Villain interludes before we rejoin our heroes!
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The doors into the inner sanctum of Shylara the Manged loomed high, twenty feet at their peak, a dull black, flecked with crimson mineral inclusions, locked in place and surrounded by the pulsing, flesh-like matrix of the Tower of Incarnate Pain, itself built of tens of millions of souls, brick by screaming, sentient, imprisoned brick.
The two arcanaloths stood before the door, mildly apprehensive as they stared up at it, waiting for it to swing open and admit them.
“The Mistress is finally returned.” Apteris ap Othrys turned to regard his brother, uncertainty in his voice. The red-robed, jackal-headed arcanaloth’s right ear twitched, and not voluntarily. The normally irritated, hairless flesh that surrounded the notch carved from it like a mark of ownership was no longer simply erythemic, but now openly wept blood.
“Play time then would seem to be over…” Alpthis ap Othrys lamented, his exaggerated, flippant mirth hiding his own apprehension poorly. The fiend’s left ear, a mirror image of his brother’s was swollen and likewise openly wept blood.
“She is not pleased.”
“Understandably so,” Alpthis shrugged, “Given her status for this past while of not-the-lovely-kind-of-bondage.”
“Ideas for later yes,” Apteris smirked, an expression mirrored by his twin, but then his face turned more serious. “But she has been awake for over a week and absent from the tower, with no word to us or any others and...”
“…” Alpthis, normally so quick to speak was silent, his eyes turning back to the door and his clawed fingers toying nervously with the tasseled silver fringe of his robes.
“…” Apteris took a deep breath but was otherwise silent.
A soft breeze passed through the chamber, the periodic result of the tower’s living bricks tensing and relaxing in synchrony like the myocardial twitch of some great and alien heart filling an atria full to the brim with suffering.
“She was terrified.” They both whispered at once, an image of darkness, ivory white teeth, and lurid, albino-pink eyes came to their thoughts unbidden.
Abruptly the doors swung open.
The twin proxies of the Overlord of Carceri glanced nervously at the twin nycaloths who opened the door. Both greater yugoloths bore spikes of cobalt crystal thrust into their foreheads, and both of them stared down with eyes glazed over and showing no rational thought: puppets and little else, even if somewhere locked within their physical essence both arcanaloths understood that their consciousness screamed in agony, aware but powerless.
“I never quite get used to them.”
“Never at all…”
Both fiends continued into the massive, vaulted chamber at the tower’s heart, Apteris walking on bare feet, his claws clacking on the mirror-polished obsidian floor, and his sibling floating forward, his silk slippered feet hovering several inches above the ground, both of them casting elongated shadows. For each step they made, their shadows twisted behind them as if in agony, a manifestation of the searing ultraviolet radiance that flooded the chamber itself from an open set of doors on its opposite end that opened directly into the tower’s core: the reflective chasm, the engine of misery whose light, drawn from the tower’s living soul-bricks and siphoned from the surrounding landscape of Carceri itself poured into the chamber like the radioactive glare of a dying star slipping towards oblivion.
Despite their apprehension and despite the effect upon their shadows, the twin proxies simultaneously smiled as the light of the reflective chasm struck their flesh, an effect of their empowerment by and linkage to the archfiend who watched their approach.
“It is good to see you both once more.” The voice of Shylara the Manged echoed through the room, seemingly projected from the structure of the tower itself, blurring the line between fiend and landscape.
“We are here at your pleasure.”
“For each and every of your beautifully malicious desires.”
The siblings knelt down at the edge of the pool at the chamber’s center, staring worshipfully at the surface. Dozens of channels carved into the floor fed the pool with a slow and steady flow of blood, shed by the wounds of a dozen bound and captive celestials suspended from the ceiling, directly exposed to the reflective chasm’s corrosive light.
As if in answer to her subjects admissions of supplication the surface of the pool quivered and a figure rose up from where she had lounged, bathing in the blood of celestials, surrounded by the terrible light at the tower’s heart. Naked and slick with blood, ironically masking her own bleeding, ravaged flesh, Shylara the Manged stood up and stepped out of the pool.
“Good, because I have a great many to see brought to fruition now that I have returned.” Shylara snarled, ferocious and unhinged. “And I have a task set out for me from the Oinoloth, -my- Oinoloth.”
“And what is that Mistress?”
“How may we help accomplish it?”
The archfiend reached out a hand to touch first the lips of each kneeling arcanaloth, then trailing her hands across their chin in a streak of warm, slowly clotting blood, a gesture hovering between loving and rank ownership.
“You may start by cleaning me.” She smiled down at her proxies, teeth awash in blood and her eyes flickering a wild spectrum of colors, leaving the details of how precisely to do so unspoken.
The siblings could only nod and comply, albeit with a brief giggle of unrestrained delight from Alpthis.
****
Five figures stood about a sixth in a room most recently seen by the late Malcolm Anders, though for the current night’s activities the brigade of chefs was absent. The present evening was more spontaneous and less atrocity conjoined to spectacle as that event had been. The present evening would be much shorter and to the point.
“Sit up!” A particularly well-dressed tiefling shouted, landing a kick into the woman who lay on the floor, a leash about her neck, her hands and ankles tied together, and a black leather bag tied over her head.
The bound woman yelped in pain and begrudgingly sat up. She was dressed in the garments of a priestess of Tymora, a faith never far from the gambling taking place within the Fortune’s Wheel, and it was there that she’d been swiftly apprehended. A human of indeterminate origin, planar or prime, her fall was not from her actions or her presumed faith -the symbol of which had been disposed of before entering the room- but from the tattoo present upon her neck, briefly glimpsed and there sealing her fate: the black, crimson, and blue symbol of Shylara the Manged, overlord of Carceri.
Upon closer inspection the tattoo swirled with powerful necromancy and enchantment, forcing her to act in servitude to the Manged, and unwilling to allow her to actually die permanently in the process of those tasks. Shylara had utilized similar such bindings on disposable mortal servitors when she’d been posing as a rakshasa noble over a year prior and sought to assassinate the owners of the Portal Jammer.
That latter act had been noticed by and would have been appreciated had it succeeded, had it been accomplished by the agents of literally any other being in the multiverse.
“Your mistress, my wayward apprentice, has been a busy little bee, hasn’t she?” Shemeska the Marauder sneered, looking down from where she sat upon a padded ivory throne decorated with swirls of platinum, carnelian, and jade inlay depicting herself amidst scenes of opulent debauchery. A faint but frequent blink of one eye and irritated twitching of the fingers on one hand betrayed the only recently healed injuries that she had sustained in Khin-Oin, the aftermath of which had kept her out of the public eye for some time.
At the sound of Shemeska's voice, the figure on the floor looked up and snarled. Even with her head covered by a black leather satchel she recognized the voice, and her reaction was much the same as her owner's would have been.
Clicking her tongue with arrogant disapproval, Shemeska casually motioned with her left hand and held her right out and open. Two things immediately occurred: four of the tieflings commenced violently beating their captive with a mixture of hooves, steel-toed shoes, iron rods, and barbed whips, and in absolute discordance with the crude violence, the fifth of their number leapt to the arcanaloth’s side and placed a pre-prepared cigarette and long-stemmed holder into her open hand, lighting it a fraction of a second before the mouthpiece graced her lips.
Ten minutes passed with the sound of enraged screams slowly dwindling down like a bonfire’s dying embers to wet coughs and moans and more than one sound of cracking rib or lone bone. The fiend watched with casual satisfaction though it all, neither commenting or critiquing her employees’ work, instead enjoying her smoke and letting it burn down to embers of its own, slowly and deliberately drawing the moment out with zero concern for the captive’s injuries.
“You’ve loosened her up enough for now,” Shemeska cooed, bringing an immediate cessation to the violence. An appreciative smile upon her face, she pursed her lips and exhaled a thin stream of smoke towards the Manged’s servitor, “Let’s see if she’s willing to talk.”
The hooded woman gasped for breath, moaning through the exertion with several shattered ribs, before looking up in the Marauder’s direction and spitting blood, “I have nothing to say to you.”
“Good.” Shemeska smirked, “Because you don’t have to. You don’t have to say an intelligible word at all. Strip her above the waist.”
Swift as could be the assembled tieflings tore off the captive’s blouse and underclothes, leaving her bare above the waist, her flesh unprotected for what would come next. With a pleased-with-herself smirk, the Marauder stepped down off of her throne and approached the woman, her tieflings stepping back and giving her space for what would come next. Rarely did their mistress involve herself, and her not-infrequent public temper tantrums during which she would flog some random berk with razorvine was more show and put-upon spectacle than anything intrinsic to her. This time with a servitor of Shylara the Manged was different.
“No, you needn’t say a thing at all…” Shemeska’s face was calm and a faint smile creased her muzzle as she reached up and plucked a coiled length of razorvine from out of her crown and without a word of warning began brutally whipping her victim, the faint smile breaking into a broad and enraptured grin.
Shylara’s puppet tried to remain as silent as possible to deny Shemeska the satisfaction, and she succeeded for nearly a minute before she could not longer withstand the agonizing bite of the blood-hungry razorvine and began screaming and thrashing while except for her rapturous smile, Shemeska said not a word.
Five minutes later Shemeska stopped once the floor was liberally spattered in spilt blood and her hand grasping the vine plucked from her crown was slick and crimson.
“You may execute them now,” She said, a faint panting in her voice, “Or take your time and have some fun, but, using the standard methods and precautions with Shylara’s little puppets, see that she ceases to exist by antipeak. I have what I want.”
With that Shemeska turned, her gown stained with blood, and walked away, gently coiling the razorvine about her left hand, with the sounds of torture silenced only when she stepped through a portal. One portal to the next she traveled, following a circuitous route of portals to a sealed chamber below Sigil’s streets warded to an order of magnitude greater than any other that she owned, with one exception.
A simple chamber, barely ten by ten with a domed ceiling, carved with a level of extravagance that was only a shadow of Shemeska’s current fashion, the room was old. Regardless of its age however, it was beyond protected, with the walls inlaid in spells laid down and subsequently reinforced in lines of precious metals and gemstone dust. Thus protected, the chamber provided a sanctum safe from prying eyes and secure for the fiend to engage in one specific task unfit for almost anywhere else in Sigil.
At its center sat a chair, finely carved and cushioned with its surfaces polished by frequent sessions of use to sit and ponder, absolutely prosaic compared to most such pieces of furniture Shemeska deigned to grace, the wood nearly as old as the ‘loth’s tenure in the City of Doors.
Taking a seat upon the chair, Shemeska smiled, relaxed, and removed her crown, slowly and gently uncoiling it before entwining it with the blood-soaked length coiled about her left hand. Having refashioned the crown she placed it to her lips, stroked it gently with her claws and licked the bloodied, razored surface like a lover’s lips.
A genuinely pleasant smile upon her face, she sighed, further relaxing into the chair as she closed her eyes and perked her ears, speaking to the razorvine crown still slick with its victim’s blood, still feasting upon it through bladed stem and leaf, “Now tell me what you have learned…”
****
