Shemeska
Adventurer
“Holy sh*t!” Velkyn exclaimed as he looked at the hovering, speaking skull that looked nothing so much as a demilich.
Reacting purely on instinct, Victor held aloft his holy symbol and invoked the name of his god. Sunlight momentarily filled the room, illuminating a small section around the cleric with the distinct exception of anywhere near the corpse of Nergal’s last avatar, but otherwise nothing much happened before the shadows and silvery light rushed back in like the tide and swamped the foreign god’s intrusion.
The skull, absolutely unaffected, turned to glance at Victor and a distinctly dismissive scoff echoed in his head. Garibaldi of course hadn’t moved an inch from where he stood, a deer-in-headlights look fixed on his face.
“…Ooops?” Victor said as he slowly began to back away with a look of contrition on his face.
Whatever it was, demilich or not, his attempt to turn it, the same power that had so many times sent the undead of the Great Barrow into flight, or incinerated them outright, it had done absolutely nothing. He wasn’t going to further provoke it, and he dreaded what actions it might take next.
But the floating skull did nothing, though it mentally spoke a few inscrutable words towards Victor, dripping with condescension.
Morbidly curious, Inva whispered the arcane phrases of a tongues spell. Moments later after she heard the next few statements by the floating skull, she blinked with a mixture of emotions crossing over her face, emotions that comprised a bit more awe, surprise, and seriousness than was typical for the her.
“You can put that down Victor.” She said, listening as the skull turned to look at her and repeated its first pronouncements.
”Upesh. Upesh Ma’hackteh…”
“He’s not a demilich, and he isn’t the phylactery we’re looking for.” The tiefling explained. “-He’s- the codex of Long Shadows and Last Breaths.”
“Excuse me?” Victor asked, lowering his holy symbol.
Velkyn looked at it: a floating, talking skull. “It’s a mimir?”
The skull didn’t seem to like that statement; evidently it could understand them perfectly, and was either unable to talk to them outside of its ancient tongue, or just unwilling to. Regardless of which the case was, it belted out a long string of angry words, followed by manic laughter, finally followed by a shout of pain and a crackle of energy that surged across the lines of silver runes carved into its cranium.
“Woah!” Marcus said, taking a step back. “What the hell was that?”
Inva winced. “Nergal reaching out of the grave to punish his killer.”
“Excuse me?” Victor asked a second time.
Phaedra tilted her head, “Wasn’t Nergal killed by one of the Imaskari emperors?”
The skull shook slightly, almost as if it were recovering from a seizure or fit of some sort. Again it rattled off a long string of words, but the second time its tone was more subdued, though with the same undercurrent of cynicism and suppressed anger.
“The first thing he said.” Inva explained. “Roughly translating: I’m still alive. I am still here. Nergal is dead. Gilgeam is dead. Imaskar lives on.”
Victor came to an unsettling realization. “Wait a minute…”
“Yeah…” Inva nodded. “The Codex is a mimir made out of the skull and spirit of the last Imaskari Sorcerer-King, Grand Artificer Yuvaraj the Purple Emperor.”
The skull-mimir nodded, and the soul-gem lodged in its mouth pulsed with light.
“For those of us who aren’t from Toril,” Marcus said, pointing to the skull. “Review the history here a bit?”
Inva nodded, “He was responsible for the abduction of the Mulhorandi and Untheric people from their worlds, and he was there when their gods came to Toril seeking revenge. He managed to inflict a mortal wound on Nergal before they finally killed him and took their revenge for what he’d done.”
The skull rattled off another several statements and Inva nodded. “Correct me if I’m wrong here. Or say it yourself if you don’t want me to interpret.”
The skull continued speaking in Raurinese, the tongue of Imaskar, and let the tiefling continue to translate.
“They forced him to bear witness to Nergal’s dying words, and they forced him to serve as an unwilling repository for the lore of his enemies, a witness to the eventual destruction of the Imaskari Empire and people at the hands of their slaves’ gods.”
The gilt skull hovering before them contained the soul of one of the most powerful spellcasters to have ever walked the face of Toril.
“Yes…” Yuvaraj said, slipping into an archaic yet fluid dialect of planar common. The Imaskari were intimately familiar with the planes; of course their last emperor knew how to speak to his guests.
“I was made to listen to Nergal’s babbling delirium before he passed away, and after they had carved their prayers into my skull they carried me as a trophy as they finished their destruction of my nation and my people. Their victory was not complete, but alas, I’m unable to speak on the issue. Their restrictions on what I might say are more a hell than any of the lower planes, and more a torment then my current state of being as an over-glorified mimir, an unliving example of what the elves might call a selukiira.”
“Well you won’t have to stay here in Nergal’s tomb anymore.” Velkyn said. “Our employers are rather interested in meeting you, though I’m not sure if they entirely knew just who or what you were.”
Inva gave him a skeptical look. “Assuming they told us everything they knew before they sent us.”
“Who sent you?”
“That’s a very good question.” Victor said. “We don’t know all of the particulars. One of them is a wizard, but I won’t know precisely what race he might be. He looks human, but I doubt that he is. We haven’t met any of the others yet.”
“We’ll be taking you to meet them.” Inva explained. “Well, once we’ve finished looking over what Nergal seems to have left us that is.”
“You have my gratitude.” Yuvaraj said, putting as much thanks into his tone as his status seemed capable of permitting. “In the meantime, I am obligated by my current nature to offer you what information I know, within limits set forth by Nergal’s priests. Ask me any question and I will answer if capable.”
“So what do you know about looting Nergal’s tomb?” Marcus asked.
As grossly inappropriate a question as it was, Yuvaraj projected a mental impression of a smile, all a moment before the pain came once again. As he’d indicated, Nergal’s last clerics and the high-priests of the Untheric pantheon had written prohibitions and strictures into his state of existence down to what he was capable of saying, what he couldn’t say, and what would bring down punishment unless he avoided it. They left open the chance to blaspheme, tempting and taunting him with the satisfaction of speaking his mind, but he would suffer for each and every word of it.
“I am limited to a great extent in what I can say mortal.” The Emperor explained. “A result of the process by which the clerics of Gilgeam, Nergal, Assuran, and others ripped my soul from my corpse and bottled me inside the gem they set into my skull like an apple in the maw of a roast pig. I would wish nothing more than to help you… collect… what you wish from this place.”
It was obvious the Sorcerer-King gone mimir was picking and choosing his words carefully so as to avoid pain, and to provide what knowledge he could to the people who could actually affect his most-hated enemies, past and perhaps still present.
“Be direct mortal. I can answer you more in depth if asked specific questions.”
Victor winced at the agony the man’s state of being must have been, all at the same time he knew that in life he was responsible for atrocities on a grand and staggering scale. Still, Victor had to feel pity, but they had some other pressing questions before they could begin to understand more about who Yuvaraj was, and just why their employers wanted his spirit so badly.
“One of the clerics in this tomb was a lich.” Victor stated. “He had a phylactery. Do you know what it looks like and where it is?”
“His phylactery was crafted out of and embedded into the magical structure of a minor artifact, generically referred to as a so-called Talisman of Ineffable Evil. His particular amulet, roughly four inches across and carved of black onyx, is currently still gripped in his hand.”
“You enjoyed that.” Inva said, leaning back against one of the empty sarcophagi.
“Yes. Yes I did.” Yuvaraj spat. “He was one of the lesser priests involved in my… situation. He can rot in Hades for all I care. I suspect that he’ll find his afterlife even worse than mine however, given the status of Nergal’s domain.”
Phaedra grimaced, “I can only imagine.”
Garibaldi looked to his left and stooped down to pick up the talisman still resting amid the corporeal remains of the clerical lich. He looked at Victor and then down to the phylactery, and then with a nod he placed it on one of the funeral biers and smashed it into a dozen pieces with the heavy, weighted end of his sword’s pommel.
Again there was the sensation of pleasure projected by the trapped spirit of Yuvaraj, but he’d crossed a line and a sharp cry of pain echoed across the chamber a moment later.
“As you can see, there are limitations in place.” He said with some difficulty, still recovering.
“Could we remove them?” Velkyn asked.
The skull rotated side to side, shaking its head in the negative. “My knowledge of how to do precisely that is locked away among the topics that are entirely prohibited.”
Inva and Velkyn looked at one another, thinking the same thought. Yuvaraj was Imaskari, and the vast majority of that ancient kingdom’s lore was vanished and forgotten. Their magic was also among the grandest and most unique to have ever been developed on Toril, so the question remained, what could the spirit of their last emperor tell them about that magic, and Imaskar itself.
“I take it that you’re prohibited from telling us about Imaskari magic?”
The skull audibly sighed, for a moment sounding like a broken prisoner. “Yes…”
“Damn.” Velkyn said, gently kicking Nergal’s funeral platform. “Too much to hope for I suppose.”
Yuvaraj drifted slightly closer to the ground, almost a submissive gesture. “Not only am I prevented from using any magic of my own, but I am utterly prohibited from teaching it to others.”
“What about Imaskar itself?” Velkyn asked. “Can you talk about it and its history?”
“To an extent, but only in the context of the eventual conquest of my nation by our slaves and their god-kings. I could tell you of the fall of Inupras and the march of Horus-Re through the gates of the city, and I could speak of the features of the city as it was sacked, but I couldn’t delve into its history except when relating to its destruction. The foreign gods took revenge on us, on me, for what we did. But I do not regret it”
Yuvaraj was getting angry again, and the end result was by that point well known.
“I would do it again.” He snarled. “I would build a hundred cities on the broken backs of their worshippers, and I would dance atop Nergal’s corpse and every other so-called god if I had the chance. I watched him die, and I will treasure that moment when he begged first for help, and then deliriously begged for release from his pain. I never begged, not even when they tore my soul out. I…”
The skull dropped to the ground, enmeshed in a coruscating field of purple energy whose static crackle was overshadowed complete by a howl of pain. When it ended, Yuvaraj was once again more subdued.
“Ask what you will. But please do not tempt me to say what I mustn’t.”
Victor looked down at the lich’s shattered phylactery. “What my brother asked about before, just in a bit more detail. Are there any traps here in this chamber, and are their any other phylacteries present? There was the one lich, but more undead of a similar nature, but I’m not certain if they others might be able to reform after their destruction.”
“There are no traps in the most… holy… sanctuary of Nergal. They considered it superfluous and blasphemous. There were only the undead guardians, and among their kind only one of them was a true lich. The others were undead yes, but more primitive, not capable of regenerating a form after the destruction of their shell. They rose not out of intentional descent into undeath, but as a side effect of their burial and their dying oaths to their patron. There is nothing else to bother you.”
Marcus looked around, Velkyn glanced at the spot where the undead wizard had been disintegrated, and Inva let loose a covetous giggle that simply couldn’t be held in any longer. It was open season on a dead god’s tomb, at least for whatever could be immediately stuffed into bags, pouches, and pockets to bring out of the tomb and back to the prime material. They had what their employers wanted, though it was a person as much as an object, and anything else in the tomb was theirs to claim.
In rapid fashion the standing sarcophagi were opened, their contents emptied and the corpses within stripped of obvious grave goods. The bodies lying in the open atop their funeral platforms were similarly stripped, and ultimately only the corpse of Nergal’s avatar itself was left unmolested.
Gemstones, coins, jewelry and adornments of archaic design, and all sorts of mundane treasures began to pile up, with a smaller pile of obviously magical or unique looking objects set off the side, but the second pile was smaller only by comparison to the first.
“We can’t carry all of this…” Francesca lamented as she opened up a sack and glanced at a pile of gemstones at the edge of one corpse’s shoulder.
“That’s what coming back is for.” Inva said as she picked up a glowing, rose-quartz ring from the destroyed remains of the undead wizard.
The ring wasn’t magical, at least it didn’t glow with a dweomer beneath the tiefling’s divination magic, but the ring was glowing on its own, and the moment that Inva picked it up, she knew immediately that it wasn’t simply natural phosphorescence.
Passing now from the hand of Iutep Shulnok, Court Conjurer and Son-in-Law of Nergal, once bound to the hand of Imenseph, Artificer of Kaeleish, you hold me in your hands, Towapesh’s Eternal Companion. Wear me, and I shall be with you unto the end. Wear me and know me, if you are worthy of my gifts.
Inva grinned and looked at the others. She knew that if they got into a discussion over it, there was going to be an argument about who got the ring, something which screamed –artifact-. Yes there was probably a drawback to wearing it, and inwardly she suspected that putting the ring on was probably much easier than taking it off, if the ring’s name and words were any indication.
Nothing risked, nothing gained. She thought to herself before slipping the ring onto her left ring finger.
The rose-quartz ring was carved into the shape of an ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail, and the moment that she slipped it onto her finger, she felt it awake. Suddenly becoming animate, the ring rotated a complete circle of her finger and then proceeded to release its tail and sink its fangs into her flesh, drawing up and consuming a pair of tiny drops of blood.
“Damn it…” Inva muttered, shaking her hand. “I should have expected that.”
Velkyn and Phaedra looked over at her and collectively spoke their first thought. “What did you do?”
Inva held up her hand, showing the ring, showing the tiny smear of blood, and showing the glowing ring that wasn’t glowing with any obvious magic under the sight of her companions.
“I tried it on to see how it would look.” She replied, frowning at the ring. “It seems to have taken a liking to me.”
“Has it done anything else?” Phaedra asked. “I’m thinking about curses and such.”
Inva shrugged and gently tugged at the ring. As expected it didn’t move an inch, and though she could adjust its position on her finger, rotate it around and gently move it ever so forwards and back, attempting to slip it off of her finger was impossible. The ring was bound to her, presumably till death, or maybe the loss of a finger, neither of which was a pleasant thought.
“Hasn’t even said anything since it bit me.” She said.
The ring hadn’t made any comments or indications of what it was capable of since she’d put it on, though she was vaguely aware of it at the fringes of her consciousness. It was there, but it was being measured and distant, likely still mulling over the quality and content of its new companion. Eventually she figured that it would break its silence and they would talk, but till then, there was little she could do.
“We’ll be keeping an eye on you.” Velkyn said. “Just in case it’s intelligent if you know what I mean, possession and all.”
Inva nodded and sat down again, admiring the ring and trying to coax it into responding, but after several moments of the ring’s continued silence she gave up and went back to sifting through more of Nergal’s treasure.
Next came a plethora of wands, a glass staff whose surface flowed and crawled with a drifting series of shadowy runes. Whatever it was, it seemed imbued with the essence of shadowstuff, and though Inva seemed more curious about the ring in her hand, everyone else looked at the staff, and then at her and realized that she’d be the only one suited to use it even before it had been properly identified.
Velkyn picked up a second staff, one of bleached and polished white wood inlayed with a line of golden Untheric script. The staff felt warm to his touch and was tipped with a flame carved from carnelian, with a single colored flaw that resembled nothing so much as a curl of smoke at the flame’s tip. It wasn’t self-identifying, but the connection to flame or smoke was obvious, and as soon as they had time, he’d be casting the spells to be certain of its purpose.
A number of magical bracers and similar protective objects were found, cursorily identified and divvied up among Phaedra and Marcus, the latter of which also took a ring that produced a barrier of force, much like a smaller shield, but which wouldn’t cause any encumbrance.
Off to the other side of the tomb, Francesca picked up a slim pewter and ivory flute whose surface swirled with tiny symbols of wind storms and gusts. It was the same flute that the spectral bard had been using when they entered the tomb, but it wasn’t definite if the powers it had shown had been ones granted by the flute, or by its own magical abilities as a bard or an undead creature.
“Anyone have an idea what this might do?” The fighter asked, holding up the flute and turning towards the pile of objects that Velkyn, Inva, and Phaedra were hovering over like vultures at a carcass.
Velkyn looked back and at the flute that was glowing at a more than decent strength.
“Quite a bit of conjuration magic.”
Later when they had a chance to discern just what it did, they’d find that the flute was capable of summoning and controlling air elementals, assuming the user could properly play the instrument. Additionally, and perfectly in line with something found in the tomb of a god of air and darkness, the flute had a limited capacity to summon forth a wind storm when played at midnight on the prime material.
Francesca nodded and went back to sorting a cluster of wands while Velkyn admired a slender and well-balanced dagger that glittered with a sheen of ice.
Marcus put down an incense filled censer and looked over at the others. “Do we want to make claim to stuff now, or are we going to wait till later once we’ve fully identified things?”
“I think a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.” Phaedra said.
Victor shivered. Surrounded by the dead, a dozen feet away from the corpse of an evil god’s avatar, in the Plane of Shadow… it was all as far away from his concept of what was healthy and holy as it could be. Nergal’s essence was still swirling about the tomb, and occasionally he would find himself having to force himself to breath, like the dead god would have happily let someone willingly suffocate in his tomb, a fate that appeared to have happened on some scale elsewhere in the tomb complex among the builders and some of the buried dead themselves.
It might not have just been Nergal’s presence either, because the Plane of Shadow on its own tended to twist, distort, and exacerbate certain feelings and perceptions. The plane was a dark mirror of the prime material, and while Inva might have been at home in the dark wasteland, Victor felt like the plane was trying to suffocate him even more than a living Nergal might have tried.
“This place is disturbing.” The cleric said, unconsciously rubbing his holy symbol like a worry stone.
“The dark getting to you?” Inva asked, suddenly standing behind him, emerging from the gloom behind one of the sarcophagi, the red of her eyes standing out from the darkness.
Victor jumped in surprise and the tiefling grinned and giggled, slapping his shoulder as she walked past him.
“Sorry Victor.” She said, still grinning. “I couldn’t help that.”
“I know.” He replied. “But still, this place is seriously getting under my skin.”
Phaedra felt mildly uncomfortable, but it wasn’t anything that she couldn’t put up with. “Is it that bad?”
Garibaldi nodded his head vigorously, and seeing that it wasn’t just Victor expressing such a level of discomfort, Francesca and Marcus nodded as well. Half the group wasn’t comfortable with the surroundings, even in the absence of any danger, assuming that the floating skull of an ancient sorcerer-king with a brutal hatred of gods had been telling the truth about the absence of danger in the first place.
Perhaps it was best if they retreated to a safer, or at least more comfortable location.
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad.” Victor said. “Would anyone object to getting everything together and moving out of the plane of Shadow? Maybe even back to the surface on the prime? I don’t know if I could even receive my spells here when I pray to my deity.”
There weren’t any real objections, though Inva made some half-hearted jibs at her fellows for being scared of the dark, or scared of things hiding in the dark, maybe including herself. But the decision seemed pretty solid that leaving the Plane of Shadow was in order, and likely moving back beyond the tomb on the other side of the portal as well.
After some final discussions about who was going to carry what, they prepared to leave, making one final pass over the contents of the tomb. As they did so, Garibaldi glanced down at the pile of dust and pooled robes that marked where their erstwhile ally, Odesseron, had been disintegrated. "So how exactly are we going to break the news about Odesseron to his apprentices?"
“Gingerly.” Velkyn said. “I don’t want them attacking us, which they might just do.”
“They don’t strike me as very loyal though.” Victor said. “Well, not to their old master anyway. You think they’ll retaliate if they think we killed him?”
He shrugged, “No, they’re not. I’m assuming they won’t care that he’s dead and they’ll take it as an opportunity to enrich themselves now that they’re not in his shadow anyway. I’m worried that they’ll freak over losing out on material from the Barrow they might have gotten from him, or that they might freak because I’ve got his spellbook and they might consider that theirs. I don’t know.”
“Should we give the guy a proper burial or anything?” Garibaldi asked. “I’m assuming that nobody is even considering bringing him back to life.”
“He doesn’t deserve it.” Velkyn said firmly, a frightening solidity in his voice. “Neither a proper burial or resurrection. Wherever his soul goes is what fate he’ll be deserving of. Hopefully somewhere ugly.”
“I’d guessing Carceri.” Inva said. “If I was a betting girl.”
Velkyn nodded. “That’d be a safe bet I think. But yeah, we’ll handle his apprentices when we get back. Odesseron’s ashes can share space with Nergal till the end of time. It’s better than he deserves, but it’ll have to do.”
As they gathered their spoils, Yuvaraj included, and descended down from the top of the ziggurat, it seemed that Nergal's tomb was to become Odesseron's as well. There wasn’t a single lament, verbal or mental, about the Thayan’s fate as they wandered back into the shadow fringe, back to the pool of liquid shadow, and finally back into the depths of the Great Barrow on the Prime.
Back in the tomb, there was a small discussion about exploring some of the additional chambers and unexplored sections, but the discussion was brief. They had as much treasure as they could possibly carry, even taking magic into account, and more importantly they had the object that they had come for in the first place. With the Codex in their possession, they had very little reason to risk their lives within the trap-studded recesses of the central mound.
It took just under an hour to make their way back through the barrow and to the glass-coated shaft that led up to the surface. Thankfully there was little but a mental grumble from Severesthifek the imprisoned balor as they made their way to the exit, and they had little intention of ever meeting the tanar’ri again.
"Throw down the rope!" Velkyn shouted up towards the pinpoint of daylight at the top of the shaft. "We're coming back up!"
"And if you don't lower the rope, or you decided to run off with anything from our camp, life will be unpleasant…" Inva muttered darkly.
"Oh, I suspect life was already unpleasant for them." Phaedra added.
"Well the worst of their unpleasantness is over." Velkyn said. "We left his dust back on the Plane of Shadow."
Victor nodded, "True. Hopefully they won't follow the same path as he did."
Velkyn took a deep, measured breath and shrugged. "Well see how they'll take it. I'm not keeping my hopes up, but we'll see how they handle it. Hopefully they aren't stupid about it because they've got an opportunity to do better now that they're out from under lichbait's shadow."
Inva motioned with her hand impatiently. "Anytime now guys. Don't make me pop out of that zombie's shadow."
Phaedra raised an eyebrow.
"Well I could..."
A sudden sound of heavy friction and uncoiling rope from above cut off any complaints however, and a few seconds later the heavy, weighted end of the rope dropped down from above.
Velkyn gripped the rope and started to climb, "And now we see how they take it."
The first thing they saw at the top of the shaft however wasn't the bald heads and red robes of the apprentice Red Wizards, but the rotting face of one of their zombies. The zombie could have cared less that its creator and primary master was dead; evidently the apprentices still had control over it, and indeed Odesseron's pupils were all standing only a few feet back from the shaft, behind their source of cheap, if pungent, labor.
The apprentices looked at them curiously, expectantly, and with a bit of suppressed dread as they climbed out of the barrow entrance. Depending on how things inside the tomb went, their master might be in a sour mood, which wouldn’t benefit them at all, and would make the rest of the evening difficult.
Inva smiled at them, “I hate traps. I love treasure. Lich's are a pain in the *ss. Light is overrated if you ask me..."
"And your former master is dead." Velkyn added the last notion, which was the one that needed to be said.
"Ever so dead." The tiefling chipped in, unwilling to have her irreverence completely upstaged.
“What?” One of the Thayans asked incredulously.
“Dead.” Phaedra told them as she flew up and out from the barrow entrance.
“Disintegrated to be exact.” Velkyn said. “You’re welcome to go back down there and find the dust that was left of him, but we’ll tell you right now that it’s not exactly on the same plane.”
The glass staff that Inva cradled in his arms leaked a bit of shadowstuff into the dying dusk light. “The Plane of Shadow is a bit of an acquired taste.”
The apprentices collectively stared at them with shock, giving expressions as hollow as their zombie. They stood there in shock for a few long minutes, absolutely stunned by the revelation.
“So the question is.” Velkyn stated. “Now that you’re out from under the hand of an uncaring master, just what are you going to do with your freedom?”
And that was the point where any notion of loyalty or community among Odesseron’s former apprentices cracked, splintered and died. One of the apprentices immediately teleported, probably hoping to get back to Thay before the others did, giving him time to lay claim to their master’s most valued possessions.
“Bastard!” Another one of them shouted, coming to the same realization. Unable to cast the spell themselves, they took out a small token and crushed it in their fist, activating a similar spell to speed them across the leagues and return them to their magocratic nation of birth.
And so it went as Odesseron’s apprentices scrambled to escape and take their own ill-gotten share of their master’s estate, utterly ignoring his and their former allies. Two of the wizards remained however.
Khezen Ansalab looked across to her lover of convenience and made a decision that came quick to her, a true child of Thay’s brutally competitive magocracy. She shrugged and whispered the words to a teleport, choosing to leave her fellow apprentice to his fate in the wilds, hundreds of miles from home. In the end he was competition, despite their different focuses in the various schools of magic, and he was still crippled in body and magical capacity from the undead attack a few nights before. Because of that he wouldn’t be able to get home on his own, and she could let the elements do her work for her, leaving her hands less overtly sullied than they already were.
“Goodbye.” She said, shrugging and avoiding his gaze and the look of loss on his face as she vanished.
Velkyn winced and clenched his fists. He loathed those wizards more and more. He despised their culture as a perversion of the proper order.
“So much for loyalty…” Phaedra sighed. “You’d think I’d be used to it from family and all, but damn.”
“She left me!” Whimpered the lone remaining Thayan. “She left me behind…”
His lover had abandoned him, tossing him aside when a quicker route to power had made itself available. He’d entered into their companionship purely out of lust, but over time he’d grown fond of her, and to some extent he felt that she might have shared some of those feelings. But had she ever loved him? Left alone in the Great Dale, unable to cast anything more than a cantrip because of his earlier experience with the shadows, he slowly came to the realization that no, she never had in all likelihood.
“What’s your name?”
He stared off into space and tears collected in the corners of his eyes.
“I asked you, what’s your name?”
The voice jolted him and he looked up at the drow’s face. “Sorander Dakros. Apprentice necromancer of Thay.”
Velkyn nodded and looked at the man sternly, though since the man thought him to be a fullblooded drow, he could have rested entirely on those laurels and the other wizard would have been none the wiser.
“Your colleagues left you here.” Velkyn said. “They abandoned you, and without magic it’s very likely that you’ll die out here in the cold from exposure or the claws of something hungry before you manage to get back to civilization. I have an offer for you, but I’ll need you to answer a question for me with absolute truth.”
Dakros nodded and waited.
“Which is more important to you?” Velkyn asked. “Your Nation or your Art? Choose your loyalty.”
The Thayan blinked and stuttered, the gears of his mind probably running themselves into a smoking tangle as he weighed his chances of survival, the bitterness of his betrayal and abandonment by his former lover and fellow Thayan, and the unknown of the offer by the necromancer drow asking the question.
“So which is it?”
Dakros swallowed hard and looked up at the other necromancer. “My Art.”
Velkyn nodded and his expression became softer. The Thayan visibly relaxed.
“We’ll discuss your future apprenticeship and your future in general once we get back to Sigil.”
Dakros looked confused. Evidently he’d never heard of Sigil, or just hadn’t expected that his master’s former allies weren’t from Toril.
“But till that point, we have some business of our own to attend to.” Velkyn explained, taking out a bag of holding and tossing it to the ground. “Get in, and we’ll take you out when we’re back in the City of Doors.”
The Thayan looked at him, looked out at the winter sky of the Great Dale, and hastily stepped into the yawning, magical opening of the bag, vanishing into the stasis of its extradimensional space.
“Well that went well I think.” Velkyn said as he closed up the satchel and put it back on his belt. “We’ll have to find something to do with him now, but we can worry about that later.”
“You didn’t have anything to offer him?” Marcus asked, raising an eyebrow.
“No, I did.” He replied. “I know exactly where I’ll be bringing him, and I’m pretty certain that it’ll work out. I just haven’t asked the person I’m going to hand him over to if he’ll agree to it.”
Phaedra tilted her head. “You’re not thinking…?”
“Yeah, that’s who I’m thinking of.” Velkyn answered. “Why would he say no?”
“Because it’s a Red Wizard.” Phaedra said. “He hates them.”
“Then we’ll just leave out that Dakros is a Thayan before we drop him off.”
“Yeah, that’ll go over well.”
Victor broke into the conversation with a question. “Who are you going to hand this guy over to? I take it you both know him?”
“Our “uncle”.” They explained. “Family friend, we knew him growing up. He’s a nice guy. A little obsessed with magic, married to a barmy of the best sort, but a nice guy.”
“What’s his name?” Victor asked. “You haven’t yet called him by name.”
Velkyn chuckled. “We’re trying to avoid that.”
“Because he’ll hear us.” Phaedra said. “And this’ll work better if we can just spring it on him.”
“He’ll hear you? How?”
“Because that’s just what he can do.” Phaedra smiled. “He’s a proxy or something like that.”
Or something like that. Dakros might find himself a home and a new master, but the eventual trip to Sigil was going to be interesting in the way that a priest of the Chinese pantheon might call it interesting.
“Anyway, should we pack up camp and get going?” Inva asked them all. “The food in Center is a bit better than out here. No offense to your conjured food Victor, but it’s a bit on the bland side. I’ll take my food like I take my vices: exotic.”
Phaedra snickered and caught Inva winking at her. Victor, and Garibaldi even more so, were incredibly easy to squick. Victor chuckled and shook his head, taking the tiefling’s joking in stride, though it might have been an open question how much of it had been a joke, and how much of it had been accurate.
“So back to Center then?” Velkyn asked.
Victor made a face at the idea, "I really, -really- don't want to go marching right back to Center. It's not a pleasant place, and I'd rather leave here for somewhere that has sunlight. The weather and cloud cover here is far too much like Center's sky. Gray."
Phaedra shrugged, “Where else were you thinking?”
“Someplace here on this world if anyone is familiar with it, or maybe one of the Gatetowns on the Outlands. Just, just not Center.”
Inva shrugged as well, “I’d suggest Hopeless just to save us some time on the trip to Center, but that city sucks so no. Gnome-ville is looking like a decent compromise I suppose.”
“Gnome-ville?” Velkyn asked, grinning.
“Exactly.” Inva replied. “Gnome-ville. My ever so adoring name for Tradegate.”
They chuckled and traded some comments about that particular city as they went to gather their camp together, and take a quick look at anything that might have been left at Odesseron’s camp. But finding nothing that hadn’t already been stripped by his apprentices, they prepared themselves to leave Toril itself and head to the outer planes.
Yet before they did so, they first returned their horses back to the small outpost in the western reaches of the Dale, and only once that was done were finished with that world. Before they left for the Outlands however, in the fading sunlight of the Prime, Inva noticed that her ring, a shade of rose in darkness, had turned a dusky black in natural light. She wasn’t sure just what that meant, but as soon as they were settled and resting, she had every intention of finding out.
Amazingly, their planeshift onto the Outlands only placed them a dozen miles outside of Tradegate, and a teleport made the miles vanish in an instant. They were in good spirits then when they walked into a small inn and tavern to the south of the town’s markets, slapping gold onto the bar and ordering food, spirits, and the last available rooms. Luck was apparently on their side after their experiences in the Great Dale.
About an hour later, having filled their stomachs and taken a moment to wash, they went about sorting through their gains and picking and choosing objects as Velkyn and Phaedra identified their properties.
“Oh these are always amusing.” Velkyn chuckled as he held up a golden wand. “A wand of wonder. It’s like having a faerie dragon usable by command word.”
“Amusing or dangerous?” Phaedra asked, remembering her “aunt’s” misadventures with one of those creatures.
“A bit of both I think.” Victor said.
Across the room from them, Marcus and Francesca were busy cleaning their pistols, while Inva sat by herself, staring at her ring while the mimir that was Yuvaraj hovered silently only a few feet away. She had plans for him, but only if her ring remained silent.
“Ok now this is nice…” Velkyn said back on the other side of the room, holding a small, carved silver box taken from the broken corpse of the dead lich back in Nergal’s tomb. It was a phylactery in the classical sense, a container with bits of scripture or other holy relics contained within that allowed someone wearing them to benefit from a divine gift, focused and attuned by the objects inside.
“What does it do?” Victor asked, being the one person who’d be the most obvious to benefit from such an item.
“Hmm…” Velkyn said, gradually understanding more and more of its properties as he concentrated. “It was called Selukarth’s Efferent Phylactery… allows a priest access to the specific spells granted by gods of air and wind, even if they aren’t normally able to do so.”
Victor blinked. That was incredibly useful.
“So what’s the drawback?”
“Yeah…” Velkyn said, slowly putting the object down as he understood just what sort of price it extracted. “You have to wash it in the blood of a sacrificial animal killed by suffocation, or else you can still use the granted powers, but at a cost to your own health that then won’t return till the same process is repeated, but with a sentient creature killed by suffocation.”
Victor made a face. “I think I’ll pass.”
Garibaldi rolled his eyes. “Stupid evil gods.”
Sitting just within earshot, Inva rolled her own eyes and silently whispered a prayer to Shar as she looked down at the ring on her finger.
"So how talkative are you feeling?” She asked Towapesh’s Eternal Companion. “Now that we're quite a ways away from Nergal's tomb, do you have anything to say?"
The ring gave no reply, either telepathically, or even so much as a quiver on her finger. Enigmatic as when she'd first picked it up, the tiny jeweled eyes of the ouroboros glittered in the room's light, nestled happily atop the smeared, yellow-blue bruise slowly leaking its way down her ring finger.
"Apparently not very talkative at all." The tiefling said, frowning momentarily. "Keep your secrets."
There was an ever so faint sensation of amusement at the far edge of Inva's perception. Evidently the artifact felt attached to its silence, was still uncertain about the tiefling, or was simply headstrong.
Inva gave a sly grin, "Of course there might be ways around that."
Again at the edge of her mind there was a touch of emotion from the ring, this time something lodged between a grumble of irritation and pleasantly tacit approval.
A few moments later she was staring into the hollow eye sockets of Grand Artificer Yuvaraj, last Emperor of Imaskar. The sorcerer-king come mimir had been made an unliving repository of knowledge, and so long as he wasn't prompted to share the arcane secrets of his dead empire then he would hopefully be able to talk frankly. The object was found in his killers' tomb, and the scope of his knowledge was likely leagues deeper than Inva's.
"Hello there." Inva said cheekily as the amethyst lodged in the skull's mouth glittered with internal light.
“Yes?” The skull asked, slipping into its programmed role as mimir.
She held up her finger to show the lesser artifact. “What do you know about this?”
Reacting purely on instinct, Victor held aloft his holy symbol and invoked the name of his god. Sunlight momentarily filled the room, illuminating a small section around the cleric with the distinct exception of anywhere near the corpse of Nergal’s last avatar, but otherwise nothing much happened before the shadows and silvery light rushed back in like the tide and swamped the foreign god’s intrusion.
The skull, absolutely unaffected, turned to glance at Victor and a distinctly dismissive scoff echoed in his head. Garibaldi of course hadn’t moved an inch from where he stood, a deer-in-headlights look fixed on his face.
“…Ooops?” Victor said as he slowly began to back away with a look of contrition on his face.
Whatever it was, demilich or not, his attempt to turn it, the same power that had so many times sent the undead of the Great Barrow into flight, or incinerated them outright, it had done absolutely nothing. He wasn’t going to further provoke it, and he dreaded what actions it might take next.
But the floating skull did nothing, though it mentally spoke a few inscrutable words towards Victor, dripping with condescension.
Morbidly curious, Inva whispered the arcane phrases of a tongues spell. Moments later after she heard the next few statements by the floating skull, she blinked with a mixture of emotions crossing over her face, emotions that comprised a bit more awe, surprise, and seriousness than was typical for the her.
“You can put that down Victor.” She said, listening as the skull turned to look at her and repeated its first pronouncements.
”Upesh. Upesh Ma’hackteh…”
“He’s not a demilich, and he isn’t the phylactery we’re looking for.” The tiefling explained. “-He’s- the codex of Long Shadows and Last Breaths.”
“Excuse me?” Victor asked, lowering his holy symbol.
Velkyn looked at it: a floating, talking skull. “It’s a mimir?”
The skull didn’t seem to like that statement; evidently it could understand them perfectly, and was either unable to talk to them outside of its ancient tongue, or just unwilling to. Regardless of which the case was, it belted out a long string of angry words, followed by manic laughter, finally followed by a shout of pain and a crackle of energy that surged across the lines of silver runes carved into its cranium.
“Woah!” Marcus said, taking a step back. “What the hell was that?”
Inva winced. “Nergal reaching out of the grave to punish his killer.”
“Excuse me?” Victor asked a second time.
Phaedra tilted her head, “Wasn’t Nergal killed by one of the Imaskari emperors?”
The skull shook slightly, almost as if it were recovering from a seizure or fit of some sort. Again it rattled off a long string of words, but the second time its tone was more subdued, though with the same undercurrent of cynicism and suppressed anger.
“The first thing he said.” Inva explained. “Roughly translating: I’m still alive. I am still here. Nergal is dead. Gilgeam is dead. Imaskar lives on.”
Victor came to an unsettling realization. “Wait a minute…”
“Yeah…” Inva nodded. “The Codex is a mimir made out of the skull and spirit of the last Imaskari Sorcerer-King, Grand Artificer Yuvaraj the Purple Emperor.”
The skull-mimir nodded, and the soul-gem lodged in its mouth pulsed with light.
“For those of us who aren’t from Toril,” Marcus said, pointing to the skull. “Review the history here a bit?”
Inva nodded, “He was responsible for the abduction of the Mulhorandi and Untheric people from their worlds, and he was there when their gods came to Toril seeking revenge. He managed to inflict a mortal wound on Nergal before they finally killed him and took their revenge for what he’d done.”
The skull rattled off another several statements and Inva nodded. “Correct me if I’m wrong here. Or say it yourself if you don’t want me to interpret.”
The skull continued speaking in Raurinese, the tongue of Imaskar, and let the tiefling continue to translate.
“They forced him to bear witness to Nergal’s dying words, and they forced him to serve as an unwilling repository for the lore of his enemies, a witness to the eventual destruction of the Imaskari Empire and people at the hands of their slaves’ gods.”
The gilt skull hovering before them contained the soul of one of the most powerful spellcasters to have ever walked the face of Toril.
“Yes…” Yuvaraj said, slipping into an archaic yet fluid dialect of planar common. The Imaskari were intimately familiar with the planes; of course their last emperor knew how to speak to his guests.
“I was made to listen to Nergal’s babbling delirium before he passed away, and after they had carved their prayers into my skull they carried me as a trophy as they finished their destruction of my nation and my people. Their victory was not complete, but alas, I’m unable to speak on the issue. Their restrictions on what I might say are more a hell than any of the lower planes, and more a torment then my current state of being as an over-glorified mimir, an unliving example of what the elves might call a selukiira.”
“Well you won’t have to stay here in Nergal’s tomb anymore.” Velkyn said. “Our employers are rather interested in meeting you, though I’m not sure if they entirely knew just who or what you were.”
Inva gave him a skeptical look. “Assuming they told us everything they knew before they sent us.”
“Who sent you?”
“That’s a very good question.” Victor said. “We don’t know all of the particulars. One of them is a wizard, but I won’t know precisely what race he might be. He looks human, but I doubt that he is. We haven’t met any of the others yet.”
“We’ll be taking you to meet them.” Inva explained. “Well, once we’ve finished looking over what Nergal seems to have left us that is.”
“You have my gratitude.” Yuvaraj said, putting as much thanks into his tone as his status seemed capable of permitting. “In the meantime, I am obligated by my current nature to offer you what information I know, within limits set forth by Nergal’s priests. Ask me any question and I will answer if capable.”
“So what do you know about looting Nergal’s tomb?” Marcus asked.
As grossly inappropriate a question as it was, Yuvaraj projected a mental impression of a smile, all a moment before the pain came once again. As he’d indicated, Nergal’s last clerics and the high-priests of the Untheric pantheon had written prohibitions and strictures into his state of existence down to what he was capable of saying, what he couldn’t say, and what would bring down punishment unless he avoided it. They left open the chance to blaspheme, tempting and taunting him with the satisfaction of speaking his mind, but he would suffer for each and every word of it.
“I am limited to a great extent in what I can say mortal.” The Emperor explained. “A result of the process by which the clerics of Gilgeam, Nergal, Assuran, and others ripped my soul from my corpse and bottled me inside the gem they set into my skull like an apple in the maw of a roast pig. I would wish nothing more than to help you… collect… what you wish from this place.”
It was obvious the Sorcerer-King gone mimir was picking and choosing his words carefully so as to avoid pain, and to provide what knowledge he could to the people who could actually affect his most-hated enemies, past and perhaps still present.
“Be direct mortal. I can answer you more in depth if asked specific questions.”
Victor winced at the agony the man’s state of being must have been, all at the same time he knew that in life he was responsible for atrocities on a grand and staggering scale. Still, Victor had to feel pity, but they had some other pressing questions before they could begin to understand more about who Yuvaraj was, and just why their employers wanted his spirit so badly.
“One of the clerics in this tomb was a lich.” Victor stated. “He had a phylactery. Do you know what it looks like and where it is?”
“His phylactery was crafted out of and embedded into the magical structure of a minor artifact, generically referred to as a so-called Talisman of Ineffable Evil. His particular amulet, roughly four inches across and carved of black onyx, is currently still gripped in his hand.”
“You enjoyed that.” Inva said, leaning back against one of the empty sarcophagi.
“Yes. Yes I did.” Yuvaraj spat. “He was one of the lesser priests involved in my… situation. He can rot in Hades for all I care. I suspect that he’ll find his afterlife even worse than mine however, given the status of Nergal’s domain.”
Phaedra grimaced, “I can only imagine.”
Garibaldi looked to his left and stooped down to pick up the talisman still resting amid the corporeal remains of the clerical lich. He looked at Victor and then down to the phylactery, and then with a nod he placed it on one of the funeral biers and smashed it into a dozen pieces with the heavy, weighted end of his sword’s pommel.
Again there was the sensation of pleasure projected by the trapped spirit of Yuvaraj, but he’d crossed a line and a sharp cry of pain echoed across the chamber a moment later.
“As you can see, there are limitations in place.” He said with some difficulty, still recovering.
“Could we remove them?” Velkyn asked.
The skull rotated side to side, shaking its head in the negative. “My knowledge of how to do precisely that is locked away among the topics that are entirely prohibited.”
Inva and Velkyn looked at one another, thinking the same thought. Yuvaraj was Imaskari, and the vast majority of that ancient kingdom’s lore was vanished and forgotten. Their magic was also among the grandest and most unique to have ever been developed on Toril, so the question remained, what could the spirit of their last emperor tell them about that magic, and Imaskar itself.
“I take it that you’re prohibited from telling us about Imaskari magic?”
The skull audibly sighed, for a moment sounding like a broken prisoner. “Yes…”
“Damn.” Velkyn said, gently kicking Nergal’s funeral platform. “Too much to hope for I suppose.”
Yuvaraj drifted slightly closer to the ground, almost a submissive gesture. “Not only am I prevented from using any magic of my own, but I am utterly prohibited from teaching it to others.”
“What about Imaskar itself?” Velkyn asked. “Can you talk about it and its history?”
“To an extent, but only in the context of the eventual conquest of my nation by our slaves and their god-kings. I could tell you of the fall of Inupras and the march of Horus-Re through the gates of the city, and I could speak of the features of the city as it was sacked, but I couldn’t delve into its history except when relating to its destruction. The foreign gods took revenge on us, on me, for what we did. But I do not regret it”
Yuvaraj was getting angry again, and the end result was by that point well known.
“I would do it again.” He snarled. “I would build a hundred cities on the broken backs of their worshippers, and I would dance atop Nergal’s corpse and every other so-called god if I had the chance. I watched him die, and I will treasure that moment when he begged first for help, and then deliriously begged for release from his pain. I never begged, not even when they tore my soul out. I…”
The skull dropped to the ground, enmeshed in a coruscating field of purple energy whose static crackle was overshadowed complete by a howl of pain. When it ended, Yuvaraj was once again more subdued.
“Ask what you will. But please do not tempt me to say what I mustn’t.”
Victor looked down at the lich’s shattered phylactery. “What my brother asked about before, just in a bit more detail. Are there any traps here in this chamber, and are their any other phylacteries present? There was the one lich, but more undead of a similar nature, but I’m not certain if they others might be able to reform after their destruction.”
“There are no traps in the most… holy… sanctuary of Nergal. They considered it superfluous and blasphemous. There were only the undead guardians, and among their kind only one of them was a true lich. The others were undead yes, but more primitive, not capable of regenerating a form after the destruction of their shell. They rose not out of intentional descent into undeath, but as a side effect of their burial and their dying oaths to their patron. There is nothing else to bother you.”
Marcus looked around, Velkyn glanced at the spot where the undead wizard had been disintegrated, and Inva let loose a covetous giggle that simply couldn’t be held in any longer. It was open season on a dead god’s tomb, at least for whatever could be immediately stuffed into bags, pouches, and pockets to bring out of the tomb and back to the prime material. They had what their employers wanted, though it was a person as much as an object, and anything else in the tomb was theirs to claim.
In rapid fashion the standing sarcophagi were opened, their contents emptied and the corpses within stripped of obvious grave goods. The bodies lying in the open atop their funeral platforms were similarly stripped, and ultimately only the corpse of Nergal’s avatar itself was left unmolested.
Gemstones, coins, jewelry and adornments of archaic design, and all sorts of mundane treasures began to pile up, with a smaller pile of obviously magical or unique looking objects set off the side, but the second pile was smaller only by comparison to the first.
“We can’t carry all of this…” Francesca lamented as she opened up a sack and glanced at a pile of gemstones at the edge of one corpse’s shoulder.
“That’s what coming back is for.” Inva said as she picked up a glowing, rose-quartz ring from the destroyed remains of the undead wizard.
The ring wasn’t magical, at least it didn’t glow with a dweomer beneath the tiefling’s divination magic, but the ring was glowing on its own, and the moment that Inva picked it up, she knew immediately that it wasn’t simply natural phosphorescence.
Passing now from the hand of Iutep Shulnok, Court Conjurer and Son-in-Law of Nergal, once bound to the hand of Imenseph, Artificer of Kaeleish, you hold me in your hands, Towapesh’s Eternal Companion. Wear me, and I shall be with you unto the end. Wear me and know me, if you are worthy of my gifts.
Inva grinned and looked at the others. She knew that if they got into a discussion over it, there was going to be an argument about who got the ring, something which screamed –artifact-. Yes there was probably a drawback to wearing it, and inwardly she suspected that putting the ring on was probably much easier than taking it off, if the ring’s name and words were any indication.
Nothing risked, nothing gained. She thought to herself before slipping the ring onto her left ring finger.
The rose-quartz ring was carved into the shape of an ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail, and the moment that she slipped it onto her finger, she felt it awake. Suddenly becoming animate, the ring rotated a complete circle of her finger and then proceeded to release its tail and sink its fangs into her flesh, drawing up and consuming a pair of tiny drops of blood.
“Damn it…” Inva muttered, shaking her hand. “I should have expected that.”
Velkyn and Phaedra looked over at her and collectively spoke their first thought. “What did you do?”
Inva held up her hand, showing the ring, showing the tiny smear of blood, and showing the glowing ring that wasn’t glowing with any obvious magic under the sight of her companions.
“I tried it on to see how it would look.” She replied, frowning at the ring. “It seems to have taken a liking to me.”
“Has it done anything else?” Phaedra asked. “I’m thinking about curses and such.”
Inva shrugged and gently tugged at the ring. As expected it didn’t move an inch, and though she could adjust its position on her finger, rotate it around and gently move it ever so forwards and back, attempting to slip it off of her finger was impossible. The ring was bound to her, presumably till death, or maybe the loss of a finger, neither of which was a pleasant thought.
“Hasn’t even said anything since it bit me.” She said.
The ring hadn’t made any comments or indications of what it was capable of since she’d put it on, though she was vaguely aware of it at the fringes of her consciousness. It was there, but it was being measured and distant, likely still mulling over the quality and content of its new companion. Eventually she figured that it would break its silence and they would talk, but till then, there was little she could do.
“We’ll be keeping an eye on you.” Velkyn said. “Just in case it’s intelligent if you know what I mean, possession and all.”
Inva nodded and sat down again, admiring the ring and trying to coax it into responding, but after several moments of the ring’s continued silence she gave up and went back to sifting through more of Nergal’s treasure.
Next came a plethora of wands, a glass staff whose surface flowed and crawled with a drifting series of shadowy runes. Whatever it was, it seemed imbued with the essence of shadowstuff, and though Inva seemed more curious about the ring in her hand, everyone else looked at the staff, and then at her and realized that she’d be the only one suited to use it even before it had been properly identified.
Velkyn picked up a second staff, one of bleached and polished white wood inlayed with a line of golden Untheric script. The staff felt warm to his touch and was tipped with a flame carved from carnelian, with a single colored flaw that resembled nothing so much as a curl of smoke at the flame’s tip. It wasn’t self-identifying, but the connection to flame or smoke was obvious, and as soon as they had time, he’d be casting the spells to be certain of its purpose.
A number of magical bracers and similar protective objects were found, cursorily identified and divvied up among Phaedra and Marcus, the latter of which also took a ring that produced a barrier of force, much like a smaller shield, but which wouldn’t cause any encumbrance.
Off to the other side of the tomb, Francesca picked up a slim pewter and ivory flute whose surface swirled with tiny symbols of wind storms and gusts. It was the same flute that the spectral bard had been using when they entered the tomb, but it wasn’t definite if the powers it had shown had been ones granted by the flute, or by its own magical abilities as a bard or an undead creature.
“Anyone have an idea what this might do?” The fighter asked, holding up the flute and turning towards the pile of objects that Velkyn, Inva, and Phaedra were hovering over like vultures at a carcass.
Velkyn looked back and at the flute that was glowing at a more than decent strength.
“Quite a bit of conjuration magic.”
Later when they had a chance to discern just what it did, they’d find that the flute was capable of summoning and controlling air elementals, assuming the user could properly play the instrument. Additionally, and perfectly in line with something found in the tomb of a god of air and darkness, the flute had a limited capacity to summon forth a wind storm when played at midnight on the prime material.
Francesca nodded and went back to sorting a cluster of wands while Velkyn admired a slender and well-balanced dagger that glittered with a sheen of ice.
Marcus put down an incense filled censer and looked over at the others. “Do we want to make claim to stuff now, or are we going to wait till later once we’ve fully identified things?”
“I think a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.” Phaedra said.
Victor shivered. Surrounded by the dead, a dozen feet away from the corpse of an evil god’s avatar, in the Plane of Shadow… it was all as far away from his concept of what was healthy and holy as it could be. Nergal’s essence was still swirling about the tomb, and occasionally he would find himself having to force himself to breath, like the dead god would have happily let someone willingly suffocate in his tomb, a fate that appeared to have happened on some scale elsewhere in the tomb complex among the builders and some of the buried dead themselves.
It might not have just been Nergal’s presence either, because the Plane of Shadow on its own tended to twist, distort, and exacerbate certain feelings and perceptions. The plane was a dark mirror of the prime material, and while Inva might have been at home in the dark wasteland, Victor felt like the plane was trying to suffocate him even more than a living Nergal might have tried.
“This place is disturbing.” The cleric said, unconsciously rubbing his holy symbol like a worry stone.
“The dark getting to you?” Inva asked, suddenly standing behind him, emerging from the gloom behind one of the sarcophagi, the red of her eyes standing out from the darkness.
Victor jumped in surprise and the tiefling grinned and giggled, slapping his shoulder as she walked past him.
“Sorry Victor.” She said, still grinning. “I couldn’t help that.”
“I know.” He replied. “But still, this place is seriously getting under my skin.”
Phaedra felt mildly uncomfortable, but it wasn’t anything that she couldn’t put up with. “Is it that bad?”
Garibaldi nodded his head vigorously, and seeing that it wasn’t just Victor expressing such a level of discomfort, Francesca and Marcus nodded as well. Half the group wasn’t comfortable with the surroundings, even in the absence of any danger, assuming that the floating skull of an ancient sorcerer-king with a brutal hatred of gods had been telling the truth about the absence of danger in the first place.
Perhaps it was best if they retreated to a safer, or at least more comfortable location.
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad.” Victor said. “Would anyone object to getting everything together and moving out of the plane of Shadow? Maybe even back to the surface on the prime? I don’t know if I could even receive my spells here when I pray to my deity.”
There weren’t any real objections, though Inva made some half-hearted jibs at her fellows for being scared of the dark, or scared of things hiding in the dark, maybe including herself. But the decision seemed pretty solid that leaving the Plane of Shadow was in order, and likely moving back beyond the tomb on the other side of the portal as well.
After some final discussions about who was going to carry what, they prepared to leave, making one final pass over the contents of the tomb. As they did so, Garibaldi glanced down at the pile of dust and pooled robes that marked where their erstwhile ally, Odesseron, had been disintegrated. "So how exactly are we going to break the news about Odesseron to his apprentices?"
“Gingerly.” Velkyn said. “I don’t want them attacking us, which they might just do.”
“They don’t strike me as very loyal though.” Victor said. “Well, not to their old master anyway. You think they’ll retaliate if they think we killed him?”
He shrugged, “No, they’re not. I’m assuming they won’t care that he’s dead and they’ll take it as an opportunity to enrich themselves now that they’re not in his shadow anyway. I’m worried that they’ll freak over losing out on material from the Barrow they might have gotten from him, or that they might freak because I’ve got his spellbook and they might consider that theirs. I don’t know.”
“Should we give the guy a proper burial or anything?” Garibaldi asked. “I’m assuming that nobody is even considering bringing him back to life.”
“He doesn’t deserve it.” Velkyn said firmly, a frightening solidity in his voice. “Neither a proper burial or resurrection. Wherever his soul goes is what fate he’ll be deserving of. Hopefully somewhere ugly.”
“I’d guessing Carceri.” Inva said. “If I was a betting girl.”
Velkyn nodded. “That’d be a safe bet I think. But yeah, we’ll handle his apprentices when we get back. Odesseron’s ashes can share space with Nergal till the end of time. It’s better than he deserves, but it’ll have to do.”
As they gathered their spoils, Yuvaraj included, and descended down from the top of the ziggurat, it seemed that Nergal's tomb was to become Odesseron's as well. There wasn’t a single lament, verbal or mental, about the Thayan’s fate as they wandered back into the shadow fringe, back to the pool of liquid shadow, and finally back into the depths of the Great Barrow on the Prime.
Back in the tomb, there was a small discussion about exploring some of the additional chambers and unexplored sections, but the discussion was brief. They had as much treasure as they could possibly carry, even taking magic into account, and more importantly they had the object that they had come for in the first place. With the Codex in their possession, they had very little reason to risk their lives within the trap-studded recesses of the central mound.
It took just under an hour to make their way back through the barrow and to the glass-coated shaft that led up to the surface. Thankfully there was little but a mental grumble from Severesthifek the imprisoned balor as they made their way to the exit, and they had little intention of ever meeting the tanar’ri again.
"Throw down the rope!" Velkyn shouted up towards the pinpoint of daylight at the top of the shaft. "We're coming back up!"
"And if you don't lower the rope, or you decided to run off with anything from our camp, life will be unpleasant…" Inva muttered darkly.
"Oh, I suspect life was already unpleasant for them." Phaedra added.
"Well the worst of their unpleasantness is over." Velkyn said. "We left his dust back on the Plane of Shadow."
Victor nodded, "True. Hopefully they won't follow the same path as he did."
Velkyn took a deep, measured breath and shrugged. "Well see how they'll take it. I'm not keeping my hopes up, but we'll see how they handle it. Hopefully they aren't stupid about it because they've got an opportunity to do better now that they're out from under lichbait's shadow."
Inva motioned with her hand impatiently. "Anytime now guys. Don't make me pop out of that zombie's shadow."
Phaedra raised an eyebrow.
"Well I could..."
A sudden sound of heavy friction and uncoiling rope from above cut off any complaints however, and a few seconds later the heavy, weighted end of the rope dropped down from above.
Velkyn gripped the rope and started to climb, "And now we see how they take it."
***
The first thing they saw at the top of the shaft however wasn't the bald heads and red robes of the apprentice Red Wizards, but the rotting face of one of their zombies. The zombie could have cared less that its creator and primary master was dead; evidently the apprentices still had control over it, and indeed Odesseron's pupils were all standing only a few feet back from the shaft, behind their source of cheap, if pungent, labor.
The apprentices looked at them curiously, expectantly, and with a bit of suppressed dread as they climbed out of the barrow entrance. Depending on how things inside the tomb went, their master might be in a sour mood, which wouldn’t benefit them at all, and would make the rest of the evening difficult.
Inva smiled at them, “I hate traps. I love treasure. Lich's are a pain in the *ss. Light is overrated if you ask me..."
"And your former master is dead." Velkyn added the last notion, which was the one that needed to be said.
"Ever so dead." The tiefling chipped in, unwilling to have her irreverence completely upstaged.
“What?” One of the Thayans asked incredulously.
“Dead.” Phaedra told them as she flew up and out from the barrow entrance.
“Disintegrated to be exact.” Velkyn said. “You’re welcome to go back down there and find the dust that was left of him, but we’ll tell you right now that it’s not exactly on the same plane.”
The glass staff that Inva cradled in his arms leaked a bit of shadowstuff into the dying dusk light. “The Plane of Shadow is a bit of an acquired taste.”
The apprentices collectively stared at them with shock, giving expressions as hollow as their zombie. They stood there in shock for a few long minutes, absolutely stunned by the revelation.
“So the question is.” Velkyn stated. “Now that you’re out from under the hand of an uncaring master, just what are you going to do with your freedom?”
And that was the point where any notion of loyalty or community among Odesseron’s former apprentices cracked, splintered and died. One of the apprentices immediately teleported, probably hoping to get back to Thay before the others did, giving him time to lay claim to their master’s most valued possessions.
“Bastard!” Another one of them shouted, coming to the same realization. Unable to cast the spell themselves, they took out a small token and crushed it in their fist, activating a similar spell to speed them across the leagues and return them to their magocratic nation of birth.
And so it went as Odesseron’s apprentices scrambled to escape and take their own ill-gotten share of their master’s estate, utterly ignoring his and their former allies. Two of the wizards remained however.
Khezen Ansalab looked across to her lover of convenience and made a decision that came quick to her, a true child of Thay’s brutally competitive magocracy. She shrugged and whispered the words to a teleport, choosing to leave her fellow apprentice to his fate in the wilds, hundreds of miles from home. In the end he was competition, despite their different focuses in the various schools of magic, and he was still crippled in body and magical capacity from the undead attack a few nights before. Because of that he wouldn’t be able to get home on his own, and she could let the elements do her work for her, leaving her hands less overtly sullied than they already were.
“Goodbye.” She said, shrugging and avoiding his gaze and the look of loss on his face as she vanished.
Velkyn winced and clenched his fists. He loathed those wizards more and more. He despised their culture as a perversion of the proper order.
“So much for loyalty…” Phaedra sighed. “You’d think I’d be used to it from family and all, but damn.”
“She left me!” Whimpered the lone remaining Thayan. “She left me behind…”
His lover had abandoned him, tossing him aside when a quicker route to power had made itself available. He’d entered into their companionship purely out of lust, but over time he’d grown fond of her, and to some extent he felt that she might have shared some of those feelings. But had she ever loved him? Left alone in the Great Dale, unable to cast anything more than a cantrip because of his earlier experience with the shadows, he slowly came to the realization that no, she never had in all likelihood.
“What’s your name?”
He stared off into space and tears collected in the corners of his eyes.
“I asked you, what’s your name?”
The voice jolted him and he looked up at the drow’s face. “Sorander Dakros. Apprentice necromancer of Thay.”
Velkyn nodded and looked at the man sternly, though since the man thought him to be a fullblooded drow, he could have rested entirely on those laurels and the other wizard would have been none the wiser.
“Your colleagues left you here.” Velkyn said. “They abandoned you, and without magic it’s very likely that you’ll die out here in the cold from exposure or the claws of something hungry before you manage to get back to civilization. I have an offer for you, but I’ll need you to answer a question for me with absolute truth.”
Dakros nodded and waited.
“Which is more important to you?” Velkyn asked. “Your Nation or your Art? Choose your loyalty.”
The Thayan blinked and stuttered, the gears of his mind probably running themselves into a smoking tangle as he weighed his chances of survival, the bitterness of his betrayal and abandonment by his former lover and fellow Thayan, and the unknown of the offer by the necromancer drow asking the question.
“So which is it?”
Dakros swallowed hard and looked up at the other necromancer. “My Art.”
Velkyn nodded and his expression became softer. The Thayan visibly relaxed.
“We’ll discuss your future apprenticeship and your future in general once we get back to Sigil.”
Dakros looked confused. Evidently he’d never heard of Sigil, or just hadn’t expected that his master’s former allies weren’t from Toril.
“But till that point, we have some business of our own to attend to.” Velkyn explained, taking out a bag of holding and tossing it to the ground. “Get in, and we’ll take you out when we’re back in the City of Doors.”
The Thayan looked at him, looked out at the winter sky of the Great Dale, and hastily stepped into the yawning, magical opening of the bag, vanishing into the stasis of its extradimensional space.
“Well that went well I think.” Velkyn said as he closed up the satchel and put it back on his belt. “We’ll have to find something to do with him now, but we can worry about that later.”
“You didn’t have anything to offer him?” Marcus asked, raising an eyebrow.
“No, I did.” He replied. “I know exactly where I’ll be bringing him, and I’m pretty certain that it’ll work out. I just haven’t asked the person I’m going to hand him over to if he’ll agree to it.”
Phaedra tilted her head. “You’re not thinking…?”
“Yeah, that’s who I’m thinking of.” Velkyn answered. “Why would he say no?”
“Because it’s a Red Wizard.” Phaedra said. “He hates them.”
“Then we’ll just leave out that Dakros is a Thayan before we drop him off.”
“Yeah, that’ll go over well.”
Victor broke into the conversation with a question. “Who are you going to hand this guy over to? I take it you both know him?”
“Our “uncle”.” They explained. “Family friend, we knew him growing up. He’s a nice guy. A little obsessed with magic, married to a barmy of the best sort, but a nice guy.”
“What’s his name?” Victor asked. “You haven’t yet called him by name.”
Velkyn chuckled. “We’re trying to avoid that.”
“Because he’ll hear us.” Phaedra said. “And this’ll work better if we can just spring it on him.”
“He’ll hear you? How?”
“Because that’s just what he can do.” Phaedra smiled. “He’s a proxy or something like that.”
Or something like that. Dakros might find himself a home and a new master, but the eventual trip to Sigil was going to be interesting in the way that a priest of the Chinese pantheon might call it interesting.
“Anyway, should we pack up camp and get going?” Inva asked them all. “The food in Center is a bit better than out here. No offense to your conjured food Victor, but it’s a bit on the bland side. I’ll take my food like I take my vices: exotic.”
Phaedra snickered and caught Inva winking at her. Victor, and Garibaldi even more so, were incredibly easy to squick. Victor chuckled and shook his head, taking the tiefling’s joking in stride, though it might have been an open question how much of it had been a joke, and how much of it had been accurate.
“So back to Center then?” Velkyn asked.
Victor made a face at the idea, "I really, -really- don't want to go marching right back to Center. It's not a pleasant place, and I'd rather leave here for somewhere that has sunlight. The weather and cloud cover here is far too much like Center's sky. Gray."
Phaedra shrugged, “Where else were you thinking?”
“Someplace here on this world if anyone is familiar with it, or maybe one of the Gatetowns on the Outlands. Just, just not Center.”
Inva shrugged as well, “I’d suggest Hopeless just to save us some time on the trip to Center, but that city sucks so no. Gnome-ville is looking like a decent compromise I suppose.”
“Gnome-ville?” Velkyn asked, grinning.
“Exactly.” Inva replied. “Gnome-ville. My ever so adoring name for Tradegate.”
They chuckled and traded some comments about that particular city as they went to gather their camp together, and take a quick look at anything that might have been left at Odesseron’s camp. But finding nothing that hadn’t already been stripped by his apprentices, they prepared themselves to leave Toril itself and head to the outer planes.
Yet before they did so, they first returned their horses back to the small outpost in the western reaches of the Dale, and only once that was done were finished with that world. Before they left for the Outlands however, in the fading sunlight of the Prime, Inva noticed that her ring, a shade of rose in darkness, had turned a dusky black in natural light. She wasn’t sure just what that meant, but as soon as they were settled and resting, she had every intention of finding out.
***
Amazingly, their planeshift onto the Outlands only placed them a dozen miles outside of Tradegate, and a teleport made the miles vanish in an instant. They were in good spirits then when they walked into a small inn and tavern to the south of the town’s markets, slapping gold onto the bar and ordering food, spirits, and the last available rooms. Luck was apparently on their side after their experiences in the Great Dale.
About an hour later, having filled their stomachs and taken a moment to wash, they went about sorting through their gains and picking and choosing objects as Velkyn and Phaedra identified their properties.
“Oh these are always amusing.” Velkyn chuckled as he held up a golden wand. “A wand of wonder. It’s like having a faerie dragon usable by command word.”
“Amusing or dangerous?” Phaedra asked, remembering her “aunt’s” misadventures with one of those creatures.
“A bit of both I think.” Victor said.
Across the room from them, Marcus and Francesca were busy cleaning their pistols, while Inva sat by herself, staring at her ring while the mimir that was Yuvaraj hovered silently only a few feet away. She had plans for him, but only if her ring remained silent.
“Ok now this is nice…” Velkyn said back on the other side of the room, holding a small, carved silver box taken from the broken corpse of the dead lich back in Nergal’s tomb. It was a phylactery in the classical sense, a container with bits of scripture or other holy relics contained within that allowed someone wearing them to benefit from a divine gift, focused and attuned by the objects inside.
“What does it do?” Victor asked, being the one person who’d be the most obvious to benefit from such an item.
“Hmm…” Velkyn said, gradually understanding more and more of its properties as he concentrated. “It was called Selukarth’s Efferent Phylactery… allows a priest access to the specific spells granted by gods of air and wind, even if they aren’t normally able to do so.”
Victor blinked. That was incredibly useful.
“So what’s the drawback?”
“Yeah…” Velkyn said, slowly putting the object down as he understood just what sort of price it extracted. “You have to wash it in the blood of a sacrificial animal killed by suffocation, or else you can still use the granted powers, but at a cost to your own health that then won’t return till the same process is repeated, but with a sentient creature killed by suffocation.”
Victor made a face. “I think I’ll pass.”
Garibaldi rolled his eyes. “Stupid evil gods.”
Sitting just within earshot, Inva rolled her own eyes and silently whispered a prayer to Shar as she looked down at the ring on her finger.
"So how talkative are you feeling?” She asked Towapesh’s Eternal Companion. “Now that we're quite a ways away from Nergal's tomb, do you have anything to say?"
The ring gave no reply, either telepathically, or even so much as a quiver on her finger. Enigmatic as when she'd first picked it up, the tiny jeweled eyes of the ouroboros glittered in the room's light, nestled happily atop the smeared, yellow-blue bruise slowly leaking its way down her ring finger.
"Apparently not very talkative at all." The tiefling said, frowning momentarily. "Keep your secrets."
There was an ever so faint sensation of amusement at the far edge of Inva's perception. Evidently the artifact felt attached to its silence, was still uncertain about the tiefling, or was simply headstrong.
Inva gave a sly grin, "Of course there might be ways around that."
Again at the edge of her mind there was a touch of emotion from the ring, this time something lodged between a grumble of irritation and pleasantly tacit approval.
A few moments later she was staring into the hollow eye sockets of Grand Artificer Yuvaraj, last Emperor of Imaskar. The sorcerer-king come mimir had been made an unliving repository of knowledge, and so long as he wasn't prompted to share the arcane secrets of his dead empire then he would hopefully be able to talk frankly. The object was found in his killers' tomb, and the scope of his knowledge was likely leagues deeper than Inva's.
"Hello there." Inva said cheekily as the amethyst lodged in the skull's mouth glittered with internal light.
“Yes?” The skull asked, slipping into its programmed role as mimir.
She held up her finger to show the lesser artifact. “What do you know about this?”
Last edited:
