No update yet, but here's some new artwork I had done of a pair of characters that will eventually show up later on in the story (tangent to the main plot). Artwork was done by the very talented Sangluna as part of a sketchbook that she's raffling off (that she's still selling tickets for FWIW).
Escheris the Rotting
“Can I assume that the agreements signed with your predecessor are still in place?” The pit fiend asked, looking up at the three-headed yugoloth lord.
“You may tell your master yes.” The leftmost head replied, its eyes flickering a dozen colors like those of an ultroloth. “The contracts agreed to by Mother will be honored as written before I took power here. At the present moment I have neither the desire nor the intention to change the terms of such things.”
The archfiend’s head smiled in unison and it turned away from the baatezu to light a series of tall candles arranged around something atop a block of glossy, black stone that protruded from the tower’s petitioner-flesh structure.
“At the moment that is.” The leftmost head chuckled with a tone that left the other fiend somewhat unsettled. Yet more uncertainty from the ‘loths was not something the Hells particularly needed at the moment.
The baatezu nodded and looked up at the towering but sickly form of the yugoloth lord and erstwhile Overlord of Carceri. That position hadn’t been the most stable in the last two hundred years given the presumed death of Bubonix at the hands of the Ebon, the passing of the title to the Manged, and then her passing of it to Escheris the Rotting upon her ascent to Oinoloth.
‘So much for purity’, the baatezu thought. The archfiend’s matted fur was a jaundiced shade of yellowish-green, and its limbs were elongated and far too thin for its nearly twenty foot height. Still, that mattered little if it played nicely and honored the agreements the Hells had invested much in cultivating.
“You are most kind.” The pit fiend stated. “Dagos will be pleased.”
The baatezu turned to leave, his primary duty accomplished, but the arch-‘loth’s voice abruptly caused him to stop.
“You may also tell your true master that his agreements with the Manged are to be continued as stipulated.”
The pit fiend turned and looked up at Escheris’s central head. For the first time since meeting him, it made eye contact with that head, fixing him with dull, glassy eyes like those of a dead animal. It was unnerving, and for a split second they seemed to be possessed of a reddish-pink glow, like those of an albino…
“Excuse me?” The pit fiend recomposed himself. It had to have just been a reflection from the candles it was lighting in an almost ritualistic manner.
“Give Cantrum my regards.” Escheris said. “His contracts will remain in place till I decide to change them.”
How the hell did the fiend know about Cantrum and apparently his actual reason for being there in Carceri?
“He’s a smart boy.” Escheris said with all three heads as he lowered one candle into the object in front of him. “That’s for him to figure out. But it matters little so long as he abides by those contracts.”
The pit fiend felt cold as the archfiend chuckled and the first few wisps of burning incense rose up from the broken remains of Talasid’s skull.
Vorasha the Ophidian
“Tell the Keeper that I desire to meet.” The fiend said as she slowly and deliberately pulled down the heavy velvet cowl of her cloak.
It was a testament to the arcanaloth scribe’s years of servitude to Gehenna’s Tower that he only flinched momentarily, and then only out of surprise rather than any other emotion.
Vorasha smiled and a black, forked tongue slipped between fangs and lips to taste the air and the other yugoloth’s repressed worry. No longer constrained by the cowl, the coif of green and crimson serpents that sprouted from her skull hissed in offset time with a chorus of soft, serpentine chuckles.
The scribe didn’t respond immediately, but stared hard at his unannounced guest, glancing from her slitted emerald eyes, to the scales visible along her neck and hands, to the serpentine mane atop her head. The question that came to his mind was soon to come to his lips.
“Just what in the General’s name are you?”
The fiend smiled and answered as the serpents hissed mockingly. “One of Three.”
*cough*
