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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 9378310" data-attributes="member: 11697">His physical body situated within the depths of Khin-Oin, in a room that should not have existed within the spatial constraints of the vast columns of god-bone that his kind had carved the great tower from, Vorkannis the Ebon paused for a moment of introspection. Then, with the scarcest bit of effort, he forced a portion of his consciousness across the planes, across the entirety of the cosmos nearly, jumping back into his ultroloth vessel in the Inner Planes, flying atop a slasrath a dozen feet distant from Shylara the Manged.When the Oinoloth had left them, the assembled yugoloth army, tailor-crafted to withstand the environment of the Gemfields, it yet retained some 90% of its original numbers. Yet when Vorkannis next looked out through the eyes of his puppet vessel, that army had shrug by nearly half.Massive numbers of elementals and elemental creatures harried the yugoloth army on all sides, and several thousand of them were cut off from the main force, separated by a flow of molten, liquid quartz conjured into effect by an elemental duke in service to Ogremach.The Overlord of Carceri immediately sensed her master’s renewed presence and turned to glance at him, a mixture of emotions playing across her muzzle: relief, fear, and embarrassment. In the Oinoloth’s absence, she’d taken charge, and in a game of attrition, surrounded by hostile elementals on all fronts, things had gone poorly.Shylara paused and opened her mouth, about to say something, but thinking better of it, she held herself back. The Oinoloth spoke in the silence that followed.“Things are settled. As much as they can be.” The Oinoloth bluntly stated, his words completely ignoring the present status of their army.“Does it pertain to…” She asked, ears flat against her head.“It does not. Not directly.” The Oinoloth scowled, snapping his fingers and solidifying the river of glass cutting off a portion of their army in an instant, the expanding vitreous matrix crushing and killing dozens of mezzoloths who’d attempted to wade through the molten tributary.It would be another week before they reached their ultimate destination. A period during which the bulk of their forces would die hideous, agonizing deaths, and the Oinoloth and his consort would smile, unconcerned.****“Sparkly!” Nisha said, the bell on her tail gently ringing, “Oh so sparkly!”The Xaositect had been gleefully saying various iterations of that statement for the past hours and a half, ever since they emerged from a portal to Sigil that opened up into the Gemfields, less than a hundred miles from their intended and ever-so-mysterious destination.Travel wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t as difficult as perhaps might have been expected. Rather than the typical darkness of the Elemental Plane of Earth, the Gemfields were luminous, with ambient positive energy causing great crystalline outcroppings and even entire geode-like caverns to flicker and burn with a fierce, phosphorescent radiance. The way had been made even easier by an initial encounter with a dao trading caravan, the leaders of which had been more than happy to pause their own travel in order to sell and barter with a powerful group of adventurers uniquely flush with gold and items from the Outer Planes.Not only did they purchase various items, they gained knowledge of the surrounding terrain and a warning: the plane was under invasion.“What?” Clueless had asked with some incredulity as the dao caravan-master had explained the situation, one which had caused their own travels to veer off course considerably so as to avoid the ongoing and shifting battlefield itself.Mass-invasion of the Inner Planes by an Outer Planar power was utterly unheard of.Faced with the doubting faces all around him, the dao responded with proof, offering to sell them objects scavenged from the battlefield periphery.“Is that…?” Florian asked.“That’s a mezzoloth’s trident.” Fyrehowl said with an apprehensive sigh.“That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s from…” Toras paused and stopped as he gazed down at the stamped icon at the juncture of the trident’s three barbed prongs. The symbol was immediately recognizable and boded ill. “naughty word. Yeah, that’s the symbol of Shylara the Manged.”Several moments of silence followed as they gazed out at the other objects obtained from pillaging the dead: several other mezzoloth tridents and various other objects marked with the symbols of the Oinoloth and the Tower Arcane, displaying the marshaled allegiance of the various dead ‘loths.“Sh*t…” Toras muttered, “They’re already here, ahead of us.”That realization made short work of the meeting with the dao, and armed with the knowledge and layout of the land, the group continued onwards, swiftly but warily.While Tristol’s fiancé was more obsessed with the literal mountains of gemstones that emerged from the rocky landscape, and which grew ever more populous and luminous the closer that they got to the blurry metaphysical edge between the Quasielemental Plane of Mineral and the Positive Energy Plane, the others were more concerned about what they might find when they got there, or what they might find on the way.It didn’t take them long to discover the latter.“Tempus forbid…” Florian whispered as they emerged onto a blasted landscape. The cavern they stood within was more than a dozen miles long and nearly half as many wide, and a heavy cloud of smoke drifted unnaturally overhead and the clearer air below was thick with the reek of ash, ozone, and death.“That…” Fyrehowl covered her nose and softly whimpered at the smell, “That’s a massive number of dead out there. It smells like a Blood War battlefield.”As they wandered out into the cavern, they passed by thousands of dead yugoloths, some of them piled high enough to obstruct their view as literal mountains of mezzoloth and other corpses. That they’d encountered an army or armies of elementals was also abundantly clear. Dead dao, crumbled earth elementals of all types, and even a deceased and mutilated gem dragon lay strewn about the ravaged landscape.“There’s no way, just no way.” Florian gasped as she saw the scale of the devastation. “They probably could have forced a gate open right at the Tower of Lead’s doorstep and walked in with a small group of them, but they’re marching with a f*cking army through what, a hundred miles of the plane and slaughtering everything they come across? It makes no sense!”Tristol gazed out at the battlefield and his eyes went wide as he beheld the ragged storm of frayed magical auras left behind by a truly staggering display of magic, and while he didn’t immediately understand it, he knew that there was something else going on, something that linked into Florian’s question of just why the ‘loths were proceeding, counterintuitively, in the way that they were.“There’s just no way we can do this.” Florian despaired, looking back at the others. “There are thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of dead ‘loths piled high, just here in this cavern! Who knows how large of a total force they brought with them. How in the names of all the gods of war and combat are we supposed to be able to fight that? What are we expected to do?!”Toras took a deep breath, feeling much the same way as the cleric. He considered responding with some short, humorous quip to break the tension, but as he gazed out at the hillocks of dead and dissolving mezzoloths, he too considered the enormity of their task. He simply wasn’t thinking about the situation in the right way.“We don’t need to fight them.” Clueless said, “They have an army. Who knows how large that is, but armies aren’t fast. They’ve probably got every elemental power or even a god or two curious or enraged by their presence, drawn to them like flies to a bloated corpse.”Florian blinked. It was accurate. Whatever size of their force, they were large and based on the battlefield they present bore witness to, they were fighting massive numbers of elementals and others loyal to the powers who held sway over the plane.“Damn, you’re right.” Florian said, her face breaking into a smile as she held up and kissed her holy symbol. “Tempus be praised, but no army that’s facing fighting like what happened here is going to be moving at more than a snail’s pace.”“Like I said,” Clueless continued, pointing forward with Razor’s tip, “We don’t need to fight them. We just need to get around them and get there first. We keep going until we’ve found the tail end of their columns and then we divert, take a side tunnel or something and find the Tower of Lead before they do. That we can absolutely do.”Smiles crossed their assembled faces and a renewed sense of purpose and hope washed over them and the party began the difficult task of crossing the ravaged battlefield, drawing ever closer to the ‘loth army and to the Tower of Lead itself.What Clueless hadn’t mentioned to any of the others however was that ever since they’d stepped though the portal into the Gemfields, his ankle had begun to ache. It was the same dull pain that had only manifested when he’d been in some proximity to a yugoloth lord or other major power, and his ankle had never ached this much on any prior occasion, even when they’d fought the Overlord of Carceri, or her possessed surrogate body she’d formed via astral projection and color pool hopping. What that mean, he wasn’t certain, but they would find out soon enough.****“Soon my love, soon we shall be there…” Shylara the Manged spoke softly, her voice dipping for the second and third word so that it might only be heard by him and no others. The phrase was out of place for a yugoloth to whisper and the concept alien and despised, but coming from her lips it somehow fit as an expression of fanatical devotion, a soft and ritualized prayer whispered by a being who could, by her nature, never understand its true meaning.The Oinoloth, his conscious mind ensconced within its ultroloth shell and swathed with illusions to appear as himself did not respond. In fact, Vorkannis did not even look at her, though he acknowledged her words with a brief flash of ivory-white fangs.He hadn’t spoken much over the past twenty-four hours, his focus being less on the immediate battles faced by his army and more to magically surveying the path ahead and to nearly the same extent, the path behind them.The Oinoloth smirked. “We’re being followed. How amusing.”Shylara’s response was immediate. She snarled and spat out a guess, half a question and half a curse, “Taba?!”The Oinoloth gave a wry, almost taunting smirk before he shook his head. “No,” He replied, “It isn’t her. She’s not stupid enough to follow in our shadows when she knows that I’m personally gazing about. No, she’s more likely to butcher someone in Carceri or Gehenna or wherever else she thinks it will pain us most.”“Who then has the audacious stupidity to follow us?” The Overlord of Carceri asked, pausing only to briefly mentally instruct a cohort of her troops.“Oh, several who you’ll remember…” Vorkannis replied, taunting her softly before finally explaining himself. “The mortals who imprisoned you in stone so very recently.”Shylara screamed of course, then begged to go slaughter them in person before she was silenced with a motion of the Oinoloth’s talons.“I will see to it.” Vorkannis’s response was short and he provided no further explanations, nor did he want to begin the discussion because what he knew but his consort did not, was that the group following them, the same ones who had managed to foil Shylara’s actions in the Astral and imprison her in stone, were the same ones who had sprung Nilesia from her prison and released Nimicri’s child.Without anything but a thought, the Oinoloth teleported away, emerging in a gem-filled cavern a dozen miles away and behind his armies, not far from where the mortal and one immortal thorns in his side were still on the move. He considered his options, the easiest being to simply wait for and then obliterate them, but for an immortal being physically wrought of the metaphysical essence of agony, selfishness, and malevolent sorcery, that would have been too easy and far too boring.The adventurers had proven to be adept and a frustrating annoyance to him, but as far as creatures went, they were insects, nearly beneath his notice. Unconcerned with any actual threat on their part to stop his efforts there in the Gemfields, he dismissed the notion of personally killing them or even simply warding the tunnels to explode and bury them alive as it wouldn’t fulfill his personal sense of satisfaction. No, this was something he could play with, something he could enjoy, and in such a way to remove them from the playing field until well after he’s taken what he desired from the Tower of Lead.And with that, the Oinoloth began to cast.****</blockquote>

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