Shemmy's Planescape Storyhour #2 (Updated x3 10-17-07)
- Thread starter Shemeska
- Start date
Shemeska
Adventurer
In the half-light of the freshly opened shaft, the symbols on the sealed door glittered like tiny golden constellations in the night sky.
“Inva?” Velkyn asked, motioning to the script. "If you would."
The tiefling stared at the symbols for a long, hard moment before shaking her head. “I don’t know a word of it. It’s a different dialect, or a code, something like that. I can’t help out here.”
Velkyn frowned. “There’s no magic on it. At least none that I can see.”
Meanwhile the others called up after them, curious what they’d found, and if they were alright or needed help.
“We’re fine!” Velkyn shouted back. “Just… give us a minute here.”
Unseen to them both, a tiny scry focus immediately appeared above them. The Thayan wasn’t taking the risk that once separated from him and his own people that his erstwhile allies wouldn’t simply loot to their hearts content, and he wanted to make certain that they were telling the truth about whatever it was that they saw when they came back down to report it.
“So do you want to open it?” They both asked one another at once.
Inva smirked. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“I have a bad feeling about it. And besides, we can always come back to explore beyond this point if we don’t find the Codex elsewhere in here.”
Inva nodded. “Alright, then let’s go back down and let the others know and see what they think.”
On the way down of course, Inva deliberately flicked the tip of her tail and smacked the tiny glassy orb of Odesseron’s scry focus. Not that she necessarily held it against the man to not have implicit trust; no, on some level it was just a wise idea to know what they were doing up there, but it was rude and she simply didn’t appreciate being spied on, she preferred the other way around thank you very much.
Odesseron was smiling when they climbed back down from the shaft. “So what did you find?”
“Not much.” Inva said. “A sealed door and some runes I can’t identify.”
“And no traps.” Velkyn added. “And no magic.”
“That doesn’t sound right.” Phaedra said. “Everything else so far has been trapped all to hell. If it’s important it just stands to reason that the original builders would have done so up there.”
“Exactly.” Odesseron said. “Care to wager on the idea that there’s a trap just beyond the door?”
Marcus shrugged, “Not really. I’d rather just know if it’s safe or not. Victor?”
The cleric nodded and began to pray a simple, but very useful augury. ‘Is it in our best interest to pass beyond the sealed door above?’ A straightforward question, and the answer from his deity was just as direct: NO.
“Uhh… I don’t suggest we go that way.” Victor said. “Something definitely isn’t right up that way, given the tone and intensity of the response.”
Victor’s divinely inspired foresight wasn’t questioned in the least. Something had seemed suspect about the door already, and the response to the augury had confirmed it as more than simple paranoia. And so casting one last, baleful gaze upward, the group progressed deeper down the passage.
“Well at least we won’t have to worry about that dead end or any traps beyond it.” Marcus said, looking back over his shoulder.
Odesseron scoffed. “Keep in mind that I’m not looking for just one thing. Leave it behind now, I won’t complain, beneficent man that I am, but eventually I’ll ask for your help when we go back there.”
Garibaldi tried to change the topic of conversation. “Well Victor, at least we can count on your brother to find out those hidden chambers.”
“Speaking of which, have you ever been dowsing?” Inva asked, glancing up from where she’d been looking for traps.
Victor paused and looked down at the tiefling. “What do you mean?”
“The elf thing.” She said. “You know, we get garibaldi to grab you by the head and hold you up, and when we get to a spot with a hidden door, you tug to one side… at least that’s what I’ve heard. Doesn’t it work like that?”
Victor chuckled with as much good humor as he could manage. “Your ears are just as pointed as mine. You and Velkyn both actually.”
“Oh I’ll still tease.” She said. “And in any event, it got everyone to stop and laugh at you rather than continuing, which is good because there’s a spell trap across the hall.”
“Eh?” Victor asked. He hadn’t noticed anything.
Inva pointed to a small series of runes cut shallow into the walls. The runes were unfamiliar to any of the spellcasters, but the intent seemed obvious since the same runes were cut into the opposite side of the passage as well.
“Lovely…” Phaedra said. “It’s giving off a bit of an evocation aura.”
The tiefling nodded as she reached into a bag at her waist. A moment later she held up a squeaking mouse, the same one that she’d dropped into the tomb’s entrance shaft earlier.
“It’s a lucky mouse.” She said, looking at the glances she was getting. “He survived the first time, and he and his sister can tell me what this thing does and what the recharge time on the trap is, assuming it has one.”
“I doubt he’ll be lucky after this…” Victor said. “Not that I’m going to volunteer to go in his place mind you.”
“I assumed so.” Inva said, taking the mouse by the tail and gently tossing it across the warded stretch of corridor.
Blue-white lightning arced across the passage, temporarily illuminating it with a light as harsh as the smell of ozone. Where the coruscating bolts touched the runes on the other wall it threw off a shower of sparks and left a brilliant corona of lingering static in its wake along with trailing, slowly rescinding ghostly afterimages in their eyes.
Of course the mouse was incinerated.
Inva chuckled and held the other mouse up, “Not so lucky indeed.”
The bolts continued for several seconds and finally abated, throwing the corridor back into relative gloom and the tiefling counted off several seconds as she prepared to throw the other mouse.
“Don’t.” Phaedra said.
“Excuse me?”
Phaedra stuck her arm across the gap abruptly and lightning coursed through her hand with no effect except for the static causing her fur to billow and stand on end.
“I’m immune.” She said, shaking her arm and brushing the fur back down. “Save the mouse for later. I’ll just walk through and find it out on my own.”
She paused and though about it a moment more. “Just so long as nobody says anything about the fur. It’s embarrassing.”
“Suit yourself.” Victor said. “Won’t your clothes and such… you know? Lightning can’t be good for that.”
Phaedra gave a polite chuckle. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Most of the magical bits are fairly well proofed.”
Victor shrugged and the others didn’t raise too much of a fuss at the half-loth’s partial evasion of the question. Why question her about the clothing issue, after all she was going to handle testing a magical trap for them; not a fiendish gift horse to be looked in the mouth. Of course Phaedra wasn’t concerned about her clothing, precisely because she wasn’t wearing any, all of her ‘clothing’, at least at the moment, was entirely an artifact of her own shapechanging abilities.
But without any further comment or complaint, Phaedra stepped through the ward and was immediately enveloped in a crackling cascade of lightning. Ten seconds later the spell stopped and she stood there with a mildly unpleasant look on her face, looking more like she was descended from some sort of planar pomeranian and a lightning mephit than anything else.
While Velkyn and Inva snickered slightly, they all quickly moved through the warded space while it was still busy recharging, returning back up towards its lethal potency. Once beyond the trap, the corridor began to ascend once more at a shallow angle, and in the process of their ascent they found and bypassed another latent spell and a pair of pressure plate triggered traps.
Once past the series of traps, and of course after some more giggles at a very static-poofed Phaedra, the gallery grew more and more elaborate in the detail carved into the walls, and rather than decorative gusts of wind, the stone seemed cut into the shapes of flickering sheets of windblown flame. It was disturbing, not only from the clash of aesthetics with the overall theme of the tomb and of Nergal’s portfolio, but also that some of the demonic servitors cut into the walls seemed to shine with the faintest reddish glow.
“Is that a light up ahead?” Phaedra asked, peering into the darkness and warily noticing a reddish glow, the same glow reflected within the glassy eye sockets of the snarling figures.
“Yes.” Inva said. “Yes it is but…”
The tiefling’s voice trailed off, and at the same time Phaedra’s ears perked. There was something moving in the darkness ahead of them, and they could hear them moving before they could see them emerge out of the gloom and into the range of their vision.
“What the hell is that?” The half-loth muttered as the sound reached her ears.
There were several things out in the gloom approaching them, and based on the sounds of their footfalls, they weren’t the same glassy, spirit containing statues that they’d fought initially when they entered the tomb. No, there was a rattling sound of bone on bone, a clatter of metal against metal, and one of the figures in the darkness was significantly heavier and larger, just based on the methodical plodding of its steps; whatever that latter one was, it was massive.
“Guys, be ready.” Victor said, preemptively taking out his bow and nocking an arrow.
Moments later a pair of skeletal warriors strode out of the gloom, wearing ancient but still glittering ceremonial armor, and moving with the same disturbing agility that the earlier tomb guardians had possessed. But unlike those earlier constructs, their armor seemed more decorative than functional, and in fact, while one of them carried a gleaming kopesh, the other carried not a weapon but a glowing length of bluish crystal: a wand.
True undead rather than constructs, they both abruptly stood to the side as another figure emerged into the light, the source of the lumbering footsteps and the grinding of bone on bone. A hideous amalgamation of dozens of mortal skeletons, the creature towered over its smaller brethren, looking down with a trio of grinning skulls as it brandished elaborate weapons in each of its six arms.
"What the hell is that?" Marcus asked.
Inva grinned and began to cast a spell. "Something that hopefully has a high center of balance."
Immediately the ground under the undead and their freakish compatriot shimmered with a magically conjured slick of grease. Whatever their own immunities or spell protections, they weren't protected from the combination of gravity, an incline, and the oily surface. The two skeletal warriors were already in the affected area and immediately began to lose their footing, the sword bearing one falling and dropping its weapon, while the wand holding one stopped and managed to brace itself against the wall.
The bone golem was not so lucky as its fellows though, and as it lumbered forwards, largely oblivious of the slippery skein across the floor, it fell like a collapsing tower during an earthquake. With a massive crash the creature spilled forward with the momentum from its earlier movement and began to slide down the ramp, helplessly flailing its arms and legs like an overturned beetle.
Rumbling down the incline and picking up speed, the golem's bulk obscured the one remaining upright tomb guardian.
"Best use of a first sphere spell I've seen in a while." Velkyn said as he watched the undead stumble and flail.
"Why thank you." Inva said, giving a bit of a bow as she stepped back, well out of the way of the sliding golem's arms.
The golem would eventually careen past them, but so long as they were careful to avoid the reach of its weapons or being bowled over by it they were safe. The same could not be said of their having any sort of safety from the skeleton holding the wand though. With a sound best described as a rasping hiss punctuated by the staccato rattle of teeth only loosely tethered to their skull, there was a flash of light and the corridor plunged in temperature.
"Sh*t!" Velkyn shouted as the vapor in the air began to freeze and crystallize out as tiny snowflakes.
With the exception of Inva and Phaedra, every member of the group was affected with the skeleton's freezing curse. Grunts of pain echoed through the hallway as ice crystals formed on or even underneath exposed skin, lips dried and cracked and eyes began to painfully sting.
Grimacing through the pain, Victor moved first, recognizing the threat of allowing the skeletal mage to use its wand a second time. Taking out his bow and whispering a prayer to his deity, the cleric fired a pair of arrows up towards the top of ramp, striking the undead creature both times.
Further back down the slope of the hallway, Odesseron stepped to the side and turned invisible. It was only a trio of creatures yes, and so his temporary companions could handle them easily. Let them use their spells, and he'd keep his. Plus, he knew full well that the golem was just that, a golem, and he'd be virtually useless against the lumbering construct.
It hissed again but still remained standing, even with one of the bolts embedded into its sternum, and the wand continued to sparkle with evil intent in its outstretched hand.
"Hell with that." Velkyn said, fixing his eyes on the undead and stepping to avoid the oncoming golem.
As the half-drow was chanting, a bolt of lightning erupted from Phaedra's hand and slammed into the tumbling construct, resonating through its form before discharging out and into the one fallen skeletal warrior. Unfortunately the electrical force seemed to have no effect on either of them, and nothing came of it except for an odor of ozone and a string of rather inventive curses in a pidgin of celestial and infernal.
Meanwhile, still flailing aimlessly, the bone golem rumbled past them all, and immediately afterwards, Velkyn finished his incantation and his spell took effect. The wand-wielding skeleton still brandished its crystalline rod and the object still shed an icy luminescence, but the undead guardian was fixed rigidly in place.
The next moments were more drudgery than danger, as both undead were fixed firmly in place, not moving on their own accord even as they were hacked to pieces by Francesca and Garibaldi.
"It's a convenient spell." Velkyn said, glancing up towards the two fighters and smiling as they nudged at the shattered bones with their feet.
"Well at least that's two dangers down." Inva said, glancing over towards a spot in the hallway. "So you can come out now. I think us lesser wizards have taken care of the problem."
Odesseron faded back into visibility. "There is still the golem you realize. A fall isn't going to destroy it in all likelihood."
"No." Velkyn said. "But the traps it'll fall into on the way down are something else entirely."
And no sooner had he spoken then there was a resounding crash from the bottom of the passage followed immediately thereafter by a fierce electrical hum and crackle as the wards activated and enveloped the hapless golem.
“So much for selective warding.” Inva said as she watched the blue-white glow pulse and surge from below.
Victor smiled. “I doubt the tomb builders considered their own guardians being clumsy, or clumsy with help.”
“Anyways…” The tiefling said, feeling pretty good with herself. “It’s taken care of.”
Cautiously moving up the ramp and joining Francesca and Garibaldi, they found no further tomb guardians, undead or otherwise. The incline continued forwards past where the guardians had been, but for the moment their attention was held more on the glowing sword and crystalline wand that lay where their former undead owners had fallen.
Marcus picked up the sword and gave it a few appraising swings through the air. The sword was fairly heavy, though well balanced, and seemed to have been cast in some manner of magically hardened bronze, rather than any sort of steel.
"Not bad." He said, holding it up and offering it to the others.
Inva shook her head. "I'm already preferential to mine. It's nice and all, but..."
"What she's trying to say is that it's money." Odesseron said. "Though that wand on the other hand..."
Velkyn had already picked it up from the bones of its former owner. "It's an interesting little thing, but if you want to look at it after we're done here we can do that."
A sudden loud noise resounded up the passage and a familiar tremble passed through the stone.
"You've got to be kidding me." Phaedra said as she slowly turned around and threw a minor light spell down towards the bottom of the ramp.
Sure enough, standing fully upright, battered but not destroyed, was the bone golem, slowly clambering its way back up towards them after having survived its collision and the magical traps it had set off in the process.
In truth though the construct had little chance of ever reaching them, slow as it was. For each step it took back up the ramp, and for each provocative slash of its swords on empty air, it was battered with a series of ranged attacks. Marcus and Francesca both fired time and again with their pistols, Victor fired arrows, and Velkyn used the opportunity to use the newly acquired crystalline wand.
Eventually, despite its unnaturally crafted resiliency, only halfway towards them, the golem finally buckled under its own weight from the damage. Slumping over in a pile of diffuse bones, half of them shattering as its magical animation failed, it kicked up a cloud of dust, twitched one last time and then went silent.
"Well," Phaedra said. "Now that that's over with, let's move on to something I can feel helpful with."
"Don't worry, I'm sure we can find some lightning traps up ahead you can test for us." Inva said with a chuckle as she passed the sorceress.
"Yeah." She replied, trying to make the best of it. "It's better than, oh I don't know, tossing Velkyn in to check them."
Velkyn paused. "Wait. What? Hey, I've been more than useful so far thank you very much. It's not my fault you're immune to lightning and the skeletons were too."
But with Inva snickering and Phaedra and Velkyn still bantering, the group carefully moved past the inanimate bones of the undead guards and casting one last look at the remains of the golem, they slowly began to walk up towards the top of the ascending gallery. All along the way the tiefling checked for any further traps but the tiefling found none, at least not till they reached the top of the ramp.
"Well guys," Inva said, backlit by a glowing green barrier of shifting ghostlike forms. "I didn't find any traps so we're safe to go."
She paused for a moment and then turned around. "Oh dear, seems I missed one. So very well hidden..."
Velkyn rolled his eyes and there were several chuckles behind him.
The barrier glowed with a phosphor green light, a disturbingly cold glow that seemed to leech away at their body heat as they stood in its proximity. Wispy, like many steamers of thin mist, it was nonetheless opaque and looking at it, they gradually became aware of the faces writhing within, like entrapped and damned spirits within a glass prison, and even more, the faces seemed to whisper.
Velkyn looked at the severe glow of necromancy the spirit wall exuded. "Well, it's got to go. It just doesn't fit with the decor. Sorry guys."
“Not a worry then.” Odesseron said. “I’m familiar enough with similar spells. It shouldn’t be difficult to dispel. Stand back.”
“Suit yourself I suppose.” Velkyn said, stepping back and giving the red wizard some space.
Odesseron began to chant, and very briefly reached his hands out, almost as if he expected someone to take them. But of course his apprentices weren’t there, he’d left them behind at the barrow’s entrance, and so his normal practice of thayan circle magic wasn’t an option. Realizing the mistake of habit, he resumed a more orthodox manner of casting and intoned the words of a powerful dispelling dweomer.
The glowing barrier wavered but did not fall.
The necromancer cursed in a guttural mulan dialect. “A rather powerful priest set it in place. This may take several attempts.”
“I thought this wasn’t going to be a problem?” Velkyn smirked at the other wizard’s failure. “Let me try.”
There were some suppressed and muffled chuckles, nothing the thayan could hear, as the half-drow began to whisper the words to a spell to counter the barrier. A moment later and the stationary wave of necromantic force first guttered and then died like a match in a hurricane.
"Not bad." Odesseron nodded his head appreciatively. A wizard superior in skill to Velkyn had cast the ward, but the half-drow had dispelled it nonetheless.
Velkyn gave a short bow and gestured them up the opened passage. "Thank you, it's what I do."
Beyond the spiritwall the corridor leveled out and ended in a single open archway, but there was something different about the hallway up to that point. The tomb had previously been swathed in darkness, embraced by the shadows and finality of Nergal’s death, but slowly they’d begun to notice a faint red hue within the glassy walls. As they approached the end of the passage, they saw the source of the glow.
Spilling forth a dull reddish light, the archway at the corridor’s end yawned wide, opening into a room that was easily the largest they had yet seen within the central barrow, or any of the others.
"Nobody step inside..." Odesseron ordered from the rear of the party.
“Already ten steps ahead of you on that idea…” Velkyn muttered.
The first inclination in their heads was that the chamber resembled that in which they'd found the succubus tethered and bound into the last, very much lesser mound. The floor was decorated with a massive, inset iron pentagram lined along its perimeter with the misshapen lumps of melted candles, while at each point of the star sat some manner of metallic sphere.
But that wasn't the detail that dominated their attention.
Hovering in the very center of the binding circle, suspended several feet above the ground was a melon-sized, blood red crystal glowing with a fierce internal light. The gemstone, some manner of ruby or spinel of obscene size, appeared to move with an almost frenetic excitation as they drew closer to the chamber. Rather than pulsing like a beating heart though, the gemstone flickered like a waxing flame, feeding on the air like a vampire on heartsblood.
Phaedra felt a pressure on her mind, a telepathic weight, some presence holding its breath with anticipation at their approach.
"Victor?" The sorceress asked. "Would you mind checking the room..."
I knew that you would come... The whisper trickled into the half-loth's mind in perfect time with the rise and fall of the tomb's omnipresent breeze like the exhalation of a god, the pleading of a fiend.
She shivered but ignored the voice. "Please? I don't like this."
The feeling was broadly shared, even if they weren't privy to the whispers of a True Tanar'ri licking at the base of their minds, and Velkyn and Odesseron were already going about their own divinations. Under their eyes the chamber was aglow with magic, virtually all of it directed inwards towards Severesthifek's prison, centered on the metallic spheres at the points of the pentagram.
The fiend sensed the moment of its release. It could taste release, and there so close to its unwitting saviors, its thoughts swum with its wishes and desires. A thousand bloody acts of violation juxtaposed with the purest ideas of freedom and choice and will. It only needed them to break the wards that it could not on its own, bereft of a physical body as it was.
Come closer, come closer… oh do come closer. For all the bindings and curses of Nergal’s forsaken priests, give me a mortal coil and a weak will and all their precautions will be for nothing… come closer, oh do come closer…
“Inva?” Velkyn asked, motioning to the script. "If you would."
The tiefling stared at the symbols for a long, hard moment before shaking her head. “I don’t know a word of it. It’s a different dialect, or a code, something like that. I can’t help out here.”
Velkyn frowned. “There’s no magic on it. At least none that I can see.”
Meanwhile the others called up after them, curious what they’d found, and if they were alright or needed help.
“We’re fine!” Velkyn shouted back. “Just… give us a minute here.”
Unseen to them both, a tiny scry focus immediately appeared above them. The Thayan wasn’t taking the risk that once separated from him and his own people that his erstwhile allies wouldn’t simply loot to their hearts content, and he wanted to make certain that they were telling the truth about whatever it was that they saw when they came back down to report it.
“So do you want to open it?” They both asked one another at once.
Inva smirked. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“I have a bad feeling about it. And besides, we can always come back to explore beyond this point if we don’t find the Codex elsewhere in here.”
Inva nodded. “Alright, then let’s go back down and let the others know and see what they think.”
On the way down of course, Inva deliberately flicked the tip of her tail and smacked the tiny glassy orb of Odesseron’s scry focus. Not that she necessarily held it against the man to not have implicit trust; no, on some level it was just a wise idea to know what they were doing up there, but it was rude and she simply didn’t appreciate being spied on, she preferred the other way around thank you very much.
Odesseron was smiling when they climbed back down from the shaft. “So what did you find?”
“Not much.” Inva said. “A sealed door and some runes I can’t identify.”
“And no traps.” Velkyn added. “And no magic.”
“That doesn’t sound right.” Phaedra said. “Everything else so far has been trapped all to hell. If it’s important it just stands to reason that the original builders would have done so up there.”
“Exactly.” Odesseron said. “Care to wager on the idea that there’s a trap just beyond the door?”
Marcus shrugged, “Not really. I’d rather just know if it’s safe or not. Victor?”
The cleric nodded and began to pray a simple, but very useful augury. ‘Is it in our best interest to pass beyond the sealed door above?’ A straightforward question, and the answer from his deity was just as direct: NO.
“Uhh… I don’t suggest we go that way.” Victor said. “Something definitely isn’t right up that way, given the tone and intensity of the response.”
Victor’s divinely inspired foresight wasn’t questioned in the least. Something had seemed suspect about the door already, and the response to the augury had confirmed it as more than simple paranoia. And so casting one last, baleful gaze upward, the group progressed deeper down the passage.
“Well at least we won’t have to worry about that dead end or any traps beyond it.” Marcus said, looking back over his shoulder.
Odesseron scoffed. “Keep in mind that I’m not looking for just one thing. Leave it behind now, I won’t complain, beneficent man that I am, but eventually I’ll ask for your help when we go back there.”
Garibaldi tried to change the topic of conversation. “Well Victor, at least we can count on your brother to find out those hidden chambers.”
“Speaking of which, have you ever been dowsing?” Inva asked, glancing up from where she’d been looking for traps.
Victor paused and looked down at the tiefling. “What do you mean?”
“The elf thing.” She said. “You know, we get garibaldi to grab you by the head and hold you up, and when we get to a spot with a hidden door, you tug to one side… at least that’s what I’ve heard. Doesn’t it work like that?”
Victor chuckled with as much good humor as he could manage. “Your ears are just as pointed as mine. You and Velkyn both actually.”
“Oh I’ll still tease.” She said. “And in any event, it got everyone to stop and laugh at you rather than continuing, which is good because there’s a spell trap across the hall.”
“Eh?” Victor asked. He hadn’t noticed anything.
Inva pointed to a small series of runes cut shallow into the walls. The runes were unfamiliar to any of the spellcasters, but the intent seemed obvious since the same runes were cut into the opposite side of the passage as well.
“Lovely…” Phaedra said. “It’s giving off a bit of an evocation aura.”
The tiefling nodded as she reached into a bag at her waist. A moment later she held up a squeaking mouse, the same one that she’d dropped into the tomb’s entrance shaft earlier.
“It’s a lucky mouse.” She said, looking at the glances she was getting. “He survived the first time, and he and his sister can tell me what this thing does and what the recharge time on the trap is, assuming it has one.”
“I doubt he’ll be lucky after this…” Victor said. “Not that I’m going to volunteer to go in his place mind you.”
“I assumed so.” Inva said, taking the mouse by the tail and gently tossing it across the warded stretch of corridor.
Blue-white lightning arced across the passage, temporarily illuminating it with a light as harsh as the smell of ozone. Where the coruscating bolts touched the runes on the other wall it threw off a shower of sparks and left a brilliant corona of lingering static in its wake along with trailing, slowly rescinding ghostly afterimages in their eyes.
Of course the mouse was incinerated.
Inva chuckled and held the other mouse up, “Not so lucky indeed.”
The bolts continued for several seconds and finally abated, throwing the corridor back into relative gloom and the tiefling counted off several seconds as she prepared to throw the other mouse.
“Don’t.” Phaedra said.
“Excuse me?”
Phaedra stuck her arm across the gap abruptly and lightning coursed through her hand with no effect except for the static causing her fur to billow and stand on end.
“I’m immune.” She said, shaking her arm and brushing the fur back down. “Save the mouse for later. I’ll just walk through and find it out on my own.”
She paused and though about it a moment more. “Just so long as nobody says anything about the fur. It’s embarrassing.”
“Suit yourself.” Victor said. “Won’t your clothes and such… you know? Lightning can’t be good for that.”
Phaedra gave a polite chuckle. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Most of the magical bits are fairly well proofed.”
Victor shrugged and the others didn’t raise too much of a fuss at the half-loth’s partial evasion of the question. Why question her about the clothing issue, after all she was going to handle testing a magical trap for them; not a fiendish gift horse to be looked in the mouth. Of course Phaedra wasn’t concerned about her clothing, precisely because she wasn’t wearing any, all of her ‘clothing’, at least at the moment, was entirely an artifact of her own shapechanging abilities.
But without any further comment or complaint, Phaedra stepped through the ward and was immediately enveloped in a crackling cascade of lightning. Ten seconds later the spell stopped and she stood there with a mildly unpleasant look on her face, looking more like she was descended from some sort of planar pomeranian and a lightning mephit than anything else.
While Velkyn and Inva snickered slightly, they all quickly moved through the warded space while it was still busy recharging, returning back up towards its lethal potency. Once beyond the trap, the corridor began to ascend once more at a shallow angle, and in the process of their ascent they found and bypassed another latent spell and a pair of pressure plate triggered traps.
Once past the series of traps, and of course after some more giggles at a very static-poofed Phaedra, the gallery grew more and more elaborate in the detail carved into the walls, and rather than decorative gusts of wind, the stone seemed cut into the shapes of flickering sheets of windblown flame. It was disturbing, not only from the clash of aesthetics with the overall theme of the tomb and of Nergal’s portfolio, but also that some of the demonic servitors cut into the walls seemed to shine with the faintest reddish glow.
“Is that a light up ahead?” Phaedra asked, peering into the darkness and warily noticing a reddish glow, the same glow reflected within the glassy eye sockets of the snarling figures.
“Yes.” Inva said. “Yes it is but…”
The tiefling’s voice trailed off, and at the same time Phaedra’s ears perked. There was something moving in the darkness ahead of them, and they could hear them moving before they could see them emerge out of the gloom and into the range of their vision.
“What the hell is that?” The half-loth muttered as the sound reached her ears.
There were several things out in the gloom approaching them, and based on the sounds of their footfalls, they weren’t the same glassy, spirit containing statues that they’d fought initially when they entered the tomb. No, there was a rattling sound of bone on bone, a clatter of metal against metal, and one of the figures in the darkness was significantly heavier and larger, just based on the methodical plodding of its steps; whatever that latter one was, it was massive.
“Guys, be ready.” Victor said, preemptively taking out his bow and nocking an arrow.
Moments later a pair of skeletal warriors strode out of the gloom, wearing ancient but still glittering ceremonial armor, and moving with the same disturbing agility that the earlier tomb guardians had possessed. But unlike those earlier constructs, their armor seemed more decorative than functional, and in fact, while one of them carried a gleaming kopesh, the other carried not a weapon but a glowing length of bluish crystal: a wand.
True undead rather than constructs, they both abruptly stood to the side as another figure emerged into the light, the source of the lumbering footsteps and the grinding of bone on bone. A hideous amalgamation of dozens of mortal skeletons, the creature towered over its smaller brethren, looking down with a trio of grinning skulls as it brandished elaborate weapons in each of its six arms.
"What the hell is that?" Marcus asked.
Inva grinned and began to cast a spell. "Something that hopefully has a high center of balance."
Immediately the ground under the undead and their freakish compatriot shimmered with a magically conjured slick of grease. Whatever their own immunities or spell protections, they weren't protected from the combination of gravity, an incline, and the oily surface. The two skeletal warriors were already in the affected area and immediately began to lose their footing, the sword bearing one falling and dropping its weapon, while the wand holding one stopped and managed to brace itself against the wall.
The bone golem was not so lucky as its fellows though, and as it lumbered forwards, largely oblivious of the slippery skein across the floor, it fell like a collapsing tower during an earthquake. With a massive crash the creature spilled forward with the momentum from its earlier movement and began to slide down the ramp, helplessly flailing its arms and legs like an overturned beetle.
Rumbling down the incline and picking up speed, the golem's bulk obscured the one remaining upright tomb guardian.
"Best use of a first sphere spell I've seen in a while." Velkyn said as he watched the undead stumble and flail.
"Why thank you." Inva said, giving a bit of a bow as she stepped back, well out of the way of the sliding golem's arms.
The golem would eventually careen past them, but so long as they were careful to avoid the reach of its weapons or being bowled over by it they were safe. The same could not be said of their having any sort of safety from the skeleton holding the wand though. With a sound best described as a rasping hiss punctuated by the staccato rattle of teeth only loosely tethered to their skull, there was a flash of light and the corridor plunged in temperature.
"Sh*t!" Velkyn shouted as the vapor in the air began to freeze and crystallize out as tiny snowflakes.
With the exception of Inva and Phaedra, every member of the group was affected with the skeleton's freezing curse. Grunts of pain echoed through the hallway as ice crystals formed on or even underneath exposed skin, lips dried and cracked and eyes began to painfully sting.
Grimacing through the pain, Victor moved first, recognizing the threat of allowing the skeletal mage to use its wand a second time. Taking out his bow and whispering a prayer to his deity, the cleric fired a pair of arrows up towards the top of ramp, striking the undead creature both times.
Further back down the slope of the hallway, Odesseron stepped to the side and turned invisible. It was only a trio of creatures yes, and so his temporary companions could handle them easily. Let them use their spells, and he'd keep his. Plus, he knew full well that the golem was just that, a golem, and he'd be virtually useless against the lumbering construct.
It hissed again but still remained standing, even with one of the bolts embedded into its sternum, and the wand continued to sparkle with evil intent in its outstretched hand.
"Hell with that." Velkyn said, fixing his eyes on the undead and stepping to avoid the oncoming golem.
As the half-drow was chanting, a bolt of lightning erupted from Phaedra's hand and slammed into the tumbling construct, resonating through its form before discharging out and into the one fallen skeletal warrior. Unfortunately the electrical force seemed to have no effect on either of them, and nothing came of it except for an odor of ozone and a string of rather inventive curses in a pidgin of celestial and infernal.
Meanwhile, still flailing aimlessly, the bone golem rumbled past them all, and immediately afterwards, Velkyn finished his incantation and his spell took effect. The wand-wielding skeleton still brandished its crystalline rod and the object still shed an icy luminescence, but the undead guardian was fixed rigidly in place.
The next moments were more drudgery than danger, as both undead were fixed firmly in place, not moving on their own accord even as they were hacked to pieces by Francesca and Garibaldi.
"It's a convenient spell." Velkyn said, glancing up towards the two fighters and smiling as they nudged at the shattered bones with their feet.
"Well at least that's two dangers down." Inva said, glancing over towards a spot in the hallway. "So you can come out now. I think us lesser wizards have taken care of the problem."
Odesseron faded back into visibility. "There is still the golem you realize. A fall isn't going to destroy it in all likelihood."
"No." Velkyn said. "But the traps it'll fall into on the way down are something else entirely."
And no sooner had he spoken then there was a resounding crash from the bottom of the passage followed immediately thereafter by a fierce electrical hum and crackle as the wards activated and enveloped the hapless golem.
“So much for selective warding.” Inva said as she watched the blue-white glow pulse and surge from below.
Victor smiled. “I doubt the tomb builders considered their own guardians being clumsy, or clumsy with help.”
“Anyways…” The tiefling said, feeling pretty good with herself. “It’s taken care of.”
Cautiously moving up the ramp and joining Francesca and Garibaldi, they found no further tomb guardians, undead or otherwise. The incline continued forwards past where the guardians had been, but for the moment their attention was held more on the glowing sword and crystalline wand that lay where their former undead owners had fallen.
Marcus picked up the sword and gave it a few appraising swings through the air. The sword was fairly heavy, though well balanced, and seemed to have been cast in some manner of magically hardened bronze, rather than any sort of steel.
"Not bad." He said, holding it up and offering it to the others.
Inva shook her head. "I'm already preferential to mine. It's nice and all, but..."
"What she's trying to say is that it's money." Odesseron said. "Though that wand on the other hand..."
Velkyn had already picked it up from the bones of its former owner. "It's an interesting little thing, but if you want to look at it after we're done here we can do that."
A sudden loud noise resounded up the passage and a familiar tremble passed through the stone.
"You've got to be kidding me." Phaedra said as she slowly turned around and threw a minor light spell down towards the bottom of the ramp.
Sure enough, standing fully upright, battered but not destroyed, was the bone golem, slowly clambering its way back up towards them after having survived its collision and the magical traps it had set off in the process.
In truth though the construct had little chance of ever reaching them, slow as it was. For each step it took back up the ramp, and for each provocative slash of its swords on empty air, it was battered with a series of ranged attacks. Marcus and Francesca both fired time and again with their pistols, Victor fired arrows, and Velkyn used the opportunity to use the newly acquired crystalline wand.
Eventually, despite its unnaturally crafted resiliency, only halfway towards them, the golem finally buckled under its own weight from the damage. Slumping over in a pile of diffuse bones, half of them shattering as its magical animation failed, it kicked up a cloud of dust, twitched one last time and then went silent.
"Well," Phaedra said. "Now that that's over with, let's move on to something I can feel helpful with."
"Don't worry, I'm sure we can find some lightning traps up ahead you can test for us." Inva said with a chuckle as she passed the sorceress.
"Yeah." She replied, trying to make the best of it. "It's better than, oh I don't know, tossing Velkyn in to check them."
Velkyn paused. "Wait. What? Hey, I've been more than useful so far thank you very much. It's not my fault you're immune to lightning and the skeletons were too."
But with Inva snickering and Phaedra and Velkyn still bantering, the group carefully moved past the inanimate bones of the undead guards and casting one last look at the remains of the golem, they slowly began to walk up towards the top of the ascending gallery. All along the way the tiefling checked for any further traps but the tiefling found none, at least not till they reached the top of the ramp.
"Well guys," Inva said, backlit by a glowing green barrier of shifting ghostlike forms. "I didn't find any traps so we're safe to go."
She paused for a moment and then turned around. "Oh dear, seems I missed one. So very well hidden..."
Velkyn rolled his eyes and there were several chuckles behind him.
The barrier glowed with a phosphor green light, a disturbingly cold glow that seemed to leech away at their body heat as they stood in its proximity. Wispy, like many steamers of thin mist, it was nonetheless opaque and looking at it, they gradually became aware of the faces writhing within, like entrapped and damned spirits within a glass prison, and even more, the faces seemed to whisper.
Velkyn looked at the severe glow of necromancy the spirit wall exuded. "Well, it's got to go. It just doesn't fit with the decor. Sorry guys."
“Not a worry then.” Odesseron said. “I’m familiar enough with similar spells. It shouldn’t be difficult to dispel. Stand back.”
“Suit yourself I suppose.” Velkyn said, stepping back and giving the red wizard some space.
Odesseron began to chant, and very briefly reached his hands out, almost as if he expected someone to take them. But of course his apprentices weren’t there, he’d left them behind at the barrow’s entrance, and so his normal practice of thayan circle magic wasn’t an option. Realizing the mistake of habit, he resumed a more orthodox manner of casting and intoned the words of a powerful dispelling dweomer.
The glowing barrier wavered but did not fall.
The necromancer cursed in a guttural mulan dialect. “A rather powerful priest set it in place. This may take several attempts.”
“I thought this wasn’t going to be a problem?” Velkyn smirked at the other wizard’s failure. “Let me try.”
There were some suppressed and muffled chuckles, nothing the thayan could hear, as the half-drow began to whisper the words to a spell to counter the barrier. A moment later and the stationary wave of necromantic force first guttered and then died like a match in a hurricane.
"Not bad." Odesseron nodded his head appreciatively. A wizard superior in skill to Velkyn had cast the ward, but the half-drow had dispelled it nonetheless.
Velkyn gave a short bow and gestured them up the opened passage. "Thank you, it's what I do."
Beyond the spiritwall the corridor leveled out and ended in a single open archway, but there was something different about the hallway up to that point. The tomb had previously been swathed in darkness, embraced by the shadows and finality of Nergal’s death, but slowly they’d begun to notice a faint red hue within the glassy walls. As they approached the end of the passage, they saw the source of the glow.
Spilling forth a dull reddish light, the archway at the corridor’s end yawned wide, opening into a room that was easily the largest they had yet seen within the central barrow, or any of the others.
"Nobody step inside..." Odesseron ordered from the rear of the party.
“Already ten steps ahead of you on that idea…” Velkyn muttered.
The first inclination in their heads was that the chamber resembled that in which they'd found the succubus tethered and bound into the last, very much lesser mound. The floor was decorated with a massive, inset iron pentagram lined along its perimeter with the misshapen lumps of melted candles, while at each point of the star sat some manner of metallic sphere.
But that wasn't the detail that dominated their attention.
Hovering in the very center of the binding circle, suspended several feet above the ground was a melon-sized, blood red crystal glowing with a fierce internal light. The gemstone, some manner of ruby or spinel of obscene size, appeared to move with an almost frenetic excitation as they drew closer to the chamber. Rather than pulsing like a beating heart though, the gemstone flickered like a waxing flame, feeding on the air like a vampire on heartsblood.
Phaedra felt a pressure on her mind, a telepathic weight, some presence holding its breath with anticipation at their approach.
"Victor?" The sorceress asked. "Would you mind checking the room..."
I knew that you would come... The whisper trickled into the half-loth's mind in perfect time with the rise and fall of the tomb's omnipresent breeze like the exhalation of a god, the pleading of a fiend.
She shivered but ignored the voice. "Please? I don't like this."
The feeling was broadly shared, even if they weren't privy to the whispers of a True Tanar'ri licking at the base of their minds, and Velkyn and Odesseron were already going about their own divinations. Under their eyes the chamber was aglow with magic, virtually all of it directed inwards towards Severesthifek's prison, centered on the metallic spheres at the points of the pentagram.
The fiend sensed the moment of its release. It could taste release, and there so close to its unwitting saviors, its thoughts swum with its wishes and desires. A thousand bloody acts of violation juxtaposed with the purest ideas of freedom and choice and will. It only needed them to break the wards that it could not on its own, bereft of a physical body as it was.
Come closer, come closer… oh do come closer. For all the bindings and curses of Nergal’s forsaken priests, give me a mortal coil and a weak will and all their precautions will be for nothing… come closer, oh do come closer…
The Forsaken One
Explorer
Just copied your complete SHs into a word file. Gratz on breaking the 1000 pages with this update 
. (1002 now in case you have no clue how big your own thing is 
)
I'll be taking it to the printers tomorrow and have it printed and bound in a couple of volumes so it can go on the shelf next to sep's and PC's SHs after I finish reading it all as good bedtime literature and something to read during my long hours in train and bus each week.
. (1002 now in case you have no clue how big your own thing is )I'll be taking it to the printers tomorrow and have it printed and bound in a couple of volumes so it can go on the shelf next to sep's and PC's SHs after I finish reading it all as good bedtime literature and something to read during my long hours in train and bus each week
.Burningspear
First Post
Obviously absolutely *FABULOUS* 
,
I have read half of the 1st story line and are up to date on the 2nd,
I actually started reading the first story line shortly before i had a 6 week trip to the Ukaine,
and during my trip, if i had time, i would read a bit on this story, it was so intoxicating.
I wish i could play such a detailed and fun game.
And Shemmy, u write good, very good, u really need to think of publishing this kind of thing.
Have fun you all in reading this, i know i am,
Burning spear
(Dutch guy living now in the U.K., trying to find a group to play with)
,I have read half of the 1st story line and are up to date on the 2nd,
I actually started reading the first story line shortly before i had a 6 week trip to the Ukaine,
and during my trip, if i had time, i would read a bit on this story, it was so intoxicating.
I wish i could play such a detailed and fun game.
And Shemmy, u write good, very good, u really need to think of publishing this kind of thing.
Have fun you all in reading this, i know i am
,Burning spear
(Dutch guy living now in the U.K., trying to find a group to play with)
Last edited:
Goldferret
First Post
I loved it all Planescape was one of my favorite settings for 2 ed ,so when it was dropped I was P.Off . Your stuff was a great read ,and now I will start a Game tomorrow night. Thanks for doing this Shemeska I am truly inspired.
Shemeska
Adventurer
I'm glad that everyone seems to be enjoying my storyhours, and even more it can inspire folks from time to time.
And on that note, here's another update.
Victor didn't like the place either, even if he couldn't feel the giddy expectations of the fiend, brimming with a searing, boiling mixture of bloodlust and hatred.
"Hold on a second guys." He said, putting up a hand. "This is quite a bit different from when we found that succubus. I don't trust the place to just be binding another fiend. Call me paranoid, but that seems too straightforward. Let me try a few things."
The others didn't complain, especially given how some of them could already perceive the latent magic swirling about the chamber. Given that the tomb was constructed by a dead power's priesthood, divine magic might stand a better chance of determining just what they'd left behind in wait for future generations.
That in mind, Victor whispered the words of a prayer and immediately regretted his actions, giving a sharp exclamation of pain and turning away from the chamber. The room swum with the taint of undeath, seven discrete and burning glows suspended in an ocean of pain inducing evil, seven little worlds in orbit around a pulsing, glittering spinel sun.
"Son of a..." He muttered as he staggered into garibaldi before regaining his balance.
"Well," Inva said. "That's an optimistic sign for us..."
Victor shook his head, both to shake off the effects of the spell, and to reply to the tiefling. "No, it's not all bad. Just way too much evil. That's a big fiend, but there might be some other things in there as well, probably undead, and strong ones at that."
Gesturing to what he'd seen before the sensations had overwhelmed him, Victor pointed beyond the iron pentagram and its bound and imprisoned fiend. Beyond each point of the star was a sealed door inset into the far wall of the chamber, each covered with silver cuneiform script suspended in black glass. Seven doors, seven tombs, each glowing liberally with an undead presence.
"Nobody touch anything." Velkyn said as he moved forward.
Following the half-drow, the others gingerly stepped into the room, staying away from the boundary of the binding diagram and making their way towards the sealed doors on the other side. After all, in the earlier barrow mound, they'd found the main burial chamber past the chamber that had held the bound succubus.
The doors were sealed with glossy bricks, either obsidian or some manner of dark, glossy crystal that swirled with minute imperfections that carried over between the individual blocks, creating a mosaic with their flaws. Gossamer spirits of the dead rose up from their tombs in the cunningly crafted, haunting scenes, souls caught up by a gale of wind bearing them away to the afterlife.
Velkyn stepped close to the first door, taking note of the Untheric script that made up half of the lines depicting the winds. "What do you make of this Inva?"
The tiefling wasn't looking at the door however, and in any event the script was a cursive, decorative form that she didn't understand beyond picking out a word here or there. Rather she was standing next to one of the bowls at the edge of the binding circle, peering down at it curiously.
They weren't perfectly spherical, and in fact they appeared to be two separate vessels one of iron and one of gold. The object she stood over was composed of two bowls, joined at the seams and sealed with wax, molten silver, or some other substance.
"Weird..." She muttered, leaning in closer as she noticed writing that wound its way along the seam, chipped or hammered into the material.
"Guys..." Phaedra said, looking around for anything amiss. There was a sudden telepathic lull in the air.
As cautious as Inva normally was, self-preservation bordering on selfish paranoia -justified given her past-, that was precisely the wrong move for her to have made. The crystalline tomb containing Severesthifek's essence flickered and something lanced out seeking to shove her consciousness aside and seize control.
Phaedra spun around as a deep chuckle echoed in her mind, rumbling like a peal of thunder and she saw Inva slip backwards and fall onto her backside.
The others turned at the sound and subsequent muttered curse from the tiefling.
"What just happened?" Odesseron demanded, spooked as he was by the proximity of a True Tanar'ri, imprisoned though it was. It was making him jumpy.
"Son of a b*tch..." Inva muttered while her tail lashed angrily. "Something tried to get inside my head."
They all gazed up towards the Balor's prison. Victor however was whispering a prayer and looking intently towards the tiefling with obvious intent; he wasn't going to take the chance that the fiend had actually possessed her.
"Are you alright?" Victor asked, peering at her intently, seeing the same thing he always did when he looked at her: a blank spot where an aura of good or evil might otherwise be if she didn't studiously ward herself.
Inva brushed the dust off of her tail and breaches, lamenting the supreme moment of ungracefulness as much as the dirt.
"I'm fine." She said. "Don't worry Victor, I'm still the same sarcastic bitch I've always been..."
Victor shook his head and smiled, Inva was fine. What he didn't notice though was the gleam in his brother's eyes.
As Velkyn gave a sigh of relief that she was fine, he was still worried about what had triggered the mental attack on her in the first place. "What did you touch?"
"I didn't touch anything." Inva said. "I just looked at one of the damn bowls."
"They're demon bowls." Odesseron said. "They're part of the binding circle."
The tiefling scowled up at the necromancer and her eyes glittered angrily in the reflected light, "That would have been helpful to know."
He shrugged, "I hadn't gotten close enough to see them. And I've only read about them, not seen them in person before. If I was binding a fiend, I'd do it differently, in fact I have done it differently quite a few times."
The spellcasters, all of them, descended into a petty bout of bickering and discussion of the bowls, each of which was anchored to the spirit of Severesthifek like the white hot nails driven through the flayed skins of petitioners on their iron racks in the libraries of Phaedra's ancestors. Each of the bowls anchored a separate fragment of the balor's essence to the binding circle, each of them kept it fractionally bound, and together kept it obedient to defend the tomb.
But so close to its prison, only footsteps away, the fiend was able to exert a fraction of its will otherwise.
The spellcasters bickered, but off to the side, Marcus felt like he was dreaming. It was like one of those lucid dreams where you realize in the middle of some impossible situation that you're in a dreamscape, that you're not awake and from some distorted and nonsensical 1st person/3rd person dual perspective, you're controlling things while watching yourself at the same time. Except Marcus wasn't controlling anything, he was watching without having a hand on any of his own strings, dancing to a fiend's flute.
He tried to scream, he tried to warm the others, he tried to stop and purge himself of the fiend who'd slipped effortlessly into his mind, but he was powerless against the millennia-pent fury and will of a true tanar'ri. And while he was thinking and struggling, it only took the balor a split second to accomplish one fifth of its goal of freedom.
Crash! A single swift kick sent one of the bowls flying across the room and into the far wall.
"What the f*ck?!" Inva shouted as she turned away from Odesseron and looked across the circle.
"Marcus! What are you..." Phaedra shouted before she saw the vacant look in his eyes and the pause as he moved towards another one of the bowls. "Sh*t! He's possessed!"
Across the room the broken remnants of the bowl sparkled with equally broken magic. Ancient binding dweomers crackled and ignited with a harsh glow as they failed one by one, both the spells penned in ink on the inside of the bowls and on the carved, parchment wrapped bones and other physical tokens of the fiend that they'd held sealed within.
A single spiderweb crack broke upon the surface of the balor's prison.
The room exploded into a chorus of shouts and a flurry of motion as people alternately tried to stop Marcus or get out of the way of those who were.
As he screamed in Abyssal, howled in rage and frothed at the mouth, Garibaldi, Inva, and Velkyn pinned the fighter to the ground and held him prone, inches away from another of the bowls.
"I'd banish the fiend to get it out of him but he's not -from- Toril, you made that clear earlier, that really complicates things." Odesseron said as the fighter continued to plaintively, desperately struggle.
"I can take care of it." Victor said, walking up to his brother, preparing to force the fiend to abandon its host.
But then, abruptly, Marcus went quiet and a bewildered expression crossed his face. That of course was when Francesca started to smile.
Crash! A second bowl shattered as the other fighter stomped on it heavily, cackling with a voice that wasn’t entirely hers.
“It’s like a magic jar spell.” Inva shouted as she tackled Francesca from behind. “Someone throw a ward against it or else the fiend is just going to keep trying each and every one of us the moment we’ve got our guard down.”
As quick as the tiefling was, she wasn’t a large person nor was she very strong, and Francesca was dragging herself forward on the ground with Inva in tow, moving towards the next bowl.
“Some help please!” Inva shouted as she was struggled to keep the much stronger Francesca from moving. “Marcus! I’m gonna stab her if I have to.”
A moment later and the fighter was there, helping hold down his possessed cohort and trying to avoid getting bitten or punched in the process. But as they struggled, they could hear the fiend in their mind as the crystal in the room’s center began to glow brighter by the second. Each bowls’ cumulative loss was weakening the prison, letting Severesthifek act more and more in his normal character rather than by the strict instructions of the priests who had bound him there to serve.
“Do something!” Inva shouted up towards Victor and the other spellcasters as Garibaldi helped out Marcus.
Francesca, already speaking in Abyssal, began to chant the initial phrases of a spell.
“Ah sh*t!” The tiefling said as she dodged a kick and heard the fiend’s casting by proxy. “Now! Now would be a good time to do something!”
Victor began to chant almost immediately, whispering the prayers to invoke a protective spell against evil, a side effect of which was to prevent possession. His holy symbol glowed brilliantly like a fragment of the sun taken to earth, and as the light touched each of his companions and allies, they felt a sudden, steady reassurance against harm like a parent standing at their back with a hand upon their shoulder telling them not to worry.
Francesca went limp for a moment, followed by a wave of confusion as Inva, Garibaldi, and Marcus got up from on top of her. Three of the demon bowls were still intact, and Severesthifek had been, for the moment, deprived of his chance to break the shackled that held him into Nergal’s service.
“Fools!” The balor’s voice screamed into their minds as his prison rattled violently, spilling crimson light from its cracks.
"F*ck you!" Velkyn said, pointing directly at the crystalline prison.
“Release me! Release me and I will reward you!
Velkyn sneered at the binding circle, “Ignore the son of a b*tch.”
Marcus and Francesca’s looks were filled with even more hatred than the half-drow. They’d felt the fiend inside of them, felt its rage, and they knew that the first actions it would take if given freedom would be to wallow in that state, slaughtering the first things it came across: them.
“NOW! RELEASE ME NOW!!!”
But its chance was lost, and for the moment at least, the power of Victor’s deity was holding it at bay, impotent and raging.
Wary of just how far the enraged fiend could reach and what it could do on its newly loosened chain, beyond watching them and alerting other guardians of their presence, they abandoned any notion of searching the seven tombs linked to the balor’s chamber, and backtracked. Rather than risking a fight versus undead with a true tanar’ri in their midst waiting for a moment of weakness, they figured they could explore the rest of the tomb and only return there if the codex wasn’t found elsewhere.
That left them with two options: a sealed door that divinations had already revealed to be a danger, and of no use in finding the object they sought, or returning to the first branch in the tomb that they’d found and had initially left unexplored.
"And so here we are again..." Velkyn said as he glanced down at the octagonal pool of mercury.
A single bubble rose to the surface with a dull hiss as the air escaped the dense, silvery metal. Normally that would be virtually impossible, given the properties of the liquid, but yet it was happening nonetheless. But Velkyn wasn't overly concerned with that, he was mentally scowling as he stood there at the pool's edge, frustrated both from having to walk all the way back through the tomb to where they now stood, and from an increasing anger towards their red robed and tattooed erstwhile ally.
Meanwhile, Odesseron was in the middle of a spell of sending, speaking to his apprentices that had been left behind at the barrow's entrance.
"Get yourselves comfortable up there." He whispered as the magic carried his words high above. "Build a fire or something, because we'll be down here a while. And build it by hand, because I'll be using your reserves for a circle casting once I have to transport things out of the tomb."
Crass, pompous, presumptive, disrespectful *ss. Velkyn felt like punching him in the face, preferably with something sharp. If the man got much worse, got under his skin, he was sorely tempted to kill him.
Inva tapped her blade on the edge of the pool to get their attention. "Now as fun as a swim might be to some of you all, mercury... not so good."
"We already tried to scry," Odesseron said. "And without knowing what's down there, any form of teleportation is risky, if it would even work inside of here. So do you have any better suggestion?"
"Physically moving the mercury out." Victor said. "If it comes to it, we can try that, I could conjure a few buckets or something."
Suddenly the surface of the pool vibrated like a sheet of taught rubber that had been thumped in the center. They all stepped back from the edge, half expecting something unto a water weird to lash out at them, but then they noticed the liquid depress like a heavy and invisible weight had been dropped onto it, and the look of concentration on Phaedra's face.
"You think you can lift that out?"
Phaedra bit her lip. "Maybe... just somebody open up a bag of holding for me to shove this stuff into. It's heavy and it's hard to keep this stuff together."
Marcus opened up a bag and Phaedra complied, gathering up and funneling the mercury in a thin but constant stream out of the pool and into the extra-dimensional space. Slowly but surely the level of liquid metal shrank, and inch by inch they uncovered a shaft that ended in a flat seal of vented black glass.
"And it's even got what looks like a curse on it." Inva said. "So very homey."
Odesseron's eyes narrowed. "A real curse or priestly boasting?"
The tiefling waved his concern off as she translated. "Not anything magical, though the plug's got some abjurations on it looks like."
"To keep up the weight of the mercury? Absolutely." Velkyn commented.
"So what's it say?"
"Something about being 'the most holy repository of Nergal. Only those initiated into the dark mysteries by the will of Nergal are worthy to pass. For those not blessed, only darkness resides within.’"
They looked at one another, half curious, half worried about what the dead god might have left lying in weight for them. Magical or not, the curse was having an effect on their nerves.
Inva looked down at the plug, "And so we're at an impasse with something blocking our way from certain fortune and maybe even certain death. So who wants to have their fun? Spell? Rock? Telekinesis?"
"...Marcus..." Phaedra mentally whispered back.
Velkyn raised a hand and gestured at the plate, whispering a few sibilant words that seemed to resonate after leaving his tongue. The plate began to hum and shudder, then a series of cracks slowly traced their way across its surface from the sonic attack. All was calm, and then the glass imploded downwards with a resounding shatter that then welcomed a swirling updraft of bitterly cold, eerily fresh wind.
"Weird..." Victor said. "That's fresh wind."
Velkyn nodded, "Very weird, but at least it's only about a ten foot drop down from the opening. We'll only need one rope."
Phaedra looked at him oddly, "A ten foot drop down from the opening? What do you mean?"
A moment passed and the rest of the party looked down the shaft and then likewise gave the half-drow the same funny look. As far as they were concerned, the glass seal had shattered and fallen away to reveal nothing but an ominous and pitch black opening. Even for those whose bloodline allowed them to see in normal darkness and shadow, they saw nothing but an umbral void that licked at them with a windborne tongue.
Velkyn paused and realized he'd inadvertently let slip something he'd never mentioned.
"It's about ten feet from the opening." He repeated. "Magical darkness, I can see through it."
Inva gave him a look both impressed and also vaguely jealous. "Not bad. Explains the curse too."
Victor nodded, "The magical darkness yeah. If you follow Nergal, or have some object his priests would have on you, the darkness probably lifts."
Odesseron nodded. "Not that it really helps the rest of us though."
"I can dispel some of it if we need to." Victor said, then turning to Velk. "But otherwise we might just need you to go first and guide us by a rope."
Phaedra and Odesseron were meanwhile whispering spells of their own to let them pierce the darkness. The former's was of Baatezu origin, the latter of Mulan, but the function was equivalent enough to Velkyn's ability, though in truth Phaedra's was closer in nature to the source of that than not.
But one by one they clambered down the rope and into the lower passage, staying closely together in the darkness.
Inva passed a rope around, “Everyone just hold on and trust that Velkyn doesn’t lead us into the depths to some evil spider goddess or something similarly cliché.”
“Haha.” Velkyn said, looking down the hallway. “I’ll tug the rope to have you all move, and if I need anyone to stop, I’ll say it out loud.”
They started to move, slowly and awkwardly at first since most of them couldn’t see their own feet or each other, much less the path of the corridor. But Velkyn, muttering about ‘stupid spiders’ and ‘stupid drow pantheon’, led them down a straight stretch of hallway that seemed carved from glass more so than built, eventually turning twice before reaching something that made him stop.
“Well this looks ever so welcoming.” Velkyn said, glancing to the left.
There, its surface flush with the rest of the wall, a jagged array of spikes jutted from the wall.
Velkyn turned and whispered a spell. “And what do you know, it’s even more welcoming to the right.”
“What’s there?” Marcus asked uncomfortably from out of the gloom.
“Oh, just a contingent spell to toss you back into a wall of spikes. Fun, fun stuff… it’ll just take a minute to dispel it.”
With the exception of Phaedra, Odesseron, and Velkyn, the others stood there in the darkness and could only listen and shiver as the lurking spelltrap was dispelled. A moment later and the rope they held was gently tugged and they moved forward, following in good faith along a path they couldn’t perceive except for the occasional bump against the frost-kissed walls of glass.
Time lost some of its meaning, deprived of a major sense as they were, but twice along their slow and shambling progression, they were all ordered to move to one side and walk slowly. Apparently at several places in the corridor there were blatant, undisguised pressure plates set into the floor. Normally they’d have seen them, even if they’d been flush with the rest of the floor, but the tomb designers had gone under the assumption that anyone but their own priests would have been walking blind, unable to see the traps in the magical darkness, and it was only because of a single strange ability, and two rare spells that the group wasn’t likewise struck entirely sightless.
Another tug on the rope.
“Alright, everyone get comfortable.” Velkyn said. “We’re at a stop for the moment.”
Victor began to whisper, and suddenly they were all blinking and squinting as a brilliant sunlight radiance illuminated the hallway.
“Warning please!” Phaedra said as she covered her face with a sleeve.
Victor gave a sheepish look, but any angry looks in his direction over the sudden light vanished as soon as they all had a chance to look at where they were.
The hallway ended a dozen feet ahead at the foot of a pair of metallic doors. They gave no magical glow, they appeared to have neither handles nor a locking mechanism, and the margins between them had been sealed by melting them shut.
Inva walked up to the door and traced a finger across the surface of the weld. It had been done well, not in any sort of rush, and it might be difficult to get past, depending on what type of metal it was.
Phaedra looked at the tiefling. “’Hon, I don’t think you can pick this one.”
Inva half-turned and beckoned her over with her tail as a dozen frozen, metallic faces leered down from the door carvings. “You mind touching the door for a half-second?”
Phaedra shrugged and touched the door, jumping back when there was a hiss and a bit of smoke as she made contact.
“Well, it’s a silver door.” Inva said, patting Phae’s head as the half-loth sucked on the singed fingertip for a moment as it healed.
“Don’t disintegrate it.” Odesseron said. “It’s worth something.”
“Wasn’t going to disintegrate it.” Inva replied. “I was going to have Victor sculpt away the stone from the hinges and have Phaedra move it to the side. If it was steel or something besides silver it might have been too heavy.”
Odesseron didn’t reply to that mild retort, and he stood back against the wall rather quietly as they proceeded to remove the doors just as Inva had suggested. But sure enough, the moment the hallway was opened, the Thayan was back up front as if he expected them to arrive into a riches packed burial chamber at any moment.
But not yet.
With the doors removed and pushed to the side, the hallway continued beyond the reach of Victor’s illumination, and plunged back into magical darkness. Those that could see through the sorcerous gloom however, saw that the corridor was flanked every thirty feet by paired statues of vulture-headed divine servitors, each of them carved with a permanent snarl as they brandished glassy lightning bolts.
Brushing past Odesseron, Velkyn took the lead again, stopping just before the first pair of statues.
“Inva, do you have any more mice?” The half-drow asked.
From back in the gloom, there was a rustle of cloth and a few soft squeaks. “Want me to just throw one?”
“Yeah, just…”
A mouse went flying through the air between the two statues, and the air crackled with lightning.
“Alright.” Velkyn said. “We’ve got traps and we’re down a mouse. Sorry Inva.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty where that one came from.”
Then there was a squeak from the corridor in front of them all.
“Umm… was that the lucky mouse?” Phaedra said as he ears perked to the sound. “I think the little guy survived.”
Another squeak.
Velkyn strained to see something moving on the ground. “What the…”
The ‘mouse’ was there, but it wasn’t alive. The lightning had virtually carbonized its flesh, and little remained but the skeleton, which was still moving around like a normal mouse, but with tiny pin-pricks of light glowing in its eye sockets. The ‘pinky’ wasn’t quite so pink anymore.
“Not bad.” Odesseron said. “Anything that gets killed by the traps rises as an undead. Cute.”
Behind them, they could hear Inva putting away her bag of holding with the other mice. “On second thought, I won’t be wanting that one back.”
Velkyn and Odesseron both looked at Phaedra as the odor of ozone washed over them with a cold rush of wind from deeper in the tomb.
The half-‘loth sighed and her ears went flat. “Fine. I’ll go find out how many traps there are, what the recharge time on them happens to be, and what else is down there.”
She stepped forward and into a blistering rush of lightning, but after the glow faded, with her fur sticking up from the static, she turned and pointed back. “You owe me!”
But regardless of being more than a bit self-conscious about the static and feeling like an over glorified version of Inva’s mice, Phaedra tested each of the numerous traps. Any true priest of Nergal would have been safe, either immune to the magic, or more likely, they wouldn’t have triggered at their passage as they did for Phae, her companions, and any other tomb robber who trod the same path. Each of the traps also seemed to have a few second delay before being able to go active again. Not much time, but enough to carefully shepherd the group to the end of the hallway where it looked like there was an entrance into a chamber.
But unfortunately for Phaedra, the hallway held more than traps and magical darkness.
And on that note, here's another update.
***
Victor didn't like the place either, even if he couldn't feel the giddy expectations of the fiend, brimming with a searing, boiling mixture of bloodlust and hatred.
"Hold on a second guys." He said, putting up a hand. "This is quite a bit different from when we found that succubus. I don't trust the place to just be binding another fiend. Call me paranoid, but that seems too straightforward. Let me try a few things."
The others didn't complain, especially given how some of them could already perceive the latent magic swirling about the chamber. Given that the tomb was constructed by a dead power's priesthood, divine magic might stand a better chance of determining just what they'd left behind in wait for future generations.
That in mind, Victor whispered the words of a prayer and immediately regretted his actions, giving a sharp exclamation of pain and turning away from the chamber. The room swum with the taint of undeath, seven discrete and burning glows suspended in an ocean of pain inducing evil, seven little worlds in orbit around a pulsing, glittering spinel sun.
"Son of a..." He muttered as he staggered into garibaldi before regaining his balance.
"Well," Inva said. "That's an optimistic sign for us..."
Victor shook his head, both to shake off the effects of the spell, and to reply to the tiefling. "No, it's not all bad. Just way too much evil. That's a big fiend, but there might be some other things in there as well, probably undead, and strong ones at that."
Gesturing to what he'd seen before the sensations had overwhelmed him, Victor pointed beyond the iron pentagram and its bound and imprisoned fiend. Beyond each point of the star was a sealed door inset into the far wall of the chamber, each covered with silver cuneiform script suspended in black glass. Seven doors, seven tombs, each glowing liberally with an undead presence.
"Nobody touch anything." Velkyn said as he moved forward.
Following the half-drow, the others gingerly stepped into the room, staying away from the boundary of the binding diagram and making their way towards the sealed doors on the other side. After all, in the earlier barrow mound, they'd found the main burial chamber past the chamber that had held the bound succubus.
The doors were sealed with glossy bricks, either obsidian or some manner of dark, glossy crystal that swirled with minute imperfections that carried over between the individual blocks, creating a mosaic with their flaws. Gossamer spirits of the dead rose up from their tombs in the cunningly crafted, haunting scenes, souls caught up by a gale of wind bearing them away to the afterlife.
Velkyn stepped close to the first door, taking note of the Untheric script that made up half of the lines depicting the winds. "What do you make of this Inva?"
The tiefling wasn't looking at the door however, and in any event the script was a cursive, decorative form that she didn't understand beyond picking out a word here or there. Rather she was standing next to one of the bowls at the edge of the binding circle, peering down at it curiously.
They weren't perfectly spherical, and in fact they appeared to be two separate vessels one of iron and one of gold. The object she stood over was composed of two bowls, joined at the seams and sealed with wax, molten silver, or some other substance.
"Weird..." She muttered, leaning in closer as she noticed writing that wound its way along the seam, chipped or hammered into the material.
"Guys..." Phaedra said, looking around for anything amiss. There was a sudden telepathic lull in the air.
As cautious as Inva normally was, self-preservation bordering on selfish paranoia -justified given her past-, that was precisely the wrong move for her to have made. The crystalline tomb containing Severesthifek's essence flickered and something lanced out seeking to shove her consciousness aside and seize control.
Phaedra spun around as a deep chuckle echoed in her mind, rumbling like a peal of thunder and she saw Inva slip backwards and fall onto her backside.
The others turned at the sound and subsequent muttered curse from the tiefling.
"What just happened?" Odesseron demanded, spooked as he was by the proximity of a True Tanar'ri, imprisoned though it was. It was making him jumpy.
"Son of a b*tch..." Inva muttered while her tail lashed angrily. "Something tried to get inside my head."
They all gazed up towards the Balor's prison. Victor however was whispering a prayer and looking intently towards the tiefling with obvious intent; he wasn't going to take the chance that the fiend had actually possessed her.
"Are you alright?" Victor asked, peering at her intently, seeing the same thing he always did when he looked at her: a blank spot where an aura of good or evil might otherwise be if she didn't studiously ward herself.
Inva brushed the dust off of her tail and breaches, lamenting the supreme moment of ungracefulness as much as the dirt.
"I'm fine." She said. "Don't worry Victor, I'm still the same sarcastic bitch I've always been..."
Victor shook his head and smiled, Inva was fine. What he didn't notice though was the gleam in his brother's eyes.
As Velkyn gave a sigh of relief that she was fine, he was still worried about what had triggered the mental attack on her in the first place. "What did you touch?"
"I didn't touch anything." Inva said. "I just looked at one of the damn bowls."
"They're demon bowls." Odesseron said. "They're part of the binding circle."
The tiefling scowled up at the necromancer and her eyes glittered angrily in the reflected light, "That would have been helpful to know."
He shrugged, "I hadn't gotten close enough to see them. And I've only read about them, not seen them in person before. If I was binding a fiend, I'd do it differently, in fact I have done it differently quite a few times."
The spellcasters, all of them, descended into a petty bout of bickering and discussion of the bowls, each of which was anchored to the spirit of Severesthifek like the white hot nails driven through the flayed skins of petitioners on their iron racks in the libraries of Phaedra's ancestors. Each of the bowls anchored a separate fragment of the balor's essence to the binding circle, each of them kept it fractionally bound, and together kept it obedient to defend the tomb.
But so close to its prison, only footsteps away, the fiend was able to exert a fraction of its will otherwise.
The spellcasters bickered, but off to the side, Marcus felt like he was dreaming. It was like one of those lucid dreams where you realize in the middle of some impossible situation that you're in a dreamscape, that you're not awake and from some distorted and nonsensical 1st person/3rd person dual perspective, you're controlling things while watching yourself at the same time. Except Marcus wasn't controlling anything, he was watching without having a hand on any of his own strings, dancing to a fiend's flute.
He tried to scream, he tried to warm the others, he tried to stop and purge himself of the fiend who'd slipped effortlessly into his mind, but he was powerless against the millennia-pent fury and will of a true tanar'ri. And while he was thinking and struggling, it only took the balor a split second to accomplish one fifth of its goal of freedom.
Crash! A single swift kick sent one of the bowls flying across the room and into the far wall.
"What the f*ck?!" Inva shouted as she turned away from Odesseron and looked across the circle.
"Marcus! What are you..." Phaedra shouted before she saw the vacant look in his eyes and the pause as he moved towards another one of the bowls. "Sh*t! He's possessed!"
Across the room the broken remnants of the bowl sparkled with equally broken magic. Ancient binding dweomers crackled and ignited with a harsh glow as they failed one by one, both the spells penned in ink on the inside of the bowls and on the carved, parchment wrapped bones and other physical tokens of the fiend that they'd held sealed within.
A single spiderweb crack broke upon the surface of the balor's prison.
The room exploded into a chorus of shouts and a flurry of motion as people alternately tried to stop Marcus or get out of the way of those who were.
As he screamed in Abyssal, howled in rage and frothed at the mouth, Garibaldi, Inva, and Velkyn pinned the fighter to the ground and held him prone, inches away from another of the bowls.
"I'd banish the fiend to get it out of him but he's not -from- Toril, you made that clear earlier, that really complicates things." Odesseron said as the fighter continued to plaintively, desperately struggle.
"I can take care of it." Victor said, walking up to his brother, preparing to force the fiend to abandon its host.
But then, abruptly, Marcus went quiet and a bewildered expression crossed his face. That of course was when Francesca started to smile.
Crash! A second bowl shattered as the other fighter stomped on it heavily, cackling with a voice that wasn’t entirely hers.
“It’s like a magic jar spell.” Inva shouted as she tackled Francesca from behind. “Someone throw a ward against it or else the fiend is just going to keep trying each and every one of us the moment we’ve got our guard down.”
As quick as the tiefling was, she wasn’t a large person nor was she very strong, and Francesca was dragging herself forward on the ground with Inva in tow, moving towards the next bowl.
“Some help please!” Inva shouted as she was struggled to keep the much stronger Francesca from moving. “Marcus! I’m gonna stab her if I have to.”
A moment later and the fighter was there, helping hold down his possessed cohort and trying to avoid getting bitten or punched in the process. But as they struggled, they could hear the fiend in their mind as the crystal in the room’s center began to glow brighter by the second. Each bowls’ cumulative loss was weakening the prison, letting Severesthifek act more and more in his normal character rather than by the strict instructions of the priests who had bound him there to serve.
“Do something!” Inva shouted up towards Victor and the other spellcasters as Garibaldi helped out Marcus.
Francesca, already speaking in Abyssal, began to chant the initial phrases of a spell.
“Ah sh*t!” The tiefling said as she dodged a kick and heard the fiend’s casting by proxy. “Now! Now would be a good time to do something!”
Victor began to chant almost immediately, whispering the prayers to invoke a protective spell against evil, a side effect of which was to prevent possession. His holy symbol glowed brilliantly like a fragment of the sun taken to earth, and as the light touched each of his companions and allies, they felt a sudden, steady reassurance against harm like a parent standing at their back with a hand upon their shoulder telling them not to worry.
Francesca went limp for a moment, followed by a wave of confusion as Inva, Garibaldi, and Marcus got up from on top of her. Three of the demon bowls were still intact, and Severesthifek had been, for the moment, deprived of his chance to break the shackled that held him into Nergal’s service.
“Fools!” The balor’s voice screamed into their minds as his prison rattled violently, spilling crimson light from its cracks.
"F*ck you!" Velkyn said, pointing directly at the crystalline prison.
“Release me! Release me and I will reward you!
Velkyn sneered at the binding circle, “Ignore the son of a b*tch.”
Marcus and Francesca’s looks were filled with even more hatred than the half-drow. They’d felt the fiend inside of them, felt its rage, and they knew that the first actions it would take if given freedom would be to wallow in that state, slaughtering the first things it came across: them.
“NOW! RELEASE ME NOW!!!”
But its chance was lost, and for the moment at least, the power of Victor’s deity was holding it at bay, impotent and raging.
***
Wary of just how far the enraged fiend could reach and what it could do on its newly loosened chain, beyond watching them and alerting other guardians of their presence, they abandoned any notion of searching the seven tombs linked to the balor’s chamber, and backtracked. Rather than risking a fight versus undead with a true tanar’ri in their midst waiting for a moment of weakness, they figured they could explore the rest of the tomb and only return there if the codex wasn’t found elsewhere.
That left them with two options: a sealed door that divinations had already revealed to be a danger, and of no use in finding the object they sought, or returning to the first branch in the tomb that they’d found and had initially left unexplored.
"And so here we are again..." Velkyn said as he glanced down at the octagonal pool of mercury.
A single bubble rose to the surface with a dull hiss as the air escaped the dense, silvery metal. Normally that would be virtually impossible, given the properties of the liquid, but yet it was happening nonetheless. But Velkyn wasn't overly concerned with that, he was mentally scowling as he stood there at the pool's edge, frustrated both from having to walk all the way back through the tomb to where they now stood, and from an increasing anger towards their red robed and tattooed erstwhile ally.
Meanwhile, Odesseron was in the middle of a spell of sending, speaking to his apprentices that had been left behind at the barrow's entrance.
"Get yourselves comfortable up there." He whispered as the magic carried his words high above. "Build a fire or something, because we'll be down here a while. And build it by hand, because I'll be using your reserves for a circle casting once I have to transport things out of the tomb."
Crass, pompous, presumptive, disrespectful *ss. Velkyn felt like punching him in the face, preferably with something sharp. If the man got much worse, got under his skin, he was sorely tempted to kill him.
Inva tapped her blade on the edge of the pool to get their attention. "Now as fun as a swim might be to some of you all, mercury... not so good."
"We already tried to scry," Odesseron said. "And without knowing what's down there, any form of teleportation is risky, if it would even work inside of here. So do you have any better suggestion?"
"Physically moving the mercury out." Victor said. "If it comes to it, we can try that, I could conjure a few buckets or something."
Suddenly the surface of the pool vibrated like a sheet of taught rubber that had been thumped in the center. They all stepped back from the edge, half expecting something unto a water weird to lash out at them, but then they noticed the liquid depress like a heavy and invisible weight had been dropped onto it, and the look of concentration on Phaedra's face.
"You think you can lift that out?"
Phaedra bit her lip. "Maybe... just somebody open up a bag of holding for me to shove this stuff into. It's heavy and it's hard to keep this stuff together."
Marcus opened up a bag and Phaedra complied, gathering up and funneling the mercury in a thin but constant stream out of the pool and into the extra-dimensional space. Slowly but surely the level of liquid metal shrank, and inch by inch they uncovered a shaft that ended in a flat seal of vented black glass.
"And it's even got what looks like a curse on it." Inva said. "So very homey."
Odesseron's eyes narrowed. "A real curse or priestly boasting?"
The tiefling waved his concern off as she translated. "Not anything magical, though the plug's got some abjurations on it looks like."
"To keep up the weight of the mercury? Absolutely." Velkyn commented.
"So what's it say?"
"Something about being 'the most holy repository of Nergal. Only those initiated into the dark mysteries by the will of Nergal are worthy to pass. For those not blessed, only darkness resides within.’"
They looked at one another, half curious, half worried about what the dead god might have left lying in weight for them. Magical or not, the curse was having an effect on their nerves.
Inva looked down at the plug, "And so we're at an impasse with something blocking our way from certain fortune and maybe even certain death. So who wants to have their fun? Spell? Rock? Telekinesis?"
"...Marcus..." Phaedra mentally whispered back.
Velkyn raised a hand and gestured at the plate, whispering a few sibilant words that seemed to resonate after leaving his tongue. The plate began to hum and shudder, then a series of cracks slowly traced their way across its surface from the sonic attack. All was calm, and then the glass imploded downwards with a resounding shatter that then welcomed a swirling updraft of bitterly cold, eerily fresh wind.
"Weird..." Victor said. "That's fresh wind."
Velkyn nodded, "Very weird, but at least it's only about a ten foot drop down from the opening. We'll only need one rope."
Phaedra looked at him oddly, "A ten foot drop down from the opening? What do you mean?"
A moment passed and the rest of the party looked down the shaft and then likewise gave the half-drow the same funny look. As far as they were concerned, the glass seal had shattered and fallen away to reveal nothing but an ominous and pitch black opening. Even for those whose bloodline allowed them to see in normal darkness and shadow, they saw nothing but an umbral void that licked at them with a windborne tongue.
Velkyn paused and realized he'd inadvertently let slip something he'd never mentioned.
"It's about ten feet from the opening." He repeated. "Magical darkness, I can see through it."
Inva gave him a look both impressed and also vaguely jealous. "Not bad. Explains the curse too."
Victor nodded, "The magical darkness yeah. If you follow Nergal, or have some object his priests would have on you, the darkness probably lifts."
Odesseron nodded. "Not that it really helps the rest of us though."
"I can dispel some of it if we need to." Victor said, then turning to Velk. "But otherwise we might just need you to go first and guide us by a rope."
Phaedra and Odesseron were meanwhile whispering spells of their own to let them pierce the darkness. The former's was of Baatezu origin, the latter of Mulan, but the function was equivalent enough to Velkyn's ability, though in truth Phaedra's was closer in nature to the source of that than not.
But one by one they clambered down the rope and into the lower passage, staying closely together in the darkness.
Inva passed a rope around, “Everyone just hold on and trust that Velkyn doesn’t lead us into the depths to some evil spider goddess or something similarly cliché.”
“Haha.” Velkyn said, looking down the hallway. “I’ll tug the rope to have you all move, and if I need anyone to stop, I’ll say it out loud.”
They started to move, slowly and awkwardly at first since most of them couldn’t see their own feet or each other, much less the path of the corridor. But Velkyn, muttering about ‘stupid spiders’ and ‘stupid drow pantheon’, led them down a straight stretch of hallway that seemed carved from glass more so than built, eventually turning twice before reaching something that made him stop.
“Well this looks ever so welcoming.” Velkyn said, glancing to the left.
There, its surface flush with the rest of the wall, a jagged array of spikes jutted from the wall.
Velkyn turned and whispered a spell. “And what do you know, it’s even more welcoming to the right.”
“What’s there?” Marcus asked uncomfortably from out of the gloom.
“Oh, just a contingent spell to toss you back into a wall of spikes. Fun, fun stuff… it’ll just take a minute to dispel it.”
With the exception of Phaedra, Odesseron, and Velkyn, the others stood there in the darkness and could only listen and shiver as the lurking spelltrap was dispelled. A moment later and the rope they held was gently tugged and they moved forward, following in good faith along a path they couldn’t perceive except for the occasional bump against the frost-kissed walls of glass.
Time lost some of its meaning, deprived of a major sense as they were, but twice along their slow and shambling progression, they were all ordered to move to one side and walk slowly. Apparently at several places in the corridor there were blatant, undisguised pressure plates set into the floor. Normally they’d have seen them, even if they’d been flush with the rest of the floor, but the tomb designers had gone under the assumption that anyone but their own priests would have been walking blind, unable to see the traps in the magical darkness, and it was only because of a single strange ability, and two rare spells that the group wasn’t likewise struck entirely sightless.
Another tug on the rope.
“Alright, everyone get comfortable.” Velkyn said. “We’re at a stop for the moment.”
Victor began to whisper, and suddenly they were all blinking and squinting as a brilliant sunlight radiance illuminated the hallway.
“Warning please!” Phaedra said as she covered her face with a sleeve.
Victor gave a sheepish look, but any angry looks in his direction over the sudden light vanished as soon as they all had a chance to look at where they were.
The hallway ended a dozen feet ahead at the foot of a pair of metallic doors. They gave no magical glow, they appeared to have neither handles nor a locking mechanism, and the margins between them had been sealed by melting them shut.
Inva walked up to the door and traced a finger across the surface of the weld. It had been done well, not in any sort of rush, and it might be difficult to get past, depending on what type of metal it was.
Phaedra looked at the tiefling. “’Hon, I don’t think you can pick this one.”
Inva half-turned and beckoned her over with her tail as a dozen frozen, metallic faces leered down from the door carvings. “You mind touching the door for a half-second?”
Phaedra shrugged and touched the door, jumping back when there was a hiss and a bit of smoke as she made contact.
“Well, it’s a silver door.” Inva said, patting Phae’s head as the half-loth sucked on the singed fingertip for a moment as it healed.
“Don’t disintegrate it.” Odesseron said. “It’s worth something.”
“Wasn’t going to disintegrate it.” Inva replied. “I was going to have Victor sculpt away the stone from the hinges and have Phaedra move it to the side. If it was steel or something besides silver it might have been too heavy.”
Odesseron didn’t reply to that mild retort, and he stood back against the wall rather quietly as they proceeded to remove the doors just as Inva had suggested. But sure enough, the moment the hallway was opened, the Thayan was back up front as if he expected them to arrive into a riches packed burial chamber at any moment.
But not yet.
With the doors removed and pushed to the side, the hallway continued beyond the reach of Victor’s illumination, and plunged back into magical darkness. Those that could see through the sorcerous gloom however, saw that the corridor was flanked every thirty feet by paired statues of vulture-headed divine servitors, each of them carved with a permanent snarl as they brandished glassy lightning bolts.
Brushing past Odesseron, Velkyn took the lead again, stopping just before the first pair of statues.
“Inva, do you have any more mice?” The half-drow asked.
From back in the gloom, there was a rustle of cloth and a few soft squeaks. “Want me to just throw one?”
“Yeah, just…”
A mouse went flying through the air between the two statues, and the air crackled with lightning.
“Alright.” Velkyn said. “We’ve got traps and we’re down a mouse. Sorry Inva.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty where that one came from.”
Then there was a squeak from the corridor in front of them all.
“Umm… was that the lucky mouse?” Phaedra said as he ears perked to the sound. “I think the little guy survived.”
Another squeak.
Velkyn strained to see something moving on the ground. “What the…”
The ‘mouse’ was there, but it wasn’t alive. The lightning had virtually carbonized its flesh, and little remained but the skeleton, which was still moving around like a normal mouse, but with tiny pin-pricks of light glowing in its eye sockets. The ‘pinky’ wasn’t quite so pink anymore.
“Not bad.” Odesseron said. “Anything that gets killed by the traps rises as an undead. Cute.”
Behind them, they could hear Inva putting away her bag of holding with the other mice. “On second thought, I won’t be wanting that one back.”
Velkyn and Odesseron both looked at Phaedra as the odor of ozone washed over them with a cold rush of wind from deeper in the tomb.
The half-‘loth sighed and her ears went flat. “Fine. I’ll go find out how many traps there are, what the recharge time on them happens to be, and what else is down there.”
She stepped forward and into a blistering rush of lightning, but after the glow faded, with her fur sticking up from the static, she turned and pointed back. “You owe me!”
But regardless of being more than a bit self-conscious about the static and feeling like an over glorified version of Inva’s mice, Phaedra tested each of the numerous traps. Any true priest of Nergal would have been safe, either immune to the magic, or more likely, they wouldn’t have triggered at their passage as they did for Phae, her companions, and any other tomb robber who trod the same path. Each of the traps also seemed to have a few second delay before being able to go active again. Not much time, but enough to carefully shepherd the group to the end of the hallway where it looked like there was an entrance into a chamber.
But unfortunately for Phaedra, the hallway held more than traps and magical darkness.
Burningspear
First Post
Woohoo, that was nice again ))
and i got first reply
))and i got first reply
Burningspear
First Post
Time going by makes me wonder when this juvenile version is going to get an update, i was to exhilirated about the other update that i did not mind not seeing this alive again, but now....
(chanting in the background)
...........*We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More*...............
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
(chanting in the background)
...........*We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More...............We Want More*...............
Shemeska
Adventurer
Not as often as the first storyhour 
This week SH1 is scheduled for an update, but at the full conclusion of it's current plot arc, which will mark about 40-45% of the total SH being complete, and something of a turning point in the plot, I'll be writing up a prologue of sorts to the major metaplot of the latter half of that campaign and then putting the breaks on for two weeks or so. At that point I'll start giving SH2 some love, probably through the conclusion of this current plot line in the Great Barrow, and into the introduction of the next plot arc (and we'll revisit that meeting between Phaedra and A'kin from earlier).
This week SH1 is scheduled for an update, but at the full conclusion of it's current plot arc, which will mark about 40-45% of the total SH being complete, and something of a turning point in the plot, I'll be writing up a prologue of sorts to the major metaplot of the latter half of that campaign and then putting the breaks on for two weeks or so. At that point I'll start giving SH2 some love, probably through the conclusion of this current plot line in the Great Barrow, and into the introduction of the next plot arc (and we'll revisit that meeting between Phaedra and A'kin from earlier).
Burningspear
First Post
hmmz
the week has gone and no update as yet, although i did see that there is a update comming for the bigger storyline... :\
the week has gone and no update as yet, although i did see that there is a update comming for the bigger storyline... :\
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