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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)
- Thread starter Shemeska
- Start date
Yep, at the time this began the Mercurial as far as I knew was a 2d8 x4 of doom. It was dropped to 2d6 by updates. By this point, I have a scabbard of keen edges, and improved crit. with that thing. (Add some serious strength and it gets nasty). He orginally began as a much'ed mechanics exercise (when I thought it would be a one shot)
Just to give you some idea of how to picture Toras's style/weapon, I always viewed the mercurial as secondary (in the look). He fights and is built much like Guts from Beserk. (Though his personality is 1 part Xander / 1 part Father Anderson (hellsing managa, not anime))
Just to give you some idea of how to picture Toras's style/weapon, I always viewed the mercurial as secondary (in the look). He fights and is built much like Guts from Beserk. (Though his personality is 1 part Xander / 1 part Father Anderson (hellsing managa, not anime))
Shemeska
Adventurer
Ryltar said:Smith I am not familiar with, but Mieville is the uncrowned king of post-planescape fiction.
Clark Ashton Smith, a fellow pulp horror writer, friend and contemporary of Lovecraft. Honestly in some ways he was a better writer than Lovecraft. Here you'll find stuff about him and some of his works. My personal favorites are 'The Double Shadow', 'The Light From The Pole', 'The Coming of the White Worm', and 'The Seed from the Sepulchre'.
Clueless
Webmonkey
Ah - our favorite cross dressing fiend and all. *chuckle* *leans over and scritches behind the fuzzy ear*
Re: the NPC - a few of these events are quite out of order, leaving our intrepid writer realizing, only half way through things that 'wait - this guy wasn't supposed to be here - hm. Ok - he does nothing.' Forgiveness is due though, it *was* a few years ago and not everyone has my memory or obsessive note taking.
Re: the NPC - a few of these events are quite out of order, leaving our intrepid writer realizing, only half way through things that 'wait - this guy wasn't supposed to be here - hm. Ok - he does nothing.' Forgiveness is due though, it *was* a few years ago and not everyone has my memory or obsessive note taking.
Eluvan
First Post
Oooh, more nice updates!
Very cool. I particularly like the Pseuodonatural Midget.
Thanks for mentioning Mieville, too. I hadn't heard of him before but this prompted me to go take a look at Perdido Street Station in the town library, and after perusing it for a few minutes I promptly went to a bookshop and bought it. Enjoying it lots so far.
Very cool. I particularly like the Pseuodonatural Midget.
Thanks for mentioning Mieville, too. I hadn't heard of him before but this prompted me to go take a look at Perdido Street Station in the town library, and after perusing it for a few minutes I promptly went to a bookshop and bought it. Enjoying it lots so far.
Shemeska
Adventurer
In Nomine Mysterium
Hours, and several changes of watch later, the group woke and stared back up once more at the trio of crystalline prisons. None of them had moved during the three separate watches that they had held, despite Skalliska’s worry that the Illithid would wake up at any point and devour their brains.
Clueless spoke first. “So I think we can agree to let the githzerai out first? They’re less likely to attack us for no reason. Then we can maybe ask him if they know anything about the others.”
“Hell, for all we know the Illithid is a pacifist and the other two are psychotic.” Florian said wistfully.
“Still, be ready in case anything happens.” Toras said as he reached forward to touch the orange gemstone on the base of the githzerai’s pedestal.
The moment he touched it there was soft hum from the crystalline block and it grew more and more transparent by the second. Gradually it faded from sight and its inhabitant slumped to the ground and seemed to awake with a start as if he had been asleep and deeply dreaming.
The githzerai glanced up at his surroundings and immediately adopted a defensive stance of sorts. He was dressed in simple brown robes and only a single gemstone adorned him, seemingly attached to his forehead. He blinked coal black eyes and took in the details of where he was and who stood before him with caution. Slowly, he tilted his head to the side in curiosity as his sense of danger to himself faded since the group made no move to raise weapons or harm him.
He coughed, clearing his throat, and then asked something in an archaic form of gith. Getting no response from his incomprehensible question he paused, seemed to concentrate for a moment, and then he spoke again. While none of them recognized his words, they knew precisely what he was saying somehow.
“Who are you and where am I?”
Fyrehowl spoke to him first in celestial, though there was an odd undercurrent of the words that seemed to oddly resemble what the githzerai was speaking in.
“We’re trapped in this place as well. Somewhere within the City of Doors, far beneath the streets under a place known as the Palace of the Jester.”
The githzerai nodded and scowled. “I had come to Sigil for reasons of my own, hoping to find allies among the representatives of the celestials or others.”
He furrowed his yellow skinned brow and sighed. “How long has it been? Did Gith devour my people? Did she ruin us all in her madness of blood, revenge, and empire?”
“It has been… it has been a long time.” Fyrehowl said slowly, “Some of those events are legends to us.”
He winced and inhaled deeply. “What has become of us? Do not spare me harsh details. I need to know this.”
The lupinal nodded. “Your race remained split in two. Your people, the githzerai, fled to Limbo and there they remain. Gith’s followers, the githyanki, they traveled to the Astral plane and they’re still there. No one knows where Gith is, vanished or perhaps dead; the race is ruled by the lich queen Vlaakith, a descendant of the original.”
Slowly they explained to him, Far’tel’las was his name, what had transpired since those times. He calmly took in the details, though he seemed rattled by mention of the githzerai Wizard-King, Zaerith Menyar Ag Gith. Following their conversation he stood up and paced the room.
Clueless asked him in modern githzerai, “We were hoping that you could help us. In order to leave this place we have to release another of those who were imprisoned along with you.”
The ‘zerai understood him but waited some time before answering.
“I was alone when I came here. The duplicitous hypocrite who was responsible for me being here would have put them here out of irony.” He glanced at the crystalline columns. “One of Gith’s followers and one of the most hated slave masters, bastard spawn of Illsensine. Release the githyanki and let me speak to her. If there is conflict, it is not yours to interfere in. Do I make myself clear?”
They nodded and backed up as the ‘zerai pressed the glittering orange gem below where the githyanki was held in stasis. As her prison walls evaporated, they exposed a bony female githyanki. Her skin was as sallow as the rest of her kind though she had a series of elaborate, glowing tattoos scrawled across her flesh and a flowing, never still sword of silvery metal in one hand.
The ‘zerai backed up and presented his open palms to her when she looked up and saw him. He spat out something in their ancient language and she paused from where her hands had gripped her sword. She snarled at him and spat back at him in return. Names were exchanged, and while they did not know the other, they did seem to vaguely recognize the other by reputation.
They seemed to argue for some time, and the words “Gith” and “Vlaakith” were repeated over and over again like curses. At some point the githyanki dropped her sword and screamed at the top of her lungs in what seemed like agonized disbelief. She began to weep.
Fyrehowl shook her head, “She was a handmaiden or bodyguard, perhaps a consort even, to the first Vlaakith. He told her about Gith, what we had told him about her vanishing. She realized that her mistress betrayed the mother of their race. She may have suspected back so many years ago that Vlaakith was planning something, but now she knows…”
The githzerai made no move to help her up or console her, but he stepped back and pointed to the Illithid.
“This is going to be bloody.” Skalliska said as she moved to get a closer view. She was eager for the coming slaughter.
Far’tel’las, the githzerai, and Par’rash’ket, the githyanki, calmly approached the crystalline block that held the Illithid, some noble of long ago Penumbra. During their time imprisoned, both of the children of Gith had been asleep, dreaming away the centuries. When Far’tel’las pressed the orange gemstone and released the Illithid, all knew immediately that something had gone differently, gone terribly wrong for it.
In the split second before the monk’s hand burst through the illithid’s chest and its head was cleaved in twain by the antipaladin, there was a mind rattling psionic scream of terror and madness that erupted from the squid-like head of the mind flayer. The Illithid had been awake and conscious for all of the eons of its entrapment; it was insane beyond any measure of the word.
Far’tel’las whispered some benediction to himself, a prayer, as he let the illithid’s sickly blood drip from his hand. Opposite him, Par’rash’ket ripped away the head of the kill and stepped away with her grisly trophy held by the dangling spinal column.
There was an unpleasant silence as both gith looked at one another for some time. Some unspoken communication or rapport passed between them both and they nodded to one another.
The githyanki hefted the illithid’s head and held it next to her own as she turned towards a suddenly visible exit from the room. “This is done. If ever we meet again it will be different. I must go now, I have ancient sins to punish.”
The githzerai nodded to her, neither showing anger nor sympathy. He understood clearly that if they ever did meet again, one of them would die.
“So it must be.”
The githyanki passed through the door and vanished in a flicker of light.
Tristol jerked upright. “That was a teleport.”
They glanced at one another and immediately made for the same exit that had flickered into appearance on the far wall, set within the frosted glass surface. They weren’t going to pass up a chance to escape the confines of the whimsical but deadly labyrinth they had been trapped within.
Far’tel’las cleaned his hands of the illithid’s blood and followed them out of the chamber, giving one last scathing look at the walls and freely showing his contempt for the individual who had trapped him there so long ago, ushering him to his palace under false pretense as one of the great benefactors of gleaming Sigil. The Jester of old, that black-cloaked Tartuffe would have made a saint of Baalzebul, and he was probably still alive and laughing. The gith spat on the floor and followed his rescuers.
As soon as they passed through the door there was a vague sense of something watching them, and oddly enough something being satisfied with them, willingly letting them go, releasing them from where it had entrapped them. But still, as they left, that same eye was yet turned in their direction as it continued stirring from slumber. He was intrigued.
“Alright, we’re out of that damned funhouse finally.” Florian said, followed by a loud curse in Tempus’s name.
“Indeed we are.” The githzerai said, as he closed his eyes and sighed with relief. Then, after a long pause, pregnant with silence, he thanked them. “Thank you for releasing me. I fear from what you have told me that my own people have wandered from the path of my mentor just as much as the githyanki have been led astray by first Gith herself and then by Vlaakith and her descendants alike.”
“You’re welcome to come with us. We’re all still stuck in the tunnels and passages down here. And what we’re hunting are former servants of the Illithid deity. You could help us with what you know.” Fyrehowl said as she bowed to the githzerai monk, an original disciple of Zerthimon himself.
“My path is my own, and I need time to gather my thoughts before I decide what to do. There is much to ponder before I act.”
Clueless stepped forward. “I’m curious though. About what you know, about the time you’re from. So much of that is myth and legend to us. I’d like to learn from someone who was there to witness it.”
“Then sit and I will answer.”
Far’tel’las gestured and sat down on the cold stone and talked to them for some time. He told them of Gith, of Zerthimon, how the two had been lovers and bitter ideological enemies both before the war with the Illithids was won and how afterwards there was no reconciliation. He spoke of Zerthimon’s agony over his actions that split the race of Gith in two and caused so much misery, but that it was better for all of creation than the blood laden crusade that Gith would have placed them all upon.
So many details he gave: descriptions of battles, the grown and engineered living weapons of the Illithids, the siege of Penumbra itself, and the spread of the revolt to all the far flung worlds of the empire in the prime, the ethereal, and beyond to even the whispering, hidden cities of the astral and the forgotten city of Slaan in the depths of the inner planes.
So much that he knew first hand was either a mystery to planar scholars or so far lost and forgotten that they didn’t have the questions to ask to obtain them as answers. But he told them as much as they wished to hear before he spread his hands and stood up without preamble.
“I may see you again. I may not. When I am able, if I am able, I will send you a more proper way of thanks. But for now I must find myself in a world in which I may no longer be relevant, no longer viewed as a leader or one of the enlightened. I may have to free my people a second time from ourselves. Goodbye.”
And with that he nodded to them all and silently walked off down one of the passages that spread out before them, eventually to make his way back up to Sigil far above them. They watched him go with some measure of awe reserved for pieces of living history, proxies, archfiends or gods. They didn’t know if they would see him again.
Nisha scuffed a hoof on the stone and looked up at the others. “So… what now?”
“What are we here looking for again?” Skalliska asked plaintively.
“Rats.” Clueless said. “We’re here hunting rats. Maybe trying to find out what it was down here that they were looking for too.”
Tristol nodded. “And we don’t have a clue where they are, just down here somewhere and probably waiting to jump out at us when we least expect it.”
“And curdle our brains like expensive cheese and…” Fyrehowl paused and glanced down the passage. “…does anyone else feel that?”
The rest of the group paused and looked intensely in the direction they were walking. At first they felt nothing, but then gradually they became aware of what the cipher’s own preternatural senses had told her of: there was a cool, fresh wind blowing at them faintly from that direction.
Cautiously they moved forward down the passage and up to the source of the chill.
“Whoa…” Tristol said as he paused at the lip of the shaft and looked down. A gentle breeze wafted up from the darkness below to rustle the fur at the tips of his vulpine ears.
They stood clustered around a twenty foot or so wide shaft that plunged down into darkness beyond the range of their vision or their lights. The walls of the shaft were smooth, featureless stone and a spiral staircase was notched into the lip that curled around the sides as far down as they could follow.
“Hey Tristol, gimme that lucky copper again.” Nisha said as she fumbled in one of the mage’s pockets with a free hand and continued to stare down into the gloom.
“No! Get your own, I don’t want to…” *plink*
Tristol sighed as Nisha dropped the copper down the shaft with a flick of a finger. It sailed out of sight and they watched and waited for a sound that it had hit bottom. No sound reached up to grace their ears.
A minute later Fyrehowl nodded softly. “I heard something, but it might have just been the wind. I can’t say how deep that goes.”
“So, who wants to go down there?” Skalliska asked as she glanced into the shaft.
Fyrehowl sniffed at the air again. “The rats have been this way. Recently.”
Toras fingered the hilt of his sword. “That settles it then.”
Jerimin looked up at the fighter and then down into the darkness. He hesitated and was about to voice an objection.
“We’ll let you out when everything is safe.” Toras said as he held open the mouth of a bag of holding. “Drop the sword, check for sharp objects and then into the bag with you.”
Twenty minutes earlier at the same spot, thirty or forty cranium rats peered over the lip of the shaft. Their whiskers twitched in the wind and their exposed braincases crackled with flickers of psionic energy.
This is the source of what we have felt. The power that has lain hidden under this place. The lurker in the walls has kept us hidden from it thus far, but here is it before us.
The rats, hundreds of them, blinked in unison as they communed and pondered across their interconnected minds. The being within the underhalls had mocked them, stymied them without ever revealing itself, and the Natterer’s hunters who had hurt them so were still at large, sheltered in some manner by that former entity. But regardless of that, they stood congregated at the edge of what they had come seeking and they were not willing to risk losing access to it, whatever it actually was.
We are intrigued. We are delighted with curiosity. Revenge against the Natterer’s pawns can wait till we have found what it is that this place hides in the bowels of the city. It will be ours and we will make the Godbrain suffer.
The hivemind of vermin swarmed and rushed forwards. Like a living wave the legion of rats hurled themselves as one over the sides of the shaft and down into the depths for whatever waited for them below.
“Has anyone paused to ask themselves just who actually built all of this? Tunneled down into Sigil’s bedrock and built all of this fun?” Toras asked wryly.
Skalliska held up a finger and pointed to the smooth, gray surface of the shaft. “Sigil doesn’t have bedrock. It has Sigilrock, and if you’ll notice, that’s what this goes down into or has been for the past twenty minutes while we’ve been walking.”
“How far down are we? We’ve been walking forever…” Nisha said with a groan. “I’d rather be back up there hallucinating. That was kinda fun.”
“About a mile or so down I think.” Fyrehowl said.
“How is that even possible?” Clueless asked. “I mean, going down we’re technically going into the ring of Sigil. How thick is the ring? There’s got to be a limit of how far down we can go, right?”
The others had no answer, and as far as the bladesinger’s last question, they weren’t sure if they wanted to know the answer. Twenty minutes later the rock changed.
“What the hell…” Skalliska had stopped dead in her tracks to stare at the walls of the shaft.
The gray, chalk-like Sigilrock had transitioned to a dense, almost metallic mineral, vaguely reminiscent of something biological: the spongy tissue of a liver or a lung or the hollow of a long bone. But yet it was stone, still hard and cold to the touch as the walls of the shaft made a fluid transition from one type of rock to the next.
“Anyone know what that is?” Toras asked curiously.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before. I don’t have a clue.” Skalliska said with a shrug. “There was a rumor though, that in portions of the Great Below near the Ditch, somewhere around where Tattershade, the Lord of Sigil’s wererats was lairing, that they found, or claimed to have found, an abandoned Dabus warren. There was something in the rumor about stone that was alive, or stone that didn’t act like normal Sigilrock. I didn’t put any truth in the matter though; it was probably just to spook anyone who might intrude into Tattershade’s so-called kingdom. I never liked having to deal with his people at all in the past.”
The insinuation of that rumor, and any possible link to what they saw in the transition of the stone as they progressed further and further down the stairs, it largely snuffed their conversation with each other. As they continued deeper they had only the darkness above, the darkness below, and the cool wind that rushed about them from the umbra like the shallow breath of a god, pensive and frightened, hiding in the depths.
Admitting it or not, they were all frightened.
Four miles down from the top of the shaft they reached the bottom. The stairs extended into a small chamber with a series of smooth arches leading off in several random directions. The cool breeze that had wafted up the shaft blew in soft gusts from the various passages.
“Here’s your copper back.” Nisha quipped as she picked up the coin where it lay against a wall. “It’s a bit bent from the fall, but oh well.”
Tristol accepted it back with a chuckle. “So who wants to pick this time?” He glanced down the various passages that led away from the stairs.
“Anyone but a fiend this time.” Florian said.
Toras smirked. “That wasn’t fun. Not till the very end it wasn’t.”
Nisha looked up from where she’d taken a seat. “I’m part fiend, does that count?”
Skalliska was already moving towards one of the exits. “For now yes. And I’m making a map. That’s something that we’ve been damn remiss about doing so far. Though who knows if it’ll work at all down here, if this is even considered part of the Jester’s Palace and all.”
Florian nodded, “Good idea.”
Ten minutes later they walked back into the same room.
“What the hell?” Skalliska said in disbelief as she looked up from her rough map. “This can’t be the room we started in. We walked in a straight line and didn’t take any of the intervening passages we found. We didn’t turn any corners and there weren’t any portals in the way.”
“Maybe it’s a similar room and not the same one?” Tristol mused.
“Can’t be.” Nisha said, picking up something on the ground. “Here’s a copper piece of my own that I left.”
“Than why is it bent just like mine?” The mage asked as one of his ears twitched.
“…you weren’t supposed to ask that.” The tiefling said as she handed it back to him.
Skalliska tossed the map up in the air and took a seat by the stairs. “Alright. Fine. This place doesn’t want to behave like normal space should. Lovely. I’m up for wandering. Anyone else?”
“That’s worked for us so far down here. I don’t see why not.” Fyrehowl said with a shrug.
And so they wandered. Several times they ended up back where they started or seemed to follow the same path despite having started and ended up on different sides of the chamber with the stairs. After some time however they did stumble upon a unique room, and it was not empty by any means.
The chamber was surreal in its contents: what initially appeared to be a rough-hewn block of stone sat in its center. It was a golem, or perhaps a half-finished statue cut from black marble and shot through with shimmering veins of gold.
Whatever it was, it was surrounded by some manner of warding circle that took the form of runes written into the floor that shimmered and faded in and out of sight. The symbols didn’t actually touch the stone; they floated above it like Dabus rebuses, seeming to exist only partially in phase with the stone of the floor they hovered above in a constant flux.
Looking warily at the symbols that made up the circle they could make out three distinct and separate rings of runes, one of them fading into nothing while two others remained manifest. When they shifted, the two extant rings seemed to rotate several degrees counter to one another, and always they remained blurry. In fact they seemed to grow fuzzy and indistinct upon examination, only gaining detail in half glances out of the corner of one’s eyes. They blurred almost as if the eyes couldn’t focus on them or they defied definition. They hurt the eyes to stare at them. They were the same sets of symbols that had been present upon the solidified protomatter filaments that wound round the exterior of the mazes of Her Serenity within the depths of the Trackless Sea.
“F*ck if I’m going near that, whatever it is!” Clueless said bluntly as he backed up from the silently shifting rings of runes.
Even without any further explanation from the bladesinger, the others slowly realized that same connection between the runes and what they had previously witnessed in the weblike manifestations that cloaked the maze in the deep ethereal.
Tristol whispered a few words and glanced at the circle and the figure within. His vision didn’t change, despite the spell taking effect.
“It’s not magical, whatever it is. I don’t have any idea what it might be. No idea at all…”
Fyrehowl was spooked but cautiously approached the shifting rings. There were several things laying on the ground near the ring that the others hadn’t noticed, and she had smelt the acrid, copper scent of spilt blood.
Seven cranium rat corpses lay at the edge of the outermost ring of symbols, all of them unmoving and dead. Where they had touched the circle they simply ceased to exist, heads and limbs severed and simply gone. It was as if they had plunged into a prismatic wall, testing it for vulnerabilities, or blundered into the serrated shadow of The Lady.
Fyrehowl shuddered and backed away from the deadly trio of flickering circles.
“The rats have been here. They tried to step through the circle.” The lupinal motioned to the corpses at the edge of the wardings. “They died.”
“What is that thing in there? A statue? A golem or something?” Toras asked curiously. “Tristol? Skalliska? You know anything resembling that?”
They both shook their heads in the negative.
“Is this what the rats were down here looking for?” Florian asked as she walked a slow circle around the figure, making certain that she didn’t tread near the deadly barrier.
Clueless shrugged. “Maybe, I don’t know. There might be more things down here.”
“I’m not so sure I want to go looking for them though…” Fyrehowl said, perhaps a bit of cipher’s intuition seeping into her mind if not yet her actions.
Florian stopped and glanced not at the wards, but at the ground in front of the odd figure held within their bladed embrace.
“There’s something written on the floor in front of this thing. In Chondathan, my first language…”
Tristol walked up next to her, looked at the lines of text and shook his head. “No, it’s in Halruaan.”
“Unless Halruaan looks like celestial, than no.” Fyrehowl said as she glanced at it.
And so it was with all of them. The lines appeared to have been written in whatever language the seven of them spoke best, and still, despite those things, Tristol saw no emanation of magic from the wards, the golem, or anywhere else in the chamber outside of his companions and himself.
Gathered together around the three deadly rings surrounding the statue they read the refrain at its base:
‘In silence, in solitude, entombed here in the depths of Her Serenity’s vaults I wait. Patient as the Great Spire and fearing none, for I see where others do not. Only by our Lady’s Will does darkness cloud my eyes as I wait for HUBRIS to shake the Heavens and Hells.
“Her Serenity’s Vaults?…” Fyrehowl asked warily. “I don’t think we should be down here.”
Toras backed away from the figure in the center of the room slightly. “I’ve already been in a maze once. I don’t want to ever be in one to call my own, thank you very much.”
Clueless asked a question. “Who or what is Hubris?”
“Pride? SIRBUH spelled backwards all ominous like?” Nisha said with a chuckle.
Florian patted the Xaositect on the head. “Not a rhetorical question Nisha.”
Skalliska mused. “Well that might be a name. Maybe of this whatever it is that’s sitting here in the circle. I don’t know.”
“Whatever it is, the cranium rats seemed interested in it, and gave up trying to get to it. I mean, if that passage is actually suggesting that whatever is down here was put here by” Florian lowered her voice, “…you know who… than I don’t think the rats were going to get into it.”
The cleric received some nods in reply. It seemed like a sensible enough notion.
“But since we know the rats are actually down here, or were at some point, I think we should at least look around some more. Yes it’s creepy but still.” Clueless replied with a gesture to one of the three archways out of the room.
And so off they went through a nondescript maze of passages that seemed to continually loop back on themselves in defiance of any sort of spatial laws. Twice they ended back up in the room with the stairway and its miles high shaft, and another time they ended up back in the room with the warding circles in which they had started. In fact, none of the passages seemed to lead to the same destination twice or even to follow the same path each time they would take it.
Not even marking the passages with chalk, ink, paint, or string remedied the situation. The marks they made would vanish, appear in different places, or make no sense at all if one tried to follow them in a straight line. And all the while, Tristol noticed not a drop of magic to be present.
Eventually however, they did find a second unique chamber. The room was roughly the same size as the previous one, and again a single object stood at its center. A three-sided glass obelisk perhaps seven feet tall, it hovered above the floor by several inches. Odd symbols hovered above its surface causing discomfort and pain to the eyes if they were focused upon.
Periodically the obelisk turned to expose a different one of its faces to each of the three exits from the chamber. As it did so the runes seemed to shimmer for an instant but otherwise they remained the same.
And again, just like the last chamber, a half dozen cranium rats littered the floor around the object, their blood and gore spattered explosively about their forms but leaving the obelisk untouched by even a single drop. And still Tristol saw no evidence of magic despite everything else they beheld.
“Don’t look too closely at it. Trust me on this one. Bleeding eyes aren’t fun.” Clueless said.
Florian nodded and pointed to the rats. “And don’t touch is an operative term again. Thanks to the rats for illustrating this for us.”
They stared at the odd, hovering object for some time before shrugging and pondering the exact reason for its motion and its changes when it did move.
Clueless stood and looked at the obelisk and then at the exits. “Maybe there’s a pattern to what rooms the exits lead to depending on which side of the obelisk is facing each of them? It’s an idea.”
“Perhaps. It’s worth a try. I’ve still got string and chalk.” Skalliska said as she avoided glancing at the object.
“Actually I’ve got your string and chalk. But same difference.” Nisha said as she handed them to Skalliska.
The kobold gave her a look and then walked towards one of the entrances.
Some time later they had wandered in and out of the same featureless tunnels, the entrance to the current warren, and the other previous chamber they had found. Eventually they gave up. There was no apparent pattern to the exits and the position of the obelisk. There was however a detail of the obelisk that they had not before noticed.
Within its translucent interior, when it shifted its position, there was a flicker of an image within that seemed to linger, ghostlike, for a split second before vanishing. Three separate images that were present in sequence, one for each time the object turned and the runes shimmered.
Clueless and Nisha looked at one another as the first image flickered and was gone. They had both seen it before. A marble standing stone there in the gloom of the second layer of the Gray Waste, one of the Loadstones of Misery. When the obelisk had cycled fully and returned to the Loadstone image, it was subtly different. Another cycle later and it was different once more. Three Loadstones in all, each of them present in the crystalline interior of the hovering monolith.
The second image within the interior was the otherwise familiar Infinite Spire within the Outlands. Oddly though, Sigil was absent at its summit in the obelisk’s image.
“Well, there’s one we recognize. Sort of, there’s just no Sigil.” Fyrehowl said.
“So what’s the pattern? Sort of spires or big rocks on the planes? There isn’t a third one.” Skalliska said with a shrug.
The third was one they didn’t recognize: some column of gleaming, burning moonlight rising up out of some body of water or a calm ocean. For whatever reason its appearance seemed both calming and guilt forming, as if they had seen something that wasn’t meant to be seen. Or perhaps it wasn’t guilt, but rather a sense of longing or a sense of regret at something that once was, but was no longer.
“That almost looked like Thalasia. But there’s nothing like that there. At least nothing that I know of.” Fyrehowl looked confused at the very notion. None of the others could really question her though being that of them, she was the only native of Elysium. If there were something like that there, certainly she would have known about it, no?
With a bit more confusion they wandered out of the chamber and blindly sought another one. Two unique chambers, each with three exits and a single object in the center, and they always kept finding their way back to the spots that they began. It only seemed to stand to reason that there would be a third unique room like the other two that would fulfill the rule of three, center of all, and unity of rings as they seemed to be present in each. But of course, the only truth about the rules tended to be that they usually never truly and easily applied unless you went out of your way looking for them, if even then.
Nearly an hour later of aimless wandering though, they finally noticed an incongruity in the soft gusts of wind and a bit of light from the end of one side passage. The air seemed colder and fresher than anywhere else, and the light was almost natural seeming. Curiously they looked at one another and then turned down that particular passage. At the end of it was an archway, much like those that had graced the entrances to the other two previous unique chambers, or vaults as they might have been. But something was distinctly odd about what they could see through the entrance, and near the rear of the group as they walked, Fyrehowl was increasingly nervous and skittish.
Tristol’s voice choked up as they passed through the portal. “This isn’t possible…”
Above them there was no ceiling of rock or stone, but only an empty, open sky that stretched out into a featureless blue-green nothingness. Underground, four miles below the streets of Sigil, they looked up and saw the sky above them reaching out over the walls of a room that was otherwise like the other two, save what was there that should not have been. They all walked into a courtyard in the depths of Sigil open to a sky that should not have existed.
Opposite them, perhaps a hundred feet away, was another archway that stood separate from the courtyard. The arch was obviously a portal of sorts, though it did not register as one, nor did it flicker with the telltale glow of magic, but another of the nondescript tunnels was visible through it.
A cold wind drifted down from the expanse of sky above them, the source of the breeze that had crept up from the vaults and the miles long staircase that had led them there, wherever there was.
But the void above was not what frightened them by comparison. At the very center of the courtyard, atop a low pedestal, stood a life-sized statue of Her Serenity, The Lady of Pain. Cut from the purest white marble, blades of glimmering silver sprouted like organic, living things from the stone. The marble seemed to actually transmute from rock to metal where they emerged, seemingly having been grown rather than made. Not a speck of dust marred the statue’s surface, nor any marks of age or weathering, and like Her Bladed Majesty, its gaze was unreadable, emotionless, and implacable.
“…We… we shouldn’t be here.” Clueless said with an almost frightened solemnity.
Skalliska had a worried tone to her voice as she asked, “How is there a sky here? We’re miles underground and we haven’t gone through a single actual damn portal down here.”
“Is it possible to come out on the other side of the ring and look… out?” Florian asked as she stared up into the infinite blank reach of the cold, cloudless sky above them.
Skalliska whispered several words and began to float up from the ground. “There’s one way to find out. I’m going to go look.”
“Skalliska, I don’t think you should, uh, be doing that…” Fyrehowl said as a warning before she glanced back at the statue of Her Serenity.
The others nervously milled about as the kobold drifted up to the top of the courtyard and looked up into the sky and over the edge of walls that anywhere else would have touched and bordered upon a ceiling. What she saw took her breath away. The stone surface extended out infinitely in a flat plane in every direction without any hint of curvature. The cold expanse of the sky gazed down over all of it without an end in sight. There was no hint of clouds, or ground, or the spire.
Skalliska gripped the edge tightly and glanced back at the others. “There’s no spire. Just the sky and a flat surface of rock over the edges that just… goes on…”
Tristol looked up at her, his tail was tucked between his legs and his ears were flat against his head. “Come on down now. We should leave.”
She didn’t object, and still holding on to the stone she drifted back down to the ground and consciously avoided looking at the statue of The Lady at any point during her descent.
“So, how about we leave now and see if we can find the rats on the way back? If they’re down here, I don’t think they should be and I dare say that they can’t do anything they shouldn’t…” Clueless said as he glanced once more over at the statue.
“Good idea. I haven’t said anything about it, but guys…” Fyrehowl paused and sounded actually disturbed. “Nothing down here feels right. The Cadence… I can’t describe it at all. Please, let’s leave.”
The cipher turned towards the archway that wasn’t a portal but yet was, intending to leave, but then she stopped and abruptly turned towards the other exit across the courtyard. She had barely the time to scream a warning to her companions and roll for cover as The Us, all of them, hundreds upon hundreds of cranium rats, burst through and into the courtyard with nothing but hatred seething across their raging, undulating carpet of eyes, teeth, claws and brains.
Hours, and several changes of watch later, the group woke and stared back up once more at the trio of crystalline prisons. None of them had moved during the three separate watches that they had held, despite Skalliska’s worry that the Illithid would wake up at any point and devour their brains.
Clueless spoke first. “So I think we can agree to let the githzerai out first? They’re less likely to attack us for no reason. Then we can maybe ask him if they know anything about the others.”
“Hell, for all we know the Illithid is a pacifist and the other two are psychotic.” Florian said wistfully.
“Still, be ready in case anything happens.” Toras said as he reached forward to touch the orange gemstone on the base of the githzerai’s pedestal.
The moment he touched it there was soft hum from the crystalline block and it grew more and more transparent by the second. Gradually it faded from sight and its inhabitant slumped to the ground and seemed to awake with a start as if he had been asleep and deeply dreaming.
The githzerai glanced up at his surroundings and immediately adopted a defensive stance of sorts. He was dressed in simple brown robes and only a single gemstone adorned him, seemingly attached to his forehead. He blinked coal black eyes and took in the details of where he was and who stood before him with caution. Slowly, he tilted his head to the side in curiosity as his sense of danger to himself faded since the group made no move to raise weapons or harm him.
He coughed, clearing his throat, and then asked something in an archaic form of gith. Getting no response from his incomprehensible question he paused, seemed to concentrate for a moment, and then he spoke again. While none of them recognized his words, they knew precisely what he was saying somehow.
“Who are you and where am I?”
Fyrehowl spoke to him first in celestial, though there was an odd undercurrent of the words that seemed to oddly resemble what the githzerai was speaking in.
“We’re trapped in this place as well. Somewhere within the City of Doors, far beneath the streets under a place known as the Palace of the Jester.”
The githzerai nodded and scowled. “I had come to Sigil for reasons of my own, hoping to find allies among the representatives of the celestials or others.”
He furrowed his yellow skinned brow and sighed. “How long has it been? Did Gith devour my people? Did she ruin us all in her madness of blood, revenge, and empire?”
“It has been… it has been a long time.” Fyrehowl said slowly, “Some of those events are legends to us.”
He winced and inhaled deeply. “What has become of us? Do not spare me harsh details. I need to know this.”
The lupinal nodded. “Your race remained split in two. Your people, the githzerai, fled to Limbo and there they remain. Gith’s followers, the githyanki, they traveled to the Astral plane and they’re still there. No one knows where Gith is, vanished or perhaps dead; the race is ruled by the lich queen Vlaakith, a descendant of the original.”
Slowly they explained to him, Far’tel’las was his name, what had transpired since those times. He calmly took in the details, though he seemed rattled by mention of the githzerai Wizard-King, Zaerith Menyar Ag Gith. Following their conversation he stood up and paced the room.
Clueless asked him in modern githzerai, “We were hoping that you could help us. In order to leave this place we have to release another of those who were imprisoned along with you.”
The ‘zerai understood him but waited some time before answering.
“I was alone when I came here. The duplicitous hypocrite who was responsible for me being here would have put them here out of irony.” He glanced at the crystalline columns. “One of Gith’s followers and one of the most hated slave masters, bastard spawn of Illsensine. Release the githyanki and let me speak to her. If there is conflict, it is not yours to interfere in. Do I make myself clear?”
They nodded and backed up as the ‘zerai pressed the glittering orange gem below where the githyanki was held in stasis. As her prison walls evaporated, they exposed a bony female githyanki. Her skin was as sallow as the rest of her kind though she had a series of elaborate, glowing tattoos scrawled across her flesh and a flowing, never still sword of silvery metal in one hand.
The ‘zerai backed up and presented his open palms to her when she looked up and saw him. He spat out something in their ancient language and she paused from where her hands had gripped her sword. She snarled at him and spat back at him in return. Names were exchanged, and while they did not know the other, they did seem to vaguely recognize the other by reputation.
They seemed to argue for some time, and the words “Gith” and “Vlaakith” were repeated over and over again like curses. At some point the githyanki dropped her sword and screamed at the top of her lungs in what seemed like agonized disbelief. She began to weep.
Fyrehowl shook her head, “She was a handmaiden or bodyguard, perhaps a consort even, to the first Vlaakith. He told her about Gith, what we had told him about her vanishing. She realized that her mistress betrayed the mother of their race. She may have suspected back so many years ago that Vlaakith was planning something, but now she knows…”
The githzerai made no move to help her up or console her, but he stepped back and pointed to the Illithid.
“This is going to be bloody.” Skalliska said as she moved to get a closer view. She was eager for the coming slaughter.
Far’tel’las, the githzerai, and Par’rash’ket, the githyanki, calmly approached the crystalline block that held the Illithid, some noble of long ago Penumbra. During their time imprisoned, both of the children of Gith had been asleep, dreaming away the centuries. When Far’tel’las pressed the orange gemstone and released the Illithid, all knew immediately that something had gone differently, gone terribly wrong for it.
In the split second before the monk’s hand burst through the illithid’s chest and its head was cleaved in twain by the antipaladin, there was a mind rattling psionic scream of terror and madness that erupted from the squid-like head of the mind flayer. The Illithid had been awake and conscious for all of the eons of its entrapment; it was insane beyond any measure of the word.
Far’tel’las whispered some benediction to himself, a prayer, as he let the illithid’s sickly blood drip from his hand. Opposite him, Par’rash’ket ripped away the head of the kill and stepped away with her grisly trophy held by the dangling spinal column.
There was an unpleasant silence as both gith looked at one another for some time. Some unspoken communication or rapport passed between them both and they nodded to one another.
The githyanki hefted the illithid’s head and held it next to her own as she turned towards a suddenly visible exit from the room. “This is done. If ever we meet again it will be different. I must go now, I have ancient sins to punish.”
The githzerai nodded to her, neither showing anger nor sympathy. He understood clearly that if they ever did meet again, one of them would die.
“So it must be.”
The githyanki passed through the door and vanished in a flicker of light.
Tristol jerked upright. “That was a teleport.”
They glanced at one another and immediately made for the same exit that had flickered into appearance on the far wall, set within the frosted glass surface. They weren’t going to pass up a chance to escape the confines of the whimsical but deadly labyrinth they had been trapped within.
Far’tel’las cleaned his hands of the illithid’s blood and followed them out of the chamber, giving one last scathing look at the walls and freely showing his contempt for the individual who had trapped him there so long ago, ushering him to his palace under false pretense as one of the great benefactors of gleaming Sigil. The Jester of old, that black-cloaked Tartuffe would have made a saint of Baalzebul, and he was probably still alive and laughing. The gith spat on the floor and followed his rescuers.
***
As soon as they passed through the door there was a vague sense of something watching them, and oddly enough something being satisfied with them, willingly letting them go, releasing them from where it had entrapped them. But still, as they left, that same eye was yet turned in their direction as it continued stirring from slumber. He was intrigued.
“Alright, we’re out of that damned funhouse finally.” Florian said, followed by a loud curse in Tempus’s name.
“Indeed we are.” The githzerai said, as he closed his eyes and sighed with relief. Then, after a long pause, pregnant with silence, he thanked them. “Thank you for releasing me. I fear from what you have told me that my own people have wandered from the path of my mentor just as much as the githyanki have been led astray by first Gith herself and then by Vlaakith and her descendants alike.”
“You’re welcome to come with us. We’re all still stuck in the tunnels and passages down here. And what we’re hunting are former servants of the Illithid deity. You could help us with what you know.” Fyrehowl said as she bowed to the githzerai monk, an original disciple of Zerthimon himself.
“My path is my own, and I need time to gather my thoughts before I decide what to do. There is much to ponder before I act.”
Clueless stepped forward. “I’m curious though. About what you know, about the time you’re from. So much of that is myth and legend to us. I’d like to learn from someone who was there to witness it.”
“Then sit and I will answer.”
Far’tel’las gestured and sat down on the cold stone and talked to them for some time. He told them of Gith, of Zerthimon, how the two had been lovers and bitter ideological enemies both before the war with the Illithids was won and how afterwards there was no reconciliation. He spoke of Zerthimon’s agony over his actions that split the race of Gith in two and caused so much misery, but that it was better for all of creation than the blood laden crusade that Gith would have placed them all upon.
So many details he gave: descriptions of battles, the grown and engineered living weapons of the Illithids, the siege of Penumbra itself, and the spread of the revolt to all the far flung worlds of the empire in the prime, the ethereal, and beyond to even the whispering, hidden cities of the astral and the forgotten city of Slaan in the depths of the inner planes.
So much that he knew first hand was either a mystery to planar scholars or so far lost and forgotten that they didn’t have the questions to ask to obtain them as answers. But he told them as much as they wished to hear before he spread his hands and stood up without preamble.
“I may see you again. I may not. When I am able, if I am able, I will send you a more proper way of thanks. But for now I must find myself in a world in which I may no longer be relevant, no longer viewed as a leader or one of the enlightened. I may have to free my people a second time from ourselves. Goodbye.”
And with that he nodded to them all and silently walked off down one of the passages that spread out before them, eventually to make his way back up to Sigil far above them. They watched him go with some measure of awe reserved for pieces of living history, proxies, archfiends or gods. They didn’t know if they would see him again.
Nisha scuffed a hoof on the stone and looked up at the others. “So… what now?”
“What are we here looking for again?” Skalliska asked plaintively.
“Rats.” Clueless said. “We’re here hunting rats. Maybe trying to find out what it was down here that they were looking for too.”
Tristol nodded. “And we don’t have a clue where they are, just down here somewhere and probably waiting to jump out at us when we least expect it.”
“And curdle our brains like expensive cheese and…” Fyrehowl paused and glanced down the passage. “…does anyone else feel that?”
The rest of the group paused and looked intensely in the direction they were walking. At first they felt nothing, but then gradually they became aware of what the cipher’s own preternatural senses had told her of: there was a cool, fresh wind blowing at them faintly from that direction.
Cautiously they moved forward down the passage and up to the source of the chill.
“Whoa…” Tristol said as he paused at the lip of the shaft and looked down. A gentle breeze wafted up from the darkness below to rustle the fur at the tips of his vulpine ears.
They stood clustered around a twenty foot or so wide shaft that plunged down into darkness beyond the range of their vision or their lights. The walls of the shaft were smooth, featureless stone and a spiral staircase was notched into the lip that curled around the sides as far down as they could follow.
“Hey Tristol, gimme that lucky copper again.” Nisha said as she fumbled in one of the mage’s pockets with a free hand and continued to stare down into the gloom.
“No! Get your own, I don’t want to…” *plink*
Tristol sighed as Nisha dropped the copper down the shaft with a flick of a finger. It sailed out of sight and they watched and waited for a sound that it had hit bottom. No sound reached up to grace their ears.
A minute later Fyrehowl nodded softly. “I heard something, but it might have just been the wind. I can’t say how deep that goes.”
“So, who wants to go down there?” Skalliska asked as she glanced into the shaft.
Fyrehowl sniffed at the air again. “The rats have been this way. Recently.”
Toras fingered the hilt of his sword. “That settles it then.”
Jerimin looked up at the fighter and then down into the darkness. He hesitated and was about to voice an objection.
“We’ll let you out when everything is safe.” Toras said as he held open the mouth of a bag of holding. “Drop the sword, check for sharp objects and then into the bag with you.”
***
Twenty minutes earlier at the same spot, thirty or forty cranium rats peered over the lip of the shaft. Their whiskers twitched in the wind and their exposed braincases crackled with flickers of psionic energy.
This is the source of what we have felt. The power that has lain hidden under this place. The lurker in the walls has kept us hidden from it thus far, but here is it before us.
The rats, hundreds of them, blinked in unison as they communed and pondered across their interconnected minds. The being within the underhalls had mocked them, stymied them without ever revealing itself, and the Natterer’s hunters who had hurt them so were still at large, sheltered in some manner by that former entity. But regardless of that, they stood congregated at the edge of what they had come seeking and they were not willing to risk losing access to it, whatever it actually was.
We are intrigued. We are delighted with curiosity. Revenge against the Natterer’s pawns can wait till we have found what it is that this place hides in the bowels of the city. It will be ours and we will make the Godbrain suffer.
The hivemind of vermin swarmed and rushed forwards. Like a living wave the legion of rats hurled themselves as one over the sides of the shaft and down into the depths for whatever waited for them below.
***
“Has anyone paused to ask themselves just who actually built all of this? Tunneled down into Sigil’s bedrock and built all of this fun?” Toras asked wryly.
Skalliska held up a finger and pointed to the smooth, gray surface of the shaft. “Sigil doesn’t have bedrock. It has Sigilrock, and if you’ll notice, that’s what this goes down into or has been for the past twenty minutes while we’ve been walking.”
“How far down are we? We’ve been walking forever…” Nisha said with a groan. “I’d rather be back up there hallucinating. That was kinda fun.”
“About a mile or so down I think.” Fyrehowl said.
“How is that even possible?” Clueless asked. “I mean, going down we’re technically going into the ring of Sigil. How thick is the ring? There’s got to be a limit of how far down we can go, right?”
The others had no answer, and as far as the bladesinger’s last question, they weren’t sure if they wanted to know the answer. Twenty minutes later the rock changed.
“What the hell…” Skalliska had stopped dead in her tracks to stare at the walls of the shaft.
The gray, chalk-like Sigilrock had transitioned to a dense, almost metallic mineral, vaguely reminiscent of something biological: the spongy tissue of a liver or a lung or the hollow of a long bone. But yet it was stone, still hard and cold to the touch as the walls of the shaft made a fluid transition from one type of rock to the next.
“Anyone know what that is?” Toras asked curiously.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before. I don’t have a clue.” Skalliska said with a shrug. “There was a rumor though, that in portions of the Great Below near the Ditch, somewhere around where Tattershade, the Lord of Sigil’s wererats was lairing, that they found, or claimed to have found, an abandoned Dabus warren. There was something in the rumor about stone that was alive, or stone that didn’t act like normal Sigilrock. I didn’t put any truth in the matter though; it was probably just to spook anyone who might intrude into Tattershade’s so-called kingdom. I never liked having to deal with his people at all in the past.”
The insinuation of that rumor, and any possible link to what they saw in the transition of the stone as they progressed further and further down the stairs, it largely snuffed their conversation with each other. As they continued deeper they had only the darkness above, the darkness below, and the cool wind that rushed about them from the umbra like the shallow breath of a god, pensive and frightened, hiding in the depths.
Admitting it or not, they were all frightened.
***
Four miles down from the top of the shaft they reached the bottom. The stairs extended into a small chamber with a series of smooth arches leading off in several random directions. The cool breeze that had wafted up the shaft blew in soft gusts from the various passages.
“Here’s your copper back.” Nisha quipped as she picked up the coin where it lay against a wall. “It’s a bit bent from the fall, but oh well.”
Tristol accepted it back with a chuckle. “So who wants to pick this time?” He glanced down the various passages that led away from the stairs.
“Anyone but a fiend this time.” Florian said.
Toras smirked. “That wasn’t fun. Not till the very end it wasn’t.”
Nisha looked up from where she’d taken a seat. “I’m part fiend, does that count?”
Skalliska was already moving towards one of the exits. “For now yes. And I’m making a map. That’s something that we’ve been damn remiss about doing so far. Though who knows if it’ll work at all down here, if this is even considered part of the Jester’s Palace and all.”
Florian nodded, “Good idea.”
Ten minutes later they walked back into the same room.
“What the hell?” Skalliska said in disbelief as she looked up from her rough map. “This can’t be the room we started in. We walked in a straight line and didn’t take any of the intervening passages we found. We didn’t turn any corners and there weren’t any portals in the way.”
“Maybe it’s a similar room and not the same one?” Tristol mused.
“Can’t be.” Nisha said, picking up something on the ground. “Here’s a copper piece of my own that I left.”
“Than why is it bent just like mine?” The mage asked as one of his ears twitched.
“…you weren’t supposed to ask that.” The tiefling said as she handed it back to him.
Skalliska tossed the map up in the air and took a seat by the stairs. “Alright. Fine. This place doesn’t want to behave like normal space should. Lovely. I’m up for wandering. Anyone else?”
“That’s worked for us so far down here. I don’t see why not.” Fyrehowl said with a shrug.
And so they wandered. Several times they ended up back where they started or seemed to follow the same path despite having started and ended up on different sides of the chamber with the stairs. After some time however they did stumble upon a unique room, and it was not empty by any means.
The chamber was surreal in its contents: what initially appeared to be a rough-hewn block of stone sat in its center. It was a golem, or perhaps a half-finished statue cut from black marble and shot through with shimmering veins of gold.
Whatever it was, it was surrounded by some manner of warding circle that took the form of runes written into the floor that shimmered and faded in and out of sight. The symbols didn’t actually touch the stone; they floated above it like Dabus rebuses, seeming to exist only partially in phase with the stone of the floor they hovered above in a constant flux.
Looking warily at the symbols that made up the circle they could make out three distinct and separate rings of runes, one of them fading into nothing while two others remained manifest. When they shifted, the two extant rings seemed to rotate several degrees counter to one another, and always they remained blurry. In fact they seemed to grow fuzzy and indistinct upon examination, only gaining detail in half glances out of the corner of one’s eyes. They blurred almost as if the eyes couldn’t focus on them or they defied definition. They hurt the eyes to stare at them. They were the same sets of symbols that had been present upon the solidified protomatter filaments that wound round the exterior of the mazes of Her Serenity within the depths of the Trackless Sea.
“F*ck if I’m going near that, whatever it is!” Clueless said bluntly as he backed up from the silently shifting rings of runes.
Even without any further explanation from the bladesinger, the others slowly realized that same connection between the runes and what they had previously witnessed in the weblike manifestations that cloaked the maze in the deep ethereal.
Tristol whispered a few words and glanced at the circle and the figure within. His vision didn’t change, despite the spell taking effect.
“It’s not magical, whatever it is. I don’t have any idea what it might be. No idea at all…”
Fyrehowl was spooked but cautiously approached the shifting rings. There were several things laying on the ground near the ring that the others hadn’t noticed, and she had smelt the acrid, copper scent of spilt blood.
Seven cranium rat corpses lay at the edge of the outermost ring of symbols, all of them unmoving and dead. Where they had touched the circle they simply ceased to exist, heads and limbs severed and simply gone. It was as if they had plunged into a prismatic wall, testing it for vulnerabilities, or blundered into the serrated shadow of The Lady.
Fyrehowl shuddered and backed away from the deadly trio of flickering circles.
“The rats have been here. They tried to step through the circle.” The lupinal motioned to the corpses at the edge of the wardings. “They died.”
“What is that thing in there? A statue? A golem or something?” Toras asked curiously. “Tristol? Skalliska? You know anything resembling that?”
They both shook their heads in the negative.
“Is this what the rats were down here looking for?” Florian asked as she walked a slow circle around the figure, making certain that she didn’t tread near the deadly barrier.
Clueless shrugged. “Maybe, I don’t know. There might be more things down here.”
“I’m not so sure I want to go looking for them though…” Fyrehowl said, perhaps a bit of cipher’s intuition seeping into her mind if not yet her actions.
Florian stopped and glanced not at the wards, but at the ground in front of the odd figure held within their bladed embrace.
“There’s something written on the floor in front of this thing. In Chondathan, my first language…”
Tristol walked up next to her, looked at the lines of text and shook his head. “No, it’s in Halruaan.”
“Unless Halruaan looks like celestial, than no.” Fyrehowl said as she glanced at it.
And so it was with all of them. The lines appeared to have been written in whatever language the seven of them spoke best, and still, despite those things, Tristol saw no emanation of magic from the wards, the golem, or anywhere else in the chamber outside of his companions and himself.
Gathered together around the three deadly rings surrounding the statue they read the refrain at its base:
‘In silence, in solitude, entombed here in the depths of Her Serenity’s vaults I wait. Patient as the Great Spire and fearing none, for I see where others do not. Only by our Lady’s Will does darkness cloud my eyes as I wait for HUBRIS to shake the Heavens and Hells.
“Her Serenity’s Vaults?…” Fyrehowl asked warily. “I don’t think we should be down here.”
Toras backed away from the figure in the center of the room slightly. “I’ve already been in a maze once. I don’t want to ever be in one to call my own, thank you very much.”
Clueless asked a question. “Who or what is Hubris?”
“Pride? SIRBUH spelled backwards all ominous like?” Nisha said with a chuckle.
Florian patted the Xaositect on the head. “Not a rhetorical question Nisha.”
Skalliska mused. “Well that might be a name. Maybe of this whatever it is that’s sitting here in the circle. I don’t know.”
“Whatever it is, the cranium rats seemed interested in it, and gave up trying to get to it. I mean, if that passage is actually suggesting that whatever is down here was put here by” Florian lowered her voice, “…you know who… than I don’t think the rats were going to get into it.”
The cleric received some nods in reply. It seemed like a sensible enough notion.
“But since we know the rats are actually down here, or were at some point, I think we should at least look around some more. Yes it’s creepy but still.” Clueless replied with a gesture to one of the three archways out of the room.
And so off they went through a nondescript maze of passages that seemed to continually loop back on themselves in defiance of any sort of spatial laws. Twice they ended back up in the room with the stairway and its miles high shaft, and another time they ended up back in the room with the warding circles in which they had started. In fact, none of the passages seemed to lead to the same destination twice or even to follow the same path each time they would take it.
Not even marking the passages with chalk, ink, paint, or string remedied the situation. The marks they made would vanish, appear in different places, or make no sense at all if one tried to follow them in a straight line. And all the while, Tristol noticed not a drop of magic to be present.
Eventually however, they did find a second unique chamber. The room was roughly the same size as the previous one, and again a single object stood at its center. A three-sided glass obelisk perhaps seven feet tall, it hovered above the floor by several inches. Odd symbols hovered above its surface causing discomfort and pain to the eyes if they were focused upon.
Periodically the obelisk turned to expose a different one of its faces to each of the three exits from the chamber. As it did so the runes seemed to shimmer for an instant but otherwise they remained the same.
And again, just like the last chamber, a half dozen cranium rats littered the floor around the object, their blood and gore spattered explosively about their forms but leaving the obelisk untouched by even a single drop. And still Tristol saw no evidence of magic despite everything else they beheld.
“Don’t look too closely at it. Trust me on this one. Bleeding eyes aren’t fun.” Clueless said.
Florian nodded and pointed to the rats. “And don’t touch is an operative term again. Thanks to the rats for illustrating this for us.”
They stared at the odd, hovering object for some time before shrugging and pondering the exact reason for its motion and its changes when it did move.
Clueless stood and looked at the obelisk and then at the exits. “Maybe there’s a pattern to what rooms the exits lead to depending on which side of the obelisk is facing each of them? It’s an idea.”
“Perhaps. It’s worth a try. I’ve still got string and chalk.” Skalliska said as she avoided glancing at the object.
“Actually I’ve got your string and chalk. But same difference.” Nisha said as she handed them to Skalliska.
The kobold gave her a look and then walked towards one of the entrances.
Some time later they had wandered in and out of the same featureless tunnels, the entrance to the current warren, and the other previous chamber they had found. Eventually they gave up. There was no apparent pattern to the exits and the position of the obelisk. There was however a detail of the obelisk that they had not before noticed.
Within its translucent interior, when it shifted its position, there was a flicker of an image within that seemed to linger, ghostlike, for a split second before vanishing. Three separate images that were present in sequence, one for each time the object turned and the runes shimmered.
Clueless and Nisha looked at one another as the first image flickered and was gone. They had both seen it before. A marble standing stone there in the gloom of the second layer of the Gray Waste, one of the Loadstones of Misery. When the obelisk had cycled fully and returned to the Loadstone image, it was subtly different. Another cycle later and it was different once more. Three Loadstones in all, each of them present in the crystalline interior of the hovering monolith.
The second image within the interior was the otherwise familiar Infinite Spire within the Outlands. Oddly though, Sigil was absent at its summit in the obelisk’s image.
“Well, there’s one we recognize. Sort of, there’s just no Sigil.” Fyrehowl said.
“So what’s the pattern? Sort of spires or big rocks on the planes? There isn’t a third one.” Skalliska said with a shrug.
The third was one they didn’t recognize: some column of gleaming, burning moonlight rising up out of some body of water or a calm ocean. For whatever reason its appearance seemed both calming and guilt forming, as if they had seen something that wasn’t meant to be seen. Or perhaps it wasn’t guilt, but rather a sense of longing or a sense of regret at something that once was, but was no longer.
“That almost looked like Thalasia. But there’s nothing like that there. At least nothing that I know of.” Fyrehowl looked confused at the very notion. None of the others could really question her though being that of them, she was the only native of Elysium. If there were something like that there, certainly she would have known about it, no?
With a bit more confusion they wandered out of the chamber and blindly sought another one. Two unique chambers, each with three exits and a single object in the center, and they always kept finding their way back to the spots that they began. It only seemed to stand to reason that there would be a third unique room like the other two that would fulfill the rule of three, center of all, and unity of rings as they seemed to be present in each. But of course, the only truth about the rules tended to be that they usually never truly and easily applied unless you went out of your way looking for them, if even then.
Nearly an hour later of aimless wandering though, they finally noticed an incongruity in the soft gusts of wind and a bit of light from the end of one side passage. The air seemed colder and fresher than anywhere else, and the light was almost natural seeming. Curiously they looked at one another and then turned down that particular passage. At the end of it was an archway, much like those that had graced the entrances to the other two previous unique chambers, or vaults as they might have been. But something was distinctly odd about what they could see through the entrance, and near the rear of the group as they walked, Fyrehowl was increasingly nervous and skittish.
Tristol’s voice choked up as they passed through the portal. “This isn’t possible…”
Above them there was no ceiling of rock or stone, but only an empty, open sky that stretched out into a featureless blue-green nothingness. Underground, four miles below the streets of Sigil, they looked up and saw the sky above them reaching out over the walls of a room that was otherwise like the other two, save what was there that should not have been. They all walked into a courtyard in the depths of Sigil open to a sky that should not have existed.
Opposite them, perhaps a hundred feet away, was another archway that stood separate from the courtyard. The arch was obviously a portal of sorts, though it did not register as one, nor did it flicker with the telltale glow of magic, but another of the nondescript tunnels was visible through it.
A cold wind drifted down from the expanse of sky above them, the source of the breeze that had crept up from the vaults and the miles long staircase that had led them there, wherever there was.
But the void above was not what frightened them by comparison. At the very center of the courtyard, atop a low pedestal, stood a life-sized statue of Her Serenity, The Lady of Pain. Cut from the purest white marble, blades of glimmering silver sprouted like organic, living things from the stone. The marble seemed to actually transmute from rock to metal where they emerged, seemingly having been grown rather than made. Not a speck of dust marred the statue’s surface, nor any marks of age or weathering, and like Her Bladed Majesty, its gaze was unreadable, emotionless, and implacable.
“…We… we shouldn’t be here.” Clueless said with an almost frightened solemnity.
Skalliska had a worried tone to her voice as she asked, “How is there a sky here? We’re miles underground and we haven’t gone through a single actual damn portal down here.”
“Is it possible to come out on the other side of the ring and look… out?” Florian asked as she stared up into the infinite blank reach of the cold, cloudless sky above them.
Skalliska whispered several words and began to float up from the ground. “There’s one way to find out. I’m going to go look.”
“Skalliska, I don’t think you should, uh, be doing that…” Fyrehowl said as a warning before she glanced back at the statue of Her Serenity.
The others nervously milled about as the kobold drifted up to the top of the courtyard and looked up into the sky and over the edge of walls that anywhere else would have touched and bordered upon a ceiling. What she saw took her breath away. The stone surface extended out infinitely in a flat plane in every direction without any hint of curvature. The cold expanse of the sky gazed down over all of it without an end in sight. There was no hint of clouds, or ground, or the spire.
Skalliska gripped the edge tightly and glanced back at the others. “There’s no spire. Just the sky and a flat surface of rock over the edges that just… goes on…”
Tristol looked up at her, his tail was tucked between his legs and his ears were flat against his head. “Come on down now. We should leave.”
She didn’t object, and still holding on to the stone she drifted back down to the ground and consciously avoided looking at the statue of The Lady at any point during her descent.
“So, how about we leave now and see if we can find the rats on the way back? If they’re down here, I don’t think they should be and I dare say that they can’t do anything they shouldn’t…” Clueless said as he glanced once more over at the statue.
“Good idea. I haven’t said anything about it, but guys…” Fyrehowl paused and sounded actually disturbed. “Nothing down here feels right. The Cadence… I can’t describe it at all. Please, let’s leave.”
The cipher turned towards the archway that wasn’t a portal but yet was, intending to leave, but then she stopped and abruptly turned towards the other exit across the courtyard. She had barely the time to scream a warning to her companions and roll for cover as The Us, all of them, hundreds upon hundreds of cranium rats, burst through and into the courtyard with nothing but hatred seething across their raging, undulating carpet of eyes, teeth, claws and brains.
***
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