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<blockquote data-quote="sciborg3" data-source="post: 5943334" data-attributes="member: 6678667"><p>Had to trim this out of a Planewalker piece:</p><p></p><p>The Infinite Staircase leads you to your heart's desire, but what if your heart's desire is the murder of the Lady of Pain?</p><p></p><p>Given the difficulties of navigating the staircase alone and keeping the flame of desire clear and bright in your heart, few have found their heart's desire even when their goal has been something far less grand than the assassination of the Lady of Pain. This however has not kept the monks of the Cerulean Garden from continuing in their attempts to dispose of Her Serenity. A collection of githzerai, the cerulean monks were content to meditate on the nature of reality within their monastery on the plane of Limbo until the day all of them had a single vision of impending disaster. The nature of this disaster, and whom it affects, has been kept secret to all outside the order. All that is known is that to avert this calamity the Lady of Pain must die. The monks, originally numbering in the hundreds, believed that their conviction coupled with their will would allow them to seek the answer to their problem in the myriad turns of the Infinite Staircase. Unfortunately none of them truly desired the death of the Lady in their innermost hearts, each of them wanted baser things such as love, joy, peace, or even a selfish enlightenment and release of the spirit. Of the hundreds who departed, only forty-nine monks were able to refuse their hearts desire and return to the monastery.</p><p></p><p></p><p> The flaw, they realized, was that they had experienced too much of the multiverse to focus their hearts on such a singular task. At first they attempted to bear and raise children dedicated to the singular goal of the Lady's demise, but even this proved to be a fruitless endeavor for even the staunchest fanantic sought such frivolities as glory, worship, or even a parent's unconditional love. After the last of the children sent a letter explaining she had found happiness and would never return to the monastery nor complete the quest she'd been birthed for, the elder githzerai decided to create the Cerulean Garden.</p><p></p><p>Located in the depths of a Ysgardian's earthberg's Underdark, the Garden is a massive heptagon pool with seventy seven levels of floors built above its placid, sapphire surface. Every floor leads to wings upon wings of art supplies, libraries, instruments, alchemist labs, mage workshops and engineer dens. Windows open out to locations across the Multiverse so that materials and inspiration, not to mention sustenance, are easily acquired. Creators of all sorts are welcomed to this place, all invited for the express purpose of ensuring the Garden forever connects to the Infinite Staircase.</p><p></p><p> The pool is accessible only to the githzerai elders, each of these monks possessing the powers of an anarch in addition to other powers of the mind not the least of which is a powerful telepathy. Using this discipline they communicate to the giant water plants grown in the great pool, where each specimen contains a gestating gith child within the head of its unbudded stalk. When a plant finally blossoms into a flower, the child is found sleeping peacefully at the center. Each child awakens, walking upon the water with all the weight of a pond skater, to the monks who equip the adolescent psion with various items for its trip onto the Staircase. Note that each child is a true child of the ancient, undifferentiated race of Gith, and for all the significance of this fact the monks still indoctrinate them with a single heart's desire and send them to what so far are their likely demises on the turns of the Infinite Staircase.</p><p></p><p>=-=-=</p><p></p><p>Follow up to Die Vecna Die:</p><p></p><p>According to the events of Die Vecna Die!, the archlich enters Sigil by controlling the power of Ravenloft's Mists whose tendrils are argued to be capable of kidnapping anyone from any part of the Great Wheel. Additionally, the hotly contested adventure claims that at his moment of entry Vecna was not a god. We could assume that he was a proxy to his own burgeoning divinity, that it is only after he takes a step into the Cage does his divinity wax to its fullness within his own being.</p><p> </p><p>Even if we took all of this at face value, and accepted that a group of adventurers aided the Lady of Pain in ousting the Whispered One from Sigil, the conclusion of the adventure is that the reality of the Great Wheel is rewritten and that few, if anyone, remembers the events leading up to the cataclysmic encounter that almost granted the Master of the Spider the Throne the Lady's own Throne of Blades as well as the means of controlling the entirety of the Multiverse.</p><p> </p><p>So did these events in truth take place, with only those of us within the sheltered confines of Earth privy to them given our unique relationship to the Great Wheel? Did Vecna receive a unique understanding of magic through communication with a mysterious entity referred to as the Serpent? While it is only one possibility out of many, here is what at least some scholars and many Multiversal guardians believe:</p><p></p><p> Vecna retains a patchwork of memories of the now overwritten timeline, but even he is not sure if these visions possess any veracity. The Serpent, if it was ever more than a manifestation of his own thoughts and desires, no longer speaks to the Whispered One.</p><p></p><p>His confusion about the rewritten past is manifested in the Cavern of Insight, a massive underground realm hidden deep within the depths of Pluton's color leeching soil. All the eyes in cavern are turned toward its center, where a rough hewn altar supports a mummified hand holding up a single desiccated eye. The altar, itself a bound elemental, rotates, with whisper of grinding stone, returning all the gazes directed at it. The entire site radiates a malevolent divinity churning with frustration toward itself. This because the entire Cavern of Insight is an avatar of the Dark Lord of Secrets. Vecna hopes that somewhere in the recurrence of self examination the Cavern provides the truth of what happened to him before Time itself was unfurled and rewoven.</p><p></p><p>=-=-=</p><p></p><p>The Lady is a Vestige, and can only be killed by another like Herself </p><p><em></em></p><p><em>"Soaked into me deeper than any lover Ipos whispers secrets in the braids of my muscle and the marrow-filling of my too brittle bones. He tells me the Lady is a vestige that has departed from their place outside the boundaries of true existence. She is a fully present spirit who has no need of a vessel to be Here, to be extant in the Now.</em></p><p> </p><p>Sigil is Her circle She has summoned Herself into, the circumference-price for Her ability to traverse the axes of the Real.</p><p> </p><p>Can She be killed? Yes, everything can die, but She can only be killed by someone who follows Her, who shadows the Road She took..."</p><p>-Praetor Noriia, Legends of the Pact Binders</p><p> </p><p></p><p>Vestiges are beings who are trapped beyond life and death, existing a spiritual state quite different not only from undeath but from the rest of existence all together. Normally, vestiges are beyond the reach of the gods but also, to those with the knowledge, able to be summoned by mere mortals known as pact binders.</p><p> </p><p></p><p>Summoning a vestige requires a seal, a portal through which it can step trough. In the normal course of this highly abnormal magic, vestiges can only influence reality through those pact binders who take them into their flesh for a time. Even then their ability to work their will is limited both in time and control.</p><p> </p><p></p><p>But what if a vestige was summoned, or summoned itself, utilizing Sigil as a seal? A pact to itself, just as it is said that Odin hung from Yggdrasil as a sacrifice to his own divinity? Or perhaps someone else, possibly the dabus, called her here to serve as the city's eternal guardian? Could such a being remain somehow aloof from the powers of the gods but also possess, within that limited circumference, mastery of its environment? After all, their nature is held to be undefinable by the known laws of the Multiverse, and the Lady and Sigil certainly qualify on that front. Not only would it bring meaning to using the Cage to describe the city, it might explain why the city is referred to as a Sigil if it were the Lady's own pact binding seal?</p><p> </p><p></p><p>Could the Lady of Pain be a vestige?</p><p> </p><p></p><p>Most people, including most pact binders, find this to be nothing more than the ravings of Praetor Norila after the once great pact binder went mad attempting to wrest the secrets of creation from the vestiges she summoned obsessively. Those wishing to follow in her footsteps would have to seek answers from the vestiges, who themselves are enigmatic beings existing in place possibly farther than the nightmarish Far Realms.</p><p> </p><p></p><p>Questioning vestiges requires summoning them, and pact binders must contest with these spirits for dominance in the binding. Such contests can include solving and posing riddles, other mental challenges, or some sort of contest pitting the binders psyche against that of the vestige. However, even when one has mastered a vestige its memory of its own past, let alone any secrets it had about the Multiverse, might be unclear or even long forgotten. Additionally, vestiges hunger to know the reality they were shorn from, and will pretend to possess knowledge they, in fact, do not have. Following their advice or their directions to supposed methods of killing the Lady might lead one to fates worse than death. If one could somehow compel them to recall their pasts, one would have a valuable resource given their numbers include the Accerak the Devourer, the once Lord of Nine Geryon, the dead sun god Amon, and numerous other beings of legend who once possessed incredible power.</p><p></p><p></p><p> If there are any pact binders seeking to become vestiges then return via their own wills, they are keeping it a secret and for good reason. Pact binding isn't well tolerated at the best of times, and pact binders in Sigil suspected of threatening the Lady are likely to be drawn and quartered without so much as a trial or possibly even an arrest. Anyone undertaking such a mission should realize that Ipos, perhaps the first pact binder, ended up as a vestige himself and for all the incredible power he was said to possess, not the least of which was traveling through the depth and breadth of the Multiverse, remains on the far side of all creation.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="sciborg3, post: 5943334, member: 6678667"] Had to trim this out of a Planewalker piece: The Infinite Staircase leads you to your heart's desire, but what if your heart's desire is the murder of the Lady of Pain? Given the difficulties of navigating the staircase alone and keeping the flame of desire clear and bright in your heart, few have found their heart's desire even when their goal has been something far less grand than the assassination of the Lady of Pain. This however has not kept the monks of the Cerulean Garden from continuing in their attempts to dispose of Her Serenity. A collection of githzerai, the cerulean monks were content to meditate on the nature of reality within their monastery on the plane of Limbo until the day all of them had a single vision of impending disaster. The nature of this disaster, and whom it affects, has been kept secret to all outside the order. All that is known is that to avert this calamity the Lady of Pain must die. The monks, originally numbering in the hundreds, believed that their conviction coupled with their will would allow them to seek the answer to their problem in the myriad turns of the Infinite Staircase. Unfortunately none of them truly desired the death of the Lady in their innermost hearts, each of them wanted baser things such as love, joy, peace, or even a selfish enlightenment and release of the spirit. Of the hundreds who departed, only forty-nine monks were able to refuse their hearts desire and return to the monastery. The flaw, they realized, was that they had experienced too much of the multiverse to focus their hearts on such a singular task. At first they attempted to bear and raise children dedicated to the singular goal of the Lady's demise, but even this proved to be a fruitless endeavor for even the staunchest fanantic sought such frivolities as glory, worship, or even a parent's unconditional love. After the last of the children sent a letter explaining she had found happiness and would never return to the monastery nor complete the quest she'd been birthed for, the elder githzerai decided to create the Cerulean Garden. Located in the depths of a Ysgardian's earthberg's Underdark, the Garden is a massive heptagon pool with seventy seven levels of floors built above its placid, sapphire surface. Every floor leads to wings upon wings of art supplies, libraries, instruments, alchemist labs, mage workshops and engineer dens. Windows open out to locations across the Multiverse so that materials and inspiration, not to mention sustenance, are easily acquired. Creators of all sorts are welcomed to this place, all invited for the express purpose of ensuring the Garden forever connects to the Infinite Staircase. The pool is accessible only to the githzerai elders, each of these monks possessing the powers of an anarch in addition to other powers of the mind not the least of which is a powerful telepathy. Using this discipline they communicate to the giant water plants grown in the great pool, where each specimen contains a gestating gith child within the head of its unbudded stalk. When a plant finally blossoms into a flower, the child is found sleeping peacefully at the center. Each child awakens, walking upon the water with all the weight of a pond skater, to the monks who equip the adolescent psion with various items for its trip onto the Staircase. Note that each child is a true child of the ancient, undifferentiated race of Gith, and for all the significance of this fact the monks still indoctrinate them with a single heart's desire and send them to what so far are their likely demises on the turns of the Infinite Staircase. =-=-= Follow up to Die Vecna Die: According to the events of Die Vecna Die!, the archlich enters Sigil by controlling the power of Ravenloft's Mists whose tendrils are argued to be capable of kidnapping anyone from any part of the Great Wheel. Additionally, the hotly contested adventure claims that at his moment of entry Vecna was not a god. We could assume that he was a proxy to his own burgeoning divinity, that it is only after he takes a step into the Cage does his divinity wax to its fullness within his own being. Even if we took all of this at face value, and accepted that a group of adventurers aided the Lady of Pain in ousting the Whispered One from Sigil, the conclusion of the adventure is that the reality of the Great Wheel is rewritten and that few, if anyone, remembers the events leading up to the cataclysmic encounter that almost granted the Master of the Spider the Throne the Lady's own Throne of Blades as well as the means of controlling the entirety of the Multiverse. So did these events in truth take place, with only those of us within the sheltered confines of Earth privy to them given our unique relationship to the Great Wheel? Did Vecna receive a unique understanding of magic through communication with a mysterious entity referred to as the Serpent? While it is only one possibility out of many, here is what at least some scholars and many Multiversal guardians believe: Vecna retains a patchwork of memories of the now overwritten timeline, but even he is not sure if these visions possess any veracity. The Serpent, if it was ever more than a manifestation of his own thoughts and desires, no longer speaks to the Whispered One. His confusion about the rewritten past is manifested in the Cavern of Insight, a massive underground realm hidden deep within the depths of Pluton's color leeching soil. All the eyes in cavern are turned toward its center, where a rough hewn altar supports a mummified hand holding up a single desiccated eye. The altar, itself a bound elemental, rotates, with whisper of grinding stone, returning all the gazes directed at it. The entire site radiates a malevolent divinity churning with frustration toward itself. This because the entire Cavern of Insight is an avatar of the Dark Lord of Secrets. Vecna hopes that somewhere in the recurrence of self examination the Cavern provides the truth of what happened to him before Time itself was unfurled and rewoven. =-=-= The Lady is a Vestige, and can only be killed by another like Herself [I] "Soaked into me deeper than any lover Ipos whispers secrets in the braids of my muscle and the marrow-filling of my too brittle bones. He tells me the Lady is a vestige that has departed from their place outside the boundaries of true existence. She is a fully present spirit who has no need of a vessel to be Here, to be extant in the Now.[/I] Sigil is Her circle She has summoned Herself into, the circumference-price for Her ability to traverse the axes of the Real. Can She be killed? Yes, everything can die, but She can only be killed by someone who follows Her, who shadows the Road She took..." -Praetor Noriia, Legends of the Pact Binders Vestiges are beings who are trapped beyond life and death, existing a spiritual state quite different not only from undeath but from the rest of existence all together. Normally, vestiges are beyond the reach of the gods but also, to those with the knowledge, able to be summoned by mere mortals known as pact binders. Summoning a vestige requires a seal, a portal through which it can step trough. In the normal course of this highly abnormal magic, vestiges can only influence reality through those pact binders who take them into their flesh for a time. Even then their ability to work their will is limited both in time and control. But what if a vestige was summoned, or summoned itself, utilizing Sigil as a seal? A pact to itself, just as it is said that Odin hung from Yggdrasil as a sacrifice to his own divinity? Or perhaps someone else, possibly the dabus, called her here to serve as the city's eternal guardian? Could such a being remain somehow aloof from the powers of the gods but also possess, within that limited circumference, mastery of its environment? After all, their nature is held to be undefinable by the known laws of the Multiverse, and the Lady and Sigil certainly qualify on that front. Not only would it bring meaning to using the Cage to describe the city, it might explain why the city is referred to as a Sigil if it were the Lady's own pact binding seal? Could the Lady of Pain be a vestige? Most people, including most pact binders, find this to be nothing more than the ravings of Praetor Norila after the once great pact binder went mad attempting to wrest the secrets of creation from the vestiges she summoned obsessively. Those wishing to follow in her footsteps would have to seek answers from the vestiges, who themselves are enigmatic beings existing in place possibly farther than the nightmarish Far Realms. Questioning vestiges requires summoning them, and pact binders must contest with these spirits for dominance in the binding. Such contests can include solving and posing riddles, other mental challenges, or some sort of contest pitting the binders psyche against that of the vestige. However, even when one has mastered a vestige its memory of its own past, let alone any secrets it had about the Multiverse, might be unclear or even long forgotten. Additionally, vestiges hunger to know the reality they were shorn from, and will pretend to possess knowledge they, in fact, do not have. Following their advice or their directions to supposed methods of killing the Lady might lead one to fates worse than death. If one could somehow compel them to recall their pasts, one would have a valuable resource given their numbers include the Accerak the Devourer, the once Lord of Nine Geryon, the dead sun god Amon, and numerous other beings of legend who once possessed incredible power. If there are any pact binders seeking to become vestiges then return via their own wills, they are keeping it a secret and for good reason. Pact binding isn't well tolerated at the best of times, and pact binders in Sigil suspected of threatening the Lady are likely to be drawn and quartered without so much as a trial or possibly even an arrest. Anyone undertaking such a mission should realize that Ipos, perhaps the first pact binder, ended up as a vestige himself and for all the incredible power he was said to possess, not the least of which was traveling through the depth and breadth of the Multiverse, remains on the far side of all creation. [/QUOTE]
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