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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(contact)" data-source="post: 1370481" data-attributes="member: 41">102—A frozen place where deeper dreams fester and burn. “I’ve got it all figured,” Taran is whispering conspiratorially to Gorquen as the group marches through the streets of Sigil, back to the portal to the Abyss.  “I took my headband off last night—don’t tell Thel.”“You have what figured?” Gorquen asks wearily.“Why Ishlok picked losers like me and you to go to Faerun and f-ck everything up.”“No way, Taran.  I’m not taking religious advice from you.”  “See, Ishlok chooses her Champions based on merit and past service—she has to know that they can take the heat; but she doesn’t guide them at all, once they are in the fire.”“Well, that’s not true.”“It isn’t?”  Taran scowls at Gorquen.  “The hell it isn’t!  When was the last time she answered a divination for us?  Why are we stuck asking Lathander for directions all the time?”Gorquen scowls.  Taran continues.  “By leaving us out in the cold, she is demonstrating the pasoun in action—self determination in all things, even for her direct mortal representatives.  It shows her commitment to her values.”Gorquen is laughing.  “Did your familiar help you come up with that stupid theory?  Ishlok is a goddess, Taran.  You’d think she could have picked better Champions than us.” “Well, I don’t know about Trezler, but I figured out about us three:  I think Ishlok picked us because she knew we’d piss everybody off.  All the friendly stuff?  That’s just a smokescreen.  We’re not diplomats—we’re the tip of the spear.  If you want to start a fight with a whole world, send Gorquen and Taran.”-----The party has travels through the Hive-ward portal, and after a brief trek across the abyssal plain, stands before a second portal that leads directly to the realm of Orcus (called Tenebrous by his Faerunian worshippers).Thelbar prepares a unique spell;  he discovered this powerful summoning in a lost Sigilian library—a former celestial redoubt, now buried under centuries of city-growth in the Foundry Ward of Sigil.  After painstakingly transcribing the spell from shattered parchment fragments, Thelbar was able to copy it into his spellbook, and prepare it against this journey.  The spell is nothing less than the most puissant summoning Thelbar is aware of—it calls forth a small parcel of the very Light that serves as a sun in Mount Celestia.  As Taran says, “If you have to go to Hell, go big.”As Thelbar finishes his spell, a tremendous glow emerges from a point in space just above his head, illuminating the Abyss as far as the eye can see, and piercing the plane’s aura of terror and inscrutability.  Within this light, wicked creatures are revealed for what they are—terrified entities without realization at the core of themselves.  This  exposure manifests physically in their utter blindness.  From horizon to horizon, the demons of the Abyss cannot see.Basking in the light, Elgin Trelzer summons an elder earth elemental from the crust of the plane, and shields the party with a holy aura.  Thelbar casts a series of protection from spells abjurations upon his friends, and Ilwe likewise prepares, rendering the group immune to flame and electricity.  Taran stands regarding the Abyssal terrain—viewed in the blinding light of Thelbar’s spell, it seems smaller somehow, safer.  “Gorquen and I will need to be deaf,” he says flatly to his brother.  “Hundreds of vrocks make some kind of fearful racket, I imagine, and it’s better safe than sorry.”  Elgin Trezler casts a pair of deafness spells, and thus shielded from the terrors of Nar Tyr, the Champions of the Risen goddess step through the portal and into a massacre.Of course, it was not a massacre prior to their arrival.-----The other side of the portal is the absolute low-point of an Abyssal valley; a narrow, miserly rivulet cutting an impossibly vertical chasm through craggy and dense-packed bands of black and grey stone.  Stunted trees thrust scrawny trunks up through cracks in  the valley walls, and as far as the eye can see, filthy vulture-headed vrocks sit and befoul their perches, calling raucously to one another across the narrow span.  “One hundred vrocks,” Thelbar has decided, was probably a scholar’s euphemism for “too many to count.”   And the countless vrocks do in fact create a world-sundering screech at the first appearance of the celestial sun bursting into their reality and undermining everything they are.Elgin Trezler calls an elemental swarm upon the scene, and follows it with an earthquake that rattles vrocks from their perches, and creates fissures in the earth that swallow them whole.  Thelbar eradicates demons with sonic substituted meteor swarms and chain lightings.  Truth be told, few enough enemies even reach the characters to justify the protective spells spent warding Taran or Gorquen, but hindsight is always the father of economy.  Taran spends a half-minute taking half-hearted swings at blinded and panicking demons, but there is really no need.  Before a full minute has elapsed, the vrocks that survived the onslaught have fled, and the Champions hold the filth-encrusted field.Thelbar allows the blinding glory spell to elapse, and suggests that the party may want to be gone before the layer’s rulers arrive to investigate the unannounced intrusion of Mount Celestia into the 313th layer of the Abyss.  Thelbar teleports the group to the horizon, and after consulting their maps, they begin their overland flight to Nar Tyr.-----To say that Tenebrous’ realm is cold would be true, but it would not do the sensation justice.  Certainly, there are places in the mortal realms that are colder; a strong adult human could survive this Abyssal chill.  But there are no places common to mankind that can freeze a soul as quickly as Orcus’ meat-locker.  Here, a traveler’s generous qualities become slow and languid in the chill, while the secret passions and hidden lusts of the heart flare up and nag at the mind.  It is a confusing sensation, at once diminishing and aggrandizing; within this place, each being is encouraged by the very frost condensing from his breath to place himself first, foremost, and always.“If it comes down to it, I say we eat Gorquen first,” Taran thinks to Thelbar.“It would be better to starve than take such a meal here,” Thelbar snaps back.  “Keep yourself focused, and keep your gallows humor to yourself.”The landscape of this layer seems very familiar to Thelbar’s eyes; tightfisted rivers trickle between rolling hills, black water struggling forward beneath a thin layer of ice.  There is no animal life to be seen, and a thin layer of frost sits on the landscape like dust in a neglected home.  It could all pass for a particularly bad winter in a particularly bad part of a bad world, but here there is no potential for anything else—and this lack is so common, so pervasive, that it takes hours to notice.  The trees, the rock, even the sky itself is miserly and drab; this land will never know spring.  There is no life waiting its turn, incubating under a blanket of snow.  Here, the frost reaches icy tendrils deep within anything that does not move, and strangles it dead.“If it comes down to it, I say we eat Gorquen first,” Taran says out loud, determining to try his joke on the rest of the party.“F-ck you, Tar Ilou,” she replies distractedly, by rote.  Elgin does not respond.The hills slowly give way to another arm of the mountain-range that they just left, forming a horizon-to-horizon horseshoe, with Nar Tyr nestled into the concave section of its apex.  Thelbar motions the party to land, and they consult an ancient map, purchased from a market-ward demonologist.  That way lies the Home of the Dead.</blockquote>

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