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Shemeska's Planescape Storyhour (Updated 29 Jan 2014)
- Thread starter Shemeska
- Start date
demiurge1138
Inventor of Super-Toast
I like Little One. A lot. And I forgot to mention how happy the dark hints at the Ancient Baatorians in the statue room made me last installment; this one reminded me.
Damn, I love this Story Hour.
Demiurge out.
Damn, I love this Story Hour.
Demiurge out.
Dakkareth said:Better not take the chance, that the 'little one' might also be the one to have build all this. The cautious planewalker retreats.
My normal response to this would be somthing like "The cautious planewalker never has his name sung from every spiky rooftop and dripping gutter in the Cage by adoring hoards of Sigilians whilst he feasts on the fruits of his labour (unless, ofcource, he doese
)" but, given that Shemeska is DMing this, I agree with you whole heartedly.
Shemeska
Adventurer
A bit of artwork in progress for NPCs of the storyhour that a friend of mine is working on. Here it is showing Helekanalaith and Shemeska. The artist isn't happy with it and she was pondering redoing it in its entirety, and I think she's crazy. Hele's head is slightly too small, but damn if it doesn't look fine otherwise.
Shemeska
Adventurer
"Run. Run now."
And they did. The passage continued to grow more and more elaborate with stone replaced by marble and stained wood paneling like the grandest chambers of the Palace of the Jester. The ceiling of stone was replaced with high vaulted ceilings of crystal and stained glass through which light streamed down from above like simulated moonlight.
“What the hell is that thing?!” Tristol shouted as they dashed down the corridor blindly.
Clueless answered as they ran, “I don’t know. But I saw it in the memories the trees showed me. Whatever that thing was it was delivering bodies to the trees like a caretaker. It’s not human or anything else remotely close.”
Five minutes of running later and they were noticing the same side passages reoccurring almost as if the corridors were herding them in a specific direction. The hallways continued to become more and more grand and nearly spotless without a speck of dust, age or decay. And then they saw it in the center of the widening passage.
In the center of the corridor was a monument or tomb of some sort. A massive block of white marble topped with a life-like statue of a man cast in either bronze or iron in high relief. The block of stone seemed to lie atop and partially encase a massive oblong box or sarcophagus of black marble encircled with a set of seven silver or platinum bands, each sealed with an ornate iron and silver lock. The figure looming atop the apparent tomb was smirking at them in so lifelike a pose that they paused their run and stared at it.
“What the hell?” Toras said as he looked at the statue of the man atop the tomb.
“Wow, he’s taller than you are Toras.” Nisha said as she too looked at the statue.
He was perhaps seven feet tall and dressed in an elaborate and archaic dark cloak and greatcoat that curled around his boots almost like a prosaic form of wizard’s garments, though the man’s build would have been more fitting upon a fighter. He stood ramrod straight, and in one hand he held a staff and in the other an open tome or codex. Looking up to his face, obscured above the nose under the edge of a wide brimmed hat, the man was charismatic in a way that Jeremo himself would be hard pressed to approach on the best of days. The man was smiling, smirking almost; a knowing look that could have held multiple meanings.
Tristol was looking at the base of the statue and the words carved into the stone there: “The Lady’s Jester.”
The base of the statue was carved with images of a tiny figure, draped in a heavy robe, its head cowled, and its arms folded patiently as if it were waiting. The form gave no true features, but they had already seen it and they knew that it was nothing natural. The figures all seemed to be staring at them ominously; and what more, as they circled the tomb each of them saw the statue always turned exactly towards them, its enigmatic smirk always looking down at them sardonically.
Clueless broke away from staring at the face of the man whose gaze might have been equally at place in the parlors of Sigil or the courts of Baator.
“That sounds like he, whoever he was, didn’t take that title from anyone. Wow, umm… well I think we know who built the Palace of the Jester.”
“And this labyrinth.” Skalliska replied.
“And…” *CLICK* Clueless trailed off as one of the silver and iron locks on the side of the sarcophagi popped open with a sudden, unnerving, and heavy click as it clattered discordantly to the marble floor.
“…Nisha?” Clueless said without turning to look.
“…not me.” Nisha replied almost immediately. She wasn’t even close to the tomb.
“The lock is how many centuries old? Coincidence.”
*CLICK*
All eyes went to the side of the sarcophagi where a second of the great silver locks had clattered to the floor untouched by any of them. They glanced at each other and then back up to the statue of The Jester, where for the first time they noticed the second figure that curled about the man’s ankles like a bizarre familiar: a small thing, dressed in a loose robe that covered its whole body except for the tentacles that sprouted from its open sleeves as it peered out from behind the leg of its master.
*CLICK*
“…coincidence…” Skalliska said as she began to edge away from the sarcophagi and warily look up into the grinning face of The Jester.
And then, without preamble, they saw the figure of a tall man, swathed in black standing some fifty feet away from them back down the way they had come. His face still largely shrouded by the brim of his hat, they could see the glimmer of teeth and that same enigmatic smile on the face of the statue that equally looked down upon them.
*CLICK*
Three seals remained upon the casket when they turned and ran from the tomb and from the unmoving shade of the man who had constructed the Palace in the first place. As they ran they heard the remaining seals break and open in smooth, equally spaced sequence. They never looked back and they blindly ran, faster than when they had seen the man’s familiar, whatever it was.
Behind them the man smiled and chuckled to himself before reaching down to pat his hand across the cowled head of the smaller figure that had appeared next to him from out of nowhere. Like a favored pet it pressed into the gesture of affection and then soundlessly they both vanished, but the man was still darkly smiling with an interest that was now sparked and active.
The air grew warmer as they ran and they soon noticed a dusting of sand across the floor that was crisscrossed by footprints. Further along there was more sand but there was no real way to determine how old they were. For all they knew they could have been millennia old or only a few hours.
Clueless glanced behind them as they momentarily slowed as the details of their surroundings changed.
“No sign that either of them is chasing us down. But for all I know they could just step out of the walls. I think we’re safe for the moment.”
“Oh ouch…” Fyrehowl said as her keen eyes fixed on something in the center of the passage.
“Hmm? Oh…” Florian said as she and the other noticed the same feature.
Another trap, this one sprung already, stood before them with the corpse of its last victim still suspended upon it. A set of nine silvered pikes, glaives or spears stood upright with a corpse impaled on at least six of its points cleanly through the chest. The force of the pikes had lifted the deceased up to head height above the passage and the sand was discolored with its dried blood. The man had been bled to death from the puncture wounds, one of them probably going into his heart, aorta or other major vessel to spill pints worth of his blood across the sandy floor.
They warily approached the corpse and glanced at it. The body wasn’t rotted or desiccated. Outside of being pale from blood loss the corpse was fresh. Toras looked over the body and commented on the man having been obviously a swordsman… and then the corpse twitched and opened its eyes.
“Sh*t! It’s undead!” Toras shouted a second before driving his sword into the corpse.
Blood dripped down the fighter’s sword, pulsing slightly from the fresh wound in the corpse… the man had been alive.
“…” Toras pursed his lips and looked at the fresh blood on his sword. “Oh hells…”
“He was alive?!” Fyrehowl blurted out.
Tristol whispered a few words and glanced at the pikes the man had been suspended upon. They glowed a complex series of colors, difficult to understand, but the end result was definite.
“So it would seem. He was alive. Barely. Those pikes were keeping him alive, healing him whenever he began to slip away.” The mage said with disgust.
Toras grew pale.
“Toras don’t feel bad. What you did was better than what he was going through.” Florian said as she put a hand on his shoulder.
“And he was working for Jeremo…” Skalliska said as she picked up the man’s now dead and limp hand. There was a familiar signet ring on his finger, identical to those that they wore themselves. The man had been a member of the previous group the Ring Giver Factol had sent down into the depths of the palace.
Florian glanced at the others for confirmation and then began to chant over the man’s corpse to invoke the power of her deity to bring him back to life. Moments later his corpse began to softly glow, there were the distant sounds of swords clashing upon shields and faint calls of warriors to battle and then he opened his eyes.
“All the gods above bless you…” He began to cry as he whispered up to Florian and then to Toras, saying the same blessings over and over again. He had been at a state of death for days, conscious the entire time; the agony must have been unimaginable…
“Who are you? Another of Jeremo’s hires?” Florian asked the man.
He kissed her hand as she helped him to his feet. “Yes. My name is Jerimin Rovalis out of Fortitude; Jeremo hired some of my fellows and me and then put us in with another group. Sent us down here. I may be the last one alive though.”
“What happened?” Clueless asked.
“The rats.” He said with a distant voice and hollow eyes. “The rats were upon us almost immediately after the doors were sealed behind us. They swarmed and we ran. We lost the map soon after and then we lost track of each other as we blindly ran through this place. I haven’t seen the rats since I was pulled into this deathtrap.”
The others nodded and glanced warily behind themselves back up the passage as something, a figure or the shadow of a figure seemed to cross paths with it further up. They could talk later.
“We can talk later Jerimin. Nice to meet you, my name’s Florian and you’re with us till we all get out of here alive.” Florian slapped him on the back and flashed her ring from Jeremo.
Jerimin nodded and asked them for a spare weapon if they had any to give to him. “I’m pulling my weight if I’m going along with you. You saved me and I want the change to repay that debt.”
Toras nodded and handed him a spare blade, unremarkable but perfectly serviceable. Jerimin thanked him and they continued walking, though they soon regretted the act.
The passage opened up into the basin of an arena, a subterranean coliseum strewn with sand and sawdust and dried blood: gladiators had lived and died here while those above in the stands had watched. Three massive portcullises stood in the marble walls of the area and atop walls thirty feet high stood rows upon rows of benches.
The exit back out suddenly slammed shut as a glittering crystalline wall, not unlike a wall of force, flickered into existence and sealed off their only true point of egress. Then a low droning noise like the sound of a horn reverberated through the air of the arena and the stands were suddenly flooded with either the illusory images of or the specters of long dead spectators, citizens of Sigil dressed in archaic clothing, silently cheering or heckling those living or dying for their pleasure below.
“Ah… sh*t…” Florian said as she glanced up at the laughing, jeering faces of the long dead amoral socialites of Sigil of old.
Clueless was looking up too, and for a moment he would have sworn that he saw a single more substantive figure standing there among the crowd: a tall man in swathed in black and gazing down with that damning, knowing smile. And then he was gone, vanished like a figment of the imagination of a hunted man.
The dust and sand that covered the arena floor began to stir and swirl with unseen currents of air and the three sealed gates swung wide and shimmered with the sudden activation of portals…
From one of the portals emerged two creatures that seemed composed of living darkness. They had either two or three heads, a lashing tail or pair of tails, and they seemed to phase in and out of existence as they charged out of the portal with a dim reddish glow in their eyes.
From the next portal came a glittering metallic beast wrought in steel or adamantine with the head a madman, the body of a twisted lion, and a tail that was studded with an exaggerated array of bristling spikes.
Finally, from the third and largest gate, the one at the center of the opposite wall of the arena came an impossibly large figure. Standing partially hunched over, it still rose to triple Toras’s height with its cloven hooves the size of shields on their sides and its twisted bulls head making it look like some nightmarish Minotaur of the Abyss. A Goristro, one of the living siege engines of the Tanar’ri, it screamed a bellow wrought with rage and indiscriminate destructive anger as it charged.
“Oh sh*t! They’ve got a Goristro?!” Tristol said unbelievingly as he launched into a flurry of spellcasting.
“The shadow critters are mine. Fyrehowl and Toras you go for the Goristro and keep it away from the casters. Florian you smite anything that gets past us.” Clueless said as he flicked his wings and darted towards the pair of umbral creatures with his sword swinging and a spell upon his lips.
Nisha darted to the side as Toras and Fyrehowl charged the Goristro in a valiant but perhaps unrealistic defiance of shear scale; the Tanar’ri was massive by comparison, but not for long. Florian didn’t charge with the cipher and the fighter, but instead called out a prayer to Tempus and hurled it at Toras who instantly doubled in size as the power of the cleric’s spell coursed through him.
Clueless darted between the sporadic lashes of the shadow creature’s tail and slashed at one while hurling a bolt of lightning at the other. As the first of the pair jerked in the grip of the electricity it was also struck by a pair of explosive-tipped bolts from Skalliska who stood across the arena and out of immediate harms way.
Tristol hurled a beam of pale green energy at the adamantine manticore and it struck dead on and burrowed a hole into the beast but failed to fully affect it, enraging the mechanical beast rather than killing it. Its human face snarled and glared at the wizard as its tail whistled through the air and loosed a volley of spikes not unlike javelins.
Toras slammed into the Goristro and struck it a glancing blow with his sword as it punched its shoulder into his chest and sent him flying backwards. Fyrehowl slashed and hacked at its legs on the other side of it and left furrows and gouges in her wake across its hide before it aimed a kick for her that she narrowly avoided. The fiend’s blood rained down on the dusty floor of the arena but it only seemed to make the beast all the more rabid for slaughter. That was the case at least till a roaring column of holy fire descended down upon it from Florian’s outstretched hand.
“Oh lord! Smite that unholy f*ck!” The cleric bellowed out at the top of her lungs with glee and holy conviction.
Nisha meanwhile was somewhere dangerously on the other side of the Tanar’ri as it was engulfed in flames.
Tristol and Skalliska dove for cover as the hail of spikes from the manticore shot through the air. Skalliska managed to avoid them but one of them, a ragged spike of silvery metal a foot long and an inch wide lodged in his thigh. The mage gritted his teeth and threw another spell at the mechanical beast, conjuring forth a wall of stone several meters high to block off its line of sight and sparing them from another such immediate attack.
Meanwhile, one of the umbral beasts was dead and Clueless was slashing like a man possessed at the other despite having taken several bites and lashes from their heads and tails in the process. Another combination of spells and swordplay and the second was dead as well, and not a moment too soon as the manticore slunk with a predatory gleam in its glimmering eyes around the other side of the wall that had blocked it from the casters.
Meanwhile Florian had turned her attention to healing Tristol’s wound as Toras, Fyrehowl, and the Goristro traded blows. The fighters jabbed their swords into the Tanar’ri’s flank as it gored them with its horns or swung at them with its hammer-like fists, and then it stumbled as one of its legs seemed to buckle and give way. Toras stepped back and swung at its suddenly unprotected chest, and Fyrehowl jammed her blade into its lung as it fell to one knee. Nisha darted out from behind the beast with her sword bloody and trailing remnants of the Goristro’s achilles tendon.
“Gaaah!” Clueless shouted as the manticore let loose another volley of metallic spines to hurtle through the air.
The bladesinger tumbled through the air as he tried to evade the deadly shower of spikes. He didn’t entirely succeed and several of them lodged in his side or grazed him through his layers of magical protection. He landed in a defensive crouch behind the corpse of one of the umbral beasts as the manticore came out fully into the open just as Toras and Fyrehowl finished off the Goristro.
Florian charged the creature to avoid giving it the opportunity to fire off another cloud of spikes from its tail and the strategy seemed to work as it leapt at her, fiercely biting and clawing as she approached within range. It was then distracted as Fyrehowl and Toras charged it from its other side, joined moments later by a still injured Clueless. Still, despite their numerical advantage, the monstrosity was preternaturally quick despite being a construct and it seemed to resist the damage inflicted by most of their weapons that were all edged and did only marginal damage to its thick metallic hide.
Minutes later, bloody and hurting, they finally inflicted enough damage upon the adamantine manticore that it collapsed, gave several spasms with a sound of metal against metal, and then lay still and motionless. They had it down but the cost was high given the multitude of wounds that it had been able to inflict upon them all and healing them all would likely drain Florian of most of her ability to heal all said and done.
A low droning horn echoed out above the arena once more and the spectral crowd above them continued to jeer and silently mock them.
“Oh no… not more of this…” Fyrehowl said wearily as she and the others half expected more portals to appear for the purpose of belching forth more horrors against them.
Then, as one, the spectral crowd began to disperse from the stadium as a single portal, the one that had issued forth the Goristro, appeared in the arena and nothing leapt out to attack them. It seemed that they had passed whatever mocking test it had been, or at least they had survived and were simply being shunted off to some other portion of the labyrinth and the deathtraps that awaited them there. That said, they gave it only a moment’s thought however before they jumped through the portal.
Finally free of the arena and its jeering specters of some bizarre and malign fragment of Sigil’s past, they crept onwards through the passage as Florian slowly healed their wounds as they walked and limped along, finally glad to have a moment’s respite.
Eventually as they progressed they found themselves standing within another chamber, this one roughly as large as the arena had been, but it was not thankfully another such trial. The huge chamber, which they seemed to have entered near the top, had a low ceiling that descended down into a depression by way of broad, shallow stairs ringing the room.
In the center of the chamber, situated at the heart of the depression was a gigantic binding circle with a number of chains set into the stone of the floor with large iron rings. They appeared to be loose and unoccupied, the circle long since having been vacated.
“Looks like something flew the coop.” Nisha said as she glanced at the chains on the floor. Something within her blood screamed at her that the chains were made of cold iron.
“Can’t say I mind. Hell it might have been that Goristro actually.” Tristol said as they descended the steps.
The chains rattled with subtle movement.
“Or not…” Florian said as she paused her descent.
Something like an electric crackle ran through the dry air of the chamber and the chains shifted as if an occupant was suddenly active and aware of their presence. There was a low, bestial growl and a serpentine hiss as something shimmered and faded into view within the circle, bound in the chains.
The fiend was roughly 12 feet tall, heavily muscular and dressed in ornate bronze platemail with a sash of copper colored fabric and a long gray cloak. Its skin was a dusky red and its head was like that of a massive dire wolf while a second head like that of a equally monstrous serpent sprouted from its shoulders as well. Both heads turned to regard the group…
And they did. The passage continued to grow more and more elaborate with stone replaced by marble and stained wood paneling like the grandest chambers of the Palace of the Jester. The ceiling of stone was replaced with high vaulted ceilings of crystal and stained glass through which light streamed down from above like simulated moonlight.
“What the hell is that thing?!” Tristol shouted as they dashed down the corridor blindly.
Clueless answered as they ran, “I don’t know. But I saw it in the memories the trees showed me. Whatever that thing was it was delivering bodies to the trees like a caretaker. It’s not human or anything else remotely close.”
Five minutes of running later and they were noticing the same side passages reoccurring almost as if the corridors were herding them in a specific direction. The hallways continued to become more and more grand and nearly spotless without a speck of dust, age or decay. And then they saw it in the center of the widening passage.
In the center of the corridor was a monument or tomb of some sort. A massive block of white marble topped with a life-like statue of a man cast in either bronze or iron in high relief. The block of stone seemed to lie atop and partially encase a massive oblong box or sarcophagus of black marble encircled with a set of seven silver or platinum bands, each sealed with an ornate iron and silver lock. The figure looming atop the apparent tomb was smirking at them in so lifelike a pose that they paused their run and stared at it.
“What the hell?” Toras said as he looked at the statue of the man atop the tomb.
“Wow, he’s taller than you are Toras.” Nisha said as she too looked at the statue.
He was perhaps seven feet tall and dressed in an elaborate and archaic dark cloak and greatcoat that curled around his boots almost like a prosaic form of wizard’s garments, though the man’s build would have been more fitting upon a fighter. He stood ramrod straight, and in one hand he held a staff and in the other an open tome or codex. Looking up to his face, obscured above the nose under the edge of a wide brimmed hat, the man was charismatic in a way that Jeremo himself would be hard pressed to approach on the best of days. The man was smiling, smirking almost; a knowing look that could have held multiple meanings.
Tristol was looking at the base of the statue and the words carved into the stone there: “The Lady’s Jester.”
The base of the statue was carved with images of a tiny figure, draped in a heavy robe, its head cowled, and its arms folded patiently as if it were waiting. The form gave no true features, but they had already seen it and they knew that it was nothing natural. The figures all seemed to be staring at them ominously; and what more, as they circled the tomb each of them saw the statue always turned exactly towards them, its enigmatic smirk always looking down at them sardonically.
Clueless broke away from staring at the face of the man whose gaze might have been equally at place in the parlors of Sigil or the courts of Baator.
“That sounds like he, whoever he was, didn’t take that title from anyone. Wow, umm… well I think we know who built the Palace of the Jester.”
“And this labyrinth.” Skalliska replied.
“And…” *CLICK* Clueless trailed off as one of the silver and iron locks on the side of the sarcophagi popped open with a sudden, unnerving, and heavy click as it clattered discordantly to the marble floor.
“…Nisha?” Clueless said without turning to look.
“…not me.” Nisha replied almost immediately. She wasn’t even close to the tomb.
“The lock is how many centuries old? Coincidence.”
*CLICK*
All eyes went to the side of the sarcophagi where a second of the great silver locks had clattered to the floor untouched by any of them. They glanced at each other and then back up to the statue of The Jester, where for the first time they noticed the second figure that curled about the man’s ankles like a bizarre familiar: a small thing, dressed in a loose robe that covered its whole body except for the tentacles that sprouted from its open sleeves as it peered out from behind the leg of its master.
*CLICK*
“…coincidence…” Skalliska said as she began to edge away from the sarcophagi and warily look up into the grinning face of The Jester.
And then, without preamble, they saw the figure of a tall man, swathed in black standing some fifty feet away from them back down the way they had come. His face still largely shrouded by the brim of his hat, they could see the glimmer of teeth and that same enigmatic smile on the face of the statue that equally looked down upon them.
*CLICK*
Three seals remained upon the casket when they turned and ran from the tomb and from the unmoving shade of the man who had constructed the Palace in the first place. As they ran they heard the remaining seals break and open in smooth, equally spaced sequence. They never looked back and they blindly ran, faster than when they had seen the man’s familiar, whatever it was.
***
Behind them the man smiled and chuckled to himself before reaching down to pat his hand across the cowled head of the smaller figure that had appeared next to him from out of nowhere. Like a favored pet it pressed into the gesture of affection and then soundlessly they both vanished, but the man was still darkly smiling with an interest that was now sparked and active.
***
The air grew warmer as they ran and they soon noticed a dusting of sand across the floor that was crisscrossed by footprints. Further along there was more sand but there was no real way to determine how old they were. For all they knew they could have been millennia old or only a few hours.
Clueless glanced behind them as they momentarily slowed as the details of their surroundings changed.
“No sign that either of them is chasing us down. But for all I know they could just step out of the walls. I think we’re safe for the moment.”
“Oh ouch…” Fyrehowl said as her keen eyes fixed on something in the center of the passage.
“Hmm? Oh…” Florian said as she and the other noticed the same feature.
Another trap, this one sprung already, stood before them with the corpse of its last victim still suspended upon it. A set of nine silvered pikes, glaives or spears stood upright with a corpse impaled on at least six of its points cleanly through the chest. The force of the pikes had lifted the deceased up to head height above the passage and the sand was discolored with its dried blood. The man had been bled to death from the puncture wounds, one of them probably going into his heart, aorta or other major vessel to spill pints worth of his blood across the sandy floor.
They warily approached the corpse and glanced at it. The body wasn’t rotted or desiccated. Outside of being pale from blood loss the corpse was fresh. Toras looked over the body and commented on the man having been obviously a swordsman… and then the corpse twitched and opened its eyes.
“Sh*t! It’s undead!” Toras shouted a second before driving his sword into the corpse.
Blood dripped down the fighter’s sword, pulsing slightly from the fresh wound in the corpse… the man had been alive.
“…” Toras pursed his lips and looked at the fresh blood on his sword. “Oh hells…”
“He was alive?!” Fyrehowl blurted out.
Tristol whispered a few words and glanced at the pikes the man had been suspended upon. They glowed a complex series of colors, difficult to understand, but the end result was definite.
“So it would seem. He was alive. Barely. Those pikes were keeping him alive, healing him whenever he began to slip away.” The mage said with disgust.
Toras grew pale.
“Toras don’t feel bad. What you did was better than what he was going through.” Florian said as she put a hand on his shoulder.
“And he was working for Jeremo…” Skalliska said as she picked up the man’s now dead and limp hand. There was a familiar signet ring on his finger, identical to those that they wore themselves. The man had been a member of the previous group the Ring Giver Factol had sent down into the depths of the palace.
Florian glanced at the others for confirmation and then began to chant over the man’s corpse to invoke the power of her deity to bring him back to life. Moments later his corpse began to softly glow, there were the distant sounds of swords clashing upon shields and faint calls of warriors to battle and then he opened his eyes.
“All the gods above bless you…” He began to cry as he whispered up to Florian and then to Toras, saying the same blessings over and over again. He had been at a state of death for days, conscious the entire time; the agony must have been unimaginable…
“Who are you? Another of Jeremo’s hires?” Florian asked the man.
He kissed her hand as she helped him to his feet. “Yes. My name is Jerimin Rovalis out of Fortitude; Jeremo hired some of my fellows and me and then put us in with another group. Sent us down here. I may be the last one alive though.”
“What happened?” Clueless asked.
“The rats.” He said with a distant voice and hollow eyes. “The rats were upon us almost immediately after the doors were sealed behind us. They swarmed and we ran. We lost the map soon after and then we lost track of each other as we blindly ran through this place. I haven’t seen the rats since I was pulled into this deathtrap.”
The others nodded and glanced warily behind themselves back up the passage as something, a figure or the shadow of a figure seemed to cross paths with it further up. They could talk later.
“We can talk later Jerimin. Nice to meet you, my name’s Florian and you’re with us till we all get out of here alive.” Florian slapped him on the back and flashed her ring from Jeremo.
Jerimin nodded and asked them for a spare weapon if they had any to give to him. “I’m pulling my weight if I’m going along with you. You saved me and I want the change to repay that debt.”
Toras nodded and handed him a spare blade, unremarkable but perfectly serviceable. Jerimin thanked him and they continued walking, though they soon regretted the act.
The passage opened up into the basin of an arena, a subterranean coliseum strewn with sand and sawdust and dried blood: gladiators had lived and died here while those above in the stands had watched. Three massive portcullises stood in the marble walls of the area and atop walls thirty feet high stood rows upon rows of benches.
The exit back out suddenly slammed shut as a glittering crystalline wall, not unlike a wall of force, flickered into existence and sealed off their only true point of egress. Then a low droning noise like the sound of a horn reverberated through the air of the arena and the stands were suddenly flooded with either the illusory images of or the specters of long dead spectators, citizens of Sigil dressed in archaic clothing, silently cheering or heckling those living or dying for their pleasure below.
“Ah… sh*t…” Florian said as she glanced up at the laughing, jeering faces of the long dead amoral socialites of Sigil of old.
Clueless was looking up too, and for a moment he would have sworn that he saw a single more substantive figure standing there among the crowd: a tall man in swathed in black and gazing down with that damning, knowing smile. And then he was gone, vanished like a figment of the imagination of a hunted man.
The dust and sand that covered the arena floor began to stir and swirl with unseen currents of air and the three sealed gates swung wide and shimmered with the sudden activation of portals…
From one of the portals emerged two creatures that seemed composed of living darkness. They had either two or three heads, a lashing tail or pair of tails, and they seemed to phase in and out of existence as they charged out of the portal with a dim reddish glow in their eyes.
From the next portal came a glittering metallic beast wrought in steel or adamantine with the head a madman, the body of a twisted lion, and a tail that was studded with an exaggerated array of bristling spikes.
Finally, from the third and largest gate, the one at the center of the opposite wall of the arena came an impossibly large figure. Standing partially hunched over, it still rose to triple Toras’s height with its cloven hooves the size of shields on their sides and its twisted bulls head making it look like some nightmarish Minotaur of the Abyss. A Goristro, one of the living siege engines of the Tanar’ri, it screamed a bellow wrought with rage and indiscriminate destructive anger as it charged.
“Oh sh*t! They’ve got a Goristro?!” Tristol said unbelievingly as he launched into a flurry of spellcasting.
“The shadow critters are mine. Fyrehowl and Toras you go for the Goristro and keep it away from the casters. Florian you smite anything that gets past us.” Clueless said as he flicked his wings and darted towards the pair of umbral creatures with his sword swinging and a spell upon his lips.
Nisha darted to the side as Toras and Fyrehowl charged the Goristro in a valiant but perhaps unrealistic defiance of shear scale; the Tanar’ri was massive by comparison, but not for long. Florian didn’t charge with the cipher and the fighter, but instead called out a prayer to Tempus and hurled it at Toras who instantly doubled in size as the power of the cleric’s spell coursed through him.
Clueless darted between the sporadic lashes of the shadow creature’s tail and slashed at one while hurling a bolt of lightning at the other. As the first of the pair jerked in the grip of the electricity it was also struck by a pair of explosive-tipped bolts from Skalliska who stood across the arena and out of immediate harms way.
Tristol hurled a beam of pale green energy at the adamantine manticore and it struck dead on and burrowed a hole into the beast but failed to fully affect it, enraging the mechanical beast rather than killing it. Its human face snarled and glared at the wizard as its tail whistled through the air and loosed a volley of spikes not unlike javelins.
Toras slammed into the Goristro and struck it a glancing blow with his sword as it punched its shoulder into his chest and sent him flying backwards. Fyrehowl slashed and hacked at its legs on the other side of it and left furrows and gouges in her wake across its hide before it aimed a kick for her that she narrowly avoided. The fiend’s blood rained down on the dusty floor of the arena but it only seemed to make the beast all the more rabid for slaughter. That was the case at least till a roaring column of holy fire descended down upon it from Florian’s outstretched hand.
“Oh lord! Smite that unholy f*ck!” The cleric bellowed out at the top of her lungs with glee and holy conviction.
Nisha meanwhile was somewhere dangerously on the other side of the Tanar’ri as it was engulfed in flames.
Tristol and Skalliska dove for cover as the hail of spikes from the manticore shot through the air. Skalliska managed to avoid them but one of them, a ragged spike of silvery metal a foot long and an inch wide lodged in his thigh. The mage gritted his teeth and threw another spell at the mechanical beast, conjuring forth a wall of stone several meters high to block off its line of sight and sparing them from another such immediate attack.
Meanwhile, one of the umbral beasts was dead and Clueless was slashing like a man possessed at the other despite having taken several bites and lashes from their heads and tails in the process. Another combination of spells and swordplay and the second was dead as well, and not a moment too soon as the manticore slunk with a predatory gleam in its glimmering eyes around the other side of the wall that had blocked it from the casters.
Meanwhile Florian had turned her attention to healing Tristol’s wound as Toras, Fyrehowl, and the Goristro traded blows. The fighters jabbed their swords into the Tanar’ri’s flank as it gored them with its horns or swung at them with its hammer-like fists, and then it stumbled as one of its legs seemed to buckle and give way. Toras stepped back and swung at its suddenly unprotected chest, and Fyrehowl jammed her blade into its lung as it fell to one knee. Nisha darted out from behind the beast with her sword bloody and trailing remnants of the Goristro’s achilles tendon.
“Gaaah!” Clueless shouted as the manticore let loose another volley of metallic spines to hurtle through the air.
The bladesinger tumbled through the air as he tried to evade the deadly shower of spikes. He didn’t entirely succeed and several of them lodged in his side or grazed him through his layers of magical protection. He landed in a defensive crouch behind the corpse of one of the umbral beasts as the manticore came out fully into the open just as Toras and Fyrehowl finished off the Goristro.
Florian charged the creature to avoid giving it the opportunity to fire off another cloud of spikes from its tail and the strategy seemed to work as it leapt at her, fiercely biting and clawing as she approached within range. It was then distracted as Fyrehowl and Toras charged it from its other side, joined moments later by a still injured Clueless. Still, despite their numerical advantage, the monstrosity was preternaturally quick despite being a construct and it seemed to resist the damage inflicted by most of their weapons that were all edged and did only marginal damage to its thick metallic hide.
Minutes later, bloody and hurting, they finally inflicted enough damage upon the adamantine manticore that it collapsed, gave several spasms with a sound of metal against metal, and then lay still and motionless. They had it down but the cost was high given the multitude of wounds that it had been able to inflict upon them all and healing them all would likely drain Florian of most of her ability to heal all said and done.
A low droning horn echoed out above the arena once more and the spectral crowd above them continued to jeer and silently mock them.
“Oh no… not more of this…” Fyrehowl said wearily as she and the others half expected more portals to appear for the purpose of belching forth more horrors against them.
Then, as one, the spectral crowd began to disperse from the stadium as a single portal, the one that had issued forth the Goristro, appeared in the arena and nothing leapt out to attack them. It seemed that they had passed whatever mocking test it had been, or at least they had survived and were simply being shunted off to some other portion of the labyrinth and the deathtraps that awaited them there. That said, they gave it only a moment’s thought however before they jumped through the portal.
***
Finally free of the arena and its jeering specters of some bizarre and malign fragment of Sigil’s past, they crept onwards through the passage as Florian slowly healed their wounds as they walked and limped along, finally glad to have a moment’s respite.
Eventually as they progressed they found themselves standing within another chamber, this one roughly as large as the arena had been, but it was not thankfully another such trial. The huge chamber, which they seemed to have entered near the top, had a low ceiling that descended down into a depression by way of broad, shallow stairs ringing the room.
In the center of the chamber, situated at the heart of the depression was a gigantic binding circle with a number of chains set into the stone of the floor with large iron rings. They appeared to be loose and unoccupied, the circle long since having been vacated.
“Looks like something flew the coop.” Nisha said as she glanced at the chains on the floor. Something within her blood screamed at her that the chains were made of cold iron.
“Can’t say I mind. Hell it might have been that Goristro actually.” Tristol said as they descended the steps.
The chains rattled with subtle movement.
“Or not…” Florian said as she paused her descent.
Something like an electric crackle ran through the dry air of the chamber and the chains shifted as if an occupant was suddenly active and aware of their presence. There was a low, bestial growl and a serpentine hiss as something shimmered and faded into view within the circle, bound in the chains.
The fiend was roughly 12 feet tall, heavily muscular and dressed in ornate bronze platemail with a sash of copper colored fabric and a long gray cloak. Its skin was a dusky red and its head was like that of a massive dire wolf while a second head like that of a equally monstrous serpent sprouted from its shoulders as well. Both heads turned to regard the group…
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Shemeska
Adventurer
"What can he do but lock his door and cry to God?"
The Jester was originally a little bit of flavor I tossed in as an easter egg to myself, based on the works of M.R. James, specifically his story 'Count Magnus' . The character's base idea is straight from James' work, but anything else is my own, but no spoilers from me.
Clueless's player recognized this almost immediately given our shared taste in fiction.
The Jester was originally a little bit of flavor I tossed in as an easter egg to myself, based on the works of M.R. James, specifically his story 'Count Magnus' . The character's base idea is straight from James' work, but anything else is my own, but no spoilers from me.
Clueless's player recognized this almost immediately given our shared taste in fiction.
