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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4047606" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 356INTO THE LAIR OF THE MASTERThe tunnel continued straight ahead without notable features, the floor and walls worn smooth.  The darkness seemed to press in around them, their torches dimming until they seemed barely as strong as candles.  Even Beatus Incendia’s white flames began to flicker, the glow of the holy sword struggling against the dark.  By the time they had taken fifty steps into the tunnel, they could barely see ten feet ahead of them, and they pressed closer together within the narrowing ring of light.  They did not falter, and pressed on.  Through some unknown agency, as the light withdrew some facility of vision began to extend, and things began to take on shape within the black, vague outlines that shifted and crept across the walls ahead of them.  They clutched their weapons and magical devices, alert for an ambush, but when the light finally caught up to their perceptions, it revealed only bare stone, and more empty tunnel. They began to hear things as well, faint whispers that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.  Letellia, bringing up the rear, spun several times and lifted her magical torch to illuminate the way behind them, but each time the light revealed nothing.  The sorceress seemed to glow, and as they kept moving forward they could all see pale outlines around all of them, visible reflections of the various magical wards that protected them.  “Is this... real?” Allera asked, waving a hand in front of her.  The thin, pale flesh of her fingers left faint trails in the air before fading away. “It is the reality as conceived by the Demon,” Varo said, his voice a hollow dirge as it sounded within his helm.  “Remember who you are, what you are.”“The tunnel opens up ahead,” Dar warned.  “A room, maybe... tough to tell.”  He lifted his sword, willing it to brighten, but the darkness persistently resisted his efforts, and if anything, tightened around them.“It is time,” Varo said quietly. Allera began spellcasting, touching each of them in turn, imparting a magical ward that flickered slightly around their bodies as it took hold.  Letellia refreshed her own defenses, while Varo cast a potent defensive spell of his own.  A look of doubt briefly passed across his face as he touched his divine focus, but the magic came at his call, and faint runes flickered around him in twirling bands for a moment, hovering protectively around him as though unrolled from a long, invisible scroll. Once she was done protecting the others, Allera closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.  She uttered a word of simple, pure clarity, one that for a moment burned away the confusion that hung over them like a cloak.  When she opened her eyes, there was a glow within them, a deep flickering like the light of a dozen stars. “Are you all right?” Dar asked her.  “What did you do?”She looked at him, and while there was something distant in her eyes, the love she had for him was still there as well.  “It is a protective ward, a power that gives me insight into the immediate future.  It is... strange,” she said.  “I have never felt anything like it.”  She looked at Varo, who nodded meaningfully.  The cleric had drawn out a pair of scrolls from his bag, which he removed from their cases and tucked into his belt for easy access.  Alderis was now out in front of them; while they had made their final preparations the elf had taken a few halting steps toward the end of the tunnel, as if drawn forward by an invisible tether.  Dar shot a wary look at him, but the elf had finally stopped, and did not seem inclined to wander further ahead for the moment.  “Why does he not take action against us?” Letellia asked.“He is waiting for us,” Varo said, moving forward to stand beside Alderis.  “Let the bastard wait,” Dar said.  He turned to Allera, and for a moment the pair embraced, saying what needed to be said without words.  When they were done, they joined the others, and the five moved forward into the chamber at the end of the tunnel. The walls drew back around them as they left the confines of the passage.  The place was massive, and the tread of their boots upon the stone vanished into the distance, without a returning echo.  With each step, their perceptions expanded, until they could begin to grasp the nature of the reality of this place. It was grim.  The floor began to crunch under their tread, and as they looked down, they saw bones embedded in the rock, ancient shards smashed and cracked by the passage of time.  As their perceptions extended to the walls, and the ceiling that rose up high above them, unsupported by any pillar or bastion that they could see, they realized that it was all bones, thousands, millions of them, an architectural sculpture of death and ruin.  The empty eye sockets of skulls of all sizes and shapes gaped empty at them.  Whole forests of long leg and arm bones ran up the lengths of the walls, broken by small mounds of intact rib cages, the dangling fingers of whole hands.  Bones were crushed together in weird and unpredictable combinations, forming entire new species of creatures, and there were some so odd that they could not even guess what manner of thing their owner had been in life.  The entire chamber was a graveyard, given shape and substance by the will of the dark master of this place. “Gods,” Letellia whispered, her face paler than the white dust and cracked shards that they trod beneath their boots.       The wall of darkness ahead of them continued to retreat as they moved forward, and the chamber kept getting larger, the walls spreading farther apart with each step they took.  By the time they had counted a hundred paces into the chamber, the place stretched almost a hundred and fifty feet across, and the ceiling had risen to almost fifty feet above them.  And everywhere, still, bones, both intact and in fragments.  They could see an almost intact skeleton of some massive creature embedded in the wall to their left, a thing that would have rivaled the Ravager, or an adult dragon perhaps, in life.  Bones crunched under their feet as they walked, and gray-white dust clung to their legs almost up to their knees from the dust they’d disturbed. “There is only death here,” Allera said.  “Perhaps with my arcane sight,” Letellia began, but Varo interrupted her with a raised hand. “I would not recommend it.  The power concentrated here is overwhelming, stronger tenfold than what we felt out in the maze.”“It’s here, it’s here, it’s here, it’s here,” Alderis began to chant, his limbs shaking.  They could see that his fingers were bloody, where he had dug into the crystals encrusted upon his chest.  The elf was staring into the darkness, and no longer seemed to realize that they were there.  Allera tried to calm him, but he ignored her.Dar stepped forward, and lifted Beatus Incendia high above his head.  “Orcus!  We have come for you!  Show yourself, demon!”Dar’s shout vanished into the darkness.  There was no echo.  Something stirred.  They could feel it, a current that rose up and crept across their skin, piercing their bodies and chilling them to the core.  A terror that threatened their sanity swept over them, threatening even through the magical protections of their wards and Allera’s heroes’ feast consumed that morning.  “Remember who you are,” Varo’s voice came, steadying them.  They still could not see into the darkness, but there was something, a tremor in that part of the mind where nightmares begin.  And then a pair of red embers appeared within the darkness.SO. AT LAST, YOU HAVE COME.The darkness fell away like a shroud pulled back from a coffin.  The entirety of the chamber was revealed to them, extending for hundreds of feet into the distance, an almost endless mausoleum.  And ahead of them, the objective of their quest waited for them.Orcus sat upon a throne composed of thousands and thousands of bones, built massive to withstand the weight of its bloated frame.  The throne shifted continuously under the demon lord, the bones grinding ponderously together, and as the demon revealed itself, the skulls set into the great chair began to moan, a terrible noise of misery and suffering.  The demon was huge, even seated; standing it would have been over fifteen feet tall.  Its body was fat, bloated, but its thick arms and legs were also muscled, and none of them doubted the considerable physical strength bespoken by the demon’s size.  In its right hand it clutched its terrible rod, a black shaft topped by a huge skull, surrounded by a palpable aura of destructive power.  Its face, known to them from the hundreds of depictions that they had seen in Rappan Athuk, was a hundred times worse in person, a hideous amalgam of goat and demon and man.  Worst of all were those eyes, red flares from the deepest pits of the Abyss, which held them with a grim promise of their fate. They were ready for it, had expected it, but even so the reality of Orcus’s presence blinded them for several moments to the presence of the others.  Oddly it was Dar who recovered first, blinking and lifting his sword; he did not remember dropping it to his side.A marilith stood to the side of the Prince’s throne, its long tail coiled around its squat base.  The demon looked little the worse for wear from their earlier encounter, although black scorch marks covered one side of her torso where Varo’s flame strike had seared her.  And behind the throne... undead. Dozens, Dar thought at first.  But then, as his gaze spread wider, he revised the assessment.  There were arrays of corporeal undead gathered in chaotic masses around and behind the thone, skeletons and zombies and ghouls and ghasts, the least of the undead, creatures that the Doomed Bastards had faced and destroyed by the thousands.  But then Dar’s stare traveled upward, to what he thought had been wisps of fog hovering about the Prince like a plume of smoke caught in the wind.  But no... they were undead monsters, shadows and wraiths and spectres, orbiting their Master, bound to its slightest whim.  But all of it, the handmaid, the undead, the creepy throne, the massed death gathered in this place, all of it paled before the sheer power that resided in the center of this place.  Objectively, they knew that the avatar of Orcus had been weakened, that their destruction of the three temples in Rappan Athuk had diminished it.  They knew what Varo and Honoratius had told them, that Orcus still lacked the power to effect a physical translation into their world.  They knew little of the demon lord’s hidden agendas, the politics of the Abyss, the dark litany of events that had ended with this creature poised to invade and destroy their world.  They only knew that they stood in the presence of a being that was, if not a god, the closest thing to one that any mortal of Camar had ever faced in the flesh. Orcus let the moment of realization and revelation stretch on for moments, minutes; time no longer seemed to matter.  The mortals that had come here to confront the demon felt frozen, as though the slightest action would collapse this détente and begin the chaos that they knew had to come.  The demon seemed to swell as it drank in their fear, and then, finally, it spoke again. LONG HAVE I WAITED.  I HAVE DRUNK DEEP OF YOUR WORLD, BUT YOU FIVE ARE SPECIAL.  I HAVE MARKED YOU, MARKED YOU EVEN BEFORE YOU FIRST ENTERED MY DEMESNE, MY RAPPAN ATHUK.  YOU MORTALS, SO POWERFUL, SO RICH WITH LIFE.  I WILL FEED, AND YOUR POWER, YOUR SOULS WILL OPEN THE WAY.  I WILL CONSUME YOUR WORLD, AND THANATOS WILL RISE AGAIN.“A nice little plan, goat-face, but there’s one little problem,” Dar said, brandishing Beatus Incendia.  “We will never allow you to destroy our world!” Allera shouted.  Alderis let out a terrible, mewling noise.  Orcus let out a grumbling noise of laughter. YOU HAVE CARVED A SWATH THROUGH MY MINIONS, AND GAINED POWER.  YOUR ASCENDENCY HAS BEEN IMPRESSIVE, BUT ULTIMATELY FUTILE.  YOU ARE MINE, NOW.Without further warning, Orcus hit them with a devastating wave of power.  The blackness came rushing back in, but this time it brought with it a suffocating potency that smothered them with dark claws of mental energy.  Several of them screamed as the darkness enveloped them, but the sounds faded into the black, leaving only the malevolent laughter of Orcus, which escorted them into oblivion.</blockquote>

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