Elsewhere, the third group stood before the largest of the caves, and in fact they’d been standing there for some time. Standing there with them, Toras couldn’t entirely blame them since the rock was almost completely obscured with a dense blanket of white, gauzy webbing.
Glancing into the darkness of the yawning cave mouth, with his hands on both of his sword pommels, Frollis Terpence smiled at Toras, “You go first.”
Toras raised an eyebrow, “Really? Seriously? I haven’t heard a word out of you in a day and a half –I don’t think I even saw you yesterday- and the first thing out of your mouth is ‘you go first’?”
“Gallantry is over-rated my friend.” The rogue quipped. “And that’s not normal white lichen covering on the rocks. You’re a much bigger and much better armored target for whatever caused it.”
“Gee, thanks for the endorsement of my function here.”
Frollis bowed and motioned the half-celestial forward. “Consider it a Pandemonium version of having a friend be the first to walk a new trail in the woods, breaking all of the spider webs across the way in doing so. I’m not just being safe, I’m giving you the endorsement of my view of your capacity for courage.”
“Yeah…” Toras trailed off. “Just stay close by.”
“I’ll be in your shadow, don’t worry.”
-fades away slightly as the larger, half-celestial’s shadow passed over him.
“You know, I haven’t really gotten much of a chance to actually talk to you that much.” Toras said, looking the rogue over and wondering just what sort of person he was.
Dressed almost completely in black and wearing not one, but two holy symbols around his neck, one of which was Mask, the Faerunian god of thieves, he didn’t exactly seem the most wholesome of a person. Having talked with Fyrehowl and Florian earlier that day, they’d been of rather the same opinion, and Clueless had had his eyes on him for a while longer. Still though, it seemed too obvious to blame random and horrific murders on someone just because they wore black, were a rogueish sort, and wait… just because the other holy symbol around their neck was the Faerunian god of retribution. Hmm.
“That’s an odd collection of jewelry around your neck.” Toras remarked, glancing at the rogue’s holy symbols.
Frollis chuckled but didn’t make any attempt to hide either of them. “We’re both tools of a god aren’t we? It’s just that you only have to deal with one; lucky you. There’s more than one holy worm in my ears. It can be annoying at times, but their intentions and methods aren’t always all that different.”
“Oh?”
“Justice and shadows, that’s what I’m all about.” Frollis explained. “Mask for instance is the patron of stealth and intrigue.”
“And thieves.” Toras added.
Frollis raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “So he is, but your tiefling friend is both a nutter and a thief, and you seem to get along quite well with her. Hmm?”
Nutter? Absolutely. Thief? Well that was a matter of perspective. Nisha was Nisha.
“Hoar the Doombringer is the god of poetic justice and retribution. I prefer to carry out the latter god’s will via the former’s.” Frollis flashed a self-satisfied grin.
“How so?”
“Justice doesn’t have to be about kicking in the door at noon, dressing in silver armor and loudly bashing heads and arresting someone for a crime. Punishment doesn’t have to be by the rule of law or the rule of men. Sometimes the best kind of justice is that which takes place without a single soul knowing about it except for the one that deserves it.”
Toras nodded, partially out of understanding and partially out of uncertainty. “The person carrying it out would know as well.”
“So I would.” Frollis said with a grin. “The shadows don’t have to be the rule of thieves and those hiding out of selfishness. Evil needs to fear the darkness just as it does the light. You can’t hide from justice.”
“And now you sound like a Mercykiller.”
Frollis wrinkled his face as if he’d tasted bad wine turned to vinegar. “So I do. That’s…”
He paused abruptly and moved to the cave wall, motioning Toras to do the same.
Further down the passage, something was moving. It was abrupt, and then it stopped; paused, waiting. It was a series of brief, whispered taps of something hard on stone in rapid succession. Whatever caused it, the sound was something very unlike humanoid feet, booted or otherwise.
“I heard it too.” Toras whispered. “What the hell is that?”
Frollis gave Toras an annoyed stare and motioned to his lips, then shrugged as a reply to the question. Still though, he drew both of his blades and eased back into the half-celestial’s shadow.
A dozen feet away, the shadow-dancer stepped out of one pool of darkness and then hopped to the next, trying to scout out the location of whatever had made the noise. Watching him, and barely managing to keep track of his location each time he stepped between shadows, Toras gave a nod to himself. That’s what he was capable of, and that’s why he seemed to simply vanish with barely a second’s notice. Half the time he bolted, he might have simply been a few feet away but largely out of sight. Still, it just raised more questions since clearly he was more capable than anyone had initially suspected.
A tap on his shoulder took Toras from his thoughts and sent a hand to his sword grip before he heard a sigh and the same hand slap at his. Frollis now stood behind him, having jumped back into his shadow.
“Well?” Toras asked as quietly as possible.
Frollis shrugged uselessly, throwing his hands up.
And that of course was when they were both illuminated in a wash of sickly yellow light. From directly above them came a bellowing roar and the chattering rustle of mandibles and pedipalps as the head and forelegs of a massive bebelith erupted from out of a previously hidden side tunnel. Toras and his shadow-dwelling companion dove to the side as the creature dropped down, filling the entirety of the passage with its steel-grey and pale violet carapace. Down the tunnel came nearly a dozen eruptions of insectile whines and shrieks, followed shortly thereafter by the shouts of men and the movement of torchlight and franticly dancing shadows.
Toras glanced up, gripping his sword tightly, looking at his face reflected back in miniature from across the multitude of the spider-like fiend’s compound eyes. The creature grinned, cherishing the chance to rend something beyond its normal prey, belying the intelligence of something far beyond and far more malevolent than simply a giant, monstrous spider.
***
Meanwhile back with the second group, there was more to come with the bizarre material written upon the walls, and momentarily they dismissed the one oddly and disturbingly familiar line of text that harkened back to a name –HUBRIS– written at the base of an ancient statue or golem, miles below the streets of Sigil.
Tristol moved to examine some of the strange writing, glancing at the same portion of the wall that currently occupied Fyrehowl’s attention.
“What’s that one say?” The lupinal tapped the mage on the shoulder and inclined her nose towards one of the meandering stanzas.
Tristol looked at her oddly, “I thought guardinals could understand pretty much every language.”
Fyrehowl shook her head. “We can, sort of. It’s spoken languages only. And it’s not exactly the same as knowing the language itself. We can understand anything spoken, but unless I go out and learn the language I don’t get all of the quirks and subtleties, and it doesn’t work at all when it’s written down.”
Tristol nodded, “Nice ability though nonetheless. I took me years to learn all of the ones that I’ve picked up.”
“How many do you know? You’ve seemed to do pretty well so far with most of what we’ve seen.”
Tristol had to think for a moment, and he silently tapped a few fingers on one hand and then another. “Twelve at the moment.”
“Twelve?” Fyrehowl’s looked impressed, ears canted forward. “That’s quite a number. I can pull half of that, and I’ve had a lot longer to learn them.”
The aasimar smiled. “You haven’t needed to learn them though, you get to cheat.”
She shrugged, “It’s more fun to actually learn the real language though. It’s easier to just ‘cheat’ as you say it, but it doesn’t feel as authentic, or as close to truly understanding someone. But it works for most things, although it doesn’t come close to knowing what Xaositects are babbling about half of the time.” She glanced over at Nisha as the tiefling stood upside down on the cave ceiling, crouching like a bat, wordlessly opening her mouth in batty pantomime.
“Here’s a secret.” Tristol whispered. “I don’t think Xaositects know what Xaositects are saying half the time either.”
Up on the ceiling, the Nisha-Bat nodded vigorously with a grin on her face. A moment later she paused and looked confused, babbled to herself in xaos-speak, and then promptly understood herself perfectly well.
“I’m inclined to agree with you.” Fyrehowl said, chuckling at Tristol as they both glanced at Nisha.
Ignoring the tiefling-come-bat, the two of them studied the brief bits of writing that dotted the tunnel, reading them or using magic to translate when they didn’t fully understand the source languages. Most of them were mundane things, but one of them scrawled its way across the ceiling and initially refused translation. In the end they could only gather that it spoke of something related to ‘the howling madness and the wisdom of the Demented.’
But that was quickly forgotten once they reached another stretch of text. This one was easy to read, except that when they let their eyes play over the text –written in archaic planar common- they swore that for a moment they heard claws scratching at the stone and a distant shrill whistle of wind, almost like a far-off howling.
‘Do you hear the code? Can you listen to the keen and wail of the winds and hear their secret whisperings even the gods deign to ignore out of ignorance… and fear?’
They stared at the text again, slowly rereading it, and once again they heard the same things. Ears erect and glancing about with more than a small bit of paranoia, no one else in the tunnel seemed to have heard anything. Clueless was looking at a patch of wall a ways down from them, seemingly unconcerned and unaware of what they’d heard, several of their academics were likewise paying rapt attention to bits of text, and equally unaware. Nisha for her part was busy chomping at imaginary bugs, still embroiled in her bat pantomime.
“Bebeliths are yummy!” She quipped down at Tristol and Fyrehowl, flapping her arms like wings. She took their worried reactions to pertain to her own brand of crazy. “Teeny tiny bebeliths…”
Less concerned with Nisha than on the apparently supernatural element of the wall’s text, Tristol and Fyrehowl looked back at the text, reading it over and over.
While both the aasimar and lupinal were both staring blankly at the wall for far too long than was probably healthy, Clueless had found something of his own to be concerned about. Below a line of text on the wall which he hadn’t pondered long enough to translate, a single mage rune was neatly and intricately melted into the stone. Below that very familiar symbol -a mage’s personal rune melted into the stone- the text from above picked back up in the same language as the earlier text.
***
-Insert fight with multiple bebeliths and several immature ones.-
***
Clueless stared at the mage rune melted into the rock. Like the eye of some slumbering, dreaming serpent long buried over by the earth, it gazed back, insensate but like a slumbering dragon’s eye, it served a warning to not disturb its resting place. Clueless had no intention of simply ignoring it however as he looked more intensely at it, and its surroundings.
What disturbed him the most was that from the wear patterns on the rock, the top inscription was obviously oldest, nearly worn away in places. By contrast the mage rune was ancient as well, but orders of magnitude younger, and the next line of text was roughly the same age as it. But both top and bottom texts were in the same script and seemingly by the same hand, almost as if the words in the stone had reacted to the defacing of the wall with the mage rune where some ancient wizard had marked his self-important coming.
“naughty word…” Clueless muttered to himself. He recognized the symbol from when he’d looked into information on heavy magic and stumbled upon the story of Shekelor. The details of the last factol of the Incanterium came back to the forefront of his mind with eerie recall. Shekelor had vanished into the depths of Pandemonium, searching for something and claiming that when he returned to Sigil, he would do so to topple The Lady. That hadn’t happened, and instead he’d come back screaming, babbling nonsense, and publically incinerating. The full details of his time in Pandemonium weren’t fully known, but apparently at some point he’d come here to Howler’s Crag.
The translation was simple enough with magic: ‘We gather where the rock grows jagged, where the wind whistles its tune, where the hole in the sky rests beneath the bedrock of all chaos and madness’
Glancing back at his companions, still staring intently at another distant wall, or in Nisha’s case simply being Nisha, Clueless inhaled and whispered the words of a
legend lore spell as he dipped his finger into the tiny fraction of heavy magic he kept on his person. Shekelor had found the orb and its contents, and while it wasn’t what had compelled him to abruptly abandon his factol, depart Sigil, and trek through the bowels of the multiverse, what he’d considered a fascinating if trivial anomaly might help unravel what he’d been looking for at Howler’s Crag, and why he’d marked the place with his personal symbol.
***
Conjured light illuminated the cave, throwing heavy shadows from some of the smaller, jagged outcroppings of rock, pooling within the many niches and recessed shrines. Footsteps approached from the mouth of the tunnel, sending a scatter of rocks and pebbles before their master, his footsteps unsteady and awkward – not out of any notion of wariness or fear, but rather they were the steps of someone unused to physically walking when teleportation and flight were but a thought away. But certain things required exertion and deigning unhallowed ground with their presence, and this cave within Howler’s Crag was one such thing.
Clueless watched the conjured vision continue as a familiar person stepped into view and approached the same set of carvings upon the cave wall. Shekelor, the Archmage, the once-factol of the Incanterium. He’d left everything behind on his quest to bring the Lady low, or so he’d claimed. Clueless had met his apprentice factors, and in their maze they’d achieved an immortality of a sorts, and they hadn’t fallen far from their master’s example.
Shekelor’s eyes glowed with a dull platinum light, swirling with muted reflections, the hallmark of his decision to physically embrace his faction’s ideology. Magic is everything.
He smiled, tracing his fingers over the lines, obviously gaining some knowledge from them that eluded the half-fey watching his actions millennia later.
“How interesting…” His smile turned introspective, his thoughts wandering for a long moment before he whispered a phrase and traced his mage-rune into the wall where Clueless had found it.
But then the light shifted as another set of shadows interrupted his, followed in turn by a synchronized series of footfalls. A trio of figured melted out of the darkness, gaunt men with blank expressions, dressed in oily black from head to foot, black goggles hiding their eyes.
“Give us the Orb.” The first of their number demanded without inflection or emotion.
Shekelor turned and scowled at the Keepers.
“I am growing tired of you and your kind. I’ve already killed a dozen of you. How many more must I waste my time with?”
“Give us what we want and we will let you be.”
“And why are you so interested in it?” Shekelor’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a powerful curiosity, but it has nothing to do with you. You just show up, repeatedly, and demand that I give it to you. You’ve hassled me on five different planes, and I repeat, I am growing tired of you and your kind.”
The Keepers glanced at one another and as one turned back to coldly stare at the archmage. Their gaze was unnerving, and Shekelor knew full well that no eyes stared back from below their goggles, and no heart beat within their pale, rubbery chests. But for that matter his own eyes were anything but human, nor any more, and his life existed independent of the normal substances that sustained virtually every other being. Why should they disturb him, whatever they were, wherever they were from, and regardless of what they demanded?
“You’ve seen what I’m capable of.” The Incantifer bluntly stated. “I neither sleep nor tire, and outside of proving yourselves an annoyance, you have no capacity to threaten me. Leave now and never bother me again. This is my last warning.”
The silence was oppressive as neither the mage nor the Keepers moved, not even to breath, since none of them required it. Shekelor sneered with an elitism borne of tremendous power and tremendous ego, and for their part the construct-like beings that hounded him now and before gave no emotion or other indication of worry at his threat.
“Give us the Orb.”
With sudden abruptness, and speed belying his outwardly late-middle age appearance, Shekelor clapped his hands together. The fabric of space distorted, rippling as the clap echoed through across the cave. Simultaneously, all three Keepers imploded, falling to the ground as dissolving amalgamations of clothing and flesh, crushed to pulp in the space of a moment.
“No.” The archmage dryly pronounced as he stepped around their bubbling, evaporating essence, laughing at their deaths as he left.
Shekelor was gone and his conjured light began to fade when it happened. The factol never saw it, but it might have served a warning if he had. The letters on the wall that he’d searched for, the writing that he’d travelled so far to find, the answer to whatever question he had, it began adding to itself. A second line formed of its own accord, seeping out of the rock like wriggling insects. “…and long shall you gaze.”
The spell ended abruptly, wrenching Clueless’s mind out of that conjured moment of the past and back to the present. The bladesinger shivered as looked up at the complete line of text, knowing that it had reacted to Shekelor’s passing, and the archmage had never noticed. He shivered again, almost like a thousand tiny spiders crawling on his skin. Spiders…
“Oh hell with that.” Clueless softly cursed, knowing all too well what the factol’s last words had been. He shook the memory out of his head as much as he could. Evidently the factol had found what he’d been searching for, or perhaps it had found him.
***
The Ward of Masks was alife with the skipper skapper of tongues heralding the looming festival of lamps run by the merchants of the copper district. Soon their dancing lights would themselves pay prophet to the groundbreaking of the Festhall one ward over. Crowds had already gathered for the ceremonial lighting.
The firre and his coterie of coure lampers stood upon their podium and the assembled crowd watched as the silver and burgundy clad eladrin raised his hands in welcome. A warm glow began at his fingertips, and then, unexpectedly, the courtyard flashed with colors entirely outside of his planning. The crowd gasped and turned as a portal flickered into being, outlined by the arms of a pair of statues and a tiny spider’s web that branched between their outstretched fingers.
Crimson turned to inky black as the portal opened, blowing a hollow, metallic scent upon the air as a single figure stumbled out of the darkness. He stumbled as he exited from wherever he’d come, losing his grip and sending a handful of sparkling gemstones scattered out onto the ground and amidst the shocked crowds’ feet. He was dirty, once fine robes smudged with dirt and ashes. His hair was wild and unwashed, but a palpable sense of –power- exuded from his very being.
The portal closed with a resounding crackle of energy and its former boundaries, the twin statues, shuddered. Lightning sparked between the marble fingers, incinerating the spider and its web into a fine dust of ashes, and a moment later the statues themselves cracked and crumbled to dust. The portal was closed, the air was still, but light still cascaded across the plaza.
The man stumbled forward another step. He looked confused, and above and beyond that, he seemed terrified. Light was shining from his body, illuminating an outline of his body beneath his robes, and every second that passed the intensity grew. Too shocked at his sudden appearance, the crowd was yet silent.
The light grew brighter, shining from his flesh brighter even than the firre who stood a score of yards distant. The eladrin felt something terribly wrong. Something had touched this man. Something terrible. Something –wrong-. But he couldn’t tell if it was evil or not.
Something horrible was about to happen.
Shekelor’s senses screamed. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Why was he here? Could they have followed? Oh gods above, what he’d seen in The Harmonica. His flesh burned from within, and he grew aware of the building light that even now seared his fingers.
Distantly, beyond the crowd, the archmage saw a single figure drifting into view; tall, regal, serene. Hovering, She turned and looked at him, making eye contact as the pain became unbearable.
He had to warn them. He had to warn them all, before it was too late.
“THE SPIDERS!!!!”
The crowd’s hush broke into a screaming, scrambling frenzy as the man burst into flame, erupting into a searing glow, screaming madly for a second more before he completely incinerated into nothing. Nothing remained but for the scattering of stones, each of them glowing with inner light, lost to the scramble of the crowd, kicked and dispersed in the passing of feet, claws, hooves.
Shekelor was gone, his vision to topple The Lady uncompleted. His mad, grand claims snuffed out like a candle flame in Pandemonium’s winds.
The figure turned and drifted away, as silent and serene as before.
***
Toras made a face as he tried in vain to get the sticky, disgusting mess of bebelith silk and blood off of his sword, off of his armor, and out of his hair. It reeked, and unlike tanar’ri it didn’t seem to evaporate once they died, or flashed away in a cloud of fire, or turned into luminescent corpse flies. That would be fine on the grand scale of things; anything but the mess that was left after he’d taken on a bebelith hive. And where the hell had Frollis up and vanished off to?
Back down the warren of tunnels, away from where Toras was venting his frustration and kicking a dead bebelith, Settys Al Khylian walked through the caves, gingerly avoiding each bunch of burning webbing, letting them smolder and light his way. Brandishing his glowing khopesh, he went about neatly and methodically severing the heads of each bebelith corpse he encountered, ensuring that the creatures were and stayed dead.
Walking alongside the cleric, both Doran and Leobtav followed along, staying close in the event that something was still alive in the cave, both of them carrying conjured globes of light. Behind them, a small number of academics followed along dutifully, taking notes on the symbols on the cave walls, mapping the tunnel itself, or simply curious to watch as his went about his business.
“I’d also advise that we incinerate the remains along with any eggs.” The priest of Thoth warned. “If one of them hatches, they rapidly mature and we have too many things out in the dark already.”
“How much do you know about them? Bebeliths I mean.” Leobtav asked.
“I’ve run across them before near Curst, south of one of the tributaries of Maat. Difficult, violent creatures, but I haven’t studied them extensively beyond knowing how to handle them in a practical manner.”
“Then you aren’t aware of their feeding and hunting habits no?” Leobtav was going somewhere with his commentary, and beside him, Doran winced as he came to the same realization.
“They subsist almost entirely on tanar’ri flesh.” The elf explained in his colleague’s stead. “They hunt and eat demons.”
“The irony is that they probably preyed more on the fiends out there than anything else.” Leobtav remarked. “With the bebeliths gone, it might actually be more dangerous for us here in the long run.”
As they talked, Leobtav felt a tiny tug on his collar. Looking down, Ficklebarb caught his attention and motioned with his tail directly above them. Previously covered by a large swathe of bebelith webbing, a spidery collection of runes danced across the ceiling. When the last of the arachnid demons fell, its dying spasms had dislodged the covering and revealed the writing.
“I have to wonder if the bebelith hive might not be the source of our latest problems.” Doran asked, glancing at the massive body of one of the fiends. “They’re intelligent, so it’s not entirely out of the question I suppose. And I’ve never personally seen a hive this large.”
“Perhaps,” Settys mused. “But I seriously doubt it. They wouldn’t toy with us, and something clearly is doing just that. And we’re still missing two people. If we don’t find them dismembered and half-eaten somewhere in the caves here, covered in webbing and bebelith spittle, I think that notion can be dropped.”
The cleric clearly didn’t think much of the idea, but the elf was honestly more interested in his reaction. Based on the past few days, they needed to be open to the idea that one of their own had gone mad, and it wasn’t some fiend out in the shrieking darkness preying on them.
“What’s your opinion?” Doran asked, glancing over at Leobtav.
Leobtav wasn’t paying attention though. His eyes were fixed on a portion of the ceiling and a tracing of symbols that ran back and forth across the hand-carved stone back and forth for several dozen lines. His eyes were wide as he glanced between the symbols and his field journal. Perched on his shoulder, Ficklebarb’s head craned back and forth in alternating pattern to his master’s from book to script and back.
“Do you think…?” The pseudodragon asked with some hesitation.
Leobtav was preoccupied however, flipping back and forth, comparing samples in his journal with those on the stone. Each time he went from stone to book his expression lifted, growing more and more excited, grinning ear to ear.
“Sir?” Highsilver asked again. His voice trailed off though upon noticing his colleague’s expression.
It would evade magical translation as every other sample of the language had before – something to do with the tieres’ self-made damnation. But mundane translation was something else entirely.
“Our glorious father, creator and protector. Our lives we gave, our tears we wept, children we raised in adoration of you. The labor of centuries we gave, poured forth from our midst to build unto you an eternal Cathedral in honor and obeisance of You our patron and maker.
It continued for paragraphs more, and while the fine details would need to be painstakingly deciphered, word by word, this was it: Gautish.
The professor’s voice was ecstatic. “I think we’ve found it.”
***
