When the dust settled out of the air, their vision cleared, and the ringing in their ears ended, they all looked up. A ragged hole was punched in the wall from whatever force the rats had launched outwards in desperate, reflexive rage. Dozens of their corpses lay lifeless on the ground, in the rubble, and still plugging a network of burrowed holes deeper in the wall.
Pain! How dare you harm us! Reduce us, make us fewer, and make us weaker! Death!
The shrill psionic screams of the collective burned out on the ether and into the still recovering minds of their foes. Tristol glanced over at Clueless.
“… you said you’d hold off on using that stuff!”
Clueless leapt to his feet with a flick of his wings, “I didn’t! Sorta… Complain later because they’re pissed.”
“No sh*t.” Florian said as she looked at the hole in the wall.
The group regained their footing and stood back up as the seething anger that seemed to reverberate all around them began to pump and pulse like a living thing. Fyrehowl’s ears were flat against her head and Skalliska and Nisha were glancing nervously at the ground where the dust, gravel, and flakes of ragged stone were beginning to dance from an unseen force building up below them all and growing stronger by the second.
“Guys, we need to move. Now!” Fyrehowl shouted a split second after her feet were already bursting into motion and carrying here out of the way. The warning was not unfounded, and a moment after they all dashed from the immediate area and down the hallway, the floor where they had been standing erupted in a fiery glaze of green and white liquid flames.
Not even Nisha glanced back for more than a moment at the lapping, sloshing flames that roared out of nothingness to flood the hallway. They bolted, weapons drawn and spells in mind as they turned a random corner, forgetting for the moment any pretense of following the directions from Jeremo’s map. Turn after turn down the mazework of ancient, elegant corridors, and they were thoroughly lost. But still, they continued to run.
“Guys? I think we’ve lost them for the moment.” Florian said as she glanced behind them.
Fyrehowl chuckled, “Lost them? Too quiet for that.”
Spoken like a true Cipher apparently, as a moment later they turned a blind corner and came face to face with a dozen rats in the center of the hallway, staring intently at them with unblinking eyes and lightning crackles of energy flashing in concert between and amongst their exposed brains. Then there was suddenly something else.
Toras flew backward with a cry as a semisolid, vaguely humanoid being of glowing, writhing ectoplasm manifested out of thin air and charged him, standing between them all and the circle of concentrating cranium rats who had formed it out of sheer force of will.
Clueless, Fyrehowl and Florian didn’t stop their charge either, but slammed into the astral construct nearly as hard as it had slammed into Toras. They drove it back with a number of blows, leaving splatters of ectoplasmic goo to splash across the hallway and quickly evaporate into nothing. However it soon recovered from their attacks as the rats only continued to blankly stare while mental energies danced between their heads with an intensity to rival the white knuckled hatred in their pink, glistening eyes.
Another series of blows to the conjured beast and it was starting to falter, but at the same time it had dealt a series of blows to its attackers. Toras steadied himself and rejoined the conflict, but the moment he struck a final blow to the creature, making it erupt into steaming fragments of semisolid jelly, the rats were gone, scampering down the hall with some form of warding that deflected Skalliska’s crossbow bolts and a flurry of magical bolts from Nisha’s wand.
“Oh, hell no. You’re not getting away that easily.” Toras said as he dashed off in pursuit of the rats.
Another blind corner turned and the fighter realized how poor an idea that was as he ran into the same group of rats, as well as two more of the conjured astral constructs and the glistening shockwave of a bolt of concussive force that slammed into him solidly in the chest.
The others turned the corner as well a split second later and barely had time to fend off to two smaller, but much quicker, glowing attackers as the rats seemed to ready themselves to launch another mental detonation. Tristol had other idea however.
“Someone hit the damn rats or else we’ll be doing this over again like a bunch of…” Nisha didn’t finish the sentence before the rat’s hurled another bolt of glistening, rippling force at her.
Tristol hurled a bolt of lightning into their midst a moment later and it detonated with a thunderous crack and the harsh stench of ozone. Half of the rats were dead, roasted and turned to cinders, but where the others had stood there was the telltale trace and flickers of teleportation magic. The rats were gone.
“Oh hell with that! They hurt Nisha!” Clueless shouted as he flicked a bolt of lightning from the end of his sword and into the chest of one of the two lingering constructs.
As the bladesinger’s spell detonated on one of the two, Fyrehowl was all but dancing around the other. The lupinal was making it seem slow by comparison as she darted and weaved out of the way of its blows and left gouges and slashes across its weak side every time it tried to strike at her.
By the time Toras had helped Nisha up to her feet, Florian had caved in the translucent skull of one of the constructs and Tristol had turned another to stone.
The mage brushed down the fur on his tail as he looked over to the tiefling, “It’s not going anywhere soon Nisha. It’s all yours for the taking if you want to break it apart into as many pieces as you like.”
Nisha looked at him like he had a hole in his head.
“No? Seeing as how the rats took off to regroup, you’ve got your chance to break something of theirs while you have it still.”
Nisha just held up her rapier. “Sneak sneak, poke poke. That’s what I do. I don’t have the habit of going around up to things twice my size and going, ‘RAAARRRR! Me Toras! Me smash! RAAAAAARRRR! And me give presents and candy to orphans and small children in general! RAAAARRRR!’”
She smiled over at Toras who only raised an eyebrow as he stood with his sword slung over his shoulder.
“Can I have candy?” Clueless asked hopefully.
“I’ll break it for you, but I’m not saying that when I do it.” He said, more than slightly bemused. “And what’s wrong with that at all? I think that’s a perfectly reasonable way to go about life.”
“Awww…” She said halfheartedly before she stepped to the side to let Toras shatter the transmuted construct with a few solidly placed blows.
Skalliska, with a more serious tone, glanced over at Fyrehowl. “Anything you can sense around here? I can’t see any traces of them in the area, but your nose is better than mine.”
Fyrehowl shook her head, “No. They took off when the first few times didn’t kill us immediately.”
“They’re smarter than that.” Tristol said.
Clueless nodded, “Yep. They’ve got an idea of what we’re capable of, and they’ll probably just wait and either let us find them and maybe get ourselves killed in the process as the pull more stunts like that on us.”
“Plus, we’re lost.” Skalliska said with a sigh.
“…yeah. That too.” Clueless said as he glanced around at the marble columns that supported a crystal dome overhead. The dome was studded with flickering beljurils, each of them a tiny star in a series of constellations inset into the artificial night ‘sky’.
“As much as I’d love to make some wishes on some falling, pried out stars from up over top of us, let’s try to find our way back onto that map.” Nisha said as she stared up at the flickering gemstones in the ceiling of the chamber.
Forty minutes later they had managed to do just that, and without any interference from the cranium rats. In fact there had been a disturbing silence from the rats since their last attack, though they did feel keenly aware that –something- was watching them. The feeling only increased as they made their way to the stairwell down to the next level and to the point at which, according to what Jeremo had told them, the map would cease to be of use.
“That’s a long staircase…” Fyrehowl said as she glanced down the shaft that the spiral staircase descended down into.
The stairs actually seemed to vanish after a point, curving out of sight and into darkness. Tristol shook his head as far as portals or magical traps were concerned, but nonetheless, Skalliska found herself being volunteered to check the stairs for any surprises left by the psionic vermin who where still lurking out there in the walls, waiting and regrouping.
“Fine fine, I’ll go first.” Skalliska said as she tapped a sunrod on the ground and held it aloft to light her way down the stairs.
“Set off any traps!” Nisha shouted after her.
“Surely you mean disarm them. Right?” Skalliska responded quickly.
“Same thing in the end!” Nisha shouted back down.
An uncomfortable amount of time passed, and Skalliska’s glow passed out of immediate view as she descended. Eventually, the others became worried and called out after her.
“Everything alright down there?” Florian shouted.
“… yes. Just come down here. I think you’ll want to see this…” Skalliska replied with a sense of awe.
The others followed and as they wandered into range of the kobold’s light, they too were struck by what she had seen. Florian immediately whispered a prayer to Tempus and conjured a brilliant flare of daylight to banish the shadows that cloaked the shaft that surrounded the stairs. What she revealed even more of was amazing.
While the stairs they stood upon wrapped around and meandered about the shaft, eventually going down, there were other stairwells that did the same. Some of them passed back up the shaft along the walls, some of them sideways, some of them upside down, etc. It was a massive recreation of perhaps fifty landings on the Infinite Staircase; all of them pulled out of some mad, genius architect’s grandest dreaming.
“Who in the hell built this place?” Clueless asked as he flicked his wings and darted over to another of the stairways. Gravity immediately reoriented itself as he touched down, the same way as it would have on the actual Infinite Staircase.
Tristol chuckled, “Whoever it was, they certainly had a sense of imagination.”
“Or a sense of the crazies.” Nisha replied. “And I don’t say that as a bad thing…”
Fyrehowl glanced over to one of the landings that seemed to stand out more than the others. In fact, it wasn’t a true landing at all, but rather a doorway that simply hovered in space, surrounded by a tangle of staircases that weaved around it as they meandered through the shaft like spider webs.
“Tristol or Skalliska? Take a look at that doorway over there.” The lupinal said as she pointed towards the door.
They both looked over towards the closed doorway that simply hovered in the void and they looked puzzled and intrigued at the same time. A moment and a whispered spell later they were both staring more intently at the bound space contained within the doorframe.
“That’s a portal.” They both said at the same time.
“Where to?” Clueless shouted over from the adjacent staircase.
“If there’s portals down here, maybe that’s how the rats got in.” Toras mused as Tristol whispered a few phrases in draconic and then began to float off the ground.
“Be back in a minute, I just want to check something out…” The aasimar said as he drifted quickly over towards the doorway, opened it and peered through.
Tristol laughed with glee as he stared through to the other side and then vanished through it. A few moments later his head reappeared through the doorframe and he was smiling.
“Amusing architecture on this side or not, it’s an actual door onto the Infinite Staircase. Give me a minute here. Be back in a second.”
Tristol dashed back through the door and paused on the other side, looking up at the disorienting but awe-inspiring sight on the other side. Out into a featureless void spun the stairs and landings of the Infinite Staircase off and out of sight in every direction, each of its landings holding a single door that led off to places of inspiration, culture, art, creativity, and passion. And he had just found such a doorway leading into a very mysterious place, and he wanted a way to find it again without having to beg Jeremo for permission to walk around without an escort.
“Can’t turn this opportunity down. Lady of Mysteries be praised, but certainly won’t be me to let this slip by.” Tristol said with a giddy grin as he whispered a few words and inscribed his personal arcane mark into the corner of the doorframe.
“There. Now you’ll be easier to find later from this side of things and spare me from red tape and favors.”
That said, Tristol stepped back through and hovered in midair in the open void of the replica Staircase in the depths of the Jester’s Palace.
“Well,” He said to the others, “If we need another way out of here, there’s our ticket.”
Clueless nodded, “Damn good idea.”
Tristol only smiled at his good fortune and wondered idly what the information might be valued by certain persons in Sigil if he ever needed some information from them, or a spell, or some arcane knowledge they might be willing to trade.
And so as he continued to smile inwardly to himself, they slowly made their way down the stairs and onto the next level of the underhalls. As they stepped out from the stairs, they emerged into a circular chamber of wood and rose colored marble, the walls adorned with tapestries that still glimmered with magically preserved images of wild beasts and scenes from the legends of a dozen worlds.
Fyrehowl’s ears immediately perked, and Tristol’s did as well a split second later.
“What?” Florian asked with some alarm as she handled her holy symbol gingerly, half expecting a swarm of rats to burst into the room.
“… music. I hear music.” Fyrehowl said with slight confusion.
Tristol nodded as well, “Same here. Down the larger hallway.”
Florian glanced at Skalliska, “So, which way now? You’ve got the map.”
Skalliska tossed the map to Nisha who then tossed it over to Clueless.
“Hell if I know. The map doesn’t have anything on this level. I shows this room yes, but it shows it as having four exits, not three like we’ve got now. We’re on our own at this point.” The kobold replied.
Clueless pocketed the map and looked over to Fyrehowl and her perked, attentive ears.
“Alright, the music is coming from,” Fyrehowl pointed down one of the passages, “That direction.”
“Cranium rats don’t play music do they?” Nisha asked randomly.
“Not to my knowledge, no.” Skalliska replied as she glanced down the hallway in that direction.
“Because if they do, well, they’ve really been practicing.” Nisha said, continuing to ramble about cheese and musical instruments for rodents.
“Please tell me that whatever is making the music is magical? Because frankly I don’t treasure the idea of someone else down here practicing their musical skills in a warren of forgotten tunnels and chambers. That’s just not healthy.” Toras said as they all started to walk towards the source of the sounds.
“Not healthy at all. Besides, that’s not one instrument I can hear. That’s a full orchestra, or at least most of one.” Fyrehowl said as her ears continued to twitch as she began to distinguish between flutes, horns, and a variety of stringed instruments.
“That sounds almost like music that you’d play at an overly fancy party…” Florian said as she strained to listen to the song as it filtered through the otherwise deathly silent, walnut paneled corridor.
Toras snickered, “Someone needs to tell the Marauder that there’s a secret party down here and that she wasn’t invited by the cranium rats. She’ll go berserk and solve the problem for us….”
Clueless chuckled, “I’d put my money, and my satisfaction, on the rats frankly… I’m going to shave that b*tch one of these days…”
“Heh. There’s an idea…” Nisha said with a grin. The moment that she did, Tristol’s tail reflexively curled out of sight under his robes and Fyrehowl started putting some distance between herself and the tiefling.
Ten minutes later they emerged out of the hallway and into a larger chamber with a tiled mosaic on the floor that depicted the Lady’s Ward in Sigil as seen from the Palace of the Jester, though not one of the buildings seemed even remarkably familiar with the exception of the singing fountain.
A series of smaller passages led off from the chamber, with the sounds of music leading off from one of the halls to the right. Suddenly, Fyrehowl’s ears perked and swiveled to the opposite direction.
“Guys, get ready, there’s something coming this way.” She said as she drew her sword.
Expecting a tide of hive minded rats to swarm at them from the tunnels, they were shocked when the last thing they expected appeared out of the passage and into the radius of their lights: a Dabus.
“What the hell?” Fyrehowl said as she immediately lowered her sword and stepped to the side.
The Dabus was carrying a trowel and a bucket of crushed morter as it drifted silently out of the passage and into the room, simply passing through as if it were just crossing the street in the Lower Ward to patch a pothole in the cobblestones. It barely regarded the group’s presence as it passed by them, though it did slow down when Nisha waved hello.
As it slowed down, a symbol of a (stone Well), (-W), (+ O) appeared over its head, and then it simply passed by, ignoring them and going about whatever business it had. The group was left in puzzled silence as they watched it depart back the way that they had entered the room.
“It said hello!” Nisha chirped with glee as everyone else was largely disturbed to see a Dabus so far below ground.
“Why would a Dabus be underground?” Clueless openly asked.
Skalliska shrugged, “Popular rumor is that the Dabus live in hidden warrens underneath the streets and emerge every day to do what work they need to do. Nobody has ever found one of the places, or managed to follow one of them back there, but they do seem to all emerge up out of the Great Below and then return there at times. Maybe there’s a larger connection between the labyrinth here and the sewers and tunnels of UnderSigil?”
“So where now?” Toras asked, “Eventually we’ll wander into those rats again, but frankly I’m curious now what all is down here that got their attention in the first place.”
“Same here.” Clueless replied.
The entryways to the passages that branched out from the room all seemed to have labels over them, either a symbol or a set or words. Among them was a symbol of musical instruments, another had an open book and the draconic word for ‘history’, and several other similarly vague descriptors.
The ‘history’ label immediately appealed to Clueless, Skalliska, and Tristol, and so because of that, and the eerie undertone to the music filtering down the other passage, they entered its corresponding entryway instead. The walls were largely blank and the passage thin, but soon it opened up into a long, wide chamber.
The room was simple enough, a short gallery with another exit on the far end that seemed to lead into another chamber of similar construction. Along the walls, in regular spacing, were elaborate mosaics that depicted the symbols of the old factions at the time of the Faction War. All of them glowed faintly, though all of them seemed to have had the color leached out of them except for the symbol of the Transcendent Order and to a lesser degree, the Bleak Cabal. The symbols of the Harmonium and the rest of the factions were a shade of gray.
“The ones that were killed, the ones that lived, and the ones that got mazed I guess.” Toras said as he looked at the mosaics.
“Is anyone else disturbed by the fact that these are the contemporary factions, and this place down here was built probably several thousands of years ago? Some of these factions didn’t exist that far back. The Harmonium is fairly recent even…” Clueless asked with an odd expression.
“And yeah, of all of them, Rhys is still alive. But it’s like you think Toras, why is the Bleak Cabal not darkened out?” Fyrehowl mused.
“Not true.” Skalliska said as she pointed at the symbol for the Bleak Cabal. “Factol Lahar went completely insane the week before the Faction War, the ‘Grim Retreat’ as they would have called it. They stuck him into the asylum and he didn’t get mazed. Rather, his replacement did. Poor guy.”
“Lahar the barmy, or his replacement?” Nisha asked.
“I meant his replacement that got mazed, but might as well apply to both of them. They’ve got two other former factols of theirs bottled up in the Gatehouse as well: Esmus and Tollysalmon, and they’re even crazier. Apparently the Bleakers, or rather the former Bleakers, don’t like to talk about it.” Skalliska said with a shrug.
Clueless looked at the faction symbols again, trying to puzzle out the meaning. “Alright, the ones that are normal colored are the ones with living factols. And actually, the others aren’t all the same color.”
Sure enough, the symbols for the Harmonium and Fraternity of Order were a darker shade of gray than the others. Sarin had been killed by an arrow, and Hashkar had been stabbed to death the same week. They were very much dead. The other faction symbols seemed to represent those factols who had been mazed, or rather had been acted upon by The Lady. The lot of them had been mazed, except for Nilesia who had been flayed at a later period, and then Darkwood whose fate was… complex.
“Weird that they have Nilesia and the others in the same category. They got mazed and she was flayed.” Fyrehowl said with a shrug.
“It still creeps me out that stuff from the present, more or less, is here down in a place that predates all of them…” Clueless said with a shiver.
“It might just be that those are the ones that all fell afoul of The Lady.” Toras suggested.
Florian nodded, “Seems to be the case.”
Tristol was staring intently at the symbols of the old factions. The patterns of magic woven into them were extraordinarily powerful, and seeming to shift and change by the second as if they were nearly alive with active spells.
“I’m not entirely sure what they are, but they’re seriously magical, and active. So I wouldn’t suggest touching them. Odd though, it almost reminds me of sensory stones in a way.”
“So what happens if I touch one?” Nisha asked with a jingle of the bell on her tail.
“I’m not entirely sure what happen. Why?” Tristol replied.
“Because I just did.” Came her reply as they all stared at the symbol of the Athar.
The odd, abstract symbol of the Lost swirled with a halo of colors and a figure seemed to form in the center of the room, flickering into existence from the light shed by the faction symbol.
The figure nodded sagely to them as he took on more and more solidity by the second. He was dressed in the robes of a high ranking member of the Athar, his head was nearly bald, but his face was calm and soothing, like the look of a man who had lost his way utterly and then found it again.
And then Terrence spoke, “Blessings of the Great Unknown to you all. Welcome to this place, a moment in time snatched from the jaws of oblivion and penned down for posterity. I am what was and what is, here even when I am no more. Ask of me what you wish and learn what you will of what I am willing to give.”
.
