“Ok,” Toras narrowed his eyes, “Answers. But answers to what?”
The fighter didn’t trust the babbling, serpent-eyed crone any more than he trusted any given yugoloth, and it showed on his frown, and his question. Nearly every time that he’d received a vague description and a task to perform, there had been something more that had been conveniently omitted, and led to injury or near death. He’d had enough of riddles and half-answers that promised some nebulous truth at the end of a gilded road and secret door.
“To why the Oinoloth came here to Portent?” Nisha shrugged, her tail curled into a wiggling question mark. “But no, she kinda sorta answered that. Huh.”
“I doubt it.” Toras grimaced, “Like everyone else, she’s leaving something out.”
All the while, Clueless had stared not towards the ancient tiefling, but towards the osseous throne that grew from the bedrock at the center of the Great Hall. Part of him briefly considered using heavy magic to plumb the throne’s depths. If it wouldn’t deign to speak to any but a yugoloth, he could always seek to brute force an answer from the mind of the slumbering, primordial horror that spoke through it. Thankfully though, he dismissed the notion after but a moment’s thought.
“I don’t have the answers that you’re looking for. Not me. Not here.” Laughing Jane shook her head in the negative, the serpents that grew from her eye sockets lagging slightly from the motion of her humanoid body. “The answers that Lariset came to find and which she most certainly did find here, they came not from me, but from something else, something else entirely.”
“Channeled…” One serpent hissed.
“Whispered…” The second enjoined.
“An asp granting an Apple of Knowledge to a mind so rapacious...”
“But so naïve…”
Laughing Jane chuckled.
“But yet you’re sending us to someone or something else.” Clueless narrowed his eyes, “And that very much implies that there’s something tangential to this that you can tell us. Even if you don’t know what we’ll learn in Torch, there’s a reason why you know an answer is there and waiting for us. Why? What it is.”
The tiefling snarled, turning around and around, putting her hands to her head and snarling her fingers in her mess of wild, tangled hair. There’d been limits seemingly to either what she knew, filtered down by the baernaloth imprisoned far below in Portent’s foundation stones, or pried from the god-like proto-fiend’s torpid mind, and clearly she struggled to say more than she had.
Toras opened his mouth to say something, but Fyrehowl stepped up and put a hand on his shoulder. The half-celestial glanced over at her and sighed before patiently waiting for Laughing Jane to cease her fit and explain herself further, if she could.
She could and she did.
“The Oblivion Compass,” Laughing Jane whispered, her eyes lambent in the darkness, “It ticks and tocks, grinding away on the bones of Modrons, flush with the blood of parai, and the neurological flicker of screaming moignos.”
“The what?” Tristol’s vulpine ears perked with the faintest glimmer of dim recognition.
“I don’t like the sound of any of that…” Nisha grimaced.
“In the Waste it sits,” Laughing Jane continued, the light of her eyes flickering and small hemorrhages blossoming in the sclera as she pushed against her limits, “Winnowing away the potentials and possibilities, dragging reality down to the foreseen and rendered, engineered conclusion of The Thirteen. Find it. Know it. Understand it. It is key…”
With that the tiefling collapsed, panting and gasping as she suffered a series of minor convulsions, gritting her teeth and riding out the seizures before finally waving the party away and crawling up to the base of the throne and curling into a fetal position. She would speak no more, but she’d given them something to go on. It hadn’t been what they’d expected or hoped for, but it perhaps was far, far more.
****
“So then…” Clueless looked at the others as the massive doors of the Great Hall shut behind them as they exited back onto the streets of Portent. “Where do we go next?”
Glancing up briefly at the skyline of Portent, each roof topped by spikes or barbed wire, and above them all the even more unwelcoming expanse of the bleak and lightless void between the Furnaces, the party realized that under normal circumstances any place would be better than their current location. But when their choices potentially included the Gray Waste, the available options precluded any notion of normal circumstances.
“Torch?” Fyrehowl mused, intentionally avoiding the suggestion of the Waste. The very idea sent a shudder through her spine.
Florian shook her head, “Tempus forbid we waltz into the f*cking Nadir.”
Tristol sighed, mentally calculating the swiftest way to the Waste or Gehenna’s gatetown, and just as importantly the quickest way to escape from either should the need arise, as it likely would. He’d heard of the Oblivion Compass in some tome or another, but it was brutally obscure and other than that passing reference it was a blank spot in his base of knowledge.
Nisha reached down and tugged upon Tristol’s tail, “You’re thinking about something. A lot.”
“If everyone else is ok with it, I’d like to go to the Waste first.” Tristol’s ears tilted back as he anticipated the reaction that he would momentarily receive. “I’ve heard of the Oblivion Compass. Vaguely. It’s obscure as heck and frankly if it seems important I’d like to at least get a better idea of what it is and what’s going on with it before we launch into anything else. So… thoughts?”
“Hey! I know! Let’s go from the number 2 ranked shithole in the multiverse, Gehenna, to the top ranked one!” Toras beamed a grin of abjectly false glee.
“I really really –really– don’t want to go to the Waste…” Fyrehowl muttered, even as she curled her arms about herself and glanced up at the sky. Gehenna was not doing the celestial any wonders.
“Listen,” Tristol grimaced, “I know how you feel. I don’t want to go there either. But I think we need to. I don’t know what we’ll find in Torch either, but if it’s linked in some capacity to the Compass, I think we should have some grounded idea of what it is prior to showing up and possibly asking questions about it.”
“Stop talking sense.” Florian grumbled. “I’ve been to the Gatetown of Hopeless and this is going to be even worse… but you’re right. We shouldn’t go to whatever there is in Torch without having a solid footing of what we need to find out.”
The others nodded, though the agreement was marked by more than few unhappy sighs. Nisha however opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again as she mentally debated asking what came to mind since none of the others had considered it a pertinent issue to raise so clearly it wasn’t but still…
“What’s Dubai’s Obscure Woe?” Nisha blurted out, her tail curled into a question mark.
Silence. Somewhere off in the distance a man screamed as he was stabbed, and in closer proximity the shouts of barkers and merchants produced a fog of white noise rising up from the marketplace, rising in pitch and distinct voices becoming more and more clear as the party said nothing as they turned to look at the tiefling.
Florian sighed and nodded, “I’d say something about stop talking sense to you too, but… Xaositect.”
Nisha smiled appreciably and gave a curtsey.
“Yeah, rack up another thing that we don’t fully know as we’re walking into a situation.” Clueless glanced back at the doors to the Great Hall. “We could always wait and see how long it takes Laughing Jane to wake up, but something tells me that it might be a few days and she likely won’t be any more forthcoming than she already was.”
“Torch won’t be much different than here,” Toras shrugged, slapping a fist into his other palm. “We can always beat up the first locals that try to assault us and get some directions and information from them.”
“I agree with this plan.” Fyrehowl grinned, her tail swishing behind her, “Quite wholeheartedly!”
There was more banter to be had, promises of higher quality drink back in Sigil once they were done, worries about yugoloths in the Waste or suddenly finding themselves in the midst of an active Blood War battle surrounding them for hundreds of miles in every direction, and all other manner of looming concerns both sincere and absurd. Minutes stretched by and the proportion of concerns grew more and more weighted to the latter, if only to delay their departure to the Waste, until finally Tristol began to cast, settling any debate or just complaints before they departed Portent and dove headlong into the heart of Evil itself in the Gray Waste.
Tristol’s plane shift enveloped the party in a burst of crimson radiance, with any outside observer noticing that the magical eruption swiftly faded to gray at the edges and then as it whisked them away from the Fourfold Furnace, it leached their fading afterimages left behind for but a moment of every trace of color like bleak and ghostly scotomas.
****
Ominous clouds hung overheard like an impenetrable vault, black and heavy with looming, cold rain, the shut and tired eyes of despondent gods momentarily pausing from their grief. While Hell unendingly echoed with the wailing agonies of the tormented and the Abyss with shrieks of rage, loss, and triumph, a symphony of its Darwinian nightmare, the Gray Waste was altogether different.
“Why is it so deathly quiet?” Florian asked as she glanced about at the surrounding landscape, a stretch of desolation swathed in low fog and periodic eruptions of withered black trees. Above the bleak plain and below the black vault of the sky, there was naught but smothering silence. No cries, no distant ring of warring armies, but only the soft crunch of the party’s boots, paws, and hooves on the ashen soil. The Waste devoured noise to isolate, further impressing upon every wretch who walked upon it that they were alone, abandoned, and forsaken.
It was hideous, and it was only the beginning. Moments later the party felt the plane’s emotional and spiritual wasting.
“Gods above I hate this place…” Fyrehowl whimpered, tucking her tail between her legs. “Tristol let’s get there and get out… sooner than later please…”
“Working on it…” Tristol winced as a gentle breeze brought with it the unbidden thought that they would never return home, that he would be forgotten, that everything of meaning not only would be lost, but that it had never held any worth or meaning in the first place. Shaking his head to fight off the plane’s spiritual wasting, he began to cast a teleportation spell, focusing on the concept of the Oblivion Compass and what details he knew. Hopefully it would be enough.
It was.
Within the confines of the fraction of a second that it took the spell to whisk them across the metaphysical space of the Gray Waste to the base of the Oblivion Compass, the ever-present gnawing of the Waste ceased. But then they emerged from that space between spaces, staring up at the great and enigmatic horror they’d come to find. While the Waste’s spiritual leaching had been terrible before when they first emerged upon Oinos, there at the base of the Oblivion Compass it was worse. So very, very much worse.
Fyrehowl and Toras immediately stumbled and nearly fell, followed shortly thereafter by Tristol as their own celestial nature or heritage reacted with terror and sickness to the abomination that rose up out of the ashen soil.
An impossible, ever-shifting teratogen of reality rose up from the Waste, great things of metal and stone, gears and nightmarish clockwork from the fever dreams of an insane modron. There were hundreds shafts, the largest of them the size of towers, the smallest of them the size of a man, all of them festooned with a forest of cogs, some interlocking with their adjacent neighbors and others by themselves, alone, disconnected except for whatever might exist deep within the depths of the Waste itself. The greatest of them displayed massive dials and indicators like the faces of some mad clock, all arranged about a singularly large, central dial with dozens of hands and swirling circles of symbols, all of them displaying an indecipherable pattern of information, all of it written in the tongue of the baern.
Below their feet the dust of the Waste frothed with the vibrations, seen and unseen, of the great device. All around them resounded the cacophony of whirring, ticking, and pounding of gears and mechanisms thrust into the marrow of the Waste, thrumming and grinding away in a fearsome, unnatural capacity no engine of Hell could ever approach.
That was when they noticed the incongruities.
That was when they noticed the screaming.
The machine was not wrought of metal, cast, molded or forged. When one of the whirling spindles ceased its motion, the shaft was not crafted of steel or stone, the cogs not cast in brass or bronze, rather they were crafted from the bodies of modrons, thousands of them welded together. Broken apart, mutilated, fused like deformed, malformed and immortal neonates gasping for air, and like debilitated infants the modrons were inexplicably alive, their eyes bulging, maddened with agony, and all of them were screaming. The white noise of unending horror suffused the valley that held the Oblivion Compass, rising and ebbing in pitch and volume as the nightmare device spun in its mad, unintelligible pattern.
Winding about the screaming, turning modron amalgamations, ropes of black lightning erupted, occasionally lancing between the many cogs like the firing of a mad, crippled god’s neurons. The lightning was not solid black however, but instead composed of symbols, and not of baern, but the mathematical patterns of moignos, another native creature of Mechanus broken, tortured, and chained to the great Compass.
They too were screaming, erupting in a tangible froth of mathematical ephemera.
Spectral figures moved about, aimlessly stumbling and shambling about the valley’s surface, the immaterial, ghostly shadows of wayward parai stripped from their clockwork nirvana and bound to the baernaloth device for reasons unknown.
The party stood there, overwhelmed by the horror of what they had found, uncertain of how to react at the enormity and the pointless terror of it all as the Waste gnawed at their souls.
“Oh Tempus forbid,” Florian dropped to one knee, weeping uncontrollably. “What in the gods’ names is this?!”
As she dropped, she left behind an afterimage of herself standing, dozens of them superimposed on one another in different possible actions in each moment: potential iterations of reality, all of them worse than the actual. There was one Florian walking forward to grind herself to death upon the gears, another cutting her throat and bleeding out upon the Waste, another turning to cast at her companions.
For each member of the party it was the same. Under the reality-warping influence of the Compass, they each trailed and spawned afterimages of themselves, each of them going about routes of action that deviated in every horrible possibility from what did actually happen. Unbeknownst to them, each of them were in microcosm alternate timelines made manifest, haunting the present with the specters of what might or could have been.
Tristol stared at the gears, dials, and hands of the Oblivion Compass, his mind staggered by the scope and scale of it all, completely overwhelmed by the question of how the manifest horror had been created and what it even meant. Clearly they were crafted to some hideous purpose by the Gloom Fathers, but unable to even read their language, the aasimar wizard hadn’t the slightest idea of how to answer the very questions that it raised.
“You will never understand this…” One of the many shades that fractured off of Tristol turned, sneering to whisper in his vulpine ears. “You will never accomplish a fraction of what Karsus did. Mystra weeps at your wasted potential and the waste of her gift to you…”
Tristol screamed, tears in his eyes as the Compass whirled and turned, uncaring in the face of his agony.
“Get us out of here Tristol!” Clueless screamed, turning to the wizard even as his own possible-selves plunged Razor into their own chests or hacked off their legs to hurl away Shemeska’s gemstone in their ankles.
“Please just plane shift us all!” Nisha shook her boyfriend by the shoulder even as her shadows slid a knife between his ribs or handed him her own gouged out heart or rocked back and forth as they sat in the dust, babbling to themselves in scramble speech. “I don’t care to where! Just get us anywhere but here!”
Again, Fyrehowl vomited into the dust, and with the act caused the swirling, low fog of swirling dust to part, momentarily revealing the actual surface of the land beneath it. They hadn’t noticed it as they’d teleported in and, faced with the effects of the Waste and the Compass alike, they hadn’t stepped forward or walked about. But as the lupinal stared at the revealed ground beneath she realized that they stood not on the bedrock of the Waste itself, but upon a carpet of bones and great drift of other bones before them ground down to dust by the vibrations of the Compass.
Nearly every creature that had stumbled into that isolated Valley by happenstance or design and then fallen prey to the black hole of emotional agony and self-destructive apathy that existed there, they had never left. Those many millions of creatures were now dead and forgotten, consumed and gone in pointless depths in a plane of pointless despair.
Fyrehowl shook her head and glanced up, bleeding possible shadows of herself with each and every movement, half of them fallen versions of herself given up to rage and fury, bestial and snarling. They had to get out before it was too late.
“Tristol!” She screamed, “Get us out of here!”
Eyes wide, barely conscious of Fyrehowl and the others’ shouting, Tristol still stood in place, staring up at the Oblivion Compass’s central dial. The symbols in ancient baernaloth were completely unintelligible and beyond his comprehension, despite his having already whispered spells of comprehension and divination. True enough as his possible specter had promised him, he didn’t understand it, at least not now. As the shadows sneered and taunted, the wizard realized that there was nothing to be accomplished by staying there unless he wanted to condemn himself and his fellows to the same death as had taken the millions there before them.
Tristol’s lips were already moving and his brain already calling the planeshift into his mind’s forefront to whisk them all away to safety and the next spot on their trip at Laughing Jane’s urging before the scrying foci began to appear, each of them swirling with symbols in the same alphabet as the Compass itself. Who they belonged to and what their presence presaged was lost as the spell took effect and dragged the companions across the space between the planes, but for a fraction of a second the feeling of being observed and followed remained with them all in a way that had never before occurred.
They would know that gaze again.
They would feel that gaze without the intercessor of a scry focus.
They would feel it soon.
****
