Three days later and they finally arrived at the Tower of Lead. For the last day of their travel along the literal edge of Mineral and Positive Energy, the landscape danced with crackles of blue-white energy that collected in the crystalline veins of gemstones and metals that made up the cavern and tunnel walls, periodically discharging with ferocious surges of what at first seemed to be lightning. But the first time one such bolt connected with one of them, rather than triggering magical protection or causing pain, the effect was altogether invigorating.
“To be honest, I expected that to hurt…” Nisha quipped, having just had one such bolt connect with her chest, run through her body, and discharge from her tail before grounding in the far wall to create a glittering kaleidoscope pattern in the mineral veins therein.
“It doesn’t hurt; it’s just embarrassing.” Fyrehowl shook her head, her fur standing nearly straight up from ambient static.
Below the banter and running as an unspoken undercurrent was the worry that all of their struggle might have been for naught. They wanted, no, they -needed- to stop the ‘loths from… well they didn’t even know what they needed to stop them from getting, only that it was related to Factol Lariset’s discovery so long ago. Something ancient and unfathomable waited within the depths of the Elemental planes and if the Oinoloth desired it, they had to stop him.
While they weren’t sure of what it was waiting for them, they likewise hadn’t a clue of what waited for them at the Tower of Lead itself. Would they have to fight through a literal army of fiends encamped about the tower’s base? Would it be laden with horrific spells that would have made the nightmare of the Incantifer’s prison-maze a sunny spring afternoon? They openly debated what might or might not be as they passed through cavern upon cavern, tunnel after tunnel until they finally, blessedly arrived.
“What the f**k…” Clueless blurted out.
***
3 days earlier…
The arcanaloths whimpered, archmage level sorcerers reduced to a pack of keening dogs, the door to the Tower of Lead now broken inward and the rubble splattered in blood. Behind them all, the Overlord of Carceri smiled radiantly, while next to her, Vorkannis’s eyes danced with obsession.
“My beloved Oinoloth, my master, how shall we proceed?” She glanced back at the tens of thousands of lesser yugoloths who had survived their bloody passage through the depths of Quasielemental Mineral.
Rank and file, they waited in near-perfect organization as their overseers did their best to keep them from murdering one another in their perpetual need to hurt and kill without the intelligence and insight to grander or more subtle maliciousness that their self-appointed betters possessed. They’d passed through the depths of the plane, seen and slaughtered the greatest of its beings for reasons unknown to themselves beyond the orders they obeyed and the fact that the bloodshed pleased them. They had functioned perfectly to the purpose for which they had been created, and there at the base of the Tower of Lead in some way, they waited perhaps for the reward they might have considered earned.
Vorkannis didn’t so much as turn to glance at the remaining army. “Kill them all.”
Shylara blinked, her mouth open and tongue momentarily trembling as she mulled over how to respond. Within earshot, a dozen other arcanaloths’ ears swiveled and focused on what was said and what it meant for them in the coming days or hours.
“Execute every last one of them.” Vorkannis flashed his fangs, illusions over the puppeteered body of his ultroloth proxy, but in that moment, they seemed virtually tangible such was the callous malignancy of his intent. “They are polluted filth, no matter how useful they’ve been up to this point. We only need a small force to take the tower’s interior and seize what I have come for.”
What precisely they had come for was left deliberately unexplained. Not even Shylara understood the answer to that question and the Ebon provided absolutely zero suggestions or hints.
“Yes, my Oinoloth…” Internally the Overlord of Carceri’s mental eyes widened in equal parts horror and equal parts desire.
****
There were no armies encamped about the base of the Tower of Lead, only the horrific aftermath of a senseless slaughter. Far from their natives Planes of Conflict the corpses of tens of thousands of mezzoloths and every other rank of lesser yugoloth lay massed like the accreted, packed and piled banks of freshly fallen snow, gleaming black with armor, chitin, polearms, and shallow lakes of ichor. As the corpses slowly broke down, the elemental energies infused into them departed and dissipated, causing the hills of the dead to undulate and move, escaping yugoloth Evil issuing forth like shrieks and cries of those abandoned and lost to their own self-loathing and misery.
From the slaughter the great Tower rose up like some great cenotaph, uncaring and swathed in naught but its own silence. Not a single living yugoloth waited there to defend their positions and as the group stared at the winding path between corpse mountains to the open, broken remains of the Tower’s door, they collectively feared that they were in truth far, far too late for it to have mattered.
“We’re too damn late.” Florian spat, reaching up to touch her holy symbol.
Toras looked about at the piles of death ‘loths, noticing the difference between what they now saw and what they had already passed by, days earlier.
“There wasn’t a battle here.” The half-celestial said, confusion turning to contempt. “The ‘loths slaughtered their own army once they arrived. Why?! They had no reason!”
They shouldn’t have been surprised but the looks on their faces still showed that emotion, though time and again they’d seen the horrors that the fiends were capable of.
“The f*ck…” Clueless whispered to himself as they made their way to the Tower’s door, slowly and carefully so as to avoid any potential traps that had never been placed there in their way by the ‘loths.
The door itself had clearly been broken inward by great force and then wrenched free from its hinges as if by the fingers of some enraged titan. The remains of a single arcanaloth were splattered across the door’s remains, one of the barking sorcerers having clearly been punished or simply used in callous convenience as an impromptu battering ram.
The broken stone was cut from some unknown, metallic stone the color of soft lead, laced through with intricate lines of glittering gold which at fine inspection seemed almost to bleed into individual letters and characters in an unknown, unknowable script just beyond the very edge of comprehension.
“Well, if the door was trapped, someone took care of that for us already…” Nisha laughed fatalistically, though given that the victim had been an arcanaloth, no tears were spent and warily they proceeded within.
“It smells like a forge in here.” Fyrehowl sniffed at the air, “And a wizard’s tower, an alchemist’s lab and…” The lupinal grimaced as the air shifted and a breeze rushed down the passage from somewhere ahead. “Blood. There’s so much blood ahead.”
Blades would have been drawn had they not already been at the ready, fully-expecting an ambush by the ‘loths having been left lying in wait for them, but which never manifested. The fiends and their master hadn’t the slightest respect for, nor concern for the group pursuing them, even if it would have been prudent to do so.
“Whatever they’re looking for, they haven’t changed one bit.” Toras chuckled as they found a corpse laying to one side of the passage. A single black-robed, arcanaloth with a cursed blade buried in their back, the black iron blade still sputtering with eruptions of green, necrotic energy, the fiend had been taken by surprise by one of its own kind and left there to die, paralyzed and suffering in agony, ignored by its companions at best, or its misery smiled at and appreciated by others.
“Get ready,” Clueless motioned to them all, “There’s a door ahead, and noise.”
Fyrehowl nodded, her ears perked and muscles tense, “And blood and death…”
****
2 days earlier:
Delcindurim ap Hopeless gazed through the doorway with confusion and disdain, the fingers of his left hand still spattered with the blood of his rival and lover still begging for help in the hallway behind him. The vast workshop he beheld bent space beyond what the Tower of Lead’s exterior could have ever physically held, the cavernous interior a sprawling multi-level miracle of engineering with platforms built to house hundreds of individual in-progress creations surrounded by everything required to construct them: blackboards of formulae, tables covered in blueprints and prototype parts, then the forges and alchemical apparatuses used to see those plans into creation.
The air hummed with the sounds of creation and labor, each platform staffed by beings from across the planes, a frenetic energy in their movements, their eyes, and their words.
“You!” A dwarf called out, his face caked with soot and what seemed like gold dust and a green, crystalline powder as he stepped up onto the landing that the arcanaloth stood upon, several sets of branching stairs leading off to other platform-workshops. “You look like you’re new! Would you like to help me out? I have such a wonderful idea that I’ve been working on and I’m nearly finished! Or… did you have something to create?”
Delcindurim sneered, his confusion deepening as he telepathy reached out and encountered the same in every mind that he touched.
CREATION. IDEAS BROUGHT TO FRUITION. EVERYTHING IS WITHIN YOUR GRASP. BUILD IT. DREAM IT. CONSTRUCT IT. TIME IS NO BARRIER. AGE IS NO BARRIER. RESOURCES ARE NO BARRIER. CREATE. CREATE. CREATE.
“Come on and help!” The dwarf tugged on the ‘loth’s sleeve. “A decade and it’s almost finished now! Or was it a century, I don’t really recall. I’ve been splitting my time between my work and a half dozen other projects and ideas that the others have been working on and…”
Every creature seemed possessed of an unnatural creative energy. Every resource was seemingly at their grasp to dream up and create the greatest masterwork their hands and minds could conceive of. These masterworks littered the sprawling platforms along with an even larger number of half-finished and abandoned creations of breathtaking beauty and majesty. Fueled by such a torrent of creativity it seemed to perpetually bubble over and push them to go on to new and different ideas, seemingly never capable of finishing a single work.
Delcindurim reached out with his other hand and sent a bolt of lightning surging through the mortal’s body, boiling the blood in his veins and setting him alight before hurling him over the platform’s edge and into open space to fall and tumble over and over like the first, grotesque and fleshy snowflake of a Gehennan volcanic winter.
The Oinoloth’s telepathic command surged through the air, overwhelming the near hive-mind mental weight that overwhelmed the great workshop. “Slaughter each and every creature herein. Rip their dying thoughts from their minds and find the way to the tower’s apex. Nothing else herein is of any importance.”
The ‘loths took flight, arcanaloths and a small number of surviving nycaloths spreading out platform to platform, slaughtering each and every creature they encountered, laughing with hysterical delight and spouting out praises to the Oinoloth. Spells lanced out, creatures were hurled from the heights, plunged screaming into forges and furnaces or thrust into the gears of great machines filling the air with a chorus of screams.
The various creatives staffing and living there in the great workshop seemed virtually incapable of fighting back. They died with looks of surprise or even irritation on their faces, politely or fervently asking to be allowed to continue their work because they were just so close to completion, always just so close to completion, or even finding inspiration for new masterworks in their dying moments, inspired by the laughter of the yugoloth severing their limbs or burning a corrosive hole in their torso. Many of the beings tried to continue their work, stepping to the side to avoid one of their fellows being savaged by claws or burned alive, just to reach an anvil and begin the next stage of hammering on some unknown cog for a device that would, in truth, never reach completion.
All around screams, explosions, eruptions of flame and molten metal, books and scrolls set alight or trampled and torn, the collapse of architecture held aloft by grand design or sheer willpower of its creators now condemned to utter and complete destruction along with the senseless death of thousands, any one of whom would have at one time or another been the greatest shining light of a civilization, their works celebrated, revered, and built upon for centuries or millennia.
Now all of them and all of their unfinished masterpieces would be destroyed and forever lost.
Stepping through the door, surrounded all around by truly senseless death and destruction, Vorkannis smiled.
****
The air smelled of alchemical spirits, molten steel, burning paper, and burning flesh as the party emerged through the doorway into the tower’s vast workshop. Eyes wide with equal parts wonder and grief they ascended the nearest set of stairs, climbing over multiple bodies along the way. Some had been trampled by their fellows seeking to escape in a blind panic, but most showed the obvious signs of violence at the hands of the yugoloths who’d swept through like a merciless wave of claws and sorcery.
“Who are they?” Nisha asked, glancing down at the body of a dwarf, an earth genasi, a human, and a dao-blooded… something. All were of advanced age but in seemingly immaculate health, as if either their own need to complete their work and sheer willpower, or the Tower’s proximity to the positive energy plane had fueled their pursuits beyond their bodies’ normal mortal constraints.
“They…” Fyrehowl looked down at the bodies and shook her head. “They’re people who shouldn’t have died.”
Clueless reached down to pick up a half-finished weapon pommel engraved in breathtaking detail with a woodland scene, nearly completed and ready to be fitted with a blade, only to have been set aside at some unknown point in favor of a different project. A pile of dozens of similar objects littered the floor, forgotten and abandoned.
“What even was this place?” The bladesinger asked, glancing across the open space between platforms to another where multiple half-constructed siege-engines of breathtaking complexity stood, many of them on fire and one of their number having been hurled over the edge to topple onto another platform hundreds of feet below.
“It’s like watching Netheril’s fall all over again…” Tristol softly whispered to himself, gazing out at a place of wonder and majesty now callously destroyed as a pointless casualty of an arch-yugoloth’s bloody quest for power.
“Say what?” Florian turned to the wizard.
“Everything here reminds me of witnessing the fall of Netheril once more.” Tristol explained, “It’s a giant workshop designed for world-altering genius craftfolk to come, learn, collaborate, and create the singular masterwork of their dreams. The Tower’s proximity to the Positive Energy Plane provided everything that they might have needed: equipment, raw materials, and even inspiration.”
They glanced about and continued on and found truth in the statement along with more and ever greater needless bloodshed. Every platform was the same as they ascended higher and higher up through the Tower: dead craftsman of all types, including painters and sculptors, and troves of half-completed masterworks, all seemingly abandoned and cast aside in favor of the next and greatest project, ever creating and never completing.
“Can’t you feel it?” Fyrehowl asked as she glanced at a half-finished sculptor of breathtaking detail and grandeur, and next to it an in-progress sketch on paper of a statue that would likely soon half-emerge from rough stone, only to be cast aside like dozens of others.
Everywhere around, springing from the ground, springing from the air, from everywhere around them was an overwhelming feeling of creativity, energy, and ideas budding in the back of their minds. They watched as resources for every creative pursuit imaginable spontaneously appeared out of nothingness on tables, shelving, and containers of every type when not directly observed.
“They had everything they needed.” Clueless glanced at a table suddenly filled with his favorite food. “This place fed them, clothed them, gave them everything that they might have ever wanted if only they pursued their dreams and created.”
“Not that they ever completed anything, ever.” Tristol motioned to the untold thousands of abandoned, unfinished masterworks.
“Not that they ever will now…” Fyrehowl sighed, stepping over a pile of mangled corpses, all butchered by the ‘loths.
They couldn’t tell for certain if they Tower drew them in and fed them, or if the Tower lured them there and then fed -from- them. Without staying themselves, they’d have no way of ever knowing, but that dualistic conundrum wasn’t the reason for their presence in the Tower of Lead, and so they explored ever onwards.
Higher up still they found a door and then a maze of passages strewn with smaller workshops set aside from the first, massive one, and then a shrine to the three powers of Elemental Earth.
“Oh yeah, the ‘loths have been here…” Clueless rolled his eyes as they all beheld that the carious altars and idols had been uniformly desecrated and marked with the Oinoloth’s personal sigil and at least one arcanaloth had urinated on the altar of Sunnis, the sharp and acrid ammonia scent rising up on the air, causing Fyrehowl’s nose to wrinkle in disgust.
“None of this was what they came for though.” Toras shook his head, “It doesn’t even look like they took a moment’s interest in anything in the grand workshop, and they certainly didn’t come just to piss on an altar.
“They came for something past this…” Nisha motioned to a spot on the wall with a cleverly hidden mechanism hiding a recessed, secret door. She smiled and rattled the silver bell on her tail.
****
1 day earlier:
“Mistress Shylara,” Ebulim ap Colothys glanced at the overlord of Carceri from where she crouched over top over a trio of charred human corpses. “We are not the first to trod these steps.”
“Who are they?” A look of worry passed over Shylara’s features as she studied the bodies. Their plate armor was finely made, nearly identical, and bore no maker’s mark or suggestion of who had equipped them or to whom their allegiance lay.
Each corpse lay there mangled, reaching out as if to touch what lay at the corridor’s end, each dying from what waited there.
“I don’t know Mistress.” The arcanaloth sorcerer shook her head, the motion rustling the coif of silver hair she wore like a mane. “The manner in which they all died was profoundly destructive. Their bones have been turned to molten copper and…” She through up her hands in a gesture of uselessness. “They have no tongues, their jaws will not move, their souls are… absent!”
Shylara snarls and turned her back to the other yugoloth, one of only 15 that had survived their ascent through the Tower of Lead. The passages had been labyrinthine, with multiple dead-end routes and a multitude of passages that led through horrific traps but ultimately merged into a single final route to the door that stood there in front of them in mocking majesty.
The remaining ‘loths, most of them wounded, some heavily so, either argued amongst themselves who would approach and open the door, or else they simply stared ahead with hollow, terrified expressions after having passed through the gauntlet of traps that had lay along their ascent. The Tower of Lead had reacted to them, rearranged its internal map to harry them, to deny them, and at the order of the Oinoloth they had suffered and died each and every step of the way until now. The door ahead of them now remained sealed, but the charred mortal bodies before it had already drawn out and dissipated the spells that had once protected it.
Behind them all, the Oinoloth lay silent and stared ahead, the sickly albino-pink eyes of his proxy’s illusory sheath staring at only one thing: the great star ruby at the sealed doorway’s center. The source of the deadly magic that had lanced through the floor’s dead who bore no banners, no insignia, and whose corpses bore no witness to the cause of their death nor their origin, that crimson corundum source sparkled ominously, reflecting the Oinoloth’s baneful gaze back at him.
“Who ARE they?” Shylara demanded, a genuine dismay and concern in her voice. They’d encountered a dozen other similar corpses along their ascent, and most pointedly, the Oinoloth hadn’t asked a single question about them, nor had he seemed the least bit concerned or surprised at an apparent other group attempting to seize the Tower’s secrets.
“I…” Ebulim furrowed her brow before attempting a different variety of magic to interrogate the dead, at first receiving only ominous, desolate silence. She softly snarled, feeling the Overlord of Carceri’s seething gaze upon her. “They will not speak, they…” Her voice petered out and her ears lay back flat against her head. In response to her furious magical interrogation the remnants of animus that still remained there could only
SCREAM.
The sorceress clutched her clawed hands to her head and shrieked in horror and agony, her mind having touched a thing of manifest nightmare beyond the comprehension of her immortal mind. Eyes wide, she collapsed to the floor, her body jerking without conscious control.
The Oinoloth smirked at the exchange between the arcanaloth and the dead and stepped forward. He took only a brief glance down at the corpses and made a motion with two fingers for all of them to move aside as he approached the door, stepping over the dead without a single concern or interest for either them, nor the screaming, seizing arcanaloth who lay there with them.
“My Oinoloth we don’t know who…” Shylara stammered, glancing down at Ebulim with a moment of fear.
“They are not important.” He quipped, “They are also expected. Do not concern yourself with them.”
He knew the answer to the question that they hinted at but would not ask of him.
The remaining arcanaloths stood silently with their backs against the wall as the Lord of the Waste stood before the door and stared silently at the great gemstone. Staring into the depths at something the others could not see therein, his reflection stared back at him, showing the illusion he wore rather than his proxy physical body. He smiled, chuckled even with contempt and triumph, and then with a furious alacrity slammed his fist upon the once-deadly gemstone and shattered it into a dozen pieces.
With a telekinetic push, the door swung open to a small, modest chamber where a single figure therein sat, waiting.
“Give me what I have come here for.” Vorkannis smiled.
****
