Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
carborundum
Adventurer
What they did sounds reasonable, and it's going to be true...and awful.
I wonder how many people reading this now have already read the original version of this part of the story and know what's coming, versus how many are reading it for the first time -- and which we should feel more sorry for.
@Shemeska -- the "price" is one that, while all the characters are horrified by it, feels particularly aimed at one character in particular -- in the original game how did that work out with the player of the character in question?
@Shemeska -- the "price" is one that, while all the characters are horrified by it, feels particularly aimed at one character in particular -- in the original game how did that work out with the player of the character in question?
Karsten
Explorer
I've read both versions, but I am never certain over what is coming or not.
I also disagree with your view that the "price" aims one character only.
Having read through this story, there are still some open and untouched points, which are rather serious...think for example the lupinal and what happened to that layer of Elysium, for which so far we haven't seen the aftermath nor the upper planes reaction.
per different chapter, there may be more focus over one or the other character, but overall, noone has escaped the whirlwind of the wheels within wheels...
Shemeska
Adventurer
Honestly at the time it wasn't to the best of my recollection. I was aiming for a general emotional sucker punch to absolutely emphasize just how much of an abomination the baern were, and it worked. It absolutely focused the PCs on getting righteous revenge in the long-game as the campaign progressed towards an end. But yes, given Toras's divine patron, it hammered that PC in particular. The player talked justified smack and I let him know that revenge was possible in-game, and deserved. You'll see.
Shemeska
Adventurer
We will come back to the Upper Plane's role in all of this, and why very pointedly it seems like they've been vacuously absent from fighting back even in the face of a layer of Elysium being ripped out, debased, and stolen. Very little in the campaign was ever a true red herring that didn't tie back into something else on a deeper level for later explanation and exploration. It will be a little bit, but you'll absolutely see what's going on with the Guardinals. There's a future Fyrehowl-focused plot art that goes there, and it ties into a previous short bit about one or more of the Guardinal Lords clearly understanding something involving the Oinoloth and it bringing up terrible memories of some past event for them. That past will be absolutely revisited and explained. Also there was a previous short bit involving a portal to the Waste in Elysium that took the form of a tranquil pool of water, that started boiling IIRC as the Oinoloth went about his consolidation of power in the Lower Planes of Conflict.
And there will be an update some time this next week.
When did the players realize just how deep a campaign you'd constructed and start taking notes to avoid being caught flat-footed by events of the past, be it theirs personally or of the Planes in general?
Shemeska
Adventurer
They started taking notes quite early on. I want to say multiple players were jotting things down by the time they saw Factol Nilesia (seemingly) being flayed by Her Serenity. I still have one player's notes as an adjunct to my own for writing the storyhour.
Shemeska
Adventurer
The bladesinger cradled the vial in his hands, watching what seemed to be liquid starlight held within shift and flow with the motions of his hands turning it. It was syrupy, whatever it was, a consistency thicker than water or wine, with the slightest amount of viscosity. The light it shed played over his face and with it came the bizarre mix of emotions: a paradoxical combination of courage, regret, horror, and adoration all at once.
“Let’s get the hell out of here and finish this and be done.” Toras said, his hand on the bladesinger’s shoulder breaking him from an almost trance-like reverie from where he’d stared into the vial’s interior even as the baernaloth loomed over them all with the faintest of smiles playing across its diseased and ancient lips.
Tristol glanced at the proto-fiend, “Before I waste my magic, can I even gate out of this place?” Concern weighed heavily on him as he called the formulae into his mind’s eye and prepared to whisper the words and perform the gestures required by the spell even if his nature eschewed the use of any mundane components and even the foci typically needed.
The Clockmaker ignored Tristol for several moments, tinkering instead with the great device that hung perched like a spider above a doomed and struggling victim over the ether gap the demiplane was drafted about. Finally the proto-fiend responded with a dismissive gesture and a curt, “I will allow it.”
“Please Tristol.” Fyrehowl’s ears lay flat against her head, the demiplane’s nature as a portion of the Waste and the proximity of the baernaloth starting to take its toll on her, with thin wisps of silvery vapor wafted from her like the vapor of ice sublimating under the heat of a forge. “The quicker the better.”
The freakish spectacle was enough to jolt the wizard into action, and with Nisha’s tail curled about his ankle and her hand on his side, he intoned the spell and opened a gate to deposit them at the location of their choosing: the roots of Yggdrasil where the World Ash rose up improbably from the blighted soil of Nifflheim the Second Gloom.
“I’m standing on the naughty word Waste and I feel better.” Fyrehowl took a deep breath of relief, “I never thought that I’d say that.”
The others nodded in agreement. As strange as it was to say, even as the Waste stretched out eternally about them, they felt relieved to have left the Clockwork Gap. The difference was profound.
Safe from Harishek’s anathemic presence as they were, they had not arrived in a place of safety in any way, nor were they alone as they stood on a grey bluff of weathered rock and dusty top soul overlooking the plain surrounding the World Tree’s base.
Glancing the kilometer or so that stretched between them and the tree, the Waste oddly seemed to yield in some tenuous way, with the faintest traces of color in the soil and an equally faint increase in the luminosity of the plane’s sickly halflight gloom. The source of that difference, Yggdrasil’s roots sunk deep into the plane’s dust and ash, a putrid soil solidified with the bloodshed of the War Eternal, the flesh and spiritual essence alike of untold billions rotting away to form what passed for the soil of the Waste. From such a rotting source, the World Tree improbably rose up and out of sight into the wispy, mournful clouds that hung above, a thing of plane-spanning greatness, somehow drawing sustenance from the frigid dark of the Second Gloom. But as they huddled there in the roots’ long-shadows, they beheld the others crowded about the tree’s base.
“What the hell are those things?” Florian squinted to make out the details as the terrain seemed to move.
It wasn’t the land itself that moved however.
All about the World Ash crawled hundreds of dragons, wyrms, and linnorms. The blighted progeny of Nidhogg, the unholy beast that daily sought to bring down the tree by clawing, gnashing and gorging upon the roots. Most of the scaled terrors seemed content to sit there, oblivious of their surroundings in the greater expanse of the Waste, and there in their focused oblivion to gnash upon and claw madly at the roots, though they collectively seemed to do little more than barely scratch the bark to no great effect.
As they gazed out, Nidhogg was not immediately to be seen, though as the vast trunk of the World Ash dominated the horizon and blocked out sight of much of the Waste, it was presumed that the dragon was there, distantly gorging upon the tree, miles out of sight on the far side of the expanse.
“Please tell me that we don’t have to actually, you know, fight our way through those like few thousand different dragons down there?” Nisha spoke the obvious.
“Yeah I think that’s a wise idea.” Fyrehowl shook her head.
“Cowards.” Toras said, half-jokingly with a self-effacing grin.
Clueless produced the baernaloth’s vial and watched as its light flickered about on his hands, cold and alien. “I assume we go airborne, teleport over there onto one of the tallest roots, away from the dragons, and do what we came here to do.”
“Tempus isn’t going to argue with discretion here rather than wading into the fray.” Florian clutched her holy symbol and whispered a preemptive prayer.
That was when they saw it.
“Powers above…” Fyrehowl said with fright, jerking up one hand topoint to the horizon where the base of the World Tree curved out of sight. Where the trunk met the horizon, a staggeringly gargantuan tail and part of an equally vast wing of the mother of Norse dragons itself lay upon the Waste partially obscured amidst a river of sticky, slowly flowing sap. As they all watched, Nidhogg’s tail twitched in irritation every few minutes and with each such motion they could feel the earth shake ever so slightly from miles away as it vented its apocalyptic desires upon Yggdrasil’s roots.
“Let’s just pour this vial out before that thing or any of its children notices us, alright?” Clueless said.
“Sneaky would be good right now. That thing would give the Mother of Serpents a dance partner…” Nisha said as she scanned the tree for a safe place to alight. “We ready to go?”
Nodding in assent, they all gathered around Tristol and with a word from the aasimar they vanished in the flicker-flash of a teleport, leaping the miles across the plain to reappear upon one of the largest roots that still bore a recent and open wound from Nidhogg herself.
“Ok go!” Florian shouted, glancing out at the nearest of Nidhogg’s children several hundred feet away. “Dump it and let’s go!”
Clueless was more measured in his approach and slowly and deliberately uncorked the vial, watching the sparkling, starlit liquid within begin wafting up from the cork and interior alike. He didn’t have a moment to act further however before Toras took the vial from his hands and clambered further up the root.
“Can’t wait!” Toras said, looking back as he climbed higher up to where the flesh and bark was stripped raw and sap bubbled forth from a deep slash that went several feet into the massive root, itself thick as a house. Looking around once more, ever warily for any sign that Nidhogg’s children had taken notice of them, or that their mother itself had, he whispered a soft prayer to his god and upended the crystalline vial, hastily pouring its contents onto the wound.
It didn’t take long to notice the effect. The syrupy fluid was instantly absorbed, streaks of starlight washing through the xylem and racing through the root in every possible direction as the wound sealed almost as quickly with a sparkle of cold, violet light.
“What the hell?” Toras said as he stepped back from the rapidly spreading glow, watching the root regenerate, grow, and furiously shed itself of its wounds and the dust of the Waste itself.
Yggdrasil was healing.
They watched in amazement as the glow increased, rocketing up and across the swath of roots in range of their vision. Within moments they beheld the tree’s myriad wounds heal as suddenly the air was rent by the confused and angered roars of the drakes that had spent their lives at their mother’s feet, madly seeking to tear down the World Tree. A moment after her children cried out, so did Nidhogg.
“Oh naughty word!” Toras shouted as the very ground shook and with a single agonized roar of frustration, the clouds overhead swirled and parted as the great dragon unleashed her fury, watching as long centuries of her and her broods’ wrath were reversed and erased.
“Umm… let’s move. Now! Before that thing comes hunting for us!” Nisha whispered harshly as she waved her arms wildly, pointing up the side of the tree into the sky.
She didn’t have to wait long.
Like a rogue wave erupting from a churning sea of scales, Nidhogg’s head peered around the trunk, eyes the size of great wyrms blazing with fury to focus on the party and as one the tide of wyrms turned to where Yggdrasil’s saviors stood upon the roots.
She had little need to say so as Clueless and Fyrehowl were already hurtling up into the sky as Tristol hastily cast a spell to give the rest of them flight. Moments later they too joined in their skyward jaunt, glancing downwards only once to watch the healing of Yggdrasil’s roots continue and to watch the blind, but ultimately impotent, hatred of Nidhogg and its children erupt with a continuing chorus of rage and bursts of flame, acid, and more shooting skywards, but already the targets of their fury were long gone.
The spiritual gnawing of the Waste decreased meter by meter as they hurtled skyward, emotions racing back to them with relief as they finally lost sight of the Second Gloom far below and gradually a white haze of clouds replaced it below them. Meter by meter the light began to brighten, a serene and blue sunless sky manifesting about Yggdrasil’s trunk as they transitioned from the Waste and onto the planar pathway of the World Tree itself, a route between planes if not quite one in and of itself.
Slowly but surely as they fled from the Second Gloom and from Nidhogg’s fury far below, fear and urgency fled their thoughts and the next portion of their task for the Clockmaker made itself manifest.
“Guys, slow down a bit.” Toras called out as the group gathered and matched the speed of their ascent. “The vial. It’s tugging at my hand like a compass.”
“Well, the fiend said that the vial would know where to lead us to.” Fyrehowl nodded, glancing at the now empty crystalline and seemingly prosaic-looking vial held in the half-celestial’s hand. “Now we just need to find some ratatosks.”
“Someone remind me what they even are?” Toras asked as they passed the first of many branches the size of city roads reaching out into the air and sprouting green shoots and new growth as a direct result of their actions.
“Big, sodding, squirrel people.” Nisha said, dramatically sticking her upper jaw out in an overbite and twitching her upper lip like one of Yggdrasil’s fuzzy tailed guardians.
“Heh. Well, regardless, that’s who we need to find. And so far, this hasn’t seemed like a bad thing we’re doing. Hells, we just healed the World Tree, I can’t see any way that would be evil.” Toras said with cheerful optimism as he smiled and laughed at Nisha’s pantomime.
It would be the last laughter they shared for some time.
As they climbed up the Great Tree, led onward without pause by the pull and tug of the crystal vial they held, they were being watched. Perched upon a branch high above them and looking down was a solitary woman of fey or vaguely half-elven features. Her hair was long and green, tinged with the red of autumn in places, and her skin was a milky nut brown. She was naked but unashamed as she watched the six travel upwards, ever upwards towards her children, her guardians and caretakers.
And there, as she silently watched, unable to act by virtue of a pact made in desperation in the early days of the cosmos, she wept. Yggdrasil wept. Far below, on another plane or two or three, her tears would fall like glistening raindrops upon the ground and sprout spontaneously into saplings and flowers which then withered and died, blooming and passing in an instant, evaporating in the sunlight or the gloom wherever they might touch the earth.
“Everything proceeds as you would desire my Oinoloth.” The telepathic voice of the ultroloth, Parviset ib Pluton was succinct yet oddly servile. She stood at the summit of Khin-Oin surrounded by a quartet of her own arcanaloth servitors, there at the foot of the great throne, the Siege Malicious, where the arcanaloth who was the Oinoloth, Vorkannis the Ebon, sat and stared down at them all with casual malevolence in his vivid pink eyes. She felt belittled by the contrast between her nature and his, and his station and hers as she knelt, and the Oinoloth’s smile publicly displayed that he understood her feelings and relished them.
Curiously the Ebon’s consort was nowhere to be seen.
At the center of the platform at the summit of the Wasting Tower, Vorkannis sat upon the Siege Malicious, surrounded by a fawning court of arcanaloths and ultroloths, the latter cowed not only by his own presence but by the presence of one of their own standing at the edge of the tower’s precipice, its eyes dull, a shard of cobalt crystal lodged through its skull and into its brain, swirling with magic and agony.
Vorkannis shifted on his throne, preparing to speak and then, abruptly, he paused. It was subtle but it was there: a faint hum in the air, a tremor in the ossified stones of the Tower. He felt something and with no regard to the ultroloth at his feet he ignored her and gazed out into the Waste.
In his jackal’s ears the sounds of the courtiers faded away and he concentrated on the horizon, shifting his attentions to each layer of the Waste in turn, sifting, sensing, feeling…
One of the braver arcanaloths raised his voice for attention.
Vorkannis glanced down, snarled, and snapped his fingers.
Time ceased its flow. The wheels of forward causality ground to a halt far above and beyond the momentary tinkering of a mortal wizard’s mightiest attempts to do the same. About him the arcanaloths’ hung mid-motion, the ultroloths’ eyes shimmered, locked into one color and their chorus of telepathic pleading weighed heavily in silence.
All about was silence.
The Oinoloth stared out into the distance.
“What are you doing?... Ah. Yes. It is that time again isn’t it…” Vorkannis whispered to himself, his senses cast into the depths of Niffleheim where he could feel the great and suddenly more virile roots of the World Ash pulse deep within the soil of the Waste as they began to regenerate their accumulated wounds.
Surrounded by the temporally frozen yugoloth court, Vorkannis closed his eyes and basked in the sensations that he felt from the Second Gloom. His ear’s twitched as if they could physically hear Nidhogg’s rage and agony as its Sisyphean task reset once again by the actions of the Gloom Father’s and their puppets.
It had happened so very many times, the interlude like the finely run gearwork of a great clock of suffering. It was beautiful. It was a thing of respect for him. Even if the entity responsible for it, Harishek ap Thulkesh, was one of disdain. The Oinoloth briefly snarled at the mental image of the Blind Clockmaker, though it had been many, many years since they had stood in one another’s presence. They would again, and when they did, circumstances would be far, far different if his plans held true.
He despised the perpetual mad tinkering of the baern on a reality he held that they had tacitly abandoned their claims upon. He was aware of such things if he cast his attentions wide, and the greatest of such actions, like the regeneration of Yggdrasil was something he felt even without such.
The present action was expected. The time was right.
Perfectly coordinated as the final act in a repeating cycle before it began once again, and though it was the puppeteering of the Demented, it was not a concern of his. It was nothing he had not seen before. Again and again and again.
The work’s blind creator might have been worthy of his ire, but the actions themselves were worthy of his respect, worthy of his appreciation, worthy of his attention and a moment of bliss to savor.
The Oinoloth’s form grew ever so slightly indistinct, his margins fading, and his own darkness blurring and sinking into the shadows of the Siege Malicious. Relaxing, the puissant radiance of his eyes erupting like a burning beacon atop of Khin-Oin, his fingers sunk into the suddenly liquid substance of the Siege and down into the matrix of the Wasting Tower itself.
Merging and mingling with the substance of the Waste itself, he felt the distant rage and inchoate agony in Niffleheim. The Oinoloth felt it resonating through his bones, echoing there in the abject hollow of his soul, a darkness devoid of empathy.
His eyes closed and his ivory teeth gleaming in the darkness within and without, Vorkannis the Ebon smiled.
“Let’s get the hell out of here and finish this and be done.” Toras said, his hand on the bladesinger’s shoulder breaking him from an almost trance-like reverie from where he’d stared into the vial’s interior even as the baernaloth loomed over them all with the faintest of smiles playing across its diseased and ancient lips.
Tristol glanced at the proto-fiend, “Before I waste my magic, can I even gate out of this place?” Concern weighed heavily on him as he called the formulae into his mind’s eye and prepared to whisper the words and perform the gestures required by the spell even if his nature eschewed the use of any mundane components and even the foci typically needed.
The Clockmaker ignored Tristol for several moments, tinkering instead with the great device that hung perched like a spider above a doomed and struggling victim over the ether gap the demiplane was drafted about. Finally the proto-fiend responded with a dismissive gesture and a curt, “I will allow it.”
“Please Tristol.” Fyrehowl’s ears lay flat against her head, the demiplane’s nature as a portion of the Waste and the proximity of the baernaloth starting to take its toll on her, with thin wisps of silvery vapor wafted from her like the vapor of ice sublimating under the heat of a forge. “The quicker the better.”
The freakish spectacle was enough to jolt the wizard into action, and with Nisha’s tail curled about his ankle and her hand on his side, he intoned the spell and opened a gate to deposit them at the location of their choosing: the roots of Yggdrasil where the World Ash rose up improbably from the blighted soil of Nifflheim the Second Gloom.
“I’m standing on the naughty word Waste and I feel better.” Fyrehowl took a deep breath of relief, “I never thought that I’d say that.”
The others nodded in agreement. As strange as it was to say, even as the Waste stretched out eternally about them, they felt relieved to have left the Clockwork Gap. The difference was profound.
Safe from Harishek’s anathemic presence as they were, they had not arrived in a place of safety in any way, nor were they alone as they stood on a grey bluff of weathered rock and dusty top soul overlooking the plain surrounding the World Tree’s base.
Glancing the kilometer or so that stretched between them and the tree, the Waste oddly seemed to yield in some tenuous way, with the faintest traces of color in the soil and an equally faint increase in the luminosity of the plane’s sickly halflight gloom. The source of that difference, Yggdrasil’s roots sunk deep into the plane’s dust and ash, a putrid soil solidified with the bloodshed of the War Eternal, the flesh and spiritual essence alike of untold billions rotting away to form what passed for the soil of the Waste. From such a rotting source, the World Tree improbably rose up and out of sight into the wispy, mournful clouds that hung above, a thing of plane-spanning greatness, somehow drawing sustenance from the frigid dark of the Second Gloom. But as they huddled there in the roots’ long-shadows, they beheld the others crowded about the tree’s base.
“What the hell are those things?” Florian squinted to make out the details as the terrain seemed to move.
It wasn’t the land itself that moved however.
All about the World Ash crawled hundreds of dragons, wyrms, and linnorms. The blighted progeny of Nidhogg, the unholy beast that daily sought to bring down the tree by clawing, gnashing and gorging upon the roots. Most of the scaled terrors seemed content to sit there, oblivious of their surroundings in the greater expanse of the Waste, and there in their focused oblivion to gnash upon and claw madly at the roots, though they collectively seemed to do little more than barely scratch the bark to no great effect.
As they gazed out, Nidhogg was not immediately to be seen, though as the vast trunk of the World Ash dominated the horizon and blocked out sight of much of the Waste, it was presumed that the dragon was there, distantly gorging upon the tree, miles out of sight on the far side of the expanse.
“Please tell me that we don’t have to actually, you know, fight our way through those like few thousand different dragons down there?” Nisha spoke the obvious.
“Yeah I think that’s a wise idea.” Fyrehowl shook her head.
“Cowards.” Toras said, half-jokingly with a self-effacing grin.
Clueless produced the baernaloth’s vial and watched as its light flickered about on his hands, cold and alien. “I assume we go airborne, teleport over there onto one of the tallest roots, away from the dragons, and do what we came here to do.”
“Tempus isn’t going to argue with discretion here rather than wading into the fray.” Florian clutched her holy symbol and whispered a preemptive prayer.
That was when they saw it.
“Powers above…” Fyrehowl said with fright, jerking up one hand topoint to the horizon where the base of the World Tree curved out of sight. Where the trunk met the horizon, a staggeringly gargantuan tail and part of an equally vast wing of the mother of Norse dragons itself lay upon the Waste partially obscured amidst a river of sticky, slowly flowing sap. As they all watched, Nidhogg’s tail twitched in irritation every few minutes and with each such motion they could feel the earth shake ever so slightly from miles away as it vented its apocalyptic desires upon Yggdrasil’s roots.
“Let’s just pour this vial out before that thing or any of its children notices us, alright?” Clueless said.
“Sneaky would be good right now. That thing would give the Mother of Serpents a dance partner…” Nisha said as she scanned the tree for a safe place to alight. “We ready to go?”
Nodding in assent, they all gathered around Tristol and with a word from the aasimar they vanished in the flicker-flash of a teleport, leaping the miles across the plain to reappear upon one of the largest roots that still bore a recent and open wound from Nidhogg herself.
“Ok go!” Florian shouted, glancing out at the nearest of Nidhogg’s children several hundred feet away. “Dump it and let’s go!”
Clueless was more measured in his approach and slowly and deliberately uncorked the vial, watching the sparkling, starlit liquid within begin wafting up from the cork and interior alike. He didn’t have a moment to act further however before Toras took the vial from his hands and clambered further up the root.
“Can’t wait!” Toras said, looking back as he climbed higher up to where the flesh and bark was stripped raw and sap bubbled forth from a deep slash that went several feet into the massive root, itself thick as a house. Looking around once more, ever warily for any sign that Nidhogg’s children had taken notice of them, or that their mother itself had, he whispered a soft prayer to his god and upended the crystalline vial, hastily pouring its contents onto the wound.
It didn’t take long to notice the effect. The syrupy fluid was instantly absorbed, streaks of starlight washing through the xylem and racing through the root in every possible direction as the wound sealed almost as quickly with a sparkle of cold, violet light.
“What the hell?” Toras said as he stepped back from the rapidly spreading glow, watching the root regenerate, grow, and furiously shed itself of its wounds and the dust of the Waste itself.
Yggdrasil was healing.
They watched in amazement as the glow increased, rocketing up and across the swath of roots in range of their vision. Within moments they beheld the tree’s myriad wounds heal as suddenly the air was rent by the confused and angered roars of the drakes that had spent their lives at their mother’s feet, madly seeking to tear down the World Tree. A moment after her children cried out, so did Nidhogg.
“Oh naughty word!” Toras shouted as the very ground shook and with a single agonized roar of frustration, the clouds overhead swirled and parted as the great dragon unleashed her fury, watching as long centuries of her and her broods’ wrath were reversed and erased.
“Umm… let’s move. Now! Before that thing comes hunting for us!” Nisha whispered harshly as she waved her arms wildly, pointing up the side of the tree into the sky.
She didn’t have to wait long.
Like a rogue wave erupting from a churning sea of scales, Nidhogg’s head peered around the trunk, eyes the size of great wyrms blazing with fury to focus on the party and as one the tide of wyrms turned to where Yggdrasil’s saviors stood upon the roots.
She had little need to say so as Clueless and Fyrehowl were already hurtling up into the sky as Tristol hastily cast a spell to give the rest of them flight. Moments later they too joined in their skyward jaunt, glancing downwards only once to watch the healing of Yggdrasil’s roots continue and to watch the blind, but ultimately impotent, hatred of Nidhogg and its children erupt with a continuing chorus of rage and bursts of flame, acid, and more shooting skywards, but already the targets of their fury were long gone.
The spiritual gnawing of the Waste decreased meter by meter as they hurtled skyward, emotions racing back to them with relief as they finally lost sight of the Second Gloom far below and gradually a white haze of clouds replaced it below them. Meter by meter the light began to brighten, a serene and blue sunless sky manifesting about Yggdrasil’s trunk as they transitioned from the Waste and onto the planar pathway of the World Tree itself, a route between planes if not quite one in and of itself.
Slowly but surely as they fled from the Second Gloom and from Nidhogg’s fury far below, fear and urgency fled their thoughts and the next portion of their task for the Clockmaker made itself manifest.
“Guys, slow down a bit.” Toras called out as the group gathered and matched the speed of their ascent. “The vial. It’s tugging at my hand like a compass.”
“Well, the fiend said that the vial would know where to lead us to.” Fyrehowl nodded, glancing at the now empty crystalline and seemingly prosaic-looking vial held in the half-celestial’s hand. “Now we just need to find some ratatosks.”
“Someone remind me what they even are?” Toras asked as they passed the first of many branches the size of city roads reaching out into the air and sprouting green shoots and new growth as a direct result of their actions.
“Big, sodding, squirrel people.” Nisha said, dramatically sticking her upper jaw out in an overbite and twitching her upper lip like one of Yggdrasil’s fuzzy tailed guardians.
“Heh. Well, regardless, that’s who we need to find. And so far, this hasn’t seemed like a bad thing we’re doing. Hells, we just healed the World Tree, I can’t see any way that would be evil.” Toras said with cheerful optimism as he smiled and laughed at Nisha’s pantomime.
It would be the last laughter they shared for some time.
***
As they climbed up the Great Tree, led onward without pause by the pull and tug of the crystal vial they held, they were being watched. Perched upon a branch high above them and looking down was a solitary woman of fey or vaguely half-elven features. Her hair was long and green, tinged with the red of autumn in places, and her skin was a milky nut brown. She was naked but unashamed as she watched the six travel upwards, ever upwards towards her children, her guardians and caretakers.
And there, as she silently watched, unable to act by virtue of a pact made in desperation in the early days of the cosmos, she wept. Yggdrasil wept. Far below, on another plane or two or three, her tears would fall like glistening raindrops upon the ground and sprout spontaneously into saplings and flowers which then withered and died, blooming and passing in an instant, evaporating in the sunlight or the gloom wherever they might touch the earth.
***
“Everything proceeds as you would desire my Oinoloth.” The telepathic voice of the ultroloth, Parviset ib Pluton was succinct yet oddly servile. She stood at the summit of Khin-Oin surrounded by a quartet of her own arcanaloth servitors, there at the foot of the great throne, the Siege Malicious, where the arcanaloth who was the Oinoloth, Vorkannis the Ebon, sat and stared down at them all with casual malevolence in his vivid pink eyes. She felt belittled by the contrast between her nature and his, and his station and hers as she knelt, and the Oinoloth’s smile publicly displayed that he understood her feelings and relished them.
Curiously the Ebon’s consort was nowhere to be seen.
At the center of the platform at the summit of the Wasting Tower, Vorkannis sat upon the Siege Malicious, surrounded by a fawning court of arcanaloths and ultroloths, the latter cowed not only by his own presence but by the presence of one of their own standing at the edge of the tower’s precipice, its eyes dull, a shard of cobalt crystal lodged through its skull and into its brain, swirling with magic and agony.
Vorkannis shifted on his throne, preparing to speak and then, abruptly, he paused. It was subtle but it was there: a faint hum in the air, a tremor in the ossified stones of the Tower. He felt something and with no regard to the ultroloth at his feet he ignored her and gazed out into the Waste.
In his jackal’s ears the sounds of the courtiers faded away and he concentrated on the horizon, shifting his attentions to each layer of the Waste in turn, sifting, sensing, feeling…
One of the braver arcanaloths raised his voice for attention.
Vorkannis glanced down, snarled, and snapped his fingers.
Time ceased its flow. The wheels of forward causality ground to a halt far above and beyond the momentary tinkering of a mortal wizard’s mightiest attempts to do the same. About him the arcanaloths’ hung mid-motion, the ultroloths’ eyes shimmered, locked into one color and their chorus of telepathic pleading weighed heavily in silence.
All about was silence.
The Oinoloth stared out into the distance.
“What are you doing?... Ah. Yes. It is that time again isn’t it…” Vorkannis whispered to himself, his senses cast into the depths of Niffleheim where he could feel the great and suddenly more virile roots of the World Ash pulse deep within the soil of the Waste as they began to regenerate their accumulated wounds.
Surrounded by the temporally frozen yugoloth court, Vorkannis closed his eyes and basked in the sensations that he felt from the Second Gloom. His ear’s twitched as if they could physically hear Nidhogg’s rage and agony as its Sisyphean task reset once again by the actions of the Gloom Father’s and their puppets.
It had happened so very many times, the interlude like the finely run gearwork of a great clock of suffering. It was beautiful. It was a thing of respect for him. Even if the entity responsible for it, Harishek ap Thulkesh, was one of disdain. The Oinoloth briefly snarled at the mental image of the Blind Clockmaker, though it had been many, many years since they had stood in one another’s presence. They would again, and when they did, circumstances would be far, far different if his plans held true.
He despised the perpetual mad tinkering of the baern on a reality he held that they had tacitly abandoned their claims upon. He was aware of such things if he cast his attentions wide, and the greatest of such actions, like the regeneration of Yggdrasil was something he felt even without such.
The present action was expected. The time was right.
Perfectly coordinated as the final act in a repeating cycle before it began once again, and though it was the puppeteering of the Demented, it was not a concern of his. It was nothing he had not seen before. Again and again and again.
The work’s blind creator might have been worthy of his ire, but the actions themselves were worthy of his respect, worthy of his appreciation, worthy of his attention and a moment of bliss to savor.
The Oinoloth’s form grew ever so slightly indistinct, his margins fading, and his own darkness blurring and sinking into the shadows of the Siege Malicious. Relaxing, the puissant radiance of his eyes erupting like a burning beacon atop of Khin-Oin, his fingers sunk into the suddenly liquid substance of the Siege and down into the matrix of the Wasting Tower itself.
Merging and mingling with the substance of the Waste itself, he felt the distant rage and inchoate agony in Niffleheim. The Oinoloth felt it resonating through his bones, echoing there in the abject hollow of his soul, a darkness devoid of empathy.
His eyes closed and his ivory teeth gleaming in the darkness within and without, Vorkannis the Ebon smiled.
carborundum
Adventurer
Cheerful optimism, Toras, when a baernoloth is involved? Oh you sweet, sweet man.
