Taba cackled with delight as she reared up on the spiked, metallic insect legs newly sprouted from her body. As she laughed, a half dozen other mouths formed across her morphic flesh like physical echoes to express the same blasphemous exclamation.
“Scream in the name of Lord of the Crawling City! Suffer in the name of the first Ultroloth. Die in the name of my master!”
As the yugoloth lord invoked the unholy titles of one of the most feared and enigmatic names upon all of the planes, thoughts of shock and fear raced through all six of their assembled minds.
“Taba…” In a flash of insight, Clueless knew exactly what the creature was, by name, and knew why the artifact in his ankle reacted such as it had. Although the controlling link to the Marauder had been severed long ago, the gem still reacted instinctively to warn her former puppet and tool of the threat that Taba represented. Whatever the altraloth’s reason for being there in Maladomini, it was not at the behest of the current Oinoloth. “F*cking f*ck…”
The General of Gehenna and its citadel the Crawling City had not been seen upon the face of the planes since just before the beginning of the yugoloth civil war between Anthraxus and Mydianchlarus. That war had ended with the deaths of both the former and then present Oinoloth and the ascension of Vorkannis the Ebon. When the blood had cooled and ashes settled, and the corpses strung from the spires of the Wasting Tower finally ceased growing in number, the General of Gehenna was absent. The whereabouts of the yugoloths’ near-mythical puppetmaster remained unknown, and the nature of its relation to the current Oinoloth’s purges and purification of the ‘loth race equally opaque.
In the silent void of information on the greatest unsettled mystery of yugoloth politics, the altraloth Taba gleefully invoked not the Oinoloth’s name, but the General’s.
“F*cking f*ck is right!” Fyrehowl dodged to narrowly avoid a gout of liquid flame from the creature’s mouth. The burning bolt nearly hit, and only the fact that she began her rolling leap in true Cipher fashion prior to it actually being expelled saved her from taking it full in the chest.
Undeterred by the manifest horror rearing up in front of them, towering nearly three times his height, Toras rushed forward, leading with this blade. Taba never bothered to move or intercept his charge. A flicker of thought and the fighter was hurled backwards through the air by a ferocious burst of telekinetic force.
Eyes wide at the sight of Toras being bandied about like a ragdoll, Tristol began to cast. A thought of his to bring a spell to mind and a tiny prayer to Mystra to aid him and the lightning crackled from his outstretched hand, heightened to a potency beyond its standard limits. The harsh reek of ozone filled the air along with the thunderclap that followed a split second later as the bolt lanced between the wizard and the altraloth before it abruptly changed direction and lanced out to strike Fyrehowl, counterspelled with a meager effort.
The lupinal gasped in surprise, but by virtue of her celestial nature (however sullied or fallen she might be), avoided actual damage.
“Little more than larvae waiting for the moment you crystallize upon the Waste. Pitiful mewling creatures, do you actually think that you could harm me? Me? The exalted servitor of the General? I who remain loyal even as the rest of my race follow a mere arcanaloth pretender to the Siege Malicious?” Eyes glittering in the darkness, Taba smiled.
“I say again,” Florian called out with worry and the ever so faintest tremor in her hand as she gripped her holy symbol, “What the f*cking f*ck is that thing?!”
“It’s a mother*cking yugoloth lord!” Clueless shouted as he sliced at one of Taba’s tentacles, spinning in midair as he did so to avoid a vicious counterattack and finishing with his hand outstretched to hurl a bolt of flame. While Razor struck and bit deeply, the fiend’s flesh already began to knit itself whole and the bolt of flame sizzled, blunted by the fiend’s innate magical resistance. “F*cking ‘loths…”
“Oh Foe Hammer smite it all! I wanted to be done with them!” Florian snarled as she invoked down the power of Tempus to smite the abomination. She felt the power build with her, bubble up from the divine channel within her soul that tethered her spirit to the divinity she followed. She felt the power erupt forth from her holy symbol, and then she watched as it fizzled, blunted by another seemingly effortless counterspell by the cackling altraloth.
“Godslave…” Taba hissed with a wet chuckle from a dozen newly formed mouths in her flank.
Undaunted and outnumbering the archfiend, they continued their attack despite the first, fruitless efforts.
Aware of the fiend’s proficiency in disrupting spells, but counting on it being distracted and unable to do so swiftly again after soaking Florian’s own attempt, Tristol hurled another spell and hoped for the best. The fireball detonated fully on Taba’s body, enveloping the horror in a globe of flames and raw arcane energies. Protected against the flames to a degree, the archfiend still roared in pain from the damage it could not avoid or resist.
Pressing the advantage, Fyrehowl leapt through the air, spinning and swinging her scimitar to sink deep into what might best be considered its shoulder. No sooner had she done so with a burst of blood into the air that the fiend struck her with a massive pincher, lifting her up and hurling her back against the far wall.
Finally darting into the fray, Nisha jumped forward with a burst of wild magic to appear behind the fiend, momentarily unnoticed. Seemingly surprised with what she’d accomplished, she giggled and clapped her hands before belatedly realizing what she’d intended to do in the first place. The tiefling whipped out her rapier and stabbed the fiend repeatedly, though to little effect before it slapped her away almost half-heartedly, sending her skidding across the floor like a giant flicking away a gnat.
Toras charged again, striking a series of blows and finally injuring the archfiend, followed by spells from Florian, Tristol, and Clueless alike. Though one of the spells fizzled against the altraloth’s resistance and another was negated by counterspell, the third struck true, and along with the physical damage of the half-celestial’s sword, Taba hissed with frustration.
The altraloth screamed incoherently and hurled a meteor swarm. Explosions rocked the room and shouts of pain and fear echoed through the smoke cut only by the archfiend’s glistening ruby eyes.
Casting her mind out and up like a fisherman’s net, ignoring the still healing pinpricks of steel and the burn of divine and arcane energies, Taba listened for her quarry. There, up above like a terrified mouse, it moved and then waited, moved and then waited, then drew still in a hiding place where it thought itself safe.
Swarming above in the gilded maze, the baatezu scrambled like ants, moving to concentrate their ranks in defense of the Duke they called master. Their hellish master was the only creature present that would have caused the Infiltrator of the Planes any concern at all, but he was not and never had been Taba’s target, that honor was granted to one of his guests. Up above she waited, hiding and panicking, unable to simply flee to another plane on her own power by virtue of the diabolic restrictions on such freedoms; vengeance would not be long in coming for her.
“ENOUGH!” Taba snarled as she skittered backwards, her legs altering shape moment by moment to accelerate that specific action even as her wounds regenerated at a ferocious rate. “Mewling mortal insects! I am not here for you.”
Fingers wriggled from suddenly liquid flesh, completing the somatic components of a spell that flickered within the altraloth’s mind and then was spent. A ring of flame ignited from the ground, putting distance between her and her current foes as she looked up at the ceiling and smiled, telepathically licking her lips at the psychic scent of her prey high and directly above.
Opening the razor-fanged maw at the end of her elongated, serpentine neck, the altraloth screamed. Distorting and rippling the air, a lance of force erupted from her mouth, shooting upwards and ripping into the vaulted shadows. Above her, the ceiling exploded, showering the chamber with splinters of stone and melted iron.
“Sh*t!” Nisha threw her hands over her head and darted behind the largest cover that she could find, which happened to be Toras.
The half-celestial didn’t much bother to shield himself other than putting an arm across his face as rocks clattered off of his armor. Within a fraction of a second though, he relaxed his arm as a globe of force shimmered into being over the party courtesy of Tristol.
Through it all as the ceiling collapsed, Taba’s body was still shifting, adapting to the needs of the moment. Twelve legs, like those of some hellish grasshopper formed from her lower body. They tensed, gathered strength, and then she leapt upwards through the hole of her own making. A screaming eager cackle echoed down from above along with the sound of her nightmare arrangement of limbs propelling her forwards three stories above as she hunted for her true quarry.
“Maybe we’re lucky and she’s here for the same elf we came to gank?” Nisha nervously chuckled and sheathed her rapier, craning her neck to look up the passage the yugoloth lord had created in its wake.
“I hesitate to say that.” Fyrehowl frowned, “Since when are we that lucky?”
Catching her breath, Florian held her holy symbol aloft and invoked a burst of healing to herself and the others, healing numerous bites, slashes, and terrible burns from its last spell. Surprisingly they’d survived the encounter, though in truth it hadn’t been their first battle with an archfiend.
“Is gank even a real word?” Nisha looked away and tapped her chin with her tail. Tristol put a hand on her shoulder to bring her back to the moment.
“So we randomly run into a yugoloth lord?” The aasimar’s tail bottlebrushed as he looked up at the ragged hole in the ceiling.
“Yeah, another one of them.” Fyrehowl shook her head in disbelief, “One that’s been missing since the rest of its kind were killed or presumably killed by the Oinoloth. Showing up in the same place where we came to kill someone. I don’t think there’s anything random about that.”
“I don’t think there was ever an elf.” Clueless narrow his eyes and gripped Razor’s handle.
“Huh?” Florian looked away from the smoking hole in the ceiling and now glanced at the bladesinger. “What are you talking about?”
“We weren’t sent here to kill an elf.” Clueless scoffed and pointed Razor up towards the hole, “We were sent here to kill that thing.”
“Really?” A look of conflicted confusion passed over Toras’s face. “You think that Marvent lied to us? He didn’t strike me as the lying type.”
“Nor me…” Clueless shrugged, remembering uneasily the unearthly aura that had surrounded the factol of the Illuminated. Whatever the man was, he hadn’t at all stricken him as a liar. “I truly don’t know.”
High above, shrieks of terror echoed as a trickle of dust and stone continued to fall. The sound of running, steel-shod boots and hooves on stone rang out between more screaming and a string of explosive detonations and the altraloth’s mad cackling. In the heart of a diabolic noble’s domain, two stories up, Taba continued her slaughter.
“So then… we go after it?” Nisha gave a disturbingly carefree chuckle.
“You have any better ideas?” Fyrehowl shrugged as she made a judgment on the height between them and the upper limit of the ascending shaft.
“Oh! Hey!” A voice rang out from above in planar common without a trace of an infernal accent. “There you are! I’ve been waiting for you, so hurry up here before the fiend gets away!” Peering down from the lip of the hole, Alex waved down and motioned them up with one hand while pointing with the other. “It ran off this way! Hurry!”
****
