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<blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 6041839" data-attributes="member: 11697"><p>Painstakingly copied from cave-wall to paper, the gautish script was easily the largest such sample that had been found written within the passages that honeycombed Howler’s Crag. It was also one of the most well preserved, almost as if the hatred of the people once known as the tiere continued down through the ages, reaching across the planes from their long-since become native Carceri to preserve and protect it like some sort of stranglehold upon the memory of their origin, and their great crime of virtual deicide.</p><p></p><p>None of the researchers, not even Highsilver or Leobtav had yet managed to fully decipher the text, and so for the moment it sat, illuminated by lamplight on Leobtav’s desk. His familiar though glanced at it warily, a look of worry on his face as if the poisoned thoughts of the gautiere might reach out like a sort of worm-word empowered by Pandemonium’s winds. It might indeed have, but it wasn’t the cause of the group’s current problem that stalked them in the darkness, killing them one by one.</p><p></p><p>And be that as it might, the text still held its secrets. The text contained both the lamentation of the tiere, the tale of their self-initiated damnation, and buried within its words the encoded location of their fall. It was there, waiting to be unlocked, and out in the darkness, someone was willing to kill for it.</p><p></p><p><em>“Our glorious father, creator and protector. Our lives we gave, our tears we wept, children we raised in adoration of you. The labor of centuries we gave, poured forth from our midst to build unto you an eternal Cathedral in honor and obeisance of You our patron and maker.</em></p><p><em> Why then did you hide? Why did you seek shelter inside our greatest creation, made in your name? Why did you forsake us then to our enemies and their powers when in anger and jealousy they came to steal away from you and we our eternal offering? Why did you hide as if a child within the depths of your palace we built for you with our pain and glory? Why did you seal fast the doors, bar your children entry, and leave us to the mercy of your feared rivals? Why oh mighty one?</em></p><p><em> Were you afraid? Did you fear more for your own life than those of your followers who feared not for their own in the face of death, but served you faithfully? Who then is the righteous and who is the damned? Who shows the spark of the divine, and who is but a pale reflection of it? Oh mighty one indeed. You seal the doors at the approaching hoof beats and drums of the armies and listen not to the wailings of your chosen, now forgotten and forsaken people.</em></p><p><em> RAGE to sunder the heavens we felt! All of our centuries of faith to you, forgotten in an instant! We will die not at the hands of your enemies who come to slay you and we in envy of how we glorified you. Raising our hands, voices, and spirits we scream to the multiverse and the planes themselves to take our hatred, our bitterness, our anger and our betrayal of you. To take these and shackled you for eternity in a prison of our making. No longer the Eternal Cathedral of our most beloved god, but your tomb. Our lives consumed, our souls twisted, the anger flowing out to gird your hands, and bind your feet, to cut out your tongue and blind your eyes. You will never die, but lie in undying impotence and suffering in the misty shadow of the Spire of Magic Death, betrayed by those you sought to betray yourself.</em></p><p><em> We are no longer your chosen, no longer your servants, no longer your slaves, no longer the Tiere, but the Gautiere.”</em></p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p></p><p>“This is amazing!” Leobtav was babbling as he looked over a copy of the script from the cave. “It’s going to take days to translate but…”</p><p></p><p>“Sir?” One of the associate researchers interrupted him. “Why is that? Can’t we just translate it with magic? That seems the simplest way.”</p><p></p><p>“Because we can’t,” The professor explained. “That was one of the first things that I tried, but it doesn’t do anything but provide a vague transliteration. You’re more than welcome to try if you can cast the spell, but I don’t think that it’s a protective ward that just tries to resist the effect. As far as I can tell there’s something intrinsic to the language itself that defies magical decipherment. If we want to read it, we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. Thankfully we have some small samples, mostly bits and pieces from Carceri. I’ve included those samples on the copies of the raw script that I passed out.”</p><p></p><p>Tristol’s ears twitched. Something intrinsic to the script itself? That wasn’t so out of the question, especially given what he’d experienced with another, unrelated text elsewhere on the Crag earlier that day. That one at least could be deciphered, but it didn’t really make sense. Hopefully Leobtav and the others could make quick work of theirs. The earlier experience was beginning to really bother him.</p><p></p><p>Leobtav whispered a few phrases to an amanuensis spell and smiled, satisfied as the conjured force dutifully began transcribing another stack of paper copies of the text, a transliteration, and a further page of notes that he and Doran had both added.</p><p></p><p>“No more going out into the dark?” Leobtav’s pseudodragon chirped from where he currently sat, curled up atop a pile of books between his master and Tristol.</p><p></p><p>Leobtav shuffled the stack of freshly penned pages, “No more going out into the dark. We’ve got what we came here for, and while the Crag has its mysteries and a treasure trove of philological information, I don’t want to risk anyone’s safety.”</p><p></p><p>“Yay!” The pseudodragon beamed. For the first time in two days he seemed genuinely happy.</p><p></p><p>The little familiar’s smile was infectious, and soon the others in the room were smiling as well. When they left in the next hour their mood spread along with the professor’s pronouncement that they would soon be leaving the howling hell of Pandemonium. Ale was drunk, food was shared, stories were told and laughs exchanged. Like embers scattered in the wind spreading a warm, roaring flame their happiness carried for an evening of respite from the present troubles.</p><p></p><p>Trouble cared not for their attempts, and it would jar them back to reality with brutal force in short order.</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p></p><p>Had he stood in his current position overlooking the camp on some terrestrial world it would have been at the back edge of twilight, with the sun slipping beyond a distant range of hills, with the first stars faintly appearing and the lanterns and cook fires down below only now being stoked. He looked down, watching the little ants scurry about, readying their tents for sleep, putting away their implements of a day’s work, collecting together to talk, discuss, socialize like insects, with as much mindless absence of importance. He also noted that the hired mercenaries were now walking the perimeter, watching the edges of the darkness; they were starting to worry for their safety as much as the others.</p><p></p><p>The man smiled and returned to his work, eager to finish in full view of his victims, embracing the darkness within as much as the darkness surrounding. Quickly and efficiently, with grace that belied his lack of recent practice, he arranged each of his newest victim’s bones as he desired one after another to produce the desired tableau. His shoulder was heavy, like a piece of his master perched there, watching him with approval as he moved onwards to the next corpse.</p><p></p><p>“Closer now, ever closer.” He whispered, admiring his handiwork. “Thy will be done.”</p><p></p><p>In the artificial morning of their arbitrary sleep-cycle, they would find his work.</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p></p><p>Doran’s eyes were bloodshot, his hair unkempt, and he stifled a grossly inappropriate yawn as he looked down at the bodies. They’d been found only an hour earlier, but he hadn’t yet slept a wink, neither he nor Leobtav; they’d both been bottled up inside of their respective tents, obsessively pouring over the gautiere text. The text –as far as they’d translated thus far- told the tieres’ history, almost as a rationalization of their great crime, but in a way it was less disturbing than what he looked down upon.</p><p></p><p>Atop a small ridge of rock that overlooked the camp, two bodies lay on the ground, though it was more complicated than saying precisely that. One body lay on the ground by itself, limp and wrinkled, partially collapsed in on itself. It was flesh only, with every bone removed, bloodlessly and without a single obvious incision. Its skeleton lay a dozen feet off to the side, partially buried in the rocky soil, with the second corpse posed and positioned, kneeling over it with a brush and trowel, as if excavating a find. The second man seemed to have been killed by a single, clean slash to the jugular, but once again it was more complicated. Something had petrified his bones after death, holding him in his rigid, staged position, and the blood that emerged from his neck was transmuted to a trickle of crimson sand.</p><p></p><p>“What kind of fiend would do this?” One of the other academics asked.</p><p></p><p>“A sick man, a sick woman… I don’t know.” Doran sighed. He should have known. He was a diviner for all that was holy! But divinations were worthless. He’d tried to ascertain who had performed the earlier murders. He’d even tried to witness them through various forms of psychomancy, but they’d failed. Either the Crag’s proximity limited their use, or the killer was able to thwart such methods of discovery. You cannot stop what you cannot find.</p><p></p><p>Drawn in a trail of crimson sand upon the ground, the killer had left them a taunting message, ‘You cannot find us. We will kill you all, one by one, and smile. Are you afraid?’</p><p></p><p>It was written in planar common, with no peculiarities of spelling or word use that might indicate a native plane or race. They were out there in the dark, likely watching the discovery, possibly even amongst those currently milling about. It was maddening.</p><p></p><p>“Do we know who they are? The dead I mean.” Doran asked, looking away from the bodies. “I recognize the one on the left. The complete one. He was one of the cooks.”</p><p></p><p>“He’s a cartographer.” Mellisan the lilland explained. “I actually talked to him two nights ago quite a bit. The dark and the wind were starting to get to him, he looked lonely, and I felt it an imperative to cheer him up. He actually had a decent singing voice. I haven’t seen him since then, but I didn’t think anything of it.”</p><p></p><p>“We have a lot of people,” Doran lamented. “If they’re not in your group that you work with each day, there’s no reason or ability to keep up.”</p><p></p><p>“This is getting obscene Doran…” Mellisan whispered in a distinctly harsher tone than her normally melodic, sing-song voice.</p><p></p><p>The elf scowled down at the corpses and didn’t look up to meet the lilland’s gaze as they burned holes into his head.</p><p></p><p>“We need to consider leaving.” Her voice was tinged softer now, and very much a whisper so as not to be overheard. “If we can’t find the person responsible for this, we have a responsibility to our colleagues and hires to keep them safe.”</p><p></p><p>“I know that!” Doran snipped back, clenching his left fist in the hem of his robe. “I’m not ready to make that call yet. We’ve faced worse things before. You remember Porphatys, and that’s what lead us here remember? We’re close to deciphering one of the largest remaining mysteries in planar languages!”</p><p></p><p>The lilland paused, clearly about to say something, but she turned away having evidently felt it better to hold her tongue. Below her waist, her serpentine body curled and twisted, reflecting ambient light in a mixture of green and golden scatters.</p><p></p><p>“You want to say something Mellisan.”</p><p></p><p>“You already know what I wanted to say.”</p><p></p><p>“Am I making a mistake here?” He asked, glancing from the bodies to the bard.</p><p></p><p>She flicked a wing and drifting closer to put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s neither my call nor my decision. But think about it closely because you’ll have to live with it.”</p><p></p><p>The lilland gave him a soft embrace and drifted off, back in the direction of the camp’s lights, there to break the news of more killings and to do her best to sooth nerves and fears in its wake.</p><p></p><p>Doran sighed and watched her leave, “Assuming that I live through it…”</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p></p><p>Much like the others before them, the bodies were preserved from decay through magical means, and when they returned to a safer plane, they’d be returned to life. That was the hope at least. Earlier attempts had failed in the same haunting way that divinations had failed.</p><p></p><p>“I don’t like this at all.” Toras grumbled. “We’re sitting here letting some twisted little prick pick people off at their leisure.”</p><p></p><p>“Then why don’t we go out and find them?” Florian asked, clenching a mail-covered fist. “Tempus sure as hell wouldn’t want me to sit here and act scared. We should be out looking or setting a trap.”</p><p></p><p>“We?” Nisha looked up at the cleric as she held Tristol’s tail like an overly fluffy scarf and tickled her nose with its tip. “I’m not so sure about this whole we thing. I’m getting spooked.”</p><p></p><p>Tristol stroked the back of her head. “Going out into the dark won’t help us find anything when it seems likely that it’s someone inside of our own camp.”</p><p></p><p>Clueless glanced out at the lights flickering inside of a dozen or more tents. “Hunting them down, I’m not so sure about. Setting a trap though…”</p><p></p><p>“You have anyone in mind?” Toras asked, with Florian and Fyrehowl looking up with interest.</p><p></p><p>“Possibly.” The bladesinger frowned. He suspected the shadowdancer, but he couldn’t prove anything yet.</p><p></p><p>“We might not have to do anything.” Tristol interjected. “I doubt that we’ll be here more than another day or two. Doran and Leobtav have made some really nice leaps in the translation of the gautish text.”</p><p></p><p>Conversation trailed off and they went their separate ways. Clueless wandered through the camp, looking for various persons and quietly asking about what they’d been up to in the past day. Toras and Florian both did the same on their own, while Tristol and Nisha wandered back to Leobtav’s tent –mostly so Nisha could play with his familiar- and Fyrehowl simply tried to relax. </p><p></p><p>Every time the lupinal closed her eyes though, she felt she was being watched and her ears would twitch as if alerted from some odd, unnatural sound in the distance. It was unnerving, and Tristol would have noticed the same thing except he hadn’t yet tried to sleep. The line of text from the Crag that they’d read, concentrated upon, and indeed been touched by, they would discover its impact in due time alongside other events swiftly building to a climax. </p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p></p><p>Later that day they all tried to take their minds off of the murders and several of them took the time to study more on the gautish text that the expedition had searched for and found at great cost. Both Leobtav and Highsilver had been pouring over it, comparing their ideas, and glancing over a multitude of references in books that sprawled across both of their tents. Tentatively they were making some progress, but it was proving to be much more difficult than they originally thought.</p><p></p><p>“I’m just not sure that the original text that we copied from the tunnel is accurate.” Leobtav grimaced and tapped his fingers on the table.</p><p></p><p>Doran looked at him over a pile of books as the professor’s familiar stared out into the darkness, preoccupied and afraid. The tiny dragon still couldn’t talk more about what he might have known or seen. But he didn’t seem to want to stay in their present location.</p><p></p><p>Milling about the tent, looking out into the dark as well, or simply listening to the expedition leaders’ talk, most of the other hires had assembled, with Tristol and Clueless paying especial attention.</p><p></p><p>“How so?” Doran asked. “The text was absolutely crisp for its age. It barely seems to have suffered any erosion, and no intentional damage despite its age.”</p><p></p><p>“The letters are old, and I’m starting to think that the original tiere alphabet lacked diacritical marks.”</p><p></p><p>“I’m not sure I get where you’re going with that.” Highsilver scratched his head, while behind him, having overheard the conversation, Tristol winced at the implication.</p><p></p><p>“The text is written in gautish, but I think that it’s expressing a text that was originally composed in the tiere language. It isn’t pure, and what we’re seeing was composed at a time when the gautiere had evolved and diverged from its original form. What we have are diacritical marks on our transcript…”</p><p></p><p>“And the original didn’t.” Tristol finished his thought for him. “And what we have may have applied them in such a way to partially garble the text it was attempting to express.”</p><p></p><p>“Sh*t…” Doran slowly smacked his head into the stack of books.</p><p></p><p>“It’s going to take more time to figure this out.” The professor sighed. “Our transcript doesn’t take some of the spacing and positioning into full account, and that’s going to be needed in the next day or two.”</p><p></p><p>“I want to leave…”</p><p></p><p>“Darkness is boring…” Nisha added in.</p><p></p><p>“Honestly I think we’ll make some better headway on this once we’re back at the institute. It’s a lot more comfortable than a tent in the middle of Pandemonium.”</p><p></p><p>Ficklebarb looked up and smiled, though he was still looking under the weather.</p><p></p><p>Looking over from where he slouched against the far wall, Frollis nodded in agreement, “Best idea that I’ve heard in a damn long while.”</p><p></p><p>“We don’t want her bored.” Tristol interjected, pointing at Nisha.</p><p></p><p>Quietly, Leobtav donned a pair of pristine white gloves for no apparent reason.</p><p></p><p>“I agree.” Highsilver concurred. “About leaving, not the tiefling being bored. We’ve already accomplished everything we came here to do, and staying here just puts us unnecessarily at further risk. And we have more than one person to resurrect once we’re back. Hopefully in the next few days we can have everything wrapped up and be ready to head back.”</p><p></p><p>Without prior explanation once again Leobtav stood up and walked over to the tiefling. </p><p></p><p>“Hi!” Nisha looked up and smiled.</p><p></p><p>The professor frowned disapprovingly and held out his gloved hands.</p><p></p><p>“What?” Nisha gave a quizzical look before suddenly remembering something. “Oh, yeah, that…”</p><p></p><p>Calmly, gingerly Leobtav removed a rare volume of the 1st edition of Asterguard’s ‘Languages and Dialects of the Arcadian/Mithardiir Wastes’ from the xaositect’s hands as she produced the book from the depths of a portable hole residing on the top of her head.</p><p></p><p>“Sorry about that…”</p><p></p><p>The professor said not a word but shook his head and sighed. Ficklebarb giggled for his own part.</p><p></p><p>Frollis took a sip of whiskey and broke the silence, “What was that about, and what happens if she gets bored?”</p><p></p><p>“Nothing good happens apparently!” Leobtav answered, glaring back at the tiefling. “That was in a locked case…”</p><p></p><p>Nisha grinned. Her tanar’ri ancestors couldn’t have done a much better job.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p></p><p>High above the crag, peering down through the darkness like a subterranean bird of prey, a gaunt and emaciated figure flapped its membranous wings and rose on a sharp updraft. One of the varrangoin, its kind were ancient when the first tanar’ri emerged to seize control of the Abyss, but in the eons since that time they now lived as exiles within their own home plane, and it, Zoragothmrrus, dwelled in exile within Pandemonium. The savage wonders of the Abyss -the original Abyss- were but a distant memory to even the legends told by the eldest of its tribe. Hissing at the thought, it gazed down at the Titan’s grave, the Pheonix’s Tomb, the Mountain of Dead Words –it had a thousand different names- and paused. </p><p></p><p>It should have turned back, the bebeliths hungered and despite his height above the towering edifice, it knew that it wasn’t safe. But something told it otherwise. Hitting a second up thrust of air it inhaled deeply, sifting through the scents of ancient dust, freshly spilt bebelith blood, wood smoke, tobacco, wine, gruel, and other, non-native smells that wafted up from the sheltered basin at the Crag’s base. </p><p></p><p>The demon-hunters were dead. All of them. New flesh claimed the Crag. Zoragothmrrus smiled and shrieked at the top of its lungs, piercing the air with a wild, ecstatic cry that went unheard except for his multitude of kin that prowled the tunnels a league distant. Their prey upon the ground heard nothing above the howling winds, and even if the winds had been silenced, their ears would never have detected it as anything but a buzzing such was its pitch. They would be oblivious till death came for them.</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p></p><p>-insert varangoin attack</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p></p><p>Zoragothmrrus bled heavily upon the stone, washing the rock with sticky, black ichor that stank of rot and copper. The celestial had deeply wounded his side, and had he not managed to take to the air and escape beyond the range of their lights, the lupinal would surely have ended his life between her teeth or her blade.</p><p></p><p>Claws dug into the stone and the arcanist varangoin screamed with rage and bruised pride as much as from the considerable pain of his wounds.</p><p></p><p>“Stupid guardinal b*itch! I will…”</p><p></p><p>Abruptly the fiend paused.</p><p></p><p>He was not alone. </p><p></p><p>There was another creature present. No, more than one, multiple creatures. He could smell them over the reek of his own blood. The most prominent was dragging another, presumably a victim of one of Zoragothmrrus’s brethren and he was breathing heavily from the burden. Providence had delivered more victims. His tribe would be avenged for their losses this day.</p><p></p><p>The varangoin twisted in place, turning towards the other and gasping with a deep wince of pain. He snarled and hissed a death curse at the outline of a single humanoid figure and the body that lay limply at his feet.</p><p></p><p>“Die mortal wrech! Die for the…”</p><p></p><p>Calmly, coldly the mortal cut him off.</p><p></p><p>“You are not one of mine,” The mortal spoke in fluent varangoin, “But you will suffice all the same.”</p><p></p><p>Zoragothmrrus paused, taken utterly aback by his would-be victim’s attitude and the very fact that he spoke his tongue, something that would never be taught to a mortal. Something was wrong. Another voice was whispering something, and then the man snarled a response back into the darkness.</p><p></p><p>“Who are you?” Zoragothmrrus clawed the ground with uncertainty, hoping to show a position of strength and hide his wounded status. “How do you know the tongue of the people of the Abyssal skies?”</p><p></p><p>The mortal looked down at the body at his feet and then back at the fiend. He smiled and the distant light sparkled in perfect circles. Again he spoke in the fiend’s tongue with perfect fluency, “My master cares neither for them, nor for you.”</p><p></p><p>Zoragothmrrus never had the chance to react as the man opened his mouth and a gout of liquid shadows erupted like a hundred knife blades, lancing into his dying form and a hundred hands cupped to receive his blood. His killer would be painting tonight with the blood of more than one victim.</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Shemeska, post: 6041839, member: 11697"] Painstakingly copied from cave-wall to paper, the gautish script was easily the largest such sample that had been found written within the passages that honeycombed Howler’s Crag. It was also one of the most well preserved, almost as if the hatred of the people once known as the tiere continued down through the ages, reaching across the planes from their long-since become native Carceri to preserve and protect it like some sort of stranglehold upon the memory of their origin, and their great crime of virtual deicide. None of the researchers, not even Highsilver or Leobtav had yet managed to fully decipher the text, and so for the moment it sat, illuminated by lamplight on Leobtav’s desk. His familiar though glanced at it warily, a look of worry on his face as if the poisoned thoughts of the gautiere might reach out like a sort of worm-word empowered by Pandemonium’s winds. It might indeed have, but it wasn’t the cause of the group’s current problem that stalked them in the darkness, killing them one by one. And be that as it might, the text still held its secrets. The text contained both the lamentation of the tiere, the tale of their self-initiated damnation, and buried within its words the encoded location of their fall. It was there, waiting to be unlocked, and out in the darkness, someone was willing to kill for it. [i]“Our glorious father, creator and protector. Our lives we gave, our tears we wept, children we raised in adoration of you. The labor of centuries we gave, poured forth from our midst to build unto you an eternal Cathedral in honor and obeisance of You our patron and maker. Why then did you hide? Why did you seek shelter inside our greatest creation, made in your name? Why did you forsake us then to our enemies and their powers when in anger and jealousy they came to steal away from you and we our eternal offering? Why did you hide as if a child within the depths of your palace we built for you with our pain and glory? Why did you seal fast the doors, bar your children entry, and leave us to the mercy of your feared rivals? Why oh mighty one? Were you afraid? Did you fear more for your own life than those of your followers who feared not for their own in the face of death, but served you faithfully? Who then is the righteous and who is the damned? Who shows the spark of the divine, and who is but a pale reflection of it? Oh mighty one indeed. You seal the doors at the approaching hoof beats and drums of the armies and listen not to the wailings of your chosen, now forgotten and forsaken people. RAGE to sunder the heavens we felt! All of our centuries of faith to you, forgotten in an instant! We will die not at the hands of your enemies who come to slay you and we in envy of how we glorified you. Raising our hands, voices, and spirits we scream to the multiverse and the planes themselves to take our hatred, our bitterness, our anger and our betrayal of you. To take these and shackled you for eternity in a prison of our making. No longer the Eternal Cathedral of our most beloved god, but your tomb. Our lives consumed, our souls twisted, the anger flowing out to gird your hands, and bind your feet, to cut out your tongue and blind your eyes. You will never die, but lie in undying impotence and suffering in the misty shadow of the Spire of Magic Death, betrayed by those you sought to betray yourself. We are no longer your chosen, no longer your servants, no longer your slaves, no longer the Tiere, but the Gautiere.”[/i] [center]***[/center] “This is amazing!” Leobtav was babbling as he looked over a copy of the script from the cave. “It’s going to take days to translate but…” “Sir?” One of the associate researchers interrupted him. “Why is that? Can’t we just translate it with magic? That seems the simplest way.” “Because we can’t,” The professor explained. “That was one of the first things that I tried, but it doesn’t do anything but provide a vague transliteration. You’re more than welcome to try if you can cast the spell, but I don’t think that it’s a protective ward that just tries to resist the effect. As far as I can tell there’s something intrinsic to the language itself that defies magical decipherment. If we want to read it, we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. Thankfully we have some small samples, mostly bits and pieces from Carceri. I’ve included those samples on the copies of the raw script that I passed out.” Tristol’s ears twitched. Something intrinsic to the script itself? That wasn’t so out of the question, especially given what he’d experienced with another, unrelated text elsewhere on the Crag earlier that day. That one at least could be deciphered, but it didn’t really make sense. Hopefully Leobtav and the others could make quick work of theirs. The earlier experience was beginning to really bother him. Leobtav whispered a few phrases to an amanuensis spell and smiled, satisfied as the conjured force dutifully began transcribing another stack of paper copies of the text, a transliteration, and a further page of notes that he and Doran had both added. “No more going out into the dark?” Leobtav’s pseudodragon chirped from where he currently sat, curled up atop a pile of books between his master and Tristol. Leobtav shuffled the stack of freshly penned pages, “No more going out into the dark. We’ve got what we came here for, and while the Crag has its mysteries and a treasure trove of philological information, I don’t want to risk anyone’s safety.” “Yay!” The pseudodragon beamed. For the first time in two days he seemed genuinely happy. The little familiar’s smile was infectious, and soon the others in the room were smiling as well. When they left in the next hour their mood spread along with the professor’s pronouncement that they would soon be leaving the howling hell of Pandemonium. Ale was drunk, food was shared, stories were told and laughs exchanged. Like embers scattered in the wind spreading a warm, roaring flame their happiness carried for an evening of respite from the present troubles. Trouble cared not for their attempts, and it would jar them back to reality with brutal force in short order. [center]***[/center] Had he stood in his current position overlooking the camp on some terrestrial world it would have been at the back edge of twilight, with the sun slipping beyond a distant range of hills, with the first stars faintly appearing and the lanterns and cook fires down below only now being stoked. He looked down, watching the little ants scurry about, readying their tents for sleep, putting away their implements of a day’s work, collecting together to talk, discuss, socialize like insects, with as much mindless absence of importance. He also noted that the hired mercenaries were now walking the perimeter, watching the edges of the darkness; they were starting to worry for their safety as much as the others. The man smiled and returned to his work, eager to finish in full view of his victims, embracing the darkness within as much as the darkness surrounding. Quickly and efficiently, with grace that belied his lack of recent practice, he arranged each of his newest victim’s bones as he desired one after another to produce the desired tableau. His shoulder was heavy, like a piece of his master perched there, watching him with approval as he moved onwards to the next corpse. “Closer now, ever closer.” He whispered, admiring his handiwork. “Thy will be done.” In the artificial morning of their arbitrary sleep-cycle, they would find his work. [center]***[/center] Doran’s eyes were bloodshot, his hair unkempt, and he stifled a grossly inappropriate yawn as he looked down at the bodies. They’d been found only an hour earlier, but he hadn’t yet slept a wink, neither he nor Leobtav; they’d both been bottled up inside of their respective tents, obsessively pouring over the gautiere text. The text –as far as they’d translated thus far- told the tieres’ history, almost as a rationalization of their great crime, but in a way it was less disturbing than what he looked down upon. Atop a small ridge of rock that overlooked the camp, two bodies lay on the ground, though it was more complicated than saying precisely that. One body lay on the ground by itself, limp and wrinkled, partially collapsed in on itself. It was flesh only, with every bone removed, bloodlessly and without a single obvious incision. Its skeleton lay a dozen feet off to the side, partially buried in the rocky soil, with the second corpse posed and positioned, kneeling over it with a brush and trowel, as if excavating a find. The second man seemed to have been killed by a single, clean slash to the jugular, but once again it was more complicated. Something had petrified his bones after death, holding him in his rigid, staged position, and the blood that emerged from his neck was transmuted to a trickle of crimson sand. “What kind of fiend would do this?” One of the other academics asked. “A sick man, a sick woman… I don’t know.” Doran sighed. He should have known. He was a diviner for all that was holy! But divinations were worthless. He’d tried to ascertain who had performed the earlier murders. He’d even tried to witness them through various forms of psychomancy, but they’d failed. Either the Crag’s proximity limited their use, or the killer was able to thwart such methods of discovery. You cannot stop what you cannot find. Drawn in a trail of crimson sand upon the ground, the killer had left them a taunting message, ‘You cannot find us. We will kill you all, one by one, and smile. Are you afraid?’ It was written in planar common, with no peculiarities of spelling or word use that might indicate a native plane or race. They were out there in the dark, likely watching the discovery, possibly even amongst those currently milling about. It was maddening. “Do we know who they are? The dead I mean.” Doran asked, looking away from the bodies. “I recognize the one on the left. The complete one. He was one of the cooks.” “He’s a cartographer.” Mellisan the lilland explained. “I actually talked to him two nights ago quite a bit. The dark and the wind were starting to get to him, he looked lonely, and I felt it an imperative to cheer him up. He actually had a decent singing voice. I haven’t seen him since then, but I didn’t think anything of it.” “We have a lot of people,” Doran lamented. “If they’re not in your group that you work with each day, there’s no reason or ability to keep up.” “This is getting obscene Doran…” Mellisan whispered in a distinctly harsher tone than her normally melodic, sing-song voice. The elf scowled down at the corpses and didn’t look up to meet the lilland’s gaze as they burned holes into his head. “We need to consider leaving.” Her voice was tinged softer now, and very much a whisper so as not to be overheard. “If we can’t find the person responsible for this, we have a responsibility to our colleagues and hires to keep them safe.” “I know that!” Doran snipped back, clenching his left fist in the hem of his robe. “I’m not ready to make that call yet. We’ve faced worse things before. You remember Porphatys, and that’s what lead us here remember? We’re close to deciphering one of the largest remaining mysteries in planar languages!” The lilland paused, clearly about to say something, but she turned away having evidently felt it better to hold her tongue. Below her waist, her serpentine body curled and twisted, reflecting ambient light in a mixture of green and golden scatters. “You want to say something Mellisan.” “You already know what I wanted to say.” “Am I making a mistake here?” He asked, glancing from the bodies to the bard. She flicked a wing and drifting closer to put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s neither my call nor my decision. But think about it closely because you’ll have to live with it.” The lilland gave him a soft embrace and drifted off, back in the direction of the camp’s lights, there to break the news of more killings and to do her best to sooth nerves and fears in its wake. Doran sighed and watched her leave, “Assuming that I live through it…” [center]***[/center] Much like the others before them, the bodies were preserved from decay through magical means, and when they returned to a safer plane, they’d be returned to life. That was the hope at least. Earlier attempts had failed in the same haunting way that divinations had failed. “I don’t like this at all.” Toras grumbled. “We’re sitting here letting some twisted little prick pick people off at their leisure.” “Then why don’t we go out and find them?” Florian asked, clenching a mail-covered fist. “Tempus sure as hell wouldn’t want me to sit here and act scared. We should be out looking or setting a trap.” “We?” Nisha looked up at the cleric as she held Tristol’s tail like an overly fluffy scarf and tickled her nose with its tip. “I’m not so sure about this whole we thing. I’m getting spooked.” Tristol stroked the back of her head. “Going out into the dark won’t help us find anything when it seems likely that it’s someone inside of our own camp.” Clueless glanced out at the lights flickering inside of a dozen or more tents. “Hunting them down, I’m not so sure about. Setting a trap though…” “You have anyone in mind?” Toras asked, with Florian and Fyrehowl looking up with interest. “Possibly.” The bladesinger frowned. He suspected the shadowdancer, but he couldn’t prove anything yet. “We might not have to do anything.” Tristol interjected. “I doubt that we’ll be here more than another day or two. Doran and Leobtav have made some really nice leaps in the translation of the gautish text.” Conversation trailed off and they went their separate ways. Clueless wandered through the camp, looking for various persons and quietly asking about what they’d been up to in the past day. Toras and Florian both did the same on their own, while Tristol and Nisha wandered back to Leobtav’s tent –mostly so Nisha could play with his familiar- and Fyrehowl simply tried to relax. Every time the lupinal closed her eyes though, she felt she was being watched and her ears would twitch as if alerted from some odd, unnatural sound in the distance. It was unnerving, and Tristol would have noticed the same thing except he hadn’t yet tried to sleep. The line of text from the Crag that they’d read, concentrated upon, and indeed been touched by, they would discover its impact in due time alongside other events swiftly building to a climax. [center]***[/center] Later that day they all tried to take their minds off of the murders and several of them took the time to study more on the gautish text that the expedition had searched for and found at great cost. Both Leobtav and Highsilver had been pouring over it, comparing their ideas, and glancing over a multitude of references in books that sprawled across both of their tents. Tentatively they were making some progress, but it was proving to be much more difficult than they originally thought. “I’m just not sure that the original text that we copied from the tunnel is accurate.” Leobtav grimaced and tapped his fingers on the table. Doran looked at him over a pile of books as the professor’s familiar stared out into the darkness, preoccupied and afraid. The tiny dragon still couldn’t talk more about what he might have known or seen. But he didn’t seem to want to stay in their present location. Milling about the tent, looking out into the dark as well, or simply listening to the expedition leaders’ talk, most of the other hires had assembled, with Tristol and Clueless paying especial attention. “How so?” Doran asked. “The text was absolutely crisp for its age. It barely seems to have suffered any erosion, and no intentional damage despite its age.” “The letters are old, and I’m starting to think that the original tiere alphabet lacked diacritical marks.” “I’m not sure I get where you’re going with that.” Highsilver scratched his head, while behind him, having overheard the conversation, Tristol winced at the implication. “The text is written in gautish, but I think that it’s expressing a text that was originally composed in the tiere language. It isn’t pure, and what we’re seeing was composed at a time when the gautiere had evolved and diverged from its original form. What we have are diacritical marks on our transcript…” “And the original didn’t.” Tristol finished his thought for him. “And what we have may have applied them in such a way to partially garble the text it was attempting to express.” “Sh*t…” Doran slowly smacked his head into the stack of books. “It’s going to take more time to figure this out.” The professor sighed. “Our transcript doesn’t take some of the spacing and positioning into full account, and that’s going to be needed in the next day or two.” “I want to leave…” “Darkness is boring…” Nisha added in. “Honestly I think we’ll make some better headway on this once we’re back at the institute. It’s a lot more comfortable than a tent in the middle of Pandemonium.” Ficklebarb looked up and smiled, though he was still looking under the weather. Looking over from where he slouched against the far wall, Frollis nodded in agreement, “Best idea that I’ve heard in a damn long while.” “We don’t want her bored.” Tristol interjected, pointing at Nisha. Quietly, Leobtav donned a pair of pristine white gloves for no apparent reason. “I agree.” Highsilver concurred. “About leaving, not the tiefling being bored. We’ve already accomplished everything we came here to do, and staying here just puts us unnecessarily at further risk. And we have more than one person to resurrect once we’re back. Hopefully in the next few days we can have everything wrapped up and be ready to head back.” Without prior explanation once again Leobtav stood up and walked over to the tiefling. “Hi!” Nisha looked up and smiled. The professor frowned disapprovingly and held out his gloved hands. “What?” Nisha gave a quizzical look before suddenly remembering something. “Oh, yeah, that…” Calmly, gingerly Leobtav removed a rare volume of the 1st edition of Asterguard’s ‘Languages and Dialects of the Arcadian/Mithardiir Wastes’ from the xaositect’s hands as she produced the book from the depths of a portable hole residing on the top of her head. “Sorry about that…” The professor said not a word but shook his head and sighed. Ficklebarb giggled for his own part. Frollis took a sip of whiskey and broke the silence, “What was that about, and what happens if she gets bored?” “Nothing good happens apparently!” Leobtav answered, glaring back at the tiefling. “That was in a locked case…” Nisha grinned. Her tanar’ri ancestors couldn’t have done a much better job. [center]***[/center] High above the crag, peering down through the darkness like a subterranean bird of prey, a gaunt and emaciated figure flapped its membranous wings and rose on a sharp updraft. One of the varrangoin, its kind were ancient when the first tanar’ri emerged to seize control of the Abyss, but in the eons since that time they now lived as exiles within their own home plane, and it, Zoragothmrrus, dwelled in exile within Pandemonium. The savage wonders of the Abyss -the original Abyss- were but a distant memory to even the legends told by the eldest of its tribe. Hissing at the thought, it gazed down at the Titan’s grave, the Pheonix’s Tomb, the Mountain of Dead Words –it had a thousand different names- and paused. It should have turned back, the bebeliths hungered and despite his height above the towering edifice, it knew that it wasn’t safe. But something told it otherwise. Hitting a second up thrust of air it inhaled deeply, sifting through the scents of ancient dust, freshly spilt bebelith blood, wood smoke, tobacco, wine, gruel, and other, non-native smells that wafted up from the sheltered basin at the Crag’s base. The demon-hunters were dead. All of them. New flesh claimed the Crag. Zoragothmrrus smiled and shrieked at the top of its lungs, piercing the air with a wild, ecstatic cry that went unheard except for his multitude of kin that prowled the tunnels a league distant. Their prey upon the ground heard nothing above the howling winds, and even if the winds had been silenced, their ears would never have detected it as anything but a buzzing such was its pitch. They would be oblivious till death came for them. [center]***[/center] -insert varangoin attack [center]***[/center] Zoragothmrrus bled heavily upon the stone, washing the rock with sticky, black ichor that stank of rot and copper. The celestial had deeply wounded his side, and had he not managed to take to the air and escape beyond the range of their lights, the lupinal would surely have ended his life between her teeth or her blade. Claws dug into the stone and the arcanist varangoin screamed with rage and bruised pride as much as from the considerable pain of his wounds. “Stupid guardinal b*itch! I will…” Abruptly the fiend paused. He was not alone. There was another creature present. No, more than one, multiple creatures. He could smell them over the reek of his own blood. The most prominent was dragging another, presumably a victim of one of Zoragothmrrus’s brethren and he was breathing heavily from the burden. Providence had delivered more victims. His tribe would be avenged for their losses this day. The varangoin twisted in place, turning towards the other and gasping with a deep wince of pain. He snarled and hissed a death curse at the outline of a single humanoid figure and the body that lay limply at his feet. “Die mortal wrech! Die for the…” Calmly, coldly the mortal cut him off. “You are not one of mine,” The mortal spoke in fluent varangoin, “But you will suffice all the same.” Zoragothmrrus paused, taken utterly aback by his would-be victim’s attitude and the very fact that he spoke his tongue, something that would never be taught to a mortal. Something was wrong. Another voice was whispering something, and then the man snarled a response back into the darkness. “Who are you?” Zoragothmrrus clawed the ground with uncertainty, hoping to show a position of strength and hide his wounded status. “How do you know the tongue of the people of the Abyssal skies?” The mortal looked down at the body at his feet and then back at the fiend. He smiled and the distant light sparkled in perfect circles. Again he spoke in the fiend’s tongue with perfect fluency, “My master cares neither for them, nor for you.” Zoragothmrrus never had the chance to react as the man opened his mouth and a gout of liquid shadows erupted like a hundred knife blades, lancing into his dying form and a hundred hands cupped to receive his blood. His killer would be painting tonight with the blood of more than one victim. [center]***[/center] [/QUOTE]
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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)
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