“So yeah…” Clueless motioned to Leobtav’s dagger now fully embedded into the doorway and activating an open, functional portal. “There’s this.”
“You’re saying the dagger moved on its own accord to open the portal?” Toras stared and frowned.
Clueless nodded with much the same expression, “It wouldn’t be the first time the damn thing has done its own thing.”
“No. Hold on. This isn’t right.” Tristol shook his head. “We examined all of the doors in the hallway when we took over the Jammer, and there wasn’t a portal here, much less one…” He whispered the words to a divination and glanced at the portal, “… to Gehenna.”
“Lovely.” Florian rolled her eyes.
“So how about we just wall this door over and not have to worry about it?” Toras shrugged as he developed a grin. “Or maybe stick some spikes in place so any ‘loth wandering through impales themselves when they step through?”
Clueless shook his head, “The Lady would maze our *sses if you tried that.”
“You didn’t disagree with my idea though.”
“True…” The bladesinger allowed himself a chuckle at the concept. “Anyone care to find out just what this damn dagger wants?”
“So a lovely jaunt into Gehenna, just like that?” Nisha made a not exactly pleased face.
Clueless took the next twenty minutes to convince the others to go with him, as opposed to waiting for him to return. Without any expectations of what awaited them on the other side, it was a dicey affair to say the least. On top of the dangers of the Fourfold Furnace, they likewise had no idea if the artifact wasn’t simply attempting to kill them all as a side effect of its murderous, wrathful compulsions presumably wrought by its use to murder the Tiere deity.
In the end, they all stepped through and into a place that shouldn’t have existed, but which seemed to have been waiting for them for a very, very long time.
****
The black vault of Gehenna’s void-like sky stretched out above them as they stepped through the portal. Interminably far in the distance, the other furnaces burned like dying, uncaring stars swift to watch and mock the suffering of every creature that dwelled within their corrupted sliver of reality. The second thing that they noticed beyond the sky though, was the crunch of ice and ashes below their feet, or in Nisha’s case, hooves.
“Where the hell are we?” Fyrehowl asked, drawing her arms around herself with a pronounced shudder and shiver. The lupinal’s tail involuntarily curled between her legs. Whatever her present relationship with her native alignment might have been, the very structure of her being felt sick as soon as she stepped upon the frozen ground.
“Welcome to the lovely depths of Gehenna…” Toras gestured with one hand as he preemptively drew his sword. “Please stab anything that approaches you, it won’t have good intentions in mind.”
“No, I gathered that much by the floating volcanoes in the sky.” Fyrehowl shook her head and swallowed down a wave of nausea. “Where specifically, and why did Leobtav’s dagger open a portal here? Powers above, this place feels sick...”
As their eyes adjusted to the gloom of the void, they stared at the expanse of the vale stretching out before them. As best as they could guess, they stood in the middle of the ruined city, ancient beyond imagining and worn down by the passage of time to the barest foundation stones, all covered by a field of ashes several inches thick and frozen by a rime of ice. In the distance, the rubble of the largest structure, a great palace or cathedral loomed, some of its walls still reaching up into the starless vault above like grasping, pleading hands.
Then of course, there were the silent figures standing all around them. At first it was easy to notice perhaps ten of them standing within a few yards, then beyond that dozens more, and gradually they stood out from the ashen background or the darkness beyond: tens of thousands of them.
“What the hell are those things?” Florian pointed to the nearest cluster of figures. Instinctively she began to pray, nearly to the point of completion to call down a burst of holy flame before she shook her head and paused.
Looming from the nearest stack of weathered stone stood what upon first glance seemed to be the figure of a fiend crouched and ready to leap. Whether once a living fiend or else carved from stone or molded from the ice and ashes that coated the ground, it stood motionless, immobile, and not a threat.
“They’re statues…” Clueless warily approached the statue and the others near to it; they were all yugoloths.
“Very, very life-like statues…” Nisha peered up at the nycaloth, “And clearly made by someone with a sense of irony or just someone without a clue how ‘loths operate. They sculpted them praying.”
Kneeling on both knees with its wings folded back in a sign of humility, the ‘loth was a bizarre sight as it clearly knelt in a position of prayer. Of all of the constants in the multiverse, one of them held particularly true: the godless yugoloths worshipped no divine patrons. Surrounding the greater yugoloth, nearly a dozen mezzoloths knelt as well, all staring uniformly at the ruined structure at the center of the Vale.
“What the hell is this place?” Clueless remarked, noting the severe contradiction in the statues and the ‘loth abhorrence of all that was divine. His ankle throbbed with a dull pressure on and off. It wasn’t the burning, warning pain that standing in an altraloth’s proximity had invoked, but nonetheless, the stone was reacting to something. As best the bladesinger could tell, the gem in his ankle simply wasn’t sure if a threat existed or not.
“Whatever it was,” Tristol looked suspiciously at the landscape, “Leobtav said that he found something here that made him do all that he did.”
As they stood and stared at the praying fiends, moving warily to examine them further, they noticed that not all of the figures were ‘loths. Also scattered amid the rubble stood celestials, no longer beatific but frozen in positions of abject horror. Like the ‘loths, they too were composed of ice and ashes.
“What in the name of all that’s holy happened here?” Toras licked his lips and spat out the flecks of ashes on his tongue. Each step kicked up bits of frozen soot that drifted like snowflakes through the air.
“There’s nothing holy about this place.” Fyrehowl shuddered. Every moment she stood there made her feel increasingly ill.
“This place shouldn’t exist.” Alex frowned and glanced at his unseen familiar. He felt its presence inside of his mind, but curiously, it wasn’t physically manifest. Something about the fabric of that place prevented it from doing so.
“No argument from me there.” Florian nodded.
“No, it’s not just a blunt value judgment.” The alienist shook his head. “This place literally shouldn’t exist. Look up and we’re in Gehenna, clearly. But look at the ground itself, and it’s the Waste. That shouldn’t happen.”
Tristol whispered the words to a spell and glanced around, coming to the same conclusion as Alex in very short order. When he cancelled his spell and looked back up, his tail was bottlebrushed and a look of confusion marred his face.
“The only thing that I can think of that’s remotely similar is a sliding planar layer.” The wizard shrugged, perplexed by the situation. “Except I’ve never heard of a portion of the Waste sliding into Gehenna. With the ‘loths native to both planes, I wouldn’t think it’s possible.”
“Maybe the celestials were responsible?” Toras mused. “Maybe it’s the result of one of the earliest Blood War battles from when the celestials still took an active role?”
“Then why aren’t there any baatezu and tanar’ri?” Clueless narrowed his eyes at the paradox inherent in everything they saw. “And even so, that wouldn’t explain praying yugoloths. This doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Tenuously they continued to walk further into the ruins. Each step brought about the faint crackle of breaking ice and shifting ashen snow beneath their feet, all of it echoing faintly against the fallen walls and toppled columns of whatever urban landscape had once graced the Vale. Slowly they made their way towards the massive structure that had once dominated the landscape, and still nothing but unease and an ever growing population of statues, both ‘loth and celestial, all in the same arrangements as before. Above, the unforgiving void of Gehenna looked down with uncaring menace, but there was something distinctly odd about it all.
“Why is it so quiet?” Clueless paused and looked at the others. “Other than us and the ice, there’s no sound at all. No wind, no volcanism, and no screaming slasraths in the distance… it’s absolutely quiet, like noise from Gehenna at large isn’t actually reaching us.”
“It isn’t quiet…” Fyrehowl’s ears stood erect and moving as the lupinal’s eyes went wide and her fur prickled with fear. “They’re whispering. All of them. I think they’re still alive, or kept alive. Gods above, they’re in pain.”
Doom
Death
The death of all things
Everything ends
Everything ended here
Help us
Help us please
Save us
Save yourselves
Only Fyrehowl heard them, but to her it was like a softly wailing, begging chorus that took the place of wind. After having witnessed the aftermath of the yugoloth assault on Belarian, she thought that she’d seen the worst that could happen to her celestial kindred, but this was altogether different. Not only guardinals, but archons, eladrin, angels, and other rarer forms stood scattered about randomly, all of them giving whispered screams of agony and warning.
“What are they saying?” Alex asked as he approached the weeping figure of a solar. “Anything that might tell us what happened here or what was responsible?”
Fyrehowl shut her eyes and tried not to listen to the whispers, but they were more than physical. Once she’d heard them, it was as if they had collectively become aware of her and their volume grew and focused on her. The result was maddening and horrific.
“They’re terrified” She did her best to parse their meaning. “They keep warning about something horrific that happened here. But the tense is weird. Some of them are talking about it, whatever it was, as if it just happened, some as if it happened eons ago, and some of them as if it hasn’t actually happened yet.”
“That doesn’t make sense at all,” Nisha quirked an eyebrow, “And coming from me that’s probably saying something.”
Tristol whispered the words to a spell and looked at whatever magic lay upon the statues. Unsurprisingly they registered as being inert lumps of ice and ash without any active magic upon or within them. Clearly though they were, or the entire location was as a result of whatever events had formed it in the first place.
“What are the yugoloths saying?” Toras asked, “Please tell me they regret doing something stupid.”
“Oh you’ll love this…” Fyrehowl softly cursed as she strained to listen to the nearest praying figures. “Just the same damn word or words over and over again.”
“What is it?” Tristol preemptively winced, his mind having an inkling to just what the word might be.
“Vor’nel’thraanix.”
Groans and curses cut the silence; the meaningless, untranslatable word from the Outlands. Despite Leobtav’s death, his last actions just like his dagger, continued to haunt them with an utter absence of meaning.
“What Leobtav cut into the ground when he sacrificed the Tiere god.” Clueless sighed. “And it’s just as meaningless now as it was then.”
Although he hadn’t been there at the time and it seemed right for him to inquire just what his newfound companions were talking about, Alex wasn’t paying them any attention. Instead he was stepping closer to the figure of the solar that he’d been examining. It was whispering to him.
“You can help me.” The agonized celestial called out to him and only him. “You can set me free of this place. Touch me. Reach out and drag my spirit into the present, into continuity, into existence from the pit that gnaws and devours eternally. Help me Alex.”
The voice was beguiling.
“I wouldn’t get too close to that thing.” Fyrehowl shook her head and shivered. “Honestly I want to get out of here as fast we can.”
“Seriously, don’t touch it.” Toras warned. “It’s creepy. Nothing good ever comes from anything creepy.”
Alex never heard him, so intent was he on finding some fragment of meaning in the solar’s whispers as they called out to him.
“This is not right.” His familiar whispered into his mind, its typical nonchalance replaced with a sense of dread. It wasn’t just that it couldn’t physically manifest, Alex could tell that it was terrified of doing so even if it could.
“This place is a unfilled hollow. A prison carved out by the screams of angels and the tears of the architects of misery alike. Find out what has happened and then leave. Do not tarry in this place. The sickness gnaws and the sickness whispers.”
Alex reached out to touch the statue of the solar.
“Alex, what are you doing?” Nisha called out, far too late.
Time seemed to move slowly for the alienist as his finger crossed the distance between himself and the figure of the solar. Each moment of time that clicked his familiar screamed out in warning, calling out to him, begging him to stop, biting into his mind madly until it hurt itself, but unable to stop what was happening and indeed might have already occurred in the paradox mad trap that transcended causality.
His fingers touched the surface of the solar, cold and brittle, and in that singular moment he watched the surface of the statue shift and move, its expression shifting from agony and sorrow into a sneer of utter contempt and malice. His eyes met not the solar’s damned and frozen orbs, but the thing staring through them from somewhere unimaginably remote, infinite, blasphemous. Less able to find purchase in this reality than even his familiar and the intelligences of the Far Realms that he served, the thing beyond the solar’s eyes was something else entirely.
The void that swelled from within the statue’s frozen embrace was eternal. Perched within the void, rapacious and malignant, Leobtav’s god hungered.
“Why…?” His words asked only a question as he felt something reach forward to grasp his hand and drag him forward. They were the same fingers of shadow and ice that had guided the hand of Cilret Leobtav, stroked his face lovingly, and accepted his sacrifices of blood and souls. In that singular moment, Alex never understood what the creature was, even as it consumed his spirit and his body disintegrated in a shower of ashes and ice.
“HOLY SH*T!!!” Clueless leapt back as the alienist shattered into a cloud of glittering ash.
“Alex!” Florian shouted out as she watched the man die suddenly and spectacularly.
All of them moved away from the statue, suddenly intensely wary of the very real risk of harm from them. Far from simply being bizarre, whispering statues with the potential to unnerve, they suddenly looked at that as traps, and deadly ones at that.
“Ok, no one go near those things!” Clueless yelled as he made eye contact with each of his remaining companions. “I don’t know what they are, but clearly they don’t need to be interacted with.”
Silent and unobserved, the landscape subtle shifted around them. Space collapsed and vanished, buildings moved and statues stood in different positions than they had before as the structure of the Waste molded itself around the will of the creature that had been watching them patiently since they arrived. Less than ten feet away now, the wasted nightmare form of Sarkithel fek Parthis sat upon the ruined edge of a foundation.
“Oh f*ck this plane!” Toras shouted. “F*ck the ‘loths! F*ck ‘em all!”
“Florian,” Clueless sighed and motioned towards Alex’s remains, “If you don’t mind raising him.”
“Hey, I told him not to touch it.” Toras protested. “Don’t blame me if he gets himself killed running through some freaky ‘loth theme park.”
Ignoring the fighter’s flippancy, Florian knelt over Alex’s ashes, careful not to touch them in the event that whatever terrible curse lay upon the statue had also transferred over to his remains. Halfway through her prayer she stopped.
“Guys…” Florian’s eyes went wide as she looked at her holy symbol, the diamond in her hand, and then Alex’s remains. “I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” Toras suddenly looked serious. “You’re an insanely powerful cleric.”
“Just like the dead in Pandemonium.” Clueless swallowed hard. “We were never able to raise them either.”
“What in the heavens happened here?” Tristol lamented. “
“There’s no soul there to raise.” Florian stepped back from the statue. “He touched it and he died, and it’s like the damn thing ate his soul in the process. It’s just a hollow nothing looking back at me when I start to pray.”
Standing to the side, Fyrehowl paused as a wave of nausea passed through her. Without knowing the cause, she turned and wretched.
Scratching down a flurry of notes, a vague, half-hearted smirk crossed the baernaloth’s features.
“Greetings children…”
****
“That didn’t work out too well for you did it?”
The voice of former Factol Esmus of the Bleak Cabal called out from the darkness of his cell where two pinpricks of light from his eyes stood out against the darkness. His laugh betrayed an emotion somewhere between uncaring wrought of whimsy and that wrought of soul-ravaging depression.
“It accomplished exactly as I wanted it to accomplish.” Tollysalmon smiled in the darkness of her own cell. “At least as much as I can accomplish at this time from inside this cell.”
“You could walk out of here at any time you wished Factol.” Esmus ran dirty fingers and ragged fingernails through his long, tangled hair. “You’ve done it before. Let’s not delude ourselves as to just how powerful you are.”
“And I’ll do it again if it serves me.” The githyanki sneered. “But that’s not the cell that I’m referring to.”
Esmus paused on the verge of making a sarcastic remark, thinking better than to speak. He stared at his cell door and felt with his mind at the presence seated on the cold stone less than twenty feet away. He realized that for as much as she’d taught him, for as much as she’d opened his mind to the entities best described as existing beyond the meaningless of the cosmos, the very ones that granted him power of his own, he didn’t understand her at all. His predecessor’s mind wasn’t so much a fortress that he couldn’t see within, but a vacuous nothingness that simply gave no purchase to glance within. The rare moments when she slipped from babbling quiescence to cognizance over the years, in that moment of transition he saw the only elements of her mind to ever show themselves: despondent loss and rage.
“I will have other hands and eyes when the time comes.” Tollysalmon’s eyes narrowed. “The Clock winds down, but those who created it cannot work against me when they don’t know that I exist as a threat. They’ve forgotten me. Everyone has.”
