End of one plot arc, the start of another.
***
Fyrehowl dove and rolled for cover as the rats poured into the courtyard. Already there was a hum in the air as a great billowing sphere of flame seemed to collect and flicker into being above the Us, their hatred taking physical form, tethered by crackles of psionic force to each of their brains.
While the flickering sphere of flame continued to build and collect, gathering its strength above the hive, a wave of rippling psionic force washed out in front of them, crashing into Toras, Florian, and Clueless before fading. A raging chorus composed of tattered, random fragments of angry, visceral screams could be heard lashing out from the minds of the cranium rats.
Killers of Us… Die!… Kill you… Feast on your thoughts! … We… crack open your skulls and drink!…Hatred…Death!
The group staggered to their feet from where they had fallen, they hastily cast defensive spells, or moved into a wider stance to divide the attentions of the swarm. Only Fyrehowl was quick enough to act immediately as she thrust out her hand and the air crackled with a billowing cone of utter cold. It slammed into the rats’ flank and shattered dozens of them with its frozen touch, burning others with the sudden exposure. It also goaded the rats into acting perhaps sooner than was wise, their fury overriding their otherwise godlike intellect.
The gathering sphere of flame above the hive lanced out in a half dozen directions, streaking into the midst of the rats’ enemies and detonating with ferocious power. But the rats had unleashed their rage too soon. It was too unfocused, and one of the beams missed the lupinal and coursed past her, streaking further into the courtyard, an errant missile moving towards the statue of The Lady. It struck the marble midsection of the serene figure, and erupted in a roar of flame, broken, clattering fragments of burnt stone and shards of molted silvery metal.
Time seemed to stop.
The minds of the collective paused, horror etched on their expressions and their mental patterns; they waiting for something to happen. Be it The Lady Herself appearing to obliterate them, cast them into a maze, or something worse, it was an unknown quantity, and they did nothing, could do nothing, but watch.
Fyrehowl blinked. Whatever feeling she had felt from the Cadence simply did not make sense to her at all.
The others also watched from where they had fallen or taken their stand, waiting for the rats’ attack. The smoke cleared, the fire sputtered and died, and there was the sound of moving stones and clinking metal; the broken fragments of the statue were being pulled back like bits of iron to a magnet.
They all watched, spellbound and terrified, even the Us, as bits of stone and metal met, fused like drops of oil, and rolled back to the broken base of the statue where the marble hem of The Lady’s robes brushed the ground. The smooth base of the statue rippled like a sculpture of water held in a solid, seamless form, the broken pieces merging with it, fusing with it, and it began to regenerate like a living thing. Within moments the enigmatic gaze of the statue of the Bladed Queen stared back at them as before, pristine and terrible, deadly grace repeated in stone and silver; not a mark remained of the damage.
Time began again.
Clueless thrust out of his hand and began to chant as his wings fluttered and drew him up above the melee. A column of roaring flame descended upon the hive, flickered against some warding that soaked it up like a sponge, but left several score of their kind scorched and enraged by pain.
Toras stepped in front of Florian, willing to take any blow directed against the cleric as she invoked the power of her deity. A raging, holy twin of the half-fey’s conjuration blasted down upon the rats, more heavily the second time.
The next moments were an agony of psionic lashes, bursts of pain directed against the minds of the hated enemies of the Us. A greenish ray scored the ground and burst against the chest of Toras, knocking him over and threatening to consume him before he managed to resist it. A ball of electricity erupted from nothing in the midst of where Skalliska, Nisha, and Tristol stood, and a ripple of force nearly hurled Clueless against one of the courtyard walls. But through it all, nothing again came even close to the baleful gaze of the statue of The Lady.
Tristol saw the overwhelming force that the Us, as a single collective, was hurling out at them, moment by moment, and he knew that if it did not end soon, they would not survive. Then he remembered something: a metallic rod that he had taken from the possessions of the Incantifer Archmage, the insane wizardress Areya Fenthellis, known as the Spellbreaker. He gripped it in his hand and began to cast.
The bolt of lightning was not any more especially powerful than normal, but it was a potent thing nonetheless, and there were hundreds of rats, none of them more than inches apart from one another. The lightning arced, the air was ripped with the scent of ozone, and as the first bolt struck one of the members of the Us, it forked, struck two, then forked again, and again, and again, flowing out over the hive, each separate lance of current striking more than a single target, the bolts overlapping in which rats they caused to shudder, dance, ignite and burst.
As the spell ended, a hundred, maybe two hundred members of the hive were naught but bone and ash. The air was rent with screams of agony both real and mental. The collective was in shock with the sudden loss of perhaps a third of its number, and the concurrent drop in its own faculties and intelligence. Too much pain. Too much loss. They could not stay or they would lose more, and they had lost far too much. They had to run. They had to flee and escape.
The thoughts were incoherent on the air as the remaining members of the hive turned and ran for the archway they had first come through, running and trying to find their way to the stairway back to the Palace of the Jester, and from there to the unmapped warrens and sewers of Sigil’s Great Below. Of course, their enemies that they left behind were in little better condition.
“Oh you don’t want more? Come back, we can try again!” Toras said, rather ineffectually, as he winced against the pain. He lay there on the ground with his breastplate punched through by the rats’ magic, a warm stain slowly spreading outwards.
“Tristol, you’re a saint. An oftentimes very destructive one, but a saint nonetheless.” Florian said as she stood up, wincing as she did.
“Don’t look at me.” The mage replied incredulously. “I didn’t think it’d work, but I was running out of options. A few more seconds and they’d have turned the rest of you to ash, and I wouldn’t have been too far behind.”
Nisha meanwhile had snagged several of the roasted cranium rats and tossed them into a bag. “Evidence for Jeremo” she called it, and the others found it not a bad idea at all.
“So this opens the question. Where did the rats end up going?” Clueless said.
Fyrehowl gave a shrug. “I don’t think they’re down here. I can’t really say why though. It’s just a feeling. And that said, I really, truly don’t want to be down here any longer than I have to.”
They all gave an uneasy look towards the statue at the courtyard’s center.
“Yeah, let’s get out of here.” Tristol said.
Not even Nisha made an objection as they made their way back to the stairs. It took them nearly an hour, during which time they stopped to rest and heal most of their more serious wounds. As they finally found the correct path back to the central chamber where the stairs entered, they found a trail of bloody footsteps and one or two more rat corpses; stragglers who had died in their flight back towards safety.
The stairs themselves were a canvas of blood from the hundreds of passing rats. It was obvious that they had fled upwards, and probably wouldn’t stop once they reached the top. Jeremo seemed to have his problem taken care of.
Skalliska looked up the stairs and whimpered.
“Hmm? Skalliska?” Fyrehowl asked.
“How long was the way down here?” The kobold asked.
“About, what? Two miles or so?” The lupinal replied.
Skalliska whimpered again.
“Oh for the Foehammer…” Florian stammered.
“Sh*t.” Toras said bluntly as he realized the implication.
“I love my wings. I really do.” Clueless said as he started to hover and ascend the stairs with Fyrehowl floating behind him for as long as her spell would last. The others grumbled and trudged behind them on foot.
***
The long, slow climb up those miles of stairs was terribly difficult, but it was all the more liberating when they finally emerged over the lip of the crevice and out into the normal expanse of the Great Below. They variously staggered and collapsed around the edge, panting and breathing deeply of the still, stagnant air as the cooler, fresher air from below wafted at their skin and brushed at hair and fur. Now of course they knew the source of that chill wind, or perhaps, all things considered, they knew less of the nature of that source than they did before.
“Remind me to send hate mail to the Planewalkers Guild.” Toras mumbled.
“Excuse me?” Skalliska said as she lay there against the cold stone floor. “Why?”
“The Infinite Staircase.” Tristol said between catching his breath. “That’s where they’re headquartered.”
“Hate mail for promoting the idea of stairs.” Toras said, half a laugh and half a wheeze. “Mother-F*cking stairs…”
“Just think of kicking Seamus down them.” Nisha said.
For a brief moment before they all got up and activated their rings that Jeremo had given them, the bemused smile that played across Toras’s face was priceless.
“I never bargaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhh!” Toras said to himself, mimicking the dust mephit’s nasal and annoying voice for a moment. “Oh, in a perfect world…”
***
The glow of the teleport quickly faded and they found themselves there at the bottom of the stairs up into the Palace of the Jester proper. It was right where they had started, and Jeremo was sitting there on the stairs, twirling his crown around one hand like a toy as he smiled down at them.
“A perfect world?” The Natterer said curiously as he glanced at his employees.
“Oh, nothing. Just talking to myself. Nevermind.” Toras said.
“Have you been waiting for us this whole time?” Florian asked with some shock. She hadn’t expected Jeremo to be there for them whenever they finally finished what he had tasked for them to do.
The Jester waved one hand while brushing his hair out of his face with the other.
“No no no, hardly no, not at all. I had a ring keyed to those I gave you. As soon as you came back it brought me here. So… what news?”
He had a keenly interested, gregarious expression on his face as he looked at them all and the various healing wounds and scorched equipment they carried. Quite obviously they had done more than just wander about for a while before giving up. And unlike the previous group, they’d come back.
“Problem solved.” Clueless said. “At least for now. They’re down about a third of their number.”
Nisha tossed out one of the rats that she had collected down below. Jeremo winced at the smell of cooked meat and burned fur.
“With a loss like that they’ll likely try to build their numbers back up before doing anything else like this.” Fyrehowl said. “I think you’re going to be rat free for some time.”
“Oh, and one other thing.” Toras said as he opened up his bag of holding and dumped first a desiccated corpse, and then a living person out of the interior. “Out of the bag with you. We’re back up top finally.”
Jerimin clambered out of the bag and onto the floor. He seemed more than a bit claustrophobic regarding where he had just been, and it took him several moments to realize that Jeremo was sitting on the steps and kicking his heels out back and forth. As soon as he saw him and recognized him, Jerimin straightened out and gave a bow.
“Factol!”
Jeremo waved off the formality as unnecessary.
“Well, you at least made it back alive.” The Natterer said. “Can’t say too terribly much about this other fellow here. Not good. Any idea on the other three that went down with you?”
“Umm… no sir.” Jerimin replied. “I can’t really say. We were attacked by the rats almost immediately and were separated from that point on. I wouldn’t have made it out expect for these fine fellows you sent down after my group. I owe them a debt, and you know how we handle that.”
“Quite seriously.” Jeremo said with a smile. Obviously his hireling was also a member of the Ring-Givers.
“You don’t want us to go back down there and try to find those other people in that first group, do you?” Florian said curiously.
“Not your problem. I sent them down there and I’ll pay another group to go recover them.” Jeremo replied. “Besides, with the rats not an issue for the moment, or at least chased off till they recover their numbers, the place should at least be less dangerous, if still not entirely coherent. Plus it’ll give me a chance to have a confirmation that the cranium rats are indeed gone.”
“Sounds fair enough.” Skalliska said.
“Anything I can get you? You look like you just walked halfway across the city.” Jeremo said with childlike curiosity.
“That’s about right probably.” Toras replied.
“You’d be surprised.” Fyrehowl said.
Jeremo cocked his head to the side. Somehow his crown stayed on, despite the ridiculous angle it usually sat at.
“Tell me about it over a drink and something to eat. You deserve to relax and I’ve got a kitchen staff that’ll make you anything you want. Besides, I want to hear about what all you found. Follow me.” Jeremo said before hopping up to his feet and motioning them forwards. A number of servants collected the corpse as well, presumably to take it to a cleric to have the poor sod raised from the dead.
And so for several hours they relaxed as best they could while Jeremo lavished them with anything they might want. The Natterer also never stopped talking for more than a scant few seconds when he wasn’t listening to an answer. He simply prattled on and on for all the time that they were in his company, though his questions all did have relevance to what he had employed them to do; the man was simply talkative.
Eventually though, Jeremo was finally exhausted of questions for them, or at least he had the sense to stop, offer them their payment, and let them be on their way with his thanks. Toras was still grumbling about stairs, Clueless was oddly quiet, and Nisha was playing ‘bitey bitey brain zappy rat’ at odd intervals, and the Xaositect still had the rats that she’d collected, though none of the others had noticed apparently.
But, within the hour they were back at the Portal Jammer for a chance to finally and wholly relax in whatever way they cared to. Tristol promptly took a nap, Nisha vanished to wherever she cared to vanish to, Florian said her daily devotions and passed out, Skalliska went back to her research that she’d been working on the prior week, Clueless, still spooked, tended the bar, Fyrehowl left to go meditate, and Toras just sat and watched people in the taproom.
For the next twenty-four hours or so, life progressed normally for them without any oddities.
***
Clueless was still thinking back to their time in the depths of the Jester’s Palace. Not to the cranium rat hive, not even to the eerie contents of the Vaults they had stumbled across. The half-fey was thinking nervously to the scenes that he had witnessed when talking to that grove of trees there in the labyrinths, the tomb and its smirking statue, and the events he had seen inside the murals depicting The Jester.
The bladesinger was wary of that still, and he was continually looking behind him as he walked through the streets of the Guildhall Ward, making his way towards the Great Bazaar. He’d intended to simply go and have a drink at a place reputed, in his outsider’s way of knowing such things, to be a place where members of the Free League met. The faction wasn’t really a faction now, nor had it ever been if you asked members, and so there was no formal way of getting into the group or learning about it. Clueless figured that if he felt certain things about the world that they apparently did as well, and made himself present in places that members of the group frequented, one of them might take notice and clue in the clueless, so to speak.
But damn if he couldn’t stop being paranoid and spooked by what had happened down there in the warrens beneath the Jester’s Palace. Every wizard he saw wearing a dark cloak, every halfling with a covered head moving about the crowd, anything even remotely similar in form to the Jester and his… companion… familiar… thing… was raising his heartbeat up a notch reflexively.
He turned a corner into the sprawling, organized chaos of the Great Bazaar, and then he stopped dead in his tracks. They were here in Sigil. Almost like they were waiting for him, the two of them. Standing no more than ten feet away, an overly tall man in a long cloak and a wide brimmed hat stood at the edge of the sprawl of tents and stands. Standing at no more than to his thigh was a smaller figure in enveloping, drab colored robes.
They both turned, and for a moment Clueless nearly bolted back the way that he had come. His eyes went wide with sudden terror.
The half ogre in the cloak glanced down, said something not heard over the din of the crowds, and laughed at his companion. The monk looked up at him, the edge of his stereotypically dwarven beard showing out of the lower lip of the robe’s hood.
“Oh son of a…” Clueless said as his pulse returned to normal. He cursed somewhere between to himself and at the pair of berks who happened to be dressed in the absolute wrong way for their respective heights as might be possible given his current mindset.
“I need to stop being so damned skittish. I’ll be sitting in this place and be so nervous that half the crowd will think that I’m a Hardhead plant, and the other half will assume that I’ve been using too many drugs in the Civic Festhall.”
He shook his head and continued on into the sprawl of the marketplace, trying ever so hard to divest himself of those lingering thoughts about what he’d seen and who he’d spoken to down there in the depths of the Great Below.
***
A day later, and back in the Portal Jammer:
“We have a letter. Two of them.” Toras announced as he placed one down in front of Skalliska.
“And another ‘free sample’ from Seamusxanthuszemus, but I’ll handle that in my own time this week.” Toras said with a roll of his eyes.
“But this first letter is for all of us…” He added as he put it down in the center of the table to stare at like it was a venomous snake.
Fyrehowl groaned when she glanced at what was written in gold foil on the envelope. “To the owners of the Portal Jammer, the sincerest apologies of The King of the Crosstrade.”
“Oh for the Foehammer…” Florian said as she snatched it up, ripped off the top and looked at the text of the letter. “Ten jink says she hasn’t written her own missives in a century.”
The cleric cleared her throat as she read it out loud, “Dear fellow landowners of Sigil, very nearly my peers perhaps.”
“Nearly her peers?” Clueless said with an offended tone.
“I haven’t bathed in the gutter lately, so I’m not a peer of hers.” Tristol said with a frown.
“I don’t frequent Tanar’ri brothels, so how could I be a peer…” Fyrehowl remarked with a snort.
“Hush!” Florian said with a faux smack of her hand. “Let me finish. This is good. And by good I mean so laughingly fake, pretentious, and put on.”
The letter read: Dear fellow landowners of Sigil, very nearly my peers perhaps. I must sincerely apologize for the horrific events of the past week that put such a pall over the celebration held by the esteemed Jeremo the Natterer, my friend for some time now even before his ascension to Factol of the Ring-Givers. It is such a terrible thing that some persons sometimes lose their sense of social rank, their ego grows too over inflated beyond their means to support it legitimately, and they feel that by causing a scene at the expense of others that they might elevate their own standing in the eyes of those who might have previously called them a peer. I was shocked (shocked!) by the horrific attitude and subsequent actions of Zadara the Titan. I simply cannot fathom what was going through her mind when she disrupted Jeremo’s party so.”
The letter went on in a similar fashion for another two pages, not once making mention of the Marauder’s screaming outburst, public attack on an otherwise dismally perceived Dust Mephit, and her attempted murder of the Titan. Mostly it rambled on and on in five jink words about how horrible Zadara was.
“Well, at least some good has come out of it.” Florian stated.
“Oh?” Toras asked.
Skalliska was, by that point, ignoring them and reading the letter addressed to her. Whatever the contents, it had her peering intently at it, scratching her chin in curiosity and pursing her lips.
“Indeed. It’s made me remember just how much blistering disdain I actually have for the b*tch. Back me up on this one Clueless.” Florian said.
Clueless smirked and nodded, “Such a lovely women…” He muttered, before his tone became more vindictive.
“I’m going to see her shaved.” He said, holding a hand to his collarbone and moving it down to his navel. “From here, to here. In public. I swear to you, that’s what I’ll do.”
“Not bad…” Fyrehowl said with a chuckle. “Maybe put it into little patterns like some of the wealthy folks in the Lady’s Ward do for their puppies?”
Florian grinned. “Not bad? That’s genius. Tempus would approve.”
Skalliska had put down the letter she’d been reading and wandered over to the bar, blissfully ignoring the commentary by her companions. Once there, she walked around to the back and chugged nearly a third of a bottle of wine. Clearly something had gotten her attention in what she’d read.
***
The Oinoloth stood in the bowels of Khin-Oin, walking on a platform high above the spawning pits, the fossilized sacral vertebrae of the Wasting Tower’s foundations riding high above him like a mummified firmament over the hell beneath. Below the gaze of The Ebon and his collection of scribes that followed him like mewling puppies, they watched the processes of the pits several hundred feet beneath them. In the bubbling and roiling toxic expanse of the pools below, Mezzoloths were formed and created; their essence ripped up from the very flesh of the Waste, their bodies extruded from the bloody innards of that which birthed them.
Vorkannis smiled through air thick with bursts of flame, electrical discharge, and noxious fumes from below as the newborn fiends rose to the surface and slowly formed, becoming more and more distinct by the minute. He smiled more when the air was ripped by thousands of pained screams. In that moment, the newly born yugoloths began to slaughter one another, killing and slaying in an orgiastic fratricide. As the screams of the dying faded away, only one of them from each monstrous vat was left alive to climb up and out of the pool where it would take its place as a cog of multiversal evil.
Hundreds of thousands of such spawning pools rose in the distance in the vaults there below the ossified foundations of the Wasting Tower, below the vaults, below the tributaries of the Styx, and below nearly thirty miles of ash, dust and solidified evil. It was one of three such places where they burrowed deep, worrying the flesh of the plane, ripping up the bloody, raw moral effluvium and forging it into their own shapes. It was more efficient that way; it allowed them to complete the process in quicker time than simply waiting for the mezzoloths to break free from the surface up above on Oinos, or crawl out as whimpering, hungry newborns on the banks of the Styx. This method ensured that only the strong and merciless survived.
It was one of three such places: Just like the great machines, the infernal devices that tapped the furnaces of Gehenna beneath the vaults and archives of the Tower Arcane; just like the cage wrought of misery and bound souls within the hollow interior shaft of the Tower of Incarnate Pain. They were things of beauty in his eyes.
He allowed himself that moment of pleasure before moving onwards with his underlings. They turned and approached a new pool at the periphery of the spawning pits, one that was constructed to his elaborate specifications.
As they approached the pool, a pair of nycaloths flanked the Ebon as ceremonial guards, and a group of arcanaloths followed after him, in awe of him and giddily attentive to his instructions; they hung on every word he spoke. Several steps behind them, three ultroloths followed along silently as well, watching, observing, and learning with more subdued attention that the jackal headed fiends.
They, the arcanaloths, were scribes, cogs of evil, but of late they had been more headstrong given that one of their own ranks had assumed the position of Oinoloth. The Ebon didn’t treat them any differently than had previous Oinoloths. He did not elevate that caste above their traditional position, his bizarre promotion of The Manged notwithstanding, nor did he look down on the Ultroloths. Very early on however he had made it clear that any Ultroloth who harbored even a speck of disdain for his nominal caste would not be long in this world. The corpses that still hung from the spires of Khin-Oin, swinging in the wind like grotesque fruit from a withered tree, they attested to this fact. To The Ebon, caste was nothing, only power and fitness mattered, and he would be an iconoclast if that served his own goals and those of their racial creed. Those who argued otherwise ceased to exist. The Ultroloths remained silent as they followed behind their Oinoloth and his sycophants.
The pool was a basin of iron bound with rings of jet stone that flickered with a pale green light from some manner of mineral inclusion. Intricate runes covered the outside rim of the vat and down deep into its interior, deep carved spaces filled with still liquid mercury, too heavy and too dense to leak from their hollows and into the boiling contents of the pool itself. A single figure grew and gestated therein, and The Ebon and his following stopped and watched it in silence.
“You have questions burning in your brains.” The Ebon said without looking away from the vat where the sickly light from his eyes reflected back in tiny, guttering pinpoints of red. “You are uncertain of the manner of sorcery I have used. You are uncertain of what manner of creature I am growing. And each of you is too fearful to be the first to ask what all of you are wondering.”
Those arcanaloths who possessed tails hung them between their legs under their robes, but still they did not answer their Oinoloth; they were afraid more than they were curious.
“You should all be well acquainted with the process that goes on about us for miles and miles. That process has not changed in millennia, and is unlikely to change unless We determine that it necessary to change the very nature of the least of our kind; to change the nature of the mezzoloth. In this instance, no radical changes are required. Purity is something to be striven for; it is an evolution of form gained by conflict, strife and painful learning. Misery makes you whole.”
He gesticulated back towards the mezzoloth vats in the distance.
“It is undesirable to make them different than they are now. That would defeat the progression from one caste to the next, the slow purification of the self that most of us have undergone. It is this painful process of learning, this unhallowed passage to maturity that causes many to look down upon those of higher caste who are born into their station rather than rising to the top and surviving by skill and merit.”
He looked back and nodded in approval as a single mezzoloth emerged from out of one of the nearby vats. It had just slaughtered its birth mates and earned itself the right of existence: The Ebon’s example in microcosm.
One of the arcanaloth scribes, one who had been born into his caste, shook slightly at the Oinoloth’s implication. He shuddered, his tail jerked spastically between his legs in terror, and he remained utterly silent.
“But this creature is different, in both form, purpose, and ontogeny.” The Ebon said, as a tendril of shadow from around his feet curled up and seemed to point like an exaggerated finger at the body in the vat before them all.
The crooning arcanaloths and silent Ultroloths alike pushed forwards to gain a closer look.
All they could see of the creature growing in the interior of the vat was a mass of semisolid tentacles and an eyeless face that seemed to be merely braincase and gnashing teeth. Whatever it was, it was nearly double the size of the largest nycaloths, perhaps bordering on the scale of a Goristro Tanar’ri, but it was agonizingly thin, like a leper’s idol or a starving godling.
A few curious souls asked him questions, and he smiled as he answered them.
“Oh I have made it from the essence of the depths, a place I am
well acquainted with, but I have not given it the capacity for independent thought as of yet.”
They asked him more questions, clarifications of intent, when the beast would think on its own, and other more prosaic items. The Ebon flashed ivory fangs.
“I require obedience and instinct from this creature and its type, not independence. I have need of puppets, perfection without fawning and idolatry.” The Ebon glanced at the scribes who flocked around him. “And I have need of abilities not possessed innately by any extant yugoloth. And so, I make them myself to suit my needs for each given task and I scribe my mandates upon their minds and their most basic essence. While you are mirrors of perfection, seeking to emulate it, I am making tools to be held by the one who sees only these distorted reflections surrounding him.”
None of them replied, especially not the Ultroloths. Eventually though, one of them asked another question.
“How will you implant conscious thought into the creature? Is it more a construct of flesh and bone, an infusion of positive energy, negative energy, or will it develop some rudimentary thought patterns of its own as its organs develop and its brain grows more complex?” One of the arcanaloths asked tentatively. “You said that you had not given it the capacity for independent thought, ‘as of yet’. Does that mean that it will require some form of vital spark before it develops in that direction? How will you accomplish this?”
The Ebon turned and faced the scribe. The others around him backed away.
“You will suffice…”
The lesser fiend was hurled towards the spawning pool, suspended above the burning waters with a simple thought on the part of the Oinoloth, the same thought stripping the fiend of its contingencies and protective wardings as if they were tissue paper; meaningless to one such as Him. The Ebon said nothing, made no movements or gestures as he caused the arcanaloth to be ripped apart, flensed and butchered in such a way to maximize its agony. The shadows that swirled about his feet like a cloud of plague spores reached out to pull at flesh and viscera, pulling out and stripping it of something more basic than its physical body. The scribe’s infantile screams, his begging, his pleading for mercy that would never come, they poured, funnel-like into the hitherto lifeless body in the tank, pared, plucked, and tapped by the Ebon to fuel its birth. The creature of brain, fang, claw and obedience, it slowly stirred to life as The Ebon began to whisper in the words of the Baern.
***
Skalliska was potently drunk by that time and she had staggered over to a table and fallen promptly asleep in a puddle of her own drool. Nisha briefly considered playing some manner of prank, but a stern look from Florian ended her fun before it began. Still, Skalliska’s letter lay otherwise unnoticed where she had left it back on the other table.
The envelope had been addressed to her. It was unsigned, and neither did the paper carry any identifying marks. It simply began by saying, “My friend, you will find this interesting in relation to your current crises of faith.
“You have been searching for clues relating to the pantheon of your old home world upon the prime. In the Outlands, within the Mausoleum of Chronepsis, there is a portal formed by the bounded space between an ancient, ragged archway of ivy covered stone near to the hourglass of a great red wyrm of some renown. The portal may be activated only through the permission of the deity himself if one has the will to approach him. This portal leads to the Astral, and from that point, two days travel will bring you to the godisle of Abiormach. Seventy hours hence will find you atop the corpse of Ibrandul, and another five hours will find you at the godisle of Maanzicorian. From the deific corpse of the Illithid god of secrets, forward from his head another day and you will find what you have been looking for. Answers await you there. Perhaps some you hope for, perhaps others that you dread. You will discover this yourself.”
