***
The air stank with the reek of Styx water, a smell so very similar to that which permeated the robes of the skeletal marraenoloths who had escorted them from the heart of Gaping Maw to the Steeping Isle to the Plain of Infinite Portals, and from there to Pandemonium. Freedom from obligation smelled like the waters of the Styx as they dribbled through the rocks of Cocytus, which was ironic of course. The Styx offered a poisoned egress from one hell to another, giving freedom from one torment while delivering one to another, and all the while its poisoned touch offered freedom from the pleasures and pains of memory and self, shackling each doomed soul to amnesia or oblivion.
Be that as it might, the air was free -blissfully free- from the brine-soaked bitch and ophidian reek that swirled about in the wake of Larisith, the molydeus proxy of Demogorgon. The two headed fiend had trailed them from the 88th layer of the Abyss, but she had either been called away on some other infernal task, or had lost their trail and given them up for lost. Either instance was absolute serendipity, given her role and her power within the Abyss.
“She’s no longer following us.” Came the stilted speech of Bormoth the Infested, one of two maurezhi that had survived their exodus.
“The bitch is gone.” Agreed the hulking, nameless hezrou that loomed behind the corpse-like fiend.
“Are you certain?” Asked another voice from the dark recess of the cave.
“I am absolutely certain.” Melish’goth clicked the pinchers of his larger forearms reflexively and smiled, sniffing at the air one final time not in worry or trepidation, but in anticipation.
The nine of them snarled, barked, hissed and chattered in various dialects of abyssal, or just bestial, non-intelligent animal sounds, but the collective mood was one of relief and hunger.
“So how many of them are there?” Belikesh the hezrou asked. The question was preceded and followed by a runny spatter of drool on the rocky floor of the cave.
“Several dozen.” The glabrezu replied. “But they’re clustered together, so it’s difficult to tell.”
“In other words: plenty to gorge ourselves upon.” The hezrou added to a chorus of hungry snarls and yet more free-flowing drool.
“And the bebeliths?” One of the vrocks asked. “What about them?”
“I hurled one of the last dretchs into their cave twelve hours ago.” Melish’goth replied. “They should be busy feeding on it for some time, and well out of our way.”
“Good.”
“If there are any aasimar, I claim them now.” Hissed the second maurezhi with unrestrained greed.
Vrelesiir hissed, leaned forward and snapped its chipped, battle-scarred beak at the lesser fiend. “You will scavenge for what is left, less Orosokth revert you into a dretch and we feed you to the spiders next!”
They’d invoked the nalfeshnee’s name, and there was an immediate hush that spread over their number. Though he hadn’t spoken yet, the bloated, boar-headed fiend was the most powerful of their kind, and to casually invoke its name –even if the meaning had been accurate- was to anger it, and that anger was a terrible thing to behold.
“The mortals aren’t going anywhere.” Orosokth’s voice rumbled out of the back of the cave. The true tanar’ri sat upon the bones of a trio of howlers and periodically broke open the bones of a fourth to suck out the greasy marrow within.
The other fiends shivered and listened, relieved that the nalfeshnee didn’t seem upset.
“But Melish’goth, what of anything else?” Orosokth asked, leaning forward with the clatter of bones displaced by flexing muscle and sweaty folds of almost porcine blubber. “Do you smell anything else?”
The nalfeshnee didn’t name it, but the glabrezu and the others knew exactly what it was talking about, even if the Styx odor serving to hide their own presence had obscured any remaining traces of it. There had been something terrible at the Crag when they’d arrived through the portal from the layer below, but whatever it was had recently departed or gone into torpor. Whatever it had been –and the fiend felt it disturbingly close to what he’d felt in the physical presence of an abyssal lord twelve centuries before- it was gone.
The mortals had arrived shortly thereafter, unaware and naive of the tanar’ri, the bebeliths lairing in the caves, and whatever power had briefly turned its attention to the Crag. But when they’d come, something had arrived with them, similar in many ways, but somehow disturbingly off. Unsettling. Like the difference between standing in the presence of Vucarik versus that of Pale Night. The nalfeshnee was concerned, but hardly frightened. Still, it was something to consider before they struck at the mortals.
“It’s still there.” The glabrezu said, its nostrils flaring and repeatedly sniffing heavily at the air. “It smells of…”
“It smells of what?” Orosokth prodded.
The glabrezu whined in apparent confusion and the pinchers on its larger forearms clacked together reflexively. “I don’t know. It’s mortal one moment, and then it’s something else.”
Unwilling to say anything further and betray weakness, Melish’goth left unspoken that the other quality that he sensed was something that terrified him. Some part of his being was instinctively retreating from its touch like a skittish mortal’s inborn fear of insects or serpents.
The nalfeshnee was growing impatient, “That tells us nothing…”
“Wait…” The glabrezu said, a sudden smile creasing its maw. “It’s moving away. The mortals are breaking into two groups. They’re wandering back towards the Crag.”
The wind blowing through the cave mouth was momentarily still, and through the darkness the air was alive with the sounds of spattering drool and tongues lapping at the air. The fiends were hungry, and their chance at sating their bloodlust had arrived.
***
“What do you mean?” Clueless asked.
“We’re ah…” Leobtav bit his lip and hesitated. “We’ve come up two people short versus yesterday.”
“Well I’m not so sure that we should be jumping to the worst conclusion.” Tristol said, seeing the nervous look on the professor’s face, and the much more worried expression playing across Ficklebarb’s snout.
Before the aasimar had finished however, Fyrehowl shook her head.
“Oh.” Tristol said. “That’s not good.”
When the Cipher was concerned, it was never a good sign at all, and given their environment, every potential explanation for the missing men began as ominous and only got worse from there.
“Doran and I already covered the camp itself, and they’re nowhere to be found.” Leobtav said. “And worse still, no one has seen them since yesterday.”
”And speaking of which, that’s kinda odd…” Tristol thought as he looked around, peering from face to face in the crowd, searching for Doran and failing to find the elf. As co-leader of the expedition, and having just been mentioned by his comrade, it was weird that he wasn’t present to be taking a lead in organizing some sort of search party for the missing men.
“Who you looking for?” Nisha whispered, tapping Tristol with her tail.
“Doran.” He replied in a hushed tone, trying not to raise any concern from those around them. “I’m just wondering where he is. It’s weird that he’s not here.”
“I’m sure he’s fine.” Nisha said. “Familiar emergency or something.”
Tristol wasn’t sure if the tiefling was being serious, or just joking to lighten the mood. But either way it worked. Whatever the other wizard was doing, it probably wasn’t anything to worry about, and so Tristol looked back to Leobtav as the scholar continued with the matter at hand.
Obviously more concerned than anyone else, the professor’s pseudodragon whimpered softly. Fyrehowl looked up at the familiar and tried to give him a reassuring smile, and in doing so she noticed something that seemed to have eluded the others: Frollis rolled his eyes and gave a brief scowl. Something was clearly on the rogue’s mind regarding the two missing sages, but he wasn’t saying anything yet.
"So where were they last seen?" Toras asked.
"They were scheduled to be part of the team that was searching a promising portion of the rubble field to the southwest of the crag." Leobtav explained.
As if on cue, Doran pushed his way through the back of the crowd and took a spot next to Leobtav.
“Well there’s your elf.” Nisha said. “Looks like he’s out of breath though.”
Indeed he did, though he didn’t look like he’d been running. His face was white, and the color was only gradually coming back to his features. Something was on the man’s mind, and even when Leobtav mentioned some salient point about the missing men, Doran clearly seemed preoccupied with something else.
"They -and the rest of that entire group-,” Leobtav said. “They were absolutely insistent on getting a jump on things and starting early. They were ambitious and proactive, and neither myself nor Doran wanted to tell them no."
Doran nodded in agreement, putting on a more composed demeanor "We thought that the area had already been well scouted, and since it wasn't that far away from the campsite, we agreed."
"Apparently it wasn't that well scouted." Fyrehowl remarked, hoping to get a response from the still frowning shadowdancer.
"Excuse me?" Frollis interjected. "It was damn well scouted before anyone went out there to poke at rocks and spend hours navel gazing. There wasn't anything larger than a rat out there to threaten those berks."
"Well there was obviously -something- out there." Fyrehowl replied. "Now don't think that anyone is blaming you..."
"Oh please. That's exactly what's going on!" The shadow-dancer shot back. His eyes were narrowed and that deep, condescending scowl reappeared on his face.
Fyrehowl sighed and looked away from the rogue, breaking his stare not out of any notion of backing down, but not wanting to feed his apparent persecution complex. He didn’t seem particularly upset about the disappearance, just the idea of being blamed for it. True to the story of his past being somewhat sketchy, she had the impression that he was something of a head case, and head cases in Pandemonium were people who needed to have a close eye kept on them.
Leobtav coughed, followed a second or two later by Ficklebarb.
“Whatever happened, we need to start looking for them.” Clueless said.
“You think it’s likely that they’re still alive?” Tristol asked. “I mean, the options aren’t exactly good out there.”
Twenty odd heads turned at the aasimar’s words and glanced in the direction of the Crag, a lighter shade of black looming against the darkness. For the previous day they had all blissfully labored under the naïve assumption that somehow the environs of the Crag were safe, insulated from the chaotic terrors that populated the twisting, winding passages of Pandemonium like insane worms chewing their way through a corpse.
That assumption was now dead, and their collective sense of wonder was now turned to worry.
Speaking for the first time at their impromptu gathering, Settys touched his holy symbol and tried to reassure the crowd. “It’s possible I suppose.”
“Well at least one of us can be full to the brim with optimism.” Frollis said sarcastically.
Settys shot the rogue a harsh look, but denied him any sort of verbal reply as he continued to the others. “They may have gotten lost in the dark and confused by the winds. If so, they may still be out there, lost and wandering, but otherwise unharmed.”
The cleric had a point. While the region around the Crag was largely sheltered to the worst of the plane’s maddening winds, a sudden mind-wrenching gale wasn’t unheard of, and the two men could have been thusly afflicting. If so, there might still be some genuine hope, and as slim a chance as it might be, the other members of the expedition needed that hope to latch onto.
“It’s also possible that they were attacked by something native to the area, but not outright killed.”
“Like what?” One of the sages asked. “Howlers aren’t exactly intelligent.”
“But demons are.” The cleric replied. “And as much as it wouldn’t be good to think too much about that possibility, they might still be alive if they were taken by a wandering fiend, or a group of them.”
“They might have even just gotten hurt.” Florian added. “For whatever reason they might be unable to get back to us. We found some caves near the Crag earlier, and it’s not inconceivable that they might have gone into a branch of the same system and gotten lost or stuck.”
A succession of positive assessments was turning the tide, and some looks of hopeful determination were quickly spreading over the faces of the assembled men and women, though it wasn’t shared by everyone. Ficklebarb looked like a small child whose puppy had run away from home, Clueless was looking away from the group with a much more somber and pragmatic assessment, Frollis seemed angry and on the verge of stalking off, and Doran of all people seemed spooked.
“Doran?” Tristol asked the elf. “Are you alright?”
“Just worried about the men.” The wizard replied, a bit too quickly. “I knew them, and I’m hoping that nothing happened.”
“I think everyone is getting a positive outlook on this.” Toras said, stepping forward and taking advantage of his clear height advantage over everyone else present, though Fyrehowl was only an inch or two behind.
“Do you want to take a group out and comb over their last known location?” Leobtav asked. “Take maybe five or six people with martial training and leave the rest here so the camp isn’t undefended?”
“We could probably take an equal number of non-combatants too, just to have some extra eyes and ears out there.” Clueless said. “I’m still hoping for a more mundane explanation to our missing men.”
“Alright then.” Leobtav nodded. “If you and Toras would like to take point on that, I’m all for it. You know how to handle this sort of thing better than I do. Good luck.”
***
As they broke up to gather their equipment before heading out to look for the missing pair, Tristol caught up to Doran and put a hand on his shoulder.
“What was that about just now?” Tristol asked him.
Doran quickly glanced around, and only replied after being sure that they were relatively alone and shielded from snooping by the background of the wind.
“No, I’m not alright.” Doran answered with a tone that actually made Tristol take a step back. The elf looked disturbed, and almost frightened.
“What the hell happened?” Tristol asked, unsure what he’d meant. “Do you know something more about the two guys who’re missing?”
“No, I don’t.” Doran said. “And that’s precisely why I’m so worried.”
Tristol gave him a look of confusion and the elf went on into detail.
“I didn’t say anything about it, because I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up prematurely, only to let them down if the result wasn’t a positive one, but a few minutes ago I tried to cast a divination to find our missing men.” Doran bit his lip and hesitated. “The spell failed. Grotesquely so.”
“Do you think that they’re somewhere shielded against the spell? Maybe something could be blocking it.”
“Maybe so.” Doran said. “But that’s not the whole story, because I tried casting a few other divinations on other subjects entirely, just as a control, and they failed too. All of them were just snuffed out, and that wasn’t at all the case two days ago. My spells were working fine then, but ever since those men vanished, the whole area is just as useful as a dead magic zone as far as that entire school of magic is concerned.”
Doran wasn’t an archmage, but he was a talented mage nonetheless. If something was silencing the spells of a diviner of his skill, it was deeply troubling, not in the least because Tristol didn’t have a clue how something could even do that in the first place.
“Just what the hell is out there?” Tristol asked, dreading any answer he might receive.
***
Ever fickle, the winds blowing and whistling off of the Crag’s ramparts suddenly changed direction, blowing down from its heights and cascading down over the group, bringing with it a chorus like the screams of ten-thousand murderers being sent to the gallows, and something else.
“Fyrehowl?” Toras asked the lupinal. “You alright?”
She had a strange expression on her face, and twice already since they’d left, she’d turned and glanced back towards the camp. A puzzled cipher was not something you saw every day.
“There’s something out here.” Fyrehowl said. “I can feel it towards the Crag, but there’s something else that I can’t focus on. For the life of me, I want to go back to the camp and yet I don’t.”
Seeing her expression, Mellisan the lilland bard drifted closer. “You’re just worried about leaving everyone behind without as many guards.”
The lupinal shrugged. Florian, Settys, Frollis, and Tristol had stayed behind along with the expedition leaders, while she, Clueless, Toras, and Nisha had ventured out with the lilland and a half dozen sages to scour the edge of the Crag for the missing men. They had plenty of martial and magical defenses back at the camp, and likewise for the group she was part of. So why did she feel so uncomfortable leaving camp?
Less than five minutes later, just as the lights of the camp began to grow more distant, muted, and diffuse against the backdrop of shadow, the wind intensified and carried with it the stench of brimstone, rot, and unwashed flesh.
“Stop.” Fyrehowl said as her fur prickled. “Tanar’ri.”
“Everyone get together!” Clueless shouted as his wings opened and the first sounds of motion picked up all around them, and most strongly –above- them.
“Huh?” One of the sages asked, turning around to face the celestial, leaving his back to the approaching fiends and their wind-borne herald.
The ear-piercing shriek of the Vrock came only a split second before the man’s scream. Talon’s pierced his back and the fiend wrenched him away from the earth, carrying him up into the windy, black vault above, leaving behind only a splattered gush of blood and a drifting, deadly cloud of spores in its wake.
More vrocks screamed high above, circling and preparing for another dive as bits of torn flesh rained down as the first of their number satisfied his gluttony. The untrained men and women on the ground screamed in terror and quickly began to break ranks, running back towards the camp, but too late their guardians realized that the rest of the tanar’ri would be waiting for them, having circled around them in the dark.
“Stay here!” Clueless shouted. “Damn it! They want to separate us!”
There was a flash of light and the barking roar of a glabrezu halfway back towards the camp, and the bladesinger knew with a sickening wrench in his gut that he’d been proven right.
***
“Tanar’ri…” The man thought, snorting derisively as he heard the vrocks shriek overheard as they hurtled down towards the camp. On one hand they were a complication, potentially a gross complication if they impinged upon his purpose there at the Crag, but on the other hand they conceivably provided a cover for his earlier, overly hesitant and clumsy actions.
Several vrocks, assorted least fiends, a pair of undead-like maurezhi, and somewhere lurking behind the hulking glabrezu and hezrou –he could feel it- there was a nalfeshnee.
A sudden hiss and wet snarl took his attention back to the present and away from his thoughts like a frantic tapping upon his shoulder. A dozen feet away, crawling over a pile of rubble was the bloated silhouette of a dretch, backlit by one of the camp’s torches, drooling and sniffing at the air as it bared its fangs and prepared to charge, hoping for easy meat with which to sate its hunger and hopefully avoid the whimsical punishments of its superiors.
“Pathetic.” He muttered, turning towards the fiend and doing what seemed most appropriate at the time. That’s what the voice told him.
‘Raise your arm and invoke that which you now feel.’ The voice was less distant now that he had killed, and its promises of power came with little effort, though its use still came with awkwardness, and perhaps some faint regret.
The dretch clambered to the top of the rocks and tensed its legs to leap, but instead of flying though the air it paused and uttered a faint, almost plaintive mewl. Something bulged within its chest and then vanished back into the greasy folds of muscle and fat once more, and then without so much as a sound, the dretch collapsed and fell forward with a dull, wet smack of its head cracking against the ground.
A thousand years before, Velgrak the Bloody had been a competent but otherwise unspectacular soldier on an otherwise unremarkable prime material world. He’d raided and killed over a trio of decades before he died not on the field of battle, not during some session of rape and conquest, but of a heart attack late one evening: a tremble and collapse of his heart’s mitral valve; an unremarkable death if there ever was one. And now, a thousand years later, the least fiend that his soul had become in death now died of the same ironic infliction.
One dretch dead, but a dozen or more, more powerful fiends remained. Best to put forth a show of sincere effort in killing them, but not too little to endanger what still needed to be done. The fiends remained a diversion, almost as much as his fading conscience.
***
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
