Like the proverbial cult Kool-Aid. But evil Kool-Aid from Gehenna.
“I think I’m going to need a bigger sword…” Toras said with a look of open-mouthed shock as he glanced up at the massive form of the Mother of Serpents where it stood towering over the forest several miles away.
“Massive yes, but… it will not remain here forever. I have seen to that, though it may take centuries still.” Tarnsilver spoke calmly. “They feed it fiends. Baatezu, Tanar’ri, even their own kind hoping to make it their pet and their tool in the Blood War or to sell it to either side like they sell themselves. No different from other celestials providing them with weapons to slaughter each other and keep them busy butchering their own kind rather than harming the innocent. Keeping the Beast here is foolish pride and self destruction.”
All eyes focused on the male lupinal as he stood calmly before them when they turned around. Tarnsilver nodded briefly at Fyrehowl, either in respect for her heritage or for the similar robes that they both wore, though his were marked with the station of a factor.
“Yugoloths… how can you help them here?” Fyrehowl was incredulous.
“Our losses were for nothing. The beast does nothing here but slowly corrupt the essence of our plane, a stain against our souls. Out of pride we keep it here! Out of pride we keep it chained before we would admit defeat so long ago!” The other lupinal snarled.
Clueless slowly stepped forward and past Fyrehowl, looking directly at Tarnsilver as he spoke. “We’ve spoken to Rhys about you, and we’ve spoken to the defenders of Rubicon. They…”
Clueless never completed the statement as the factor’s eyes glazed and the bladesinger felt dirt and blood in his mouth as he was knocked sprawling on the ground from a circle kick he never saw coming.
There was a moment of still and Tarnsilver tensed. A moment –after- he tensed, Toras charged him. The fighter was halfway through his backswing when the lupinal barely seemed to move but slammed the ball of his heel into Toras’s throat. Toras lay wincing on the ground while the former cipher factor tensed again and the others readied their own weapons or began to cast spells.
Nisha looked down at Toras while she brandished a wand and sheathed her sword. “Ah hell this isn’t going to be pretty…”
And it wasn’t. Tarnsilver seemed to slip in and out of a trance-like state as he ducked, dodged, blocked and otherwise evaded most of the attacks brought to bear against him. In fact, he seemed to anticipate things a fraction of a second before they actually happened. Out of a dozen or so blows directed against him only two of them struck, and they were only glancing blows. Tristol’s spells didn’t fare much better either as the fallen lupinal managed to evade most or all of the burst of fire that the aasimar conjured forth.
The bloodied companions looked up at Tarnsilver who stood calm and implacable in the clearing, drifting out of the trance for the moment. He chuckled at them as he gently touched and prodded the minor wounds he had taken.
“Better than most. Without the spell slinger you likely wouldn’t have landed any. How do you hit someone who knows what you’ll do next before you even decide to do it?” The fallen lupinal smirked as he gestured to Fyrehowl.
“You should know this more than the others; you’ve been inducted into the order as well. However you are only a namer, not a factor like myself. You know this is folly, and I am willing to spare you if you will listen to reason. The others have seen too much and there is too much at risk here.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing…” Fyrehowl said a moment before they charged Tarnsilver again.
Again they met with little success, as the cipher factor was a blur of kicks, punches, and spinning acrobatics that seemed to defy any sense of reality with their speed and prescience. With only a single spell and a few more glancing blows landing to any effect, the group again backed off. All of them had taken at least one hard blow in the fighting except for Clueless who, aside from the suckerpunch kick that still had him seeing spots, was the only one the factor had failed to strike. However the half-fey’s luck and evasion came less from any preternatural quickness like the lupinal, but rather from a serious combination of defensive spells in his bladesinger tradition.
Fyrehowl had stepped forward and looked at the other lupinal again and the smug smile on his face as he extended an offer to her.
“Give up and I will ensure that the Yugoloths do not harm you. The multiverse speaks and flows through me. Surely you must know that. I do what the planes themselves whisper to me is the correct actions, and in this I am resolute.”
“No… no they don’t. We spoke to Rhys and she told me to tell you that you don’t hear the planes, not anymore.”
Tarnsilver paused and his eyes lost their glazed look as he focused on Fyrehowl.
“Rhys told me to tell you that you aren’t hearing the planes, that you’re only hearing your own voice. You’re only hearing what you want to hear.”
Tarnsilver seemed to slow in that moment and in his self-doubt and uncertainty he charged her to silence the words he refused to believe. As he charged her, she struck back with all her strength and seemed to hear in the back of her mind, less as a voice and more as an instinct, something telling her when and where to strike. Tarnsilver struck hard, but harder still did Fyrehowl.
Tarnsilver stumbled and clutched at his gut. His robes were awash in crimson and he glanced at his wound and then back up at Fyrehowl with shock and disbelief.
“…how?” He shuddered and winced, “No no no, I was right in what I did, no…”
Fyrehowl’s eyes were glazed over as she walked forwards when Tarnsilver collapsed onto the ground.
The fallen lupinal coughed up blood and looked at Fyrehowl, “I was doing what was needed. I was saving us from our mistake; I was doing this for us. You, me, Rubicon, all of you. I was only trying to do what I knew was right.”
“And which of us was full of pride then?” Fyrehowl said as her scimitar severed the other lupinal’s head and her eyes lost their glaze and she stared down at his corpse.
“It’s not over. We’ve only stopped him, but we have to stop the others. We can’t allow the fiends to stay here.” The cipher was softly crying as she wrapped the fallen lupinal’s head in a white cloth. “A moment alone here please…”
The others walked away for several minutes, leaving Fyrehowl a few moments of peace and reflection before they returned, wary that the fiends would have some of their kind marching to find their lupinal ally. They did not care to be there when the ‘loths found the body.
“They’ll be sending people to look for him most likely, we should get moving.” Nisha said as she slipped into the woods and motioned for the others.
“From what he said it sounded like the fiends had a bit more than we thought.” Toras said.
Clueless nodded, “That’s what worries me, that they’ll have too many of their kind here for us to handle.”
“We’ll handle it.” Fyrehowl stated.
As they crept through the forest they began to notice that the terrain began to slope downwards as they progressed further to the east, and that soon enough to had begun to do so at an increasingly rapid pace. Perhaps a quarter of a mile distant from the road they slowed their pace and finally stopped abruptly as they saw something ahead.
“Holy crap…” Clueless said as he paused and looked at the structure that loomed ahead.
Sure enough as the terrain had bottomed out, they stood in the woods on the descending slope of a natural bowl in the landscape several hundred feet below the normal lay of the land. Rising to just below the height of the treetops at normal elevation was a jagged, bladed tower that stood several stories above the ground in a clearing at the center of the depression.
Fyrehowl motioned the group to remain quiet as they stood and peered at the scene below. The main gate at the base of the tower stood open and a dozen or more Mezzoloths stood guard, clustered around the opening, while two columns of the fiends marched in formation around the building on patrol in opposite to one another, probably forty of them all told. Mixed in with the Mezzoloths were a number of Dergholoths and Piscaloths as well.
Fyrehowl gritted her teeth in rage and disbelief at the presence of the fiends and the insult of the tower. Skalliska was more astonished than not.
“That’s a scale replica of the Tower Arcane in Gehenna, right down to the blades on the sides. And hell, judging from the color of the walls, they made it out of adamantium. They built the damn thing to last…” The kobold said before a flapping noise from overhead cut her off.
Descending from out of the sky towards the tower was the Slasrath and its Nycaloth rider that they had seen earlier making an aerial patrol of the surrounding area. The black, manta-like flier swooped down and landed upon one of three mounts on the edge of one of the upper stories of the tower where two other Slasraths were tethered atop their own aeries. The Nycaloth rider atop the beast dismounted, briefly paused to look down at the marching Mezzoloths, and then disappeared inside the tower itself.
“We’re not going to be charging the front gates, as much fun as that might be, it’d be a brief amount of fun.” Toras said as he motioned towards the troops.
“See those carvings on the sides of the second and forth floors of the tower?” Tristol said, “I can’t tell you exactly what they are, but there’s some contingent wards on them. If you look closely at the carved figures there, arcanaloths, they’re all holding wands pointed down towards the ground. The wards there are probably spells that trigger those wands to fire on intruders who approach the tower.”
“Broke out all the stops didn’t they…” Florian remarked.
“And this is where the sneaking comes into play, right?” Nisha said.
Clueless pointed away from the tower to the opposite side of the valley where the ground was considerably rockier. A few hundred feet away from the tower stood what appeared to be a mineshaft sunk into the ground and a number of blocks of cut stone that had been drug out from it, half of them gleaming partially like they were either metal or metal ores.
“I’d hazard a guess that the shaft there might connect to the tower if it has any lower levels, and it doesn’t appear defended in any way that I can see. Opinions?”
“The stone blocks there are just normal stone, but one of them looks like it’s been partially transmuted into the same metal the tower is built from. I’d guess they just took normal rock from the area here and used magic to shape it and make it into the proper material.” Skalliska said. “They might have abandoned the mine since the tower looks finished, but they might also have connections to the tower as well like you said. It’s worth a look.”
The group exchanged nods and started moving away from the tower to circle around through the woods to approach from the other side. At least that was their plan, to remain in hiding and out of sight till they could sneak into the mineshaft. But, as in all things, not everything turned out as expected.
“Oww! Sh*t…” Toras muttered as he turned and walked directly into a low hanging tree branch and snapped it off from the impact with his head. The crack of the impact was loud and resounding and not missed by the fiends in the clearing below.
Fyrehowl, Nisha, Skalliska and Clueless stared at Toras. The fighter winced and rubbed his forehead as a bright bruise slowly spread across his face.
“You can dodge arrows and sword slashes, but a tree manages to catch you with your guard down?” Florian asked with a chuckle.
“Sneaking! It’s not that hard!” Clueless harshly whispered.
Toras chuckled and blushed heavily but before he could say anything Nisha cut him off, “Move everyone, the fiends are sending guards to see what that was, so let’s move.”
Down below, one of the two Mezzoloth contingents diverted course at the direction of their Dergholoth supervisor and swung up towards the heavily forested slopes of the valley. By the time they had marched to the spot where the sound hard originated however the group was gone and nestled near to the open mouth of the mineshaft.
****
“Is there anything more that my master requires?” Shylara’s tongue may have dropped honey in the Ultroloth’s presence, but her thoughts were anything but as sweet as she knelt before the other fiend whom she had obediently chafed under for months now in Center.
Not that her service and loyalty was at the order of the Ultroloth, no, not in any way. She only served the temporary, so-called master, in order to funnel information and details of Anthraxus’s troop strength to her actual lord in Carceri. It was to He that she was loyal, and it was The Ebon who would reward her for her unquestioning loyalty, that for her bordered upon worship normally reserved for beings of higher station than even the Overlord of Carceri. But titles for those others were just words wrapped around the unworthy.
As Palinarius’s mental voice buzzed ad droned on in her mind, her thoughts that the other ‘loth felt were ones of obedience, fear, and loyalty to their shared master, Anthraxus the Decayed. Locked away and sequestered in the core of her being though, her thoughts dripped the Ultroloth’s blood. In those thoughts she bathed in his blood and draped herself with his guts like fleshy, still twitching ribbons. But there was a time and a place for everything, and desires, hers and others, were something of a key in the next days.
“I no longer require you in my service. I release you from my side and expect for you to report yourself for service with the appropriate taskmaster of your caste in the army of our mutual master.” Palinarius said as he turned away from the window high above Center in the palace of Dandy Will.
Outside, the first waves of the massed army of Anthraxus, the once and future Oinoloth, marched around the city and through its wide-open gates like waves of liquid evil. The populace of Center welcomed the massed columns of Mezzoloths, hundreds of thousands of them by the hour, to cheers of victory, encouragement, and bloodthirsty screams of revenge against those loyal to the pretender Mydianchlarus.
As Palinarius loomed over his assistant and scribe for the duration of his stay in Center, he inwardly smiled at the lesser ‘loth’s fear and worry. The silk robed arcanaloth seemed to shudder slightly at times when he gazed at her directly, always seeming to be ill at ease in his presence as were most of her kind. Behind the Ultroloth, the skies had begun to darken as the first waves of Slasraths and their riders, all of them greater yugoloths, blotted out the light above the Waste and their shadows rippled over the city. The piercing screeches of the manta-like mounts rattled the clouds as Anthraxus himself approached the city, there to make his triumphant entry before bringing his war to the coward and the coward’s army huddled and frightened around the base of the Wasting Tower.
Millions of them above and below, wheeling through the skies and marching through the city en masse, it was beautiful as much as an Ultroloth could conceive of such things. The pain, bloodshed and misery of their enemies would be a worthy sacrifice to that which had birthed them all.
Dismissed and cast aside, Shylara Akt’Atarm, Shylara the Manged, crept away from her former master and only looked back once, framing the Ultroloth against the window out into the skies swarming with the silhouettes of the slasraths. A last look before she left, because it was unlikely she would see him again, and woe to him if she did.
The moment she stepped from Palinarius’s sanctum, her mind glowed with the soft caress of a sending spell. She shuddered in nearly intimate pleasure at the touch of her master as she received his instructions and listened obediently. With a shivering, anticipatory whisper of “Yes my love…” and a gesture of her hands, she was gone in the rapid flash and collapse of an opened gate.
****
A slow exhalation of purple smoke washed over Milton Osterson’s face from the fiend’s pursed lips, flowing over grinning fangs, and sparkling almost as much as her violet tinged eyes. Not that he could see at the moment anyways since the cocktail of hallucinogens and narcotics in the smoke had hours ago washed away any sense of lucidity from his desperate mind.
‘Show up and sit still, wait as long as I require and endure whatever happens while you’re here and the calling point on your brother’s debts will be extended another month. All you have to do is sit there, not budge an inch, and not say a word till spoken to regardless of what happens. Such a simple thing, surely you can do that, can’t you?’
That was what the smiling King of the Crosstrade had said earlier in the day, and Osterson was still sitting, ramrod straight on an unpadded footstool, several hours later. That he was no longer fully aware of his surroundings didn’t change the conditions of the deal, nor was the fact that his higher brain functions were so addled that it didn’t matter that he was seeing and hearing things that might have sealed his death had he been capable of understanding it all.
The Marauder shifted slightly in her chair, dressed in a black velvet gown that might as well have been painted on her, as tight as it was. Smirking, she inhaled deeply from a bejeweled water pipe and hissed a series of long streamers of drugged smoke at the mortal while she leaned back and kept her slippered feet cradled in his lap, using him for a footrest.
“You enjoy your position far too much my dear.” An amused chuckle came from the glowing blue avatar of the Cheshire Fiend.
Shemeska laughed and took another hit from the pipe before blowing the smoke at the other ‘loth. “Were you in the same position, you’d enjoy doing the same. Don’t deny it in the least. I’m simply considering this a prelude to the coming events that are drawing ever so close now. My lot it pitched, my bets handed in, and well, I never bet on anything but a winning horse.”
“Would our mutual ringleader appreciate your comparing him to a racehorse? That seems hardly fitting darling. And is it smart to talk of this with this piece of chattel in the room?” The grin said as it nibbled on Osterson’s right ear.
“If I wanted you to have an opinion, I’d skin you and scribe it on your soul.” The fiendess replied with a sneer as she ran the tip of a painted claw over the Cheshire Fiend’s avatar.
“Besides,” She added, “You assume that I have the intention of letting this fool walk out of here alive. Oh we made a deal and I won’t break it, but he’ll relieve his brother’s debt temporarily at the cost of his sanity, likely his life, and possibly his soul as well. The Carcerian poppies in the hookah are rather toxic you see, and in about an hour he’ll be exposed to enough to constitute an overdose. You can stay and watch the seizures if you wish, I know that I will.”
The grin gave her an approving look, “And here I thought that you might have gotten soft of late. No, you’ve just taken out your frustrations on others since I had to deprive you of a toy.”
“Helekanalaith couldn’t stand me having mine when the Ebon had deprived him of his. You didn’t have to facilitate it you know, I had plans for mine beyond his current usage…”
The Cheshire Fiend scoffed politely, “I can only imagine…”
“Words words words my smiling fellow, you’re full of too many of them.” The Marauder said as she put the pipe down and stared at the mortal expectantly while speaking to the other fiend, “That’s a difference between you and I oftentimes. You give your actions too much window-dressing while I’m open about who and what I am. I don’t hide it, I revel in it and it makes life in this sordid little city all the more enjoyable. And I do enjoy it, oh so much, and it’s afforded me a position of power and influence that will take you some time to achieve yourself you see. You can feel free to serve your sire and represent the Towers interest’s in Sigil and I’ll sit here and serve myself and no other.”
“If you say so mistress, I won’t correct a lady. It wouldn’t be polite of me. Besides, I’d like to hush now and watch this all transpire, if you don’t mind sharing your entertainment.”
The yugoloths laughed mutually and chatted with one another like they were having a picnic on a sunny day with not a care in the world, and then Osterson twitched as a vessel in his brain began to leak slowly and subtly.
Outside the room in one of the upper hallways of the Fortune’s Wheel, a trio of tiefling bodyguards stood at the ready and heard nothing but the low din of the crowds below them in the gambling hall and the laughter of their mistress in the room behind them. Inside the room, and the source of the gleeful mood on the King’s part, was the mortal who had dropped to the ground slowly dying and convulsing spasmodically from the shock to his system and torment the drugs had inflicted over the hours of exposure and overdose. His last moments of life contained a single lucid moment when he looked up into the leering, razorvine crowned face of the arcanaloth who held a single black sapphire in front of his eyes and whispered with a smile, “Twenty seconds short, and so a pity about your brother too…”
****
Still being browbeaten by Clueless, Toras slipped out from behind the line of trees at the border of the forest and ducked behind a block of cut granite. As he crouched in the shadow of the boulder the others joined him and dashed one by one to closer vantage points near the mouth of the cave. Skalliska went first and slipped nearly unseen into the mouth of the shaft. A moment later she motioned them that the coast was clear and that they could follow her inside.
“The place is pretty quiet, no lights and no guards as far as I can see. Looks like they’ve just been hauling stone out of hillside to built with, and there’s not been much traffic through here recently either.” Skalliska said as the others caught up with her.
Nisha nodded, “Yep, dead on with that.”
Cautiously they proceeded down the tunnel in the dim light, with only Florian having any difficultly seeing before Skalliska handed her a metal stick.
“What’s this?” The cleric asked.
“A sunrod. Tap the end against the rock if you need it to see. But hold up on it till it’s absolutely needed because it’s pretty bright and if there’s anyone down here I don’t want to give away our position till they know we’re here already. Alright?” The kobold replied.
“Sounds good to me.” Florian said back.
The tunnel sloped down slightly as they continued, the floors being roughly cut and scuffed from the passage of blocks of stone like those they had seen littering the ground outside. Perhaps fifty yards down the passage split left and right.
“Hold on, I can hear something…” Fyrehowl said as she perked her ears and turned to the right.
“What is it?” Toras asked.
“Running water, and movement, but I can’t tell from what.” The lupinal replied.
The others nodded and tentatively crept down the right passage. The tunnels they followed were largely deserted and they blundered across two side passages as they crept ever closer to the sound of swiftly flowing water. The dead-ending side tunnels had been empty and abandoned, filled only with the marks from where blocks of stone had been removed and nothing more.
However, as the group followed one passage and the sounds grew louder, they found evidence of recent passage by fiends and a dim light emanating from the same source of the noise. Their slow creep down the hallway ended and became a dash when they heard a scream of pain and fright echo from that direction.
Bursting into the cavern at the end of the tunnel the group saw the source of the scream and the reason for it made readily apparent. The chamber was bisected by what appeared to be a tributary of the river Oceanus that cut through the rock. A group of frog-like hydroloths stood near the edge of the holy river and watched as a Piscaloth and two more hydroloths stood and aimed hooked poles and some manner of wand at the immobilized form of a woman with golden hair and blue-green skin who hovered half in and half out of the rushing waters of the river. Some manner of magical beam that formed a net-like field around the woman was directed from two silvery fiendish glyphs carved into the stone at the river’s banks.
The Noviere Eladrin struggled and meekly screamed as she was levitated out of the waters, but that was before a crackling bolt of lightning snarled two of the fiends and a roaring column of holy fire smote a third.
The fiends, taken almost completely by surprise didn’t last long and Toras took especial joy in carving through the Piscaloth while shouting righteous curses about his arm and returning the experience. As the fiend corpses slowly began to dissolve into greasy, burning splotches on the stone, Clueless and Tristol helped the Eladrin back into the water of the river.
“Thank you,” she whispered before blowing a kiss to Clueless and slipping under the surface in a sparkle of rippling gold.
Clueless blushed as he and Nisha went about breaking and disrupting the Yugoloth wards that had been designed to ensnare any intelligent creature that passed between them in the river.
“Hmm… wonder what this is…” Skalliska said as she picked up the wand that one of the ‘loths had been carrying. It was made of twin rods of black iron twisted around one another and wrapped securely around a glowing yellow topaz in its base.
The kobold cast a quick spell of identification and grinned heartily at the find. “Not useful against the ‘loths, but it’s fully charged with a cone of acid.”
Fyrehowl glanced curiously at the wand and then walked over to the kobold.
“The bastards…” She whispered before snatching the wand.
“What the…” Skalliska said as the lupinal broke the wand and shattered the gem held within.
“The bastards were powering the wand with a trapped soul. Every time that wand was used it was ripping out a piece of that soul and consuming it. Nothing deserves that.”
Any argument was ended as Fyrehowl crushed the gem and released the wispy, glowing, and indistinct spirit within that faded away into nothing. “Come on, there’s another half of the tunnels here we haven’t explored. Hopefully there’s a connection to the tower.”
Despite some minor grumbling from Skalliska, and requests from Nisha to take a swim in the river just because, they all backtracked from the cavern and returned to the first fork in the mineshaft. Following that other fork they had originally bypassed, they noticed that the stone was becoming more and more smooth and well cut as they progressed.
“Look’s like we’re on to something here…” Toras said as they approached a door set into the wall at the end of the tunnel.
With several reminders about sneaking, Nisha picked the lock and swung the door open despite Toras and Florian wanting to kick it in. Beyond the door was a long, high ceilinged, dressed stone corridor that progressed nearly fifty feet before hooking off to one side.
“Looks like we’ve found our way into the tower. But still… Nisha make sure there’s no surprise here. With all the guards they had in the front of the tower I don’t trust this way to be unguarded or otherwise unprotected.” Fyrehowl said to the rogue.
The search didn’t take the tiefling long and she grinned with a swish of her tail as she stepped to one side of the corridor and poked at and purposefully activated a pressure plate in the floor.
“Oh, now that’s just cute there.” Nisha said as she looked over the now opened pit that cut the corridor in half.
“Spiked pit?” Clueless asked.
“Yeah, pretty easy to avoid though, just don’t get near the center of the hallway and you’ll be fine.” She continued.
“Or fly.” Fyrehowl said as she lifted off the ground slightly.
“Showoff” Nisha said as she stuck out her tongue at the lupinal.
“No, you’re not a showoff unless you can do it with style.” Clueless said as his own wings sparkled with a sudden rush of greenish-blue colored faerie fire.
Nisha made another face and hopped over the trigger plate for the pit. “Anyways, nothing else… oh holy sh*t!”
At the end of the corridor where it abruptly turned to the right, something moved out into the light, hovering a dozen feet in the air and leering down at the intruders. Nine or ten reddish, rubbery stalks grew out from a spherical central point that was alight with a single, trisected eyeball. Each of the stalks that reached out from the center was studded with multiple eyes and random, and the end of each stalk was fixed with a gaping mouth that bristled with jagged fangs and a slow shower of drool.
The bizarre beholder-kin advanced down the corridor and lashed out at Fyrehowl with one of its mouthed tentacles. The creature struck hard and fast, drawing blood that seemed to visibly flow into the creatures mouth and energize it as a crackling web of electrical sparks flowed over its surface and an aura of evil radiated from it that the lupinal could feel just as acutely as the pain of its teeth. Whatever the beast was, it wasn’t wholly mortal and was likely the result of some fiendish experiment gone wrong, or perhaps from their perspective, gone terribly right.
Nisha, Skalliska and Tristol scrambled backwards and fled down the hallway, all of them acutely aware that they would be next to useless in close combat with the guardian beast’s magic nullifying central eye active. As they avoided the pit trap in the floor however, something else happened. While Florian, Fyrehowl, Toras and Clueless rushed in to attack the hovering abomination, the ceiling vanished overhead of the other three of the group and gravity reversed itself with a sickening, gut-wrenching lurch.
“AAAAAHHHH!” Nisha shouted as she looked upwards to the suddenly spiked ceiling above them as a false roof retracted and she and the others shot up towards it.
Scrambling as fast as she could, the rogue stuck one of her hooves against the wall and stuck fast, grabbing out randomly to snag Skalliska’s tail before the kobold was impaled on the ceiling overhead. Meanwhile, in a moment of quick thinking, and even quicker spellcasting, Tristol hastily mumbled the words to a spell and his ascent towards the ceiling dropped to a snails pace, though he was still drifting up towards the spikes.
Back down at the other end of the corridor, Florian was chopping his axe at the beholder and finding that attacking it was not as straightforward as he had hoped. The moment his weapon connected with one of the mouthed tentacles, a bolt of lightning discharged from the aura around the beast and arced towards the cleric.
“Florian, back away from the thing and let Fyrehowl and Toras go after it, they’re resistant or immune to lightning. I’m going to try and get around this thing and nail it from behind, go help the others!” Clueless said as he burst past and over the beholder to land behind it and out of the touch of its magic sapping eye.
Fyrehowl continued to slash and jab at the beast as it turned its attention to Toras and in the space of a few seconds it seemed to wrap around the fighter and curl its tentacles around him like it pouncing him and attempting to feed. Toras let out a strangled cry as the mouthed burrowed into his exposed flesh and gnashed and ground against armor and clothing, seeking to gorge itself.
Several of the wounds on the beholder began to restitch themselves as it fed on the fighter’s blood until a column of flame shot down from the ceiling to curl about the backside of the beholder. Howling and gurgling with rage and pain from ten different mouths, the beholder dropped Toras to the ground and spun around to face Clueless who stood with an outstretched hand still sparkling with magic.
As the beholder turned to the bladesinger, Fyrehowl carved into the creature with a fierce blow. There was a sound of deflating, rushing air and one of the creature’s bladders ruptured and it crashed to one side against the wall as it lost altitude. As it went down in a burst of discharging electricity, the end came quickly as both lupinal and half-fey descended upon it to finish the job.
“Florian? A bit of help here?” Tristol said as he held onto a rope from Skalliska and dangled a few inches away from the spiked ceiling.
“There’s probably a glyph or a trigger for this spell somewhere down there that we tripped when we ran through here from the opposite way.” Nisha shouted down to the cleric.
“What do you want me to do with it? I didn’t memorize any dispelling prayers today.” The cleric yelled back up.
“Kick it, hack at it, just break the sodding thing. Being sneaky falls out the window when we’re in imminent harm of being transmuted into yugoloths’ pincushions, so to speak…” The tiefling said, still dangling up from the wall by one hoof.
While Florian saw to breaking the effect of the spell entrapping Nisha, Skalliska and Tristol, Toras was recovering from his own injuries.
“Now I know how a steak feels…” Toras said with a moan as he struggled to his feet.
“I don’t want to know if they made more of these things, I sure hope not.” Clueless said.
As Toras quaffed several potions to heal from his wounds, the others rejoined with them, Nisha still looking back at the sprung trap. “All said, that was actually pretty awesome an idea of them.”
“Awesome is a relative term then.” Skalliska said.
“Maybe, just so long as I’m not on the pointy end of that thing I’m fine with it.” Tristol said with a chuckle.
Stepping over the fiendish Deathkiss beholder-kin, the group walked a half dozen feet before entering a larger chamber that seemed to have been the lair of the now dead eye tyrant. Several bodies of beings that were likely dragged by the fiends from the river Oceanus lay drained of their vital fluids and slowly rotting and stiffening on the floor, one of them bloated and near to bursting with internal pressure from the decay process and rigor mortis.
“Please just don’t poke the bloated one? The fiend stench is already bad enough here without adding that…” Fyrehowl said as they approached a door flush into the western wall of the chamber.
Nisha walked past the lupinal with her cheeks puffed out, eyes wide and sticking her belly out in mock imitation of the corpse.
“Ha ha Nisha, very funny. Check the door?” Florian said.
The tiefling exhaled and sucked her stomach back in with a grin and twitch of her tail, “Oh? You thought I was making like the dead guy? No no, I just do that sometimes randomly.”
“Nisha? You do –anything- sometimes randomly. That’s just what you do.” Tristol said as he poked her in the ribs.
She poked him back in the same place with her tail without turning around, “Now you’re getting the picture, randomness is what I’m all about.”
Nisha looked back over her shoulder at the mage with a grin, “And the door’s magelocked and alarmed. This would be your thing, unless you want to wait for me to pick it my way. Dispelling it would work the easiest.”
“I tell you, one of these times we’ll get to kick the door down and run in screaming.” Florian said to Toras.
“Just not now, we’re still going with the whole sneaky thing.” Clueless said as he hovered in the air next to the cleric and fighter.
Tristol nodded and slowly cast several spells to erase and undo the alarms and wards on the door. Upon whispering the last phrases of the final spell the door swung open, being otherwise unlocked, into a dimly lit and wretchedly smelling corridor.
Fyrehowl winced and narrowed her eyes shortly before the others did as well from the stomach turning stench that wafted from the open door. The odor was a thick carpet of what smelled like rotting flesh, blood and harsh chemicals.
“Everyone quiet and don’t mind the stink, because I think we just found their dungeons for that tower…” Clueless said as he slipped into the dressed stone corridor beyond the door with the others in close tow.
As they slowly crept through the hallways they heard the sounds of something bubbling and thick bubbles rising and popping through a thick liquid. At the intersection of several passages they found a vat inset into an alcove in the wall and a the stink of the corridors seeming to emanate from its contents.
“Blood,” Fyrehowl said without looking over the lip of the large vessel that seemed to have been grown into place rather that built. “Yugoloths boil victims and render them down to use as ink if they don’t devour them or put them to any other uses. We’re too late for anyone they put in there, but they might still have prisoners down here that they may have dragged out of the river behind us…”
The lupinal’s thoughts were echoed by the sudden scream that echoed down the corridors from the passage to their left. Looking at each other and hearing the pain and agony in the voice they rushed down the passage and the closed iron door at its end with weapons drawn and at the ready.
Halfway down the corridor, something flooded into the minds of the entire group. A sickening voice that seemed directed to the victim of the torture whose screams they could hear spoke into their minds.
“Filthy being, not only will I eventually kill you, but you will experience this all from my perspective as I rip you apart and feast upon your agony. I shall be generous perhaps and kill you swiftly, or perhaps I shall prolong it for weeks till you expire here on this wretched plane. But first, a taste of yourself.”
Pausing and feeling sick, they all felt and saw in their minds the act of biting or stinging the torture victim and burrowing something into its forehead. They tasted its fear saturated sweat and the layer of fat beneath the skin, and then the taste of brain matter inside their own mouths.
“You can still feel pain without this portion of your brain intact fool, do you like the taste of it? I savor this like I have savored it a hundred times before, though never with your kind exactly. We shall learn something here together then…”
The fresh screams from the end of the corridor brought the group out of their pale-faced shock and disgust. Sickened at what they had been forcibly made to experience, and that some innocent was being ravaged by a fiend, they charged the door.
“You want to, or shall I?” Toras said to Florian as they both barreled towards the end of the corridor.
“Your turn, enjoy.” Florian said a moment before Toras’s booted foot slammed into the door and ripped it from its moorings in the wall.
The door slammed into a Mezzoloth who stood at the entrance and both of them landed with a carapace cracking thunder against the far wall of what looked to be a torture chamber. Glowing implements of torture lay inside a magically hot brazier between two other Mezzoloths, but the group’s focus lay on the victim and the torturer.
Chained down to an iron slab was a broken and bleeding Nycaloth, branded upon his chest and arms with the symbol of the Oinoloth Mydianchlarus. Standing over him with a long, thin proboscis piercing into the fiend’s forehead, was a large brown-red insectoid creature with tiny black eyes and a fanged mouth that was best described as smiling as it physically burrowed into its victim’s brain and fed the sensations into the minds of others.
!
