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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 3217396" data-attributes="member: 11697">Fyrehowl paused and tilted her head as a thought bubbled up in the back of her mind. It wasn't that she'd noticed something, no; it was more something that they hadn't found."Poetry." She said.Nisha frowned, "Poetry?""The wardings on the first godisle, and on the palace in Carceri." The lupinal explained, brushing a hand against the wall like she was painting with her fingertips. "That poetry."She gave a shudder at the recollection, both the imagery in her mind’s eye, the smell when they had found it, and the horror that must have been its creation. Though she had no way of knowing, the githyanki who'd served as paint and pallet on Maanzicorian's godisle, they'd been alive when the walls were decorated with their wardings. One by one they'd been killed, piece by piece at times, forced to watch as their killer wove her spells wearing nothing but a sticky coating of their blood. Their agony had been prolonged as much as possible, and the emotional taint that had hung over the place like the blessing of a dark power still haunted the lupinal.But while their current location was just as warded and concealed as the earlier locales had been, they'd yet to see any hint of the same frescoes of blood, bile, and pulped viscera. That didn't make sense. What was serving to produce the same type of wardings?"We've been through every room in this prison." Fyrehowl said. "And we've even searched the ship and its moorings, but we haven't found anything making the warding." “That’s not something you easily hide…” Skalliska said, repressing a shudder of her own.Clueless gave a smirk, “Not like they even tried to hide it the last few times. Hell, they enjoyed it.”“They made a spectacle of it.” Toras said, shaking his head. “They only put it out of the way just to avoid it getting messed with.”The fiend that had painted those wardings had treated it as much an art as she had spellcasting. Grisly, perverse art, adjoined with brilliant, frightening spellcraft.    “I don’t think it’s here then.” Fyrehowl said. “Tristol, do you think they could have anchored the spells somewhere else and still had them effect this prison all the way out here?”    Tristol blinked. “Well…”    It was a frightening thought. Magic was boosted on the Astral plane yes, but as it was, the wardings themselves -from what he’d experienced of them- were hideously powerful spells as it was. They seemed to have been cast as rituals, anchored to a location, which would allow a spellcaster to create more powerful effects if they put time and sacrifice -of one form or another- into the casting process. But still, he didn’t honestly want to meet anyone capable of working that sort of magic, given how they’d cast it.    “It’s possible.” He reluctantly admitted, a double-edged mixture of worry and respect in his voice. “But I’m not sure I want to really think about how powerful you’d have to be to create that sort of effect. And from what we saw before with the painting, I really don’t want to see what the place where they cast it looks like.”***Tristol’s thoughts weighed heavily upon them when they left the prison complex and plunged back into the storm, leaving the godisle’s bloodied and bewildered defenders –those that were left- to lick their wounds and ponder how they’d explain the loss of their prisoners. But while it was unintended, those same defenders wouldn’t have anyone to explain themselves to in short order if all went according to plan.But protected against the storm as much as was possible, the group hurtled through the currents ever deeper towards its heart, towards the eye of the tempest, and towards the waiting corpse of Aoskar.Though the astral winds screamed in their ears and pulsed against their flesh with random sensations, they were silent as they passed through the constellation of warded godisles that they knew also haunted the storm as bleeding, desecrated companions to the godisle of the Portal Father. They paid them no attention though, avoiding them as much as they could from their vague awareness of where they were from the map they’d found among the half-blooded githyanki warlock’s chambers.They passed by a half dozen warded godisles in their line of transit, each of them sealed safe and invisible inside their own bubble of wardings. They passed them by without a second thought, without the guilty aftermath of curiosity’s ever-present war versus pragmatism.The first to be left behind unmolested and untouched was the drifting and severed head of an unknown, unnamed god whose rocky flesh sprouted thirty iron pillars, each of them serving to tether a githyanki carrack. Shelter against the storm and a marshalling point for the fiends’ githyanki servants, virtually none of whom had a clue who they actually served. Over two hundred of them stared up at the winds swirling against the magical bubble like a skein of oil on a soap bubble’s surface, and they were passed by like so many inanimate objects.Every portal key is sacred to me. Every bounded space is a window into my heart. Every portal is a piece of me.Miles deeper into the storm and they passed the strip-mined corpse of a long dead elven power mutually ignorant of the githyanki defenders encamped upon its surface. They drifted past without a second thought while far below, a githyanki warlock sat and barked orders to his troops while his familiar, a hordeling that looked like a stunted, twisted, insectile human infant drooled and chattered upon his shoulder.The swirling, raging currents of Aoskar's storm only increased, but they didn't pause or seek shelter from the screaming metaphysical wind. Even when it threatened to push inside their heads with the agony of a dead god's last screams and stillborn hopes, they continued on, deeper towards the center.Sigil flocks to me, and my name is synonymous with the very act of planewalking itself. This is right, this is proper, and this is only the beginning."How much further do we still have to go?" Nisha asked.Her words fell on deafened ears. None of the others seemed to have even noticed her ask the question, and given the howling metaphysical wind in their ears and their minds, they could hardly be blamed.The Xaositect said it again, shouting the second time, “I said how much further till we reach the center!"She frowned and drifted closer to Tristol. Another shout and another lack of a response, and at that point there was only one thing to do: she pulled his tail."Hey!" Tristol shouted, not even hearing his own words over the storm.The mage turned around and looked into Nisha's face, watching her lips move but not hearing a thing."What?!" He shouted in reply as she let go of his tail and shouted something back.Same result. None of them were hearing anything, so deep were they within the storm.    That in mind, Tristol paused and whispered a relatively weak spell, but one that hopefully would let them talk to one another despite the storm. The spell went off, and oddly enough, despite the howl of the storm and the discomfort the psionic winds had been up to that point, he suddenly felt incredibly happy. That was a pretty nifty spell; Tristol thought to himself, it was really fun to cast. It’s not all that bad out here either.    “Is this working?” Tristol said in an unusually cheerful voice, telepathically speaking into the minds of his companions.    “Working like a charm.” Toras replied, thinking the words rather than speaking them.    Skalliska mentally nodded. “Don’t have to worry about sending stones or anything else.”    “Is anyone else having weird thoughts getting inside their head?” Florian asked.    “Always.” Nisha replied without a pause. “But that’s normal. But yeah, the whispering, I know what you mean.”    Clueless nodded, “As if it wasn’t already feeling crowded up here, I’m feeling it too. Not just little stray thoughts either, it’s entire memories and bits of perception. It doesn’t make much sense out of context though.”    Tristol found himself pondering what sort of spell he could cast that might tell him more about it. But to his frustration he couldn’t think of one; but the frustration came more from the lack of an excuse to cast a spell than from any inability to help relieve some of their confusion about what the storm was bringing them.    “Well at least I know I’m not going crazy.” Florian said. “At least not yet. This is getting pretty bad as we go deeper, and I’m half expecting some yugoloth jellyfish… things… to come flying out of the storm at us.”    Fyrehowl grimaced as they plunged through a glistening barrage of filamentous, silvery astral wind, “I’m still worried about that last part.”But worries or not, deeper still they continued, past the forest covered corpse of a god of raw and bloody nature, unseen from the surface by the packs of fiendish gnolls who kept watch under the eyes of their leader, a half-fiend gnoll cleric whose holy symbol of a snarling crimson canid head in profile his followers foolishly thought to be Yeenoghu."This is my will Imendor. This is my vision of what is to come. Already they view me in their hearts as master of Sigil. All that remains to be done is to solidify their perceptions into reality. Go now, speak to the Dabus, and spread my will among them. The Lady does nothing; she dares not. I am not some mortal wizard seeking to claim the City, so go and influence the belief of her servants, bring them to me, welcome them, reveal to them the mysteries that I have shown to you. They will listen. Surely they will listen."Closer still, and nearly at the heart of the storm, they passed a dead power of fire, forges and craftsmanship, blissfully ignorant that the flaming glow that licked up from the open cavity beneath the arches of its ribcage was an open portal to Gehenna that had been constructed there by the fiends. Not everything to be mined was for the use of the Overlord of Carceri, and in fact her intentions were a secondary objective when all was said and done.But all of that was gone and past them in an instant as they broke through a nearly physical wall of multicolored astral wind and into the hollow beyond.Suddenly the storm was calm and all was silent."What the hell..." Toras whispered, his voice standing out once again.They hung in the eye of the storm, a massive hollow almost a hundred miles across lit by the electric crackle of the swirling, rotating eyewall that encompassed its boundaries. They hung there alone in the silence, suspended in the silvery and unnatural calm amid, drifting in the vast emptiness where Aoskar's godisle should have been."Where the hell is it?" The fighter asked."It's here." Kiro replied. "Right in front of us."Fyrehowl blinked. She felt something, something that felt wrong, something that screamed to her to flee, but she couldn't see it.    “Right in front of us where?” Florian asked. “I’m not seeing anything.”    Kiro turned and looked at her and the others. “Move forward about a dozen feet.”     Clueless hesitated. “They warded they entire eye of the storm?”    Tristol whispered a minor spell to see the auras of magic and smiled, “…wow…”The bubble was massive. Not only did it encompass the entirety of the eye of the storm, but also it seemed to agitate the natural rotation of the maelstrom, turning it, twisting it further and faster than it would have otherwise. It wasn’t enough to hide themselves; the fiends had made the environment even more hellish and turbulent.“Warded or not.” Clueless said, holding back from breaking the boundary. “We haven’t seen anyone yet. That worries me.”Kiro nodded, “Same here.”Somewhere in the back of his mind he honestly worried that the fiends and their ignorant servitors might have been well aware of the intruders in the heart of their storm. Was it a trap just waiting to be sprung? Or were they so worried about betraying their presence for what they actually were, and so secure in the idea that their wards and the storm would keep them safe, that most of their forces were still encamped on the dozen other godisles hurtling along with the current?Whispering a silent prayer, already able to see the godisle at the storm’s heart, he hoped that it was the latter.             “Lets not worry about that though.” Clueless said as he and the others neared the boundary of the wardings. “They might be able to sense when we go through, so let’s go in as fast as we can before they can react, and then do as much damage as possible.”             Fyrehowl nodded. “But the first fiend we see is mine.”Worried and tentative, but as headstrong and confident as they could be, with a round of prayers, chanted spells, and pleading, hoping whispers to powers and planes alike, they burst through the bubble and into the eye of the storm. The wardings rippled at their combined passage, something they hadn’t done when Kiro had breached them, subtle enchantments reacting to thoughts and life more so than movement. The cascade of magic built and reached threshold, collapsing and screaming a single message across the planes to the ears of its creator:Someone has discovered us.  ***Xolikarth Fem’at nodded. "As you requested mistress, the scaffolding above the third Spoke of Torment will proceed, followed by the others. Aoskar's flesh will be reserved for the Crown of Agony."The ultroloth's eyes flickered with their own malignant glow, but that particular quality was barely perceptible over the cold, sapping corona of light that washed over him and the rest of the chamber he stood within. Behind him, his own underlings, a trio of arcanaloth sorcerer-scribes, stood cringing back ever so slightly in the face of the frigid, burning touch of the light their mistress delighted in. Whatever she had become, she was no longer one of them.A dozen yards ahead -he had no desire to approach any closer- the darkened outline of her figure stood with her back to him, like a spot against the sun, before a pair of open doors and the source of the indescribable light. She enjoyed it he figured, awash in emotions he had shed millennia before her birth, and at first there was little sign that she'd even heard his statement as she basked like a drowsy lizard sunning itself upon a rock in the euphoric/masochistic glow that spilled forth from the Reflective Chasm.By intent or as a side effect of the heart of the Tower’s proximity, his mistress’s layers of illusions were absent, and only scattered patches of fur stood on end, bristling from the static amid the occasional crackles of purple lightning; most of her exposed flesh was raw and bloody, manged as much as her name would indicate. However there in the hellish light of the Chasm, any self-consciousness on her part was lost, or only an afterthought.A reptile might sun itself upon a rock, and even a great wyrm might enjoy such an opportunity to indulge itself in a moment of vain, lazy relaxation. But she was hardly a reptile, she was hardly mortal in any way, and no reptile would have shivered with arms spread wide, listening to the deluge of screams that erupted from the Chasm like music.Was she even listening? The ultroloth stepped forward, his robes brushing against the obsidian floor, casting shadows over the screaming visages of the petitioners locked beneath the glass like tormented insects in amber.Four steps forward and the floor rippled, losing the glassy consistency it had held a moment before to rise up like a fleshy wave, prompting the greater yugoloth to stop and reminding all present of the true nature of the Tower. Whatever bits of the structure seemed like rock, obsidian, or steel, they were only illusions and affectations, soulstuff forged into the likeness of physical materials. The Tower was a living thing, a gestalt of billions of souls cobbled together and fused into a single massive construct; an edifice wrought of endless suffering.“Good.” Was all she said in reply, not turning to her underling even to acknowledge him with eye contact, but for the briefest moment the agonized faces locked in the floor below the ultroloth smiled up at him with the same flickering, multicolored eyes as hers.She was absorbed in the sensations of the chasm, and though Xolikarth knew that he was looking at her actual physical body, her mind was probably dispersed through the entirety of the Tower, to say nothing about any avatars she might have manifested and cast out across Carceri or the other planes. She wasn’t the Oinoloth, she was young, but she was learning more and more to use the powers and abilities that her predecessors had possessed.“Additionally, the first shipments of godsblood have been received and accepted at the Wasting Tower. The…”The ultroloth continued on with the details, confidant that at least some fraction of the Overlord of Carceri’s mind was listening to him, despite being more intent on listening to the deafening screams of the Tower’s living bricks and watching the patterns in the chasm. He spoke and she listened, mixing his positive reports with the narcotic rush of the agony that was channeled, funneled, amplified, and purified by the hollow spine of her tower.Twenty minutes passed by and he was midway through his report when a ripple passed through the chamber and the archfiend’s ears flattened against her head.“…What?” She whispered softly, speaking to herself as the words were simultaneously mouthed by tens of thousands of wriggling petitioners accreted into the walls.Obediently, Xolikarth and his retinue remained quiet as their mistress tilted her head to the side and ignored him.Something had gathered her attention.“Remain here.” She said abruptly as hands formed and reached up from the floor to ensnare their ankles. “I will hear the remainder of your report when I return. Matters elsewhere require my attention.”***Aoskar's petrified corpse hung within the void, nestled within the relative calm of the eye of the storm that its presence generated within the Astral. The former god of portals and planewalkers had died in an instant of horror, a fate recorded in Sigilian legend, but a fate that history did not elaborate upon the nature of, such was the shock of those long past events. But there in the silvery void, free of the wind of the storm, free of the whispers and free of the screams, the Portal Father's death was laid bare, stark and harrowing for all to see.Several miles of slate colored stone were twisted into the rough, weathered shape of a tall and bearded man of indeterminate age. The dead god's face was young, but his eyes and the weight of the lines upon his features bespoke of ancient age, and the weariness that accompanied the elderly after a hard and distraught lifetime.Virtually all of the dead powers that littered the Astral had a sort of austere grace about them. They hung in the void with an air of former glory that still gathered respect and a certain amount of awe at the lingering presence of what they had once been. But Aoskar's corpse presented not any sense of grace, but one of absolute, chilling horror.The Portal Father's petrified mouth was frozen in a permanent expression of terror and shock, one massive stone limb held up as if to ward off an attack. The godisle was like a man's death mask as he looked down at the blade in his stomach, simply writ large, a concept taken to its extremes and solidified as an example for each and every god in the multiverse."Holy..." Florian whispered as she focused on the corpse.Clueless went pale as he noticed the details, noticed the light reflecting back from the corpse.In no fewer than twenty places, Aoskar's corpse was pierced through by massive, building sized, perfectly formed blades of a shape and style that made them instantly recognizable. Where they pierced the god's flesh, the rock was discolored and a dull hum filled the air, seeming to visibly disrupt the very fabric of the astral, while the light that glinted off of their mirrored surface couldn't have been colder than the feelings they invoked simply by their presence, and by their implication."Mystra preserve..." Tristol whispered, a noticeable tremor in his voice.But the horror of millennia past was not the only indignity that Aoskar had felt, no, it was only the first. Death had not spared him of anything further. Carefully avoiding the area around the blades, great clefts and furrows crisscrossed the isle where lengths of petrified godflesh had been ripped from the corpse across virtually 60% of its surface. The 'loths had treated the godisle like a freshly buried corpse in a shallow grave still fresh and fit to drag to the surface and repeatedly rape as one more act of pointless rage against the divine.But the blades were not the only things to defile the would-be lord of Sigil.Like a spear piercing the breast of the recently deceased, a gnarled tree tapped for its sap by an iron spike, or a mocking, defiling monument in place of a headstone, a tower, or rather a conjoined trio of towers, rose up from the center of the godisle. Sunk down into the rock, very much like a tower whose memory lurked in the back of Clueless's mind, a trio of towers rose up to half the overall structure's height. The towers were linked by dozens of crosswalks, passages and connecting walls like spittle stretched between teeth, before the smaller towers merging and fused together into a twisted, almost organic upper spire.Light, like immaterial blood leaking from the corpse, erupted up at the tower's base and flooding the hollow, reflecting dimly upon the otherwise invisible walls of force that seemed to fill the gaps between the towers. It wasn't normal light either, it was a mixture of cold, gray light centered about halfway up the tower's height, and a multicolored, shifting halo of light erupting from the stone itself."That's not originally fiendish." Fyrehowl said.Indeed it hadn't been, and those familiar with fiendish architecture, or the styles of Sigil over the past several centuries would have immediately noticed that the towers were rebuilt from an earlier, original structure.Skalliska took immediate notice of its original architecture. "That was an Athar building...""...which was originally in orbit." Tristol said, remembering in some small measure the floating castles and buildings of old Netheril. "The fiends drove it into the corpse like a knife."And like a sacrificial victim improperly restrained, Aoskar's lingering divine presence was reacting violently to the intruding presence, while somewhere in the back of their minds, the connection was made between the light rising from the godisle, and Vast's Divinity Leach. While the fiends bled the dead power dry, random flashes of light and burst of crackling energy erupted from the stone and raced along the rocky flesh of the godisle, leaping up as multicolored bolts of lightning and arcing towards the spires and cornices of the tower.But outside of the presence of the tower, the hollow at the heart of the storm seemed almost desolate, a sterile blasphemy, a mocking silence around a desecrated tomb."I like the guards they've got." Toras said.Skalliska looked at him, "There aren't any guards. Not a single one.""Exactly." They replied."Not that they really need them." Clueless said as another burst of lightning erupted out into the void before curling back and grounding on the tower's top spire.    “So what now?” Nisha asked. “We make a mad dash inside and make like Slaadi during the Modron March? Because I’m fine with that you realize.”    “Well…” Clueless said, glancing at the blades embedded in the corpse. “That’s the only place on top of the corpse I’m frankly willing to go. And it’s not like the entryways are guarded.”    “They don’t have any doors either.” Florian remarked, pointing to the open archways at the base of each lower tower portion.    “Hold on.” Fyrehowl said abruptly, a fraction of a second before Kiro put his hand on Nisha’s shoulder to hold back the oft impulsive tiefling.    Following the lupinal’s line of sight, and what Kiro had likewise seen, was a translucent figure high above the tower. Glistening and ghostly, it flitted about the boundary of the storm, leaping out and drawing bolts of the crackling lightning before then diving back into the eyewall once again. Almost as if it were playing, like a mad sea dragon cavorting at the base of a waterspout, it didn't seem to notice them in the slightest.    Not yet at least.    “Yeah…” Clueless said as they all came to the same rapid conclusion. “We make a mad dash for the door.”***Someone had found Aoskar's godisle? Impossible; at least anyone finding it intentionally. Certainly some creatures, and more often their corpses, had drifted blindly through the storm and pierced the protective, obscuring bubbles that she'd sealed each of her godisles in like treasured trinkets under glass, promised little heirlooms as part of a bride's dowry.But someone intentionally seeking out and finding the godisle where she'd found so many wonderful, wonderful treasures to give to the Oinoloth? It seemed impossible. The storm waylaid most, the Dreadnaughts were blind to their presence, the psurlons and githyanki had no reason to intrude, and the astraloths were keen to devour anything that they smelled upon the currents. Perhaps it was a false alarm, a false positive upon her contingent divinations.Surely that was it.The Overlord of Carceri shrugged and closed the door to her private chambers, shedding her illusions as soon as the physical closure was made, and as soon as the layered, overlapping wards sealed her inside from less prosaic avenues."I wonder if it's her... it..." She pondered to herself as she unconsciously began to itch at an open sore. "We never did manage to find you Taba, errant little ghost of a thing that you are. You're a fleeting little abomination that should never have been born."It was a possibility, but she doubted it. The Infiltrator of the Planes was better than that, and probably would have gotten deeper into the godisle's defenses before she'd been noticed. So no, unlikely that the altraloth was responsible for the intrusion."So who indeed might you be?" The archfiend whispered as she leaned forward and perched over a golden bowl filled to the brim with Styx water.Momentarily remembering to stop her violent worrying of her affliction, she reached forward one hand and dipped a claw into the surface as she whispered a few sibilant words in a language that vastly predated her own existence. A drop of puss on the tip of the claw contacted the liquid surface, diluting immediately into a gossamer membrane across the already polluted pool, and a moment later betraying an image of several mortals.Now that was interesting. And unexpected. Especially that one. She remembered him from a chance encounter in Center.Though the chamber was filled with the screams of petitioners that composed the walls, there was the distinct and subtle sound of spreading spittle and parting lips as Shylara smiled with a moment of entirely inappropriate glee. Licking her teeth with a raw and bloody tongue, she cancelled the spell and turned to one side to stare at the wall."And there you have it." She said, looking into the wide eyes of the ultroloth embedded into the writhing mass of conjoined petitioners. "I know you can still hear me, even through everything else. A pity you couldn't kill them in the first place, little gnats that they are. Consider it a gift from me to you, because very shortly they'll be joining you Yethmiil."***</blockquote>

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