Shemeska
Adventurer
Fyrehowl stood up from her chair, slightly buzzed but not drunk. She wasn’t a small person, and as a celestial, even a jaded one if labels had to be applied, it took a lot of alcohol to affect her. Twelve shots and she was feeling warm and pleasant, but only starting down the road to inebriation.
Still, the night was young, and not in any sense over.
“Guys?” The lupinal asked. “Does anyone mind if I go out for a while?”
Florian looked up from her own drink. “Eh? Our company isn’t good enough?”
Clueless paused in his stacking of mugs up at the bar. “My booze isn’t strong enough?”
“Well no, it’s just…” She started. “I’d like to be a bit more downwind from the Gatehouse, and to be honest I’d like to chat with some other celestials, especially since I’m in a mood to know how others might handle it.”
“That’s it Amberblue.” Nisha said to the faeriedragon. “It’s official. We’re becoming boring.”
Tristol chuckled and gave Nisha a hug, which was probably what she wanted in the first place, and for his part the tiny dragon next to her wasn’t all that concerned either. He wasn’t because he was busily munching on a tray of chocolate-coated mints that looked very much like the tray of mints that had, an hour before, been sitting on A’kin’s front counter in the Friendly Fiend. A’kin seemed rather patient with Xaositects, or at least one particular Xaositect, or maybe just a softie for ones with faeriedragons.
But regardless, Fyrehowl didn’t seem bothered by Nisha’s comment about her thinking them boring, and Tristol’s next words helped put her fully at ease.
“You’ve got a unique perspective.” He said. “So if you think that’ll help, then by all means do so. We’ll still be here when you get back.”
Fyrehowl smiled as Toras raised a glass to her in salute. They really didn’t mind, and they honestly didn’t feel slighted or rejected that she wanted to spend some time out, drinking with other people.
“I really appreciate it guys.” She said, “Now I don’t know how long I’ll be out, and that may be past closing time.
“Again, not a problem.” Clueless said.
“You can lock the doors when you close down.” Fyrehowl added. “I’ve got a key, and I’ll try not to make much noise when I get back, drunk or not.”
“You can always just go through your window,” Nisha quipped. “You keep it unlocked.”
Fyrehowl paused. “Wait. How do you know that?”
The Xaositect slouched a bit in her chair.
Tristol poked her shoulder, “Now I’m curious. Spill it.”
“I had to!” She finally admitted with a blush. “I was trying to sneak in at some point, I really don’t remember what it was even for, that happens to me a lot you know, and well… Toras keeps magical explody things in his room and I wasn’t messing with that.”
Toras grinned over his mug. “Yeah… I do. Ask the Cheshire Fiend.”
Nisha stuck out her tongue, “Fyrehowl’s room was next in line on the ledge.”
“Just don’t make a habit of it.” The lupinal walked over and patted Nisha on the head. “But I’ll see you all later. Take care.”
Wisely though, uncharacteristically wise in fact, Nisha had just then omitted any mention of just how momentarily weirded out she’d been when she’d snuck into the lupinal’s room and wandered across a tail nailed to the wall. It had belonged to the fallen lupinal Tarnsilver, the corrupt cipher who’d been almost as responsible for the slide of Belarian as the fiends had been. It wasn’t exactly a stuffed fiendish moose’s head, but it served the same purpose, and even though fiendish moose could talk half the time and so could lupinals, even fallen ones, it was still rather creepy. And if it was creepy, Nisha wanted little to do with it.
But of course, as Fyrehowl walked out of the bar and into the night on her way to happily drink herself to numbness, that one step removed memory of Belarian flickering through Nisha’s jumbled up mind was ironic considering what was about to happen that evening in only a few hours.
The figure drifted softly on the wind, descending like an ashen snowflake on the herald breeze of a forest fire, inhaling with a smile as he slowed his descent and the harsh, acrid musk of the colossal reptile rose to meet his nostrils. Teleportation would have been more expedient perhaps, but the descent from the tower’s summit gave such a view, such a perspective of the Waste from so many different heights, and an opportunity to listen to the wind scream in his ears like an infant, carrying the scents of a hundred million pointless deaths. Such beauty was not to be missed.
Clawed feet touched a flank, a ridge of muscled neck so large it was literally a scaled landscape, then ankles folded, knees bent, silken robes pooled and the Lord of Khin-Oin settled himself atop the beast below. Staring off into the distance at a pair of Tanar'ri and Baatezu armies, the Oinoloth reached down and stroked a palm across the creature's hide, generating a deep, almost infrasound rumble of contentedness. The Mother of Serpents was purring.
"We've done much, you and I, haven't we?" The Ebon asked.
The beast gently writhed below him, and the undulations of its belly against the earth at the base of the Wasting Tower sent minute tremors through the land for several miles. The beast was happy, and it replied in a wordless, obedient manner.
“Khin-Oin is mine.” The Oinoloth said matter-of-factly. “For the first time in our history, our race has some semblance of a unified hierarchy, devoid of much of the infighting except that which I choose to allow, and that which I even choose to promote. Everything is being orchestrated; everything is planned. Everything is as I choose for it to be.”
He closed his eyes and felt the rumble of the serpent’s blood surging through its veins, the memories of a hundred thousand guardinal deaths so many long eons ago still pulsing with the opening and closing of its arterial valves. Convenient how history had repeated itself, but his opposites were not the Oinoloth’s primary concern.
“But yet there is still the matter of the General.” He hissed, unconsciously slipping once more into the reality-corrupting language of the Baernaloths. “And there is still the one altraloth who escaped capitulation or execution, but as of yet, Taba has been quiet. Still, she will likely make a pain of herself in the future. But they are both puppets, or puppets of puppets.”
Neither of them were his true worry, and like a tiny aneurysm in the back of his brain, the Demented were collectively a lingering worry of an idea in his mind, festering and occluding his thoughts because they were something that had to be accounted for, but by their nature they could not be accounted for. The architects of despair were the only opponents he feared.
He opened his eyes again and sighed. “What exactly have you and your diseased ilk been up to Tellura?”
Ever since his brief encounter with the Dire Shepherd there on the Waste, only a half mile from where he presently sat atop the Mother of Serpents, the Demented had not made any further appearance, and the Waste was silent about their location. Tellura ibn Shartalan had been smiling at that earlier time. She’d been waiting for him there in the shadow of Khin-Oin, and so the metaphorical aneurysm of a worry only grew as time continued to pass without some further development.
“The Father/Mothers can…”
The Ebon paused and his words trailed off, when in the distance there was a brilliant burst of light, a glow of purity, a martyr's death like a falling star confined to the earth. It was a prick against his eye and he felt it resonate through the Waste, another discomfort at the back of his mind that though it was a minor thing in comparison to the other, it forced him to take notice.
He frowned, knowing immediately the source of the irritation. The Fourth Gloom, the ravaged layer of Elysium whose festering corpse pulsed blood through the vessels, veins, and drainpipes of the Loadstones while inch by inch an infinity of purity was sucked dry and left rotting and black under a sky of perfect gray. But more things than the dead of Rubicon and the imprisoned hydra progenitor had plummeted to the Waste when it was ripped from Elysium's flesh.
"The shame of the aasimon. The quasars." The Oinoloth cursed in his native tongue.
Ancient Baernaloth had no word for quasar, no word for aasimon, but it spewed a guttural filth that was more than demonstrative of the Ebon's distaste, words that momentarily discolored and tarnished the scales of the great serpent, words to reflect the Ebon's mood.
"Nuisances." He said, reverting to high yugoloth.
The quasar had found themselves a purpose when Belarian fell, and they despoiled an otherwise poetic and absolute dismemberment of a quarter of Elysium. The creatures were more constructs than living things, and they'd proven immune to disease, even the dozen newly tailored plagues that the Oinoloth had scattered onto their home in an idle attempt to rid himself of their presence.
But no, those attempts had done nothing, and the quasar had become something of a bother, something that presented difficulties for those servants of his that had sought to plunder the layer of the other buried terrors that the guardinals had shackled over the eons in pitiable mimicry of their own progenitors. In the absence of those ancients, their children suffered, but the martyrdom of the quasars was a blemish on the Ebon's use of the layer.
"Why must you sully my triumph with your idealistic purity?”
The future was only going to hold a need to divert resources into the 4th Gloom to slaughter the quasar and fully cement the layer into the fabric of the Waste. But that was never truly something that he’d planned; he’d never actually wanted Belarian, just the horrors that Belarian had kept imprisoned.
“Do I really want you any more?” He mused.
The layer still held treasures, still held prisoners, but nothing the Ebon needed, nothing that he required. He'd had his fill, the Waste had dined, and the scraps were left to his children. Perhaps a change was required.
“Do I need you at all?” He asked, his eyes drifting across the marshes studded with half-formed and inanimate quasars, the shriveled husks of fiends starved of sustenance and mummified by the alien soil of Belarian’s original plane. They might recover in time, but it would be decades before they stirred, and anything of immediate use would need to be intentionally hunted down, released from whatever bonds had shackled them down originally, and they’d need to be broken and controlled, more effort that might not be worth the expenditure.
His vision snapped back to the immediate and he stroked the Mother of Serpents again with his fingertips, brushing claw against scale, sneering slightly before giving a shrug.
"I suppose it has lived beyond its purpose, its immediate purpose, and it does tarnish our unholy symmetry so. It hasn't always been three, no, but long enough that I appreciate the number and the appearance beyond any sort of matter of fact acceptance, and nostalgia for that earliest era is pointless. Three feels correct. Anything more or less feels like we've lost something, the Waste and I."
The decision was made.
"We've gained the Seige Malicious yes, but more than that, it has been our second slap at Elysium, our second time to spit in the face of simpering innocence. But of course, what innocence remained after the first time?" He said, stroking the serpent's flesh, stroking the union of scale and burning, glittering gemstone.
"We hurt their pride and we destroyed their sense of inviolate safety once before. We drew blood, emotional blood the first time, and drew more visceral blood from all of them the second time. Their lords can stare into the pool and stare at their reflection, avoiding the past and hiding their shame, but they cannot protect the innocence of their kind after an entire layer of the plane was ripped away. Ignore me, pretend that I did nothing before, revel in your ignorant innocence and you do nothing but tempt me to act again. Elysium is not safe. Not from me..."
Vorkannis smiled, and below him in perfect time, so did the Mother of Serpents.
"We've had our use of Belarian. We've raped its corpse and rolled ourselves in its blood. Let's see if they still wish to have it back…”
The Oinoloth blurred and simultaneously he stepped into the mud of the swamp and onto the summit of Khin-Oin, with the faintest of wet paw-prints evaporating as he took five steps and sat upon the throne. The Ebon’s eyes rolled back in his head from the concentration, and his claws sifted through silt at the same time that they dug into the stone of his throne and into the backs of the severed and rotting, still partially conscious heads of the last two Oinoloths.
Words were spoken and the air hummed as Belarian was rocked by tremors and a sense of separation washed over the land. In the City-at-the-Center, the hastily constructed gate opening into the 4th Gloom swung open and was ripped from its hinges by a pronounced quake, revealing not the swamps of Belarian, but a black wall of nothingness slowly bleeding silvery astral light. And through it all, two infinities distant on Elysium’s second layer of Eronia, a bottomless, crystalline pool in a secluded patch of disturbingly empty forest began to froth and boil.
Of course, before that point, Fyrehowl had already been drowning her sorrows in alcohol. She was in the Lady’s Ward sitting in the Golden Bariaur Inn, chatting and drinking with a pair of avorals, a coure, and a bariaur who was drunkenly singing off-key. Fyrehowl was enjoying herself, enjoying the community of commiseration as it was, but that ended the moment that a portal to the Gray Waste was opened –intentionally as it turns out- and a form of sending spell of obscene power and reach filtered through into the City of Doors.
As broad as it was, the spell –if indeed it was a spell- was also quite specific, affecting only guardinals and half-celestials of guardinal descent. The sending was not just auditory as most such spells were, but it also carried with it a visual hallucination of its sender, relaying his expression as he spoke his bitter, poison message.
Hello again my friends. Surely you remember me…
Guardinals stood transfixed, guardinals whimpered, they snarled, they screamed, they twisted and they shuddered at even the touch of something so diametrically opposite them.
It so happens that I have something of yours…
The other celestials in the Golden Bariaur could only stare in shock as it washed over their Elysian compatriots sending them into silence, or drooling paroxysms. There was little they could do before it was over, but thankfully, mercifully, it was short.
Take it back if you wish, take it back if you can, but of course my offer is extended to any and all parties…
And then his presence was gone, and so was Belarian from the Waste. When the Oinoloth’s message had been sent, the 4th Gloom had been perched on the edge of sliding, and such was the force of his influence upon and connection to the Waste, that his pronouncement was enough to tip the metaphysical balance. Gone was Belarian the 4th Gloom, but Belarian the 3rd layer of Elysium, despoiled as it might have been, was not yet ready to return to its bleeding home.
In the shadow of the Infinite Spire, one hundred miles ringward of Hopeless, the earth trembled, the cloudless sky crackled with thunder, and the curtain of the Hinterlands was thrown back to make room for something new, something massive.
Of course, while the Oinoloth’s sending to them had happened over the space of seconds, it would be years before any of the guardinals thus affected would willingly discuss the full content of those few moments with any other celestial, let alone any mortals. Subjectively it had been longer, and they’d been forced to stare into the eyes, and thus the void of the Oinoloth’s soul, far longer than any being should have ever been forced to do.
Yet their layer was free of the shackles of the Waste. The ‘loths had withdrawn their claws, ceased their gnawing at the layer’s marrow, and given it up to history. The guardinals knew where Belarian was, and despite the insult and sickening fashion by which they’d been given that knowledge, they had the chance to reclaim what was still theirs. They knew that Belarian was in the Outlands.
Unfortunately, within the hour so would the Tanar’ri and the Baatezu, the Rilmani had felt the shudder in their plane before it had arrived, and the diseased fragment of Elysium would draw a hundred other competing parties like flies to a rotten corpse before the claims were settled.
“Fyrehowl?” Clueless asked as the lupinal staggered through the door. “Are you alright?”
Her eyes focused on the bladesinger only briefly, and they were bloodshot and swollen as if she’d been crying. She had, and Clueless picked up on that fact within seconds, but he didn’t know why. News of Belarian’s fate had not yet spread through the Cage as common knowledge.
“F*ck the Oinoloth.” She snarled in celestial as she sat down at the bar, belatedly and sullenly adding. “I don’t really want to talk about the specifics.”
Clueless didn’t press the issue, but he was curious enough to want to find out later what she was talking about.
Fyrehowl held up a half-empty bottle of Arcadian whisky that she’d been holding when she walked in the door, “Do you have anything stronger? Because this really isn’t doing much.”
“I might but are you sure that…” He didn’t argue when she looked up at him, miserable even more so than she’d been earlier that evening. “Yeah, but I don’t have much, and I don’t really know what it’ll do to you.”
Fyrehowl mumbled something incoherently as Clueless reached under the bar and retrieved a hand carved wooden box. Inside was a delicate and twisted bottle of multicolored glass, something clearly fey in origin.
“Be careful now.” Clueless said as he took out a shot glass. “This is pretty strong stuff. I normally can’t get drunk… except on this.”
“Pour me a shot.” Fyrehowl said before he’d finished. “Actually, make it two shots.”
The moment the liquid was poured, the glass was in the air and the liquid down the lupinal’s throat. A half-dozen shots later and Clueless had removed the bottle and put it back under lock and key, because Fyrehowl was ready to fall out of her chair, and was blubbering in the worst drunken stupor that he’d ever seen her in. But at least she was a happy drunk, be it her normal attitude to being wasted, or just the effects of the fey-wine.
“Thish is good stuffs…” Fyrehowl slurred as a bevy of colors waltzed across her field of vision. “Good shtuffs, good st… but maybe I drunks two, maybe I’m drank too mu… now what’s the right way to say that…”
Language was failing the lupinal, and the disturbingly potent wine was to blame. And it was going to be a source of blame for a while yet, but not the only source of blame.
“Why hellooooo there Fyrehowl!” Came a voice from over her shoulder.
Fyrehowl turned around to look directly into the face of former Factol Rhys. Or at least that was what Fyrehowl’s beer goggles were seeing, rather than who was actually there.
“Oh my gosh!” The actual cipher exclaimed, sputtering on her mouthful of alcohol. “I’m so sorry that I’m like this. I… I…”
“Factol Rhys” leaned in and gave Fyrehowl a hug. “Oh don’t worry Fyrehowl, you can be drunk! I can be drunk too! But not now!”
“Why?” Fyrehowl asked, perplexed and out of her senses. “Is there something that…”
“No no! I cannot say!” “Factol Rhys” exclaimed in a weird little singsong voice. “But only because I’m so spoooooky and mysteeeerious!”
Nisha was somehow managing to suppress her giggling as she stood there playing off of Fyrehowl’s utter intoxication, dressed in a pretty decent facsimile of Rhys’s factol-era robes. The fact that Nisha was a tiefling like Rhys, and just like the current council chairwoman also had goat-like lower legs, only added to the illusion. To top it off, the long black, potentially animated wig, and what appeared to actually be a staff of the magi completed the look, though it wasn’t a sobering thought if Nisha somehow had managed to get a hold of one of those minor-artifacts.
“But… but… but…” Fyrehowl’s ears were off-kilter and her senses were starting to fail her as the fey-wine combined with the nonsensical situation in front of her.
“Now if you’ll excuse me,” “Rhys” said, “I have to go speak with a particularly wise Xaositect named Nisha! And by wise I mean awesome!”
And on that note, “Rhys” tapped Fyrehowl on the nose with the tip of her staff, and with cipher-esque timing, the lupinal fell off her chair and passed out in front of the bar.
“I knew that was going to happen!”
Stepped back so as not to slip in the rapidly growing puddle of drool from the drunk lupinal, Nisha, dressed up as Rhys, with a giggling faerie-dragon sitting on her shoulder, began laughing so hard that she started crying. Whenever Fyrehowl eventually woke up and tumbled to what had happened, what she thought had happened, and what had actually happened, it was going to be interesting.
Thus began the prank war.
The first salvo had just been fired in something that would eventually resonate within certain quarters of the Cage as legendary. Drinking songs would eventually come out it and they would be sung centuries later. Nisha had started it, Fyrehowl had already accepted it in her mind, and the next battle in that war would be swift in coming.
Mungoth, 31 years earlier…
Still, the night was young, and not in any sense over.
“Guys?” The lupinal asked. “Does anyone mind if I go out for a while?”
Florian looked up from her own drink. “Eh? Our company isn’t good enough?”
Clueless paused in his stacking of mugs up at the bar. “My booze isn’t strong enough?”
“Well no, it’s just…” She started. “I’d like to be a bit more downwind from the Gatehouse, and to be honest I’d like to chat with some other celestials, especially since I’m in a mood to know how others might handle it.”
“That’s it Amberblue.” Nisha said to the faeriedragon. “It’s official. We’re becoming boring.”
Tristol chuckled and gave Nisha a hug, which was probably what she wanted in the first place, and for his part the tiny dragon next to her wasn’t all that concerned either. He wasn’t because he was busily munching on a tray of chocolate-coated mints that looked very much like the tray of mints that had, an hour before, been sitting on A’kin’s front counter in the Friendly Fiend. A’kin seemed rather patient with Xaositects, or at least one particular Xaositect, or maybe just a softie for ones with faeriedragons.
But regardless, Fyrehowl didn’t seem bothered by Nisha’s comment about her thinking them boring, and Tristol’s next words helped put her fully at ease.
“You’ve got a unique perspective.” He said. “So if you think that’ll help, then by all means do so. We’ll still be here when you get back.”
Fyrehowl smiled as Toras raised a glass to her in salute. They really didn’t mind, and they honestly didn’t feel slighted or rejected that she wanted to spend some time out, drinking with other people.
“I really appreciate it guys.” She said, “Now I don’t know how long I’ll be out, and that may be past closing time.
“Again, not a problem.” Clueless said.
“You can lock the doors when you close down.” Fyrehowl added. “I’ve got a key, and I’ll try not to make much noise when I get back, drunk or not.”
“You can always just go through your window,” Nisha quipped. “You keep it unlocked.”
Fyrehowl paused. “Wait. How do you know that?”
The Xaositect slouched a bit in her chair.
Tristol poked her shoulder, “Now I’m curious. Spill it.”
“I had to!” She finally admitted with a blush. “I was trying to sneak in at some point, I really don’t remember what it was even for, that happens to me a lot you know, and well… Toras keeps magical explody things in his room and I wasn’t messing with that.”
Toras grinned over his mug. “Yeah… I do. Ask the Cheshire Fiend.”
Nisha stuck out her tongue, “Fyrehowl’s room was next in line on the ledge.”
“Just don’t make a habit of it.” The lupinal walked over and patted Nisha on the head. “But I’ll see you all later. Take care.”
Wisely though, uncharacteristically wise in fact, Nisha had just then omitted any mention of just how momentarily weirded out she’d been when she’d snuck into the lupinal’s room and wandered across a tail nailed to the wall. It had belonged to the fallen lupinal Tarnsilver, the corrupt cipher who’d been almost as responsible for the slide of Belarian as the fiends had been. It wasn’t exactly a stuffed fiendish moose’s head, but it served the same purpose, and even though fiendish moose could talk half the time and so could lupinals, even fallen ones, it was still rather creepy. And if it was creepy, Nisha wanted little to do with it.
But of course, as Fyrehowl walked out of the bar and into the night on her way to happily drink herself to numbness, that one step removed memory of Belarian flickering through Nisha’s jumbled up mind was ironic considering what was about to happen that evening in only a few hours.
***
The figure drifted softly on the wind, descending like an ashen snowflake on the herald breeze of a forest fire, inhaling with a smile as he slowed his descent and the harsh, acrid musk of the colossal reptile rose to meet his nostrils. Teleportation would have been more expedient perhaps, but the descent from the tower’s summit gave such a view, such a perspective of the Waste from so many different heights, and an opportunity to listen to the wind scream in his ears like an infant, carrying the scents of a hundred million pointless deaths. Such beauty was not to be missed.
Clawed feet touched a flank, a ridge of muscled neck so large it was literally a scaled landscape, then ankles folded, knees bent, silken robes pooled and the Lord of Khin-Oin settled himself atop the beast below. Staring off into the distance at a pair of Tanar'ri and Baatezu armies, the Oinoloth reached down and stroked a palm across the creature's hide, generating a deep, almost infrasound rumble of contentedness. The Mother of Serpents was purring.
"We've done much, you and I, haven't we?" The Ebon asked.
The beast gently writhed below him, and the undulations of its belly against the earth at the base of the Wasting Tower sent minute tremors through the land for several miles. The beast was happy, and it replied in a wordless, obedient manner.
“Khin-Oin is mine.” The Oinoloth said matter-of-factly. “For the first time in our history, our race has some semblance of a unified hierarchy, devoid of much of the infighting except that which I choose to allow, and that which I even choose to promote. Everything is being orchestrated; everything is planned. Everything is as I choose for it to be.”
He closed his eyes and felt the rumble of the serpent’s blood surging through its veins, the memories of a hundred thousand guardinal deaths so many long eons ago still pulsing with the opening and closing of its arterial valves. Convenient how history had repeated itself, but his opposites were not the Oinoloth’s primary concern.
“But yet there is still the matter of the General.” He hissed, unconsciously slipping once more into the reality-corrupting language of the Baernaloths. “And there is still the one altraloth who escaped capitulation or execution, but as of yet, Taba has been quiet. Still, she will likely make a pain of herself in the future. But they are both puppets, or puppets of puppets.”
Neither of them were his true worry, and like a tiny aneurysm in the back of his brain, the Demented were collectively a lingering worry of an idea in his mind, festering and occluding his thoughts because they were something that had to be accounted for, but by their nature they could not be accounted for. The architects of despair were the only opponents he feared.
He opened his eyes again and sighed. “What exactly have you and your diseased ilk been up to Tellura?”
Ever since his brief encounter with the Dire Shepherd there on the Waste, only a half mile from where he presently sat atop the Mother of Serpents, the Demented had not made any further appearance, and the Waste was silent about their location. Tellura ibn Shartalan had been smiling at that earlier time. She’d been waiting for him there in the shadow of Khin-Oin, and so the metaphorical aneurysm of a worry only grew as time continued to pass without some further development.
“The Father/Mothers can…”
The Ebon paused and his words trailed off, when in the distance there was a brilliant burst of light, a glow of purity, a martyr's death like a falling star confined to the earth. It was a prick against his eye and he felt it resonate through the Waste, another discomfort at the back of his mind that though it was a minor thing in comparison to the other, it forced him to take notice.
He frowned, knowing immediately the source of the irritation. The Fourth Gloom, the ravaged layer of Elysium whose festering corpse pulsed blood through the vessels, veins, and drainpipes of the Loadstones while inch by inch an infinity of purity was sucked dry and left rotting and black under a sky of perfect gray. But more things than the dead of Rubicon and the imprisoned hydra progenitor had plummeted to the Waste when it was ripped from Elysium's flesh.
"The shame of the aasimon. The quasars." The Oinoloth cursed in his native tongue.
Ancient Baernaloth had no word for quasar, no word for aasimon, but it spewed a guttural filth that was more than demonstrative of the Ebon's distaste, words that momentarily discolored and tarnished the scales of the great serpent, words to reflect the Ebon's mood.
"Nuisances." He said, reverting to high yugoloth.
The quasar had found themselves a purpose when Belarian fell, and they despoiled an otherwise poetic and absolute dismemberment of a quarter of Elysium. The creatures were more constructs than living things, and they'd proven immune to disease, even the dozen newly tailored plagues that the Oinoloth had scattered onto their home in an idle attempt to rid himself of their presence.
But no, those attempts had done nothing, and the quasar had become something of a bother, something that presented difficulties for those servants of his that had sought to plunder the layer of the other buried terrors that the guardinals had shackled over the eons in pitiable mimicry of their own progenitors. In the absence of those ancients, their children suffered, but the martyrdom of the quasars was a blemish on the Ebon's use of the layer.
"Why must you sully my triumph with your idealistic purity?”
The future was only going to hold a need to divert resources into the 4th Gloom to slaughter the quasar and fully cement the layer into the fabric of the Waste. But that was never truly something that he’d planned; he’d never actually wanted Belarian, just the horrors that Belarian had kept imprisoned.
“Do I really want you any more?” He mused.
The layer still held treasures, still held prisoners, but nothing the Ebon needed, nothing that he required. He'd had his fill, the Waste had dined, and the scraps were left to his children. Perhaps a change was required.
“Do I need you at all?” He asked, his eyes drifting across the marshes studded with half-formed and inanimate quasars, the shriveled husks of fiends starved of sustenance and mummified by the alien soil of Belarian’s original plane. They might recover in time, but it would be decades before they stirred, and anything of immediate use would need to be intentionally hunted down, released from whatever bonds had shackled them down originally, and they’d need to be broken and controlled, more effort that might not be worth the expenditure.
His vision snapped back to the immediate and he stroked the Mother of Serpents again with his fingertips, brushing claw against scale, sneering slightly before giving a shrug.
"I suppose it has lived beyond its purpose, its immediate purpose, and it does tarnish our unholy symmetry so. It hasn't always been three, no, but long enough that I appreciate the number and the appearance beyond any sort of matter of fact acceptance, and nostalgia for that earliest era is pointless. Three feels correct. Anything more or less feels like we've lost something, the Waste and I."
The decision was made.
"We've gained the Seige Malicious yes, but more than that, it has been our second slap at Elysium, our second time to spit in the face of simpering innocence. But of course, what innocence remained after the first time?" He said, stroking the serpent's flesh, stroking the union of scale and burning, glittering gemstone.
"We hurt their pride and we destroyed their sense of inviolate safety once before. We drew blood, emotional blood the first time, and drew more visceral blood from all of them the second time. Their lords can stare into the pool and stare at their reflection, avoiding the past and hiding their shame, but they cannot protect the innocence of their kind after an entire layer of the plane was ripped away. Ignore me, pretend that I did nothing before, revel in your ignorant innocence and you do nothing but tempt me to act again. Elysium is not safe. Not from me..."
Vorkannis smiled, and below him in perfect time, so did the Mother of Serpents.
"We've had our use of Belarian. We've raped its corpse and rolled ourselves in its blood. Let's see if they still wish to have it back…”
The Oinoloth blurred and simultaneously he stepped into the mud of the swamp and onto the summit of Khin-Oin, with the faintest of wet paw-prints evaporating as he took five steps and sat upon the throne. The Ebon’s eyes rolled back in his head from the concentration, and his claws sifted through silt at the same time that they dug into the stone of his throne and into the backs of the severed and rotting, still partially conscious heads of the last two Oinoloths.
Words were spoken and the air hummed as Belarian was rocked by tremors and a sense of separation washed over the land. In the City-at-the-Center, the hastily constructed gate opening into the 4th Gloom swung open and was ripped from its hinges by a pronounced quake, revealing not the swamps of Belarian, but a black wall of nothingness slowly bleeding silvery astral light. And through it all, two infinities distant on Elysium’s second layer of Eronia, a bottomless, crystalline pool in a secluded patch of disturbingly empty forest began to froth and boil.
***
Of course, before that point, Fyrehowl had already been drowning her sorrows in alcohol. She was in the Lady’s Ward sitting in the Golden Bariaur Inn, chatting and drinking with a pair of avorals, a coure, and a bariaur who was drunkenly singing off-key. Fyrehowl was enjoying herself, enjoying the community of commiseration as it was, but that ended the moment that a portal to the Gray Waste was opened –intentionally as it turns out- and a form of sending spell of obscene power and reach filtered through into the City of Doors.
As broad as it was, the spell –if indeed it was a spell- was also quite specific, affecting only guardinals and half-celestials of guardinal descent. The sending was not just auditory as most such spells were, but it also carried with it a visual hallucination of its sender, relaying his expression as he spoke his bitter, poison message.
Hello again my friends. Surely you remember me…
Guardinals stood transfixed, guardinals whimpered, they snarled, they screamed, they twisted and they shuddered at even the touch of something so diametrically opposite them.
It so happens that I have something of yours…
The other celestials in the Golden Bariaur could only stare in shock as it washed over their Elysian compatriots sending them into silence, or drooling paroxysms. There was little they could do before it was over, but thankfully, mercifully, it was short.
Take it back if you wish, take it back if you can, but of course my offer is extended to any and all parties…
And then his presence was gone, and so was Belarian from the Waste. When the Oinoloth’s message had been sent, the 4th Gloom had been perched on the edge of sliding, and such was the force of his influence upon and connection to the Waste, that his pronouncement was enough to tip the metaphysical balance. Gone was Belarian the 4th Gloom, but Belarian the 3rd layer of Elysium, despoiled as it might have been, was not yet ready to return to its bleeding home.
In the shadow of the Infinite Spire, one hundred miles ringward of Hopeless, the earth trembled, the cloudless sky crackled with thunder, and the curtain of the Hinterlands was thrown back to make room for something new, something massive.
Of course, while the Oinoloth’s sending to them had happened over the space of seconds, it would be years before any of the guardinals thus affected would willingly discuss the full content of those few moments with any other celestial, let alone any mortals. Subjectively it had been longer, and they’d been forced to stare into the eyes, and thus the void of the Oinoloth’s soul, far longer than any being should have ever been forced to do.
Yet their layer was free of the shackles of the Waste. The ‘loths had withdrawn their claws, ceased their gnawing at the layer’s marrow, and given it up to history. The guardinals knew where Belarian was, and despite the insult and sickening fashion by which they’d been given that knowledge, they had the chance to reclaim what was still theirs. They knew that Belarian was in the Outlands.
Unfortunately, within the hour so would the Tanar’ri and the Baatezu, the Rilmani had felt the shudder in their plane before it had arrived, and the diseased fragment of Elysium would draw a hundred other competing parties like flies to a rotten corpse before the claims were settled.
***
“Fyrehowl?” Clueless asked as the lupinal staggered through the door. “Are you alright?”
Her eyes focused on the bladesinger only briefly, and they were bloodshot and swollen as if she’d been crying. She had, and Clueless picked up on that fact within seconds, but he didn’t know why. News of Belarian’s fate had not yet spread through the Cage as common knowledge.
“F*ck the Oinoloth.” She snarled in celestial as she sat down at the bar, belatedly and sullenly adding. “I don’t really want to talk about the specifics.”
Clueless didn’t press the issue, but he was curious enough to want to find out later what she was talking about.
Fyrehowl held up a half-empty bottle of Arcadian whisky that she’d been holding when she walked in the door, “Do you have anything stronger? Because this really isn’t doing much.”
“I might but are you sure that…” He didn’t argue when she looked up at him, miserable even more so than she’d been earlier that evening. “Yeah, but I don’t have much, and I don’t really know what it’ll do to you.”
Fyrehowl mumbled something incoherently as Clueless reached under the bar and retrieved a hand carved wooden box. Inside was a delicate and twisted bottle of multicolored glass, something clearly fey in origin.
“Be careful now.” Clueless said as he took out a shot glass. “This is pretty strong stuff. I normally can’t get drunk… except on this.”
“Pour me a shot.” Fyrehowl said before he’d finished. “Actually, make it two shots.”
The moment the liquid was poured, the glass was in the air and the liquid down the lupinal’s throat. A half-dozen shots later and Clueless had removed the bottle and put it back under lock and key, because Fyrehowl was ready to fall out of her chair, and was blubbering in the worst drunken stupor that he’d ever seen her in. But at least she was a happy drunk, be it her normal attitude to being wasted, or just the effects of the fey-wine.
“Thish is good stuffs…” Fyrehowl slurred as a bevy of colors waltzed across her field of vision. “Good shtuffs, good st… but maybe I drunks two, maybe I’m drank too mu… now what’s the right way to say that…”
Language was failing the lupinal, and the disturbingly potent wine was to blame. And it was going to be a source of blame for a while yet, but not the only source of blame.
“Why hellooooo there Fyrehowl!” Came a voice from over her shoulder.
Fyrehowl turned around to look directly into the face of former Factol Rhys. Or at least that was what Fyrehowl’s beer goggles were seeing, rather than who was actually there.
“Oh my gosh!” The actual cipher exclaimed, sputtering on her mouthful of alcohol. “I’m so sorry that I’m like this. I… I…”
“Factol Rhys” leaned in and gave Fyrehowl a hug. “Oh don’t worry Fyrehowl, you can be drunk! I can be drunk too! But not now!”
“Why?” Fyrehowl asked, perplexed and out of her senses. “Is there something that…”
“No no! I cannot say!” “Factol Rhys” exclaimed in a weird little singsong voice. “But only because I’m so spoooooky and mysteeeerious!”
Nisha was somehow managing to suppress her giggling as she stood there playing off of Fyrehowl’s utter intoxication, dressed in a pretty decent facsimile of Rhys’s factol-era robes. The fact that Nisha was a tiefling like Rhys, and just like the current council chairwoman also had goat-like lower legs, only added to the illusion. To top it off, the long black, potentially animated wig, and what appeared to actually be a staff of the magi completed the look, though it wasn’t a sobering thought if Nisha somehow had managed to get a hold of one of those minor-artifacts.
“But… but… but…” Fyrehowl’s ears were off-kilter and her senses were starting to fail her as the fey-wine combined with the nonsensical situation in front of her.
“Now if you’ll excuse me,” “Rhys” said, “I have to go speak with a particularly wise Xaositect named Nisha! And by wise I mean awesome!”
And on that note, “Rhys” tapped Fyrehowl on the nose with the tip of her staff, and with cipher-esque timing, the lupinal fell off her chair and passed out in front of the bar.
“I knew that was going to happen!”
Stepped back so as not to slip in the rapidly growing puddle of drool from the drunk lupinal, Nisha, dressed up as Rhys, with a giggling faerie-dragon sitting on her shoulder, began laughing so hard that she started crying. Whenever Fyrehowl eventually woke up and tumbled to what had happened, what she thought had happened, and what had actually happened, it was going to be interesting.
Thus began the prank war.
The first salvo had just been fired in something that would eventually resonate within certain quarters of the Cage as legendary. Drinking songs would eventually come out it and they would be sung centuries later. Nisha had started it, Fyrehowl had already accepted it in her mind, and the next battle in that war would be swift in coming.
***
Mungoth, 31 years earlier…
