NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 7048728" data-attributes="member: 11697">****The next five hours passed without incident, save for the tension between Tristol and his mother that left the others holding their breath and their tongues. Tristol’s father did his best to mediate it all before anything unfortunate and regrettable might be said, and as for Nisha… it was up for debate if Nisha was even aware of her soon-to-be mother-in-law’s subtext, and if she was aware of it, if she even cared. The Xaositect retained a near cherubic smile on her face as she toured the Starweather estate, ooing and aahing at every bit of normal-for-Halruaa magic, and especially Lutra’s omnipresent illusions.Eventually though, hackneyed excuses were made so as to excuse them, even in the face of offers to put the group up for the evening, even with Lutra’s offer of separate rooms for each guest, including Tristol and Nisha. Smiles and polite pleasantries were made, as well as offers to return when able, and of course that both Lutra and Kefnar would be invited to a grand wedding ceremony once decisions were made on time and place.A curious worry repeatedly crossed over Kefnar’s face though at various points throughout the evening, beginning at dinner, and growing more profound and bewildered as the evening progressed. He hid the expression well, and none of his guests said anything about it, though several of them noticed: most prominently Tristol himself. Nisha remained seemingly oblivious.The fact of the matter was that every single piece of heirloom, antique silverware and a decent amount of the Starweather’s tableware had vanished into thin air without Nisha having obviously left her chair at any point. She did however leave her in-laws’ estate with a spring in her step and a portable hole full of purloined cutlery. How she’d managed the feat was one thing, but how she’d managed to waltz off without the lifted knives or forks popping the portable hole was something else.Nisha wasn’t and wouldn’t ever be an archmage in the obvious sense, but she had more than a bit of magic in her own chaotic way. Any understanding of how she managed it all probably eluded her even as she did it, but it never stopped her from grinning like a fool when she left the estate and belatedly slipping a salad fork through her belt.****It was never up for debate as to whether the group would or wouldn’t follow up on Taba’s letter to them via the Starweathers. The only question was if the whole thing was a deathtrap or something else. Multiple attempts to scry Taba resulted in only darkness and the sounds of a screaming man or woman raggedly begging for escape, mad from their capture and sensory deprivation in whatever demiplanar hell they’d been stashed within, the likely result of Taba having redirected divination attempts to multiple imprisoned proxies.Utilizing the letter itself however proved something of a key to that steel doorway of obfuscation. While it didn’t show the altraloth lord herself, it showed a barren patch of earth scorched by heat and scattered with dozens of broken, still-twitching undead corpses. In the midst of the carnage, Taba had crudely scrawled a personal sigil.Tristol’s teleportation spell deposited the group within several hour’s walk of their destination. The High Forest itself wasn’t a particularly dangerous location, and the relative monotony of the journey provided some time for them to talk and discuss their most recent “vacation” as they started what would likely be a much more dangerous vacation from that one.“You couldn’t help yourself could you?” Tristol raised an eyebrow and glanced to his left where Nisha clip-clopped alongside him, occasionally batting at the tip of his tail as it swished back and forth.“Hmm?” The Xaositect looked up with a look of utter innocence.“The silverware? Really?” Tristol cast a look of both ashamed disbelief and amusement at his fiancé. “You stole the silverware.”Nisha paused in her walk, chuckled and cracked a smile as her tail flicked the silver bell at its tip, “Oh… that. Yeah…”“Just how’d you manage that?” Tristol’s ears flattened as he looked down, awaiting an explanation that likely wouldn’t be very forthcoming.“I’ll second that.” Fyrehowl added, “I never saw you move from your seat during dinner, and trust me, I’m pretty good at noticing things.”“So wait wait wait…” Nisha waved her hands and tail in concert, “You’re less concerned that I walked off with your mom’s silverware and more about how I managed it?”“No,” Tristol held up a finger, “Because I’m damned certain that she probably has an instant summons spell nailed to every single piece of cutlery in that set given that it was actually Netherese and passed down through her side of the family for centuries. She’ll get it back once she realizes that they’re gone. No, what I want to know is how you did it without leaving your chair, while still playing footsie with me under the table, and how you managed to not pop either one of the portable holes I know you keep on your person. I expected you to pilfer anything that caught your eye and I love you and forgive you for that, but the other stuff, that’s just weird!”Around them, the forest floor danced with errant rays of sunlight filtered through the tall, old growth evergreens. A sea of muted browns and greens, the occasional patch of wildflowers clung tenaciously to spots where a fallen tree had released the canopy’s tyranny over available daylight. The natural beauty of the northern latitudes was a far cry from the tropical wilds of Halruaa or the manifest and quite literal hellscapes of their most recent planar travels.Nisha shrugged as she reached up and pulled a soup spoon from behind Tristol’s ear, “Hell if I know!”“Huh?” Tristol stopped walking and stared at his fiancé as she tapped his nose with the spoon. “Hell if you know?”“Beats me.” Nisha shrugged and produced a salad fork from the other ear, “I just do these sorts of things on occasion.”“Yeah, your ‘on occasion’ tends to be most of the time.” Tristol shook his head, “You can’t keep playing clueless about it all. You know precisely what you’re doing.”“Sometimes?” Nisha gave yet another emphatic shrug“Only sometimes?” Tristol’s skepticism burned fierce.“Only sometimes.” Nisha laughed and rattled a belt pouch that hadn’t been there at her hip a moment before, enjoying the satisfying rattling jingle of silverware. “This time I just wanted something to snatch up to keep A’kin from picking my purse and snatching back some of the stuff I lifted from his shop. We’ll see if he has burned fingers next time we drop by.”Tristol’s ears fell flat back against his head with worry.“You shoplifted from A’kin?”“Oh trust me, he knows full well what I’ve lifted and when I’ve lifted it.” Nisha waved away Tristol’s concern about stealing from a greater yugoloth. “I give everything back eventually, at least what he doesn’t somehow manage to lift out of the space of a portable hole on my person when I’m not in his shop.”As his tail bottlebrushed, Tristol didn’t look at all mollified in his concern.“Oh Nisha! How did you steal your mother in law’s cutlery?” She pointed a finger at Tristol, “Everybody wants to know that, but nobody asks how A’kin snatched stuff back from a distant extraplanar space huh? That’s some crazy magical juju if you ask me! But no, you didn’t ask me did you? Hmm? All about suspecting the crazy tiefling lady from the Hive of being a thief!”“Nisha honey, you are a thief.” Tristol put a fingertip on her nose.“So Tristol!” Clueless glanced at the Torilian native, breaking up his and Nisha’s conversation before they started actually arguing or starting kissing in front of everyone else. “What do you know about the High Forest?”Tristol paused and thought for a second before responding with a string of facts, both geographical and historical.“That’s all well and good,” Clueless nodded, “But anything that would actually relate to why Taba would be here in the first place?”“To kill us likely…” Florian muttered.“Well, not so much the High Forest itself,” Tristol explained, “But there’s one rather unique landmark: the Dire Wood, and it’s not that far from the spot I scryed.”“Just based on the name, that sounds like someplace I don’t want to go.” Fyrehowl grimaced.Florian frowned, “I’ve heard of that place before, though I can’t quite put my finger on what it was. Something about Netheril though.”“The end of Netheril to be more precise.” Tristol sighed, “When Karsus cast his masterwork, the Karsus Avatar, he wasn’t able to control the influx of magic when he briefly ascended to godhood, stealing that moment from a previous incarnation of Mystra, Mystral. He died and when he did, the Weave died with him until Mystra reincarnated several minutes later. Magic was forever changed on Toril for the worse, and never again would the Weave be capable of supporting the magic the Netherese mastered. What’s more however was that Karsus, in trying to save Netheril, he doomed it. When he died, his body manifested as a giant stone corpse frozen in a moment of horror at what he’d done and the floating cities fell from the clouds, hurtling to the ground.”Tristol looked away, an almost immeasurable sense of loss filling his eyes as he wondered what magic could have accomplished if not for Karsus’ folly. As Halruaa was formed by refugees from Netheril at its height, he was linked by blood, culture, and magical tradition to the Netherese mages of old, and the legacy of Karsus was his in some small measure.“Not all of the Netherese died of course.” Tristol continued, “Refugees dispersed to all corners of Toril, with my home of Halruaa being the largest and most cohesive of those groups. A few archwizards survived personally, only to vanish into obscurity and likely undeath, and the floating city of Shade pulled itself into the Plane of Shadow in the months prior, and actually reappeared this past year. They didn’t survive those centuries in the Shadow plane very well from what I understand. F*cking Shar…”Tristol muttered to himself, a sense of anger and envy in his voice. He considered the Netherese of Shade as both rival inheritors of Netheril’s greatness, and also as traitors to everything it was, given their abandonment of their fellows with seeming foreknowledge of the tragedy to come, and their turn away from Mystra to Shar.“So the corpse of Karsus has been here since then?” Florian glanced at Tristol. “I would think that sort of spectacular monument to hubris would be something that was more widely known.”“It was for a time,” Tristol shrugged, “There were enough people that venerated Karsus, or his failure, or his attempt, or all three that they built a city around his petrified mountain of a corpse. Either being all super respectful or just unimaginative, they named it Karse.”“I vote for the latter.” Toras shook his head, “Cultists are never particularly imaginative.”“Still though, I’m really not sure what Taba would want here in the High Forest or the Dire Wood.” The wizard shrugged.Tristol’s introspection was suddenly interrupted by the soft whisper of a magical call into his and his companions’ minds. It began as a soft, whispering hiss and chuckle before resolving itself into discrete words and the mental impression of something perpetually changing shape: Taba.“Good. You’ve arrived in the High Forest.” The altraloth’s voice carried the impression of rancid syrup and claws tracing down the spine. “You mortals at least know how to follow directions. I await you in the ruins of Karse in the center of the Dire Wood. The Halruaan should be more than well aware of the location and its history. I am even more aware. Ponder that until we meet, and do avoid the undead that litter the forest. They are ever so hungry, and their master Jingleshod seems particularly upset with me, but less at me and more at my kind in general at the moment. But that’s a detail I leave to him to explain should you run afoul of the death knight, or something for you to discover once you arrive and we can speak directly.”The altraloth’s telepathic call then slid from their minds with a soft chuckle and a faintly lingering sensation of the archfiend’s crimson eyes upon them.****</blockquote>

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