire the gith, or the psurlon, or The Guardian to find out what we seek. Though in truth, the psurlon and gith are soon to be embroiled in their own war presently and do not pose a threat, though Vlaakith has done her best to peer inside even here… and been rebuffed harshly each and every time. I would like to see the look of frustration on her withered, blackened face, but alas she has wardings nearly as potent as mine, and I have neither the time nor the motivation to do so. Other things are more important you see."
She shrugged and snapped her fingers, and they watched as the features of a noble rakshasa melted away and evaporated like spilled wine, leaving in its passage not the dregs of the bottle, but a corruption altogether worse.
They'd expected an ultroloth, but the lithe, jackal-headed figure seated in front of them was anything but one of the faceless lords of the Waste. An expression of exuberant, fanatical malice was written in the lines of her face, the sheen of spittle on fangs, and the tension of lean muscle under tan fur. She was an arcanaloth, at least that was what their first impression was, except that her eyes were glowing and flickering with the fierce patterns of an ultroloth's.
Clueless's eyes went wide. "Ah sh*t..."
He'd seen her before.
Behind the bladesinger, Nisha cringed and a hand went to her mouth. As whimsical and chaotic as her mind might have been at times, certain things burned themselves indelibly into the brain's fabric, and her memory lurched back to earlier that year in the Palace of Dandy Will in the City-at-the-Center.
Shylara Akt'Atarm. That was the name she had been called at the time by her erstwhile lord, the ultroloth Palinarius, himself a servitor of Anthraxus. The former Oinoloth was dead, executed, and very likely the same thing had befallen the arcanaloth's former liege. But something suggested that she'd never truly been working for him at all, and that her loyalties had always lain elsewhere. Given the flicker in her eyes, whatever that truly implied about her nature, betrayal had improved her lot in life.
She'd been a scribe then, just another one of the rank and file of her caste, endlessly jotting down the names of the damned, the prices of souls, and the contractual obligations of the purchased or deceived. She'd been the dutiful scribe, the obedient servitor, or she'd at least put on a good show of such at the time.
Clueless and Nisha had last seen her dressed in simple blue robes, nothing very special, with fingertips singed and lacquered in a veneer of caramelized blood, much like a mortal scribe's fingers might be stained with ink and gum. But no longer, as the fiend sitting before them glittered with nearly two dozen rings and earrings, and rather than robes, she was dressed, if the word truly applied, in what amounted to little more than a blue satin loincloth and a single long ribbon of blue leather that crisscrossed her body, obscuring a select few inches of her breasts but otherwise leaving nothing to the imagination.
"Now as for two of you, I believe that we've already met." She said with a chuckle, looking at Clueless and Nisha. "Though admittedly, circumstances were very different at the time, weren't they halfbreed?"
Idly she reached up and itched at her neck, and a moment later at her ear. Clueless remembered her doing that in the same habitual manner when he'd met her in Center. He also recalled that at the time she'd been glowing with illusion magic, though he hadn't had the chance to try to see beneath it, and he figured that if she'd previously wrapped herself in illusions when playing a rakshasa, who was to say that she still wasn't masking something about herself.
"Quite different." Clueless replied.
Aping a nervous gesture and grasping a hand to the side of his neck, he tapped the bubble of heavy magic nestled against the skin there, and willed a spell of true seeing into effect, hoping to pierce whatever illusions might still be wrapped around the fiend. Immediately the magic welled up inside of him like honey in his veins, thick and sweet, and a dozen layers of deception went transparent around the 'loth, but Clueless immediately wished that he could take it back and scrub the image from his mind permanently.
Far from the elegant, brushed and decorated fiend that sat before them preening and dressed as provocatively as possible, the figure beneath the illusions was abhorrent. Clueless suddenly understood why when he'd first met her, she'd been unconsciously itching, scratching and worrying some unseen irritation: her flesh was a bleeding and manged patchwork of inflamed and irritated skin covered in self-inflicted cuts, interposed by clumps of ragged, blood-slicked fur and open, weeping sores.
Blanching slightly and swallowing hard, Clueless tried his best to mask his disgust as simply worry or fear, something that played across the faces of every one of his companions.
"But for the rest of you yet to make my acquaintance, mortals and otherwise, know that you stand in the presence of Shylara the Manged, Overlord of Carceri, consort to the Oinoloth." The archfiend spread her hands in mock hospitality. "But your presence here is an unfortunate one..."
The room grew uncomfortably silent and the wind whistled softly through the chamber's open heights.
"I could kill you one by one." Shylara continued, leaning forward. "Rip out your organs, paint the walls in your blood, give you the same experience I've given to quite a few githyanki in the past year."
"You're welcome to try." Florian said, keeping her composure.
She laughed and snapped her fingers, "Bluster all you like godslave, but you stand before an archfiend."
The space flanking the yugoloth lord shimmered and rippled, and the drifting, billowing forms of a pair of astraloths congealed into being at the side of their mistress. They took no action, but their blind heads craned towards her like slavering, obedient puppies held tight on a very tenuous leash. They were eager for a sign, but her eyes were closed for the moment, and there was a visible shiver that coursed through her body, a tremble through her breasts and twitch of her tongue as she bit her lower lip and soaked up the welling sense of despair that filled the room.
"You'll be stopped." Fyrehowl said. "You'll be made to account for what you did to Elysium."
Shylara's eyes sprung open and focused on the lupinal for the first time. "The filth can speak! Would you like to know just what happened there at Rubicon? I could tell you..."
She sneered and Fyrehowl snarled, the first tear welling in one eye.
"Alas, I was not there to see it myself." She lamented. "I was not granted that pleasure, but the Ebon has told me what he saw. He was there you know. The Oinoloth himself stood on your plane before he ripped a piece of it away and drew it across the breadth of the planes with him. He was there for the slaughter, the executions, and the defilement. He painted the walls, he drove the nails, he..."
Toras and Florian held Fyrehowl back before she launched herself across the room.
"But I am not the Ebon." She continued. "Though every child of the Waste might act in emulation of him, if even in the smallest way. I might emulate him, I might willingly submit to him as his whore, but I am not him. I am a flawed creature."
She paused for dramatic effect.
"And so I will be merciful to you."
What? They stared at the fiend, uncertain of how to respond. Surely she was mocking them, toying with them, giving them false hope somehow. She was yugoloth, the closest thing to an elemental of lies that there was.
"What?" Skalliska asked.
"I will provide you with the means of your salvation." She explained, rapping the claws of one hand across the side of her chair, and to Clueless's vision leaving a smear of blood and puss behind.
"One of you will die." She said. "One of you will willingly die at my hands, and in return, as a flawed and imperfect fiend, I will release the rest of you to go upon your way. You will be free to leave, and I will give you egress away from my demiplane, but one of you must choose to die here. Now. Permanently and without hope of resurrection. Serve yourself up upon my gilded platter, suffer for the sake of the others."
"B*tch..." Toras said, shaking his head and looking at his feet.
Fyrehowl snarled. The fiend was toying with them. She would dangle them hope and then snatch it away, but the offer was one that more than likely several of them would actually consider in order to save the others. The fiend would make their deaths meaningless and hollow, but before that point the chance to save companions, friends, or loved ones was too much to dismiss.
"You know what I am." Shylara said. "You've seen what I am capable of. I could kill you with an afterthought if I wished it. You have your chance at mercy. Will you accept it?"
The room was cold and quiet. The astraloths drifted, the archfiend licked her lips, and eyes darted to eyes as the question weighed heavily upon their hearts.
"Who will be my martyr?"
"Kill me." Kiro said, abruptly stepping forward before any of his companions could say a word otherwise.
The fiend blinked. The Settite. How unexpected.
"So be it." She said, masking her surprise at the priest's sacrifice.
But that was not the end of her surprise, or that of anyone else’s.
Kiro put his hands at his sides, seemingly at peace with his impending death. But his eyes were locked on the fiend, and he was smiling at her as if he knew some secret that she did not.
"We are aware of you." He said calmly, a moment before his features blurred, shifted and melted away.
Gone was the spindly human cleric in homespun clothes, and in his place was a lithe, copper-skinned humanoid with eyes like liquid, molten bronze. The cuprilach rilmani was still smiling at her, even as his former companions stared slack jawed in surprise at his true nature. They'd never once suspected him of being anything other than what he had claimed and seemed.
"Destroy a world and we will piece it back together. Build a nation and we will tear it down. Steal and plane and surely, surely you cannot expect for us not to act against you."
Shylara the Manged, the archfiend of Othrys was speechless, and if but for a moment she seemed completely taken back. A rilmani?! Kiro's revelation seemed to have blindsided her, combined with the fact that she hadn't discerned the cuprilach's nature before that point. Doubtless the Oinoloth was aware of their meddling, but had seen no need to inform her, or perhaps he'd known and considered it a test for her. A discrete portion of her mind tumbled over the possibilities while the rest stayed focused on the present and the slaughter soon to be.
Kiro turned back to his companions. "Do not worry for me."
He turned back to the fiend and once again smiled, "We know of you yugoloth. Kill me and let them go. May the Balance be served."
"Done." She snarled at him, standing up and barking a single invocation.
Kiro flinched, felt the air ripple and something wash over him... and then he looked back up at the fiend. Florian's death ward. The cleric of Tempus had cast one on him earlier in the day, and somehow it had held and nullified the fiend's incantation. He'd forgotten about the ward himself, and the fiend had never bothered to strip him of any protections before trying to execute him.
Florian's eyes went wide as she realized what had happened, and the others did a moment later as well as Shylara snarled in embarrassed rage.
"F*ck your Balance." She hissed, her lips peeled back in a snarl as she pointed at the Rilmani and hurled a second spell.
A crackling greenish ray burst from a claw and lanced towards her victim.
"I don't think so." Tristol blurted out.
The mage wasn't sure why he did it. It was part desperation, part the wish to save a friend, and frankly it just felt like the right thing to do at the time. When he spoke his hands were also moving on instinct, weaving the motions of a counterspell, weaving the same exact spell that Shylara had chosen to execute Kiro.
The spell's glow had barely left the surface of her eyes when it returned, as Tristol's conterspell caused the original disintegration to reflect back to its source. It struck her square in the chest, totally off guard and unprepared, and though it was blunted and absorbed by her own magical protections, her pride had been gored savagely and her composure snapped along with whatever veneer of stability she'd managed to present.
"YYYEEEAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!" She screamed with mad rage, eye's erupting with emerald flame, her hands down at her sides, and her fur standing on end. "DIE! ALL OF YOU!!!"
She was still shrieking when they attacked first and the two astraloths launched forward to protect her.
"Who the hell do we attack first?!" Toras shouted as he clenched his fist and invoked his celestial heritage to hurl a spell at the yugoloth constructs.
It was a good question. They fought a pair of astraloths, both of whom were only selectively vulnerable to damage or spells, and both of whom could easily decimate them with their energy draining touch. But ignore them at the expense of allowing their archfiend mistress to do whatever she was capable of?! What a choice...
The incorporeal fiends hissed and recoiled, repelled by the holy force, but it was only for a moment before they struck in a flailing, lashing storm of tentacles around Toras, Fyrehowl, and Kiro. The result would have been hideous, but for the moment still, they had the protections and wards from earlier, and an entire slew of beneficial spells that Tristol and Florian had cast before they had ever entered the tower atop Aoskar's corpse.
For the moment they held.
Florian held her holy symbol high and a column of holy flame descended on the Oinoloth's consort. The rage of Tempus was hot and strong, but his servant's ability to channel it paled against the archfiend's ability, and the spell was snuffed before it touched her, but the process of targeting the spell activated and launched the first of the fiend's contingencies.
From Shylara's perspective Clueless was a dozen feet away in the midst of casting, Tristol likewise, the kobold and Xaositect had yet to act, and the astraloths were enmeshed in combat with the rest of her enemies, spinning mobiles of life-sucking tentacles frozen in mid-air, frozen in time. The contingent time-stop afforded her the ability to layer the battlefield with spells before a single beat of her enemies hearts, and though she was at the nadir of her power for the present, her nature there in the demiplane being what it was, she was capable of much.
Time resumed and the air was cut with a hideous scream like the sound that surely must have echoed across Carceri when Cronus deposed his father Uranus. A circular wave of necromantic energy erupted from the fiend's mouth along with bloody spittle, a web of lightning lashed to each and every one of her enemies, and a bolt of darkness leapt from her finger towards Florian's chest.
All in the space of a scant few seconds the spells struck with the rising scent of ozone to herald their passage. Florian's death ward was still in place to blunt the force of the wail, but Kiro shuddered and struggled to resist it with all the force of his being even as he lashed with his swords at the tentacles of one of the astraloths. The lightning's effect was much more direct though, and the smell of burnt flesh soon joined the stench of ozone as the fiend's last spell struck Florian with full force.
The mortal was a cleric, a representative of a deity, one of the ignorant and overblown children of simpering mortal faith and worship. It was an object of faith, an object of belief, an icon of hope in whatever flavor it might present, and these things were anathema to the misery and hopelessness embodied by the yugoloth ideal; of course Shylara would target the godslave.
Florian staggered back and clutched her chest, feeling her heart quiver and skip a beat, and then another and then another as the fiend's spell sought to snuff her life-force. Shylara sought to will her death like she was a solitary yugoloth blowing out the last candle in the last temple upon a freshly sterilized world on the prime, snuffing the light into darkness before sending the world's star to nova.
Florian's hand clenched tight around her holy symbol, a prayer to Tempus tumbled from her lips, and she resisted, somehow she resisted. Somehow. And the fight raged on.
Blades flashed and tentacles dug into flesh, spells flickered and died against wards or innate and inborn resistance to magic. Everything seemed to happen so quickly in a maddening blur, but paradoxically to all occur in a sluggish fog moment by moment and action by action with each beat of the heart. The fiend was laughing, cackling with mad abandon and sadistic glee, acting without any apparent regard to herself, offering no defense outside of whatever she might have prepared earlier.
But that might have been enough as a bolt of lightning from Clueless's sword, and a cone of cold from Fyrehowl's hand both dissipated against Shylara's body without touching her in the slightest. Her astraloths were faring poorly as they darted to cover her, opening themselves to opportunistic strikes by Kiro, but they were giving as much damage as they took, leaving their targets drained multiple times over, Toras especially.
Tristol saw the toll the astral fiends were inflicting, and likewise the brutality of the archfiend's spells. Even one of Shylara's spells might kill, or kill multiple times over, and their own defenses simply weren't sufficient; in fact he was surprised that they were still alive, and he wanted to remain that way as he cast his next spell.
"Nisha! Skalliska!" He shouted as his spell blanketed him in a bubble of antimagic. "Get close to me! The rest of you too!"
In an instant Nisha was next to him, hugging tight around his chest almost to the point of hindering his ability to breath, let alone cast, but the others seemed far too preoccupied with the fight to consider a tactical retreat away from the archfiend's magic or the worst effect's of the astraloth's tentacles.
Meanwhile a slice from Razor clipped the archfiend's flesh and drew blood just before once again, for the second time, time stood still. Again, it was only a scant few moments, but the fiend used her time to layer the air thick with spells without giving any regard to the quarter inch of steel that had just opened a bleeding line across her abdomen.
The demiplane returned to the proper flow of time, and became like Phlegethos in an instant as a trio of massive fireballs detonated directly atop of Shylara and expanded outwards to envelope the entire chamber and everything in it. Air turned to flame and lungs were burned and wounds cauterized wherever wards and resistances did not at least protect from some of the damage, but the astraloths were struck just as much, and their nature seemed to preclude their resistance to that element in the slightest.
Her servants or not, she didn't care; the Ebon would create more for her. Let them die. She called more spells to mind and simply watched them absorb more and more wounds from her mortal and immortal foes, themselves brutally injured or near death as it was. It would all end shortly.
Toras plunged his sword into the center of the nearest Astraloth and watched it dissolve upon death, falling backwards and out of phase and visibility as its twin was consumed in a column of flame invoked by Florian. All that was left was the fiend.
"She's about the cast again!" Skalliska shouted. "Someone f*cking stop her!"
Tristol whimpered and his tail twitched nervously as he half expected a shout of "Get her Tristol!" to erupt from somewhere. He might be able to stop her from casting if he got close to her, but she was an archfiend, and magic or not she could rip him to pieces with her bare hands if needed.
Time didn't stop for a third time, but her actions were supernaturally sped up nonetheless, and before they could act to counter her, she was hurling spells again. First a burning column of multicolored light leapt from one hand and struck Clueless, some manner of single target prismatic spray, covering him in a sheet of flame and cloud of poison. The bladesinger was burned, but the spell's effects could have been much worse, and his fey heritage protected him from its other effects, but then the second spell went from the fiend's mind and into reality.
From inside his antimagic field Tristol watched the spell erupt from the fiend as a thousand drops of syrupy black blood leaking from her every pore and orifice, evaporating into sinuous tendrils of glistening, sickly vapor that swirled about her body before enveloping the chamber and surging towards nostrils and mouths, open wounds and anywhere they might find purchase and avenue of infection. Whatever it was it was unique and personal, something 9th sphere or maybe higher, he couldn't tell but only he and Nisha were safe from its cloying touch.
"Get out of there!" He screamed while Shylara laughed and then kissed two of her fingers like she was giving a perverse blessing to the spell.
He turned away when the fiend's gestures grew obscene and his companions began to stagger and choke, sores erupting on their body from contagion, as the spell sought to siphon away their physical and mental abilities. The effects were hideous, and for a moment he thought Skalliska and Toras might have been dead, even as Kiro, Clueless and Fyrehowl shuddered and contorted in agony, resisting the spell's worst effects through pure force of will. But then Florian gripped her holy symbol and hurled a spell while the fiend was still knuckledeep in self-indulgent perversity and unprepared for any counterattack.
It was the highest sphere spell that Florian still retained in memory, and it was a powerful spell at that. Directly invoking the wrath of her god, Florian called out for the fiend's utter and complete destruction, and somehow it seemed to actually work.
Shylara paused and shuddered as her spell abruptly ended and her hands went slack. Her eyes went wide and their light dimmed as the flame that had previously licked from her sockets guttered and died. She stumbled on her feet and blinked, momentarily disoriented before she finally looked back up for one last moment of eye contact before her body imploded upon itself, leaving behind only a ragged stain of slurried blood and ashes.
"...f*ck..." Florian said, falling to her knees and catching her breath amid the pain.
Clueless blinked in disbelief and looked over at Kiro, shocked and overwhelmed that they had survived. They were both brutally injured and covered in lesions from virtually head to toe, weakened terribly in mind and body alike, but they were alive.
Suddenly from behind them, there was a sound.
*CLAP*
A pair of hands slowly and deliberately smacked together.
*CLAP*
Again.
*CLAP*
A third time.
They spun around to see the fading glow of a closing gate and the snarling, blood slicked figure of Shylara the Manged, devoid of illusions, as she walked towards them leaving a trail of crimson footprints in her wake. No words. No dire speech. Just a bestial expression and a rapid gesture in the air before their moment of shock had passed.
How?! She was dead! They'd watched her die! F*ck!
One gesture from the archfiend's hand and Tristol watched as she called down a 9th sphere evocation, one of the most powerful spells he was even aware of short of a wish. In a split second the roof of the chamber was ripped apart and open as a burning globe of hatred and molten iron hurtled from out of the sky directly onto where Kiro stood, striking home and then exploding, immolating the rilmani and sending everyone, himself included scrambling, screaming, tumbling for shelter from the rain of burning metal and fragmented stone.
He couldn't see anything except for the archfiend's form standing black against the smoke, alone on the rim of the crater overlooking Kiro's atomized remains. Tristol didn't know if anyone besides himself and Nisha were still alive. He didn't have the slightest clue.
Time seemed to stand still for a moment, and then for the second time that day, Tristol acted purely on instinct, something Fyrehowl or any other Cipher would have been proud of, but to tell the truth the second time around it was purely desperation. It was the first spell that came to mind, a random enough choice to make Nisha proud, desperation or not.
Each arcane syllable fell from his lips in perfect sequence, each dropping into place with the skill of an archwizard, and with a finality that would have resonated with his Netherese ancestors, it forced its way into reality and found a chink within the archfiend's wards. Perhaps she hadn't planned for it, perhaps he'd been lucky, perhaps her fury had distracted her from making the proper defense, perhaps perhaps perhaps but the end result was the same.
Frozen in mid-snarl, the Overlord of Carceri stood there on the crater's rim petrified fast in stone, while deep within the bowels of the Tower of Incarnate Pain, the archfiend's true physical body lay catatonic and sessile, unable to act and unable to withdraw her mind from its stony tomb.
Flickering blue light filtered down upon a desk carved from fossilized bones, a block of slate cut from the depths of the furnace of Krangath, the last traces of an ancient battlefield long since buried from a time only shortly after the beginning of the Blood War. A dozen books lay neatly arranged alongside a similar stack of bound and framed petitioners, all of them holding their own share of infernal knowledge, but for the time being they'd been roughly shoved aside, as roughly as their fastidious master might treat such things.
It wasn't a book that occupied the primary surface of the desk, not a book at all, but rather the feet of the desk's owner that lay sprawled atop it as he leaned back on his chair with another book leisurely perched in his lap. Pen moved across paper, and the pages were filled with an intricate array of flowing script, arranged in elaborate detail so as to convey a picture in the spacing and placement of their lines and characters.
There was a soft chuckle as the last word was penned into place and the picture of script was finished, having taken the form of the Overlord of Carceri's face at the moment of the petrification of her surrogate astral body. There was another chuckle and a claw brushed the surface of the page like its author were stroking the face of a child who'd fallen, bruised their knee, and then come running to cry and whimper to an adult.
Another chuckle, another smile at the page, and finally Helekanalaith broke into laughter.
The voice was syrupy, thick with amusement and clotted with malice. "As I said, do come in, the quicker to get this over with."
They stood in an open air chamber at the peak of a high tower, a vaulted stone cupola whose arched terraces overlooked a dark, perpetually twilight landscape of thick forest bathed in the light of a full moon. The air was cool and carried the scent of wood smoke and tiny particulate ash, hinting at the some hellish forest fire just beyond the edge of the dusky horizon. The portal that had deposited them there was gone, apparently having been one way, and from where it had dropped them in the middle of the demiplane, they stood looking up into the face of a fiend.
Playing with a crystalline scrying globe in one backwards oriented paw, a tiger-headed rakshasa looking down at them from where she lounged in a padded chair, a look of petulant amusement across her face. Her form being what it was, they already knew that whatever her true identity, she had killed the Lady Brampandra and it was that other fiend's form that cloaked her as much as the blue and silver robe that she wore.
The faux-rakshasa cupped the scry globe in both hands and grinned at her guests with a wide tigerish smile. She didn't seem concerned at the group of eight standing less than twenty feet from her with weapons drawn; in fact she looked to be perched somewhere on the line between petty amusement and uncaring brutality. So full of herself, so self-assured, she might be goaded into violence with a single wrong statement.
The gem in Clueless's ankle was itching. Beyond the point of distraction, it was almost painful. Fyrehowl had the urge to run, except that there was no apparent exit, and the demiplane's visual appearance didn't seem to translate into its actual physical dimensions. Tristol's tail was fluffed out like the brush of a Sigilian chimneysweep, and he felt an almost static ripple when the fiend's eyes passed over him, such was the intensity of magic that seemed present on her person.
Kiro however... Kiro didn't seem worried in the same way. Somewhere between confident and calm resignation, his gaze hadn't left the fiend's eyes once.
"I’ve grown tired of you pin pricking at me and mine," She said, snarling softly. "And likewise I haven't appreciated you sending Yethmiil back to me a bloodied husk on two separate occasions now. But I can assure you that he suffered more at my hands than yours. It speaks well of your competence, but as much as that is an admirable quality, I can’t have you disrupting my activities here anymore than you have already. With everything you’ve done, you haven’t changed ANYTHING."
"Just what the f*ck are you?" Toras asked.
“What am I?" She asked in reply, looking down at one of her own backwards paws.
"I already know -what- you are." Kiro explained. "It's who exactly you are that I don't."
Something in the cleric's tone was odd. Even for a Settite, there was too much cold confidence there.
"We know that you're a 'loth." Clueless said. "You can drop the pretense."
"Agreed," She said, tossing the globe off to one side where it hung in mid-air. "This ruse is tiring, but necessary I will admit. My Love does not desire the gith, or the psurlon, or The Guardian to find out what we seek. Though in truth, the psurlon and gith are soon to be embroiled in their own war presently and do not pose a threat, though Vlaakith has done her best to peer inside even here… and been rebuffed harshly each and every time. I would like to see the look of frustration on her withered, blackened face, but alas she has wardings nearly as potent as mine, and I have neither the time nor the motivation to do so. Other things are more important you see."
She shrugged and snapped her fingers, and they watched as the features of a noble rakshasa melted away and evaporated like spilled wine, leaving in its passage not the dregs of the bottle, but a corruption altogether worse.
They'd expected an ultroloth, but the lithe, jackal-headed figure seated in front of them was anything but one of the faceless lords of the Waste. An expression of exuberant, fanatical malice was written in the lines of her face, the sheen of spittle on fangs, and the tension of lean muscle under tan fur. She was an arcanaloth, at least that was what their first impression was, except that her eyes were glowing and flickering with the fierce patterns of an ultroloth's.
Clueless's eyes went wide. "Ah sh*t..."
He'd seen her before.
Behind the bladesinger, Nisha cringed and a hand went to her mouth. As whimsical and chaotic as her mind might have been at times, certain things burned themselves indelibly into the brain's fabric, and her memory lurched back to earlier that year in the Palace of Dandy Will in the City-at-the-Center.
Shylara Akt'Atarm. That was the name she had been called at the time by her erstwhile lord, the ultroloth Palinarius, himself a servitor of Anthraxus. The former Oinoloth was dead, executed, and very likely the same thing had befallen the arcanaloth's former liege. But something suggested that she'd never truly been working for him at all, and that her loyalties had always lain elsewhere. Given the flicker in her eyes, whatever that truly implied about her nature, betrayal had improved her lot in life.
She'd been a scribe then, just another one of the rank and file of her caste, endlessly jotting down the names of the damned, the prices of souls, and the contractual obligations of the purchased or deceived. She'd been the dutiful scribe, the obedient servitor, or she'd at least put on a good show of such at the time.
Clueless and Nisha had last seen her dressed in simple blue robes, nothing very special, with fingertips singed and lacquered in a veneer of caramelized blood, much like a mortal scribe's fingers might be stained with ink and gum. But no longer, as the fiend sitting before them glittered with nearly two dozen rings and earrings, and rather than robes, she was dressed, if the word truly applied, in what amounted to little more than a blue satin loincloth and a single long ribbon of blue leather that crisscrossed her body, obscuring a select few inches of her breasts but otherwise leaving nothing to the imagination.
"Now as for two of you, I believe that we've already met." She said with a chuckle, looking at Clueless and Nisha. "Though admittedly, circumstances were very different at the time, weren't they halfbreed?"
Idly she reached up and itched at her neck, and a moment later at her ear. Clueless remembered her doing that in the same habitual manner when he'd met her in Center. He also recalled that at the time she'd been glowing with illusion magic, though he hadn't had the chance to try to see beneath it, and he figured that if she'd previously wrapped herself in illusions when playing a rakshasa, who was to say that she still wasn't masking something about herself.
"Quite different." Clueless replied.
Aping a nervous gesture and grasping a hand to the side of his neck, he tapped the bubble of heavy magic nestled against the skin there, and willed a spell of true seeing into effect, hoping to pierce whatever illusions might still be wrapped around the fiend. Immediately the magic welled up inside of him like honey in his veins, thick and sweet, and a dozen layers of deception went transparent around the 'loth, but Clueless immediately wished that he could take it back and scrub the image from his mind permanently.
Far from the elegant, brushed and decorated fiend that sat before them preening and dressed as provocatively as possible, the figure beneath the illusions was abhorrent. Clueless suddenly understood why when he'd first met her, she'd been unconsciously itching, scratching and worrying some unseen irritation: her flesh was a bleeding and manged patchwork of inflamed and irritated skin covered in self-inflicted cuts, interposed by clumps of ragged, blood-slicked fur and open, weeping sores.
Blanching slightly and swallowing hard, Clueless tried his best to mask his disgust as simply worry or fear, something that played across the faces of every one of his companions.
"But for the rest of you yet to make my acquaintance, mortals and otherwise, know that you stand in the presence of Shylara the Manged, Overlord of Carceri, consort to the Oinoloth." The archfiend spread her hands in mock hospitality. "But your presence here is an unfortunate one..."
The room grew uncomfortably silent and the wind whistled softly through the chamber's open heights.
"I could kill you one by one." Shylara continued, leaning forward. "Rip out your organs, paint the walls in your blood, give you the same experience I've given to quite a few githyanki in the past year."
"You're welcome to try." Florian said, keeping her composure.
She laughed and snapped her fingers, "Bluster all you like godslave, but you stand before an archfiend."
The space flanking the yugoloth lord shimmered and rippled, and the drifting, billowing forms of a pair of astraloths congealed into being at the side of their mistress. They took no action, but their blind heads craned towards her like slavering, obedient puppies held tight on a very tenuous leash. They were eager for a sign, but her eyes were closed for the moment, and there was a visible shiver that coursed through her body, a tremble through her breasts and twitch of her tongue as she bit her lower lip and soaked up the welling sense of despair that filled the room.
"You'll be stopped." Fyrehowl said. "You'll be made to account for what you did to Elysium."
Shylara's eyes sprung open and focused on the lupinal for the first time. "The filth can speak! Would you like to know just what happened there at Rubicon? I could tell you..."
She sneered and Fyrehowl snarled, the first tear welling in one eye.
"Alas, I was not there to see it myself." She lamented. "I was not granted that pleasure, but the Ebon has told me what he saw. He was there you know. The Oinoloth himself stood on your plane before he ripped a piece of it away and drew it across the breadth of the planes with him. He was there for the slaughter, the executions, and the defilement. He painted the walls, he drove the nails, he..."
Toras and Florian held Fyrehowl back before she launched herself across the room.
"But I am not the Ebon." She continued. "Though every child of the Waste might act in emulation of him, if even in the smallest way. I might emulate him, I might willingly submit to him as his whore, but I am not him. I am a flawed creature."
She paused for dramatic effect.
"And so I will be merciful to you."
What? They stared at the fiend, uncertain of how to respond. Surely she was mocking them, toying with them, giving them false hope somehow. She was yugoloth, the closest thing to an elemental of lies that there was.
"What?" Skalliska asked.
"I will provide you with the means of your salvation." She explained, rapping the claws of one hand across the side of her chair, and to Clueless's vision leaving a smear of blood and puss behind.
"One of you will die." She said. "One of you will willingly die at my hands, and in return, as a flawed and imperfect fiend, I will release the rest of you to go upon your way. You will be free to leave, and I will give you egress away from my demiplane, but one of you must choose to die here. Now. Permanently and without hope of resurrection. Serve yourself up upon my gilded platter, suffer for the sake of the others."
"B*tch..." Toras said, shaking his head and looking at his feet.
Fyrehowl snarled. The fiend was toying with them. She would dangle them hope and then snatch it away, but the offer was one that more than likely several of them would actually consider in order to save the others. The fiend would make their deaths meaningless and hollow, but before that point the chance to save companions, friends, or loved ones was too much to dismiss.
"You know what I am." Shylara said. "You've seen what I am capable of. I could kill you with an afterthought if I wished it. You have your chance at mercy. Will you accept it?"
The room was cold and quiet. The astraloths drifted, the archfiend licked her lips, and eyes darted to eyes as the question weighed heavily upon their hearts.
"Who will be my martyr?"
"Kill me." Kiro said, abruptly stepping forward before any of his companions could say a word otherwise.
The fiend blinked. The Settite. How unexpected.
"So be it." She said, masking her surprise at the priest's sacrifice.
But that was not the end of her surprise, or that of anyone else’s.
Kiro put his hands at his sides, seemingly at peace with his impending death. But his eyes were locked on the fiend, and he was smiling at her as if he knew some secret that she did not.
"We are aware of you." He said calmly, a moment before his features blurred, shifted and melted away.
Gone was the spindly human cleric in homespun clothes, and in his place was a lithe, copper-skinned humanoid with eyes like liquid, molten bronze. The cuprilach rilmani was still smiling at her, even as his former companions stared slack jawed in surprise at his true nature. They'd never once suspected him of being anything other than what he had claimed and seemed.
"Destroy a world and we will piece it back together. Build a nation and we will tear it down. Steal and plane and surely, surely you cannot expect for us not to act against you."
Shylara the Manged, the archfiend of Othrys was speechless, and if but for a moment she seemed completely taken back. A rilmani?! Kiro's revelation seemed to have blindsided her, combined with the fact that she hadn't discerned the cuprilach's nature before that point. Doubtless the Oinoloth was aware of their meddling, but had seen no need to inform her, or perhaps he'd known and considered it a test for her. A discrete portion of her mind tumbled over the possibilities while the rest stayed focused on the present and the slaughter soon to be.
Kiro turned back to his companions. "Do not worry for me."
He turned back to the fiend and once again smiled, "We know of you yugoloth. Kill me and let them go. May the Balance be served."
"Done." She snarled at him, standing up and barking a single invocation.
Kiro flinched, felt the air ripple and something wash over him... and then he looked back up at the fiend. Florian's death ward. The cleric of Tempus had cast one on him earlier in the day, and somehow it had held and nullified the fiend's incantation. He'd forgotten about the ward himself, and the fiend had never bothered to strip him of any protections before trying to execute him.
Florian's eyes went wide as she realized what had happened, and the others did a moment later as well as Shylara snarled in embarrassed rage.
"F*ck your Balance." She hissed, her lips peeled back in a snarl as she pointed at the Rilmani and hurled a second spell.
A crackling greenish ray burst from a claw and lanced towards her victim.
"I don't think so." Tristol blurted out.
The mage wasn't sure why he did it. It was part desperation, part the wish to save a friend, and frankly it just felt like the right thing to do at the time. When he spoke his hands were also moving on instinct, weaving the motions of a counterspell, weaving the same exact spell that Shylara had chosen to execute Kiro.
The spell's glow had barely left the surface of her eyes when it returned, as Tristol's conterspell caused the original disintegration to reflect back to its source. It struck her square in the chest, totally off guard and unprepared, and though it was blunted and absorbed by her own magical protections, her pride had been gored savagely and her composure snapped along with whatever veneer of stability she'd managed to present.
"YYYEEEAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!" She screamed with mad rage, eye's erupting with emerald flame, her hands down at her sides, and her fur standing on end. "DIE! ALL OF YOU!!!"
She was still shrieking when they attacked first and the two astraloths launched forward to protect her.
"Who the hell do we attack first?!" Toras shouted as he clenched his fist and invoked his celestial heritage to hurl a spell at the yugoloth constructs.
It was a good question. They fought a pair of astraloths, both of whom were only selectively vulnerable to damage or spells, and both of whom could easily decimate them with their energy draining touch. But ignore them at the expense of allowing their archfiend mistress to do whatever she was capable of?! What a choice...
The incorporeal fiends hissed and recoiled, repelled by the holy force, but it was only for a moment before they struck in a flailing, lashing storm of tentacles around Toras, Fyrehowl, and Kiro. The result would have been hideous, but for the moment still, they had the protections and wards from earlier, and an entire slew of beneficial spells that Tristol and Florian had cast before they had ever entered the tower atop Aoskar's corpse.
For the moment they held.
Florian held her holy symbol high and a column of holy flame descended on the Oinoloth's consort. The rage of Tempus was hot and strong, but his servant's ability to channel it paled against the archfiend's ability, and the spell was snuffed before it touched her, but the process of targeting the spell activated and launched the first of the fiend's contingencies.
From Shylara's perspective Clueless was a dozen feet away in the midst of casting, Tristol likewise, the kobold and Xaositect had yet to act, and the astraloths were enmeshed in combat with the rest of her enemies, spinning mobiles of life-sucking tentacles frozen in mid-air, frozen in time. The contingent time-stop afforded her the ability to layer the battlefield with spells before a single beat of her enemies hearts, and though she was at the nadir of her power for the present, her nature there in the demiplane being what it was, she was capable of much.
Time resumed and the air was cut with a hideous scream like the sound that surely must have echoed across Carceri when Cronus deposed his father Uranus. A circular wave of necromantic energy erupted from the fiend's mouth along with bloody spittle, a web of lightning lashed to each and every one of her enemies, and a bolt of darkness leapt from her finger towards Florian's chest.
All in the space of a scant few seconds the spells struck with the rising scent of ozone to herald their passage. Florian's death ward was still in place to blunt the force of the wail, but Kiro shuddered and struggled to resist it with all the force of his being even as he lashed with his swords at the tentacles of one of the astraloths. The lightning's effect was much more direct though, and the smell of burnt flesh soon joined the stench of ozone as the fiend's last spell struck Florian with full force.
The mortal was a cleric, a representative of a deity, one of the ignorant and overblown children of simpering mortal faith and worship. It was an object of faith, an object of belief, an icon of hope in whatever flavor it might present, and these things were anathema to the misery and hopelessness embodied by the yugoloth ideal; of course Shylara would target the godslave.
Florian staggered back and clutched her chest, feeling her heart quiver and skip a beat, and then another and then another as the fiend's spell sought to snuff her life-force. Shylara sought to will her death like she was a solitary yugoloth blowing out the last candle in the last temple upon a freshly sterilized world on the prime, snuffing the light into darkness before sending the world's star to nova.
Florian's hand clenched tight around her holy symbol, a prayer to Tempus tumbled from her lips, and she resisted, somehow she resisted. Somehow. And the fight raged on.
Blades flashed and tentacles dug into flesh, spells flickered and died against wards or innate and inborn resistance to magic. Everything seemed to happen so quickly in a maddening blur, but paradoxically to all occur in a sluggish fog moment by moment and action by action with each beat of the heart. The fiend was laughing, cackling with mad abandon and sadistic glee, acting without any apparent regard to herself, offering no defense outside of whatever she might have prepared earlier.
But that might have been enough as a bolt of lightning from Clueless's sword, and a cone of cold from Fyrehowl's hand both dissipated against Shylara's body without touching her in the slightest. Her astraloths were faring poorly as they darted to cover her, opening themselves to opportunistic strikes by Kiro, but they were giving as much damage as they took, leaving their targets drained multiple times over, Toras especially.
Tristol saw the toll the astral fiends were inflicting, and likewise the brutality of the archfiend's spells. Even one of Shylara's spells might kill, or kill multiple times over, and their own defenses simply weren't sufficient; in fact he was surprised that they were still alive, and he wanted to remain that way as he cast his next spell.
"Nisha! Skalliska!" He shouted as his spell blanketed him in a bubble of antimagic. "Get close to me! The rest of you too!"
In an instant Nisha was next to him, hugging tight around his chest almost to the point of hindering his ability to breath, let alone cast, but the others seemed far too preoccupied with the fight to consider a tactical retreat away from the archfiend's magic or the worst effect's of the astraloth's tentacles.
Meanwhile a slice from Razor clipped the archfiend's flesh and drew blood just before once again, for the second time, time stood still. Again, it was only a scant few moments, but the fiend used her time to layer the air thick with spells without giving any regard to the quarter inch of steel that had just opened a bleeding line across her abdomen.
The demiplane returned to the proper flow of time, and became like Phlegethos in an instant as a trio of massive fireballs detonated directly atop of Shylara and expanded outwards to envelope the entire chamber and everything in it. Air turned to flame and lungs were burned and wounds cauterized wherever wards and resistances did not at least protect from some of the damage, but the astraloths were struck just as much, and their nature seemed to preclude their resistance to that element in the slightest.
Her servants or not, she didn't care; the Ebon would create more for her. Let them die. She called more spells to mind and simply watched them absorb more and more wounds from her mortal and immortal foes, themselves brutally injured or near death as it was. It would all end shortly.
Toras plunged his sword into the center of the nearest Astraloth and watched it dissolve upon death, falling backwards and out of phase and visibility as its twin was consumed in a column of flame invoked by Florian. All that was left was the fiend.
"She's about the cast again!" Skalliska shouted. "Someone f*cking stop her!"
Tristol whimpered and his tail twitched nervously as he half expected a shout of "Get her Tristol!" to erupt from somewhere. He might be able to stop her from casting if he got close to her, but she was an archfiend, and magic or not she could rip him to pieces with her bare hands if needed.
Time didn't stop for a third time, but her actions were supernaturally sped up nonetheless, and before they could act to counter her, she was hurling spells again. First a burning column of multicolored light leapt from one hand and struck Clueless, some manner of single target prismatic spray, covering him in a sheet of flame and cloud of poison. The bladesinger was burned, but the spell's effects could have been much worse, and his fey heritage protected him from its other effects, but then the second spell went from the fiend's mind and into reality.
From inside his antimagic field Tristol watched the spell erupt from the fiend as a thousand drops of syrupy black blood leaking from her every pore and orifice, evaporating into sinuous tendrils of glistening, sickly vapor that swirled about her body before enveloping the chamber and surging towards nostrils and mouths, open wounds and anywhere they might find purchase and avenue of infection. Whatever it was it was unique and personal, something 9th sphere or maybe higher, he couldn't tell but only he and Nisha were safe from its cloying touch.
"Get out of there!" He screamed while Shylara laughed and then kissed two of her fingers like she was giving a perverse blessing to the spell.
He turned away when the fiend's gestures grew obscene and his companions began to stagger and choke, sores erupting on their body from contagion, as the spell sought to siphon away their physical and mental abilities. The effects were hideous, and for a moment he thought Skalliska and Toras might have been dead, even as Kiro, Clueless and Fyrehowl shuddered and contorted in agony, resisting the spell's worst effects through pure force of will. But then Florian gripped her holy symbol and hurled a spell while the fiend was still knuckledeep in self-indulgent perversity and unprepared for any counterattack.
It was the highest sphere spell that Florian still retained in memory, and it was a powerful spell at that. Directly invoking the wrath of her god, Florian called out for the fiend's utter and complete destruction, and somehow it seemed to actually work.
Shylara paused and shuddered as her spell abruptly ended and her hands went slack. Her eyes went wide and their light dimmed as the flame that had previously licked from her sockets guttered and died. She stumbled on her feet and blinked, momentarily disoriented before she finally looked back up for one last moment of eye contact before her body imploded upon itself, leaving behind only a ragged stain of slurried blood and ashes.
"...f*ck..." Florian said, falling to her knees and catching her breath amid the pain.
Clueless blinked in disbelief and looked over at Kiro, shocked and overwhelmed that they had survived. They were both brutally injured and covered in lesions from virtually head to toe, weakened terribly in mind and body alike, but they were alive.
Suddenly from behind them, there was a sound.
*CLAP*
A pair of hands slowly and deliberately smacked together.
*CLAP*
Again.
*CLAP*
A third time.
They spun around to see the fading glow of a closing gate and the snarling, blood slicked figure of Shylara the Manged, devoid of illusions, as she walked towards them leaving a trail of crimson footprints in her wake. No words. No dire speech. Just a bestial expression and a rapid gesture in the air before their moment of shock had passed.
How?! She was dead! They'd watched her die! F*ck!
One gesture from the archfiend's hand and Tristol watched as she called down a 9th sphere evocation, one of the most powerful spells he was even aware of short of a wish. In a split second the roof of the chamber was ripped apart and open as a burning globe of hatred and molten iron hurtled from out of the sky directly onto where Kiro stood, striking home and then exploding, immolating the rilmani and sending everyone, himself included scrambling, screaming, tumbling for shelter from the rain of burning metal and fragmented stone.
He couldn't see anything except for the archfiend's form standing black against the smoke, alone on the rim of the crater overlooking Kiro's atomized remains. Tristol didn't know if anyone besides himself and Nisha were still alive. He didn't have the slightest clue.
Time seemed to stand still for a moment, and then for the second time that day, Tristol acted purely on instinct, something Fyrehowl or any other Cipher would have been proud of, but to tell the truth the second time around it was purely desperation. It was the first spell that came to mind, a random enough choice to make Nisha proud, desperation or not.
Each arcane syllable fell from his lips in perfect sequence, each dropping into place with the skill of an archwizard, and with a finality that would have resonated with his Netherese ancestors, it forced its way into reality and found a chink within the archfiend's wards. Perhaps she hadn't planned for it, perhaps he'd been lucky, perhaps her fury had distracted her from making the proper defense, perhaps perhaps perhaps but the end result was the same.
Frozen in mid-snarl, the Overlord of Carceri stood there on the crater's rim petrified fast in stone, while deep within the bowels of the Tower of Incarnate Pain, the archfiend's true physical body lay catatonic and sessile, unable to act and unable to withdraw her mind from its stony tomb.
***
Flickering blue light filtered down upon a desk carved from fossilized bones, a block of slate cut from the depths of the furnace of Krangath, the last traces of an ancient battlefield long since buried from a time only shortly after the beginning of the Blood War. A dozen books lay neatly arranged alongside a similar stack of bound and framed petitioners, all of them holding their own share of infernal knowledge, but for the time being they'd been roughly shoved aside, as roughly as their fastidious master might treat such things.
It wasn't a book that occupied the primary surface of the desk, not a book at all, but rather the feet of the desk's owner that lay sprawled atop it as he leaned back on his chair with another book leisurely perched in his lap. Pen moved across paper, and the pages were filled with an intricate array of flowing script, arranged in elaborate detail so as to convey a picture in the spacing and placement of their lines and characters.
There was a soft chuckle as the last word was penned into place and the picture of script was finished, having taken the form of the Overlord of Carceri's face at the moment of the petrification of her surrogate astral body. There was another chuckle and a claw brushed the surface of the page like its author were stroking the face of a child who'd fallen, bruised their knee, and then come running to cry and whimper to an adult.
Another chuckle, another smile at the page, and finally Helekanalaith broke into laughter.
***
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Burningspear
First Post
....."absolute silence".... and then, Whow....................................... WICKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
All Hail Shemmy
(and the players in the campaign ofcourse)
btw, Happy New Year.
All Hail Shemmy
(and the players in the campaign ofcourse)
btw, Happy New Year.
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Shemeska
Adventurer
A couple of comments on the game those events happened in:
Tristol's player rolled a nat 20 on the flesh to stone, and I rolled a critical miss for Shylara on her save versus the spell.
When they "killed" her the first time, it was nearly a TPK already from the pure number of spells she was tossing out in the space of every round, and there was silence when I took a break to go get a drink, and then walked back into the room doing the clapping and all and told them what they saw. Shylara was pulling a little trick with astral projection: projecting from Carceri and then diving through a color pool to form a surrogate body.
In the surrogate body she was then just gating or planeshifting to the demiplane or wherever else she needed to be. If "killed" in that form no harm to her, she'd just wake up in Carceri and do it again. But the petrification denied her the ability to end her projection, or do much of anything, and she was so recently ascended to her position of power that she hadn't yet learned to do planar projections like other more powerful archfiends rather than using the color pool trick. Lots and lots of power, but just not the experience to use it as fully as other similar beings might be capable of.
So what do you do with an archfiend if you happen to find yourself in possession of one? That's the ten million jink question.
Tristol's player rolled a nat 20 on the flesh to stone, and I rolled a critical miss for Shylara on her save versus the spell.
When they "killed" her the first time, it was nearly a TPK already from the pure number of spells she was tossing out in the space of every round, and there was silence when I took a break to go get a drink, and then walked back into the room doing the clapping and all and told them what they saw. Shylara was pulling a little trick with astral projection: projecting from Carceri and then diving through a color pool to form a surrogate body.
In the surrogate body she was then just gating or planeshifting to the demiplane or wherever else she needed to be. If "killed" in that form no harm to her, she'd just wake up in Carceri and do it again. But the petrification denied her the ability to end her projection, or do much of anything, and she was so recently ascended to her position of power that she hadn't yet learned to do planar projections like other more powerful archfiends rather than using the color pool trick. Lots and lots of power, but just not the experience to use it as fully as other similar beings might be capable of.
So what do you do with an archfiend if you happen to find yourself in possession of one? That's the ten million jink question.
Excellent update.
How did your players react when the realised they had to fight her for the first time?
What about the second?
As for the body 2 options spring to mind. Leave it the hell alone and run, very fast and very far or take it somewhere it cant be retrieved. Pitiless or an upper plane perhaps?
For true meaness if you have a party member willing to commit suicide take it to Sigil and then break the spell and let the Lady of Pain do your work for you. Of course, none of them might ever be able to go back again after it.
How did your players react when the realised they had to fight her for the first time?
What about the second?
As for the body 2 options spring to mind. Leave it the hell alone and run, very fast and very far or take it somewhere it cant be retrieved. Pitiless or an upper plane perhaps?
For true meaness if you have a party member willing to commit suicide take it to Sigil and then break the spell and let the Lady of Pain do your work for you. Of course, none of them might ever be able to go back again after it.
The Forsaken One
Explorer
Sep 2 updates and here 2 updates! *drool*
best christmas ever
best christmas ever
Ahh. The Wack-a-Loth moment.
We had a few options.
1) Throw her into the blades in the God Corpse of Aoskar
2) Stone Shape her into something fitting, and hand her over to the Rilmani
3) Bring her to Sigil and throw her over the side (dangerous)
4) Hand her over to Apomps (amusing)
We had a few options.
1) Throw her into the blades in the God Corpse of Aoskar
2) Stone Shape her into something fitting, and hand her over to the Rilmani
3) Bring her to Sigil and throw her over the side (dangerous)
4) Hand her over to Apomps (amusing)
One quick question from someone unfamiliar with Palnescape.
Who or what are the Rilmani? I get the impression they aresome sort of defenders of the balance ut thats about it. Are they more concerned with the good/evil or law/chaos struggle or both? Given the powers involved on either side how do they manage to make any sort of difference.
Who or what are the Rilmani? I get the impression they aresome sort of defenders of the balance ut thats about it. Are they more concerned with the good/evil or law/chaos struggle or both? Given the powers involved on either side how do they manage to make any sort of difference.
