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Story Hour
Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
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<blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 7548920" data-attributes="member: 11697"><p>As their eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond the great bronze doors of Portent’s Great Hall, the first things they noticed were Laughing Jane’s eyes. A glimpse of yellowed, crooked teeth flashing in a grim smile as the sudden light exposed her, but above that the absence of normal eyes and instead a quartet of reddish serpentine slits moving, bobbing, and then softly hissing their greetings.</p><p></p><p>The ancient tiefling stood by herself, standing next to the morbid throne that grew up from the exposed bedrock there at the room’s center where the polished flagstones reached to within an inch of it and went no further. She wore rags, her feet were bare and her toenails ragged and claw-like, her hair was a tangled mess never brushed in centuries, and her sallow skin stretched tight against her bones, filthy and marked by age and dirt.</p><p></p><p>As ancient as Laughing Jane was, the throne was older still. A bizarre amalgamation of disparate bones fused together in an arrangement no sane creature would ever anatomically possess, it waited there for a creature to sit, hauntingly reminding them of nothing so much as the Seige Malicious atop of Khin-Oin, a comparison that might not have been entirely off base.</p><p></p><p>Surrounding the ancient tiefling though, the most disturbing element of the Great Hall was that it was empty; vacuously so. While the streets of Portent were filled with dust, dirt, and all manner of typical refuse found in the streets of an urbanized portion of the Lower Planes, that abruptly ended at the entryway. Not a speck of dust or dirt lay upon the cold flagstones within the building. Even with the door open and random gusts of wind blowing out amidst the streets, nothing entered the Great Hall to sully it.</p><p></p><p>“Well that’s not ominous at all…” Toras muttered, leaving it open whether he was referring to the unnatural emptiness of the Great Hall’s interior or to the smiling, ancient tiefling that was Laughing Jane who waited therein.</p><p></p><p>“Hopefully we can find some answers.” Clueless glanced warily at the tiefling, and at the throne beside her.</p><p></p><p>“Rather than just more questions like usual…” Fyrehowl muttered.</p><p></p><p>Laughing Jane said nothing overt as the party approached her, though the serpents that sprouted from her eye sockets exchanged glances and whispered sibilantly to one another as if sharing secret comments not meant for mortal ears. To break that silence and address the reason for which they’d traveled there from Sigil, Clueless was the first to pose a question.</p><p></p><p>“Who are you?” The bladesinger asked.</p><p></p><p>“I am Laughing Jane,” The ancient tiefling chuckled, her soft laughter followed by the trailing comments of her serpents, “A mouthpiece. Forsaken. Fought over but never claimed. A sifter of fitful dreams.”</p><p></p><p>“What are you?”</p><p></p><p>“A tiefling.” Jane quipped, “Once upon a time, so long ago I can scarcely remember. I no longer know what I was before I was here. Before I sat. Before Portent was a city, but only a stele sitting atop a prison/tomb.”</p><p></p><p>“What did I say about more questions?” Fyrehowl sighed, drawing forth a blizzard of angry hissing from Laughing Jane’s serpents.</p><p></p><p>“Do you know why we’re here?” Tristol asked, his tail bottle brushed as he glanced at the throne.</p><p></p><p>“The same reason that any come here?” Jane chuckled and spread her arms wide, “To know the future as I perceive it, or for the rare occasion that a ‘loth arrives, to sit upon the throne.”</p><p></p><p>She hadn’t directly answered their question, but her answer segued into another.</p><p></p><p>“One of the many gang members out there in the streets told us that the Oinoloth himself came here.” Tristol glanced back towards the door behind them, “Why did he come here? What was he searching for?”</p><p></p><p>The reaction was immediate as Laughing Jane snarled, threw her hands in the air and screamed in agonized, furious and embittered impotent rage while the serpents hissed in equal fury, writhing in the air before her face.</p><p></p><p>“The Oinoloth. He came to this place. He came here not to seek but to speak and to mock. There was nothing here for him. Nothing he needed.” Jane hissed, “He ignored us. He hurt us! He sat upon the throne. The self-important arcanaloth to whom Khin-Oin was but a disparaged stepping stone. He sat upon the throne and he laughed!”</p><p></p><p>“What is the throne?” Florian asked.</p><p></p><p>“Nothing to you. Nothing unless it deigns to speak to you from its slumber.”</p><p></p><p>The cleric frowned, “That doesn’t answer the question.”</p><p></p><p>Laughing Jane smirked knowingly and the serpents that grew from her eye sockets once again exchanged glances and whispered, debating perhaps how they should answer, or perhaps how far they were –allowed- to answer, given the source of that knowledge locked far below the streets of Portent.</p><p></p><p>“It is a tether to the slumbering mind of Portent’s father/mother.” The tiefling whispered, with her serpents following along as sibilant trailing echoes, drawing immediate expressions of concern and dread from the last amalgamation of words, words that were the hallmark of the baern. A baernaloth slumbered below the Great Hell. “The great one betrayed and imprisoned by the Demented long before the flight of Apomps. Before the abdication of Yrsinius the Elder. Before Tegresin’s flight. Before the formation of Gehenna or Carceri. Before the yugoloths. Before the MISTAKE. Before the fool’s errand. Before the Architect’s creation of…”</p><p></p><p>Halfway through her ranting answer her hands had already begun to tremble, her words began to slur, and as her words trailed off blood began to leak from her ears and abruptly she fell to the ground in a brutally convulsive seizure. On the ground, her serpents writhed and their own slit eyes rattled back and forth as her mouth jerked and failed to form the words she desperately wanted to relay. There were limitations to her gift of “prophecy” channeling the black knowledge of the baernaloth far below. </p><p></p><p>Eventually Laughing Jane’s convulsions ceased, she wiped the foam from her lips, and with a snarl and chorus of hisses, she slowly stood back up. She had nothing more to add to her previous statement however, and instead she waited for the next question.</p><p></p><p>“We came here looking for the answer to one question.” Clueless stated, “Centuries ago, Lariset the Inescapable, Factol of the Fraternity of Order came here to Portent. We don’t know –why– she came, but while she was here she met a man named Cilret Leobtav, a man who shouldn’t have existed at that point in history because he wouldn’t have been born for centuries still. She talked to him and something that she learned from him set her upon the path to discovering something that she thought was a loophole in the laws of creation, but it seems that it was something more. Something hidden. We don’t know what it was, but the Oinoloth is obsessed with it and whatever it is, whatever his reasons, we need to stop him.”</p><p></p><p>Laughing Jane smiled. She knew why they’d come, and finally they’d asked the question that she’d been waiting to answer.</p><p></p><p>“This one is silent.” One serpent spoke, Laughing Jane motioning to the throne and then at her feet, “Slumbering fitfully…”</p><p></p><p>“Furious raging, betrayed, bitter…” The second serpent hissed in response.</p><p></p><p>“This one will not answer. Not you.” The first sibilantly whispered, “Another though. Another I feel.”</p><p></p><p>“Brilliant, glowing,” Rejoined the second, “Burning Bright. Like a Torch.”</p><p></p><p>The assembled companions exchanged glances, picking up on her allusions, but needing more details to be certain.</p><p></p><p>“Lit in blood and paved in lies, there upon the slopes of Karal, Maygel, and Dohin…” Laughing Jane grinned, exposing ragged, yellowed teeth and bleeding gums.</p><p></p><p>“That’s Gehenna’s gatetown in the Outlands.” Tristol mused, “Torch.”</p><p></p><p>“What’s in Torch?” Clueless asked, “Why do we need to go there? We came here to find what Lariset discovered.”</p><p></p><p>“What you seek: answers.” The serpents hissed and they and Jane replied collectively, “In Gehenna’s gatetown. A short conceptual stroll. There they wait. There they weave. There they smile in the darkness. There they wait for you in Dubai’s Obscure Woe.”</p><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">****<p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“You have questions Shylara,” The Oinoloth whispered with an almost amused tone to his voice, though he never turned to glance at the Overlord of Carceri as she struggled to hold aloft the great tome that she’d been instructed to display. “They boil and froth at the edges of your conscious thought even as they seek to keep them obscured below a pot lid of fear and worry. You question why I would create the creatures you see here before you: mezzoloths infused with each of the inter-cardinal elements. Hold those questions to yourself until you have seen me do the same with other lesser yugoloths and then perhaps a greater yugoloth as well. Whatever it is that I need I will fashion. They are tools to be used and if necessary to be broken in my service, but you know that well enough on your own...”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">Shylara the Manged whimpered, but Vorkannis paid her no heed as he watched the lesser yugoloths suffer and then stabilize against the admixture of elemental energies perfusing their bodies. The tools were forged and ready to use for the specialized task that he would have need of them for in the immediate future.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“There is also the unspoken question brewing in your mind amidst a thick syrup of jealousy regarding why your former mentor, mistress, and lover Shemeska was present in this chamber before I ever invited you.” The Oinoloth let the statement linger in the air, and only when he heard the sob of bitter disappointment rise up from his consort did he deign to reply. “I could always gift you Shylara with the same attention that I gave to her. Unlike the Marauder however, I suspect that you wouldn’t mind having your teeth broken, an eye gouged out, and an arm ripped off while I snarled and laughed. Wretch you’d enjoy it…”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">The soft sobbing briefly erupted with a burst of nervous, giddy laughter, answer the Oinoloth’s hypothetical with precisely the answer that he expected. This time however he gave no response and let his consort stew in her own thoughts, both bitter and obsessive alike.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">For the next hour the Oinoloth made careful notations by hand in one of the grimoires kept there, each of them near or actual artifact level. The specific tome he added his work to was one of those originally penned by Larsdana Ap Neut, first Magistrix of the Fourfold Furnace, Helekanalaith’s vanished teacher and predecessor. What was more, the Oinoloth was also constructing something as he wrote, carefully carving a string of symbols into an object laying next to the tome, though from her static position holding aloft another of the vanished arcanaloth lord’s tomes, she could not be certain what it precisely was.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“Soon I will be sending my armies into the depths of the elemental planes to find something and return it to me. Pieces of a broken, lost and hidden thing that will be mine.” The Oinoloth turned and looked at his consort, his eyes ablaze with lurid pink light, “This is of the utmost importance to me, to us, and the race of yugoloths as a whole. Nothing is of greater importance. Nothing!”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">In the far corner of the chamber, swallowed in suffocating darkness, far from Shylara’s eyes, the pile of frozen ashes that bore Vorkannis’s back and forth footprints twitched and moved in resonance with the Oinoloth’s words.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“You will train and select those who will suffer and die for me far from the Lower Planes. As you suffer for me, you will select those to undergo the process that you have seen me fashion and perfect. Choose well.”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“Thank you my Oinoloth,” Shylara stuttered, “Thank you my master…”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“Be proud of yourself Shylara,” Vorkannis spoke with an audible smile crossing his muzzle, “Not only for the task that I assign to you, but also because soon this chamber will have only its third visitor among those that I’ve allowed to enter. Of those visitors, you will have suffered the least at my hands.”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">The Overlord of Carceri swallowed hard, uncertain in her mind if she was glad for that distinction, given the presence of Shemeska’s blood and broken teeth upon the floor, or if she was jealous. Her thoughts on the matter however did not last long.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“Our guest has arrived.” Vorkannis intoned, “Put down the book and open the door for them.”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">Shylara nodded wordlessly, placed the book down with a soft thud upon the table where she’d first retrieved it from, and made for the doors. There hadn’t been a knock or a telepathic call, but as the arcanaloth set her hands upon the silver handles of the massive doors, wincing at the pain as she wrenched them open, she found an ultroloth waiting upon the other side, patient, emotionless, and silent.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">The ultroloth stood there alone, dressed in purple robes, a rod and a sword tucked neatly into the sash it wore about its waist. Under the Oinoloth’s new structure of power, many ultroloths had taken to further decoration and unique styles by which to differentiate themselves. The ultroloths that had served as doormen when Shemeska had stood there some time before were gone, leaving the present greater yugoloth without seeming peer.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center"><em>“I am here at the Oinoloth’s call.”</em> The ultroloth, Morenikus ib Khalas’s telepathic voice carried the impression of daggers plunging into naked, expectant flesh. The fiend’s voice also carried the faint undertone of disgust as its eyes matched with Shylara’s own color-shifting orbs, viewing her very existence as a mockery of the proper order of the yugoloth hierarchy.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“Enter Morenikus ib Khalas,” Vorkannis called out, “Once servitor of Mydianchlarus, once advisor to Cholerix, once student of Larsdana ap Neut, and now servitor to myself I call you here with a task.”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">The ultroloth stepped into the chamber past Shylara the Manged who said nothing but simply lowered her head and closed the doors behind the gray-skinned, purple-robed yugoloth. The doors shuddered heavily as they sealed in place with a hideous finality.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“I will be sending my forces into the elemental planes and I will require a chosen leader to direct them.” Vorkannis had yet to turn towards the ultroloth as he spoke, instead he stood with his back turned, his head down, and his hands cradled around an object, the same object that he’d been working on for some time. “Your past experience makes you ideal for this role, and I would have you there as my representative.”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">The ultroloth gave a bow and stepped forward, its eyes blazing with lurid, multicolored light, approaching to within an arm’s distance of Vorkannis.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center"><em>“Whatever my past actions under the rule of other, lesser Masters of Khin-Oin, I assure you my Oinoloth that…”</em></p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“Silence subcreature.” Vorkannis chuckled, still not turning around to actually face the ultroloth now on its knees in confused, terrified supplication, “You have betrayed every superior that you have ever had, from your status as mezzoloth through your rise through the ranks of the Tower Arcane, and for that I am pleased with you. That is expected. That is becoming of you as a yugoloth. But I cannot tolerate your betrayal of myself.”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center"><em>“My Oinoloth I have never betrayed you!”</em> Morenikus’s mental voice hummed with barely suppressed rage as it spoke the truth, from its own perspective as its hands pounded into the floor, the colors from its eyes shifting towards reds and purples.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“You have though wretch…” Vorkannis sighed, “Even if you aren’t aware of it.”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">Behind the ultroloth, Shylara’s eyes went wide and involuntarily she licked her lips and trembled.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">Morenikus’s telepathy stammered, wildly uncertain of how to respond as the Oinoloth’s drifting cloud of shadowy filaments crept across the space between. They curled up to caress the ultroloth’s chin, stroking across its face and holding the fiend’s head in place.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center"><em>“Master I…”</em></p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">Without warning the Oinoloth spun around in place. Robes whirling and shadows curdling in place, eyes burning with albino radiance, one arm extended to bury a spike of cobalt blue crystal into the ultroloth’s forehead with a sickeningly wet crunch.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“Ignorant, all of you.” Vorkannis sneered, looking down at the fiend as blood and radiant cerebrospinal fluids bubbled up from the wound, sizzling as it came into contact with the crystalline spike that now glimmered with an internal light, illuminating the myriad symbols carefully etched into its surface and interior.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">The ultroloth blinked and twitched, a telepathic background of agony and blizzard of questions wailing out from its mind even as the crystal driven deep into its brain sizzled and hummed with activating magical puissance. Vorkannis smiled as he watched the ultroloth blink one final time before its eyes turned the same shade of pink as his own.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">“Your forces Shylara, they will not make their trip so far from the Waste alone.” Vorkannis’s words were echoed by the telepathic call of his ultroloth puppet who now stood up, its motions mirroring that of its master. “They will have me to accompany them by proxy…”</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center"></p><p style="text-align: center">****</p></p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">While the petty lords of Torch waged their subtle and occasionally bloody battles of supremacy over one another through the urban hellscape of Gehenna's gatetown, lit by the burning light of the burg's three volcanic mounts and the looming, blood-red portal to the Fourfold Furnace overhead, perched amidst the sulfurous clouds, Dubai's Obscure Woe remained free of that strife and bloodshed. The citizens and fiendish immigrants alike wanted nothing to the do with the forsaken parcel of property that stood at the edge of the Blood Swamp, there at the gatetown's</p> <p style="text-align: center">periphery as it had for as long as any could remember, and which some legends claimed predated Torch in its entirety. The ruined estate brooded in haunted stasis, the portal in the distance shedding a burning glow and casting long shadows, but oddly the light from distant Gehenna felt warming and comfortable to any who stood there on the broken stones of that forgotten place.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">Occasionally a visitor to Torch would visit, a citizen marked for death by ones of Torch's gangs would flee there in desperate dismissal of the local superstitious warnings, or a cleric of a benevolent power would travel there to banish whatever gloom resided therein. The result was the same in each and every case. The brave, the ignorant, the desperate, and the foolishly righteous all met the same fate: they never returned from their visit. Oh to be sure there were legends of those who survived a visit, but nothing concrete, and each instance seemed to only be those with a cursory transit of the estate's periphery and not actually a visit into the interior, and not at all a lengthy stay, whatever the reason. The occupant -the lone occupant- of that forsaken place brooked neither attention nor visitors, unless it had lured them there for its own purposes.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">The vanished with connections to larger organizations, factions, guilds, or adventuring companies, or those clerics strict in their faith and missed by their ecclesiastical fellows had investigations into their deaths. Those investigators vanished as well when they came. Divinations seeking the fate of either uniformly returned nothing. They were not alive, nor dead, nor trapped or imprisoned in any capacity magical or mundane: they simply no longer existed so far as the scrying lens, elaborate arcane legend lore, or divine prognostication could see.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">Whatever the fate of the vanished few, further divinations as to that ruined, once-grand hovel at the edges of the Blood Swamp returned nothing profound in the slightest.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">Nothing.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">Dubai's Obscure Woe was a black hole of information into which investigators fell, and when they did, they discovered nothing, or they themselves vanished. If anything those who survived the attempts would discover that it had originally been constructed by a tiefling wizard by the name of Daruib Chamek who lived in Torch for several decades before dying at the hands of a gacholoth assassin after he ran afoul of a nameless ultroloth's ire. After his death the estate fell into ruin and the wizard's experiments and decaying spellwork proved a sufficient hazard to prevent it from being looted by Torch's desperate or transient overlords. There was apparently nothing of note.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">Yet there was something there and clearly it hungered.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">A shadow fell across the ground, blotting out the crimson light shed across one of the inner courtyards. The solitary figure emerged out of a ripple in the fabric of space, a tear in the fabric of the Outlands already blurred from its close metaphysical proximity to Gehenna, though this tear was to the Gray Waste. It stepped forward unsteadily across the broken, unevenly settled cobblestones, leading not with a foot, but with a staff, then a foot, and then dragging along after itself one leg, withered and crippled.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">The response of the environment around the figure was immediate, no matter who or what they were, just as they would have one of Torch's natives or one the past victims who unwisely visited. Like a fly landing upon a hungry spider's web, each footstep taken set off a ripple of dweomers more ancient than Gehenna itself, Dubai's Obscure Woe being only a surface, temporal gloss of location atop a lair woven from the fabric of the Waste, where it now resided. The figure paid it no heed, and in turn the spells recognized their nature and took no actions other than to inform their weaver that a guest, a family member even, had arrived and come calling.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">The figure slowly walked forward in shambling, crippled fashion, pausing to glance at a subtle sign of shimmering movement to their right, reaching up to brush a strand of golden hair from her face and behind a slightly curved planetouched horn of a tiefling or aasimar, though in truth they were neither. Gazing down at her, a drifting, translucent figure quivered and shifted its insectile mandibles. She smirked at the ghost mezzoloth's paradoxical, impossible existence and its reaction to her presence, and then she chuckled as her own shadow pooled about her feet and moving independently of her physical form's motions, raced across the space between then reached up to caress the fiend's face. It shuddered in a transposition of agony and quasi-religious ecstasy, and as it reacted she walked on, turning away and ignoring it like a master giving a beloved pet a perfunctory pat on the head before going about their other tasks. </p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">She continued her trek deeper into the main structure at the heart of the ruined estate, smiling as the structure transitioned from metaphysical neutrality to Evil and she descended into the lightless cavern below the ground level to meet the structure's master. Each step now echoed not with staff and feet on stone, but the soft, wet shuffle of the same passing through puddles of slick, slightly viscous mucus that covered every surface, walls, floor, and ceiling alike.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">"I am here brother/sister." Tellura ibn Shartalan smiled and with her words the cavern's gloom evaporated.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">In response to her greeting, two eyes opened as the figure sitting and nearly fused into the cavern's far wall stirred from its torpor. Milky and rheumatic, corrosive in their feigned frailty, the baernaloth's eyes shed a cold and horrific light across the room, illuminating the visitor's form and the surrounding, organic walls of their surroundings. Coating every surface the mucoid matrix slowly shifted and undulated with unnatural peristalsis and as it caught and refracted the light, the words embedded, trapped, and imprisoned within its murky depths were revealed, each of them a name, a promise, a lie.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">"She whispers, she hints, she pulls from the dreams of our forgotten brother/sister." A phlegmatic chuckle emerged from the brittle lips of Daru ib Shamiq, the Lie Weaver. "They will listen and they will come, dancing upon the web of words and foretold inevitability: just as we have foreseen. Everything falls as we have desired. Everything occurs as we have ordained." </p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">The two baernaloths stared into each other's eyes as a blizzard of telepathic information flowed between the two of them, at the end of which the Shepherdess nodded and smiled, her face cherubic.</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center">"Come children." Tellura whispered, "Come mortal little lambs. Here there is bloodshed and there are lies."</p> <p style="text-align: center"></p> <p style="text-align: center"></p><p style="text-align: center">****</p> </p> </p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Shemeska, post: 7548920, member: 11697"] As their eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond the great bronze doors of Portent’s Great Hall, the first things they noticed were Laughing Jane’s eyes. A glimpse of yellowed, crooked teeth flashing in a grim smile as the sudden light exposed her, but above that the absence of normal eyes and instead a quartet of reddish serpentine slits moving, bobbing, and then softly hissing their greetings. The ancient tiefling stood by herself, standing next to the morbid throne that grew up from the exposed bedrock there at the room’s center where the polished flagstones reached to within an inch of it and went no further. She wore rags, her feet were bare and her toenails ragged and claw-like, her hair was a tangled mess never brushed in centuries, and her sallow skin stretched tight against her bones, filthy and marked by age and dirt. As ancient as Laughing Jane was, the throne was older still. A bizarre amalgamation of disparate bones fused together in an arrangement no sane creature would ever anatomically possess, it waited there for a creature to sit, hauntingly reminding them of nothing so much as the Seige Malicious atop of Khin-Oin, a comparison that might not have been entirely off base. Surrounding the ancient tiefling though, the most disturbing element of the Great Hall was that it was empty; vacuously so. While the streets of Portent were filled with dust, dirt, and all manner of typical refuse found in the streets of an urbanized portion of the Lower Planes, that abruptly ended at the entryway. Not a speck of dust or dirt lay upon the cold flagstones within the building. Even with the door open and random gusts of wind blowing out amidst the streets, nothing entered the Great Hall to sully it. “Well that’s not ominous at all…” Toras muttered, leaving it open whether he was referring to the unnatural emptiness of the Great Hall’s interior or to the smiling, ancient tiefling that was Laughing Jane who waited therein. “Hopefully we can find some answers.” Clueless glanced warily at the tiefling, and at the throne beside her. “Rather than just more questions like usual…” Fyrehowl muttered. Laughing Jane said nothing overt as the party approached her, though the serpents that sprouted from her eye sockets exchanged glances and whispered sibilantly to one another as if sharing secret comments not meant for mortal ears. To break that silence and address the reason for which they’d traveled there from Sigil, Clueless was the first to pose a question. “Who are you?” The bladesinger asked. “I am Laughing Jane,” The ancient tiefling chuckled, her soft laughter followed by the trailing comments of her serpents, “A mouthpiece. Forsaken. Fought over but never claimed. A sifter of fitful dreams.” “What are you?” “A tiefling.” Jane quipped, “Once upon a time, so long ago I can scarcely remember. I no longer know what I was before I was here. Before I sat. Before Portent was a city, but only a stele sitting atop a prison/tomb.” “What did I say about more questions?” Fyrehowl sighed, drawing forth a blizzard of angry hissing from Laughing Jane’s serpents. “Do you know why we’re here?” Tristol asked, his tail bottle brushed as he glanced at the throne. “The same reason that any come here?” Jane chuckled and spread her arms wide, “To know the future as I perceive it, or for the rare occasion that a ‘loth arrives, to sit upon the throne.” She hadn’t directly answered their question, but her answer segued into another. “One of the many gang members out there in the streets told us that the Oinoloth himself came here.” Tristol glanced back towards the door behind them, “Why did he come here? What was he searching for?” The reaction was immediate as Laughing Jane snarled, threw her hands in the air and screamed in agonized, furious and embittered impotent rage while the serpents hissed in equal fury, writhing in the air before her face. “The Oinoloth. He came to this place. He came here not to seek but to speak and to mock. There was nothing here for him. Nothing he needed.” Jane hissed, “He ignored us. He hurt us! He sat upon the throne. The self-important arcanaloth to whom Khin-Oin was but a disparaged stepping stone. He sat upon the throne and he laughed!” “What is the throne?” Florian asked. “Nothing to you. Nothing unless it deigns to speak to you from its slumber.” The cleric frowned, “That doesn’t answer the question.” Laughing Jane smirked knowingly and the serpents that grew from her eye sockets once again exchanged glances and whispered, debating perhaps how they should answer, or perhaps how far they were –allowed- to answer, given the source of that knowledge locked far below the streets of Portent. “It is a tether to the slumbering mind of Portent’s father/mother.” The tiefling whispered, with her serpents following along as sibilant trailing echoes, drawing immediate expressions of concern and dread from the last amalgamation of words, words that were the hallmark of the baern. A baernaloth slumbered below the Great Hell. “The great one betrayed and imprisoned by the Demented long before the flight of Apomps. Before the abdication of Yrsinius the Elder. Before Tegresin’s flight. Before the formation of Gehenna or Carceri. Before the yugoloths. Before the MISTAKE. Before the fool’s errand. Before the Architect’s creation of…” Halfway through her ranting answer her hands had already begun to tremble, her words began to slur, and as her words trailed off blood began to leak from her ears and abruptly she fell to the ground in a brutally convulsive seizure. On the ground, her serpents writhed and their own slit eyes rattled back and forth as her mouth jerked and failed to form the words she desperately wanted to relay. There were limitations to her gift of “prophecy” channeling the black knowledge of the baernaloth far below. Eventually Laughing Jane’s convulsions ceased, she wiped the foam from her lips, and with a snarl and chorus of hisses, she slowly stood back up. She had nothing more to add to her previous statement however, and instead she waited for the next question. “We came here looking for the answer to one question.” Clueless stated, “Centuries ago, Lariset the Inescapable, Factol of the Fraternity of Order came here to Portent. We don’t know –why– she came, but while she was here she met a man named Cilret Leobtav, a man who shouldn’t have existed at that point in history because he wouldn’t have been born for centuries still. She talked to him and something that she learned from him set her upon the path to discovering something that she thought was a loophole in the laws of creation, but it seems that it was something more. Something hidden. We don’t know what it was, but the Oinoloth is obsessed with it and whatever it is, whatever his reasons, we need to stop him.” Laughing Jane smiled. She knew why they’d come, and finally they’d asked the question that she’d been waiting to answer. “This one is silent.” One serpent spoke, Laughing Jane motioning to the throne and then at her feet, “Slumbering fitfully…” “Furious raging, betrayed, bitter…” The second serpent hissed in response. “This one will not answer. Not you.” The first sibilantly whispered, “Another though. Another I feel.” “Brilliant, glowing,” Rejoined the second, “Burning Bright. Like a Torch.” The assembled companions exchanged glances, picking up on her allusions, but needing more details to be certain. “Lit in blood and paved in lies, there upon the slopes of Karal, Maygel, and Dohin…” Laughing Jane grinned, exposing ragged, yellowed teeth and bleeding gums. “That’s Gehenna’s gatetown in the Outlands.” Tristol mused, “Torch.” “What’s in Torch?” Clueless asked, “Why do we need to go there? We came here to find what Lariset discovered.” “What you seek: answers.” The serpents hissed and they and Jane replied collectively, “In Gehenna’s gatetown. A short conceptual stroll. There they wait. There they weave. There they smile in the darkness. There they wait for you in Dubai’s Obscure Woe.” [center]****[center] “You have questions Shylara,” The Oinoloth whispered with an almost amused tone to his voice, though he never turned to glance at the Overlord of Carceri as she struggled to hold aloft the great tome that she’d been instructed to display. “They boil and froth at the edges of your conscious thought even as they seek to keep them obscured below a pot lid of fear and worry. You question why I would create the creatures you see here before you: mezzoloths infused with each of the inter-cardinal elements. Hold those questions to yourself until you have seen me do the same with other lesser yugoloths and then perhaps a greater yugoloth as well. Whatever it is that I need I will fashion. They are tools to be used and if necessary to be broken in my service, but you know that well enough on your own...” Shylara the Manged whimpered, but Vorkannis paid her no heed as he watched the lesser yugoloths suffer and then stabilize against the admixture of elemental energies perfusing their bodies. The tools were forged and ready to use for the specialized task that he would have need of them for in the immediate future. “There is also the unspoken question brewing in your mind amidst a thick syrup of jealousy regarding why your former mentor, mistress, and lover Shemeska was present in this chamber before I ever invited you.” The Oinoloth let the statement linger in the air, and only when he heard the sob of bitter disappointment rise up from his consort did he deign to reply. “I could always gift you Shylara with the same attention that I gave to her. Unlike the Marauder however, I suspect that you wouldn’t mind having your teeth broken, an eye gouged out, and an arm ripped off while I snarled and laughed. Wretch you’d enjoy it…” The soft sobbing briefly erupted with a burst of nervous, giddy laughter, answer the Oinoloth’s hypothetical with precisely the answer that he expected. This time however he gave no response and let his consort stew in her own thoughts, both bitter and obsessive alike. For the next hour the Oinoloth made careful notations by hand in one of the grimoires kept there, each of them near or actual artifact level. The specific tome he added his work to was one of those originally penned by Larsdana Ap Neut, first Magistrix of the Fourfold Furnace, Helekanalaith’s vanished teacher and predecessor. What was more, the Oinoloth was also constructing something as he wrote, carefully carving a string of symbols into an object laying next to the tome, though from her static position holding aloft another of the vanished arcanaloth lord’s tomes, she could not be certain what it precisely was. “Soon I will be sending my armies into the depths of the elemental planes to find something and return it to me. Pieces of a broken, lost and hidden thing that will be mine.” The Oinoloth turned and looked at his consort, his eyes ablaze with lurid pink light, “This is of the utmost importance to me, to us, and the race of yugoloths as a whole. Nothing is of greater importance. Nothing!” In the far corner of the chamber, swallowed in suffocating darkness, far from Shylara’s eyes, the pile of frozen ashes that bore Vorkannis’s back and forth footprints twitched and moved in resonance with the Oinoloth’s words. “You will train and select those who will suffer and die for me far from the Lower Planes. As you suffer for me, you will select those to undergo the process that you have seen me fashion and perfect. Choose well.” “Thank you my Oinoloth,” Shylara stuttered, “Thank you my master…” “Be proud of yourself Shylara,” Vorkannis spoke with an audible smile crossing his muzzle, “Not only for the task that I assign to you, but also because soon this chamber will have only its third visitor among those that I’ve allowed to enter. Of those visitors, you will have suffered the least at my hands.” The Overlord of Carceri swallowed hard, uncertain in her mind if she was glad for that distinction, given the presence of Shemeska’s blood and broken teeth upon the floor, or if she was jealous. Her thoughts on the matter however did not last long. “Our guest has arrived.” Vorkannis intoned, “Put down the book and open the door for them.” Shylara nodded wordlessly, placed the book down with a soft thud upon the table where she’d first retrieved it from, and made for the doors. There hadn’t been a knock or a telepathic call, but as the arcanaloth set her hands upon the silver handles of the massive doors, wincing at the pain as she wrenched them open, she found an ultroloth waiting upon the other side, patient, emotionless, and silent. The ultroloth stood there alone, dressed in purple robes, a rod and a sword tucked neatly into the sash it wore about its waist. Under the Oinoloth’s new structure of power, many ultroloths had taken to further decoration and unique styles by which to differentiate themselves. The ultroloths that had served as doormen when Shemeska had stood there some time before were gone, leaving the present greater yugoloth without seeming peer. [i]“I am here at the Oinoloth’s call.”[/i] The ultroloth, Morenikus ib Khalas’s telepathic voice carried the impression of daggers plunging into naked, expectant flesh. The fiend’s voice also carried the faint undertone of disgust as its eyes matched with Shylara’s own color-shifting orbs, viewing her very existence as a mockery of the proper order of the yugoloth hierarchy. “Enter Morenikus ib Khalas,” Vorkannis called out, “Once servitor of Mydianchlarus, once advisor to Cholerix, once student of Larsdana ap Neut, and now servitor to myself I call you here with a task.” The ultroloth stepped into the chamber past Shylara the Manged who said nothing but simply lowered her head and closed the doors behind the gray-skinned, purple-robed yugoloth. The doors shuddered heavily as they sealed in place with a hideous finality. “I will be sending my forces into the elemental planes and I will require a chosen leader to direct them.” Vorkannis had yet to turn towards the ultroloth as he spoke, instead he stood with his back turned, his head down, and his hands cradled around an object, the same object that he’d been working on for some time. “Your past experience makes you ideal for this role, and I would have you there as my representative.” The ultroloth gave a bow and stepped forward, its eyes blazing with lurid, multicolored light, approaching to within an arm’s distance of Vorkannis. [i]“Whatever my past actions under the rule of other, lesser Masters of Khin-Oin, I assure you my Oinoloth that…”[/i] “Silence subcreature.” Vorkannis chuckled, still not turning around to actually face the ultroloth now on its knees in confused, terrified supplication, “You have betrayed every superior that you have ever had, from your status as mezzoloth through your rise through the ranks of the Tower Arcane, and for that I am pleased with you. That is expected. That is becoming of you as a yugoloth. But I cannot tolerate your betrayal of myself.” [i]“My Oinoloth I have never betrayed you!”[/i] Morenikus’s mental voice hummed with barely suppressed rage as it spoke the truth, from its own perspective as its hands pounded into the floor, the colors from its eyes shifting towards reds and purples. “You have though wretch…” Vorkannis sighed, “Even if you aren’t aware of it.” Behind the ultroloth, Shylara’s eyes went wide and involuntarily she licked her lips and trembled. Morenikus’s telepathy stammered, wildly uncertain of how to respond as the Oinoloth’s drifting cloud of shadowy filaments crept across the space between. They curled up to caress the ultroloth’s chin, stroking across its face and holding the fiend’s head in place. [i]“Master I…”[/i] Without warning the Oinoloth spun around in place. Robes whirling and shadows curdling in place, eyes burning with albino radiance, one arm extended to bury a spike of cobalt blue crystal into the ultroloth’s forehead with a sickeningly wet crunch. “Ignorant, all of you.” Vorkannis sneered, looking down at the fiend as blood and radiant cerebrospinal fluids bubbled up from the wound, sizzling as it came into contact with the crystalline spike that now glimmered with an internal light, illuminating the myriad symbols carefully etched into its surface and interior. The ultroloth blinked and twitched, a telepathic background of agony and blizzard of questions wailing out from its mind even as the crystal driven deep into its brain sizzled and hummed with activating magical puissance. Vorkannis smiled as he watched the ultroloth blink one final time before its eyes turned the same shade of pink as his own. “Your forces Shylara, they will not make their trip so far from the Waste alone.” Vorkannis’s words were echoed by the telepathic call of his ultroloth puppet who now stood up, its motions mirroring that of its master. “They will have me to accompany them by proxy…” [center]****[/center] While the petty lords of Torch waged their subtle and occasionally bloody battles of supremacy over one another through the urban hellscape of Gehenna's gatetown, lit by the burning light of the burg's three volcanic mounts and the looming, blood-red portal to the Fourfold Furnace overhead, perched amidst the sulfurous clouds, Dubai's Obscure Woe remained free of that strife and bloodshed. The citizens and fiendish immigrants alike wanted nothing to the do with the forsaken parcel of property that stood at the edge of the Blood Swamp, there at the gatetown's periphery as it had for as long as any could remember, and which some legends claimed predated Torch in its entirety. The ruined estate brooded in haunted stasis, the portal in the distance shedding a burning glow and casting long shadows, but oddly the light from distant Gehenna felt warming and comfortable to any who stood there on the broken stones of that forgotten place. Occasionally a visitor to Torch would visit, a citizen marked for death by ones of Torch's gangs would flee there in desperate dismissal of the local superstitious warnings, or a cleric of a benevolent power would travel there to banish whatever gloom resided therein. The result was the same in each and every case. The brave, the ignorant, the desperate, and the foolishly righteous all met the same fate: they never returned from their visit. Oh to be sure there were legends of those who survived a visit, but nothing concrete, and each instance seemed to only be those with a cursory transit of the estate's periphery and not actually a visit into the interior, and not at all a lengthy stay, whatever the reason. The occupant -the lone occupant- of that forsaken place brooked neither attention nor visitors, unless it had lured them there for its own purposes. The vanished with connections to larger organizations, factions, guilds, or adventuring companies, or those clerics strict in their faith and missed by their ecclesiastical fellows had investigations into their deaths. Those investigators vanished as well when they came. Divinations seeking the fate of either uniformly returned nothing. They were not alive, nor dead, nor trapped or imprisoned in any capacity magical or mundane: they simply no longer existed so far as the scrying lens, elaborate arcane legend lore, or divine prognostication could see. Whatever the fate of the vanished few, further divinations as to that ruined, once-grand hovel at the edges of the Blood Swamp returned nothing profound in the slightest. Nothing. Dubai's Obscure Woe was a black hole of information into which investigators fell, and when they did, they discovered nothing, or they themselves vanished. If anything those who survived the attempts would discover that it had originally been constructed by a tiefling wizard by the name of Daruib Chamek who lived in Torch for several decades before dying at the hands of a gacholoth assassin after he ran afoul of a nameless ultroloth's ire. After his death the estate fell into ruin and the wizard's experiments and decaying spellwork proved a sufficient hazard to prevent it from being looted by Torch's desperate or transient overlords. There was apparently nothing of note. Yet there was something there and clearly it hungered. A shadow fell across the ground, blotting out the crimson light shed across one of the inner courtyards. The solitary figure emerged out of a ripple in the fabric of space, a tear in the fabric of the Outlands already blurred from its close metaphysical proximity to Gehenna, though this tear was to the Gray Waste. It stepped forward unsteadily across the broken, unevenly settled cobblestones, leading not with a foot, but with a staff, then a foot, and then dragging along after itself one leg, withered and crippled. The response of the environment around the figure was immediate, no matter who or what they were, just as they would have one of Torch's natives or one the past victims who unwisely visited. Like a fly landing upon a hungry spider's web, each footstep taken set off a ripple of dweomers more ancient than Gehenna itself, Dubai's Obscure Woe being only a surface, temporal gloss of location atop a lair woven from the fabric of the Waste, where it now resided. The figure paid it no heed, and in turn the spells recognized their nature and took no actions other than to inform their weaver that a guest, a family member even, had arrived and come calling. The figure slowly walked forward in shambling, crippled fashion, pausing to glance at a subtle sign of shimmering movement to their right, reaching up to brush a strand of golden hair from her face and behind a slightly curved planetouched horn of a tiefling or aasimar, though in truth they were neither. Gazing down at her, a drifting, translucent figure quivered and shifted its insectile mandibles. She smirked at the ghost mezzoloth's paradoxical, impossible existence and its reaction to her presence, and then she chuckled as her own shadow pooled about her feet and moving independently of her physical form's motions, raced across the space between then reached up to caress the fiend's face. It shuddered in a transposition of agony and quasi-religious ecstasy, and as it reacted she walked on, turning away and ignoring it like a master giving a beloved pet a perfunctory pat on the head before going about their other tasks. She continued her trek deeper into the main structure at the heart of the ruined estate, smiling as the structure transitioned from metaphysical neutrality to Evil and she descended into the lightless cavern below the ground level to meet the structure's master. Each step now echoed not with staff and feet on stone, but the soft, wet shuffle of the same passing through puddles of slick, slightly viscous mucus that covered every surface, walls, floor, and ceiling alike. "I am here brother/sister." Tellura ibn Shartalan smiled and with her words the cavern's gloom evaporated. In response to her greeting, two eyes opened as the figure sitting and nearly fused into the cavern's far wall stirred from its torpor. Milky and rheumatic, corrosive in their feigned frailty, the baernaloth's eyes shed a cold and horrific light across the room, illuminating the visitor's form and the surrounding, organic walls of their surroundings. Coating every surface the mucoid matrix slowly shifted and undulated with unnatural peristalsis and as it caught and refracted the light, the words embedded, trapped, and imprisoned within its murky depths were revealed, each of them a name, a promise, a lie. "She whispers, she hints, she pulls from the dreams of our forgotten brother/sister." A phlegmatic chuckle emerged from the brittle lips of Daru ib Shamiq, the Lie Weaver. "They will listen and they will come, dancing upon the web of words and foretold inevitability: just as we have foreseen. Everything falls as we have desired. Everything occurs as we have ordained." The two baernaloths stared into each other's eyes as a blizzard of telepathic information flowed between the two of them, at the end of which the Shepherdess nodded and smiled, her face cherubic. "Come children." Tellura whispered, "Come mortal little lambs. Here there is bloodshed and there are lies." [center]****[/center][/center][/center] [/QUOTE]
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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 14February2024)
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