Three weeks later:
Toras’s heart beat heavy in his chest as he stood before Florian’s door. His face was pale and his brain still shuddered at what he’d seen. He didn’t know what it meant, but for the moment it seemed that things had resolved themselves for the best. Thankfully so, whatever had been the cause of it.
Taking a deep breath and calming himself, he knocked upon her door. Several seconds later the door opened and Florian looked up at him, a dubious expression playing across her face.
“Listen, you can stop trying to convince me to…”
“It’s done.” Toras cut her off, his voice carrying enough of a haunting finality of tone that the cleric actually blinked and coughed.
Florian gave a confused look, “What do you mean ‘it’s done?’”
“She’ll stop f*cking with us. That’s it.”
“What do you mean ‘that’s it’? What happened? What did you do to her?”
“Nothing.” Toras took a deep breath, remember what he’d seen, and for a moment almost feeling sorry for the fiend. “I didn’t do anything to her.”
****
Three hours immediately prior:
For several days Toras of Andros had mailed requests to meet with the King of the Crosstrade and each had been declined. There’d been no explanation, just a form rejection. Following several such infuriating dismissals he’d sent another request by courier, only to have it denied as well, though this time with an actual excuse written down and handed back to him via the very same courier he’d sent.
“The King of the Crosstrade is currently busy and cannot grant your request.”
The letter was not however written by Shemeska herself, though such things rarely were compared to any of a dozen scribes. Perhaps the fiend was indeed actually busy. So he waited another day and sent another courier and again the same blunt response. Pissed and assuming that the ‘loth was by that point stringing him along to torment him, a tactic which was both working, and solidly in the fiend’s bag of tactics, Toras tipped the courier, stood up, and headed on foot straight to the fiend’s lair within the Fortune’s Wheel.
Walking through the door and then pushing his way through the throng of gamblers, merchants, prostitutes of the elegant and well-paid variety, and the drunken and despondent, the first thing that Toras noticed from the Fortune’s Wheel’s gambling floor was that Shemeska was pointedly absent from her standard table that looked down from a balcony a floor above to grant her a view of the entrance, gambling floor, and the dining room. That balcony lay empty, without any of her guards present to suggest that she was simply elsewhere and would indeed return.
Narrowing his eyes at the ‘loth’s absence, Toras turned and made his way for the stairs. If she wasn’t holding court in her usual place she’d likely be at her chamber in the Azure Iris several floors above.
Ten minutes later and Toras arrived at the door, greeted by the first positive hint of Shemeska’s presence that day: two of her black-clad tiefling groomer-guards standing to either side of the one door in the inn that wasn’t numbered and wasn’t simple painted hardwood, but elaborately carved mahogany.
“Hi.” The fighter smiled as both tiefling calmly regarded him. “I need to see her.”
Both tieflings for their part had seen every reaction under the sun from those seeking their Mistress’s audience. They’d seen men and women on their knees, begging and sobbing, and they’d seen men and women with bloody swords in their hands screaming to be let in. In neither case would they simply stand aside and allow anyone entry without the Marauder’s explicit and direct approval: they feared her anger more than a temporary death on her doorstep.
“That would not be possible at the moment.” The tiefling on the left flashed a curt smile while the tiefling on the right deftly tapped and activated a sending stone on their person. Toras noticed the action even if he wasn’t privy to the contents of the short message it allowed the tiefling to send inside the room where Shemeska brooded, doing whatever it was that ‘loths did in private. If nothing else it confirmed that she was there.
“You don’t quite understand,” Toras smiled overly long at the tiefling with the sending stone. “I know she’s here and I’m tired of being blown off, repeatedly for multiple days now. I’m going to see her.”
“Please leave sir.”
“I know you’re terrified of her, and I can understand that, so please step aside.” Toras smiled, his hand on her sword pommel, “But I’m sick and tired of the crap she’s been pulling. I just want to talk to her and end this petty back and forth. I’m tired of getting stabbed in the back and not even knowing why.”
“I believe I made myself clear,” The tiefling on the left likewise put their hand on their rapier. “You will not be seeing Her Fiendish Majesty without an appointment.”
“Stand aside and let me through or I’ll break down the door with your heads.” Toras glared at both of the Marauder’s lackeys, and there was something in both the intensity of his gaze and the tone of his voice that actually made them flinch.
Both tieflings exchanged awkward glances but both remained rooted in place.
“You are not welcome here at the present moment, Toras of Andros. Please leave.”
The Marauder’s telepathic voice echoed within Toras’s head and the minds of her servitors alike. His hand immediately dropped from its ready stance at this weapon. The fighter blinked, nearly stupefied by what he’d heard. He’d never before heard the Marauder use the word ‘please’. Something wasn’t right.
Seemingly having elicited a similar reaction from her guards, Toras burst forward, thrusting them aside. Quickly reaching out for the handle, he swung the door inward and forced his way past them into the darkened room beyond.
*****
Though he’d never been to her private chambers before, he’d expected something much more than the nearly pitch-black chamber he stood within. There were no candles. No incense. No elaborate and ostentatious feast. No debtor being tortured in the corner. No naked maidens or youths peeling grapes to hand-feed the fiend as she lay upon a plush divan.
Toras found none of that.
There in the darkness he found only a dark chamber upon whose marble tiles he now stood, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and at the edge of his senses the sound of labored breathing and a soft, erratic sobbing.
“Shemeska, I only want to see our business concluded once and for all.” Toras called out in the direction of the labored breathing, “I just need this to be…”
The fiend’s physical voice, sharp and poisonous as ever, and yet somehow carrying more bloody vitriol than ever before abruptly cut him short. What was more though, was that the fiend’s voice carried hurt: her own.
“Get the f*ck out Toras,” Shemeska wheezed, followed by a wet cough and the scent of blood. “Just get the f*ck out…”
Without thinking, Toras held up his right hand, called upon his celestial ancestry and conjured a brilliant ball of light into being. Immediately the door slammed shut and locked behind him simultaneously as the light snapped into existence, revealing a scene of horror that took Toras’s breath away.
A dozen feet away, Shemeska looked up from her desk, snarling and scowling. The most powerful creature in Sigil sat alone in the darkness, wearing her favorite, iconic gown, her normally pristine copper fur matted with her own blood. She looked up with her right eye, bloodshot and inflamed, makeup smeared and running down her cheeks and muzzle from her tears, but it was her left eye that drew a gasp from her visitor: Shemeska’s left eye had been gouged out and the bloody, empty socket stared up at Toras sightlessly.
Reaching up, she futilely tried to form and arrange her crown from a newly pruned tangle of razorvine, failing wretchedly, fumbling in the attempt with her non-dominant hand alone. Her right arm in its entirety had been ripped from her shoulder and only a few mangled inches of flesh protruded from the still-bleeding joint. The arm itself was nowhere to be seen.
Meeting Toras’s gaze, the crippled fiend shuddered and began to cry.
****
Back in the present:
In the Hive a fire genasi merchant from the Outlands by the name of Jendia Osuvidi finished her last drink at the Bottle and Jug, said her farewells to the others at her table and made for the door. Her time in Sigil had been profitable, and the smile radiating from her face and present in the flickering tongues of flame that danced across her head made that more than obvious. The contracts in her satchel carried with them the entirety of her prior year’s profit, and all of that garnered now in a single evening.
Sigil’s commerce had been thrown into disarray in the past several years with the dissolution, death, or self-exile of the various Factions. Risen up from those ashes however were a smaller number of great engines of commerce, or perhaps it might have been better to describe some of them as great slumbering dragons finally woken from their slumber, or finally slouching free of their lairs, there now in the greasy daylight of the City of Doors, there to gather up the wealth that rightfully belonged to them. She’d entered Sigil to do business with three of them: Estavan of the Planar Trade Consortium, Zadara the Titan of Potential, and the wealthiest of that group of hungry wyrms of coin: Shemeska the Marauder.
In the space of two days she’d struck bargains with all three, though she’d only done so with the latter by authorized proxy. A shame she thought, as she preferred to meet in person so as to encourage a personal touch that led to future business, though given the fiend’s mercurial reputation, that might have been for the best.
It was only a short walk to the portal by which she’d depart Sigil and there back to her estate within the Plane of Fire which contrary to the first thoughts of virtually every occupant of the Outer Planes, was not present in the City of Brass. She laughed at how so many of them seemed to think –everything– in her native plane was on that one city, grand as it was it was only one city.
“They think they know everything and all the rest of us are rubes!” The genasi laughed, pulling out the amethyst crystal wrapped in a strip of red velvet that would activate the portal by which she’d depart back to her home plane, “I can only imagine most of them trying to fumble their way about the Inner Planes…”
With a flicker flash of light the portal opened, a swirling whirl of crimson, orange, and bits of teal mixed in, shedding a beautiful spread of light across the cobblestones and the adjacent wall of a book-binder’s shop. Smiling at her good fortune the genasi stepped through and was gone.
As she did so however, and in the split second before the portal closed upon itself with her passage, something else entered into the City of Doors, something normally restricted from common entry. Not a God, no, nothing so great as one of the Powers themselves, but a whisper from one, a gentle caress, a kiss to a beloved servitor yes.
Simultaneously, back in the Portal Jammer, Tristol lay asleep in bed.
With Nisha at his side amidst a pile of pillows, each labeled “Nisha’s Pillow Fort”, the aasimar’s eyelids were shut tight with his eyes silently twitching in the tumultuous dreams of REM cycle slumber.
Over the past year the wizard’s dreams hadn’t always been a portent of anything good, either standard nightmares or curses wrought of touching the wrong things in the depths of Pandemonium. Tonight however would be different.
The dreamscape that formed about his consciousness rose up as a silvery mist, and he a disembodied bundle of senses wandering aimlessly. Gradually though his body manifested and he walked through the mist, aware only of a tugging sensation and a distant light as his surroundings likewise accreted out of the substance of dreams and divine will.
The sand was harsh and cool beneath Tristol’s feet as he strode through the wastes of the Anauroch desert. All around him the landscape twisted and reshaped itself with transient visual echoes of what had been: great shadows drifted across the desert floor as the Netherese enclaves drifted miles overheard at their height, those same enclaves hung in the air, tumbling at odd angles, forever trapped in the moment of their terrible fall, and then the desert floor was littered with the shades of those same great cities fallen, broken, and burning, soon to be covered over by the sands and many centuries of elapsed time.
Tristol walked onwards through the carnage and the glory transposed at once on the desert sands, following the light of a single, blue-white star that shown in the distance, calling him onwards, calling him closer, calling out to him by name even as through his mind, borne upon his memories, all Tristol could hear was the merciless, mocking laughter of Vorkannis the Ebon, and even there in his dream, the Oinoloth’s form hung there in the sky like a bleak, unwanted moon shining down on the pointless destruction it had caused, that same laughter booming out, if only in memory.
Snarling up at the dark blot high above, Tristol fixed his eyes upon the glowing star and continued his trek through the sands, eventually reaching a mountain that rose up above the surrounding terrain, the mountain itself the overturned peak that served as the base of Karse enclave, now fallen to the desert floor. Clambering his way from base to peak, Tristol stood at the summit, bathed in the brilliant, cool light of the star which now seemed nearly close enough that he could touch it.
That was when he heard her voice.
“My child, my beloved child,” Mystra, the Torillian goddess of magic whispered down on waves of starlight, “I saw you kneel down at the pool where once the Heart of Karsus lay. I looked into your heart in that moment and I smiled.”
The star’s light enveloped Tristol as he dreamed, illuminating him so greatly that it became difficult to say where the light ended and Tristol began.
“Know Tristol that I heard your cries of anguish there as you witnessed what befell me and my incarnation then during the fall of Netheril. Know my child that I heard your vow which you uttered then. I heard you vow and I know your heart was true in your promise then.”
The blue-white star that surrounded him twinkled and an outline of a human woman limned in silvery-blue flames stood before him and touched his cheek, gesturing for him to stand from where he’d knelt down.
“Know Tristol that I love you, and to you my servant I grant the fruits and responsibilities of that adoration. Use this to bring your vow to completion. The Oinoloth laughed as Netheril burned and I perished, but he cannot laugh forever. Now awaken my child, awaken my Chosen and embrace what you are.”
In his bedroom in Sigil, Tristol gasped and opened his eyes, tossing aside the sheets and getting to his feet, his heart pounding in his chest and his eyes squinting from the sudden, searing light. That same brilliant silvery-blue light from his dream now radiated through his room, and distantly he heard Nisha mutter something and grab his pillow to block out the sudden unwelcome radiance.
Tristol stumbled to the windows, intending to pull the curtains and shut out the light burning into the room, but then he realized that the light wasn’t out there on the street, flooding into his bedroom: the light was there inside, right where he stood.
Tristol’s eyes went wide as he held up his hands and beheld the burning flames of silverfire radiating up from his flesh. Tristol watched them burn and then as he remembered his dream and the words of Mystra, he willed it to cease, knowing what his goddess had given him and what she required of him.
His eyes sparkling with pride and awe, Tristol smiled and glanced back to Nisha curled up naked on the bed. He’d tell her in the morning, and oh it would be a tale to tell, and for the first time since he’d come to Sigil he felt like he could actually accomplish something against the forces of Evil and more specifically against the plots and plans of the Oinoloth himself.
****
