The figure suspended in a column of pale red light was a Farastu Gehreleth, and though it was horribly bruised, burned, and covered in both recent marks of torture and old surgical scars, it was alive. Slowly its fatigued and bruised ribcage expanded to draw in a ragged breath, exhaling it with equal labor a moment later. The creature hung onto life out of what seemed to be spite, something that its kind possessed in spades.
The light that suspended the fiend above the ground stretched from floor to ceiling between two rune scribed disks, while on a table just out of its reach, had it been free to move its arms outside of the light, sat a tray of various implements of surgery and torture.
Next to the tools of its tormentor hovered an orange crystal that sparkled with magic of unknown purpose. And then, there was the open book of notes and observations, all penned in the familiar hand of the Rakshasa. The book noted with a dispassionate medical style of observation the ‘subject’s’ tolerance to pain, its immunities to certain mind probing spells and psionic effects, and anything that it might have said during periods of excruciating pain or duress. The notes treated the fiend as chattel rather than a living being.
But what was perhaps most noteworthy, outside of the gehreleth itself, was that it lacked the obsidian triangle that was the prized birthright of each and every member of its race. That triangle was its link into its racial collective memory, and the link of its deity and creator into its mind. But there, on the other side of the room, a triangle of cold, black volcanic glass was held suspended from a chain within a localized antimagic bubble.
The gehreleth had been cut off from its race and its creator, made to be alone, truly alone, for the first time in its existence, and then taunted with the damningly close proximity to torture it even more. Perhaps Siddhartha had intended to attempt to draw information from the triangle’s link to Apomps, the deity/creator of the Gehreleth race. After all, with his palace situated in the jungles of Cathrys, surrounded by an unknown number of Gehreleths lurking in the depths of that scarlet hell of nauseating flora, he might have considered it a worthwhile attempt to tap into their racial memory if only to warn himself of any attack by others of their kind on his home.
Meanwhile, as they examined the chamber’s macabre contents, the ‘leth’s eyes were rolled back in its head, and two diamond shaped bumps surrounded by discolored scar tissue stood out against the slick brown and gray flesh of its head: the hallmarks of healed trepanation. It had been through horrors in that chamber that they could scarcely imagine.
The fiend groaned and coughed as it sensed them enter the room, spewing fine droplets of tar and bloody phlegm into the air and onto the floor directly in front of where it was suspended.
