The nine of them stood before the looming mouth of the cave, paused at the threshold as if it waited like the mouth of a slavering dragon. The ground was littered with discarded packs and equipment of the group that had made the late ascent with the Professor, and also a satchel belonging to the lillend who had followed them at some point thereafter. It looked nothing so much as the ground was littered with the spat out bones of the cave’s devoured victims.
They knew that something horrific waiting inside, but that also that was where they would be free of the nightmare that had stalked and taunted them in the darkness.
“We shouldn’t have left them alone down there.” Toras glanced back to the distant lights burning and conjured where they’d left the other expedition members to wait for their return.
“They’ll be safe for a short while.” Doran frowned, equally worried despite his words. “We have to finish this, and only two people are left, and they both went up here. This is where we end this.”
“So it’s either Larill or Leobtav?” Nisha tilted her head. “I can’t say I saw that coming. I thought it was Frollis. Sorry about that…”
Everyone exchanged glances, and from the guilty expressions, it seemed that most all of them had suspected the same, though Settys earned his own glance or two.
Frollis sighed. “Was it the whole darkness thing?”
“No, it was you abandoning your post and wandering off after people showed up dead and artistically dismembered.” Fyrehowl’s tail twitched as she glanced at the shadowdancer. “But the darkness thing didn’t make your case any better.”
“So much for Cipher intuition…” Frollis rolled his eyes.
Florian frowned at them both, “We can apologize about our rashness later – though for my part I thought it was Settys. No offense.”
“None taken.”
Several more rounds of bickering and after-the-fact rationalization commenced before they drew blades or readied themselves to cast and cautiously moved down the sloping entryway into the cave.
“Laerill came this way.” Doran pointed to the patterns in the gravel left behind by the lillend’s serpentine lower-half.
“And then she paused.” Toras paused likewise, kneeling down at the feet of one of the first corpses that she’d come across.
The group muttered and sighed as they looked at the trio of bodies littering the descent. But no sign of either Laerill or Leobtav.
Fyrehowl’s ears twitched and swiveled forward, pointing down the passage and into the darkness. “I heard something. Everyone be quiet, move slowly.”
It was faint, but the lupinal’s ears were preternaturally sensitive even before her training as a Cipher came into play. Someone was breathing, though it was shallow, labored, and irregular. Whoever it was, they sounded injured, though she couldn’t yet tell who it was, either the professor or the lillend.
It didn’t take long for them to find out who it wasn’t.
“Mystra preserve…” Tristol gasped as his conjured light illuminated the rear of the cave, unveiling a grisly arrangement sitting atop one of the small devotional altars carved into the walls.
Laerill's body -what remained of it- sat atop the altar above which they'd first discovered the gautish text. She'd been severed at the waist, and the serpentine lower half of her body was missing, letting her corpse appear trapped in the stone or emerging from the pool of clotted, drying blood drooling out upon the altar. Like previous corpses, her body had been positioned after death. Her arms were raised up as if in adoration or worship, and an ecstatic grin was fixed upon her face, even while the bloody hollows of her gouged out eyes trickled blood down her face.
“Laerill I’m so sorry…” Florian’s eyes were wide. She’d seen many things as a cleric of Tempus, but this was something altogether different.
Toras’ face was grim, and anger seethed in his eyes. “Gods…”
Upon the altar, written in her own blood were the following words penned in draconic, “Do you hear it? Can you hear it? Hark to the resonance of lament and the crash and pitch of misery. Join in the chorus of the damned as we keen to its whispered will.”
Other than Laerill's mutilated body and her killer's mocking words, the cave was empty. Leobtav was gone.
“Monster…” Doran whispered in a monotone. He felt hollow. He’d known Leobtav for years.
For several long minutes all was silent and still. None of them could take their eyes from what had been done to her, nor could they make sense of the words left behind in front of her body, nor the much longer grisly tableau sprawling across the wall behind her. All was silent until there came a small, sorrowful voice, high pitched and unsteady. "I tried to make him stop..."
"Ficklebarb?" Several voices, confused and unsteady all of them, rang out.
All eyes were drawn to the tiny pseudodragon curled up on the ground a few feet from Laerill's corpse. His colors were washed out, his eyes dull, and it seemed as if he'd been touched by a pack of wraiths.
"I tried to tell you." Ficklebarb looked up at them, tears leaking from his eyes. "I tried to tell someone. The professor...me... us... we needed help."
"Wait, I'm completely confused." Nisha blurted out.
Tristol rubbed her shoulder. "You're not the only one."
"What exactly is going on Ficklebarb?" Toras asked, his voice suddenly softer and gentler as if he were speaking to a child as he knelt down next to the sickly pseudodragon. The anger was completely gone from his expression.
"I'm not a familiar." Ficklebarb explained, resting his head upon a rock, seemingly incapable of the strength to hold it aloft. "I'm the professor's conscience."
"How...?" Clueless looked at the tiny dragon, wondering how that could even happen, and why.
"I've known Leobtav for decades." Doran glanced at the others. "I never suspected anything like this from him. I certainly never suspected that his familiar was anything more than that. I don't remember anything that would have suggested anything like this." He stared quietly at the dragon for a moment and then asked, "What happened to Cilret? What made him do this?"
Ficklebarb sighed and started to cry. He'd known what was going to happen, he'd known the darkness lurking in his master's soul, and he'd been unable to do anything to stop it. Now though, maybe he could explain it and maybe they could put an end to it.
"Something touched him years ago. Something terrible in Gehenna. He tried not to give in. He tried to resist it. Part of him at least. Eventually it knew it couldn't survive and it split apart, forming me. I tried to keep him stable and sane, avoiding falling back into the darkness. I couldn't stop him though, and now I'm dying."
"We can help you!" Toras protested.
"I don't think you can." Ficklebarb twitched and shuddered in pain. "I don't think anyone ever really could have. But you have to stop him now! You can't let him do what he's left to do!"
"Where is he now?" Florian demanded, eyes flickering back towards the cave mouth, praying inwardly to Tempus that the madman didn't intend to wait till they were here and then slaughter the rest of the expedition. Thankfully though, that wasn't the case.
"The Outlands." Ficklebarb moaned. "Looking for the imprisoned god of the gautiere."
"What's he going to do?" Clueless asked.
The tiny pseudodragon flicked his tail towards Laeril's grotesquely displayed corpse, and to the wall behind her. There, drawn in perverse bloody mimicry of the texts that littered the honeycombed interior of Howler's Crag, Leobtav had left behind a text of his own. Written in the lillend's blood, it was both a mocking farewell, and the cliché speech of a sociopath so deeply desiring an acknowledgement of his own superiority when his success had till that moment required anonymity rather than notoriety.
“Oh, I found my calling long ago. I was indeed once a Guvner, once the professor I have played at still being. That was before I traveled to the Ash Cities of Gehenna. There upon the frozen slopes of the 4th mount, I heard it. It spoke to me, called my name and whispered to me. So much it knew, so powerful it was; a power among powers it seemed. It was distant though, remote, and from so far off it sounded, like a voice through glass or water, struggling to speak to me. But speak it did, and rivet my attention it did. Of dire portents it spoke, of what would be, and what MUST be in order for it to occur. It took me, showed me the coming times of it, and what part I would play in the tumult.
I found my calling, and it I worshipped in secret, the darkness filling my heart till it overflowed. At the time I was living in Hopeless, an outcast, hiding from all others while I strove to understand the insights and parables it gave to teach me what I must do. Three score dead I left in my wake upon the floors and rafters of that house. It is still shunned to this day, a chapel of the Ashsinger, a cathedral of death to the Everdark, a palace for the Lord of Misery.
In secret I returned to the world I had known, the same on the outside, given torment in my own way by the lingering fragments of my former self, my conscience, my weakness, my cares, the souls of those I killed. Ficklebarb was all of that, and stronger he grew the longer I passed away the time since my calling. Action was needed to silence him, refill the void, and satiate the Darkness that Calls. Your fear, your death rattles, and your consumed soulstuff feed the Master and confirm my place as its servant, loyal and humble. It silences my regret with a blood laden reaffirmation of faith in the Faithless One.
And now the Darkness Beyond calls once more. It speaks, I listen and in the shadow of the Spire, I find what it seeks.”
"What the bloody f*ck..." Frollis stared slackjawed at the text written in blood across the wall.
Nisha tilted her head sideways and punctuated her next statement with a rattle of the bell on her tail, "That's a whole hell of a lot of crazy."
"Someone care to let me know what the Ashsinger is?" Clueless asked the obvious question. "Or the other names there? I've never heard of any of them."
Eyes glanced between Doran, Tristol, and Florian. Collectively they shrugged. None of them had ever heard of any of those names.
"I've never heard of any of them." Tristol’s ears flattened back against his head and his head tilted ever so slightly to the side as he struggled to make sense of the text and the many names and titles scattered throughout it.
"We did send an expedition to Gehenna though, years ago." Doran sighed. "The Ash Cities are real, though the expedition didn't recover much, and they nearly didn't make it back. There's not much to say about them really except that they exist. While it's been suggested that the 'loths built them, they don't go anywhere near there, though that might just be the presence of the phiuls. It's hard to say. There wasn't any indication of a deity by any of those names at any point that we excavated."
"That seems to be when he lost it though." Florian frowned. "Did he drop out of sight after that?"
Doran nodded. "He took a sabbatical from his research with the institute for several years, embarking on some private research. Everything was handled officially with the Guvners, and when he returned to service he threw himself into the next projects that popped up and everything seemed perfectly normal. The only thing that had obviously changed was that he had a familiar."
Ficklebarb's eyes were wide with regret, "I couldn't tell you Doran. I wanted to, but I couldn't."
"That's ok little one."
“You have to help him!” Ficklebarb’s eyes welled with desperation. “You have to stop him!”
“How? We don’t even know where he’s gone to.” Clueless glanced back at the bloody text Leobtav had left behind. “And even then, he somehow sealed off our access to planeshifting magic.”
“That hasn’t changed since he left.” Tristol’s ears were flattened back against his head. “We might end up using Nisha’s method after all.”
Despite the circumstances, Nisha managed a smile.
Ficklebarb pointed his snout at a discarded satchel and several sheets of paper littered around it, each of them scrawled with notations in Leobtav’s hand. “He found the location of the tiere’s imprisoned god coded into the text we found here. His notes don’t show that, but it shows the steps he took to find it. He left those earlier notes behind. He didn’t need them anymore.”
All eyes turned to Doran, and the elf was already opening the bag and leafing through the papers it held. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“What is he going to do if he reaches there before we can?”
Ficklebarb shook with an involuntary tremor. “I don’t know what he intends to do. Something horrible. Something evil. I also know that if he succeeds, I’ll vanish. I’ll die. I don’t want to die.”
“How can we stop him without… you know, killing him?” Fyrehowl asked, hesitation in her voice. “What happens to you then?”
Ficklebarb managed a smile, but otherwise didn’t answer. “You can’t let him succeed. Please. Please try.”
“I owe it to my friend, no matter what twisted him, no matter what he did.” Doran looked up from the notes to Leobtav’s dying conscience made manifest. “We have to get the others to safety first. Then we go after him.”
Toras reached down and picked up the tiny pseudodragon, gently rubbing its head, carrying it like a beloved pet or a sickly child in need of care. “We’ll take care of both things. Let’s go back down to the others. They need to know that they’re safe for the moment. Then we figure out where Leobtav went, and how we’ll get there after bringing the others back somewhere safer.”
“One more thing first.” Florian looked at Fyrehowl and the others with a more physical skill set. “Someone help me take down Laerill’s body. I don’t know if we can bring her back, what with the problems we had with the others, and her being an outsider, but we can’t leave her hear despoiled like this. We owe her that.”
None objected.
****
Several hours of feverish study later they had something. Cobbled together from Leobtav's remaining notes and others carelessly left behind in the materials abandoned in the cave high up on the Crag, it wasn't complete, but it was something nonetheless.
“It’s a translation, but the original text isn’t only plain text. There’s an acrostic that provides a starting point, several landmarks, and a distance between each of them. It’s not a conventional location within the Outlands either, because the directions don't point towards the spire at all.”
Several sets of questioning eyes focused on Doran, while a smaller number found intrigued purchase on the document in his hands, just as eager to hear the details.
"It points to somewhere out in the Hinterlands." Doran spread out a map of the plane, with circles drawn around Plague-Mort and Hopeless, the respective gatetowns to the Abyss and the Waste. "Starting at a point Spireward and moving Ringward in a specific route between those two gatetowns. Curiously it doesn't mention Curst at all, which I suspect says something about the utter antiquity of the text, since it suggests that it predates Carceri's gatetown, or at least was written during an interregnum period when the town was swallowed by the plane proper."
“The Hinterlands?” Tristol’s ears perked in attention. “That would explain why it hasn’t ever been found.”
“Indeed.” Doran continued. “Some of the place names are antiquated to the extreme, and it’s going to take a few days for me to sketch the entire route for this out in detail, but it gives a precise location for the prison-tomb of the tiere deity.”
“What are the Hinterlands?” Florian asked. “I’m not familiar with the term.”
“The Outlands are infinite in size, just like every other plane.” Tristol explained. “The ring of Gatetowns doesn’t mark a border for the plane where it drops off into the others around the Wheel. It keeps going. Forever. But away from the Spire, past that point, it gets… odd.”
Doran continued from where Tristol had stopped. “No matter how far out you travel, you’re never more than a few days away from the Gatetowns. But if you try to retrace your original path out into the Hinterlands, you may never encounter the same locations or landscape. It’s fluid in a way. Which is why no one has probably ever found the tiere godtrap before now, though I’d suspect the rilmani know of it. They’re probably the only ones.”
“The Hinterlands…” Ficklebarb wrinkled his snout and nodded. “It seems right.”
“And that’s where Leobtav is going.” Doran sighed. “Apparently. Though I’ll be damned if I know why.”
****
- trudge out and up to find a portal. Takes several days to find something usable, giving Leobtav a head start.
-trip to Hopeless to the Charnel House. Toras, Tristol, Nisha while the others work with Doran to figure out where Leobtav is actually going. Fast forward through this since nothing plot important happens, but the house is trapped, triggered when anyone seeking Leobtav appears, having made the connection between his identity and the fake name he used during those years.-
****
High above the Outlands, the sunless sky was clear and cloudless. Today the landscape of the plane of true neutrality was clear, and one could see for miles if not for the forests a few miles distant. Far beyond them, nine rings inward, the Spire rose and even at that distance it still towered above, looming, crowned like an aloof king with its crown of Sigil. But the sky was an afterthought to the young khaasta child who sat in the dirt and played with a carved stick, imagining it to be a blade, and a series of stones that he’d decorated with bits of pigment to resemble a gaggle of humanoid slaves that he, a great slave trader, would be bringing to market far on the other side of the spire in the great ribbed city of iron and gold that his father told tales of.
A shadow stretched over the ground before him and the child glanced up.
“Gssik!” His mother called out. “Hazha’mek nim!”
He glanced up at her call and then out towards the horizon, the treeline, and the figure approaching their village. A lone human, thin, unarmed, and dressed in clothing sullied by travel and a careless attitude towards their appearance. An escaped slave? Or a lost traveler perhaps, soon to be beaten, collared, and eventually sold at market by his mighty father no doubt! This would be something to watch! One day he would do the same!
As he approached the khaasta village, the man gave only a casual glance at the reptilian natives. He found it amusing to find them settled in such a fashion on the chaotic side of the Spire. They had hunted well in recent years though it seemed, as the size of their slave pens suggested, as did the presence of the finely crafted goods purchased or seized in their raids which decorated their warriors and the dozens of buildings they'd constructed. Still, they were barely civilized vermin, akin to hobgoblins of the Outlands.
“Wretches.” The man muttered with contempt as he watched several gravid females shut themselves inside their homes, gathering their young as the warrior males and females shouted out alarms and gathered their weapons. “You are not worth my time."
He would have passed directly through the village, not lifting a finger to harm them had they not intervened. His eyes were set on something else: the tiere god-trap far beyond the village, deep within the Hinterlands. Anything else in-between was meaningless by comparison unless his master told him otherwise.
“Stand still fool! Drop your weapons and hand over your gold.” The khaasta chieftain towered over him by well over two head heights. Powerfully muscled and dressed in little more than a chainmail loincloth, the ruddy-scaled khaasta sneered at the human as his eyes darted about his body, assaying not his threat as an opponent, but his worth as either a slave or a meal.
The man stopped, silent and arrogantly calm. He smiled and adjusted his glasses as the khaasta continued to bellow orders.
“If you have been sent by some master, speak it now and we will see what becomes of you. Otherwise, you have chosen a poor place to seek refuge human. If no devil or god claims you as property, then we are claiming so now.”
The man chuckled and glanced up to his shoulder, whispering something incoherently as the muscular, armed khaasta approached.
“Bow slave! Bow before your new master!” The khaasta sneered, leveling the tip of his wickedly barbed spear at the human who stood well over two head heights below him. “You now belong to Kistrex of clan Isstrekal."
"Serakal!" Kistrex called out to his secondary wife. "Fetch me some manacles!”
The man snickered and glanced up to his shoulder where something now flickered in and out of existence - a tiny figure perched there, wrought of shadow, or more distinctly, an absence of light, a hole in space, leering with a ragged tear of a mouth and hollows for eyes. It leaned in and whispered something to him. He nodded, stretched and mentally caressed a set of phrases and words that leaped from his dark companion and into his thoughts.
“You are naught but flotsam and sh*t riding on the currents ahead of the tidal wave of rilmani." He glanced at the khaasta with disdain. "They have yet to make their presence known."
The khaasta barked out more orders, snarling and preparing to beat the human into submission with a swift strike to his head. He never had the chance.
"They wait for me. They wait for us.” The man smiled, drawing the mental symbols and phrases like a sword in his mind. “And like you, they too will die.”
His mouth yawned wide, opening into a bottomless darkness, the figure on his shoulder smiled, and from his throat issued forth a wail…
****
Thick black smoke hung heavy in the air, still rising hours after the fact from the gutted frames of a dozen buildings, carrying with itself the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh. Nearly forty khaasta corpses littered the ground, their features twisted into expressions of horror and their limbs snarled and contorted like dead insects. The ravaged village was not empty however. Hiding in the ruins were several stragglers that had survived the attack, as well as a lingering enchantment upon the corpses that would in the space of hours cause them to rise up spontaneously if not first triggered by any of their killer's pursuers. They would not trigger however on the presence of either group that currently moved through the ruins, each of a distinctly different nature.
Marching with a haste normally not seen among their kind, ranks of ferrumach rilmani followed in the footsteps of the man who had shattered the khaasta village. Both on foot and riding kulduraths, accompanied by groups of cuprilach and scattered argenach marshals, they numbered in the hundreds. Further out, equivalent groups moved in the same direction. The rilmani were determined to stop any and all intrusions into the prison-temple of the tiere deity.
"Busy little ants..." Tellura Ibn Shartalan sat upon the ground amid the death and carnage, waiting. Had she been noticed by the rilmani or surviving khaast, they would have seen only what appeared to be a young aasimar girl sitting alone and utterly unconcerned by the corpses scattered around her. Bemused, she toyed with a leather doll abandoned by one of the khaasta children who had scattered at the approach of Cilret Leobtav.
Unaware of her presence, the ranks of rilmani marched around her, and occasionally she scowled at those who approached too closely, her shadow reaching out, tempted to bat at them like a cat clawing at insects. Despite her presence, and despite what she was, none of them took notice of her sitting on the ground. Far enough from the Spire as they were, Balance's champions' innate connection to the plane failed to outweigh the baernaloth’s primeval and godlike power, even diluted as it was, substantially so by her presence outside of the Lower Planes and in the Spire’s shadow. Unless she travelled closer in by several rings, or perhaps if the ferrumachs and their argenach sergeants saw fit to include an aurumach, then perhaps they might notice her presence. That would be a pity if they did.
The Second of the Demented smiled and briefly turned her head at the sound of an opening door. Within the smoldering remains of one of the larger dwellings, a ruined staircase once rose from the ground floor. The second floor no long existed and the roof have collapsed, but the stone frame of the stairwell and the door itself still, improbably, remained behind. Briefly they flickered with sickly yellow light and opened, allowing the entry of her kindred from his hunting upon the Infinite Staircase.
“Ideally they’ll finish this business.” Tellura remarked, gazing past the rilmani army in the direction that Leobtav had travelled. "It saves us the trouble of doing so ourselves, and prevents our intrusion from being noticed.
“You've been playing with dolls and puppets too long I think." The Wanderer snarled as his emerald eyes followed the rilmani. "You don't control their movement, and where they're going, you couldn't follow if you wanted. You can't see it.”
“It’s too close to the Spire even now. The Hinterlands swallowed it long ago, but where it was originally has left an imprint upon it even now. It no longer sits in the ring the tiere built it in, but to my eyes it might as well." Tellura shrugged and her face was just as nonchalantly calm as before. But the Wanderer had made his point, and below her, on the ground, her shadow swirled with frustration. "Otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem and I’d handle it myself.”
“Do you really think the rilmani can handle what you failed to notice?”
“I failed to notice nothing.” She frowned and looked up at her kindred baern. “Nor did my sibling.”
The legions of rilmani marched onwards, swarming around the baernaloth without ever noticing them, nor in fact approaching within an arm's length, as if the proto-fiends warped the landscape around themselves, repulsing the neutral exemplars like identical poles of a magnet.
"So you both have reminded the rest of us, repeatedly now." The Wanderer motioned towards the rilmani, clambering back towards the door to carry him back to the Staircase before glancing back at the Shepherdess. “If they fail we have a problem.”
“It isn’t a problem.” Tellura snarled like a petulant child and awkwardly stood, casting aside the khaasta doll and supporting herself on her staff. “Everything has been foreseen! Everything still goes according to the Architect’s designs.”
“Does it?” The Wanderer didn't look at her as he asked the question, bathed in the glow of the open portal as he prepared to leave. "We shall see."
Tellura opened her mouth, glaring at the other baernaloth's back as he slipped into the portal and vanished. Digging its claws into the earth, her shadow snarled before she turned and walked forward. On the third step the ground turned to a ragged blotch of ashes and she was gone, vanished back into the Waste, leaving all as it was and had been.
****
