Shemmy's Planescape Storyhour #2 (Updated x3 10-17-07)
- Thread starter Shemeska
- Start date
Shemeska
Adventurer
Phaedra turned away from the opening and moved back towards the group when she felt something brush against her. She assumed it was only a bit of lingering static from the lightning traps but then she felt it again, and felt the air turn colder, almost to the point of being painful. A moment later the air grew thick and her movement slowed.
Something was wrong.
Phaedra tried to open her mouth to speak and then she realized that not only was no sound coming out of her mouth, but also that she couldn’t breath.
Sh*t! She panicked as a malevolent sense seemed to crystallize out of the air and carried with it the sense of something, or multiple things, watching her, laughing at her. Suddenly the air began to squeeze.
Back down the corridor, Marcus shuffled his feet. “I wonder what she found down there.”
“Hmm?” Velkyn asked.
“Well, it’s been a while and she hasn’t come back.” The fighter replied. “Hopefully she’s alright.”
There was a sudden electric-blue current that burst across the hallway as one of the traps erupted into motion. Despite the darkness they heard the crackle and smelled the ozone.
“And speak of the devil…” Inva said. “Or ‘loth…half ‘loth… mutt… yeah. Anyway, that would be her.”
Victor’s ears picked up the rapid pace of her footsteps. “Why is she running?”
Something’s chasing me! Came Phaedra’s telepathic warning. Help!
More traps went off as she burst through them, a trio of things in tow that were best described as hollow envelopes of nothing, bits of living, self-contained vacuum. Her telepathic babbling rambled on for the next few minutes and the time went by with a flurry of movement as Victor and Garibaldi stood their ground and met the hollow creatures with arrows and blades.
If they’d been weakened by blundering through the traps, or been entirely clueless about the lay of the ground, stumbling in the darkness, the creatures would have been much more deadly opponents. As it was, they were dispatched with little difficulty considering that Victor and Garibaldi had been fighting blind, and they provoked less worry and danger than they provided for a spooked Phaedra and a wonder on Inva’s behalf of just what they might have been in the first place. But there were no more of the vacuum quasielementals, or deific creations akin to them, and after they had calmed down the half-‘loth and assured her that they had killed the creatures and that it was apparent that the darkness held no other such guardians, they managed to coax her back to the front of the party to continue leading them down the corridor, hopefully to find its end point in short order.
“Watch your step.” Phaedra said as she was momentarily outlined in blue-white lightning.
With the light came the backlit image of the half-‘loth’s fur standing on end, blowing outwards with the corona of static energy coursing harmlessly through her body. And just before the lightning ended they could see her frowning at the rather comical, decidedly unflattering appearance.
When darkness fell upon them again, there was a giggle somewhere behind the sorceress. “You’re so much better than tossing a mouse down the hallway!”
“I know your voice Velk, even if you’re behind me and I can’t see you.” Phaedra replied.
“You did remember to bring a brush right?” Inva chirped, giggling immediately afterwards.
Phaedra grated her teeth and some of her fur stood on end momentarily, and not from any static. In fact, several more lightning traps later, when the fur on her face was drifting and moving on its own accord from lingering, residual charge, she was nearly ready to let her temper get the best of her from her friends’ giggling. But seeing her discontent, Velkyn walked up behind her, did his best to smooth out the errant fuzz with a spell or two, and talked her down. It seemed to work, and some additional scratching of her ears seemed to do the trick and calm her down, plus a silent motion to the others to lay off for the moment.
But they seemed to have reached the end of the traps, and after another thirty feet of darkness they emerged into a chamber. It was still submerged in the same inky darkness, and the smallest rime of frost crunched under their feet as they made their first shuffling, tentative steps inside. But the chamber, despite having no obvious exits, was not a final burial chamber, nor exactly a dead end, but it certainly had a feature that caught the attention of the three who could see it, and likewise the ears of the others who could only hear the gentle, syrupy lapping of liquid.
“Someone please tell me what that sound is?” Marcus said as he slowed to a halt. “I’m taking that this isn’t a burial chamber? Another dead end or something?”
“…it’s something alright.” Velkyn said, looking down at the floor.
A pool, a circular notch in the floor filled with nothingness that seemed to pulse and swell, licking at the stone margins with as much a haze as a true liquid form. Tiny tendrils of shadow wafted up from the surface and then coalesced back down like a writhing mass of serpents.
In the darkness, Inva smiled. She felt it, even if the magical darkness prevented her from seeing it. The pool was not any liquid, normal, alchemical, or magical. No, the pool was filled with shadowstuff, and even more so, it was a portal.
Odesseron looked down at the pool, “Well this certainly explains something.”
Inva nodded, “That the tomb of Nergal is both inside the center barrow here and yet not within the center barrow.”
Like its mummified architect had told them, Nergal’s tomb was in fact there, dead center in the barrow complex, but physically transposed onto the bloody plane of shadow. It fit the deity certainly, and as she looked at her shadow reflection staring back and winking from within the portal, Inva inwardly smiled since it rather fit her as well.
The Thayan nodded and gestured to the writing around the lip of the pool, “Does the writing give a key to the portal?”
Inva shook her head, “It’s just rambling about the pool being the entrance to the most holy inner sanctum of Nergal. It looks permanently open if you ask me.”
Velkyn rolled his eyes at the priestly wording. “Every door we open, we’re walking into yet another most holy place. How many levels of holy are we in now? No, I think it’s just a code for ‘we drop the temperature even more past this point, hope you enjoy the cold’.”
Phaedra giggled but Victor was looking distinctly uncomfortable.
Marcus looked at his brother. “So I take it you don’t want to be the first person through?”
The cleric looked back up from the pool of shadowstuff and grimaced.
“Well… as much as I find it distasteful…”
“Oh hush!” Inva pushed him over the side and through the portal.
Victor tumbled through the portal, plunging into the liquid darkness that seemed to hungrily surround him like a living thing as he struck the surface and slipped below. It was cold and the shock of the transition left him gasping for breath as soon as he emerged onto the other side, landing heavily on his hands and knees.
The cleric shivered and blinked as his eyes adjusted to wherever he'd emerged. It was dark, and despite the black interior of the tomb they'd just left, his eyes struggled to compensate, and the light he'd carried with him originally was actually dimmed, either giving off less light, or the environment was actively consuming its glow. Victor felt the crunch of dry grass and cold earth beneath his fingers, and as his eyes reluctantly dilated and allowed him to see his surroundings what he saw was anything but natural.
He stood on a cold expanse of grassland, like the Great Dale in late autumn, but the colors were all wrong, like the land was an ink wash painting by a bitter artist in the grips of despair; there was nothing but shades of black and white mixed and blurring together, indistinct the moment he looked away to something else. Looking up, the sky was a pale, faintly shimmering gray with black, heavy clouds hanging low and threatening above a brooding plain.
"Oh hell..." Victor muttered as he felt the plane sap at his will, given its antithetical nature to his deity and his personal convictions.
More details emerged as the shadow border gave way to the depths, and steeling his mind, forcing the gloom to grudgingly reveal its secrets, Victor gazed out over the dry grass and onto a twisted version of the Great Dale that never was. The mound complex was gone, replaced by a flat, wild plain that lay waist deep in shifting, hissing grass: the Dale prior to the arrival of the ancient Mulan grieving their fallen god.
Everything was a nearly monochrome landscape of black and gray, and shadows danced in the negative spaces between the waves of grass blowing and moving on the touch of a cool, immaterial wind from out of the blurred, indistinct horizon. Distance was skewed and warped, and the distant fringes of the Forest of Lethyr and the diseased Rawlinswood were now frighteningly close, barely a half league away, looming, threatening, and distorted in their play of black on gray.
But in that vision of a Great Dale that never was, the footprint of the Untherites was not entirely absent, and where on the prime material there would have been the central mound, Nergal's Tomb, its twisted reflection on Shadow was something altogether different. Away from where they stood, the ground sloped down to form a natural depression in the plain, at the center of which was nestled a perfect and untouched black stone ziggurat. Silvery light flickered and danced like a ceremonial flame around the temple’s summit, shedding a wan, pallid glow as if the moon had been snatched out of the sky and imprisoned like a jewel in some idol within.
Behind and around him, the grass crackled and snapped as the others emerged through the portal, a bit of waning laughter at the cleric's expense trailing away as surprise and uncertainty overwhelmed their mirth.
"Thanks for scouting the place out Victor." Inva said with a giggle. "That grass shouldn't be a threat to anyone else ever again."
There was some more laughter, but perhaps tellingly, it was the tiefling's hand that reached down to help him back up to his feet. For all of the bluff and bitter irreverence, when it came down to it, she knew how to keep friends when she wanted to, and for all her moral failures in the cleric's eyes, she wasn't a bad person to have in that capacity. All of the mocking aside, she didn't hold anything ill towards Victor at all, that was just how she treated everyone given the opportunity.
"I can't say that I really care for this place." Victor said, brushing the dirt from his hands and watching warily as his flesh seemed to shed bits of light in the process.
"Welcome to the plane of Shadow." Inva said, appearing quite at home in their surroundings, while the others seemed various shades of unsteady.
Shadow had a unique effect on any who entered it, usually toying with their feelings and emotions just as much as it sapped at their body heat like a cold draft that couldn't, for all their efforts, be stamped out. Victor seemed to be taking the worst of it, and light flowed out of his skin like silt in a steady current, and concurrent with that illusion of erosion, he felt the warmth leaching from his flesh, escaping into the shadowstuff.
"Hey, cleric of "The right god"." Inva said, poking him in the side. "Just ignore that, it can't do you any harm unless you dwell on it. I've been here enough to know."
Odesseron glanced over at the tiefling. Obviously he'd misjudged her on a number of levels. He'd assumed that she was a competent thief and something of a middling wizard, but her non-reaction to the plane of Shadow, and indeed her reveling in the exposure gave a much deeper breadth to her character. All of them had gradually been appearing to be more than they seemed, some more so than others however. They were people to keep tabs upon, and possibly people to employ given his need in the future if his plans to seize position among the ranks of the Tharcions or even Zulkirs were to come to fruition.
"So how do we get back?" Marcus asked, turning around and looking at the surroundings.
"The portal isn't gone." Inva replied. "There's a weak point between the prime and the shadow border here, even if you can't see it at the moment."
Phaedra narrowed her eyes and seemed to stare at the ground at her feet. "You're right..."
Knowing what the tiefling had said, the awareness of the portal seemed to alter the ground, or at least her perception of the ground. Where there had only been cold, frozen earth, and trampled grass, the shadowstuff seemed to partially condense to a misty, gray-colored liquid in the loose shape of the original portal back in the depths of the central barrow.
"We can still get home." Inva assured them. "And even if that wasn't an option, that wouldn't be the only way. It is however probably the safest."
She gave a far too assured of herself smile and motioned towards the looming ziggurat in the distance. "I believe we have a tomb to plunder."
Marcus moved ahead, confidently striding off, but perhaps sensing something or just doing his brother a favor, Inva whistled for him to stop.
"Before I forget, just one more word of advice." The tiefling said. "Everyone stay together as a group. If you wander off too far from anything that's defined, the plane has a tendency to make it very difficult to get back. Distance is warped, and ten minutes of wandering off in a random direction might put you miles away from where you started. It's dangerous, and I don't want to have to track anyone down if they get sucked past the fringe."
Nodding and taking her advice well in mind, the group moved from the portal and deeper into the gloom, hoping to reach the tomb without spending too much time exposed to the plane, and whatever might be lurking in the gaps between more distinct locations. The gleaming light of the ziggurat at first seemed distant, maybe a quarter mile from the portal, but before they even realized it, they stood at the base of its steps, looking up at the glossy black stone foundations. Distance was a fickle thing, and the deeper into the plane one went, this fact grew even more so.
A pair of leering, vrock-like statues stood at the base of the stairs, coldly gazing down at the would-be defilers of their long-dead master's final place of rest. But outside of drawing a moment's hesitation from the group, they did little else. So secluded from the prime material, perhaps the dead god's priests had felt traps or wards to be either unnecessary, or a profanity so close to the true tomb.
But in either case, the ascent towards the summit was quick, and with each step the cold light refracted more and more through the material under their feet, mixing with the shadowstuff and the unnatural silence to provide for a disturbing, eerie atmosphere. Even in death, Nergal seemed to demand reverence, and the surroundings of his tomb only added to the strength of that desire.
"No traps and no guardians so far." Velkyn said. "Why do I not like this?"
Phaedra nodded, "I don't like it either, but it's not like we're expecting Nergal to stand up and..."
Inva cut her off, "As cute as you are Phae, you can stop with that line of thought right there..."
Phaedra replied by sticking out her tongue and the others did their best to ignore the faces the pair subsequently made to one another. All the way up to the top of the steps, right to the point where they were able to look inside, the two exchanged looks of mock annoyance that went far beyond the borderline of flirtation, and they were smiling and repressing giggles by the time the opening to the structure atop the ziggurat yawned wide before them.
Their expressions and laughter died a moment later, with a veil of quiet respect and solitude replacing it as they saw the interior. Awash in the same silvery light that bathed the top of the Untheric pyramid itself, the chamber was centered around a single platform that seemed carved from solid shadowstuff. Atop the platform and laying in state was an ebony-skinned, hawk-headed male figure some twenty feet in length, the source of the light and the only thing that seemed to push back the shadows that swirled about him and a circle of smaller platforms, each supporting the corpse of one of the royal family and its closest aides.
The room’s walls were spherical, and they constantly shifted, almost as if the light streaming from the god-corpse of Nergal's last avatar were defining the shadowstuff, forcing it into its shape. The light was cold, carrying a sense of pronounced sorrow and regret, pushing an expression of quiet reverence upon the group as they stepped into the chamber itself.
Dead or not, standing in the presence of a dead god, amid the trappings of his mortal faithful, in the manifest expression of their grief, it was a powerful thing to experience. Around such things it was difficult to not stand in a moment of quiet contemplation out of respect for the fallen, and their grief, especially when you were there to loot their corpses and plunder their wealth. But that atmosphere also was distracting, so much so that they never noticed that two of the funeral platforms were devoid of a corpse, and that one of the sarcophagi stood open and empty.
"So what would your codex happen to look like?" Odesseron asked as he glanced down at the desiccated remains of one of the royal family members, bits of gold and jewels still glittering with radiance despite the millennia.
"Who knows?" Velkyn replied, "But if it's anywhere, it's probably here. We'll have to see if any of the bodies are priests or royal wizards, somebody who might have had need to carry it."
A moment later a bolt of blue lightning erupted out of thin air, sending Inva diving for cover behind one of the sarcophagi and leaving the area coated with a swathe of ice as a robed, skeletal figure faded into sight on the other side of the chamber.
"Ok. F*ck reverence!" Came Inva's scowled response from behind the alabaster casket, followed immediately by the whispered start of a divination.
Bathed in the light of a dead god of air and darkness, surrounded by the infinite gloom of the plane of Shadow, looking up into the face of an undead wizard, Victor suddenly felt a rush of supreme confidence that till that point he'd lacked.
"Back to the hells that should have claimed you!" He shouted, holding forth the symbol of his deity and feeling a wash of power channel through his body before it erupted in a bolt of blistering radiance.
The lich shrieked as the overwhelming force of positive energy consumed it, collapsing to the ground in a cloud of dust and powdered bone. But even as it fell, its unlife snuffed at the source, there was a hiss that echoed across the room from others of its kind who seemed offended rather than harmed by the power of Victor's god. So close to their own divine patron, even if long-dead, the strength of a foreign cleric's convictions could only carry so much weight, and it spoke incredibly of Victor that he'd been able to do what he had.
"There're at least two others out there!" Inva shouted, able to see a pair of robed figures cloaked in invisibility across the room as her spell took effect. "And they don't look like zombies either!"
Shuddering at the implication, Phaedra whispered an incantation to speed her mind and quicken her actions, hoping to give her more time in the event of a protracted spell-dual with any spectral mages, or help them, any liches.
Moving next, standing next to Phaedra, Velkyn whispered the same spell that Inva had a moment earlier, but he cast it not on himself but on Marcus, knowing that the fighter was useless in the fight unless he could see a target. Marcus stepped back as the spell took effect and a trio of skeletal figures took form, and by the time he drew his sword and charged at what looked like the undead revenant of an ancient bard, Velkyn had already taken a page from Inva and made a move for cover, reasoning that the undead would confine their spells to nothing that would risk major damage to the tomb and its honored dead.
The bard was preternaturally quick however and it was already working magic before the half-drow could turn away. In fact all of the undead in Nergal's sanctum seemed possessed of an unearthly speed; they'd probably been hasted long before they'd all stepped into the tomb, and the undead had been waiting to see if they were looters, or perhaps worshippers or descendants.
The bard's translucent fingers held a long, ornately carved flute, but the sounds that leapt from its tip were twisted into something enchanted and malevolent as they reached Phaedra and Velkyn’s ears. Had they been anything other than what they were, the sounds would have inspired a heart-stopping dread, invoking their greatest fears, a dirge capable of slaying them where they stood. But by virtue of blood, fiendish and fey, neither of them was affected, and as soon as that became apparent, a snarl crossed the ghostly features of their would-be killer before it began playing a song to embolden its fellows.
Marcus was halfway to the bard, and Garibaldi and Francesca were both moving in the direction of the sound of the flute when the other lich, one of the last high priests of Nergal, screamed a blistering curse from the black depths of his soul. The words erupted outwards, rocking the senses and stopping the fighters in their tracks with its potency. Had they been lesser beings, possessed of less inner conviction, the invocation might have killed them all where they stood, but it was devastating nonetheless, and for Phaedra even more so.
The half-'loth paused and shuddered as the shadowstuff pooling at her ankles suddenly felt as if it were about to snatch hold of her, as if the plane of Shadow itself sought to grab hold of her as a being entirely non-native and forcibly expel her back to the plane of her birth (whatever that might have been). It was a harrowing few moments, but somehow she managed to resist the effect, and when she recovered from her daze, her eyes were still looking at Nergal's tomb, rather than some other vista in Elysium or Gehenna.
But Nergal's priest was hardly finished, and having already witnessed the heresy of a cleric of a power of light and good obliterate one of the viziers of the royal family, the cleric-lich turned its gaze to Victor and called upon one of the most powerful curses granted by his fallen god that was yet within his mind.
Extending its hand, a bolt of darkness leapt outwards, slamming into Victor with a roar of black flames. For a moment it seemed as if he might have been consumed by the unholy power, but when they receded, Victor was still there, still clutching his holy symbol, brutally burned and injured, but still alive and defiant against the lich's power.
Slowly the ringing in their ears stopped and the discord struck by the cleric's blasphemy receded, allowing them to regain their senses, and not a moment too soon as the pair of powerful undead guardians were already moving to hurl yet more spells.
Shaking her head, Inva narrowed her eyes and seemed to melt into the periphery of the room's shadows, moving to flank the cleric as Velkyn stayed hidden, whispering the same spell to let him see their unseen attackers. Necromancer or not, the half-drow was useless if he wasn't able to see them.
Red light flared in the eye sockets of the lich-priest, and had it lips, it would have sneered as it repeated its prayer of invoked destruction a second time, not at Victor, but at his brother, keen to prevent the fighter from disrupting the song of the spectral bard. A harsh, hissing litany of word rang out and black flames engulfed Marcus, drawing a scream and hurling the man to the ground.
"Marcus!" Victor cried out, inwardly praying that his wayward sibling was still alive.
The flames cleared and the lich hissed; Marcus was injured but somehow had managed to resist the priest's hideous spell.
Twice the defilers had resisted the destructive touch of his patron. Twice they had defied him as well as his god, and their presence would not be tolerated a moment more. Extending a fleshless hand down to the burial platform that he had lain upon in dreamless sleep for millennia, he gripped one of the last gift's of his god before they had gone to wage open war upon the most hated and godless Imaskari, a time when he himself had still been mortal. It was a black onyx talisman forged in the depths of darkest shadow, imbued with the screaming torment of all those souls ensnared by the god's talons upon the battlefields of the afterlife, and poetically enough the receptacle for his own soul in undeath.
"Zeerkash eret Nergal!" The lich screamed, pointing at Victor with one hand while grasping the talisman tightly in the other and holding it close to his bejeweled, gold inscribed sternum.
The reaction was immediate. Nergal was long dead, despite his priest's delusional laments that he would rise again, and spells invoked in his name called upon an ever waning pool of slowly dispersing faith. But the talisman as an artifact possessed of a strength all its own was not constrained by the content of such reservoirs.
Suddenly the chamber was awash in light as without warning a brilliant crack ripped open in the ground directly beneath Victor, spilling forth a torrent of flames like it were a portal to some proverbial hell below. He screamed as the lich's laughter echoed time and time again over a hail of screams that called out for endless agony from the chasm's depths.
"Sh*t!" Victor shouted, scrambling to grab something as the floor dropped out from beneath him and he felt the touch of very real, very physical fingers grasping for his feet and ankles.
The lich cackled, lost for a moment in the absolute conviction of a fanatic calling down judgment upon an infidel, but the laughter was premature. Victor lunged to one side and gripped the edge of an open sarcophagus lid, holding on for all his worth, watching the blood leach from his knuckles till he felt the heat subside, the screams fade away, and the grip upon his legs vanish back into nothing.
The crack in the floor closed, leaving no trace of its appearance, and as Victor ducked for cover behind the same marble casket that had saved his life, the lich cursed in its own forgotten tongue and turned to find its next target.
"Oh f*ck this." Odesseron muttered, eyes wide over the array of powers displayed by the lich, empowered and emboldened even more by the buttressing of the spectral bard's continued magical tune.
Let the others draw the lich's attention, let them doom themselves on the contingencies that danced across its body, but the bard was something else entirely. The bard had to go, and it presented itself as a worthy target without the risk of directly assaulting the undead priest.
Odesseron screamed a phrase in Mulhorandi and pointed to the bard, sending a glittering and deadly beam of emerald light across the chamber to strike the apparition. The magic connected and the flute's haunting song went silent, replaced by the momentary scream of its immolated master and a discordant clatter as the enchanted instrument dropped to the floor amid a pile of silvery dust.
It was a self-serving action, and the intent had been to strike a blow without risking his life in the process, but unfortunately for the Red Wizard, the bard's disintegration at his hand provoked the exact opposite. Howling with rage, the lich-priest turned and gestured with a single smooth action, and there was nothing Odesseron could have done to protect himself; he'd long ago sacrificed the entire school of abjuration in his quest for more and more mastery over the necromantic arts. But agony more so than irony washed over his flesh in the last moments of his life before it all went black as the lich's curse reduced his flesh to ash.
Distracted from its immediate surroundings by its flurry of spellcasting, the lich had made no move to protect itself from physical attack, and before Odesseron's ashes had fully settled to the ground Marcus drove the heavy basket handle of his sword into the its skull. But though the blow was heavy, and nearly knocked the spindly creature to the ground, it also activated a latent contingency.
Marcus cried out and for the second time that day was flung backwards as a jagged bolt of black energy erupted from a heavy silver pectoral around the lich's neck, lancing out to strike with deadly accuracy. The blow was not lethal, but much like the undead cleric's negative energy laced touch, the contingent spell left the fighter frigid and numb, teetering backwards with his teeth chattering as his muscles clenched unresponsively.
Perhaps less brave, or perhaps just more knowledgeable about arcane defenses, the moment the contingency was activated and its power expended, Inva coalesced out of the raw shadowstuff that formed the wall behind the lich. Lashing out and up, her sword stabbed repeatedly at its ribs and spine, eliciting a hail of necromantic sparks while gouging out chunks of brittle bone and slashing its moldering robes to ribbons.
Still grimacing from the lich's earlier assaults, Victor saw his brother injured for a second time and quickly drew an arrow to his bow. Normally it would be idiotic to fire a ranged weapon into the middle of a melee combat, but the arrow whose fletching touched his cheek was something out of the ordinary. He'd prepared them that morning when reciting his prayers: arrows imbued with positive energy, specifically designed to disrupt and destroy the undead. Given their enchantment, even if he struck his brother by accident, they were more than likely going to help him after the initial wound. It was a gamble, but it was one he needed to take before letting the lich take any more deadly action.
Three times an arrow flashed through the air in so many brief seconds, intended for the lich, but twice they sunk into Marcus's back, sinking deep and drawing blood a moment before their healing power washed through his flesh to repair their own errant damage and more. One of the arrows however sailed past the fighter and lodged in the lich's side, spearing through the back of one shoulder blade and sending a tremor through its form when the enchantment buffeted the creature with positive energy.
Away from the fighting, Garibaldi whispered a prayer and a circle of holy flame leapt up to surround him as Velkyn stood back up and called out a powerful necromantic command. Undeath had its benefits, but it also carried the drawbacks of having entire schools of magic devoted to commanding and controlling such beings. Velkyn shouted out a simple command of HALT with as much force as he could muster, hoping that the lich's distraction and injury would have weakened its willpower to the point where he could force it to submit.
The command went out and the lich turned and snarled, moving to cast again.
"Ah.... sh*t!" Velkyn said, ducking for cover even more quickly than he had the first time.
Congealing out of shadowstuff a second time, Inva flicked a single bead of amber flame at the lich's feet, figuring that she'd be gone by the time it detonated, the lich wasn't quick enough to dodge, and that Marcus... well... Victor could always heal him later. Sadly though, she failed to notice, or at least account, for Garibaldi's headstrong rush into the fray. The not-quite paladin was wreathed in flames, and only twenty feet from the lich-priest, he was wreathed in flames of an altogether different sort.
"What the hell was that?" Velkyn shouted as he felt the wave of heat emanating in waves even where he'd taken cover.
Inva slipped out of the room's shroud of darkness and ducked in next to him with a decidedly "whoops" expression on her face.
"The lich tossed a spell." She said, giving a grimace and then immediately looking away, especially from were Phaedra sat, still recovering from the earlier spell that had nearly banished her.
More shouts rang out and they heard the sound of more arrows being fired by Victor, the sound of sword on bone, and one last, almost desperate invocation by the lich followed by a defiant bellow from Garibaldi. Peering back over the top of the sarcophagus they'd ducked behind, Inva saw Victor tending to his brother and garibaldi both while next to them the lich's remains slowly smoldered.
But there was killing a lich and there was killing a lich, and one was always harder than the other.
"Where's the phylactery?" Velkyn asked with some urgency. "He doesn't look like anything stranger than a typical lich, outside of being a priest instead of a wizard, but I want to snuff it rather than risk any of these guys coming back after us."
"We'll find it eventually." Inva said as she walked a circuit around the room, deliberately prodding each of the other corpses with the end of her sword. "He won't be coming back immediately, but let's make sure there's nothing else in here to surprise us first."
Of course the tiefling very openly didn't go near the corpse of Nergal's avatar; that one would be well enough left alone, conspicuously so.
Meanwhile, Francesca crawled out from where she'd taken cover and looked down at Odesseron's remains. "Hey guys? What should we do about the Thayan?"
She drew a few confused gazes, and it took them all a moment to realize that they'd completely forgotten about the necromancer. Outside of a few magical trinkets, a book of spells and the man's crimson robe, nothing remained but a pile of fine white ash, and it was likely that the cause of his death would prohibit anything but the most powerful resurrection spell from returning him to life.
"F*ck him." Velkyn said emphatically, turning to look down at the necromancer's remains with a smile.
There was a moment of silence and they all realized that they honestly didn't have much care or concern. It had been a business relationship, a strained and awkward one at times, and several of them had only worked with him out of a desire to avoid open conflict. They had little reason to lament his passing, and Velkyn at least openly despised the man, his attitude, his treatment of his apprentices, and virtually everything about him.
Velkyn was still smiling at the pile of ash.
"You know, you've got a smile on your face that won't quit." Phaedra said as she watched light stream off of the half-drow's smile, a unique circumstance on Shadow, where normally she'd have seen light glinting off of that same grin.
"Absolutely." He replied as he knelt down and sifted through the powder-fine remains. "On some level I'm disappointed that I don't get to kill the b*stard myself, but there's an irony to him being killed by a lich. Lich-bait indeed."
Phaedra gave a soft chuckle as Velkyn lifted up the spellbook and blew the dust off of the cover.
"Not like he'll be using it anymore." Velkyn said. "Besides, I'm curious to see how well equipped he was and how much was just an act."
"Probably a bit of both." Inva said as she sat atop one of the funeral beirs.
Velkyn smirked, "At least we don't have to give him a share now."
"What about his apprentices?" Victor asked.
Phaedra shook her head, "The ones that are left anyways..."
"Yeah..." Velkyn sighed. "We'll have to handle his apprentices later, but I've got an idea on that, depending on what their reaction is. Honestly I'm not sure that they'll be much better than him, but we'll see."
In the meantime though, they had more primary concerns. Somewhere they would hopefully find the priest-lich's phylactery, and potentially another phylactery for the undead wizard who'd been disintegrated by their late Thayan companion. And hopefully somewhere in the chamber they would find the Codex of Long Shadows and Last Breaths, whatever it was, whatever it looked like.
"Hmm." Garibaldi said, looking at a small dais next to the lich's burial platform.
Resembling an altar in some ways it was surrounded by a small circle of black candles, all long since melted down to misshapen hunks of wax and soot on the floor, probably lit just before the tomb builders had traveled back to the barrow on the prime material. But nestled in the center of the circle sat a human skull carved with intricate lines of flowing cuneiform script, inlaid with silver, with its jaw hinged open to hold a flawless, fist sized amethyst.
"Guys?" Garibaldi called out to the others. "What do phylacteries tend to look like?"
He would have gotten a reply, several replies in fact, but his attention was suddenly snatched away as the gemstone in the skull's mouth began to pulse with an inner light and the skull itself rose up in the air to hover at eye level with him.
"Guys?" The fighter asked with a bit of urgency. "Umm..."
Purple light flickered off of his face as the gem inset in the skull flickered fiercely with its inner light.
"Upesh. Upesh Ma’hackteh. Shuval’akt!" The words of a language distinctly differently than ancient Untheric echoed defiantly inside Garibaldi's mind, and in the minds of each of the others as they suddenly turned to look at the floating skull. "Nergal m’akt’tresse! Gilgeam m’akt’tresse! Wa me’pe gora’tov. Imaskar gora’tov!"
Something was wrong.
Phaedra tried to open her mouth to speak and then she realized that not only was no sound coming out of her mouth, but also that she couldn’t breath.
Sh*t! She panicked as a malevolent sense seemed to crystallize out of the air and carried with it the sense of something, or multiple things, watching her, laughing at her. Suddenly the air began to squeeze.
Back down the corridor, Marcus shuffled his feet. “I wonder what she found down there.”
“Hmm?” Velkyn asked.
“Well, it’s been a while and she hasn’t come back.” The fighter replied. “Hopefully she’s alright.”
There was a sudden electric-blue current that burst across the hallway as one of the traps erupted into motion. Despite the darkness they heard the crackle and smelled the ozone.
“And speak of the devil…” Inva said. “Or ‘loth…half ‘loth… mutt… yeah. Anyway, that would be her.”
Victor’s ears picked up the rapid pace of her footsteps. “Why is she running?”
Something’s chasing me! Came Phaedra’s telepathic warning. Help!
More traps went off as she burst through them, a trio of things in tow that were best described as hollow envelopes of nothing, bits of living, self-contained vacuum. Her telepathic babbling rambled on for the next few minutes and the time went by with a flurry of movement as Victor and Garibaldi stood their ground and met the hollow creatures with arrows and blades.
If they’d been weakened by blundering through the traps, or been entirely clueless about the lay of the ground, stumbling in the darkness, the creatures would have been much more deadly opponents. As it was, they were dispatched with little difficulty considering that Victor and Garibaldi had been fighting blind, and they provoked less worry and danger than they provided for a spooked Phaedra and a wonder on Inva’s behalf of just what they might have been in the first place. But there were no more of the vacuum quasielementals, or deific creations akin to them, and after they had calmed down the half-‘loth and assured her that they had killed the creatures and that it was apparent that the darkness held no other such guardians, they managed to coax her back to the front of the party to continue leading them down the corridor, hopefully to find its end point in short order.
“Watch your step.” Phaedra said as she was momentarily outlined in blue-white lightning.
With the light came the backlit image of the half-‘loth’s fur standing on end, blowing outwards with the corona of static energy coursing harmlessly through her body. And just before the lightning ended they could see her frowning at the rather comical, decidedly unflattering appearance.
When darkness fell upon them again, there was a giggle somewhere behind the sorceress. “You’re so much better than tossing a mouse down the hallway!”
“I know your voice Velk, even if you’re behind me and I can’t see you.” Phaedra replied.
“You did remember to bring a brush right?” Inva chirped, giggling immediately afterwards.
Phaedra grated her teeth and some of her fur stood on end momentarily, and not from any static. In fact, several more lightning traps later, when the fur on her face was drifting and moving on its own accord from lingering, residual charge, she was nearly ready to let her temper get the best of her from her friends’ giggling. But seeing her discontent, Velkyn walked up behind her, did his best to smooth out the errant fuzz with a spell or two, and talked her down. It seemed to work, and some additional scratching of her ears seemed to do the trick and calm her down, plus a silent motion to the others to lay off for the moment.
But they seemed to have reached the end of the traps, and after another thirty feet of darkness they emerged into a chamber. It was still submerged in the same inky darkness, and the smallest rime of frost crunched under their feet as they made their first shuffling, tentative steps inside. But the chamber, despite having no obvious exits, was not a final burial chamber, nor exactly a dead end, but it certainly had a feature that caught the attention of the three who could see it, and likewise the ears of the others who could only hear the gentle, syrupy lapping of liquid.
“Someone please tell me what that sound is?” Marcus said as he slowed to a halt. “I’m taking that this isn’t a burial chamber? Another dead end or something?”
“…it’s something alright.” Velkyn said, looking down at the floor.
A pool, a circular notch in the floor filled with nothingness that seemed to pulse and swell, licking at the stone margins with as much a haze as a true liquid form. Tiny tendrils of shadow wafted up from the surface and then coalesced back down like a writhing mass of serpents.
In the darkness, Inva smiled. She felt it, even if the magical darkness prevented her from seeing it. The pool was not any liquid, normal, alchemical, or magical. No, the pool was filled with shadowstuff, and even more so, it was a portal.
Odesseron looked down at the pool, “Well this certainly explains something.”
Inva nodded, “That the tomb of Nergal is both inside the center barrow here and yet not within the center barrow.”
Like its mummified architect had told them, Nergal’s tomb was in fact there, dead center in the barrow complex, but physically transposed onto the bloody plane of shadow. It fit the deity certainly, and as she looked at her shadow reflection staring back and winking from within the portal, Inva inwardly smiled since it rather fit her as well.
The Thayan nodded and gestured to the writing around the lip of the pool, “Does the writing give a key to the portal?”
Inva shook her head, “It’s just rambling about the pool being the entrance to the most holy inner sanctum of Nergal. It looks permanently open if you ask me.”
Velkyn rolled his eyes at the priestly wording. “Every door we open, we’re walking into yet another most holy place. How many levels of holy are we in now? No, I think it’s just a code for ‘we drop the temperature even more past this point, hope you enjoy the cold’.”
Phaedra giggled but Victor was looking distinctly uncomfortable.
Marcus looked at his brother. “So I take it you don’t want to be the first person through?”
The cleric looked back up from the pool of shadowstuff and grimaced.
“Well… as much as I find it distasteful…”
“Oh hush!” Inva pushed him over the side and through the portal.
***
Victor tumbled through the portal, plunging into the liquid darkness that seemed to hungrily surround him like a living thing as he struck the surface and slipped below. It was cold and the shock of the transition left him gasping for breath as soon as he emerged onto the other side, landing heavily on his hands and knees.
The cleric shivered and blinked as his eyes adjusted to wherever he'd emerged. It was dark, and despite the black interior of the tomb they'd just left, his eyes struggled to compensate, and the light he'd carried with him originally was actually dimmed, either giving off less light, or the environment was actively consuming its glow. Victor felt the crunch of dry grass and cold earth beneath his fingers, and as his eyes reluctantly dilated and allowed him to see his surroundings what he saw was anything but natural.
He stood on a cold expanse of grassland, like the Great Dale in late autumn, but the colors were all wrong, like the land was an ink wash painting by a bitter artist in the grips of despair; there was nothing but shades of black and white mixed and blurring together, indistinct the moment he looked away to something else. Looking up, the sky was a pale, faintly shimmering gray with black, heavy clouds hanging low and threatening above a brooding plain.
"Oh hell..." Victor muttered as he felt the plane sap at his will, given its antithetical nature to his deity and his personal convictions.
More details emerged as the shadow border gave way to the depths, and steeling his mind, forcing the gloom to grudgingly reveal its secrets, Victor gazed out over the dry grass and onto a twisted version of the Great Dale that never was. The mound complex was gone, replaced by a flat, wild plain that lay waist deep in shifting, hissing grass: the Dale prior to the arrival of the ancient Mulan grieving their fallen god.
Everything was a nearly monochrome landscape of black and gray, and shadows danced in the negative spaces between the waves of grass blowing and moving on the touch of a cool, immaterial wind from out of the blurred, indistinct horizon. Distance was skewed and warped, and the distant fringes of the Forest of Lethyr and the diseased Rawlinswood were now frighteningly close, barely a half league away, looming, threatening, and distorted in their play of black on gray.
But in that vision of a Great Dale that never was, the footprint of the Untherites was not entirely absent, and where on the prime material there would have been the central mound, Nergal's Tomb, its twisted reflection on Shadow was something altogether different. Away from where they stood, the ground sloped down to form a natural depression in the plain, at the center of which was nestled a perfect and untouched black stone ziggurat. Silvery light flickered and danced like a ceremonial flame around the temple’s summit, shedding a wan, pallid glow as if the moon had been snatched out of the sky and imprisoned like a jewel in some idol within.
Behind and around him, the grass crackled and snapped as the others emerged through the portal, a bit of waning laughter at the cleric's expense trailing away as surprise and uncertainty overwhelmed their mirth.
"Thanks for scouting the place out Victor." Inva said with a giggle. "That grass shouldn't be a threat to anyone else ever again."
There was some more laughter, but perhaps tellingly, it was the tiefling's hand that reached down to help him back up to his feet. For all of the bluff and bitter irreverence, when it came down to it, she knew how to keep friends when she wanted to, and for all her moral failures in the cleric's eyes, she wasn't a bad person to have in that capacity. All of the mocking aside, she didn't hold anything ill towards Victor at all, that was just how she treated everyone given the opportunity.
"I can't say that I really care for this place." Victor said, brushing the dirt from his hands and watching warily as his flesh seemed to shed bits of light in the process.
"Welcome to the plane of Shadow." Inva said, appearing quite at home in their surroundings, while the others seemed various shades of unsteady.
Shadow had a unique effect on any who entered it, usually toying with their feelings and emotions just as much as it sapped at their body heat like a cold draft that couldn't, for all their efforts, be stamped out. Victor seemed to be taking the worst of it, and light flowed out of his skin like silt in a steady current, and concurrent with that illusion of erosion, he felt the warmth leaching from his flesh, escaping into the shadowstuff.
"Hey, cleric of "The right god"." Inva said, poking him in the side. "Just ignore that, it can't do you any harm unless you dwell on it. I've been here enough to know."
Odesseron glanced over at the tiefling. Obviously he'd misjudged her on a number of levels. He'd assumed that she was a competent thief and something of a middling wizard, but her non-reaction to the plane of Shadow, and indeed her reveling in the exposure gave a much deeper breadth to her character. All of them had gradually been appearing to be more than they seemed, some more so than others however. They were people to keep tabs upon, and possibly people to employ given his need in the future if his plans to seize position among the ranks of the Tharcions or even Zulkirs were to come to fruition.
"So how do we get back?" Marcus asked, turning around and looking at the surroundings.
"The portal isn't gone." Inva replied. "There's a weak point between the prime and the shadow border here, even if you can't see it at the moment."
Phaedra narrowed her eyes and seemed to stare at the ground at her feet. "You're right..."
Knowing what the tiefling had said, the awareness of the portal seemed to alter the ground, or at least her perception of the ground. Where there had only been cold, frozen earth, and trampled grass, the shadowstuff seemed to partially condense to a misty, gray-colored liquid in the loose shape of the original portal back in the depths of the central barrow.
"We can still get home." Inva assured them. "And even if that wasn't an option, that wouldn't be the only way. It is however probably the safest."
She gave a far too assured of herself smile and motioned towards the looming ziggurat in the distance. "I believe we have a tomb to plunder."
Marcus moved ahead, confidently striding off, but perhaps sensing something or just doing his brother a favor, Inva whistled for him to stop.
"Before I forget, just one more word of advice." The tiefling said. "Everyone stay together as a group. If you wander off too far from anything that's defined, the plane has a tendency to make it very difficult to get back. Distance is warped, and ten minutes of wandering off in a random direction might put you miles away from where you started. It's dangerous, and I don't want to have to track anyone down if they get sucked past the fringe."
Nodding and taking her advice well in mind, the group moved from the portal and deeper into the gloom, hoping to reach the tomb without spending too much time exposed to the plane, and whatever might be lurking in the gaps between more distinct locations. The gleaming light of the ziggurat at first seemed distant, maybe a quarter mile from the portal, but before they even realized it, they stood at the base of its steps, looking up at the glossy black stone foundations. Distance was a fickle thing, and the deeper into the plane one went, this fact grew even more so.
A pair of leering, vrock-like statues stood at the base of the stairs, coldly gazing down at the would-be defilers of their long-dead master's final place of rest. But outside of drawing a moment's hesitation from the group, they did little else. So secluded from the prime material, perhaps the dead god's priests had felt traps or wards to be either unnecessary, or a profanity so close to the true tomb.
But in either case, the ascent towards the summit was quick, and with each step the cold light refracted more and more through the material under their feet, mixing with the shadowstuff and the unnatural silence to provide for a disturbing, eerie atmosphere. Even in death, Nergal seemed to demand reverence, and the surroundings of his tomb only added to the strength of that desire.
"No traps and no guardians so far." Velkyn said. "Why do I not like this?"
Phaedra nodded, "I don't like it either, but it's not like we're expecting Nergal to stand up and..."
Inva cut her off, "As cute as you are Phae, you can stop with that line of thought right there..."
Phaedra replied by sticking out her tongue and the others did their best to ignore the faces the pair subsequently made to one another. All the way up to the top of the steps, right to the point where they were able to look inside, the two exchanged looks of mock annoyance that went far beyond the borderline of flirtation, and they were smiling and repressing giggles by the time the opening to the structure atop the ziggurat yawned wide before them.
Their expressions and laughter died a moment later, with a veil of quiet respect and solitude replacing it as they saw the interior. Awash in the same silvery light that bathed the top of the Untheric pyramid itself, the chamber was centered around a single platform that seemed carved from solid shadowstuff. Atop the platform and laying in state was an ebony-skinned, hawk-headed male figure some twenty feet in length, the source of the light and the only thing that seemed to push back the shadows that swirled about him and a circle of smaller platforms, each supporting the corpse of one of the royal family and its closest aides.
The room’s walls were spherical, and they constantly shifted, almost as if the light streaming from the god-corpse of Nergal's last avatar were defining the shadowstuff, forcing it into its shape. The light was cold, carrying a sense of pronounced sorrow and regret, pushing an expression of quiet reverence upon the group as they stepped into the chamber itself.
Dead or not, standing in the presence of a dead god, amid the trappings of his mortal faithful, in the manifest expression of their grief, it was a powerful thing to experience. Around such things it was difficult to not stand in a moment of quiet contemplation out of respect for the fallen, and their grief, especially when you were there to loot their corpses and plunder their wealth. But that atmosphere also was distracting, so much so that they never noticed that two of the funeral platforms were devoid of a corpse, and that one of the sarcophagi stood open and empty.
"So what would your codex happen to look like?" Odesseron asked as he glanced down at the desiccated remains of one of the royal family members, bits of gold and jewels still glittering with radiance despite the millennia.
"Who knows?" Velkyn replied, "But if it's anywhere, it's probably here. We'll have to see if any of the bodies are priests or royal wizards, somebody who might have had need to carry it."
A moment later a bolt of blue lightning erupted out of thin air, sending Inva diving for cover behind one of the sarcophagi and leaving the area coated with a swathe of ice as a robed, skeletal figure faded into sight on the other side of the chamber.
"Ok. F*ck reverence!" Came Inva's scowled response from behind the alabaster casket, followed immediately by the whispered start of a divination.
Bathed in the light of a dead god of air and darkness, surrounded by the infinite gloom of the plane of Shadow, looking up into the face of an undead wizard, Victor suddenly felt a rush of supreme confidence that till that point he'd lacked.
"Back to the hells that should have claimed you!" He shouted, holding forth the symbol of his deity and feeling a wash of power channel through his body before it erupted in a bolt of blistering radiance.
The lich shrieked as the overwhelming force of positive energy consumed it, collapsing to the ground in a cloud of dust and powdered bone. But even as it fell, its unlife snuffed at the source, there was a hiss that echoed across the room from others of its kind who seemed offended rather than harmed by the power of Victor's god. So close to their own divine patron, even if long-dead, the strength of a foreign cleric's convictions could only carry so much weight, and it spoke incredibly of Victor that he'd been able to do what he had.
"There're at least two others out there!" Inva shouted, able to see a pair of robed figures cloaked in invisibility across the room as her spell took effect. "And they don't look like zombies either!"
Shuddering at the implication, Phaedra whispered an incantation to speed her mind and quicken her actions, hoping to give her more time in the event of a protracted spell-dual with any spectral mages, or help them, any liches.
Moving next, standing next to Phaedra, Velkyn whispered the same spell that Inva had a moment earlier, but he cast it not on himself but on Marcus, knowing that the fighter was useless in the fight unless he could see a target. Marcus stepped back as the spell took effect and a trio of skeletal figures took form, and by the time he drew his sword and charged at what looked like the undead revenant of an ancient bard, Velkyn had already taken a page from Inva and made a move for cover, reasoning that the undead would confine their spells to nothing that would risk major damage to the tomb and its honored dead.
The bard was preternaturally quick however and it was already working magic before the half-drow could turn away. In fact all of the undead in Nergal's sanctum seemed possessed of an unearthly speed; they'd probably been hasted long before they'd all stepped into the tomb, and the undead had been waiting to see if they were looters, or perhaps worshippers or descendants.
The bard's translucent fingers held a long, ornately carved flute, but the sounds that leapt from its tip were twisted into something enchanted and malevolent as they reached Phaedra and Velkyn’s ears. Had they been anything other than what they were, the sounds would have inspired a heart-stopping dread, invoking their greatest fears, a dirge capable of slaying them where they stood. But by virtue of blood, fiendish and fey, neither of them was affected, and as soon as that became apparent, a snarl crossed the ghostly features of their would-be killer before it began playing a song to embolden its fellows.
Marcus was halfway to the bard, and Garibaldi and Francesca were both moving in the direction of the sound of the flute when the other lich, one of the last high priests of Nergal, screamed a blistering curse from the black depths of his soul. The words erupted outwards, rocking the senses and stopping the fighters in their tracks with its potency. Had they been lesser beings, possessed of less inner conviction, the invocation might have killed them all where they stood, but it was devastating nonetheless, and for Phaedra even more so.
The half-'loth paused and shuddered as the shadowstuff pooling at her ankles suddenly felt as if it were about to snatch hold of her, as if the plane of Shadow itself sought to grab hold of her as a being entirely non-native and forcibly expel her back to the plane of her birth (whatever that might have been). It was a harrowing few moments, but somehow she managed to resist the effect, and when she recovered from her daze, her eyes were still looking at Nergal's tomb, rather than some other vista in Elysium or Gehenna.
But Nergal's priest was hardly finished, and having already witnessed the heresy of a cleric of a power of light and good obliterate one of the viziers of the royal family, the cleric-lich turned its gaze to Victor and called upon one of the most powerful curses granted by his fallen god that was yet within his mind.
Extending its hand, a bolt of darkness leapt outwards, slamming into Victor with a roar of black flames. For a moment it seemed as if he might have been consumed by the unholy power, but when they receded, Victor was still there, still clutching his holy symbol, brutally burned and injured, but still alive and defiant against the lich's power.
Slowly the ringing in their ears stopped and the discord struck by the cleric's blasphemy receded, allowing them to regain their senses, and not a moment too soon as the pair of powerful undead guardians were already moving to hurl yet more spells.
Shaking her head, Inva narrowed her eyes and seemed to melt into the periphery of the room's shadows, moving to flank the cleric as Velkyn stayed hidden, whispering the same spell to let him see their unseen attackers. Necromancer or not, the half-drow was useless if he wasn't able to see them.
Red light flared in the eye sockets of the lich-priest, and had it lips, it would have sneered as it repeated its prayer of invoked destruction a second time, not at Victor, but at his brother, keen to prevent the fighter from disrupting the song of the spectral bard. A harsh, hissing litany of word rang out and black flames engulfed Marcus, drawing a scream and hurling the man to the ground.
"Marcus!" Victor cried out, inwardly praying that his wayward sibling was still alive.
The flames cleared and the lich hissed; Marcus was injured but somehow had managed to resist the priest's hideous spell.
Twice the defilers had resisted the destructive touch of his patron. Twice they had defied him as well as his god, and their presence would not be tolerated a moment more. Extending a fleshless hand down to the burial platform that he had lain upon in dreamless sleep for millennia, he gripped one of the last gift's of his god before they had gone to wage open war upon the most hated and godless Imaskari, a time when he himself had still been mortal. It was a black onyx talisman forged in the depths of darkest shadow, imbued with the screaming torment of all those souls ensnared by the god's talons upon the battlefields of the afterlife, and poetically enough the receptacle for his own soul in undeath.
"Zeerkash eret Nergal!" The lich screamed, pointing at Victor with one hand while grasping the talisman tightly in the other and holding it close to his bejeweled, gold inscribed sternum.
The reaction was immediate. Nergal was long dead, despite his priest's delusional laments that he would rise again, and spells invoked in his name called upon an ever waning pool of slowly dispersing faith. But the talisman as an artifact possessed of a strength all its own was not constrained by the content of such reservoirs.
Suddenly the chamber was awash in light as without warning a brilliant crack ripped open in the ground directly beneath Victor, spilling forth a torrent of flames like it were a portal to some proverbial hell below. He screamed as the lich's laughter echoed time and time again over a hail of screams that called out for endless agony from the chasm's depths.
"Sh*t!" Victor shouted, scrambling to grab something as the floor dropped out from beneath him and he felt the touch of very real, very physical fingers grasping for his feet and ankles.
The lich cackled, lost for a moment in the absolute conviction of a fanatic calling down judgment upon an infidel, but the laughter was premature. Victor lunged to one side and gripped the edge of an open sarcophagus lid, holding on for all his worth, watching the blood leach from his knuckles till he felt the heat subside, the screams fade away, and the grip upon his legs vanish back into nothing.
The crack in the floor closed, leaving no trace of its appearance, and as Victor ducked for cover behind the same marble casket that had saved his life, the lich cursed in its own forgotten tongue and turned to find its next target.
"Oh f*ck this." Odesseron muttered, eyes wide over the array of powers displayed by the lich, empowered and emboldened even more by the buttressing of the spectral bard's continued magical tune.
Let the others draw the lich's attention, let them doom themselves on the contingencies that danced across its body, but the bard was something else entirely. The bard had to go, and it presented itself as a worthy target without the risk of directly assaulting the undead priest.
Odesseron screamed a phrase in Mulhorandi and pointed to the bard, sending a glittering and deadly beam of emerald light across the chamber to strike the apparition. The magic connected and the flute's haunting song went silent, replaced by the momentary scream of its immolated master and a discordant clatter as the enchanted instrument dropped to the floor amid a pile of silvery dust.
It was a self-serving action, and the intent had been to strike a blow without risking his life in the process, but unfortunately for the Red Wizard, the bard's disintegration at his hand provoked the exact opposite. Howling with rage, the lich-priest turned and gestured with a single smooth action, and there was nothing Odesseron could have done to protect himself; he'd long ago sacrificed the entire school of abjuration in his quest for more and more mastery over the necromantic arts. But agony more so than irony washed over his flesh in the last moments of his life before it all went black as the lich's curse reduced his flesh to ash.
Distracted from its immediate surroundings by its flurry of spellcasting, the lich had made no move to protect itself from physical attack, and before Odesseron's ashes had fully settled to the ground Marcus drove the heavy basket handle of his sword into the its skull. But though the blow was heavy, and nearly knocked the spindly creature to the ground, it also activated a latent contingency.
Marcus cried out and for the second time that day was flung backwards as a jagged bolt of black energy erupted from a heavy silver pectoral around the lich's neck, lancing out to strike with deadly accuracy. The blow was not lethal, but much like the undead cleric's negative energy laced touch, the contingent spell left the fighter frigid and numb, teetering backwards with his teeth chattering as his muscles clenched unresponsively.
Perhaps less brave, or perhaps just more knowledgeable about arcane defenses, the moment the contingency was activated and its power expended, Inva coalesced out of the raw shadowstuff that formed the wall behind the lich. Lashing out and up, her sword stabbed repeatedly at its ribs and spine, eliciting a hail of necromantic sparks while gouging out chunks of brittle bone and slashing its moldering robes to ribbons.
Still grimacing from the lich's earlier assaults, Victor saw his brother injured for a second time and quickly drew an arrow to his bow. Normally it would be idiotic to fire a ranged weapon into the middle of a melee combat, but the arrow whose fletching touched his cheek was something out of the ordinary. He'd prepared them that morning when reciting his prayers: arrows imbued with positive energy, specifically designed to disrupt and destroy the undead. Given their enchantment, even if he struck his brother by accident, they were more than likely going to help him after the initial wound. It was a gamble, but it was one he needed to take before letting the lich take any more deadly action.
Three times an arrow flashed through the air in so many brief seconds, intended for the lich, but twice they sunk into Marcus's back, sinking deep and drawing blood a moment before their healing power washed through his flesh to repair their own errant damage and more. One of the arrows however sailed past the fighter and lodged in the lich's side, spearing through the back of one shoulder blade and sending a tremor through its form when the enchantment buffeted the creature with positive energy.
Away from the fighting, Garibaldi whispered a prayer and a circle of holy flame leapt up to surround him as Velkyn stood back up and called out a powerful necromantic command. Undeath had its benefits, but it also carried the drawbacks of having entire schools of magic devoted to commanding and controlling such beings. Velkyn shouted out a simple command of HALT with as much force as he could muster, hoping that the lich's distraction and injury would have weakened its willpower to the point where he could force it to submit.
The command went out and the lich turned and snarled, moving to cast again.
"Ah.... sh*t!" Velkyn said, ducking for cover even more quickly than he had the first time.
Congealing out of shadowstuff a second time, Inva flicked a single bead of amber flame at the lich's feet, figuring that she'd be gone by the time it detonated, the lich wasn't quick enough to dodge, and that Marcus... well... Victor could always heal him later. Sadly though, she failed to notice, or at least account, for Garibaldi's headstrong rush into the fray. The not-quite paladin was wreathed in flames, and only twenty feet from the lich-priest, he was wreathed in flames of an altogether different sort.
"What the hell was that?" Velkyn shouted as he felt the wave of heat emanating in waves even where he'd taken cover.
Inva slipped out of the room's shroud of darkness and ducked in next to him with a decidedly "whoops" expression on her face.
"The lich tossed a spell." She said, giving a grimace and then immediately looking away, especially from were Phaedra sat, still recovering from the earlier spell that had nearly banished her.
More shouts rang out and they heard the sound of more arrows being fired by Victor, the sound of sword on bone, and one last, almost desperate invocation by the lich followed by a defiant bellow from Garibaldi. Peering back over the top of the sarcophagus they'd ducked behind, Inva saw Victor tending to his brother and garibaldi both while next to them the lich's remains slowly smoldered.
But there was killing a lich and there was killing a lich, and one was always harder than the other.
"Where's the phylactery?" Velkyn asked with some urgency. "He doesn't look like anything stranger than a typical lich, outside of being a priest instead of a wizard, but I want to snuff it rather than risk any of these guys coming back after us."
"We'll find it eventually." Inva said as she walked a circuit around the room, deliberately prodding each of the other corpses with the end of her sword. "He won't be coming back immediately, but let's make sure there's nothing else in here to surprise us first."
Of course the tiefling very openly didn't go near the corpse of Nergal's avatar; that one would be well enough left alone, conspicuously so.
Meanwhile, Francesca crawled out from where she'd taken cover and looked down at Odesseron's remains. "Hey guys? What should we do about the Thayan?"
She drew a few confused gazes, and it took them all a moment to realize that they'd completely forgotten about the necromancer. Outside of a few magical trinkets, a book of spells and the man's crimson robe, nothing remained but a pile of fine white ash, and it was likely that the cause of his death would prohibit anything but the most powerful resurrection spell from returning him to life.
"F*ck him." Velkyn said emphatically, turning to look down at the necromancer's remains with a smile.
There was a moment of silence and they all realized that they honestly didn't have much care or concern. It had been a business relationship, a strained and awkward one at times, and several of them had only worked with him out of a desire to avoid open conflict. They had little reason to lament his passing, and Velkyn at least openly despised the man, his attitude, his treatment of his apprentices, and virtually everything about him.
Velkyn was still smiling at the pile of ash.
"You know, you've got a smile on your face that won't quit." Phaedra said as she watched light stream off of the half-drow's smile, a unique circumstance on Shadow, where normally she'd have seen light glinting off of that same grin.
"Absolutely." He replied as he knelt down and sifted through the powder-fine remains. "On some level I'm disappointed that I don't get to kill the b*stard myself, but there's an irony to him being killed by a lich. Lich-bait indeed."
Phaedra gave a soft chuckle as Velkyn lifted up the spellbook and blew the dust off of the cover.
"Not like he'll be using it anymore." Velkyn said. "Besides, I'm curious to see how well equipped he was and how much was just an act."
"Probably a bit of both." Inva said as she sat atop one of the funeral beirs.
Velkyn smirked, "At least we don't have to give him a share now."
"What about his apprentices?" Victor asked.
Phaedra shook her head, "The ones that are left anyways..."
"Yeah..." Velkyn sighed. "We'll have to handle his apprentices later, but I've got an idea on that, depending on what their reaction is. Honestly I'm not sure that they'll be much better than him, but we'll see."
In the meantime though, they had more primary concerns. Somewhere they would hopefully find the priest-lich's phylactery, and potentially another phylactery for the undead wizard who'd been disintegrated by their late Thayan companion. And hopefully somewhere in the chamber they would find the Codex of Long Shadows and Last Breaths, whatever it was, whatever it looked like.
"Hmm." Garibaldi said, looking at a small dais next to the lich's burial platform.
Resembling an altar in some ways it was surrounded by a small circle of black candles, all long since melted down to misshapen hunks of wax and soot on the floor, probably lit just before the tomb builders had traveled back to the barrow on the prime material. But nestled in the center of the circle sat a human skull carved with intricate lines of flowing cuneiform script, inlaid with silver, with its jaw hinged open to hold a flawless, fist sized amethyst.
"Guys?" Garibaldi called out to the others. "What do phylacteries tend to look like?"
He would have gotten a reply, several replies in fact, but his attention was suddenly snatched away as the gemstone in the skull's mouth began to pulse with an inner light and the skull itself rose up in the air to hover at eye level with him.
"Guys?" The fighter asked with a bit of urgency. "Umm..."
Purple light flickered off of his face as the gem inset in the skull flickered fiercely with its inner light.
"Upesh. Upesh Ma’hackteh. Shuval’akt!" The words of a language distinctly differently than ancient Untheric echoed defiantly inside Garibaldi's mind, and in the minds of each of the others as they suddenly turned to look at the floating skull. "Nergal m’akt’tresse! Gilgeam m’akt’tresse! Wa me’pe gora’tov. Imaskar gora’tov!"
Burningspear
First Post
wicked details about the shadow Ziggurath, and i love the "ancient" languages being spat out....
ALL HAIL SHEMMY,
May Nergal kick player butt, and vica versa
and first reply, lol.
ALL HAIL SHEMMY,
May Nergal kick player butt, and vica versa
and first reply, lol.
Last edited:
Burningspear
First Post
*Kick at the DM's shins, write faster the Demon says... 
Ghostknight
First Post
Beautifully written, as enjoyable as story hour 1. Problem is, now that I'm up to date on both I've gpt to wait for the next update!
Burningspear
First Post
Shemeska said:*chuckle*
I'm trying to finish writing something this week that has a deadline.
I think that line has gone dead and needs reanimating
-"Clear!"
*Bump, Krrrrzappppp....
Shemeska
Adventurer
Update sometime late next week. This week has been dead and I honestly don't remember much of it because I've been coming home and sleeping within an hour or two. My job is in the middle of a trio of vaccine studies and I've been getting worked nearly to death as the junior scientist in the group. Yay nearly 300 orbital bleeds in a two day period.
Due to the delay, the next update will be a bit longer.
Due to the delay, the next update will be a bit longer.
Burningspear
First Post
Shemeska said:
then u better make it at least 2 pages full long
, because i am catching way to much dust here in the "future" (U.K.).. lolSimilar Threads
