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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 6414223" data-attributes="member: 11697">****"This is something I never thought I'd see," Zenia gave a nervous giggle as she stepped out of the passage and into the buried remains of the Prime Ward."It's something alright," Surefoot glanced about with equal measures awe and wariness."Wow..." Malcolm blinked and strained to see the finer details of the ruins, details lost to his all too human eyes.The tunnel had ended abruptly, opening up into a massive underground cavern whose size made the imagination struggle to comprehend that it was the result of a mundane collapse of the old city into the underground, and more an attempt by Sigil itself to swallow and encapsulate something that it could not simply reject, like scar tissue surrounding a splinter. It all resembled nothing less than Sigil in the twilight hours of Anti-peak in the worst regions of the Hive or the slags, the only other portion of the city to have ever suffered the worst ravages of the Blood War. Everything was ancient, and though seemingly untouched by the ravages of time and mundane decay, the warring fiends had reduced many buildings to burnt-out shells and uneven piles of broken stone, protruded here and there by the bladed gables and spires even so long ago a hallmark of Sigilian architecture.A burst of light from a fiend's teleportation heralded the current status quo as a towering glabrezu appeared atop a broken foundation. It bellowed with rage a moment later as more bursts of light heralded a motley collection of other tanar'ri appeared, scattered about at random rather than in any intended fighting formation. They snarled and roared, reorienting themselves and branding their weapons both at each other as much as at the figures taking cover some twenty yards distant. There in groups of three and four, an organized detachment of barbazu braced for the chaotic fiend's charge. Heavily armored, they stayed silent with the exception of the voice of a single amnizu that bellowed forth invocations in the name of Dagos."Everyone down!" Surefoot motioned them to find cover, pointing up to a pair of armored, black-winged erinyes patrolling the skies above the baatezu encampment. "They see us and we're going to get press-ganged or just killed outright.""We could always name drop our employer." Malcolm shrugged, "She seemed powerful enough above.""That will get us tortured first, then killed." Ashlanaya smirked. "These fiends have been bottled up here for so long I think the last thing they want to deal with is a 'loth."The tanar'ri charged as dozens more flashes of light erupted from teleportations, bringing both more of their kind and baatezu reinforcements as well. Within seconds there were more than a hundred fiends tearing into one another's positions. Lightning bolts lashed from the tanar'ri, rocking the air with the sonic boom of their crack and the harsh reek of ozone, while bolts of hellfire launched from spellcasters and infernal bombardment devices on the side of the devils. What had happened daily since the Key had arrived began once more."Everyone be quiet, everyone keep your heads down." Ashlanaya put a finger to her lips and then pointed towards a series of ruined buildings away from the mass of the raging and building conflict. "Let's make for those buildings and then keep going. Avoid any fiend we see and let's get in and out of this gods-forsaken place as soon as we can. We're close. I can feel it.""You can feel it?" Malcolm glanced at the paladin questioningly. "What do you mean?""It doesn't feet right down here." She answered with a shrug. "I can't really explain it, but ever since we stepped out of that tunnel there's something just terribly unsettling; I can feel it in my bones.""I'll attest to something not feeling right." Surefoot shivered, "I've been in the Slags, and it didn't feel like this place. I can't explain it any better than that, and I'm not sure if I feel it quite as pronounced as Ashy does, but yeah.""She said that we'd know it when we were close." Doran grimaced, "I suppose that this is what she meant. You're both planars, so that might be why you can tell. Personally I've felt uneasy since I first stepped into Sigil, but that's just me."BOOM!"Sh*t!" Zenia hunkered down and the flames on her head flickered and nearly extinguished in fright as a massive sphere of flame detonated only a few yards away.The smell of brimstone wafted through the air, followed shortly afterwards by a rain of cooling, glassy tektites that cracked and shattered as they peppered the ground. Peering over the edge of their cover, as far as they could tell, no fiends were making their way towards their position; luckily it had been an errant strike and not an intentional targeting."As if we didn't need any further excuse to get out of here, there's that." Ashlanaya exhaled and nodded her head towards the next ruined structure. "Come on, let's go."Too distracted by one another and their innate and endless hatred, the ever growing mass of fiends never noticed as the small party snuck past them deeper into the ruins of the old Prime Ward. Winding their way from hiding spot to hiding spot, they progressed several city blocks inwards, following a growing sense of unease and something that could only be described as -wrong-. Blessed by serendipity, they weren't noticed by the warring fiends except for one close call with a pair of vrocks, and they thanked whatever powers they worshipped that they'd escaped the fiends' collective notice.They were not however beneath the notice of everything.****High above, something peered down and smiled. A shadow without substance, a projected fragment only barely cohesive here in the least of the Lady's dominion, it watched intently as the Marauder's pawns drew closer to the Key's location, and to it, all as intended, all as foreseen and planned. Each move was calculated, each as one more step necessary, one more tumbler to fall in the process of the grand experiment. The others would chide this appearance as micromanagement or as uncertainty in the plan itself, but no, this was neither. Bladed eyes and shadows danced around the radius of the Key's influence, and there within, it presented a manufactured blind spot. What that provoked was itself a thing of interest, and a crack in the adamantine domain of the Bladed Stranger. The destruction of the old Prime Ward had itself been a test and a deliberate provocation.Behold. Now wait, and watch for the signs to manifest themselves.The shadow pulled out of its introspection with a smile and looked down as one of the Marauder's puppet's paused and looked up. The tiefling paladin, the armored godslave of Nephthys, the one who betrayed the blood within her veins, the one whose blood sang to the shadow looking down at her. The tiefling frowned and gestured to her companions, pointing up. They noticed the barest outline of a tall, robed figure and then it vanished back into the darkness, back closer to the unhallowed artifact, the Key, the poison that allowed its tenuous purchase in Sigil's underbelly.****"What the hell was that?" Ashlanaya motioned to the figure standing atop a ragged pile of stones that had once been a tower. The tiefling's face was pale, and for a moment she'd seemed terrified."I don't see anything." Zenia shrugged, "But I was also crouched behind a wall at the time, so I can't really be of much help."Doran stared at the paladin with a look of worry, "I saw it too, just for a moment. But I also saw your expression. Honestly you went from your normal self to looking as if you were going to vomit from fright, and I've never even seen you look worried before.""There was a figure standing on top of that fallen tower," Ashlanaya was adamant. "Tall, human height, no wings, and dressed in a hooded robe.""Did you see a face?" Doran queried as he studied the empty darkness where the tiefling indicated the figure had stood."No," The paladin admitted, "it was covered in shadow.""Some sort of fiend?" Malcolm frowned. "After what we saw earlier, I doubt that there's anything else down here.""Are you sure it was real and not just a shadow?" Zenia flicked cinders off her hands and gazed up into the darkness, not seeing anything either."I had a sick feeling, the kind that I would have felt if I'd opened up my senses and looked at what sort of evil our current employer had in herself." She rolled her eyes at that very notion; she hadn't bothered at the time to spare herself the gauche obviousness of it and the wave of nausea it would have probably provoked. "Except I wasn't doing that just now, and I felt that way anyway.""Sure it wasn't a shadow of a statue," Zenia motioned off in an entirely different direction."A statue?" Ashlanaya shook off her feelings of dread for the moment.The genasi pointed deeper into the ruins, "Like that one there.""Huh?" Surefoot glanced in the direction of the genasi's motion and then blinked in disbelief. "That's something taken out of the history book right there. Damn."Largely shrouded in darkness, precariously standing upright amidst a fallen, shattered wall of stones stood a tall statue of a twin-aspected man. One face was old, one was young, each of them bearing a puzzling half-smile upon their face, and the statue's hands perched atop a single, large door carved out of the same stone as the statue. For anyone alive in Sigil with an interest in the City of Door's history, the figure was both obscure and immediately, hauntingly recognizable: Aoskar the Portal Father.****"Why do you have that look on your face?" Malcolm squinted, struggling to see the statue itself. "Unless it's a golem, we don't have anything to worry about.""Not worry really," Surefoot explained, "It's just that it's unexpected but at the same time, it completely fits the area."Malcolm shrugged, "What do you mean?""It's a statue of Aoskar the Portal Father." Ashlanaya motioned to the statue as they approached closer. "He used to be worshipped by masses of Sigil's citizens, and then he apparently stepped across a line when one of the Dabus became a high priest of his.""What happened then?" Malcolm stared at the haunting smile playing across its stone lips."The Lady of Pain killed him." The tiefling's tone was flat and somber. "In the space of moments his clergy was decimated, his worshippers flayed, his former temple in the Lower Ward razed to the ground, and his corpse hurled into the Astral. Some lines you don't cross.""Now you've got that look on your face." Malcolm watched as the paladin glanced at the statue and shivered. "Why?""Because the closer we get to the Key, I can't help but feel that we're about to cross that very same line..."Under the statue's indeterminate expression, they were all silent at that thought. But still, they proceeded deeper into the ruins, past the statue and into the heart of the region of the city that had collapsed in the aftermath of the so-called Night of Bladed Shadows. The destruction was greater deeper in, with entire buildings reduced to piles of broken stones with not a single intact block remaining, an architectural debris field marred with bones and the aftereffects of fires that must have ravaged entire city blocks at a time during the Clueless Rebellion."Death to the Incantifers?" Doran read aloud a splotch of graffiti painted on a toppled wall."They were a Faction, though they've been dead and dissolved for nearly as long as this place here." Surefoot spoke as they progressed. "They were one of the most powerful factions, and they ate magic like normal things eat food and drink water. It was their stranglehold on power in Sigil that led to the Clueless Rebellion, and though they survived that, eventually their headquarters and their leaders were mazed by Her Serenity. Supposedly a few of them survived and linger on, but their philosophy is pretty much dead and gone. Walking around down here is like a history lesson. It's fascinating."Onwards they went, passing more graffiti against the Incanterium, against the Sodkillers, and other long-forgotten groups once pillars of Sigil now turned to dust. They passed skeletons dressed in the armor of the Sodkillers, the style a precursor to the Mercykillers now split once again into their original component organizations. The deeper they went however, the looming sense of dread that Surefoot and Ashlanaya felt only increased, and doubly so for the paladin. In fact, she felt nauseated with each step."Why is there an intact building down here?" Zenia stopped dead in her tracks, pointing to what had once been a small, squat building adjacent to a short stone tower. Every building adjacent was reduced to broke stone and pools of slag, but it remained without a scratch. Upon its front still stood an archway and a single closed door, all unmarked by the passage of time and even the scavenging predation of the fiends that still haunted the subsumed city.Doran rubbed the sprig of mistletoe at his neck for luck, "What do you want to bet that that's where we're going?""That's it..." Ashlanaya grimaced and swallowed, unsteady on her feet. They were finally close to the object they were tasked to find. 'Finally,' Ashlanaya thought to herself, 'We'll finally be done with working for a fiend', but what they saw upon the door would not improve her feelings of sickness and apprehension.It was made of stone, and the hinges too, both implausibly cut from the same block, presumably conjured forth by magic than through the genius of some legendary stone-cutter. Upon the door though was something that they did not expect."Oh pike it all..." Zenia slumped her shoulders and stepped back. "This isn't good..." Ashlanaya winced and clutched her holy symbol like a life preserver."Oh what the hell?!" Surefoot gave an agonized sigh. "I really, really truly don't want to even touch that door."There upon the door was a sculpture of Her Serenity in iron, frowning, with her eyes bleeding rust and verdigris.****</blockquote>

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