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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)
- Thread starter Shemeska
- Start date
bluegodjanus
Explorer
Shemeska said:
Oh? I thought her player ended up with a different character by the end of the campaign.
Hello everyone, and a special hello to our resident writer Shemeska.
What originally started as an attempt to find more information about the planescape setting in general has eventually lead me to find this most engrossing story hour. My commendations on an excellent story. Speaking as someone who has had some experience with computer D&D games but who has never played a table version of one, I can say that I am really enjoying the story, and I can only imagine how much more the players are enjoying it as they are experiencing it live. I am really glad to have caught up with the story, as I was getting worried that my teachers might notice me incessantly reading some random web page that doesn't really deal with Java.
As others have said, Shemeska, you should really consider compiling a PDF of your story and selling it at least online, if not in print. I have no doubt it would work out.
I also have a question, and I will preface it by saying that my perspective is not exactly objective, having spent the last seven days reading almost nothing but this. Do you ever get worried that the dark, oppressive feeling which permeates most every aspect of your campaign will become boring for players/readers? As they say, too much of anything is a bad thing.
Regards,
Tal Rasha
What originally started as an attempt to find more information about the planescape setting in general has eventually lead me to find this most engrossing story hour. My commendations on an excellent story. Speaking as someone who has had some experience with computer D&D games but who has never played a table version of one, I can say that I am really enjoying the story, and I can only imagine how much more the players are enjoying it as they are experiencing it live. I am really glad to have caught up with the story, as I was getting worried that my teachers might notice me incessantly reading some random web page that doesn't really deal with Java.
As others have said, Shemeska, you should really consider compiling a PDF of your story and selling it at least online, if not in print. I have no doubt it would work out.I also have a question, and I will preface it by saying that my perspective is not exactly objective, having spent the last seven days reading almost nothing but this. Do you ever get worried that the dark, oppressive feeling which permeates most every aspect of your campaign will become boring for players/readers? As they say, too much of anything is a bad thing.
Regards,
Tal Rasha
Shemeska
Adventurer
Tal Rasha said:
Yep, but there was always the OOC point of me saying "players, trust me. I'm wanting you guys to come out on top in this all, and there will be come uppance for the large number of rotting, goat-headed bastards and also the jackal-headed bastards that seem to be bending the multiverse over and having their way with it all".
The players also took a bit of a humerous tone when they could to lighten up the mood and tone.
Shemeska
Adventurer
Only ten years prior, during the waning days of the Golden Age of the Factions, the Athar had occupied the sprawling ruins at the heart of the titular Shattered Temple district. There the faction derisively known as the 'Lost' established the heart of their organization. In their conception the place was a pinnacle of truth rising up in the ancient bastion of a false and fallen so-called god, and to their enemies it was blasphemy and arrogance of the highest order.
Oh to be certain, the members of the faction viewed their headquarters in different ways. Some saw it as cosmic irony, others as a pointed observation on the transience and ultimate mortality of the gods, and others enjoyed it with more spite towards the faithful than anything else. The factol in those days, the former high priest of Mishakal named Terrance, he personally saw it as the second of those three, and he rather loathed the third, but he had other reasons to value the precise location of his faction's most holy place.
Long before the Athar were conceived of and founded by Dunn and Ciro, long before the rise of any of the current faction, and long before the rise of the city-spanning guilds, millennia ago, the shattered temple had been the grand cathedral of Aoskar the Portal Father, god of portals and planewalkers. When the power's greed for Sigil had waxed to its zenith and his hold over the faithful of the City of Doors had become nearly monolithic, like the later founders of the Athar, he too fell from grace. In a few bloody moments of shadows and blades, his temple and much of the surrounding district were razed to the ground, his priests were slaughtered, and he himself was made an example of. With the dust settled and the blood still fresh and slowly steaming upon the cobblestones, Aoskar's corpse drifted within the Astral, petrified and pierced through with dozens of immediately recognizable blades.
Legends of that time and those events glossed over much of the original facts, letting them slip away into the mists of the collective past of the multiverse, but the lore of factions and sages told things that held closer to the truth. Terrance had been aware of much of that truth, and he'd known that the Shattered Temple held fragments of the portfolio of long-dead Aoskar. Even with the death of the power, the slaughter of his clergy, the staggering death toll among his most faithful, and the virtual nonexistence of his faith thousands of years later, the site of his destruction by the Lady of Pain was still linked to him in subtle and mysterious ways.
It was always rumored that the Athar knew of a portal that opened onto the Astral, a stable portal leading to Aoskar's drifting godisle in the silvery twilight of the graveyard of dead gods. It was true, but while the Athar sometimes spread the tale as proof of the falsehood of the so-called divine, they never shared access to the portal itself, nor to the location of the petrified corpse either. For some reason the corpse and its environs terrified them. Even as they sat clustered around the Bois Verduros, unified in their faith of faithlessness, sacrificing the holy objects of a thousand different powers, unafraid of the wrath of those gods and the rage of their servants, somehow the visage of the petrified corpse of Aoskar was the one thing that truly frightened them.
But Terrance was locked away within his maze, entrapped by the one who'd slain the Portal Father in the first place, and despite his knowledge and his worries and laments, he couldn't see the godisle, nor the hurricane of psionic wind that centered upon it, nor the men that he'd left in place to watch over it. Locked away in his maze, he had no way of knowing the fate that had befallen them.
Deep in the freezing, fog shrouded depths of Niflheim, a single figure stepped out from the trees and into a solitary hollow in the heart of the layer. She emerged out of the forest and out of nothingness, the space between spaces, and began to walk uphill with intent but with difficulty at the same time.
A chorus of cries cut the air as her first footfall broke the soil and the thin, gossamer layer of frozen water that had formed as a crust atop of it. A slow and awkward drag and then another step, and the screaming and mewling grew in pitch. Hundreds of larvae lay within the forest clearing, cluttering the hillside like stranded and suffocating fish gasping for breath. The placid, almost serenely happy look upon the young girl's face stood in stark contrast to the cries of agony of the wriggling, dying petitioners.
She ignored them and continued onwards, smiling as she gazed up at the massive obelisk that dominated the top of the hill. The Niflheim Loadstone shed an ambient blue glow from the runes cut into the mottled surface of its stone, looking like a cross between stone, meteoric iron, and long-dead marrow.
At her feet, blocking her way, a starving hordeling looked up at her with flecks of bloody foam on its lips and a ragged, raw sound rattling up from its trachea, begging her for more, begging for release, begging for something it couldn't comprehend or understand.
The young girl moved awkwardly, repositioning her lame left leg, leaning on her crooked shepherd’s staff, and bending down to take the wretched thing's chin in the palm of her hand. It snarled and purred and whined as blood swam in the humour of its eyes, blinded by the stress hemorrhages in its retinas. It could not comprehend its agony, nor the yearning that had drawn it to the second of the three great monoliths.
Tellura Ibn Shartalan smiled, false innocence sparkling on her face and dancing in her eyes as she shushed it with pursed lips.
It looked up, blind and helpless, pleading.
"Your agony is meaningless."
The hordeling, whether it could understand her or not, paused and was still in her hands, all a moment before the proto-fiend's shadow snatched it with two dimensional hands and hurled it to the tree line with a hissing snarl.
The young girl smiled, stood up, and resumed her climb as if nothing had happened.
Once at the summit of the hill, she leaned once more upon her staff and stiffly, awkwardly sat down. She brushed the dust from homespun clothes, moved her one crippled leg into a more comfortable position, and laid her staff across her knees before turning towards the Loadstone.
"Speak with me Brother."
The dust and frost at the base of the Loadstone sublimated and for a brief moment the errant fog hung in the air and seemed to cling to and define a figure rising up from the earth, partially embedded in the stone of the monolith. The shape tilted its head, the glow of the runes turned from blue to red and the particulates fell out of the air and the Shepherdess was once again alone, at least apparently.
She gave no expression but her shadow smirked.
"The matter within Pitiless is concluded." The Architect’s voice echoed across the clearing.
She touched the stone and immediately her mind was filled with a recollection of the events from a dozen different perspectives, including Vast's in his last moments.
Tellura closed her eyes and smiled, soaking in the experience. Momentarily she indulged in Vast's murder from his and the Architect's perspective until the radiating aura of sick malice drove the surrounding field of larvae into a screaming chorus.
"Be silent..." she muttered, taking her hand from the monolith, breaking contact and turning to face the soul-worms.
Wretched little filth of the mortal realm, they had their uses in the current era yes, but they were flawed, filthy things who had only the most vague conception of the alignment tethered to their souls.
She snapped her fingers brusquely and turned back to the Loadstone with a sour look of distaste crossing her features. Silence resumed its reign over the clearing as all around the Baernaloth the vocal chords of each and every larvae and hordeling were severed with a whim.
"We have our silence again Brother." She said, a calm but cold smile returning to her face. "You seem to have enjoyed yourself most recently. But more of interest, how have our children dealt with our gifts given to them through Vast?”
"The Overlord of Carceri has most of what she desires."
Tellura nodded. "Given the godisles she already stripped, with and without access to the divinity leach, she can reasonably finish the Carcerian tower, and she has enough of what her owner requires."
"Through her, the Ebon has much of what he desires, but not everything." The Architect said with a peculiar intonation as he spoke of the Oinoloth. "They will fall short."
"Heavens no…" Tellura laughed with a malicious grin. "We can't spoil them, handing them everything they need. That does them nothing, and benefits us little."
"There are enough parties opposed to them in the Astral at this point. One of them will take action given enough motivation and pointed in the right direction. Vast did well in that regard."
"We spite their face and let them struggle, thinking they have accomplished something. Let them dance on their own, but we'll supply a tune for the marionettes to rattle to."
The mental presence of the Architect nodded. "That is the intention so far as this current matter is concerned. Whether the Ebon will dance or not is something else entirely. Through his subordinates we can force the affair of course, but for the moment it appears that he is not aware of the full scope of our interest and action.”
"Are we certain though?" A bit of hesitancy crept into her voice and her shadow's eyes narrowed.
"There are aspects that remain uncertain." Lazarius stated calmly, firmly. He had the same hesitancy though, all of The Demented did, even if they didn't care to admit to it.
The shepherdess stood up and leaned heavily on her staff, tapping her fingers out of nervous habit, thinking and absorbed in her thoughts, temporarily beyond the reach of her brother.
Aspects? Funny to use that thrice-bedamned word. Aspects indeed. We've had half of eternity on this. Assumptions will do us no good when the stakes are so large. We've set our stage, populated it with our chosen actors, chosen scenes, chosen f*cking lines in many cases. Now is not the moment to lose control to someone else, something else, especially when we've been worried about it since the start.
"The Clockmaker has told us that..." The Architect began, taking his sister from her worried speculation.
Crippled fool that he is she thought as her shadow sneered and dug into claws into the soil. Uncertainly was frustrating.
She gave a resigned sigh and cut off her sibling. “Harishek can say what he wants, but at the heart of the matter his resources, our resources, on the issue are not infallible.”
"The future is an uncertain thing." The Architect replied. "While we may guess and grasp at possibilities, I am not convinced. I accept none of this at face value, and while some of the others may question the need to so closely watch and manipulate events, there are other variables involved."
"We need to find out for certain." She narrowed her eyes, shadow and shepherdess alike now. "Do you actually think that..."
"Yes.” Lazarius replied. “It is a concern."
Back here once again, Skalliska thought as she stepped through the portal and emerged into the silver expanse of the Astral. The last two times have been a mixture of hope, exploitation, and revelation. I'm not exactly certain which of those, if any of them, might apply this time around. I just hope that closure is one of the things we find, one way or another.
She drifted as gravity slipped away and inertia carried her free of the glittering, swirling portal behind her as the others emerged to join her. They chattered behind her and reflexively drew their weapons, scanning the endless omni-directional sky for githyanki, psurlon, and any other hazards of the plane. Skalliska however was still plumbing her memories, deep in thought.
An image of a dark scaled kobold flooded into her mind. He’d taught her so many things in the short time that she had known him, and known their mutual god. She thought back to the last evening she’d spent along with him, whispering prayers and burning incense, going through a specific ceremony marking the anniversary of her flight from her world and onto the planes. The date held old memories, old significance, and now held the promise of a close of another chapter of her life and the start of another.
The soft current of the astral breeze gently caressed Skalliska’s snout and she smiled, thinking of Sekeledar’s touch, gentle and reassuring, wise, calm yet passionate, the smell of his scales mixing with the incense and…
“You ok Skalliska?” Nisha asked, tugging on the kobold’s tail and breaking her out of her moment of introversion. “You were drifting off to the side there for a bit.”
Skalliska blinked and shook her head, “Oh yeah, I’m fine. The wind had something weird on it, snagged my thoughts for a moment. Sorry about that.”
Were she a mammal, she would have been blushing tremendously.
Of course with Nisha being a mammal, of perhaps dubious admixture of blood, she would have turned purple if she blushed, given that her skin was still a faint shade of green, even after having taken a bath. With her hair still colored red, and looking something like burning absinthe on hooves, Tristol was amused, and he suspected that when she’d washed up after… well… whatever she’d done in the first place, she’d spent more time playing with bubbles in the tub than actually getting clean.
Bubbles provided by a young faerie dragon of course. And speaking of Amberblue, the tiny drake was back in Sigil for his own safety, and perhaps everyone else’s. "A camping adventure all by himself in a wild and untamed bar in the Clerk's Ward!" At least that was how Toras had tried to play it off as.
The tiny drake was more than a bit suspect; even he wasn't that entirely naive, not always at least. They couldn't risk taking him along, it was simply too dangerous, but than again, it was perhaps just as risky leaving an immature, wish-wielding, butterfly-winged dragon back in Sigil with only the kitchen staff to watch after him.
“So… where exactly are we?” Florian asked as she gazed out at the largely featureless void they’d emerged out into.
The cleric very immediately paused to add one particularly salient point: “First person who says, ‘The Astral’ gets punted through a color pool.”
And what good timing it was, as Nisha babbled a few syllables of nonsense, good sense catching her tongue before it went off on its own. “No fun at all…”
“The question remains though.” The cleric said. “Are we anywhere close to Aoskar’s godisle?”
“I think we’ve got a while yet to travel.” Skalliska answered, orienting herself and looking at her planar sextant for some sense of direction.
“We did the best we could though.” Clueless said, giving a shrug.
“At least we won’t get hungry on the way there!” Toras said, chuckling.
“Hey, I would have suggested another portal, but it wasn’t an option.” Clueless explained. “Best we have is a location and some known landmarks to get there.”
They were some distance away in fact since the portal in Sigil that they had taken, a stained glass window on the flank of an arboretum in the noble's district, it hadn't opened up directly onto Aoskar's godisle. The original portal within the Shattered Temple had, but after the Tempest of Doors, it had ceased to function. And in any event, even if it were still in operation, the site was inaccessible due to the squatters, thugs loyal to Muriov Garianas, who kept it free of Athar influence, or anyone else for that matter, pending their employer's petition to build a temple of Pluto atop the ruins.
But the hours passed, and time slipped away from them, leading to long periods of silent travel through the silver sea juxtaposed with moments during which the psionic winds sent random, errant visions filtering through their heads, nudging them from their mutual solitude and prompting them into conversation.
Landmarks passed by, one waypoint of their journey falling behind and melding into the others as they continued to travel, the distance slipping away as much as the passage of time. And ultimately, they drew closer and closer to their destination, the godisle of the Portal Father, Aoskar.
“Does anyone notice anything different?” Tristol asked, brushing his hair out of his face.
“That’s your line Fyrehowl.” Nisha interjected.
Kiro drifted to a halt, having rapidly adapted to the unique mode of transit the plane presented. He might have said he’d never been there before, but he’d seemed to skip over the awkward period of adjustment that most newcomers to the experience underwent. The others didn’t notice or had other things on their minds though.
“The wind.” He said, “It’s getting stronger.”
“You’re right.” Fyrehowl agreed. “For a while now. Just random sensations.”
They were on the right course then, because from what they’d been told by Clueless, according to a semi-tangible simulacrum of Terrance, the location was surrounded by an astral storm to dwarf all astral storms.
It didn’t take them long to confirm that either, as soon the silvery light of the plane grew choppy and blurred at the edges of their sight. Less than an hour later the sky seemed to lift back to reveal a massive, continent sized whirlpool of turbulence, color, and congealed thoughts spinning and whispering in the void.
"Somewhere Talos is drooling over this." Florian said, adding a mild curse, not out of anger but out of wonder.
They stood at the fringes of the largest astral storm they had ever seen, a psionic maelstrom of such size that it staggered the imagination. Even there at the fringe of the storm they could hear and feel bits of errant thoughts and random perceptions slip into their minds like less physical sensory equivalents of the ‘dark birds’ of an ocanthan bladestorm slicing through Hriste.
"And this is where they're bottled up?" Toras asked, motioning towards the roiling, multicolored hellstorm. "In there?"
The fighter inhaled and shook his head. It wasn’t a pleasant place.
Clueless nodded, wholly sharing the sentiment. "So it would seem."
"Just one question though." Florian asked. "How long has this storm been out here?"
Fyrehowl twitched an ear and looked out at the storm. "Why is that?"
"Because if it's recent, I'm going home." The cleric said with a half chuckle. "Bye, see you later sort of thing. Anyone capable of making a storm that big... yeah."
Clueless shook his head, "No, it's been here for as long as anyone can remember."
"Fiends or not though, that's beyond anything we've seen out of them." Fyrehowl added. "They've been keen to hide themselves, and they're probably happy to use the storm as a natural feature to keep anyone else away."
Skalliska nodded. "The githyanki, even the psurlon too, they consider this whole area as cursed. If someone was here, they wouldn't be bothered."
"Which brings us to another question." Toras said. "How are we supposed to handle the storm? I'd rather not lose my mind or get separated from everyone, only to find myself with no way back to Sigil."
“I can help with that.” Florian said. “I can’t completely deal with the issue, but I can at least make it less dangerous.”
The cleric looked out at the storm and then back to the other spellcasters. “Tristol? Skalliska? Kiro? Do you have anything?”
Tristol shook his head, “Not at the moment no.”
Skalliska likewise gave a shrug, “I can keep myself safe, and if it comes to it, I have a scroll of planeshift in my pack that you’re welcome to.”
“Assuming we don’t get disintegrated.” Nisha added with a giggle.
Kiro smiled, “I trust that Sutekh will keep us safe, but he hasn’t provided me with any specific protections. Have faith, I take that as a good sign, rather than a bad one.”
Toras winced, “I’ll try. But I still don’t relish the idea of just diving into a storm.”
“Well be fine.” Fyrehowl said.
Without anything further to say, the group paused at the edge of the storm and let the casters take what few precautions they had which might help them against the winds. Once they had done so, they gathered close to one another and dove into the swirling currents.
Perhaps oddly, the influence of the storm wasn’t immediate, only a bit of mental static that clouded the senses and nothing more. But then they began to daydream, or at least that was the closest descriptor of what they experienced. Random thoughts, random images, the dreams and musings of uncounted millions rotating in space and flitting around lost, forever separated from those that had first dreamed them. It was distracting, but the deeper into the storm they progressed, the harder and harder it became to just shrug them off and keep to the task at hand. Confusion came easily, and combined with the ever increasing barrage of lights and the physically manifest current, they were likely in trouble if they had any preconceptions about staying on course into the heart of the storm.
It might not be possible.
But… what is that? Fyrehowl thought to herself as she noticed something within the storm. She’d been fighting off the constant infiltration of alien thoughts and perceptions into her mind, but what she saw seemed different. It began as just a weight in her mind, an urge to turn and look, then a physical tug like a gravity well, something more than just an errant thought from out of the storm. There was something there.
"Wait..." Fyrehowl called out, barely audible. "Does anyone else see that?"
Almost imperceptible against the swirling immaterial winds of the storm, there was an imperfection in the void, a massive volume of space that seemed somehow distorted, almost like a spot in which some deific poet had imperfectly erased a line of verse, leaving the parchment smudged.
The distortion was oblong, nearly spherical, almost exactly like the shape of the wardings that had surrounded Maanzicorian’s godisle. Set against the storm, they perceived another warded and obscured god-husk.
"Hmm..." Nisha said. "That was quick."
It was. It was far too soon in fact.
"I know that distance is almost entirely subjective on the Astral," Toras said. " But with all due respect to Nisha's mayfly attention span, there's no way we can be here already."
Florian gestured to the distortion. "I agree, on both actually, but then what's that?"
And she had a point. There was something there, seemingly a godisle, and one that was either warded or by some natural trait was warping the storm around it. If it was the former, there was a chance it was hiding something, and if the latter if might actually be Aoskar's corpse. They couldn't be sure till the actually looked.
All eyes looked to Fyrehowl, their decision seemingly hinged on the cipher's sense of horrible impending doom or lack thereof.
"What?" The lupinal asked. "I'm not Rhys you know."
"She's not objecting, I think we're safe then." Clueless said with a nudge.
Florian grinned, "Well then, that settles it, we check it out."
Fyrehowl rolled her eyes. They gave her far too much credit, though in truth she'd begun to have those sorts of hunches and premonitions more and more of late, half the time acting on them before she felt it, the responses flowing naturally as needed.
"Just so long as you don't blame me when something attacks us the moment we go through." She said. "Or if the wards disintegrate anyone, not that we've had anyone disintegrated before..."
"Buzz buzz." Nisha chirped, doing her best mayfly impression.
Kiro smiled at the Xaositect, but his mind was preoccupied on other things. He was worried about what they might find inside the distortion. But no need to concern the others with his thoughts, best to show them the outward appearance of a faithful, ever certain priest of a deity of wisdom and mysticism.
Breaking the barrier there was a gentle ripple, like an insect slipping between the gossamer meniscus of a pond's surface, but as their vision cleared and they came into view of the interior of the hollow, there were no indications of any dire wardings in place.
"No storm." Tristol said, his mind suddenly silent of the storm's mad whispers and sensations.
The interior was entirely devoid of psionic turbulence, a shelter against the current, and sitting nestled in its heart was a godisle. Rising up out of the void like an ancient and petrified dragon, the rocky island was large and reptilian, some ancient and nameless saurian power long since having slipped into eternal twilight.
The group drifted to a swift halt as they drew close enough to see the fortress constructed atop the godisle and a githyanki carrack tethered to a platform carved into the dead god's snout.
"Ah sh*t." Skalliska said, immediately moving to chant a spell from a scroll to conceal them all from sight.
Once invisible however, they drifted gradually closer. The upper floors of the keep bristled with cannons, the same as they'd seen earlier, but from the exterior the structure seemed almost vacant. Only a few of the crystalline windows burned with light, and but a handful of githyanki stood guard on the ship, but none at the main entrance; whatever the place was, it seemed to be run on a skeleton crew.
Fyrehowl paused and furrowed her brow. "Does this strike anyone else as being odd?"
"How so?" Skalliska asked.
"That's not Aoskar's godisle." The lupinal said. "We're nowhere near the center of the storm."
She had a point. If the 'loths were so keenly interested in that specific godisle, why was there a massive structure built atop what appeared to be another god-husk barely inside the fringes of the storm. If they'd occupied another unrelated godisle, why had they done so, how many resources had they hidden inside, and how many other such places drifted within the current of the storm like breakers above the tide.
A shadow suddenly passed over them, slowly drifting across the godisle, the keep, and the githyanki. The shell of wardings shimmered and crackled momentarily, reinforcing itself as the distorted shape of a pair of astral dreadnaughts passed overhead and then out of sight, passing by and continuing deeper into the storm. The guards didn't so much as give it a cursory look, the entire affair seemed almost routine to them.
Like Maanzicorian's godisle, the desecration of the divine corpses drew the attention of the Guardian of Dead Gods and his servants, but they seemed unable to pierce the wards to vent their fury on the 'loths' servants.
Fyrehowl narrowed her eyes and looked at the building. It was solidly built, almost like a fortress, but the defenses were incomplete, almost an afterthought really, and half of them seemed like they’d been partially dismantled recently. But then moving down to the windows, a majority of them seemed to have heavy bars in place across them.
Less a fortress, the building was a prison.
Oh to be certain, the members of the faction viewed their headquarters in different ways. Some saw it as cosmic irony, others as a pointed observation on the transience and ultimate mortality of the gods, and others enjoyed it with more spite towards the faithful than anything else. The factol in those days, the former high priest of Mishakal named Terrance, he personally saw it as the second of those three, and he rather loathed the third, but he had other reasons to value the precise location of his faction's most holy place.
Long before the Athar were conceived of and founded by Dunn and Ciro, long before the rise of any of the current faction, and long before the rise of the city-spanning guilds, millennia ago, the shattered temple had been the grand cathedral of Aoskar the Portal Father, god of portals and planewalkers. When the power's greed for Sigil had waxed to its zenith and his hold over the faithful of the City of Doors had become nearly monolithic, like the later founders of the Athar, he too fell from grace. In a few bloody moments of shadows and blades, his temple and much of the surrounding district were razed to the ground, his priests were slaughtered, and he himself was made an example of. With the dust settled and the blood still fresh and slowly steaming upon the cobblestones, Aoskar's corpse drifted within the Astral, petrified and pierced through with dozens of immediately recognizable blades.
Legends of that time and those events glossed over much of the original facts, letting them slip away into the mists of the collective past of the multiverse, but the lore of factions and sages told things that held closer to the truth. Terrance had been aware of much of that truth, and he'd known that the Shattered Temple held fragments of the portfolio of long-dead Aoskar. Even with the death of the power, the slaughter of his clergy, the staggering death toll among his most faithful, and the virtual nonexistence of his faith thousands of years later, the site of his destruction by the Lady of Pain was still linked to him in subtle and mysterious ways.
It was always rumored that the Athar knew of a portal that opened onto the Astral, a stable portal leading to Aoskar's drifting godisle in the silvery twilight of the graveyard of dead gods. It was true, but while the Athar sometimes spread the tale as proof of the falsehood of the so-called divine, they never shared access to the portal itself, nor to the location of the petrified corpse either. For some reason the corpse and its environs terrified them. Even as they sat clustered around the Bois Verduros, unified in their faith of faithlessness, sacrificing the holy objects of a thousand different powers, unafraid of the wrath of those gods and the rage of their servants, somehow the visage of the petrified corpse of Aoskar was the one thing that truly frightened them.
But Terrance was locked away within his maze, entrapped by the one who'd slain the Portal Father in the first place, and despite his knowledge and his worries and laments, he couldn't see the godisle, nor the hurricane of psionic wind that centered upon it, nor the men that he'd left in place to watch over it. Locked away in his maze, he had no way of knowing the fate that had befallen them.
***
Deep in the freezing, fog shrouded depths of Niflheim, a single figure stepped out from the trees and into a solitary hollow in the heart of the layer. She emerged out of the forest and out of nothingness, the space between spaces, and began to walk uphill with intent but with difficulty at the same time.
A chorus of cries cut the air as her first footfall broke the soil and the thin, gossamer layer of frozen water that had formed as a crust atop of it. A slow and awkward drag and then another step, and the screaming and mewling grew in pitch. Hundreds of larvae lay within the forest clearing, cluttering the hillside like stranded and suffocating fish gasping for breath. The placid, almost serenely happy look upon the young girl's face stood in stark contrast to the cries of agony of the wriggling, dying petitioners.
She ignored them and continued onwards, smiling as she gazed up at the massive obelisk that dominated the top of the hill. The Niflheim Loadstone shed an ambient blue glow from the runes cut into the mottled surface of its stone, looking like a cross between stone, meteoric iron, and long-dead marrow.
At her feet, blocking her way, a starving hordeling looked up at her with flecks of bloody foam on its lips and a ragged, raw sound rattling up from its trachea, begging her for more, begging for release, begging for something it couldn't comprehend or understand.
The young girl moved awkwardly, repositioning her lame left leg, leaning on her crooked shepherd’s staff, and bending down to take the wretched thing's chin in the palm of her hand. It snarled and purred and whined as blood swam in the humour of its eyes, blinded by the stress hemorrhages in its retinas. It could not comprehend its agony, nor the yearning that had drawn it to the second of the three great monoliths.
Tellura Ibn Shartalan smiled, false innocence sparkling on her face and dancing in her eyes as she shushed it with pursed lips.
It looked up, blind and helpless, pleading.
"Your agony is meaningless."
The hordeling, whether it could understand her or not, paused and was still in her hands, all a moment before the proto-fiend's shadow snatched it with two dimensional hands and hurled it to the tree line with a hissing snarl.
The young girl smiled, stood up, and resumed her climb as if nothing had happened.
Once at the summit of the hill, she leaned once more upon her staff and stiffly, awkwardly sat down. She brushed the dust from homespun clothes, moved her one crippled leg into a more comfortable position, and laid her staff across her knees before turning towards the Loadstone.
"Speak with me Brother."
The dust and frost at the base of the Loadstone sublimated and for a brief moment the errant fog hung in the air and seemed to cling to and define a figure rising up from the earth, partially embedded in the stone of the monolith. The shape tilted its head, the glow of the runes turned from blue to red and the particulates fell out of the air and the Shepherdess was once again alone, at least apparently.
She gave no expression but her shadow smirked.
"The matter within Pitiless is concluded." The Architect’s voice echoed across the clearing.
She touched the stone and immediately her mind was filled with a recollection of the events from a dozen different perspectives, including Vast's in his last moments.
Tellura closed her eyes and smiled, soaking in the experience. Momentarily she indulged in Vast's murder from his and the Architect's perspective until the radiating aura of sick malice drove the surrounding field of larvae into a screaming chorus.
"Be silent..." she muttered, taking her hand from the monolith, breaking contact and turning to face the soul-worms.
Wretched little filth of the mortal realm, they had their uses in the current era yes, but they were flawed, filthy things who had only the most vague conception of the alignment tethered to their souls.
She snapped her fingers brusquely and turned back to the Loadstone with a sour look of distaste crossing her features. Silence resumed its reign over the clearing as all around the Baernaloth the vocal chords of each and every larvae and hordeling were severed with a whim.
"We have our silence again Brother." She said, a calm but cold smile returning to her face. "You seem to have enjoyed yourself most recently. But more of interest, how have our children dealt with our gifts given to them through Vast?”
"The Overlord of Carceri has most of what she desires."
Tellura nodded. "Given the godisles she already stripped, with and without access to the divinity leach, she can reasonably finish the Carcerian tower, and she has enough of what her owner requires."
"Through her, the Ebon has much of what he desires, but not everything." The Architect said with a peculiar intonation as he spoke of the Oinoloth. "They will fall short."
"Heavens no…" Tellura laughed with a malicious grin. "We can't spoil them, handing them everything they need. That does them nothing, and benefits us little."
"There are enough parties opposed to them in the Astral at this point. One of them will take action given enough motivation and pointed in the right direction. Vast did well in that regard."
"We spite their face and let them struggle, thinking they have accomplished something. Let them dance on their own, but we'll supply a tune for the marionettes to rattle to."
The mental presence of the Architect nodded. "That is the intention so far as this current matter is concerned. Whether the Ebon will dance or not is something else entirely. Through his subordinates we can force the affair of course, but for the moment it appears that he is not aware of the full scope of our interest and action.”
"Are we certain though?" A bit of hesitancy crept into her voice and her shadow's eyes narrowed.
"There are aspects that remain uncertain." Lazarius stated calmly, firmly. He had the same hesitancy though, all of The Demented did, even if they didn't care to admit to it.
The shepherdess stood up and leaned heavily on her staff, tapping her fingers out of nervous habit, thinking and absorbed in her thoughts, temporarily beyond the reach of her brother.
Aspects? Funny to use that thrice-bedamned word. Aspects indeed. We've had half of eternity on this. Assumptions will do us no good when the stakes are so large. We've set our stage, populated it with our chosen actors, chosen scenes, chosen f*cking lines in many cases. Now is not the moment to lose control to someone else, something else, especially when we've been worried about it since the start.
"The Clockmaker has told us that..." The Architect began, taking his sister from her worried speculation.
Crippled fool that he is she thought as her shadow sneered and dug into claws into the soil. Uncertainly was frustrating.
She gave a resigned sigh and cut off her sibling. “Harishek can say what he wants, but at the heart of the matter his resources, our resources, on the issue are not infallible.”
"The future is an uncertain thing." The Architect replied. "While we may guess and grasp at possibilities, I am not convinced. I accept none of this at face value, and while some of the others may question the need to so closely watch and manipulate events, there are other variables involved."
"We need to find out for certain." She narrowed her eyes, shadow and shepherdess alike now. "Do you actually think that..."
"Yes.” Lazarius replied. “It is a concern."
***
Back here once again, Skalliska thought as she stepped through the portal and emerged into the silver expanse of the Astral. The last two times have been a mixture of hope, exploitation, and revelation. I'm not exactly certain which of those, if any of them, might apply this time around. I just hope that closure is one of the things we find, one way or another.
She drifted as gravity slipped away and inertia carried her free of the glittering, swirling portal behind her as the others emerged to join her. They chattered behind her and reflexively drew their weapons, scanning the endless omni-directional sky for githyanki, psurlon, and any other hazards of the plane. Skalliska however was still plumbing her memories, deep in thought.
An image of a dark scaled kobold flooded into her mind. He’d taught her so many things in the short time that she had known him, and known their mutual god. She thought back to the last evening she’d spent along with him, whispering prayers and burning incense, going through a specific ceremony marking the anniversary of her flight from her world and onto the planes. The date held old memories, old significance, and now held the promise of a close of another chapter of her life and the start of another.
The soft current of the astral breeze gently caressed Skalliska’s snout and she smiled, thinking of Sekeledar’s touch, gentle and reassuring, wise, calm yet passionate, the smell of his scales mixing with the incense and…
“You ok Skalliska?” Nisha asked, tugging on the kobold’s tail and breaking her out of her moment of introversion. “You were drifting off to the side there for a bit.”
Skalliska blinked and shook her head, “Oh yeah, I’m fine. The wind had something weird on it, snagged my thoughts for a moment. Sorry about that.”
Were she a mammal, she would have been blushing tremendously.
Of course with Nisha being a mammal, of perhaps dubious admixture of blood, she would have turned purple if she blushed, given that her skin was still a faint shade of green, even after having taken a bath. With her hair still colored red, and looking something like burning absinthe on hooves, Tristol was amused, and he suspected that when she’d washed up after… well… whatever she’d done in the first place, she’d spent more time playing with bubbles in the tub than actually getting clean.
Bubbles provided by a young faerie dragon of course. And speaking of Amberblue, the tiny drake was back in Sigil for his own safety, and perhaps everyone else’s. "A camping adventure all by himself in a wild and untamed bar in the Clerk's Ward!" At least that was how Toras had tried to play it off as.
The tiny drake was more than a bit suspect; even he wasn't that entirely naive, not always at least. They couldn't risk taking him along, it was simply too dangerous, but than again, it was perhaps just as risky leaving an immature, wish-wielding, butterfly-winged dragon back in Sigil with only the kitchen staff to watch after him.
“So… where exactly are we?” Florian asked as she gazed out at the largely featureless void they’d emerged out into.
The cleric very immediately paused to add one particularly salient point: “First person who says, ‘The Astral’ gets punted through a color pool.”
And what good timing it was, as Nisha babbled a few syllables of nonsense, good sense catching her tongue before it went off on its own. “No fun at all…”
“The question remains though.” The cleric said. “Are we anywhere close to Aoskar’s godisle?”
“I think we’ve got a while yet to travel.” Skalliska answered, orienting herself and looking at her planar sextant for some sense of direction.
“We did the best we could though.” Clueless said, giving a shrug.
“At least we won’t get hungry on the way there!” Toras said, chuckling.
“Hey, I would have suggested another portal, but it wasn’t an option.” Clueless explained. “Best we have is a location and some known landmarks to get there.”
They were some distance away in fact since the portal in Sigil that they had taken, a stained glass window on the flank of an arboretum in the noble's district, it hadn't opened up directly onto Aoskar's godisle. The original portal within the Shattered Temple had, but after the Tempest of Doors, it had ceased to function. And in any event, even if it were still in operation, the site was inaccessible due to the squatters, thugs loyal to Muriov Garianas, who kept it free of Athar influence, or anyone else for that matter, pending their employer's petition to build a temple of Pluto atop the ruins.
But the hours passed, and time slipped away from them, leading to long periods of silent travel through the silver sea juxtaposed with moments during which the psionic winds sent random, errant visions filtering through their heads, nudging them from their mutual solitude and prompting them into conversation.
Landmarks passed by, one waypoint of their journey falling behind and melding into the others as they continued to travel, the distance slipping away as much as the passage of time. And ultimately, they drew closer and closer to their destination, the godisle of the Portal Father, Aoskar.
“Does anyone notice anything different?” Tristol asked, brushing his hair out of his face.
“That’s your line Fyrehowl.” Nisha interjected.
Kiro drifted to a halt, having rapidly adapted to the unique mode of transit the plane presented. He might have said he’d never been there before, but he’d seemed to skip over the awkward period of adjustment that most newcomers to the experience underwent. The others didn’t notice or had other things on their minds though.
“The wind.” He said, “It’s getting stronger.”
“You’re right.” Fyrehowl agreed. “For a while now. Just random sensations.”
They were on the right course then, because from what they’d been told by Clueless, according to a semi-tangible simulacrum of Terrance, the location was surrounded by an astral storm to dwarf all astral storms.
It didn’t take them long to confirm that either, as soon the silvery light of the plane grew choppy and blurred at the edges of their sight. Less than an hour later the sky seemed to lift back to reveal a massive, continent sized whirlpool of turbulence, color, and congealed thoughts spinning and whispering in the void.
"Somewhere Talos is drooling over this." Florian said, adding a mild curse, not out of anger but out of wonder.
They stood at the fringes of the largest astral storm they had ever seen, a psionic maelstrom of such size that it staggered the imagination. Even there at the fringe of the storm they could hear and feel bits of errant thoughts and random perceptions slip into their minds like less physical sensory equivalents of the ‘dark birds’ of an ocanthan bladestorm slicing through Hriste.
"And this is where they're bottled up?" Toras asked, motioning towards the roiling, multicolored hellstorm. "In there?"
The fighter inhaled and shook his head. It wasn’t a pleasant place.
Clueless nodded, wholly sharing the sentiment. "So it would seem."
"Just one question though." Florian asked. "How long has this storm been out here?"
Fyrehowl twitched an ear and looked out at the storm. "Why is that?"
"Because if it's recent, I'm going home." The cleric said with a half chuckle. "Bye, see you later sort of thing. Anyone capable of making a storm that big... yeah."
Clueless shook his head, "No, it's been here for as long as anyone can remember."
"Fiends or not though, that's beyond anything we've seen out of them." Fyrehowl added. "They've been keen to hide themselves, and they're probably happy to use the storm as a natural feature to keep anyone else away."
Skalliska nodded. "The githyanki, even the psurlon too, they consider this whole area as cursed. If someone was here, they wouldn't be bothered."
"Which brings us to another question." Toras said. "How are we supposed to handle the storm? I'd rather not lose my mind or get separated from everyone, only to find myself with no way back to Sigil."
“I can help with that.” Florian said. “I can’t completely deal with the issue, but I can at least make it less dangerous.”
The cleric looked out at the storm and then back to the other spellcasters. “Tristol? Skalliska? Kiro? Do you have anything?”
Tristol shook his head, “Not at the moment no.”
Skalliska likewise gave a shrug, “I can keep myself safe, and if it comes to it, I have a scroll of planeshift in my pack that you’re welcome to.”
“Assuming we don’t get disintegrated.” Nisha added with a giggle.
Kiro smiled, “I trust that Sutekh will keep us safe, but he hasn’t provided me with any specific protections. Have faith, I take that as a good sign, rather than a bad one.”
Toras winced, “I’ll try. But I still don’t relish the idea of just diving into a storm.”
“Well be fine.” Fyrehowl said.
Without anything further to say, the group paused at the edge of the storm and let the casters take what few precautions they had which might help them against the winds. Once they had done so, they gathered close to one another and dove into the swirling currents.
Perhaps oddly, the influence of the storm wasn’t immediate, only a bit of mental static that clouded the senses and nothing more. But then they began to daydream, or at least that was the closest descriptor of what they experienced. Random thoughts, random images, the dreams and musings of uncounted millions rotating in space and flitting around lost, forever separated from those that had first dreamed them. It was distracting, but the deeper into the storm they progressed, the harder and harder it became to just shrug them off and keep to the task at hand. Confusion came easily, and combined with the ever increasing barrage of lights and the physically manifest current, they were likely in trouble if they had any preconceptions about staying on course into the heart of the storm.
It might not be possible.
But… what is that? Fyrehowl thought to herself as she noticed something within the storm. She’d been fighting off the constant infiltration of alien thoughts and perceptions into her mind, but what she saw seemed different. It began as just a weight in her mind, an urge to turn and look, then a physical tug like a gravity well, something more than just an errant thought from out of the storm. There was something there.
"Wait..." Fyrehowl called out, barely audible. "Does anyone else see that?"
Almost imperceptible against the swirling immaterial winds of the storm, there was an imperfection in the void, a massive volume of space that seemed somehow distorted, almost like a spot in which some deific poet had imperfectly erased a line of verse, leaving the parchment smudged.
The distortion was oblong, nearly spherical, almost exactly like the shape of the wardings that had surrounded Maanzicorian’s godisle. Set against the storm, they perceived another warded and obscured god-husk.
"Hmm..." Nisha said. "That was quick."
It was. It was far too soon in fact.
"I know that distance is almost entirely subjective on the Astral," Toras said. " But with all due respect to Nisha's mayfly attention span, there's no way we can be here already."
Florian gestured to the distortion. "I agree, on both actually, but then what's that?"
And she had a point. There was something there, seemingly a godisle, and one that was either warded or by some natural trait was warping the storm around it. If it was the former, there was a chance it was hiding something, and if the latter if might actually be Aoskar's corpse. They couldn't be sure till the actually looked.
All eyes looked to Fyrehowl, their decision seemingly hinged on the cipher's sense of horrible impending doom or lack thereof.
"What?" The lupinal asked. "I'm not Rhys you know."
"She's not objecting, I think we're safe then." Clueless said with a nudge.
Florian grinned, "Well then, that settles it, we check it out."
Fyrehowl rolled her eyes. They gave her far too much credit, though in truth she'd begun to have those sorts of hunches and premonitions more and more of late, half the time acting on them before she felt it, the responses flowing naturally as needed.
"Just so long as you don't blame me when something attacks us the moment we go through." She said. "Or if the wards disintegrate anyone, not that we've had anyone disintegrated before..."
"Buzz buzz." Nisha chirped, doing her best mayfly impression.
Kiro smiled at the Xaositect, but his mind was preoccupied on other things. He was worried about what they might find inside the distortion. But no need to concern the others with his thoughts, best to show them the outward appearance of a faithful, ever certain priest of a deity of wisdom and mysticism.
Breaking the barrier there was a gentle ripple, like an insect slipping between the gossamer meniscus of a pond's surface, but as their vision cleared and they came into view of the interior of the hollow, there were no indications of any dire wardings in place.
"No storm." Tristol said, his mind suddenly silent of the storm's mad whispers and sensations.
The interior was entirely devoid of psionic turbulence, a shelter against the current, and sitting nestled in its heart was a godisle. Rising up out of the void like an ancient and petrified dragon, the rocky island was large and reptilian, some ancient and nameless saurian power long since having slipped into eternal twilight.
The group drifted to a swift halt as they drew close enough to see the fortress constructed atop the godisle and a githyanki carrack tethered to a platform carved into the dead god's snout.
"Ah sh*t." Skalliska said, immediately moving to chant a spell from a scroll to conceal them all from sight.
Once invisible however, they drifted gradually closer. The upper floors of the keep bristled with cannons, the same as they'd seen earlier, but from the exterior the structure seemed almost vacant. Only a few of the crystalline windows burned with light, and but a handful of githyanki stood guard on the ship, but none at the main entrance; whatever the place was, it seemed to be run on a skeleton crew.
Fyrehowl paused and furrowed her brow. "Does this strike anyone else as being odd?"
"How so?" Skalliska asked.
"That's not Aoskar's godisle." The lupinal said. "We're nowhere near the center of the storm."
She had a point. If the 'loths were so keenly interested in that specific godisle, why was there a massive structure built atop what appeared to be another god-husk barely inside the fringes of the storm. If they'd occupied another unrelated godisle, why had they done so, how many resources had they hidden inside, and how many other such places drifted within the current of the storm like breakers above the tide.
A shadow suddenly passed over them, slowly drifting across the godisle, the keep, and the githyanki. The shell of wardings shimmered and crackled momentarily, reinforcing itself as the distorted shape of a pair of astral dreadnaughts passed overhead and then out of sight, passing by and continuing deeper into the storm. The guards didn't so much as give it a cursory look, the entire affair seemed almost routine to them.
Like Maanzicorian's godisle, the desecration of the divine corpses drew the attention of the Guardian of Dead Gods and his servants, but they seemed unable to pierce the wards to vent their fury on the 'loths' servants.
Fyrehowl narrowed her eyes and looked at the building. It was solidly built, almost like a fortress, but the defenses were incomplete, almost an afterthought really, and half of them seemed like they’d been partially dismantled recently. But then moving down to the windows, a majority of them seemed to have heavy bars in place across them.
Less a fortress, the building was a prison.
***
