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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 255927" data-attributes="member: 143">Book V, Part 15The drow walked easily down the wide stone corridor, his boots sounding surprisingly heavy on the worn flagstones.  His cloak billowed out behind him at the quick pace of his movements—he was quite nearly late, and in fact should have already been at his destination.  Well, there was nothing to be done for it now.  His errand had been an important one, for all that the destination ahead marked one culmination in the long road on which he’d been set for years now.  Not that years were all that much, really, for one such as he.  As he drew nearer he finally could hear the drums, the steady cadence that seemed to thrum in the very substance of the stone around him.  The drow could feel the power in that beat, could taste the magical harmonics that reverberated in those deep pulses.  Excellent.  Everything was going well, then.The drow reached the end of the corridor and turned through an opening to the side into an oval antechamber.  The guardians that flanked the arched exit at the far end drew themselves up as he approached, bowing to him with reflexive piety that did not fool him in the slightest for all its apparent sincerity.  The drow barely registered them, so fixed was he upon his goal, now so close.  He passed through the archway and its protective wards, and into the cavernous chamber beyond.The place was huge, a natural bubble in the rock, its uneven ceiling rising up at least several hundred feet above.  Dozens of magical flames burned in cool eternity at various places around the perimeter of the chamber, although even their combined brightness was not enough to fully banish the shadows that lurked in the various cracks and crevices along the walls.  There was only one other exit besides the one that the drow had used, warded by a similarly grand stone archway.  The chamber was dominated by its central feature, a massive pillar that stood in the center of the place.  The pillar’s surface glimmered as it drank in the light from the surrounding flames, for it appeared to be fashioned entirely from solid mithral, enough to buy kingdoms in the sunlit lands on the surface of Faerûn above.  Dozens, if not hundreds, of varied gemstones were set in an apparently random array along the length of the pillar, their facets scattering colored rays of light all around, with more catching the eye with each step that one took into the room.  The surface of the pillar was all angles and edges, a chaotic jumble that was both jarring and somehow disconcerting.  And yet it seemed somehow… unfinished, although one would be hard-pressed to put into words exactly how. The drow took in the magnificence of the device in a single long, lazy sweep of his eyes.  Then he turned his attention to what was happening directly in front of him.  A wide, shallow stone bowl tiled with heavy slabs of black granite stood before him, ringed by a quartet of heavy drums that were the source of the deep pounding that he’d sensed earlier.  The drums were being pounded by a quartet of duergar males, each stripped to the waist, their upper bodies painted in cascading rows of blood-red runes.  At the far end of the bowl, directly across from the drow, stood Shemma.  The duergar priestess barely paid any heed to the arrival of the newcomer, although she did shoot him an annoyed glance during one of the pauses in the litany of phrases that she was speaking to the tune of the mournful beat of the drums.  The words she spoke seemed like gibberish, but to the drow, who could sense the currents of power that were filling the place, they seemed like an edifice, layers built upon layers to construct a working of great potency.  Above the priestess stood the mithral pillar, rising over a hundred feet into the vastness of the cavern, its top wreathed in shadows.  At its base, directly behind her, an opening was sculpted into the pillar, a stylized gateway that led only to a solid slab of silvery metal unmarked by designs or embedded gemstones.  And finally, in the center of the depression, the focus of the ritual, nine prisoners huddled together, chained to the stone by thick manacles.  Nearly all were dwarves, similar to the duergar in appearance but subtly different in their features, but a muscled quaggoth and a goggly kuo-toa were also part of the group.  All wore looks of hopelessness that had been pounded into their very being by long imprisonment at the hands of the duergar.  The drow took up a position where he could watch the proceedings unobtrusively.  This had all been going on for some time, he knew, and at this point there was nothing for him to do but watch.  The chanting and the drumming seemed to build slowly to a crescendo, until the very stone of the walls seemed to tremble with stored energy.  Then, abruptly, both noises ceased and a sudden silence filled the room.The drow couldn’t help but smirk slightly, despite the gravity of the situation.  The religious types always went so overboard in their pageantry and ritual.  But while he knew that all of the trappings weren’t necessary, he was willing to grant Shemma and her hangers-on her little games.  The fact was that he needed them, and that he would not have been able to accomplish what they were about to achieve without the alliance between them.  The power of her sour dwarvish god—the dregs of the dwarven pantheon, to be sure—was the lever that would bring his audacious plan to fruition.  Shemma had lowered her head to her chest so that he could not see her face, her arms outstretched in a wide, encompassing gesture.  Now she began to chant again, unaccompanied by the drums—the rune-marked dwarves had retreated, and as the drow watched they vanished through one of the two arched exits.  The drow was slightly curious; he had wondered how Shemma was going to handle this part.The incantation did not take long, and concluded with the cleric uttering one final magical command and pointing toward the helpless captives bound within the bowl.  There was a slight delay, and then, so quickly that it seemed almost instantaneous, a black slash appeared in the ground before the cleric and a trio of beings crept out.  The creatures were horrible, bloated monstrosities, roughly humanoid in shape but with thin, wiry legs and arms and bulbous faces marked with huge, slavering jaws.  They weren’t very big, perhaps four feet in height, but looked no less frightening for that fact.  They looked around, as if gathering their bearings, and then lumbered awkwardly toward the prisoners.  It didn’t take very long, as the summoned demons were very efficient in their destruction and the manacles slaves could not put up much resistance in any case.  By the time that the summoning spell expired and the demons were sent back to the pits of the Abyss from whence they had come, all that was left were scattered heaps of torn flesh and muscle and bone.  Shemma looked up, gestured for the drow to come forward.  Another game? the dark elf thought, but he concealed his smirk as he walked down the gentle slope into the bowl.  His boots crunched on shards of bone and splashed in scattered pools of blood as he approached the center of the destruction, where nine living creatures had just met their end.  His face betrayed no hint of feeling  as he looked around, then finally saw what Shemma had meant him to find.  In the center of the group was a small depression, and in that a small bowl of mithral was recessed into the stone.  Runnels of fresh blood had run into the hollow and filled the bowl.“Hurry!” Shemma said, as he reached down and took up the bowl, careful not to spill the blood.  It was wedged tightly in place, but finally came loose at his pull.  Rising, he took the blood to the duergar priestess.  Shemma smiled as she took the bowl, and the drow felt something electric pass between them as their hands touched around the blood-stained metal.  The priestess was at her peak of power right now, the drow realized, and to his senses she seemed almost like a blazing torch, radiating stored energy.  She turned toward the pillar, and raised her voice in a final invocation that filled the room.  The dark elf thought he could hear voices echoing in the empty darkness above, and despite himself felt a sudden surge of anticipation that even his considerable self-control could not fully contain.  That anticipation was penetrated by a brief flash of annoyance as he heard a more substantial, if faint, cry from far above—the abashai was here, watching, despite his express orders—but if the duergar heard it, she paid it no heed.  Instead she stepped forward, and with a final chant sprayed the blood in the bowl across the blank face within the mithral arch at the base of the pillar.  Then, as abruptly as before, she stopped speaking and retreated back several steps.  The strange surges of power, the etheric voices, all ended, leaving them again in a stillness so deep that it seemed eternal.  Expecting something more, the dark elf nearly asked if something had failed, if it had all been for naught, but he sensed Shemma’s continued focus on the stone and forestalled himself.  He turned back to the pillar, watched as the blood ran down the silvery metal in thick gobs…And then…</blockquote>

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