Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 07April2026)
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Shemeska
Hero
That the Tower’s internal pathways changed was obvious as the group advanced ever higher. Some stairways and halls were untouched, with layers of unmarked dust, while other stretches bore the clear and gruesome evidence of the yugloths’ passage. Doors that had been barred and trapped with significant levels of magic were dispelled and torn from their hinges at times, while others were untouched, requiring Tristol to take his time, all while the group worried that their ascent would be in vain if the fiends had already achieved their goals, whatever those might even be.
“Everyone ready?” Tristol asked, silverfire flickering on his fingertips as he prepared to force open the most heavily-warded door that they’d yet encountered.
The others nodded in unison and prepared themselves as the seal was breached, the door shuddered, and swung inwards on its own to reveal a room bathed in golden light, sparkling off of crystalline walls.
“The heck…” Nisha wondered aloud as they behind a gleaming room with a multitude of doors, one other already opened, the ‘loths having clearly already passed through this same way.
“Welcome, all of you.” A voice like the ringing of bells, both tiny and sonorous at once called out as a being rose up from a crystalline dais in the room’s center: an earth weird. She looked like a perfect marble statue of a woman brought to life, surrounded by a cloud of golden light, with the grating of stone on stone with her movements. “You are not the first to pass this way, but you will be the last of consequence. I am bound to guard the stair and the way to the Guardian himself, the holder of the first part of the puzzle and the keeper of the location of the second.”
Collectively they stared at the elemental being, her statements raising only more questions.
“Puzzle?” Clueless asked, curiosity burning in his brain. “What do you mean?”
“Location of a second part?” Fyrehowl’s mind drifted back to each and every thing that Factol Nathan had spoken about regarding his late mother’s discoveries.
“Those are not my questions to answer…” The earth weird waved a marble hand, “What I can do is I can give to you a choice.”
She waved her hand again, pointing to two of the room’s doors. Each door swung open to reveal two stairwells: one up and one down.
“Two stairs and two paths to tread.” The earth weird explained, “One has been passed before by beings of belief and Evil. The other is untrod. One path ascends, the other descends, but both lead to the Leadheart and the Guardian of the 1st Key.”
“Do the traps reset?...” Nisha whispered under her breath, the question either unheard by the earth weird or she simply chose not to respond.
Tristol gave her a glance and in response she shrugged and made a goofy face. Still though, the question was an obvious one.
“The way shall be clear, but answer my questions first.” The earth weird explained, “Each of you in turn: who are you, and why are you here?”
“Who’s asking?” Toras responded warily.
The elemental shook her head and raised her hands in a deferential motion, “The answer is not for me.”
“Then for whom?” Fyrehowl’s response was just as wary as the half-celestial’s moments before.
The earth weird smiled again, her expression teasingly absent of an answer. There was no further explanation forthcoming.
Everything said that what the Oinoloth wanted there at the Tower of Lead and perhaps elsewhere scattered across the planes was of utter importance, but perhaps what each of them answered was in some way a shining reflected obverse of the Oinoloth’s designs.
“My name is Tristol Starweather of Halruaa.” The archmage stated with a firm assertiveness rarely present in his voice, his thoughts remembering the smile on the Oinoloth’s face when he’d deceived Karsus and brought down Netheril. “I’m here because Mystra will have her justice before all of this is over.”
Nisha’s answer was given with a much more flippant attitude, punctuated by a giggle, and spoken entirely in Xaositect Scramblespeak. Incomprehensible or not, the earth weird smiled and nodded at a perfectly acceptable response.
“My name is Toras of Andros,” Toras smiled and gave a polite bow to the elemental being. “Assuming that the Oinoloth is still here, I intend to punch him in the face.”
Nisha giggled, though the others gave him a glance at the flippancy of the response, but the half-celestial absolutely meant what he said. In his mind there was a target on the muzzle of the arch-yugoloth which perfectly fit his gauntlet-encased fist and the sweet, crunching sound the fiend’s teeth would make as he clocked them would be the most perfect thing he might ever experience. Whether he would ever have the opportunity or not was immaterial to the delight that the thought and anticipation brought to him, a bright light in what had been a swirling sea of darkness for months on end.
Florian’s answer was more grounded and wished for aid from and praise to her deity, certainly something that would have brought a sneer from the Oinoloth had he been there.
Fyrehowl’s reply began with her name and ended with a snarl. A righteous fury boiled in her eyes, even if her precise nature as a child of Elysium might be in question. Fallen perhaps, but in such a way to abhor the creature who called to her, mockingly, to fall ever further. Elysium would always welcome her back if she so chose, but for now there was no forgiveness in her expression or her words when she addressed her utter and absolute antipathy for the Oinoloth and his kind.
And then there was Clueless.
“I don’t know what my name was before all of this happened, and I barely know who I once was… in so many ways.” The bladesinger stared down at his ankle, “I was used and discarded by one of the Oinoloth’s co-conspirators and that action and everything since has made me into who I am now: Clueless. Whatever and whoever that makes me now, I intend to blunt and break everything that the Oinoloth and his kind intends.
“I am satisfied with your answers.” The earth weird replied after a brief pause, “The way is clear for you, whichever path you choose to take. The Guardian awaits your arrival.”
Clueless smiled, and in the guarded recesses of his mind, something dark coiled and smiled, satisfied in its own way with that answer, aside from the elemental being who stood before his student.
“Wait,” Tristol asked, “Those who passed before, can you tell us their names and what they answered?”
If the earth weird had required the same question and answers from the yugoloths, and her survival seemed to indicate that they’d actually answered rather than simply butchering her and forcing the door, that answer would provide a treasure trove of information as to what the Oinoloth wanted there and beyond, and perhaps even more, just who and what he even was.
“Alas, I cannot.” The earth weird’s expression was conspicuous in the absence of details, maddeningly so. Clearly the fiends had come this way, and as the elemental being here now was alive and uninjured, clearly, they had played its game of call and response. Sill though, what information they’d given might have been invaluable.
“You know who I am.” Vorkannis’s eyes glowed a fierce and burning albino pink as he stared down the elemental being.
“I do.” The earth weird’s response was the first that they had given in reply to any of the answers the ‘loths had each given in turn, one by one.
Prior to that back and forth, the Oinoloth had actually commanded his followers to answer the weird’s questions. Though he himself seemed to care little about their answers, he did pointedly smirk at Shylara’s response.
“My name is Shylara Akt’Atarm the Overlord of Carceri, Mistress of the Tower of Incarnate Pain, Lady of the Scarlet Prison, consort to the Oinoloth.” She smiled with abject pride, her eyes flickering a panoply of colors. “I am here to follow Vorkannis wherever He chooses to go, to obey every command, and bring his goals to fruition whatever they might be.”
The smirk on the Oinoloth’s lips was not in response her slavish, obsessive answer, but the clear absence of knowledge on her part as to why they were even there.
But back to the moment in which the Oinoloth gave his own answer to the weird, he did so by first speaking his name, Vorkannis the Ebon, in baernaloth and then proceeding to provide his litany of titles in the same primordial language, those known to his consort Shylara, and one she did not, and which she remained ignorant of given her lack of fluency in the ur-language of the Waste. As for why he was there, he responded in the same black speech with a simple, “To claim what is mine.”
The group proceeded through the ever-shifting heights of the Tower of Lead, half of the time passing through pristine sections, dealing with ever-deadlier traps and guardians, and half of the time passing through chambers that the yugoloths had already gone through, witnessing the carnage of their passing.
It didn’t take long for them to come across the first of the bodies.
“What the hell…” Toras said, gazing down at a quartet of human corpses. They were all freshly killed, rigor mortis only recently triggering in their flesh.
“Those aren’t yugoloths.” Fyrehowl spoke the confusing obvious as they all curiously and cautiously examined the bodies.
“Slaves or servitors of the yugoloths?” Clueless shrugged.
None of the bodies bore symbols of allegiance, holy symbols, or any markings that might have indicated who they were or why they were there within the Tower of Lead. Unlike the mortals below whom the yugoloths had brutally and pointlessly slaughtered, they were all armed and armored. They hadn’t come to the Tower to create, rather, they’d seemingly come for the same reason that the ‘loths had, possibly even arriving before them.
“No link to the ‘loths.” Fyrehowl crouched over one of the corpses. “They don’t have the stink of yugoloths on them at all, or the Lower Planes. The ‘loths came this way, but these bodies were already dead once they came here. They died when they opened the door out of this room.”
“They triggered a ward.” Tristol explained as he whispered a spell and examined the lingering dweomers that had once barred passage out of the chamber. “And only after they’d failed to disarm it. They knowingly triggering what killed them.”
“Who in Andros’s name are they?” Toras wondered aloud, the idea that there was a third group in the Tower apart from themselves and the yugoloths was only causing genuine confusion.
“Florian, can you interrogate the corpses?” Tristol asked, pointing to them. “I can’t tell anything from them other than the spell that killed them, and it was a brutally powerful one.” His vulpine ears twitched in disbelief.
“As long as there’s nothing of it left…” Florian nodded as she prepared to interrogate the corpse.
Tristol shook his head, confirming that there was no lingering danger on the bodies. “The spell looks to have siphoned the life from them directly, but after it triggered, that was that.”
Florian murmured a reply and continued to pray, invoking her god’s power and going about what should have been a simple task to make the relatively undamaged corpses testify as to who they were, why they were there, and what had led to their deaths. Instead, nothing happened.
“Problems?” Clueless stepped up behind the cleric.
Florian muttered a soft curse and attempted the spell a second time before abandoning the attempt and staring at the bodies in disbelief.
“It isn’t working…” The cleric explained, “And not in the sense of the bodies are refusing to answer or there’s damage to them preventing them from answering. I can’t explain it really. It’s like there’s nothing there to answer.”
“Could it have been the spell that killed them?” Clueless suggested, knowing full well the arsenal of necromantic horrors that the average arcanaloth sorcerer might call upon, or the unknown powers latent within the Tower of Lead itself as defenses.
What Florian hadn’t mentioned however is that when she’d abandoned the second casting it wasn’t because the spell had utterly failed, but rather that there’d been a resistance and she could have forced it and gotten… something… except that the entire process was something that she’d experienced once before: on the deceased victims of Cilret Leobtav when he’d killed in the name of his god, the Ashsinger, or whatever in the hells it even was. She remembered the screams and she had no desire to repeat that experience.
Just what the apparent connection meant however, they didn’t have enough information. Not yet.
And so, they continued, slowly but surely ascending through the heights of the Tower of Lead, passing through numerous trapped and warded rooms, most of them clearly unplumbed and untouched for untold thousands of years, their traps never sprung and their guardians never disturbed and dispatched before the present. There were other rooms however that the yugoloths had clearly been through, and in recent time, as evidenced by spent and triggered traps and wards and the bodies of destroyed guardians and slaughtered yugoloths.
Once again however there were the dead mortals, another troupe of them, these deceased in a horrifically violent fashion.
“More of these…” Fyrehowl stared down at a trio of charred human bodies, neither bearing any symbols or banners of identification, belief, or loyalty, all of them deceased with looks of horror on their faces. They’d passed by over a dozen similar corpses along the way, but these were the most heavily armored and best equipped.
“This is f*cking eerie,” Nisha quipped, a worried expression meandering across her face and her use of an actual curse word out of character.
Florian remained quiet about her earlier findings and her dire suspicions. Somehow there was a link and somehow there was something going on they didn’t understand where the ‘loths were being potentially aided by a third group whose loyalty and identity was, as yet, patently unknown but clearly in some way associated with the horrors that they’d witnessed in Pandemonium and later in the Outlands.
“Corpses aside,” Toras looked past the dead, “That’s a very big, very once warded door…”
At the far side of the chamber the door loomed large and ajar, a massive and shattered ruby lodged at the door’s center, sparkling with the deadly promise of the spells that had once swathed and protected whatever lay beyond it. The door was much larger and thicker than anything else they’d encountered within their ascent through the Tower of Lead and they all realized that whatever was beyond it was likely what the yugoloths had come for.
All was silent, all was still, and it was likely that they fiends had already come and gone. They tried not to dwell on the implications of that as they gazed down at the mysterious bodies and the shattered gemstone remnants.
“Tristol,” Clueless asked, “Are there any wards left on anything that you see?”
Tristol gazed out for a moment and shook his head in the negative. While the wards on the door had been utterly stupendous in nature, they’d all been triggered hours earlier. They’d come so very close on the yugoloths’ heels but fallen just short.
On the floor, the broken ruby fragments sparkled with mysterious promise.
Hours earlier:
Vorkannis stood at the room’s very center, his albino eyes locked onto the ancient tssng archmage swathed in a plain brown robe, sitting on a stone chair rising up, effectively grown from the floor. The other ‘loths slowly and warily followed into the room, all of them silent, gawking but not commenting at various details they saw in the room and more importantly, inscribed, into the walls.
The ancient elemental being possessed a humanoid body plan, wrought of brilliant crystals inscribed with magical runes, some seemingly naturally present inside of the crystalline matrix and others self-applied and cut into itself like tattoos on an elemental. Its hands were calmly crossed and it made no move to defend itself or prepare for combat, and it was an open question if the creature had been in some manner of stasis before the door had been forced open, or if it had been sitting and waiting for untold thousands of years, for this sole moment to arrive.
So many questions could have been asked but not a single question passed the Oinoloth’s lips, only that repeated demand.
“Give me what I have come here for.” The Oinoloth’s smile now bore exposed fangs, though the tone of his statement remained utterly placid and calm, a threat enough in those who knew him, to cause the other ‘loths to gingerly step back and provide their master more space for whatever might come.
“A yugoloth.” The ancient one frowned, milky quartz-like eyes studying the beings standing before him. “For a long time, too long perhaps, I’ve wondered who would come to take what was entrusted to me.”
Shylara’s mouth opened as if to speak, a thousand questions running through her mind and a burning need to KNOW.
She said nothing.
“Give me what is yours to impart.” Vorkannis demanded, his voice measured and calm at first but growing in intensity, a sudden malice and fanaticism dancing in his eyes, a tonal break in character almost unique for the Lord of the Threefold Glooms. “Give me what is mine. Give me what I am meant to possess.”
Unseen by all but Shylara and the tssng, one hand of his reached into the right pocket of his robe and touched a handful of frozen ashes that lay there, slipping his claws into them almost reverently.
Behind the Oinoloth, the surviving arcanaloths feverishly translated the words on the walls, rhyming poetry written in Terran, committing them to memory but not daring to write down a single quatrain. The meaning of it all of course eluded them, though it all seemed oddly prophetic, foretelling of future events and a puzzle of which the Tower of Lead contained but one portion, itself useless without the other pieces.
The tssng stared at the ‘loths, the light in its eyes dimming softly, like a boulder squinting doubtfully. It shook its head as it went from the arcanaloths to Shylara and then to the Oinoloth, its gaze lingering there.
“You cannot withhold what you contain.” Vorkannis spoke with malice, “It bubbles in your veins, gnawing at your thoughts, slowly breaking you with its potency. You are dying and you don’t even understand what you have.”
“Do I?” The tssng archmage locked eyes with the Oinoloth, no fear or concern passing over its features, something few creatures could have ever claimed to match. “Do you?”
Vorkannis snarled, a mirror to his expression minutes earlier when he’d stared into the ruby on the door and shattered it in anger and contempt. There would be no gift. There would be no passing of a treasured object. There would only be something taken.
The present:
Fyrehowl reached down and stopped, a hand barely an inch from the gleaming fragment, the Cadence suddenly silent and her motions suddenly wrenched from the ever-present and reassuring current. Clueless however felt no such hesitation, only curiosity.
The bladesinger held up a single broken shard of the massive gemstone, staring into the crimson depths, squinting as an image began to take shape, one wrought of the burning amalgamations of light and internal refraction: the emotionless face of Her Serenity.
“What the F*CK…” Clueless dropped the broken gemstone fragment as if he’d touch a white-hot poker from a devil’s forge.
“What happened?!” Florian shouted, taken aback by the half-fey’s reaction.
Clueless stood and silently stared at his feet, pointedly trying to avoid staring directly -into- any of the broken gem fragments.
“Again.” Florian asked, worry creeping into her voice. “What the hell just happened?”
The bladesinger motioned to the jagged, crystalline debris strewn across the floor. “I looked into one of the pieces and I saw an effigy of…” He paused, took a deep breath as if mulling over just how he was going to phrase his answer, clear consternation on his face. “… The Lady. Yeah… Her Serenity…”
Dead silence.
Utter and absolute silence.
“F*CK!” Nisha blurted out.
Vorkannis snarled, leaning forward with one hand outstretched, his mind lancing out and breaking through the tssng’s mental barriers, ignoring everything but the one profound treasure he sought. It terrified the other ‘loths, witnessing the typically preternaturally calm and smugly superior Oinoloth suddenly lose all pretense of civility and composure, literally drooling with anticipation as his acidic and weaponized telepathy broke the elemental being’s mind like the lock on a vault under a battering ram, one which he actually giggled with emotional overload for as he pillaged the contents.
“My Oinoloth…” Shylara reached forward, placing a hand on the Ebon’s shoulder as she watched his eyes widen, his smile grow exaggeratedly and his excited, ravenous drooling continue.
The Oinoloth did not respond beyond shrugging off his consort’s touch and stepping forward to loom over top of the fallen, screaming tssng, one hand in his pocket, fingers touching the frozen ashes therein and feeling an overwhelming sensation of hunger and satisfaction, feelings he himself was overwhelmed by as he captured what he’d come for, ripping it out of the tssng’s mind.
What he’d come for of course could not be described, not even by the Oinoloth, nor by the tssng who’d held it in trust for so very long. In fact, Vorkannis could only feel its presence, could only skirt about it in his mind, it being something unable to be comprehended, not yet. It was there, but it could only be inferred by the metaphysical weight of its presence, a black hole of a concept distorting the flow of everything around it. Yet he knew exactly what it was. He’d known all along what it was and would be when it was completed.
“Neither waiting nor watching for signs…” The Oinoloth whispered softly to himself, a giddy, ecstatic smile spread across his muzzle. His ears flicked unconsciously and dimly he knew that Shylara was speaking and asking him a blizzard of questions, and the other surviving arcanaloths whining in fear, but he simply didn’t care. In this moment she was nothing and they were nothing, everything else meaningless by comparison to what he’d found, even if it was useless without the remainder, scattered across the planes, hidden and sequestered away such that an inevitability might never occur, or occur only under specific, guided, shackled conditions.
“My Oinoloth do you have…” Shylara asked, her voice now cognizant to her master’s mind.
“I have it.” The Ebon whispered, though at no point was he actually speaking to her, but the presence softly whispering from across a literal and metaphysical gulf when he touched the soil of the Vale of Frozen Ashes. He spoke to that voice which had been there waiting for him, had welcomed him there upon the Waste so long ago upon his arrival. Everything it had spoken of had come to pass, or rather, he had made it come to pass.
More questions from the Manged, more pleading for direction from the handful of surviving arcanaloths, all of which he pointedly ignored. The lesser creatures trailed off, tucked their tails between their legs and were silent. Shylara would need a reminder similar to which her former Mistress had received in Khin-Oin at a significantly greater level.
“SILENCE!” Vorkannis spoke, the words and a subsequent thought instantly dropping the Overlord of Carceri to her knees, vomiting blood. “None of you are necessary in this moment if you wish to survive.”
The arcanaloths nodded and retreated to the room’s periphery while paradoxically, or perhaps not paradoxically, Shylara began to smile and giggle even as she bled from her eyes, nose, and mouth.
His mind obsessively caressing the essence of what he’d obtained, his mind moving over it like his tongue over a lover’s lips, he turned his attention to the other elements in the room: the words inscribed upon and magically dancing above the walls on two sides.
Albino eyes read over the words, quatrain by quatrain.
Vorkannis chuckled as he whispered them.
Words about himself.
Eyes blazing for one moment before he tore open a gate and left with his remaining entourage, laughing triumphantly as he departed, he whispered the second line of words, speaking one word in Baern, “What is destined shall find a way for HUBRIS cannot die.”
“Everyone ready?” Tristol asked, silverfire flickering on his fingertips as he prepared to force open the most heavily-warded door that they’d yet encountered.
The others nodded in unison and prepared themselves as the seal was breached, the door shuddered, and swung inwards on its own to reveal a room bathed in golden light, sparkling off of crystalline walls.
“The heck…” Nisha wondered aloud as they behind a gleaming room with a multitude of doors, one other already opened, the ‘loths having clearly already passed through this same way.
“Welcome, all of you.” A voice like the ringing of bells, both tiny and sonorous at once called out as a being rose up from a crystalline dais in the room’s center: an earth weird. She looked like a perfect marble statue of a woman brought to life, surrounded by a cloud of golden light, with the grating of stone on stone with her movements. “You are not the first to pass this way, but you will be the last of consequence. I am bound to guard the stair and the way to the Guardian himself, the holder of the first part of the puzzle and the keeper of the location of the second.”
Collectively they stared at the elemental being, her statements raising only more questions.
“Puzzle?” Clueless asked, curiosity burning in his brain. “What do you mean?”
“Location of a second part?” Fyrehowl’s mind drifted back to each and every thing that Factol Nathan had spoken about regarding his late mother’s discoveries.
“Those are not my questions to answer…” The earth weird waved a marble hand, “What I can do is I can give to you a choice.”
She waved her hand again, pointing to two of the room’s doors. Each door swung open to reveal two stairwells: one up and one down.
“Two stairs and two paths to tread.” The earth weird explained, “One has been passed before by beings of belief and Evil. The other is untrod. One path ascends, the other descends, but both lead to the Leadheart and the Guardian of the 1st Key.”
“Do the traps reset?...” Nisha whispered under her breath, the question either unheard by the earth weird or she simply chose not to respond.
Tristol gave her a glance and in response she shrugged and made a goofy face. Still though, the question was an obvious one.
“The way shall be clear, but answer my questions first.” The earth weird explained, “Each of you in turn: who are you, and why are you here?”
“Who’s asking?” Toras responded warily.
The elemental shook her head and raised her hands in a deferential motion, “The answer is not for me.”
“Then for whom?” Fyrehowl’s response was just as wary as the half-celestial’s moments before.
The earth weird smiled again, her expression teasingly absent of an answer. There was no further explanation forthcoming.
Everything said that what the Oinoloth wanted there at the Tower of Lead and perhaps elsewhere scattered across the planes was of utter importance, but perhaps what each of them answered was in some way a shining reflected obverse of the Oinoloth’s designs.
“My name is Tristol Starweather of Halruaa.” The archmage stated with a firm assertiveness rarely present in his voice, his thoughts remembering the smile on the Oinoloth’s face when he’d deceived Karsus and brought down Netheril. “I’m here because Mystra will have her justice before all of this is over.”
Nisha’s answer was given with a much more flippant attitude, punctuated by a giggle, and spoken entirely in Xaositect Scramblespeak. Incomprehensible or not, the earth weird smiled and nodded at a perfectly acceptable response.
“My name is Toras of Andros,” Toras smiled and gave a polite bow to the elemental being. “Assuming that the Oinoloth is still here, I intend to punch him in the face.”
Nisha giggled, though the others gave him a glance at the flippancy of the response, but the half-celestial absolutely meant what he said. In his mind there was a target on the muzzle of the arch-yugoloth which perfectly fit his gauntlet-encased fist and the sweet, crunching sound the fiend’s teeth would make as he clocked them would be the most perfect thing he might ever experience. Whether he would ever have the opportunity or not was immaterial to the delight that the thought and anticipation brought to him, a bright light in what had been a swirling sea of darkness for months on end.
Florian’s answer was more grounded and wished for aid from and praise to her deity, certainly something that would have brought a sneer from the Oinoloth had he been there.
Fyrehowl’s reply began with her name and ended with a snarl. A righteous fury boiled in her eyes, even if her precise nature as a child of Elysium might be in question. Fallen perhaps, but in such a way to abhor the creature who called to her, mockingly, to fall ever further. Elysium would always welcome her back if she so chose, but for now there was no forgiveness in her expression or her words when she addressed her utter and absolute antipathy for the Oinoloth and his kind.
And then there was Clueless.
“I don’t know what my name was before all of this happened, and I barely know who I once was… in so many ways.” The bladesinger stared down at his ankle, “I was used and discarded by one of the Oinoloth’s co-conspirators and that action and everything since has made me into who I am now: Clueless. Whatever and whoever that makes me now, I intend to blunt and break everything that the Oinoloth and his kind intends.
“I am satisfied with your answers.” The earth weird replied after a brief pause, “The way is clear for you, whichever path you choose to take. The Guardian awaits your arrival.”
Clueless smiled, and in the guarded recesses of his mind, something dark coiled and smiled, satisfied in its own way with that answer, aside from the elemental being who stood before his student.
“Wait,” Tristol asked, “Those who passed before, can you tell us their names and what they answered?”
If the earth weird had required the same question and answers from the yugoloths, and her survival seemed to indicate that they’d actually answered rather than simply butchering her and forcing the door, that answer would provide a treasure trove of information as to what the Oinoloth wanted there and beyond, and perhaps even more, just who and what he even was.
“Alas, I cannot.” The earth weird’s expression was conspicuous in the absence of details, maddeningly so. Clearly the fiends had come this way, and as the elemental being here now was alive and uninjured, clearly, they had played its game of call and response. Sill though, what information they’d given might have been invaluable.
****
“You know who I am.” Vorkannis’s eyes glowed a fierce and burning albino pink as he stared down the elemental being.
“I do.” The earth weird’s response was the first that they had given in reply to any of the answers the ‘loths had each given in turn, one by one.
Prior to that back and forth, the Oinoloth had actually commanded his followers to answer the weird’s questions. Though he himself seemed to care little about their answers, he did pointedly smirk at Shylara’s response.
“My name is Shylara Akt’Atarm the Overlord of Carceri, Mistress of the Tower of Incarnate Pain, Lady of the Scarlet Prison, consort to the Oinoloth.” She smiled with abject pride, her eyes flickering a panoply of colors. “I am here to follow Vorkannis wherever He chooses to go, to obey every command, and bring his goals to fruition whatever they might be.”
The smirk on the Oinoloth’s lips was not in response her slavish, obsessive answer, but the clear absence of knowledge on her part as to why they were even there.
But back to the moment in which the Oinoloth gave his own answer to the weird, he did so by first speaking his name, Vorkannis the Ebon, in baernaloth and then proceeding to provide his litany of titles in the same primordial language, those known to his consort Shylara, and one she did not, and which she remained ignorant of given her lack of fluency in the ur-language of the Waste. As for why he was there, he responded in the same black speech with a simple, “To claim what is mine.”
****
The group proceeded through the ever-shifting heights of the Tower of Lead, half of the time passing through pristine sections, dealing with ever-deadlier traps and guardians, and half of the time passing through chambers that the yugoloths had already gone through, witnessing the carnage of their passing.
It didn’t take long for them to come across the first of the bodies.
“What the hell…” Toras said, gazing down at a quartet of human corpses. They were all freshly killed, rigor mortis only recently triggering in their flesh.
“Those aren’t yugoloths.” Fyrehowl spoke the confusing obvious as they all curiously and cautiously examined the bodies.
“Slaves or servitors of the yugoloths?” Clueless shrugged.
None of the bodies bore symbols of allegiance, holy symbols, or any markings that might have indicated who they were or why they were there within the Tower of Lead. Unlike the mortals below whom the yugoloths had brutally and pointlessly slaughtered, they were all armed and armored. They hadn’t come to the Tower to create, rather, they’d seemingly come for the same reason that the ‘loths had, possibly even arriving before them.
“No link to the ‘loths.” Fyrehowl crouched over one of the corpses. “They don’t have the stink of yugoloths on them at all, or the Lower Planes. The ‘loths came this way, but these bodies were already dead once they came here. They died when they opened the door out of this room.”
“They triggered a ward.” Tristol explained as he whispered a spell and examined the lingering dweomers that had once barred passage out of the chamber. “And only after they’d failed to disarm it. They knowingly triggering what killed them.”
“Who in Andros’s name are they?” Toras wondered aloud, the idea that there was a third group in the Tower apart from themselves and the yugoloths was only causing genuine confusion.
“Florian, can you interrogate the corpses?” Tristol asked, pointing to them. “I can’t tell anything from them other than the spell that killed them, and it was a brutally powerful one.” His vulpine ears twitched in disbelief.
“As long as there’s nothing of it left…” Florian nodded as she prepared to interrogate the corpse.
Tristol shook his head, confirming that there was no lingering danger on the bodies. “The spell looks to have siphoned the life from them directly, but after it triggered, that was that.”
Florian murmured a reply and continued to pray, invoking her god’s power and going about what should have been a simple task to make the relatively undamaged corpses testify as to who they were, why they were there, and what had led to their deaths. Instead, nothing happened.
“Problems?” Clueless stepped up behind the cleric.
Florian muttered a soft curse and attempted the spell a second time before abandoning the attempt and staring at the bodies in disbelief.
“It isn’t working…” The cleric explained, “And not in the sense of the bodies are refusing to answer or there’s damage to them preventing them from answering. I can’t explain it really. It’s like there’s nothing there to answer.”
“Could it have been the spell that killed them?” Clueless suggested, knowing full well the arsenal of necromantic horrors that the average arcanaloth sorcerer might call upon, or the unknown powers latent within the Tower of Lead itself as defenses.
What Florian hadn’t mentioned however is that when she’d abandoned the second casting it wasn’t because the spell had utterly failed, but rather that there’d been a resistance and she could have forced it and gotten… something… except that the entire process was something that she’d experienced once before: on the deceased victims of Cilret Leobtav when he’d killed in the name of his god, the Ashsinger, or whatever in the hells it even was. She remembered the screams and she had no desire to repeat that experience.
Just what the apparent connection meant however, they didn’t have enough information. Not yet.
And so, they continued, slowly but surely ascending through the heights of the Tower of Lead, passing through numerous trapped and warded rooms, most of them clearly unplumbed and untouched for untold thousands of years, their traps never sprung and their guardians never disturbed and dispatched before the present. There were other rooms however that the yugoloths had clearly been through, and in recent time, as evidenced by spent and triggered traps and wards and the bodies of destroyed guardians and slaughtered yugoloths.
Once again however there were the dead mortals, another troupe of them, these deceased in a horrifically violent fashion.
“More of these…” Fyrehowl stared down at a trio of charred human bodies, neither bearing any symbols or banners of identification, belief, or loyalty, all of them deceased with looks of horror on their faces. They’d passed by over a dozen similar corpses along the way, but these were the most heavily armored and best equipped.
“This is f*cking eerie,” Nisha quipped, a worried expression meandering across her face and her use of an actual curse word out of character.
Florian remained quiet about her earlier findings and her dire suspicions. Somehow there was a link and somehow there was something going on they didn’t understand where the ‘loths were being potentially aided by a third group whose loyalty and identity was, as yet, patently unknown but clearly in some way associated with the horrors that they’d witnessed in Pandemonium and later in the Outlands.
“Corpses aside,” Toras looked past the dead, “That’s a very big, very once warded door…”
At the far side of the chamber the door loomed large and ajar, a massive and shattered ruby lodged at the door’s center, sparkling with the deadly promise of the spells that had once swathed and protected whatever lay beyond it. The door was much larger and thicker than anything else they’d encountered within their ascent through the Tower of Lead and they all realized that whatever was beyond it was likely what the yugoloths had come for.
All was silent, all was still, and it was likely that they fiends had already come and gone. They tried not to dwell on the implications of that as they gazed down at the mysterious bodies and the shattered gemstone remnants.
“Tristol,” Clueless asked, “Are there any wards left on anything that you see?”
Tristol gazed out for a moment and shook his head in the negative. While the wards on the door had been utterly stupendous in nature, they’d all been triggered hours earlier. They’d come so very close on the yugoloths’ heels but fallen just short.
On the floor, the broken ruby fragments sparkled with mysterious promise.
****
Hours earlier:
Vorkannis stood at the room’s very center, his albino eyes locked onto the ancient tssng archmage swathed in a plain brown robe, sitting on a stone chair rising up, effectively grown from the floor. The other ‘loths slowly and warily followed into the room, all of them silent, gawking but not commenting at various details they saw in the room and more importantly, inscribed, into the walls.
The ancient elemental being possessed a humanoid body plan, wrought of brilliant crystals inscribed with magical runes, some seemingly naturally present inside of the crystalline matrix and others self-applied and cut into itself like tattoos on an elemental. Its hands were calmly crossed and it made no move to defend itself or prepare for combat, and it was an open question if the creature had been in some manner of stasis before the door had been forced open, or if it had been sitting and waiting for untold thousands of years, for this sole moment to arrive.
So many questions could have been asked but not a single question passed the Oinoloth’s lips, only that repeated demand.
“Give me what I have come here for.” The Oinoloth’s smile now bore exposed fangs, though the tone of his statement remained utterly placid and calm, a threat enough in those who knew him, to cause the other ‘loths to gingerly step back and provide their master more space for whatever might come.
“A yugoloth.” The ancient one frowned, milky quartz-like eyes studying the beings standing before him. “For a long time, too long perhaps, I’ve wondered who would come to take what was entrusted to me.”
Shylara’s mouth opened as if to speak, a thousand questions running through her mind and a burning need to KNOW.
She said nothing.
“Give me what is yours to impart.” Vorkannis demanded, his voice measured and calm at first but growing in intensity, a sudden malice and fanaticism dancing in his eyes, a tonal break in character almost unique for the Lord of the Threefold Glooms. “Give me what is mine. Give me what I am meant to possess.”
Unseen by all but Shylara and the tssng, one hand of his reached into the right pocket of his robe and touched a handful of frozen ashes that lay there, slipping his claws into them almost reverently.
Behind the Oinoloth, the surviving arcanaloths feverishly translated the words on the walls, rhyming poetry written in Terran, committing them to memory but not daring to write down a single quatrain. The meaning of it all of course eluded them, though it all seemed oddly prophetic, foretelling of future events and a puzzle of which the Tower of Lead contained but one portion, itself useless without the other pieces.
The tssng stared at the ‘loths, the light in its eyes dimming softly, like a boulder squinting doubtfully. It shook its head as it went from the arcanaloths to Shylara and then to the Oinoloth, its gaze lingering there.
“You cannot withhold what you contain.” Vorkannis spoke with malice, “It bubbles in your veins, gnawing at your thoughts, slowly breaking you with its potency. You are dying and you don’t even understand what you have.”
“Do I?” The tssng archmage locked eyes with the Oinoloth, no fear or concern passing over its features, something few creatures could have ever claimed to match. “Do you?”
Vorkannis snarled, a mirror to his expression minutes earlier when he’d stared into the ruby on the door and shattered it in anger and contempt. There would be no gift. There would be no passing of a treasured object. There would only be something taken.
****
The present:
Fyrehowl reached down and stopped, a hand barely an inch from the gleaming fragment, the Cadence suddenly silent and her motions suddenly wrenched from the ever-present and reassuring current. Clueless however felt no such hesitation, only curiosity.
The bladesinger held up a single broken shard of the massive gemstone, staring into the crimson depths, squinting as an image began to take shape, one wrought of the burning amalgamations of light and internal refraction: the emotionless face of Her Serenity.
“What the F*CK…” Clueless dropped the broken gemstone fragment as if he’d touch a white-hot poker from a devil’s forge.
“What happened?!” Florian shouted, taken aback by the half-fey’s reaction.
Clueless stood and silently stared at his feet, pointedly trying to avoid staring directly -into- any of the broken gem fragments.
“Again.” Florian asked, worry creeping into her voice. “What the hell just happened?”
The bladesinger motioned to the jagged, crystalline debris strewn across the floor. “I looked into one of the pieces and I saw an effigy of…” He paused, took a deep breath as if mulling over just how he was going to phrase his answer, clear consternation on his face. “… The Lady. Yeah… Her Serenity…”
Dead silence.
Utter and absolute silence.
“F*CK!” Nisha blurted out.
****
Vorkannis snarled, leaning forward with one hand outstretched, his mind lancing out and breaking through the tssng’s mental barriers, ignoring everything but the one profound treasure he sought. It terrified the other ‘loths, witnessing the typically preternaturally calm and smugly superior Oinoloth suddenly lose all pretense of civility and composure, literally drooling with anticipation as his acidic and weaponized telepathy broke the elemental being’s mind like the lock on a vault under a battering ram, one which he actually giggled with emotional overload for as he pillaged the contents.
“My Oinoloth…” Shylara reached forward, placing a hand on the Ebon’s shoulder as she watched his eyes widen, his smile grow exaggeratedly and his excited, ravenous drooling continue.
The Oinoloth did not respond beyond shrugging off his consort’s touch and stepping forward to loom over top of the fallen, screaming tssng, one hand in his pocket, fingers touching the frozen ashes therein and feeling an overwhelming sensation of hunger and satisfaction, feelings he himself was overwhelmed by as he captured what he’d come for, ripping it out of the tssng’s mind.
What he’d come for of course could not be described, not even by the Oinoloth, nor by the tssng who’d held it in trust for so very long. In fact, Vorkannis could only feel its presence, could only skirt about it in his mind, it being something unable to be comprehended, not yet. It was there, but it could only be inferred by the metaphysical weight of its presence, a black hole of a concept distorting the flow of everything around it. Yet he knew exactly what it was. He’d known all along what it was and would be when it was completed.
“Neither waiting nor watching for signs…” The Oinoloth whispered softly to himself, a giddy, ecstatic smile spread across his muzzle. His ears flicked unconsciously and dimly he knew that Shylara was speaking and asking him a blizzard of questions, and the other surviving arcanaloths whining in fear, but he simply didn’t care. In this moment she was nothing and they were nothing, everything else meaningless by comparison to what he’d found, even if it was useless without the remainder, scattered across the planes, hidden and sequestered away such that an inevitability might never occur, or occur only under specific, guided, shackled conditions.
“My Oinoloth do you have…” Shylara asked, her voice now cognizant to her master’s mind.
“I have it.” The Ebon whispered, though at no point was he actually speaking to her, but the presence softly whispering from across a literal and metaphysical gulf when he touched the soil of the Vale of Frozen Ashes. He spoke to that voice which had been there waiting for him, had welcomed him there upon the Waste so long ago upon his arrival. Everything it had spoken of had come to pass, or rather, he had made it come to pass.
More questions from the Manged, more pleading for direction from the handful of surviving arcanaloths, all of which he pointedly ignored. The lesser creatures trailed off, tucked their tails between their legs and were silent. Shylara would need a reminder similar to which her former Mistress had received in Khin-Oin at a significantly greater level.
“SILENCE!” Vorkannis spoke, the words and a subsequent thought instantly dropping the Overlord of Carceri to her knees, vomiting blood. “None of you are necessary in this moment if you wish to survive.”
The arcanaloths nodded and retreated to the room’s periphery while paradoxically, or perhaps not paradoxically, Shylara began to smile and giggle even as she bled from her eyes, nose, and mouth.
His mind obsessively caressing the essence of what he’d obtained, his mind moving over it like his tongue over a lover’s lips, he turned his attention to the other elements in the room: the words inscribed upon and magically dancing above the walls on two sides.
Albino eyes read over the words, quatrain by quatrain.
Vorkannis chuckled as he whispered them.
Words about himself.
Eyes blazing for one moment before he tore open a gate and left with his remaining entourage, laughing triumphantly as he departed, he whispered the second line of words, speaking one word in Baern, “What is destined shall find a way for HUBRIS cannot die.”
****
carborundum
Adventurer
What the flip is going on!?!?
Hubris: excessive and overarching pride. Ability and achievement cultivate it over time if it is not deliberately forestalled. The root dies not and it blooms ever and anon so long as any will tend it. If one fails to embrace a measure of humility or deliberately embraces megalomania, hubris pushes forth its pyrrhic flower and reliably brings down its latest suitor.
Then the root waits for another to tend it and it seldom has to wait long. This one, that one, the one after that--all are a means to an end for HUBRIS, and nothing more. And the end? Fertilizer for the root which is the essence of evil. But Vorkannis is evil, so why would the root take him for food? Evil devours its own quite readily.
I believe Vorkannis seeks to break the cycle as described by an earlier poster and emerge triumphant over a multiverse that would then dance to his tune. Remember the extraction of god-essence from the dead gods on the Astral Plane? He seeks not merely a godhead, but an over-godhead.
Hubris.
Shemeska
Hero
Literally nothing is done without a reason, including the mining of the god-isles in the Astral with the Divinity Leech.
Additionally, I'm working on the next update, and there will be a chunk of backstory from some thousands of year prior that will be provided. :3
Shemeska
Hero
Whatever they’d thought they were there to find or there to stop or interrupt… everything was suddenly refocused and elevated to an entirely grander and more terrifying level entirely with no questions answered and even more deadly, bladed questions thrown forward.
“Oh powers above…” Fyrehowl said through gritted fangs, a faint canid whine working its way in.
“Mystra preserve us…” Tristol’s vulpine ears lay flat against his head and his tail’s fur bristled with alarm.
Collectively they stared at the gem fragments, though after that first glance not -into- them for several long minutes before turning their attention to the door itself. The otherwise unadorned slab of unknown metallic stone stood there waiting, ajar and ominous, the air silent and still.
“Are we going to talk about…?” Toras asked warily.
“Not now, no.” Clueless’s reply was blunt. It was a topic that dwarfed any other taboo and it wasn’t something that was going to be address there in the present moment or any time soon.
Fyrehowl sniffed the air, “I don’t smell them up ahead, not presently, but they’ve been here.”
“F*ck…” Clueless grimaced, Razor at the ready as he led the way and they entered the chamber, prepared, or perhaps utterly unprepared, for whatever it might hold.
Moments later they all collectively burst into the chamber, weapons at the ready or hands raised and prepared to hurl spells, all in the assumption that they hadn’t come too late. Perhaps the ‘loths might still be there, the Oinoloth’s hand outstretched to seize… something… and their perfectly timed arrival might put an end to whatever horrific and evil plans he was bringing to fruition.
But no.
There were no yugoloths.
There was nothing to save, nothing to stop, nothing left to prevent being taken.
There was only the Guardian, sitting and waiting, slowly dying without the object it had been entrusted with so very long ago.
“Who are you?” Clueless asked, slowly lowering his blade, the others following suit shortly after, disappointment simmering below the surface, covered over by a blanket of curiosity and wonder.
The Guardian, a single profoundly ancient tssng archmage, sat alone, partially slumped over, composed of brilliantly glowing crystal. The last of his most primordial kind, the firstborn of Elemental Earth, the glowing sparks that had filled the crystals making up his body slowly, one by one, were growing dim.
“I am the Guardian.” The tssng spoke into their minds as its crystalline lips spoke with a grating, fracturing and annealing susurrus. “Whatever other name I once had, I no longer remember.”
Several questions came tumbling out at once.
“What is this place?” Clueless wondered, glancing left and right at the glowing words on the walls, written in ancient Terran.
“Why are you here?” Toras asked next.
“What were you protecting?” Fyrehowl asked the most important question, “What did the Oinoloth take from this place?”
“I have waited eons to impart my wisdom upon the one fated to obtain it.” The Guardian sighed, “But now it is gone, stolen from my mind. I had no choice in the matter from the moment it was given to me, but the yugoloth would have wrenched it from my corpse either way if I’d been able to say no in the gifting of it.”
They realized that whatever the Oinoloth was searching for, it wasn’t a physical object at all.
“It is gone.” The Guardian continued, “Erased, replaced with a word or words with no meaning.”
Puzzlement crossed their faces. Nothing seemed to truly make sense. They were missing something.
“But it is all or nothing.” The Guardian leaned forward, fully half the sparks in his form burned out, smaller crystals shattering and falling from his body. “The final image cannot be seen, the final puzzle cannot be understood, without all of its components together as one. That is why they were separated, sequestered, and hidden away.”
“What is it?” Clueless asked, nearly begging for that knowledge and somewhere deep within his mind, another figure metaphorically leaned forward, keening an ephemeral ear to know and understand as well.
“I have never known.” The Guardian responded. “Perhaps one of the others like myself were given that answer, but I did not. It was safer that way if I myself did not understand the context of the corrosive, terrible thing in my mind.”
Glances of worry were exchanged. The description of it as ‘corrosive’ and ‘terrible’ did not inspire confidence in its presence in the hand, or the mind rather, of the Oinoloth.
“You held it in your mind for untold millennia. How can you not know what it ever was?” Clueless’s voice was tinged with sincere frustration bordering on anger. What happened next provided an answer, but it was something he might later have wished to not know, given the questions the attempt of an answer only raised up like vengeful revenants from a shallow, open grave.
Gathering up what strength remained to it, the Guardian raised a hand, reaching out with its mind into the bladesinger’s and looked into Clueless’s eyes. What passed between them was a single thought, a single concept, a single maddeningly meaningless everythingnothing, a hollow thing now dwelling where once something rested, treasured and protected until it was wrenched away by the Oinoloth: Vornelthraanix.
A single, horrific connection was suddenly imparted, made, and agonizingly not fully understood.
Clueless fell, momentarily blacking out.
“What the f*ck…” Clueless looked up at the Guardian, dread in his eyes as the memory of that… word… flashed before him, conjuring up the knowledge of how Leobtav had carved it into the altar upon which he’d sacrificed the chained god of the Tiere and siphoned off its divine essence.
Unity of All.
The bladesinger babbled an answer for the others before fixing the Guardian with his eyes again.
“Please, you have to know more,” he said, begging for something, anything more.
“I don’t and have never known.” The Guardian shook its head, “Only with all its pieces will it and can it be understood and used, whatever it might be.”
“Who gave it to you?” Tristol asked.
“I no longer know, if ever I did.” The Guardian’s answer was underwhelming but haunting nonetheless with what they suspected or feared. “I’ve been here so very long that even my oldest memories blur and I truly cannot say if anything in specific is real or a dream written down upon the wrong page of reality since that time when I accepted what was entrusted to me.”
They wanted to ask of the gem, to ask of Her Serenity but not a single one of them dared.
“How many others like you are there?” Tristol asked, “How many more pieces of this whatever it might be are there?”
“There are four in total,” The Guardian answered, “Each held and guarded by one such as myself, entrusted to keep and hold it such that it might never be collected and understood.”
“That’s not enough damn it!” Clueless smacked a hand on the floor, “I’m sorry. I can’t accept that we came all this way only to fail and come away with absolutely f*cking nothing!”
To varying degrees, the sentiment was shared by the others, though it was Clueless who was most open about his burgeoning anger and bitter disappointment.
“I cannot give you what I once held,” The Guardian spoke, more pieces of its body crumbling away as it neared its end, “But to you seeking my secrets, and seeking the others like me, I may still impart to you not my given charge but the location of the second. Take it, and read the words left here that will speak of the days to come, and let me die, knowing that I have done exactly as I was asked so very long ago.”
There was no argument and the tssng gave them what it could.
“Proceed now,” The Guardian explained, “Its voice breaking into achingly beautiful song, “The way is clear and seen the next door opens. The air is charged. The storm clouds hum and the tempest crackles with all its might. Seek me out in the heart of the storm where the border lies and the tower rises.”
They then turned to the walls, Tristol taking several minutes to provide a correct translation given the profound antiquity of the dialect of Terran it was written in eons before, but seemingly prescient for the present moment in time in the aftermath of the Guardian’s secret being wrenched from its mind.
Spirit made substance returns to the fore, and treachery is paid with treachery more
What is destined shall find a way for HUBRIS cannot die
And below the ring, Swalk’kur looks to the sky
Prince of the EarthHeart, Rockfather of spirit and stone
Steadfast and wise we beseech you
Return to us and gift us with your wisdom when 4 becomes 5 and 3 and 1
Heart of Steadfast Stone we wait your eyes to blaze once more
What is has been and will be done
Seeing long and seeing far, the future black or not at all
All praise to the lost prince of elemental earth, all glory to the vanished Swalk’kur whose sight is gone from us. We await your return as the next door swings open to bare its secrets to the unworthy
A figure clambered upon and over a broken, half-molten ridge of volcanic rock along the escarpment of Khalas the First Furnace. Her form constantly shifted and changed shape, adapting moment by moment to the terrain, sprouting different limbs and different shapes to better move and carapace pigmentation that mirrored the ground she stood upon to better avoid the sight of any other creature that might see her.
Of course, no creature would have likely seen Taba in the first place, given the furious level of magical protection against mundane sight and divination magics that she employed. But there, back within the plane in which she’d originated, underneath the potential eyes of servitors of Vorkannis the Ebon, she took no chances.
“Where are you my master…” She thought to herself, scuttling across the rocks, leaping over a river of glowing, molten magma, and finally coming to a stop and standing upright on a dozen crab or arachnid-like legs next to a broken and discarded claw a hundred feet long, shed from the monstrous limbs of the Crawling City, perhaps a day, perhaps a hundred thousand years earlier.
It was the Crawling City and its master to whom her loyalty lay, while virtually all of the rest of the yugoloth race, as much as any of them could ever have loyalty to anything but themselves, if even then, declared allegiance to Vorkannis the Ebon, the false Oinoloth in her mind. The Crawling City and its present, unknown location, was also the reason why Taba stood there on Khalas, blindly searching for something which always moved and whose master had cloaked it from discernment and vanished into some profound occultation when Vorkannis had made his claim for control over the planes of conflict.
Where the General of Gehenna had gone and why in the face of the Ebon’s rise to power was a singular unspoken question amongst the higher echelons of yugoloth society, though it was a death sentence to ask. Taba, outside of the standard hierarchy of her kind, had no such restrictions and since that time she’d sought to stymie the Ebon and find where the true master of his claimed domain had gone, waiting like some king under the mountain for when he was most needed by his chosen children, all the result of his use of the Heart of Darkness to purify them all.
Of course, in the space of months, she’d found absolutely nothing. Even one such as herself was blind if the General of Gehenna simply didn’t want to be found, regardless of whatever harrowing reason behind his absence.
“Please… please tell me where you are, greatest of us all…” Taba whispered, staring out over the flowing rivers of lava cascading over the edge of the nearest cliff face, glowing magma spraying out into the void and far below.
It wasn’t the General who answered her, but it was an answer nonetheless.
In the glimmers of light scintillating off of the nearest lava flow, the light moved and swirled unnaturally, rising up into the air on its own, transforming from mere light into something else. The reality Taba beheld on the edge of the First Furnace, overlooking the infinite void beyond was suddenly written in numbers and formulae in miniscule script swirling and undulating into a sea of unblinking eyes and words pounding meaningless meaning into the altraloth lord’s mind.
The very substance underlying Khalas was lifted back like a curtain and something far, far older stared back at Taba and spoke.
“You will find Him when the time has come.” Lazarius ibn Shartalan imparted, “He waits for you little wandering searching thing of ours. He will return in his glory at our urging when the moment has arrived and not a moment before.”
Taba gasped and trembled, the very words bombarding her senses and overwhelming her, obliterating her control over herself and her consciousness so beyond her was the baernaloth’s presence by comparison. On the edge of the precipice, Taba’s form shifted and changed moment by moment, second by second without any control on her part as she was lifted up by the baernaloth’s cancerous, unfathomable light, leaving her hanging in midair, dangling like a child’s toy in unseen hands.
“Everything is seen. Everything is ordained.” The First of the Demented spoke without speaking, “You will understand when your time arrives and you are given answers by the object of your hate. Hubris will tell you what He is. Until then, continue as you will.”
Reality returned to its prosaic self, the Architect’s presence departed and Taba stared up into the void gasping for breath, shaking, frozen in unholy fear, retching and weeping with newfound purpose and far too many unanswered questions.
Far from their long and difficult trek through the hinterlands of Quasielemental Mineral, the return to Sigil was swift. A gate to Ecstasy to deposit them near the natural portal back to Sigil, and then a five-block walk through the Clerk’s ward to the waiting, welcome door of the Portal Jammer.
It was however, hardly a welcome, triumphant return home. They had, after all, failed in their attempt to stop the Oinoloth, arriving perhaps only an hour after the archfiend had departed the Tower of Lead himself.
A cold emotional chill hung over them as they made their way to the back room, pausing only briefly to grab more than one bottle of liquor from the bar. Half way through the bottle as they all sat at the table, no one wanting to be the first to broach the bloated, swollen corpse of a topic that they needed to address, the meeting was abruptly adjourned.
“We’ll talk about this later…” Clueless said, taking half a bottle of wine with him before he walked out and left the Portal Jammer entirely without saying a word about where he was going or what he was doing.
The mood was infectious and one by one they got up and left to swallow themselves in something, anything, to distract themselves from what had just happened, trying not to surrender to self-doubt, trying to feel anything other than worried, terrified, and despondent.
Yes, they had failed, and the Oinoloth had gained exactly what it was he sought, something which they failed to understand the origin and even the purpose of, save that it was connected in some capacity to Factol Larriset’s loopholes or Grand Axiom which she’d been sent on the trail of by something wearing the identity of Cilret Leobtav, many years before the madman had even been born.
They would need time to collect their thoughts, collect themselves, and find the courage and piece together what they -did- know, to take the next step.
Clueless vanished into the depths of Undersigil, taking a route to the halls beneath the Palace of the Jester, there to talk and converse with the one being who shared his own hatred of the ‘loths and seemed to genuinely understand him, even if at the time the half-fey didn’t fully trust him either. The immortal, whatever he was, was nothing if not a wellspring of knowledge in his own right, and perhaps his aid might provide some glimmer of hope, or simply a path to revenge.
Florian drank profusely for a day, spent the next hung over and repeated the experience for the better part of a week.
Tristol buried himself in books, searching for any connections yet unseen or unnoticed amongst everything that they’d encountered, but for now, such connections remained elusive.
Nisha was the only one who didn’t seem troubled, not in the least. She remained as perky and spontaneous as ever, spending the next few days planning and executing a series of pranks on various members or former members of the Harmonium and several baatezu who had the profound misfortune of crossing her path.
Toras’s response was true to his faith but perhaps not as expected given his previous “vacation” escapades. This time, rather than killing fiends, both immortal and mortal alike, the half-celestial spent a week making toys and then making his way to the nearest orphanage and distributing them. As much of a failure as he felt after the events in Quasielemental Mineral, his time there bringing joy to the children at the orphanage made him genuinely smile.
Fyrehowl traveled to the Great Gymnasium and spent most of her time there, training, exercising, and sparring with any others up for it, simply acting and not thinking, emptying her mind of worry and allowing the cosmos to flow through her, hoping for answers or guidance on what to do next. Days later the Cadence would indeed provide something: not necessarily an answer, but most certainly a name, and one that they had never before heard mentioned, but not yet.
Not in Sigil, but soon to return, sequestered in the Fraternity of Order’s holdings in Mechanus, Factol Nathaniel remained deep at work on the equations his mother had begun, searching in them some clue as to the location of the next piece of the… something… that the Oinoloth had begun to collect.
12,999 years prior:
Vorkannis knelt in the dust, dug his claws into the soil, smiled and inhaled deeply, the air of the Waste filling his lungs with a comfort he’d not known for weeks. He glanced back at the natural portal some dozen feet away, his own muddy footprints leading away from it bubbling and sizzling in the ashen soil of the Waste as it mixed with and reacted with the essence of that other, misbegotten plane. Half a cosmology away on the other side of that same gate, the waters bubbled and boiled where the dust of the Waste had trickled through and burning footprints still traced a path across the surface of a pond from where he’d passed and left his indelible touch in permanent fashion, a foretaste of the bloodshed to come many, many years later when he eventually returned.
The future Oinoloth laughed.
Not a simple chuckle but a nearly hysterical bout of laughter that left him short of breath, tears leaking from his eyes and a tone of absolute smug superiority carved into his facial features as he danced, throwing his arms into the air in a celebration of himself and his deeds.
The first blow had been struck and a shot fired across the bow of those who didn’t even know he yet existed and whose doomed fate had been written into reality’s fabric long ago.
Eventually his mirth faded to a lingering smile and he stopped, smoothing his cobalt robes and preparing himself for what would come next in his grand plan.
It was time. The yugoloths were not ready, but he would make them ready with honeyed words, unholy promises, and a flood of knives into the backs of as many fiends as he needed until they fell down to their knees and begged. The cosmos itself was not ready, but he certainly was.
A soft tremor ran through the ground and twelve miles distant a force of some nine hundred thousand yugoloths under the command of Cholerix the altraloth marched forward, three days out of Center and headed towards a portal to their native Carceri.
“Filth…” Vorkannis snarled, his mind riding through the soil like a soft and subtle tremor of its own, reaching out and touching each and every yugoloth, unseen and unsensed. Emotions, thoughts, motivations, desires, names, and memories of each and every one of them flooded into the Ebon’s mind, filed away and cataloged for future reference and exploitation. Then there was Cholerix, yugoloth but not, nycaloth yet something more, her presence screaming its identity above even the handful of arcanaloths who comprised the core of her inner court within her current force.
“There you are…” Vorkannis said, chuckling to himself before shaking his head dismissively. “Haughty and proud, living but on as much borrowed time as I see pleasure in granting.”
Miles away, Cholerix, a former nycaloth rode above her army atop a massive custom-bred slasrath, triple the size of more mundane examples, surrounded by a diffuse cloud of nycaloths in flight and arcanaloths on more standard slasraths.
The heavily armored altraloth wore as a crown and helmet the skull of the night hag who’d given her her bargain and two others of the same coven crafted into decorations upon the adamantine armored plates upon her shoulders. Her flesh clung tight to her bones as if she’d succumbed to a grisly, horrific death by dehydration and simply refused to die. Despite the appearance of her corpse-like form, the altraloth’s tongue and eyes were as they were in her original form, the tongue drooling almost uncontrollably and her eyes leaking a steady stream of yellowish tears down her cheeks and upon her tabard and armor which remained otherwise clean of blood, dust, and filth by magic.
But it was not Cholerix who interested the Ebon. That would have been far too direct and any immediate usurpation of her position of power would have lacked the pleasure of what would soon come. What earned the albino-eyed fiend’s interest were the two arcanaloth chief scribes who flanked the altraloth: Eselivus ap Cathrys and Melibulum ap Pluton. They hated one another and both collectively chafed under the rule of the altraloth who’d never actually earned promotion to their caste but took a divergent path to power outside of the standard yugoloth hierarchy. Cholerix of course knew all of this and she reveled in that fact, but yet she relied on both of them and had done so for nearly eight hundred years at that point. The two of them were known variables, well-crafted cogs in a machine of regimented death for hire that served below Bubonix her master, himself a former arcanaloth turned altraloth, rumored to have suggested the bargain to her in a perversity of an arcanaloth taking a nycaloth under their wing to sponsor their promotion.
A subtle motion of a hand from a solitary figure on a rock eleven miles away and one scribe’s mount bumped into the other, rocking them in their perch and spilling a vial of ink upon a scroll. Another subtle motion and the offending arcanaloth gave in to their desire to smirk.
Nothing more would be needed.
Ten minutes later and words had escalated into hurled spells and finally ended with a silver edged blade buried in one’s chest and teeth at their throat, slurping the blood pumped by the last, trembling beats of a black heart and feeling a final breath upon the top of their head.
Centuries of building, simmering animus erupted into flame and one of Cholerix’s advisors was dead, his body cast from his mount to plummet and break from impact and the trampling feet of thousands of mezzoloths marching onwards without a concern.
A short time later and the army had arrived to find Vorkannis waiting, simply sitting there on a barren outcropping of rock as the multitude passed by.
He was of course, immediately and oh so conveniently seen by the same entity he’d desired to find him on his own terms.
“YOU!” Cholerix bellowed, pointing to the lone fiend at the army’s periphery. “Arcanaloth! Approach!”
The Ebon’s ears twitched and he stood, his body language radically different from moments before as he teleported into the air at a respectful, humble distance from the altraloth lord. His ears lay back submissively and he bowed as he hovered in midair.
Cholerix gestured for Vorkannis to approach, curiosity and malice in equal measure as her mind still swirled with genuine rage at the fact that her two closest advisors and servitors had come to blows and one of them was lay dead, trampled to pulp by her own army.
“Who are you and more importantly, what are you doing here?” The altraloth asked, rheumy eyes staring into the Ebon’s own albino orbs.
“Vorkannis ap Center,” The Ebon answered, giving himself a title that was not and had never been his, an origin location invented on the spot.
Cholerix shrugged and impatiently waited for her second question to be answered.
Before he answered, Vorkannis smiled. The same way that the greatest of actions began. “I find myself in the absence of a position. I was most recently in the employ of the… late… Zicorium ibn Niflheim. Their planned betrayal of our tanar’ri hiring masters went poorly when Pazuzu himself took to the field.”
“And you escaped.” Cholerix raised a withered ridge of muscle over one eye as she pondered her options. The arcanaloth was less deferential than ideal, and they were obviously lying about how their split from their master had occurred, but that could be explored and fully elucidated later. Their confidence was however, refreshing, to an extent, given the bowing, scraping, and obsequious fawning she was most often accustomed to receive.
“In the absence of Zicorium… yes…” Vorkannis feigned dancing about the subject as if he were some rank-and-file scribe fresh from Gehenna, terrified of admitting betrayal of their most recent master. “Understandably I cannot return to a position which no longer exists. I’ve been here for the better part of a day, pondering my future options, and… well here you are and perhaps…”
The question and offer hung in the air.
“And I am in need of a scribe with experience such as you possess.” Cholerix snapped her fingers, summoning the now available slastath most recently belonging to Eselivus ap Cathrys and motioned for the Ebon to take to her side. “Betray me and you will suffer for a millennium before I break your head from your shoulders.”
Melibulum smirked as the newcomer nodded obediently, floating through the air between the flock of nycaloths between himself and the offered slasrath mount to take mount and then fall into place across from him and next to Cholerix. The scribe stared daggers at their new colleague, eager to intimidate them and form a working relationship more on their own preferred terms than their previous had been.
Vorkannis returned Melibulum’s stare.
What the established scribe found, staring into the newcomer’s eyes, was not what they expected. What they saw… they blinked and simply skipped the thought of what they’d seen or that they’d even looked and what they’d intended. But in the back of their mind, pushing away the screams they didn’t remember, they had the oddest notion that they should have been on their knees, weeping and begging.
Listening and taking notes, following the army from the Waste and into Carceri towards the Tower of Incarnate Pain, marching off towards his next stepping stone to destiny, Vorkannis the Ebon smiled.
Layer 1 of the Abyss:
Eschewing even the need for a portal or Gate, he stepped out onto the infinite expanse of Pazunia, smiled, and looked down. The entity reaching through his soul stretched, prepared itself, and dove downwards, burrowing through the metaphysical stuff of the Abyss, coiling downwards ever downwards with an alacrity that would have surprised even Pale Night or others of her ancient ilk.
For an interminable period of time he traveled downwards, ever downwards, past layers populated, sealed, abandoned, and forgotten alike, through and beyond until he arrived and stepped out into the silent darkness there which embraced him like the caress of a long-lost, cherished friend.
What was there, waiting, it knew him.
Layer 37,825 of the Abyss:
Unplumbed, undiscovered, uncatalogued by the Fraternity of Order, untouched and unknown to tanar’ri or even the obyrith before them, the vastness of the Amber Repository was home to a horror far older than all of them.
“You knew that I would come.” The voice of Cilret Leobtav spoke, or rather, something spoke through him, a smile playing on his powerless proxy-slave’s face as it addressed something before it in a chamber swallowed in silent, claustrophobic darkness but seemingly beyond vast in size and scope given the odd, disjointed echo.
Broken, scorched lips peeled into a subtle, non-committal smirk.
“Greetings sibling of Lazarius and Tellura.” The Ashsinger spoke, “We have never spoken, you and I, not exactly, neither precisely... not directly nor by a herald such as this one here, but you know of me. You know who I am.”
A silent, knowing nod of a head.
“You may dismiss this meandering preamble and let us speak on open terms.” The voice from the darkness spoke, a calm and confidence in its voice so very different from any who had spoken directly to the entity looming behind Leobtav’s eyes.
“This is a courtesy call before certain eventualities collapse and certain choices are made and paths forged.” Leobtav’s voice continued, “I need to know what your role in things to come will be. Have the Demented approached you?”
“They have not.” The response came with a snort, dismissive but yet tinged with regret and an undercurrent of both anger and near despondent loss. “If they would not speak to the one in Portent, nor settle with Apomps, they would certainly never seek reproach with me. Not after everything. Not now. Not ever.”
“Which is precisely why I am here.”
“Speak.”
“What role if any will you play in things to come.” Leobtav’s voice asked, “You were there at the beginning with all of them, before the Fracture, before the conflicts in the aftermath, before the discovery of the other alignments and their children.”
No response.
“You were there when the Great Plan was plumbed, defined, crafted and planned. You helped them design and build the Oblivion Compass. You were there before The Demented -became- and eradicated or exiled all opposition. You were there with them when they…” Leobtav’s voice trailed off as the other being licked its lips and chuckled.
Rheumy eyes narrowed and studied the mortal and stared at the thing looming beyond his words.
“You so want to ask the question, to bring things full circle, but no need.” A soft, knowing chuckle, “What is it I want? Let me tell you.”
The voice in the darkness drew closer and a sudden, brilliant rush of light washed over Leobtav’s face as a trio of flaming halos ignited above the caprine head of the primordial baernaloth before him, washing over the surrounding reach of the vast chamber within which they stood. Vast beyond conception, stretching out to the limit of the light, great stacks of crystalline cylinders held individual bodies in sleep, preservation, or stasis: yugoloths of each and every type.
Standing amidst his unnumbered, unlamented, cursed and forgotten children, Chorazin the Thrice-Damned smiled.
“Oh powers above…” Fyrehowl said through gritted fangs, a faint canid whine working its way in.
“Mystra preserve us…” Tristol’s vulpine ears lay flat against his head and his tail’s fur bristled with alarm.
Collectively they stared at the gem fragments, though after that first glance not -into- them for several long minutes before turning their attention to the door itself. The otherwise unadorned slab of unknown metallic stone stood there waiting, ajar and ominous, the air silent and still.
“Are we going to talk about…?” Toras asked warily.
“Not now, no.” Clueless’s reply was blunt. It was a topic that dwarfed any other taboo and it wasn’t something that was going to be address there in the present moment or any time soon.
Fyrehowl sniffed the air, “I don’t smell them up ahead, not presently, but they’ve been here.”
“F*ck…” Clueless grimaced, Razor at the ready as he led the way and they entered the chamber, prepared, or perhaps utterly unprepared, for whatever it might hold.
Moments later they all collectively burst into the chamber, weapons at the ready or hands raised and prepared to hurl spells, all in the assumption that they hadn’t come too late. Perhaps the ‘loths might still be there, the Oinoloth’s hand outstretched to seize… something… and their perfectly timed arrival might put an end to whatever horrific and evil plans he was bringing to fruition.
But no.
There were no yugoloths.
There was nothing to save, nothing to stop, nothing left to prevent being taken.
There was only the Guardian, sitting and waiting, slowly dying without the object it had been entrusted with so very long ago.
“Who are you?” Clueless asked, slowly lowering his blade, the others following suit shortly after, disappointment simmering below the surface, covered over by a blanket of curiosity and wonder.
The Guardian, a single profoundly ancient tssng archmage, sat alone, partially slumped over, composed of brilliantly glowing crystal. The last of his most primordial kind, the firstborn of Elemental Earth, the glowing sparks that had filled the crystals making up his body slowly, one by one, were growing dim.
“I am the Guardian.” The tssng spoke into their minds as its crystalline lips spoke with a grating, fracturing and annealing susurrus. “Whatever other name I once had, I no longer remember.”
Several questions came tumbling out at once.
“What is this place?” Clueless wondered, glancing left and right at the glowing words on the walls, written in ancient Terran.
“Why are you here?” Toras asked next.
“What were you protecting?” Fyrehowl asked the most important question, “What did the Oinoloth take from this place?”
“I have waited eons to impart my wisdom upon the one fated to obtain it.” The Guardian sighed, “But now it is gone, stolen from my mind. I had no choice in the matter from the moment it was given to me, but the yugoloth would have wrenched it from my corpse either way if I’d been able to say no in the gifting of it.”
They realized that whatever the Oinoloth was searching for, it wasn’t a physical object at all.
“It is gone.” The Guardian continued, “Erased, replaced with a word or words with no meaning.”
Puzzlement crossed their faces. Nothing seemed to truly make sense. They were missing something.
“But it is all or nothing.” The Guardian leaned forward, fully half the sparks in his form burned out, smaller crystals shattering and falling from his body. “The final image cannot be seen, the final puzzle cannot be understood, without all of its components together as one. That is why they were separated, sequestered, and hidden away.”
“What is it?” Clueless asked, nearly begging for that knowledge and somewhere deep within his mind, another figure metaphorically leaned forward, keening an ephemeral ear to know and understand as well.
“I have never known.” The Guardian responded. “Perhaps one of the others like myself were given that answer, but I did not. It was safer that way if I myself did not understand the context of the corrosive, terrible thing in my mind.”
Glances of worry were exchanged. The description of it as ‘corrosive’ and ‘terrible’ did not inspire confidence in its presence in the hand, or the mind rather, of the Oinoloth.
“You held it in your mind for untold millennia. How can you not know what it ever was?” Clueless’s voice was tinged with sincere frustration bordering on anger. What happened next provided an answer, but it was something he might later have wished to not know, given the questions the attempt of an answer only raised up like vengeful revenants from a shallow, open grave.
Gathering up what strength remained to it, the Guardian raised a hand, reaching out with its mind into the bladesinger’s and looked into Clueless’s eyes. What passed between them was a single thought, a single concept, a single maddeningly meaningless everythingnothing, a hollow thing now dwelling where once something rested, treasured and protected until it was wrenched away by the Oinoloth: Vornelthraanix.
A single, horrific connection was suddenly imparted, made, and agonizingly not fully understood.
Clueless fell, momentarily blacking out.
“What the f*ck…” Clueless looked up at the Guardian, dread in his eyes as the memory of that… word… flashed before him, conjuring up the knowledge of how Leobtav had carved it into the altar upon which he’d sacrificed the chained god of the Tiere and siphoned off its divine essence.
Unity of All.
The bladesinger babbled an answer for the others before fixing the Guardian with his eyes again.
“Please, you have to know more,” he said, begging for something, anything more.
“I don’t and have never known.” The Guardian shook its head, “Only with all its pieces will it and can it be understood and used, whatever it might be.”
“Who gave it to you?” Tristol asked.
“I no longer know, if ever I did.” The Guardian’s answer was underwhelming but haunting nonetheless with what they suspected or feared. “I’ve been here so very long that even my oldest memories blur and I truly cannot say if anything in specific is real or a dream written down upon the wrong page of reality since that time when I accepted what was entrusted to me.”
They wanted to ask of the gem, to ask of Her Serenity but not a single one of them dared.
“How many others like you are there?” Tristol asked, “How many more pieces of this whatever it might be are there?”
“There are four in total,” The Guardian answered, “Each held and guarded by one such as myself, entrusted to keep and hold it such that it might never be collected and understood.”
“That’s not enough damn it!” Clueless smacked a hand on the floor, “I’m sorry. I can’t accept that we came all this way only to fail and come away with absolutely f*cking nothing!”
To varying degrees, the sentiment was shared by the others, though it was Clueless who was most open about his burgeoning anger and bitter disappointment.
“I cannot give you what I once held,” The Guardian spoke, more pieces of its body crumbling away as it neared its end, “But to you seeking my secrets, and seeking the others like me, I may still impart to you not my given charge but the location of the second. Take it, and read the words left here that will speak of the days to come, and let me die, knowing that I have done exactly as I was asked so very long ago.”
There was no argument and the tssng gave them what it could.
“Proceed now,” The Guardian explained, “Its voice breaking into achingly beautiful song, “The way is clear and seen the next door opens. The air is charged. The storm clouds hum and the tempest crackles with all its might. Seek me out in the heart of the storm where the border lies and the tower rises.”
They then turned to the walls, Tristol taking several minutes to provide a correct translation given the profound antiquity of the dialect of Terran it was written in eons before, but seemingly prescient for the present moment in time in the aftermath of the Guardian’s secret being wrenched from its mind.
Spirit made substance returns to the fore, and treachery is paid with treachery more
What is destined shall find a way for HUBRIS cannot die
And below the ring, Swalk’kur looks to the sky
Prince of the EarthHeart, Rockfather of spirit and stone
Steadfast and wise we beseech you
Return to us and gift us with your wisdom when 4 becomes 5 and 3 and 1
Heart of Steadfast Stone we wait your eyes to blaze once more
What is has been and will be done
Seeing long and seeing far, the future black or not at all
All praise to the lost prince of elemental earth, all glory to the vanished Swalk’kur whose sight is gone from us. We await your return as the next door swings open to bare its secrets to the unworthy
****
A figure clambered upon and over a broken, half-molten ridge of volcanic rock along the escarpment of Khalas the First Furnace. Her form constantly shifted and changed shape, adapting moment by moment to the terrain, sprouting different limbs and different shapes to better move and carapace pigmentation that mirrored the ground she stood upon to better avoid the sight of any other creature that might see her.
Of course, no creature would have likely seen Taba in the first place, given the furious level of magical protection against mundane sight and divination magics that she employed. But there, back within the plane in which she’d originated, underneath the potential eyes of servitors of Vorkannis the Ebon, she took no chances.
“Where are you my master…” She thought to herself, scuttling across the rocks, leaping over a river of glowing, molten magma, and finally coming to a stop and standing upright on a dozen crab or arachnid-like legs next to a broken and discarded claw a hundred feet long, shed from the monstrous limbs of the Crawling City, perhaps a day, perhaps a hundred thousand years earlier.
It was the Crawling City and its master to whom her loyalty lay, while virtually all of the rest of the yugoloth race, as much as any of them could ever have loyalty to anything but themselves, if even then, declared allegiance to Vorkannis the Ebon, the false Oinoloth in her mind. The Crawling City and its present, unknown location, was also the reason why Taba stood there on Khalas, blindly searching for something which always moved and whose master had cloaked it from discernment and vanished into some profound occultation when Vorkannis had made his claim for control over the planes of conflict.
Where the General of Gehenna had gone and why in the face of the Ebon’s rise to power was a singular unspoken question amongst the higher echelons of yugoloth society, though it was a death sentence to ask. Taba, outside of the standard hierarchy of her kind, had no such restrictions and since that time she’d sought to stymie the Ebon and find where the true master of his claimed domain had gone, waiting like some king under the mountain for when he was most needed by his chosen children, all the result of his use of the Heart of Darkness to purify them all.
Of course, in the space of months, she’d found absolutely nothing. Even one such as herself was blind if the General of Gehenna simply didn’t want to be found, regardless of whatever harrowing reason behind his absence.
“Please… please tell me where you are, greatest of us all…” Taba whispered, staring out over the flowing rivers of lava cascading over the edge of the nearest cliff face, glowing magma spraying out into the void and far below.
It wasn’t the General who answered her, but it was an answer nonetheless.
In the glimmers of light scintillating off of the nearest lava flow, the light moved and swirled unnaturally, rising up into the air on its own, transforming from mere light into something else. The reality Taba beheld on the edge of the First Furnace, overlooking the infinite void beyond was suddenly written in numbers and formulae in miniscule script swirling and undulating into a sea of unblinking eyes and words pounding meaningless meaning into the altraloth lord’s mind.
The very substance underlying Khalas was lifted back like a curtain and something far, far older stared back at Taba and spoke.
“You will find Him when the time has come.” Lazarius ibn Shartalan imparted, “He waits for you little wandering searching thing of ours. He will return in his glory at our urging when the moment has arrived and not a moment before.”
Taba gasped and trembled, the very words bombarding her senses and overwhelming her, obliterating her control over herself and her consciousness so beyond her was the baernaloth’s presence by comparison. On the edge of the precipice, Taba’s form shifted and changed moment by moment, second by second without any control on her part as she was lifted up by the baernaloth’s cancerous, unfathomable light, leaving her hanging in midair, dangling like a child’s toy in unseen hands.
“Everything is seen. Everything is ordained.” The First of the Demented spoke without speaking, “You will understand when your time arrives and you are given answers by the object of your hate. Hubris will tell you what He is. Until then, continue as you will.”
Reality returned to its prosaic self, the Architect’s presence departed and Taba stared up into the void gasping for breath, shaking, frozen in unholy fear, retching and weeping with newfound purpose and far too many unanswered questions.
****
Far from their long and difficult trek through the hinterlands of Quasielemental Mineral, the return to Sigil was swift. A gate to Ecstasy to deposit them near the natural portal back to Sigil, and then a five-block walk through the Clerk’s ward to the waiting, welcome door of the Portal Jammer.
It was however, hardly a welcome, triumphant return home. They had, after all, failed in their attempt to stop the Oinoloth, arriving perhaps only an hour after the archfiend had departed the Tower of Lead himself.
A cold emotional chill hung over them as they made their way to the back room, pausing only briefly to grab more than one bottle of liquor from the bar. Half way through the bottle as they all sat at the table, no one wanting to be the first to broach the bloated, swollen corpse of a topic that they needed to address, the meeting was abruptly adjourned.
“We’ll talk about this later…” Clueless said, taking half a bottle of wine with him before he walked out and left the Portal Jammer entirely without saying a word about where he was going or what he was doing.
The mood was infectious and one by one they got up and left to swallow themselves in something, anything, to distract themselves from what had just happened, trying not to surrender to self-doubt, trying to feel anything other than worried, terrified, and despondent.
Yes, they had failed, and the Oinoloth had gained exactly what it was he sought, something which they failed to understand the origin and even the purpose of, save that it was connected in some capacity to Factol Larriset’s loopholes or Grand Axiom which she’d been sent on the trail of by something wearing the identity of Cilret Leobtav, many years before the madman had even been born.
They would need time to collect their thoughts, collect themselves, and find the courage and piece together what they -did- know, to take the next step.
Clueless vanished into the depths of Undersigil, taking a route to the halls beneath the Palace of the Jester, there to talk and converse with the one being who shared his own hatred of the ‘loths and seemed to genuinely understand him, even if at the time the half-fey didn’t fully trust him either. The immortal, whatever he was, was nothing if not a wellspring of knowledge in his own right, and perhaps his aid might provide some glimmer of hope, or simply a path to revenge.
Florian drank profusely for a day, spent the next hung over and repeated the experience for the better part of a week.
Tristol buried himself in books, searching for any connections yet unseen or unnoticed amongst everything that they’d encountered, but for now, such connections remained elusive.
Nisha was the only one who didn’t seem troubled, not in the least. She remained as perky and spontaneous as ever, spending the next few days planning and executing a series of pranks on various members or former members of the Harmonium and several baatezu who had the profound misfortune of crossing her path.
Toras’s response was true to his faith but perhaps not as expected given his previous “vacation” escapades. This time, rather than killing fiends, both immortal and mortal alike, the half-celestial spent a week making toys and then making his way to the nearest orphanage and distributing them. As much of a failure as he felt after the events in Quasielemental Mineral, his time there bringing joy to the children at the orphanage made him genuinely smile.
Fyrehowl traveled to the Great Gymnasium and spent most of her time there, training, exercising, and sparring with any others up for it, simply acting and not thinking, emptying her mind of worry and allowing the cosmos to flow through her, hoping for answers or guidance on what to do next. Days later the Cadence would indeed provide something: not necessarily an answer, but most certainly a name, and one that they had never before heard mentioned, but not yet.
Not in Sigil, but soon to return, sequestered in the Fraternity of Order’s holdings in Mechanus, Factol Nathaniel remained deep at work on the equations his mother had begun, searching in them some clue as to the location of the next piece of the… something… that the Oinoloth had begun to collect.
****
12,999 years prior:
Vorkannis knelt in the dust, dug his claws into the soil, smiled and inhaled deeply, the air of the Waste filling his lungs with a comfort he’d not known for weeks. He glanced back at the natural portal some dozen feet away, his own muddy footprints leading away from it bubbling and sizzling in the ashen soil of the Waste as it mixed with and reacted with the essence of that other, misbegotten plane. Half a cosmology away on the other side of that same gate, the waters bubbled and boiled where the dust of the Waste had trickled through and burning footprints still traced a path across the surface of a pond from where he’d passed and left his indelible touch in permanent fashion, a foretaste of the bloodshed to come many, many years later when he eventually returned.
The future Oinoloth laughed.
Not a simple chuckle but a nearly hysterical bout of laughter that left him short of breath, tears leaking from his eyes and a tone of absolute smug superiority carved into his facial features as he danced, throwing his arms into the air in a celebration of himself and his deeds.
The first blow had been struck and a shot fired across the bow of those who didn’t even know he yet existed and whose doomed fate had been written into reality’s fabric long ago.
Eventually his mirth faded to a lingering smile and he stopped, smoothing his cobalt robes and preparing himself for what would come next in his grand plan.
It was time. The yugoloths were not ready, but he would make them ready with honeyed words, unholy promises, and a flood of knives into the backs of as many fiends as he needed until they fell down to their knees and begged. The cosmos itself was not ready, but he certainly was.
A soft tremor ran through the ground and twelve miles distant a force of some nine hundred thousand yugoloths under the command of Cholerix the altraloth marched forward, three days out of Center and headed towards a portal to their native Carceri.
“Filth…” Vorkannis snarled, his mind riding through the soil like a soft and subtle tremor of its own, reaching out and touching each and every yugoloth, unseen and unsensed. Emotions, thoughts, motivations, desires, names, and memories of each and every one of them flooded into the Ebon’s mind, filed away and cataloged for future reference and exploitation. Then there was Cholerix, yugoloth but not, nycaloth yet something more, her presence screaming its identity above even the handful of arcanaloths who comprised the core of her inner court within her current force.
“There you are…” Vorkannis said, chuckling to himself before shaking his head dismissively. “Haughty and proud, living but on as much borrowed time as I see pleasure in granting.”
Miles away, Cholerix, a former nycaloth rode above her army atop a massive custom-bred slasrath, triple the size of more mundane examples, surrounded by a diffuse cloud of nycaloths in flight and arcanaloths on more standard slasraths.
The heavily armored altraloth wore as a crown and helmet the skull of the night hag who’d given her her bargain and two others of the same coven crafted into decorations upon the adamantine armored plates upon her shoulders. Her flesh clung tight to her bones as if she’d succumbed to a grisly, horrific death by dehydration and simply refused to die. Despite the appearance of her corpse-like form, the altraloth’s tongue and eyes were as they were in her original form, the tongue drooling almost uncontrollably and her eyes leaking a steady stream of yellowish tears down her cheeks and upon her tabard and armor which remained otherwise clean of blood, dust, and filth by magic.
But it was not Cholerix who interested the Ebon. That would have been far too direct and any immediate usurpation of her position of power would have lacked the pleasure of what would soon come. What earned the albino-eyed fiend’s interest were the two arcanaloth chief scribes who flanked the altraloth: Eselivus ap Cathrys and Melibulum ap Pluton. They hated one another and both collectively chafed under the rule of the altraloth who’d never actually earned promotion to their caste but took a divergent path to power outside of the standard yugoloth hierarchy. Cholerix of course knew all of this and she reveled in that fact, but yet she relied on both of them and had done so for nearly eight hundred years at that point. The two of them were known variables, well-crafted cogs in a machine of regimented death for hire that served below Bubonix her master, himself a former arcanaloth turned altraloth, rumored to have suggested the bargain to her in a perversity of an arcanaloth taking a nycaloth under their wing to sponsor their promotion.
A subtle motion of a hand from a solitary figure on a rock eleven miles away and one scribe’s mount bumped into the other, rocking them in their perch and spilling a vial of ink upon a scroll. Another subtle motion and the offending arcanaloth gave in to their desire to smirk.
Nothing more would be needed.
Ten minutes later and words had escalated into hurled spells and finally ended with a silver edged blade buried in one’s chest and teeth at their throat, slurping the blood pumped by the last, trembling beats of a black heart and feeling a final breath upon the top of their head.
Centuries of building, simmering animus erupted into flame and one of Cholerix’s advisors was dead, his body cast from his mount to plummet and break from impact and the trampling feet of thousands of mezzoloths marching onwards without a concern.
A short time later and the army had arrived to find Vorkannis waiting, simply sitting there on a barren outcropping of rock as the multitude passed by.
He was of course, immediately and oh so conveniently seen by the same entity he’d desired to find him on his own terms.
“YOU!” Cholerix bellowed, pointing to the lone fiend at the army’s periphery. “Arcanaloth! Approach!”
The Ebon’s ears twitched and he stood, his body language radically different from moments before as he teleported into the air at a respectful, humble distance from the altraloth lord. His ears lay back submissively and he bowed as he hovered in midair.
Cholerix gestured for Vorkannis to approach, curiosity and malice in equal measure as her mind still swirled with genuine rage at the fact that her two closest advisors and servitors had come to blows and one of them was lay dead, trampled to pulp by her own army.
“Who are you and more importantly, what are you doing here?” The altraloth asked, rheumy eyes staring into the Ebon’s own albino orbs.
“Vorkannis ap Center,” The Ebon answered, giving himself a title that was not and had never been his, an origin location invented on the spot.
Cholerix shrugged and impatiently waited for her second question to be answered.
Before he answered, Vorkannis smiled. The same way that the greatest of actions began. “I find myself in the absence of a position. I was most recently in the employ of the… late… Zicorium ibn Niflheim. Their planned betrayal of our tanar’ri hiring masters went poorly when Pazuzu himself took to the field.”
“And you escaped.” Cholerix raised a withered ridge of muscle over one eye as she pondered her options. The arcanaloth was less deferential than ideal, and they were obviously lying about how their split from their master had occurred, but that could be explored and fully elucidated later. Their confidence was however, refreshing, to an extent, given the bowing, scraping, and obsequious fawning she was most often accustomed to receive.
“In the absence of Zicorium… yes…” Vorkannis feigned dancing about the subject as if he were some rank-and-file scribe fresh from Gehenna, terrified of admitting betrayal of their most recent master. “Understandably I cannot return to a position which no longer exists. I’ve been here for the better part of a day, pondering my future options, and… well here you are and perhaps…”
The question and offer hung in the air.
“And I am in need of a scribe with experience such as you possess.” Cholerix snapped her fingers, summoning the now available slastath most recently belonging to Eselivus ap Cathrys and motioned for the Ebon to take to her side. “Betray me and you will suffer for a millennium before I break your head from your shoulders.”
Melibulum smirked as the newcomer nodded obediently, floating through the air between the flock of nycaloths between himself and the offered slasrath mount to take mount and then fall into place across from him and next to Cholerix. The scribe stared daggers at their new colleague, eager to intimidate them and form a working relationship more on their own preferred terms than their previous had been.
Vorkannis returned Melibulum’s stare.
What the established scribe found, staring into the newcomer’s eyes, was not what they expected. What they saw… they blinked and simply skipped the thought of what they’d seen or that they’d even looked and what they’d intended. But in the back of their mind, pushing away the screams they didn’t remember, they had the oddest notion that they should have been on their knees, weeping and begging.
Listening and taking notes, following the army from the Waste and into Carceri towards the Tower of Incarnate Pain, marching off towards his next stepping stone to destiny, Vorkannis the Ebon smiled.
****
Layer 1 of the Abyss:
Eschewing even the need for a portal or Gate, he stepped out onto the infinite expanse of Pazunia, smiled, and looked down. The entity reaching through his soul stretched, prepared itself, and dove downwards, burrowing through the metaphysical stuff of the Abyss, coiling downwards ever downwards with an alacrity that would have surprised even Pale Night or others of her ancient ilk.
For an interminable period of time he traveled downwards, ever downwards, past layers populated, sealed, abandoned, and forgotten alike, through and beyond until he arrived and stepped out into the silent darkness there which embraced him like the caress of a long-lost, cherished friend.
What was there, waiting, it knew him.
Layer 37,825 of the Abyss:
Unplumbed, undiscovered, uncatalogued by the Fraternity of Order, untouched and unknown to tanar’ri or even the obyrith before them, the vastness of the Amber Repository was home to a horror far older than all of them.
“You knew that I would come.” The voice of Cilret Leobtav spoke, or rather, something spoke through him, a smile playing on his powerless proxy-slave’s face as it addressed something before it in a chamber swallowed in silent, claustrophobic darkness but seemingly beyond vast in size and scope given the odd, disjointed echo.
Broken, scorched lips peeled into a subtle, non-committal smirk.
“Greetings sibling of Lazarius and Tellura.” The Ashsinger spoke, “We have never spoken, you and I, not exactly, neither precisely... not directly nor by a herald such as this one here, but you know of me. You know who I am.”
A silent, knowing nod of a head.
“You may dismiss this meandering preamble and let us speak on open terms.” The voice from the darkness spoke, a calm and confidence in its voice so very different from any who had spoken directly to the entity looming behind Leobtav’s eyes.
“This is a courtesy call before certain eventualities collapse and certain choices are made and paths forged.” Leobtav’s voice continued, “I need to know what your role in things to come will be. Have the Demented approached you?”
“They have not.” The response came with a snort, dismissive but yet tinged with regret and an undercurrent of both anger and near despondent loss. “If they would not speak to the one in Portent, nor settle with Apomps, they would certainly never seek reproach with me. Not after everything. Not now. Not ever.”
“Which is precisely why I am here.”
“Speak.”
“What role if any will you play in things to come.” Leobtav’s voice asked, “You were there at the beginning with all of them, before the Fracture, before the conflicts in the aftermath, before the discovery of the other alignments and their children.”
No response.
“You were there when the Great Plan was plumbed, defined, crafted and planned. You helped them design and build the Oblivion Compass. You were there before The Demented -became- and eradicated or exiled all opposition. You were there with them when they…” Leobtav’s voice trailed off as the other being licked its lips and chuckled.
Rheumy eyes narrowed and studied the mortal and stared at the thing looming beyond his words.
“You so want to ask the question, to bring things full circle, but no need.” A soft, knowing chuckle, “What is it I want? Let me tell you.”
The voice in the darkness drew closer and a sudden, brilliant rush of light washed over Leobtav’s face as a trio of flaming halos ignited above the caprine head of the primordial baernaloth before him, washing over the surrounding reach of the vast chamber within which they stood. Vast beyond conception, stretching out to the limit of the light, great stacks of crystalline cylinders held individual bodies in sleep, preservation, or stasis: yugoloths of each and every type.
Standing amidst his unnumbered, unlamented, cursed and forgotten children, Chorazin the Thrice-Damned smiled.
****
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