Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour - (Updated 26Feb2026)
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Shemeska
Hero
That the Tower’s internal pathways changed was obvious as the group advanced ever higher. Some stairways and halls were untouched, with layers of unmarked dust, while other stretches bore the clear and gruesome evidence of the yugloths’ passage. Doors that had been barred and trapped with significant levels of magic were dispelled and torn from their hinges at times, while others were untouched, requiring Tristol to take his time, all while the group worried that their ascent would be in vain if the fiends had already achieved their goals, whatever those might even be.
“Everyone ready?” Tristol asked, silverfire flickering on his fingertips as he prepared to force open the most heavily-warded door that they’d yet encountered.
The others nodded in unison and prepared themselves as the seal was breached, the door shuddered, and swung inwards on its own to reveal a room bathed in golden light, sparkling off of crystalline walls.
“The heck…” Nisha wondered aloud as they behind a gleaming room with a multitude of doors, one other already opened, the ‘loths having clearly already passed through this same way.
“Welcome, all of you.” A voice like the ringing of bells, both tiny and sonorous at once called out as a being rose up from a crystalline dais in the room’s center: an earth weird. She looked like a perfect marble statue of a woman brought to life, surrounded by a cloud of golden light, with the grating of stone on stone with her movements. “You are not the first to pass this way, but you will be the last of consequence. I am bound to guard the stair and the way to the Guardian himself, the holder of the first part of the puzzle and the keeper of the location of the second.”
Collectively they stared at the elemental being, her statements raising only more questions.
“Puzzle?” Clueless asked, curiosity burning in his brain. “What do you mean?”
“Location of a second part?” Fyrehowl’s mind drifted back to each and every thing that Factol Nathan had spoken about regarding his late mother’s discoveries.
“Those are not my questions to answer…” The earth weird waved a marble hand, “What I can do is I can give to you a choice.”
She waved her hand again, pointing to two of the room’s doors. Each door swung open to reveal two stairwells: one up and one down.
“Two stairs and two paths to tread.” The earth weird explained, “One has been passed before by beings of belief and Evil. The other is untrod. One path ascends, the other descends, but both lead to the Leadheart and the Guardian of the 1st Key.”
“Do the traps reset?...” Nisha whispered under her breath, the question either unheard by the earth weird or she simply chose not to respond.
Tristol gave her a glance and in response she shrugged and made a goofy face. Still though, the question was an obvious one.
“The way shall be clear, but answer my questions first.” The earth weird explained, “Each of you in turn: who are you, and why are you here?”
“Who’s asking?” Toras responded warily.
The elemental shook her head and raised her hands in a deferential motion, “The answer is not for me.”
“Then for whom?” Fyrehowl’s response was just as wary as the half-celestial’s moments before.
The earth weird smiled again, her expression teasingly absent of an answer. There was no further explanation forthcoming.
Everything said that what the Oinoloth wanted there at the Tower of Lead and perhaps elsewhere scattered across the planes was of utter importance, but perhaps what each of them answered was in some way a shining reflected obverse of the Oinoloth’s designs.
“My name is Tristol Starweather of Halruaa.” The archmage stated with a firm assertiveness rarely present in his voice, his thoughts remembering the smile on the Oinoloth’s face when he’d deceived Karsus and brought down Netheril. “I’m here because Mystra will have her justice before all of this is over.”
Nisha’s answer was given with a much more flippant attitude, punctuated by a giggle, and spoken entirely in Xaositect Scramblespeak. Incomprehensible or not, the earth weird smiled and nodded at a perfectly acceptable response.
“My name is Toras of Andros,” Toras smiled and gave a polite bow to the elemental being. “Assuming that the Oinoloth is still here, I intend to punch him in the face.”
Nisha giggled, though the others gave him a glance at the flippancy of the response, but the half-celestial absolutely meant what he said. In his mind there was a target on the muzzle of the arch-yugoloth which perfectly fit his gauntlet-encased fist and the sweet, crunching sound the fiend’s teeth would make as he clocked them would be the most perfect thing he might ever experience. Whether he would ever have the opportunity or not was immaterial to the delight that the thought and anticipation brought to him, a bright light in what had been a swirling sea of darkness for months on end.
Florian’s answer was more grounded and wished for aid from and praise to her deity, certainly something that would have brought a sneer from the Oinoloth had he been there.
Fyrehowl’s reply began with her name and ended with a snarl. A righteous fury boiled in her eyes, even if her precise nature as a child of Elysium might be in question. Fallen perhaps, but in such a way to abhor the creature who called to her, mockingly, to fall ever further. Elysium would always welcome her back if she so chose, but for now there was no forgiveness in her expression or her words when she addressed her utter and absolute antipathy for the Oinoloth and his kind.
And then there was Clueless.
“I don’t know what my name was before all of this happened, and I barely know who I once was… in so many ways.” The bladesinger stared down at his ankle, “I was used and discarded by one of the Oinoloth’s co-conspirators and that action and everything since has made me into who I am now: Clueless. Whatever and whoever that makes me now, I intend to blunt and break everything that the Oinoloth and his kind intends.
“I am satisfied with your answers.” The earth weird replied after a brief pause, “The way is clear for you, whichever path you choose to take. The Guardian awaits your arrival.”
Clueless smiled, and in the guarded recesses of his mind, something dark coiled and smiled, satisfied in its own way with that answer, aside from the elemental being who stood before his student.
“Wait,” Tristol asked, “Those who passed before, can you tell us their names and what they answered?”
If the earth weird had required the same question and answers from the yugoloths, and her survival seemed to indicate that they’d actually answered rather than simply butchering her and forcing the door, that answer would provide a treasure trove of information as to what the Oinoloth wanted there and beyond, and perhaps even more, just who and what he even was.
“Alas, I cannot.” The earth weird’s expression was conspicuous in the absence of details, maddeningly so. Clearly the fiends had come this way, and as the elemental being here now was alive and uninjured, clearly, they had played its game of call and response. Sill though, what information they’d given might have been invaluable.
“You know who I am.” Vorkannis’s eyes glowed a fierce and burning albino pink as he stared down the elemental being.
“I do.” The earth weird’s response was the first that they had given in reply to any of the answers the ‘loths had each given in turn, one by one.
Prior to that back and forth, the Oinoloth had actually commanded his followers to answer the weird’s questions. Though he himself seemed to care little about their answers, he did pointedly smirk at Shylara’s response.
“My name is Shylara Akt’Atarm the Overlord of Carceri, Mistress of the Tower of Incarnate Pain, Lady of the Scarlet Prison, consort to the Oinoloth.” She smiled with abject pride, her eyes flickering a panoply of colors. “I am here to follow Vorkannis wherever He chooses to go, to obey every command, and bring his goals to fruition whatever they might be.”
The smirk on the Oinoloth’s lips was not in response her slavish, obsessive answer, but the clear absence of knowledge on her part as to why they were even there.
But back to the moment in which the Oinoloth gave his own answer to the weird, he did so by first speaking his name, Vorkannis the Ebon, in baernaloth and then proceeding to provide his litany of titles in the same primordial language, those known to his consort Shylara, and one she did not, and which she remained ignorant of given her lack of fluency in the ur-language of the Waste. As for why he was there, he responded in the same black speech with a simple, “To claim what is mine.”
The group proceeded through the ever-shifting heights of the Tower of Lead, half of the time passing through pristine sections, dealing with ever-deadlier traps and guardians, and half of the time passing through chambers that the yugoloths had already gone through, witnessing the carnage of their passing.
It didn’t take long for them to come across the first of the bodies.
“What the hell…” Toras said, gazing down at a quartet of human corpses. They were all freshly killed, rigor mortis only recently triggering in their flesh.
“Those aren’t yugoloths.” Fyrehowl spoke the confusing obvious as they all curiously and cautiously examined the bodies.
“Slaves or servitors of the yugoloths?” Clueless shrugged.
None of the bodies bore symbols of allegiance, holy symbols, or any markings that might have indicated who they were or why they were there within the Tower of Lead. Unlike the mortals below whom the yugoloths had brutally and pointlessly slaughtered, they were all armed and armored. They hadn’t come to the Tower to create, rather, they’d seemingly come for the same reason that the ‘loths had, possibly even arriving before them.
“No link to the ‘loths.” Fyrehowl crouched over one of the corpses. “They don’t have the stink of yugoloths on them at all, or the Lower Planes. The ‘loths came this way, but these bodies were already dead once they came here. They died when they opened the door out of this room.”
“They triggered a ward.” Tristol explained as he whispered a spell and examined the lingering dweomers that had once barred passage out of the chamber. “And only after they’d failed to disarm it. They knowingly triggering what killed them.”
“Who in Andros’s name are they?” Toras wondered aloud, the idea that there was a third group in the Tower apart from themselves and the yugoloths was only causing genuine confusion.
“Florian, can you interrogate the corpses?” Tristol asked, pointing to them. “I can’t tell anything from them other than the spell that killed them, and it was a brutally powerful one.” His vulpine ears twitched in disbelief.
“As long as there’s nothing of it left…” Florian nodded as she prepared to interrogate the corpse.
Tristol shook his head, confirming that there was no lingering danger on the bodies. “The spell looks to have siphoned the life from them directly, but after it triggered, that was that.”
Florian murmured a reply and continued to pray, invoking her god’s power and going about what should have been a simple task to make the relatively undamaged corpses testify as to who they were, why they were there, and what had led to their deaths. Instead, nothing happened.
“Problems?” Clueless stepped up behind the cleric.
Florian muttered a soft curse and attempted the spell a second time before abandoning the attempt and staring at the bodies in disbelief.
“It isn’t working…” The cleric explained, “And not in the sense of the bodies are refusing to answer or there’s damage to them preventing them from answering. I can’t explain it really. It’s like there’s nothing there to answer.”
“Could it have been the spell that killed them?” Clueless suggested, knowing full well the arsenal of necromantic horrors that the average arcanaloth sorcerer might call upon, or the unknown powers latent within the Tower of Lead itself as defenses.
What Florian hadn’t mentioned however is that when she’d abandoned the second casting it wasn’t because the spell had utterly failed, but rather that there’d been a resistance and she could have forced it and gotten… something… except that the entire process was something that she’d experienced once before: on the deceased victims of Cilret Leobtav when he’d killed in the name of his god, the Ashsinger, or whatever in the hells it even was. She remembered the screams and she had no desire to repeat that experience.
Just what the apparent connection meant however, they didn’t have enough information. Not yet.
And so, they continued, slowly but surely ascending through the heights of the Tower of Lead, passing through numerous trapped and warded rooms, most of them clearly unplumbed and untouched for untold thousands of years, their traps never sprung and their guardians never disturbed and dispatched before the present. There were other rooms however that the yugoloths had clearly been through, and in recent time, as evidenced by spent and triggered traps and wards and the bodies of destroyed guardians and slaughtered yugoloths.
Once again however there were the dead mortals, another troupe of them, these deceased in a horrifically violent fashion.
“More of these…” Fyrehowl stared down at a trio of charred human bodies, neither bearing any symbols or banners of identification, belief, or loyalty, all of them deceased with looks of horror on their faces. They’d passed by over a dozen similar corpses along the way, but these were the most heavily armored and best equipped.
“This is f*cking eerie,” Nisha quipped, a worried expression meandering across her face and her use of an actual curse word out of character.
Florian remained quiet about her earlier findings and her dire suspicions. Somehow there was a link and somehow there was something going on they didn’t understand where the ‘loths were being potentially aided by a third group whose loyalty and identity was, as yet, patently unknown but clearly in some way associated with the horrors that they’d witnessed in Pandemonium and later in the Outlands.
“Corpses aside,” Toras looked past the dead, “That’s a very big, very once warded door…”
At the far side of the chamber the door loomed large and ajar, a massive and shattered ruby lodged at the door’s center, sparkling with the deadly promise of the spells that had once swathed and protected whatever lay beyond it. The door was much larger and thicker than anything else they’d encountered within their ascent through the Tower of Lead and they all realized that whatever was beyond it was likely what the yugoloths had come for.
All was silent, all was still, and it was likely that they fiends had already come and gone. They tried not to dwell on the implications of that as they gazed down at the mysterious bodies and the shattered gemstone remnants.
“Tristol,” Clueless asked, “Are there any wards left on anything that you see?”
Tristol gazed out for a moment and shook his head in the negative. While the wards on the door had been utterly stupendous in nature, they’d all been triggered hours earlier. They’d come so very close on the yugoloths’ heels but fallen just short.
On the floor, the broken ruby fragments sparkled with mysterious promise.
Hours earlier:
Vorkannis stood at the room’s very center, his albino eyes locked onto the ancient tssng archmage swathed in a plain brown robe, sitting on a stone chair rising up, effectively grown from the floor. The other ‘loths slowly and warily followed into the room, all of them silent, gawking but not commenting at various details they saw in the room and more importantly, inscribed, into the walls.
The ancient elemental being possessed a humanoid body plan, wrought of brilliant crystals inscribed with magical runes, some seemingly naturally present inside of the crystalline matrix and others self-applied and cut into itself like tattoos on an elemental. Its hands were calmly crossed and it made no move to defend itself or prepare for combat, and it was an open question if the creature had been in some manner of stasis before the door had been forced open, or if it had been sitting and waiting for untold thousands of years, for this sole moment to arrive.
So many questions could have been asked but not a single question passed the Oinoloth’s lips, only that repeated demand.
“Give me what I have come here for.” The Oinoloth’s smile now bore exposed fangs, though the tone of his statement remained utterly placid and calm, a threat enough in those who knew him, to cause the other ‘loths to gingerly step back and provide their master more space for whatever might come.
“A yugoloth.” The ancient one frowned, milky quartz-like eyes studying the beings standing before him. “For a long time, too long perhaps, I’ve wondered who would come to take what was entrusted to me.”
Shylara’s mouth opened as if to speak, a thousand questions running through her mind and a burning need to KNOW.
She said nothing.
“Give me what is yours to impart.” Vorkannis demanded, his voice measured and calm at first but growing in intensity, a sudden malice and fanaticism dancing in his eyes, a tonal break in character almost unique for the Lord of the Threefold Glooms. “Give me what is mine. Give me what I am meant to possess.”
Unseen by all but Shylara and the tssng, one hand of his reached into the right pocket of his robe and touched a handful of frozen ashes that lay there, slipping his claws into them almost reverently.
Behind the Oinoloth, the surviving arcanaloths feverishly translated the words on the walls, rhyming poetry written in Terran, committing them to memory but not daring to write down a single quatrain. The meaning of it all of course eluded them, though it all seemed oddly prophetic, foretelling of future events and a puzzle of which the Tower of Lead contained but one portion, itself useless without the other pieces.
The tssng stared at the ‘loths, the light in its eyes dimming softly, like a boulder squinting doubtfully. It shook its head as it went from the arcanaloths to Shylara and then to the Oinoloth, its gaze lingering there.
“You cannot withhold what you contain.” Vorkannis spoke with malice, “It bubbles in your veins, gnawing at your thoughts, slowly breaking you with its potency. You are dying and you don’t even understand what you have.”
“Do I?” The tssng archmage locked eyes with the Oinoloth, no fear or concern passing over its features, something few creatures could have ever claimed to match. “Do you?”
Vorkannis snarled, a mirror to his expression minutes earlier when he’d stared into the ruby on the door and shattered it in anger and contempt. There would be no gift. There would be no passing of a treasured object. There would only be something taken.
The present:
Fyrehowl reached down and stopped, a hand barely an inch from the gleaming fragment, the Cadence suddenly silent and her motions suddenly wrenched from the ever-present and reassuring current. Clueless however felt no such hesitation, only curiosity.
The bladesinger held up a single broken shard of the massive gemstone, staring into the crimson depths, squinting as an image began to take shape, one wrought of the burning amalgamations of light and internal refraction: the emotionless face of Her Serenity.
“What the F*CK…” Clueless dropped the broken gemstone fragment as if he’d touch a white-hot poker from a devil’s forge.
“What happened?!” Florian shouted, taken aback by the half-fey’s reaction.
Clueless stood and silently stared at his feet, pointedly trying to avoid staring directly -into- any of the broken gem fragments.
“Again.” Florian asked, worry creeping into her voice. “What the hell just happened?”
The bladesinger motioned to the jagged, crystalline debris strewn across the floor. “I looked into one of the pieces and I saw an effigy of…” He paused, took a deep breath as if mulling over just how he was going to phrase his answer, clear consternation on his face. “… The Lady. Yeah… Her Serenity…”
Dead silence.
Utter and absolute silence.
“F*CK!” Nisha blurted out.
Vorkannis snarled, leaning forward with one hand outstretched, his mind lancing out and breaking through the tssng’s mental barriers, ignoring everything but the one profound treasure he sought. It terrified the other ‘loths, witnessing the typically preternaturally calm and smugly superior Oinoloth suddenly lose all pretense of civility and composure, literally drooling with anticipation as his acidic and weaponized telepathy broke the elemental being’s mind like the lock on a vault under a battering ram, one which he actually giggled with emotional overload for as he pillaged the contents.
“My Oinoloth…” Shylara reached forward, placing a hand on the Ebon’s shoulder as she watched his eyes widen, his smile grow exaggeratedly and his excited, ravenous drooling continue.
The Oinoloth did not respond beyond shrugging off his consort’s touch and stepping forward to loom over top of the fallen, screaming tssng, one hand in his pocket, fingers touching the frozen ashes therein and feeling an overwhelming sensation of hunger and satisfaction, feelings he himself was overwhelmed by as he captured what he’d come for, ripping it out of the tssng’s mind.
What he’d come for of course could not be described, not even by the Oinoloth, nor by the tssng who’d held it in trust for so very long. In fact, Vorkannis could only feel its presence, could only skirt about it in his mind, it being something unable to be comprehended, not yet. It was there, but it could only be inferred by the metaphysical weight of its presence, a black hole of a concept distorting the flow of everything around it. Yet he knew exactly what it was. He’d known all along what it was and would be when it was completed.
“Neither waiting nor watching for signs…” The Oinoloth whispered softly to himself, a giddy, ecstatic smile spread across his muzzle. His ears flicked unconsciously and dimly he knew that Shylara was speaking and asking him a blizzard of questions, and the other surviving arcanaloths whining in fear, but he simply didn’t care. In this moment she was nothing and they were nothing, everything else meaningless by comparison to what he’d found, even if it was useless without the remainder, scattered across the planes, hidden and sequestered away such that an inevitability might never occur, or occur only under specific, guided, shackled conditions.
“My Oinoloth do you have…” Shylara asked, her voice now cognizant to her master’s mind.
“I have it.” The Ebon whispered, though at no point was he actually speaking to her, but the presence softly whispering from across a literal and metaphysical gulf when he touched the soil of the Vale of Frozen Ashes. He spoke to that voice which had been there waiting for him, had welcomed him there upon the Waste so long ago upon his arrival. Everything it had spoken of had come to pass, or rather, he had made it come to pass.
More questions from the Manged, more pleading for direction from the handful of surviving arcanaloths, all of which he pointedly ignored. The lesser creatures trailed off, tucked their tails between their legs and were silent. Shylara would need a reminder similar to which her former Mistress had received in Khin-Oin at a significantly greater level.
“SILENCE!” Vorkannis spoke, the words and a subsequent thought instantly dropping the Overlord of Carceri to her knees, vomiting blood. “None of you are necessary in this moment if you wish to survive.”
The arcanaloths nodded and retreated to the room’s periphery while paradoxically, or perhaps not paradoxically, Shylara began to smile and giggle even as she bled from her eyes, nose, and mouth.
His mind obsessively caressing the essence of what he’d obtained, his mind moving over it like his tongue over a lover’s lips, he turned his attention to the other elements in the room: the words inscribed upon and magically dancing above the walls on two sides.
Albino eyes read over the words, quatrain by quatrain.
Vorkannis chuckled as he whispered them.
Words about himself.
Eyes blazing for one moment before he tore open a gate and left with his remaining entourage, laughing triumphantly as he departed, he whispered the second line of words, speaking one word in Baern, “What is destined shall find a way for HUBRIS cannot die.”
“Everyone ready?” Tristol asked, silverfire flickering on his fingertips as he prepared to force open the most heavily-warded door that they’d yet encountered.
The others nodded in unison and prepared themselves as the seal was breached, the door shuddered, and swung inwards on its own to reveal a room bathed in golden light, sparkling off of crystalline walls.
“The heck…” Nisha wondered aloud as they behind a gleaming room with a multitude of doors, one other already opened, the ‘loths having clearly already passed through this same way.
“Welcome, all of you.” A voice like the ringing of bells, both tiny and sonorous at once called out as a being rose up from a crystalline dais in the room’s center: an earth weird. She looked like a perfect marble statue of a woman brought to life, surrounded by a cloud of golden light, with the grating of stone on stone with her movements. “You are not the first to pass this way, but you will be the last of consequence. I am bound to guard the stair and the way to the Guardian himself, the holder of the first part of the puzzle and the keeper of the location of the second.”
Collectively they stared at the elemental being, her statements raising only more questions.
“Puzzle?” Clueless asked, curiosity burning in his brain. “What do you mean?”
“Location of a second part?” Fyrehowl’s mind drifted back to each and every thing that Factol Nathan had spoken about regarding his late mother’s discoveries.
“Those are not my questions to answer…” The earth weird waved a marble hand, “What I can do is I can give to you a choice.”
She waved her hand again, pointing to two of the room’s doors. Each door swung open to reveal two stairwells: one up and one down.
“Two stairs and two paths to tread.” The earth weird explained, “One has been passed before by beings of belief and Evil. The other is untrod. One path ascends, the other descends, but both lead to the Leadheart and the Guardian of the 1st Key.”
“Do the traps reset?...” Nisha whispered under her breath, the question either unheard by the earth weird or she simply chose not to respond.
Tristol gave her a glance and in response she shrugged and made a goofy face. Still though, the question was an obvious one.
“The way shall be clear, but answer my questions first.” The earth weird explained, “Each of you in turn: who are you, and why are you here?”
“Who’s asking?” Toras responded warily.
The elemental shook her head and raised her hands in a deferential motion, “The answer is not for me.”
“Then for whom?” Fyrehowl’s response was just as wary as the half-celestial’s moments before.
The earth weird smiled again, her expression teasingly absent of an answer. There was no further explanation forthcoming.
Everything said that what the Oinoloth wanted there at the Tower of Lead and perhaps elsewhere scattered across the planes was of utter importance, but perhaps what each of them answered was in some way a shining reflected obverse of the Oinoloth’s designs.
“My name is Tristol Starweather of Halruaa.” The archmage stated with a firm assertiveness rarely present in his voice, his thoughts remembering the smile on the Oinoloth’s face when he’d deceived Karsus and brought down Netheril. “I’m here because Mystra will have her justice before all of this is over.”
Nisha’s answer was given with a much more flippant attitude, punctuated by a giggle, and spoken entirely in Xaositect Scramblespeak. Incomprehensible or not, the earth weird smiled and nodded at a perfectly acceptable response.
“My name is Toras of Andros,” Toras smiled and gave a polite bow to the elemental being. “Assuming that the Oinoloth is still here, I intend to punch him in the face.”
Nisha giggled, though the others gave him a glance at the flippancy of the response, but the half-celestial absolutely meant what he said. In his mind there was a target on the muzzle of the arch-yugoloth which perfectly fit his gauntlet-encased fist and the sweet, crunching sound the fiend’s teeth would make as he clocked them would be the most perfect thing he might ever experience. Whether he would ever have the opportunity or not was immaterial to the delight that the thought and anticipation brought to him, a bright light in what had been a swirling sea of darkness for months on end.
Florian’s answer was more grounded and wished for aid from and praise to her deity, certainly something that would have brought a sneer from the Oinoloth had he been there.
Fyrehowl’s reply began with her name and ended with a snarl. A righteous fury boiled in her eyes, even if her precise nature as a child of Elysium might be in question. Fallen perhaps, but in such a way to abhor the creature who called to her, mockingly, to fall ever further. Elysium would always welcome her back if she so chose, but for now there was no forgiveness in her expression or her words when she addressed her utter and absolute antipathy for the Oinoloth and his kind.
And then there was Clueless.
“I don’t know what my name was before all of this happened, and I barely know who I once was… in so many ways.” The bladesinger stared down at his ankle, “I was used and discarded by one of the Oinoloth’s co-conspirators and that action and everything since has made me into who I am now: Clueless. Whatever and whoever that makes me now, I intend to blunt and break everything that the Oinoloth and his kind intends.
“I am satisfied with your answers.” The earth weird replied after a brief pause, “The way is clear for you, whichever path you choose to take. The Guardian awaits your arrival.”
Clueless smiled, and in the guarded recesses of his mind, something dark coiled and smiled, satisfied in its own way with that answer, aside from the elemental being who stood before his student.
“Wait,” Tristol asked, “Those who passed before, can you tell us their names and what they answered?”
If the earth weird had required the same question and answers from the yugoloths, and her survival seemed to indicate that they’d actually answered rather than simply butchering her and forcing the door, that answer would provide a treasure trove of information as to what the Oinoloth wanted there and beyond, and perhaps even more, just who and what he even was.
“Alas, I cannot.” The earth weird’s expression was conspicuous in the absence of details, maddeningly so. Clearly the fiends had come this way, and as the elemental being here now was alive and uninjured, clearly, they had played its game of call and response. Sill though, what information they’d given might have been invaluable.
****
“You know who I am.” Vorkannis’s eyes glowed a fierce and burning albino pink as he stared down the elemental being.
“I do.” The earth weird’s response was the first that they had given in reply to any of the answers the ‘loths had each given in turn, one by one.
Prior to that back and forth, the Oinoloth had actually commanded his followers to answer the weird’s questions. Though he himself seemed to care little about their answers, he did pointedly smirk at Shylara’s response.
“My name is Shylara Akt’Atarm the Overlord of Carceri, Mistress of the Tower of Incarnate Pain, Lady of the Scarlet Prison, consort to the Oinoloth.” She smiled with abject pride, her eyes flickering a panoply of colors. “I am here to follow Vorkannis wherever He chooses to go, to obey every command, and bring his goals to fruition whatever they might be.”
The smirk on the Oinoloth’s lips was not in response her slavish, obsessive answer, but the clear absence of knowledge on her part as to why they were even there.
But back to the moment in which the Oinoloth gave his own answer to the weird, he did so by first speaking his name, Vorkannis the Ebon, in baernaloth and then proceeding to provide his litany of titles in the same primordial language, those known to his consort Shylara, and one she did not, and which she remained ignorant of given her lack of fluency in the ur-language of the Waste. As for why he was there, he responded in the same black speech with a simple, “To claim what is mine.”
****
The group proceeded through the ever-shifting heights of the Tower of Lead, half of the time passing through pristine sections, dealing with ever-deadlier traps and guardians, and half of the time passing through chambers that the yugoloths had already gone through, witnessing the carnage of their passing.
It didn’t take long for them to come across the first of the bodies.
“What the hell…” Toras said, gazing down at a quartet of human corpses. They were all freshly killed, rigor mortis only recently triggering in their flesh.
“Those aren’t yugoloths.” Fyrehowl spoke the confusing obvious as they all curiously and cautiously examined the bodies.
“Slaves or servitors of the yugoloths?” Clueless shrugged.
None of the bodies bore symbols of allegiance, holy symbols, or any markings that might have indicated who they were or why they were there within the Tower of Lead. Unlike the mortals below whom the yugoloths had brutally and pointlessly slaughtered, they were all armed and armored. They hadn’t come to the Tower to create, rather, they’d seemingly come for the same reason that the ‘loths had, possibly even arriving before them.
“No link to the ‘loths.” Fyrehowl crouched over one of the corpses. “They don’t have the stink of yugoloths on them at all, or the Lower Planes. The ‘loths came this way, but these bodies were already dead once they came here. They died when they opened the door out of this room.”
“They triggered a ward.” Tristol explained as he whispered a spell and examined the lingering dweomers that had once barred passage out of the chamber. “And only after they’d failed to disarm it. They knowingly triggering what killed them.”
“Who in Andros’s name are they?” Toras wondered aloud, the idea that there was a third group in the Tower apart from themselves and the yugoloths was only causing genuine confusion.
“Florian, can you interrogate the corpses?” Tristol asked, pointing to them. “I can’t tell anything from them other than the spell that killed them, and it was a brutally powerful one.” His vulpine ears twitched in disbelief.
“As long as there’s nothing of it left…” Florian nodded as she prepared to interrogate the corpse.
Tristol shook his head, confirming that there was no lingering danger on the bodies. “The spell looks to have siphoned the life from them directly, but after it triggered, that was that.”
Florian murmured a reply and continued to pray, invoking her god’s power and going about what should have been a simple task to make the relatively undamaged corpses testify as to who they were, why they were there, and what had led to their deaths. Instead, nothing happened.
“Problems?” Clueless stepped up behind the cleric.
Florian muttered a soft curse and attempted the spell a second time before abandoning the attempt and staring at the bodies in disbelief.
“It isn’t working…” The cleric explained, “And not in the sense of the bodies are refusing to answer or there’s damage to them preventing them from answering. I can’t explain it really. It’s like there’s nothing there to answer.”
“Could it have been the spell that killed them?” Clueless suggested, knowing full well the arsenal of necromantic horrors that the average arcanaloth sorcerer might call upon, or the unknown powers latent within the Tower of Lead itself as defenses.
What Florian hadn’t mentioned however is that when she’d abandoned the second casting it wasn’t because the spell had utterly failed, but rather that there’d been a resistance and she could have forced it and gotten… something… except that the entire process was something that she’d experienced once before: on the deceased victims of Cilret Leobtav when he’d killed in the name of his god, the Ashsinger, or whatever in the hells it even was. She remembered the screams and she had no desire to repeat that experience.
Just what the apparent connection meant however, they didn’t have enough information. Not yet.
And so, they continued, slowly but surely ascending through the heights of the Tower of Lead, passing through numerous trapped and warded rooms, most of them clearly unplumbed and untouched for untold thousands of years, their traps never sprung and their guardians never disturbed and dispatched before the present. There were other rooms however that the yugoloths had clearly been through, and in recent time, as evidenced by spent and triggered traps and wards and the bodies of destroyed guardians and slaughtered yugoloths.
Once again however there were the dead mortals, another troupe of them, these deceased in a horrifically violent fashion.
“More of these…” Fyrehowl stared down at a trio of charred human bodies, neither bearing any symbols or banners of identification, belief, or loyalty, all of them deceased with looks of horror on their faces. They’d passed by over a dozen similar corpses along the way, but these were the most heavily armored and best equipped.
“This is f*cking eerie,” Nisha quipped, a worried expression meandering across her face and her use of an actual curse word out of character.
Florian remained quiet about her earlier findings and her dire suspicions. Somehow there was a link and somehow there was something going on they didn’t understand where the ‘loths were being potentially aided by a third group whose loyalty and identity was, as yet, patently unknown but clearly in some way associated with the horrors that they’d witnessed in Pandemonium and later in the Outlands.
“Corpses aside,” Toras looked past the dead, “That’s a very big, very once warded door…”
At the far side of the chamber the door loomed large and ajar, a massive and shattered ruby lodged at the door’s center, sparkling with the deadly promise of the spells that had once swathed and protected whatever lay beyond it. The door was much larger and thicker than anything else they’d encountered within their ascent through the Tower of Lead and they all realized that whatever was beyond it was likely what the yugoloths had come for.
All was silent, all was still, and it was likely that they fiends had already come and gone. They tried not to dwell on the implications of that as they gazed down at the mysterious bodies and the shattered gemstone remnants.
“Tristol,” Clueless asked, “Are there any wards left on anything that you see?”
Tristol gazed out for a moment and shook his head in the negative. While the wards on the door had been utterly stupendous in nature, they’d all been triggered hours earlier. They’d come so very close on the yugoloths’ heels but fallen just short.
On the floor, the broken ruby fragments sparkled with mysterious promise.
****
Hours earlier:
Vorkannis stood at the room’s very center, his albino eyes locked onto the ancient tssng archmage swathed in a plain brown robe, sitting on a stone chair rising up, effectively grown from the floor. The other ‘loths slowly and warily followed into the room, all of them silent, gawking but not commenting at various details they saw in the room and more importantly, inscribed, into the walls.
The ancient elemental being possessed a humanoid body plan, wrought of brilliant crystals inscribed with magical runes, some seemingly naturally present inside of the crystalline matrix and others self-applied and cut into itself like tattoos on an elemental. Its hands were calmly crossed and it made no move to defend itself or prepare for combat, and it was an open question if the creature had been in some manner of stasis before the door had been forced open, or if it had been sitting and waiting for untold thousands of years, for this sole moment to arrive.
So many questions could have been asked but not a single question passed the Oinoloth’s lips, only that repeated demand.
“Give me what I have come here for.” The Oinoloth’s smile now bore exposed fangs, though the tone of his statement remained utterly placid and calm, a threat enough in those who knew him, to cause the other ‘loths to gingerly step back and provide their master more space for whatever might come.
“A yugoloth.” The ancient one frowned, milky quartz-like eyes studying the beings standing before him. “For a long time, too long perhaps, I’ve wondered who would come to take what was entrusted to me.”
Shylara’s mouth opened as if to speak, a thousand questions running through her mind and a burning need to KNOW.
She said nothing.
“Give me what is yours to impart.” Vorkannis demanded, his voice measured and calm at first but growing in intensity, a sudden malice and fanaticism dancing in his eyes, a tonal break in character almost unique for the Lord of the Threefold Glooms. “Give me what is mine. Give me what I am meant to possess.”
Unseen by all but Shylara and the tssng, one hand of his reached into the right pocket of his robe and touched a handful of frozen ashes that lay there, slipping his claws into them almost reverently.
Behind the Oinoloth, the surviving arcanaloths feverishly translated the words on the walls, rhyming poetry written in Terran, committing them to memory but not daring to write down a single quatrain. The meaning of it all of course eluded them, though it all seemed oddly prophetic, foretelling of future events and a puzzle of which the Tower of Lead contained but one portion, itself useless without the other pieces.
The tssng stared at the ‘loths, the light in its eyes dimming softly, like a boulder squinting doubtfully. It shook its head as it went from the arcanaloths to Shylara and then to the Oinoloth, its gaze lingering there.
“You cannot withhold what you contain.” Vorkannis spoke with malice, “It bubbles in your veins, gnawing at your thoughts, slowly breaking you with its potency. You are dying and you don’t even understand what you have.”
“Do I?” The tssng archmage locked eyes with the Oinoloth, no fear or concern passing over its features, something few creatures could have ever claimed to match. “Do you?”
Vorkannis snarled, a mirror to his expression minutes earlier when he’d stared into the ruby on the door and shattered it in anger and contempt. There would be no gift. There would be no passing of a treasured object. There would only be something taken.
****
The present:
Fyrehowl reached down and stopped, a hand barely an inch from the gleaming fragment, the Cadence suddenly silent and her motions suddenly wrenched from the ever-present and reassuring current. Clueless however felt no such hesitation, only curiosity.
The bladesinger held up a single broken shard of the massive gemstone, staring into the crimson depths, squinting as an image began to take shape, one wrought of the burning amalgamations of light and internal refraction: the emotionless face of Her Serenity.
“What the F*CK…” Clueless dropped the broken gemstone fragment as if he’d touch a white-hot poker from a devil’s forge.
“What happened?!” Florian shouted, taken aback by the half-fey’s reaction.
Clueless stood and silently stared at his feet, pointedly trying to avoid staring directly -into- any of the broken gem fragments.
“Again.” Florian asked, worry creeping into her voice. “What the hell just happened?”
The bladesinger motioned to the jagged, crystalline debris strewn across the floor. “I looked into one of the pieces and I saw an effigy of…” He paused, took a deep breath as if mulling over just how he was going to phrase his answer, clear consternation on his face. “… The Lady. Yeah… Her Serenity…”
Dead silence.
Utter and absolute silence.
“F*CK!” Nisha blurted out.
****
Vorkannis snarled, leaning forward with one hand outstretched, his mind lancing out and breaking through the tssng’s mental barriers, ignoring everything but the one profound treasure he sought. It terrified the other ‘loths, witnessing the typically preternaturally calm and smugly superior Oinoloth suddenly lose all pretense of civility and composure, literally drooling with anticipation as his acidic and weaponized telepathy broke the elemental being’s mind like the lock on a vault under a battering ram, one which he actually giggled with emotional overload for as he pillaged the contents.
“My Oinoloth…” Shylara reached forward, placing a hand on the Ebon’s shoulder as she watched his eyes widen, his smile grow exaggeratedly and his excited, ravenous drooling continue.
The Oinoloth did not respond beyond shrugging off his consort’s touch and stepping forward to loom over top of the fallen, screaming tssng, one hand in his pocket, fingers touching the frozen ashes therein and feeling an overwhelming sensation of hunger and satisfaction, feelings he himself was overwhelmed by as he captured what he’d come for, ripping it out of the tssng’s mind.
What he’d come for of course could not be described, not even by the Oinoloth, nor by the tssng who’d held it in trust for so very long. In fact, Vorkannis could only feel its presence, could only skirt about it in his mind, it being something unable to be comprehended, not yet. It was there, but it could only be inferred by the metaphysical weight of its presence, a black hole of a concept distorting the flow of everything around it. Yet he knew exactly what it was. He’d known all along what it was and would be when it was completed.
“Neither waiting nor watching for signs…” The Oinoloth whispered softly to himself, a giddy, ecstatic smile spread across his muzzle. His ears flicked unconsciously and dimly he knew that Shylara was speaking and asking him a blizzard of questions, and the other surviving arcanaloths whining in fear, but he simply didn’t care. In this moment she was nothing and they were nothing, everything else meaningless by comparison to what he’d found, even if it was useless without the remainder, scattered across the planes, hidden and sequestered away such that an inevitability might never occur, or occur only under specific, guided, shackled conditions.
“My Oinoloth do you have…” Shylara asked, her voice now cognizant to her master’s mind.
“I have it.” The Ebon whispered, though at no point was he actually speaking to her, but the presence softly whispering from across a literal and metaphysical gulf when he touched the soil of the Vale of Frozen Ashes. He spoke to that voice which had been there waiting for him, had welcomed him there upon the Waste so long ago upon his arrival. Everything it had spoken of had come to pass, or rather, he had made it come to pass.
More questions from the Manged, more pleading for direction from the handful of surviving arcanaloths, all of which he pointedly ignored. The lesser creatures trailed off, tucked their tails between their legs and were silent. Shylara would need a reminder similar to which her former Mistress had received in Khin-Oin at a significantly greater level.
“SILENCE!” Vorkannis spoke, the words and a subsequent thought instantly dropping the Overlord of Carceri to her knees, vomiting blood. “None of you are necessary in this moment if you wish to survive.”
The arcanaloths nodded and retreated to the room’s periphery while paradoxically, or perhaps not paradoxically, Shylara began to smile and giggle even as she bled from her eyes, nose, and mouth.
His mind obsessively caressing the essence of what he’d obtained, his mind moving over it like his tongue over a lover’s lips, he turned his attention to the other elements in the room: the words inscribed upon and magically dancing above the walls on two sides.
Albino eyes read over the words, quatrain by quatrain.
Vorkannis chuckled as he whispered them.
Words about himself.
Eyes blazing for one moment before he tore open a gate and left with his remaining entourage, laughing triumphantly as he departed, he whispered the second line of words, speaking one word in Baern, “What is destined shall find a way for HUBRIS cannot die.”
****
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