****
The hallway stretched out before them as they trekked into the Cathedral's depths, dark beyond the mere absence of light - their conjured light seemed to degrade with each step, with small grain-like motes of light breaking off and devoured by the surrounding gloom as they progressed. It only added to their apprehension of what they would find at the end of their journey, and the surroundings themselves did not help either.
"Why couldn't they have built this as a happy place?" Nisha frowned as she gingerly stepped forward at point, a dozen feet ahead of the others, using a practiced eye and her own unnatural luck to scope for any traps, both magical and mundane.
"I think it was intended to be." Tristol's tail flitted side to side nervously. "But it certainly didn't stay that way."
"Imprisoned or not, it's a god's domain, and everything here changes to reflect it." Fyrehowl's own tail matched Tristol's nervous motions as she glanced at the bizarre architecture.
Flanking them, a line of larger statues glared down, their mouths open and frozen in alabaster snarls. They wore armor similar to the gautiere outside, but heavier, and of a much older, complex, baroque design. In one hand they held heavy silvery shields marred black with time's caress and in the other long spears whose silver spikes shown brilliantly as if new, evidently enchanted. Each was positioned such that they all seemed turned to collectively face any progressing further into the Cathedral, like a stone army prepared to fend off any invasion of the blasphemous sanctum.
"Creepy statues..." Nisha peered at their snarling faces and made her own growling expression back. "But at least Leobtav seems to have cleared out any traps. I haven't found a single one so far."
This of course was the precise moment that the party stood exactly halfway down the corridor, with an equal number of armored statues before and behind them, cutting off both routes. Collectively the statues stepped off of their bases with the sound of grating stone and shrieking metal grinding against joints not moved in eons.
"Oh you had to say that!" Toras put his hands up in the air and glared at the tiefling. "You just had to poke fate in the eye and stick your tongue out at it. Again!"
Nisha bit her lip and suppressed an inappropriate giggle, drawing her rapier in one hand and snatching a wand from her belt with the other, "If I could do that by making a joke, we'd be in a lot more trouble every day..."
"Everyone group together, we'll let them come to us." Clueless drew Razor and prepared for the attack.
Marching in lockstep, the statues advanced.
- here the PCs fight a dozen advanced caryatid columns. Skipping the full writeup of that fight.
Clueless sat down to rest for a moment on the broken remains of one of the columns, "Well, with the noise that created, now Leobtav knows we're coming after him. I suppose we don't have to worry about stealth from this point forward."
"How did -he- get past them without getting attacked?" Toras kicked a pile of broken stone and shook his head.
"How'd he get past an army of rilmani and gautiere?" Florian shrugged.
"How are we supposed to stop him when they couldn't?" Nisha's expression was dubious on the issue. "I know we've discussed this before, but still."
"Because you have to stop him." Ficklebarb's voice was even more unsteady than before; the not-pseudodragon was living on borrowed time. "Because I want you to. I'm the part of him that still cares, that looks in horror at what he's done, and is begging you to end this."
"What happens to you if we do?" Toras asked with a heavy furrow of his eyebrows, underlying his concern at what might mean killing Ficklebarb as well as his master if they were linked irrevocably.
"Whatever happens, you have to do it." The tiny dragon's expression was unreadable, "He's close."
With the warning provided by the last sane, good fragment of Cilret Leobtav's soul, the party clambered over the remains of the Cathedral's guardians. It wasn't very far as the familiar counseled them, and with a wary, heavy heart they progressed into the Cathdral's depths. The interior of the structure was larger than its exterior would have suggested, and while the vaulted, blackened corridor twisted, turned, and split numerous times, they followed Ficklebarb's advice on the swiftest route to the very interior, and indeed he was onto something as with each turn the gloom slowly but surely lifted and the passage grew wider and its architecture more and more elaborate.
"We're here..." Ficklebarb whimpered.
"What the hell is that?" Toras gripped his sword and gasped at what they saw at the Cathedral's heart.
The chamber was massive, easily encompassing the size of the entire edifice as viewed from the outside. Concentric rows of empty pews surrounded an open center; places where the entirety of the tiere race would have sat, enraptured by the manifest presence of their god. Yet at the Cathedral's heart where their god would have reigned supreme, things were not as they were originally intended.
There, atop a great raised golden dais, stood a shining white altar, atop of which hovered a black, featureless outline of a giant humanoid body. It hung limp and motionless in the air, each of its limbs bearing a golden manacle and trailing golden chains down to spikes driven into the floor. Imprisoned and entombed by his own worshippers, the tiere deity had constructed a prison of his own making, and eventually his realm had grown to resemble that concept ever more directly.
The imprisoned tiere deity was not solitary as it hung there above the altar turned cenotaph.
"It is done. Another tumbler falls. You are too late."
Leobtav's frail form straddled the blackened outline as he looked down upon the deity's shackled form. His back was turned to the them, and he had not even turned to so much as regard them when they stepped into the chamber.
"Whatever you're doing, we're here to put an end to it." Clueless pointed Razor at the ex-Guvner, resolute and angry, staring eye to eye with the madman.
"You will pay for what you did to those people in Pandemonium, and to those in Hopeless." Toras shouted, blade drawn and eager to bring justice to those who could not exact it themselves.
Leobtav smirked and casually leapt from the altar down to the ground. As he did so, the rest of the tiere god's form was revealed, as was the black glass dagger plunged into its heart. Spreading out from the wound, the black of the figure's body was leached away into a pale grey, as was the color of the altar and the floor below it as if the blade was feeding and leaching something far more than life.
"Those people did not deserve what I did to them." Leobtav shrugged and then laughed, half-triumphant, half nervous. "But we don't always choose to do what we do in life. Some things simply must happen. I learned that a very long time ago."
Upon his shoulder, the shadowy figure sneered and stroked his head like a treasured pet.
"They didn't deserve what I did to them, but I did enjoy it however." Leobtav sneered derisively, slapping his hands together with a motion of washing his hands. "It wasn't quick for most of them you know. I let them suffer."
Leobtav casually recited a summary of the murders in Pandemonium, the ones before then in Hopeless, and a half dozen in other places. None of them made sense. They served no purpose at all. Whatever had polluted his mind all of those years ago in Gehenna had left him a broken, damned shell. Leobtav's victims had simply been side effects of the corrosive, soul-devouring process that began in the Vale of Frozen Ashes that had progressively molded him into a tool for the entity he called the Ashsinger to use in a task that ultimately led to the tiere deity.
"Would you care to listen to them?" Leobtav smiled and opened his mouth. Rather than his own voice, what issued was a chorus of tormented cries for mercy, screams of pain and horror, and prayers whispered far too late - all of them the wails and whispers of his victims.
Fyrehowl snarled and pointed her blade at him, joining the others. "I've seen too many innocent people suffer for no reason in this life, and I'll be damned if I let you add to that any further."
"Yes, yes you will be..." Leobtav whispered as he looked at the lupinal. "Do what you will celestial bitch, it will be as relevant and effective as your attempts to help your own people at Rubicon."
"F*ck you!!!" Fyrehowl's face as a contorted mask of rage and pain, tears welled in her eyes, and she tensed to pounce.
"Master, I have served you well." Leobtav's voice was triumphant as he laughed. Giddy on his success at the task of decades, he wanted to celebrate, and also to put to death the last fragments of his former self. "Please allow me the pleasure of rending these irrelevant fools' souls into so much metaphysical paste, and with them, what little is left of me that you have not taken as your own."
Holding on to Toras's shoulder, the last remaining portion of Leobtav's soul shed a tear. "He's too far gone. I'm too far gone. This can't end any other way. I'm so sorry..." The not-familiar understood what would happen, what -must- happen, and ultimately what that fate entailed for himself.
It happened in the space of a single instant as Leobtav dropped a hand to his side, snatched something there and then brought his hand back up, now brandishing a rod. Nothing of its type had been there a moment before, nor within reach tucked into his belt or anywhere else, it had simply appeared. Whatever the thing upon his shoulder was, it was affording him whatever he wished to have. With a crooked smile upon his face a chain of contingencies went off, erupting in flashes of light that caused his glasses to glare over, appearing like solid, luminous eyes as they did. The man's skin hardened with an invisible gloss of stone, a circle of flame erupted around him, and his movements sped up into a blur of motion.
"Don't let him cast!" Tristol shouted, preparing to counterspell whatever the former Guvner might hurl at them. Surely he would be on the last of his memorized spells after having butchered countless rilmani, surely that must be the case. But the thing on his shoulder whispering in his ear threw all of those assumptions and all rationality by the wayside.
Clueless and Fyrehowl were swift and in the blink of an eye they spread out to the sides, hoping to flank Leobtav and divide his attention as they others attacked from the front. Before they managed to ran more than a few yards however, Leobtav was ready with something of his own.
"Rise up chaff of the lower planes. Rise up forsaken broken things. Rise up spawn of the Heart of Darkness, things that should have never been made. You are nothing, but you will obey nonetheless in the name of He that I serve."
Leovtav's words drifted in and out of Abyssal, Infernal, Yugoloth, and in a droning whisper underlying them all, something older and darker whose use caused bits of blood to leak from his eyes and ears. But he did not care. This would be his last battle. He had served his purpose well and this last triumph was for him and him alone.
Around him, shadows coiled and gathered in three pools of darkness, and with each word he spoke, they congealed and coagulated into discrete forms: shadowy versions of tanar'ri, baatezu, and yugoloth - vrock, cornugon, and nycaloth. They lifted themselves up from whence they'd formed, stretched, and roared. Leobtav pointed at his foes and his servants moved without question, spreading their wings and brandishing fangs and talons.
"What the hell are those?" Florian shouted as she hefted her weapon and intoned a prayer to Tempus, exhorting the Foehammer to guide their hands and shield their bodies and souls.
Though they superficially resembled those fiends, Leobtav's servitors were made of congealed, shifting darkness. Within their greater forms the shadows moved in impressions of smaller, struggling, tortured figured trapped within. Those three fiends would normally be at one anothers' throats, but at Loeobtav's call they acted without reservation. The normal divide of Law and Chaos was absent, assuming of course that they were the actual fiends they appeared to be.
Tristol's eyes went wide and he whispered a prayer to Mystra as he watched Leobtav launch into a frenzy of spellcasting, unleashing two or three spells in the space that he would have hurled one or potentially rarely two. The madman's magical repertoire was also utterly unphased by his recent battles against the rilmani and gautiere; the spells were simply flowing into his head from somewhere else, affording him the luxury of simply calling them down without having to perform the normal, complex mental calculations and hurdles to appropriately put them from abstract formulae to unleashed reality.
The first spells Leobtav hurled were among the most powerful that Tristol knew existed: a spread of blistering meteors, a rolling cloud of desiccating vapor, and finally a finger pointed at Toras and an intonation of a single word, "Die!" The meteors were dodged and the horrid wilting withstood, but not without injury, some of them brutal, and while Toras momentarily stiffened, he resisted the necromantic curse in time to viciously attack the shadowy vrock lunging at him.
A burst of flickering, clashing colors erupted about the shadowy cornugon, stunning and disorienting it. Nisha let out a shout of surprised glee, and whatever the creature truly was, at the very least it reacted to spells as if it were an actual baatezu.
Fyrehowl and Clueless teamed up on the nycaloth, with the bladesinger unleashing a flurry of slashing strikes and a bolt of flame as the lupinal tripped, tackled, and savagely mauled it with fangs and claws before it thrust its wings are darted free.
A second time Leobtav invoked death, only this time on Clueless. But like Toras before him, the half-fey gave a pained, injured grimace but shook off the full effect.
"Good luck with that!" Clueless mocked Leobtav, "Piss off with the necromancy."
Leobtav smiled and turned to the half-fey, his glasses reflecting the guttering, dying waves of the meteor swarm's flames. "Death is not the worst that I could give you..."
Tristol was prepared to counterspell, thinking that Leobtav would use a similar spell on the bladesinger, but the first words that spilled from his mouth were something altogether different. This time he didn't hurl a trio of spells. He only cast one.
"Suffer for my Master." Leobtav called out. "Suffer for me. Suffer forever."
The ambient light dimmed and Clueless was wrenched from where he stood on the ground, his voice cutting off and erupting in an unmitigated shriek of agony. His body glowed with black flame and once hurled into the air he simply stayed there, suspended, contorting in pain. Whatever Leobtav had done to him, none of Clueless's fellows had ever seen anything like it, nor had they ever seen the bladesinger in so much blind torment.
"Help... me..." The words formed on Clueless's lips and then he twisted in the air again, dancing about like a tormented rag-doll, blood seeping from his eyes and nose.
Tristol couldn't place the spell. It was terrible, blasphemous and completely beyond anything that he had ever witnessed, even in Halruaa. The closest thing to it were the ferocious spells hurled by the Netherese archmages of old.
"All of you will suffer like him!" Leobtav gestured to Clueless, cackling in mad glee.
Seeing their companion suffering so only pushed them to greater heroism however. Leobtav's servitors were dispatched, and slowly the madman accrued wounds of his own: a holy smite from Florian, a diving slash from Nisha, and a disintegration counterspelled and turned back on him by Tristol. Leobtav was more powerful on his own than any of them, but he was a weak, sickly man outside of the power he channeled, and there was only one of him.
"Die! All of you!" The reek of ozone gathered around Leobtav and flickers of electricity formed into the maw of a great blue wyrm above his head. Gesturing and laughing bolts of blue-white lightning chained between all of his foes, with Florian and Nisha taking the worst of it, and the latter collapsing to the ground, moaning but still conscious.
"Helpless! Worthless wretches all of you!" Leobtav mocked them, all the while oblivious to the lupinal, herself immune to lightning. With the stealth borne of her adherence to the Ciphers she darted forward, scimitars ready to strike.
Neither oblivious nor mad, Toras smiled and charged forward, drawing another bolt of lightning to his chest, a flurry of bolts of glowing force, and a flickering green beam of corrosive energy. They all struck true, but it didn't matter. He couldn't fail. No matter how it hurt, he had to put an end to this.
"How does it feel bastard of the upper planes?" Leobtav lambasted him and moving his hands in the same motions that he had before nailing Clueless in place in agony. "How does it feel to know that..."
Fyrehowl's blades sunk deep, followed a moment later by the point of Toras's greatsword. Both of them broke through Leobtav's magical shielding with a shattering noise tempered by the wet, sickening sound of a punctured lung. Blood welled up and stained his shirt. With a horrified look of surprise and fear he staggered back.
"Master! Restore me that I might finish this task!" Leobtav begged, coughing up blood with each strangled, tortured word. "Master please! Help me!"
The thing upon his shoulder crouched down, put one hand on his head and turned to look at him with their eyes on an equal level.
"Please..." Leobtav begged, bracing himself against the tiere god's altar. "You promised me..."
The shadow smiled like a darker gulf in a black, starless sky. It smiled and it snickered, audibly mocking its servant before turning and leaping off of him, vanishing into a sudden tear in the fabric of space. The air was deathly cold and filled with a sense of palpable loss and emotional agony, and then it sealed and the presence was gone.
"Master no..." Leobtav wailed as blood pulsed from his hemorrhaging wound. His eyes were wide and hollow, his mind unable to grasp that just like the tiere, his god had abandoned him. As he struggled to comprehend its betrayal as the life left his body, his expression was hauntingly similar to that of the gautiere who wandered, lost, enraged and weeping at the Cathedral's gates.
Leobtav dropped the rod in his hands and slumped to the ground, focusing on the tiny, now transparent form of that fragment of his soul named Ficklebarb. He focused on that portion of himself and scowled, mad with fury, curses and invectives spilling from his lips in a furious torrent. His fury fell silent, the loss of blood ebbed, and then he began to weep, never taking his eyes off of the pseudodragon. Leobtav shuddered and died.
Perched within Toras's hands, in the moment before his great self passed, Ficklebarb whispered, "I forgive you."
Toras looked down at his empty hands and shed a tear of his own. Leobtav was dead, and with him, so too was the only good fragment of his soul. What might become of them, if there was anything there that might be redeemed and reclaimed somewhere else on the planes, none could truly say.
Clueless dropped to the ground, gasping and coughing blood. With Leobtav dead, the spell was ended.
Softly, Nisha began to cry and not from the pain of the lightning bolt that had burned her terribly only a minute before. Tristol sat down and held her, only barely holding back his own emotions.
"Why did Ficklebarb have to die?" She asked, holding the aasimar's tail like a security blanket, wiping her tears and the ashes on her face upon its white tip. "It isn't fair, it isn't right."
Tristol held her close and looked up at the others'. Their faces were sullen and marked with regret. There was little different that they could have done. Leobtav and Ficklebarb were portions of the same soul, and inevitably the death of the larger one would mean the death of the other.
"He gave us permission Nisha," Clueless said, trying to justify their actions. "He begged us to do what we needed to do, and we did what he wanted."
"It really was the best way." Tristol concurred, "Even if it doesn't feel that way right now."
Silence fell over them all as they stared at Leobtav's broken body, and Toras stared long and hard at his empty hands where Ficklebarb had perched, and at the lingering black marks on the guvner's corpse where his puppet master had sat.
"What the hell was that thing on his shoulder?" Toras's face was livid with a cold rage, and his fists clenched and unclenched. With Ficklebarb's passing, it was as if a child had died on his watch. An innocent creature had vanished and the world was left a colder, harder place as a result. The thing that had caused all of its pain and eventual obliteration would pay.
"I don't have a clue." Tristol's ears lay back on his head as he cradled Nisha against his chest. "It didn't honestly seem to be there under any detections spells; no magic, nothing. But it was giving Leobtav access to magic that I've never seen anyone cast. Some of those spells are just so far beyond me, or anyone I've ever known...he shouldn't have been able to just casually hurl those about."
"What do you think the chances are that he has anything on his corpse that might give us a hint at what the hell he was doing?" Clueless glanced down at where Leobtav's body lay on the ground, bloody and contorted. "Who wants to roll the body?"
Nisha waved her hands in the negative, reacting to the idea of touching Leobtav's corpse like it were red hot and covered in filth.
"I'll do it." Fyrehowl patted the tiefling on the shoulder and went about riffling through the dead man's pockets and pouches. He didn't have much. Despite the ferocity of the spells he'd unleashed, his spellbook was small, comprising only those spells that would have been expected for a moderately skilled wizard and member of the Fraternity of Order. What had granted him power beyond his mortal capacity had done so while flaunting the normal rules of magic.
"Ring, ring, bracers, a pair of rods, a dagger, and a metal cog or something." The lupinal listed out the other items on Leobtav's person before standing up and furiously brushing her hands on her thighs, disgusted for having touched the man. "When we have a chance to rest, we can identify everything. But from the look of it all, there's nothing spectacular here. No mocking will and testament, no cursed items, nothing that brought him back from the dead when you touch it."
"Yeah..." Toras said as he upended a flask of oil on the corpse. "Not risking that happening. Someone care to set the body alight for me?"
Florian whispered a prayer and dropped a small burst of flame on the oil-soaked corpse. It was small consolation perhaps for the horrific things that he'd done, but at the very least it put a more definitive end to what they'd been through in Pandemonium and beyond.
Toras smiled grimly as he watched the corpse burn, "We're still left with no idea what the hell he was even trying to do here."
Clueless sighed, "Whatever it was, we should assume that he was successful. The thing controlling him seemed happy enough to just discard him like a tool that had outgrown its usefulness."
"So why stick a knife in the heart of a deity? Why this one?" Florian pondered, looking at the hovering body atop the altar. "Because clearly this was the only one he cared about, given he spent decades trying to find it."
"Whatever corrupted him might have had a history with the tiere, or their god." Clueless guessed, throwing out ideas, equally perplexed with all of them. "I don't know. I really don't know."
Tristol meanwhile had walked up to the altar, staring at the words that Leobtav had carefully carved into the stone. Much like the bloody text he'd left at Howler's Crag, it was a self-righteous exultation of himself and the entity he worshipped, but this time there was something else.
“By His WILL the sacrifice is offered and accepted. The space of years be not a barrier to what shall be. And so shall the First be the Last; the Original to which all are but shadows shall ascend. Let the patterns of the world bear witness to the inevitability of the Everdark, the Ashsinger, the VOR’NEL’THRAANIX”
"What the hell does that mean?" Tristol puzzled over a the last portion of the inscription: "VOR’NEL'THRAANIX". A word or perhaps a phrase within the text, he struggled to make heads or tails of its meaning. He whispered the words to a spell, hoping to decipher it via magical translation, but it only left him more bewildered and ill at ease. Three attempts later and it simply translated as the exactly same word, a slurry of meaningless letters that inexplicably translated to the exact same meaningless meaning each time.
"What does what mean?" Clueless walked over to inspect the text himself.
"Does it make your eyes hurt if you stare at it?" Fyrehowl gave an apprehensive shudder. "You know, like, well, that other language we know of that I'm not going to talk about?"
She meant Baernaloth, but whatever it was, the text was not written in Baern.
"No, it doesn't." Tristol was definitive on that. "It isn't written in that language or anything like it. In fact it isn’t related to any language I’ve ever seen. It just refuses to translate to anything more than that phrase. Whatever I do, it's the same garbled random nothing."
"Don't look at me," Nisha quipped, turning her head sideways to glance at the text and coming up equally as confused and stumped as Tristol. "Garbled, random, nothing yes, but even so I didn't write it."
Tristol chuckled while Fyrehowl circled the text, gazing down at it warily. The lupinal squinted, turned her head to one side and then the other, and finally gave up with a perplexed look upon her face.
"I don't have any idea what that means." She frowned, "The rest of it sure, it's planar common with a few obscure words in Infernal and Celestial tossed in, but that seems pretty standard for someone who used to be a member of the Fraternity of Order. It's spooky sounding garbage but that one word sticks out like a vrock flying around in Celestia."
Several more minutes were spent in discussion about the text and its meaning, both obvious and hidden. Ultimately they could come to no firm conclusions, and as discussion on it wore thin, their attention shifted to the tiere god's corpse, and to the dagger plunged into its heart.
"So what exactly do we do with -that-?" Toras gestured towards the blade.
"We don't ask the tiefer to climb up there and touch it?" Nisha quipped as she conspicuously stepped behind Tristol, doing her best to hide. "But that being said, what did Leobtav intend anyway? Was it a sacrifice? Part of a ritual for something else? Is it even dead? Is it just a normal dagger or some sort of freaky artifact? Etc Etc"
"Etc Etc?" Tristol chuckled.
"Yep, Etc Etc." The bell at the tip of Nisha's tail jangled as she smiled.
They bantered amongst themselves while the others stared at the tiere god-corpse.
"I don't know what he intended to do, but I don't think it's wise to just leave this here." Clueless looked down at the obsidian dagger plunged into where the tiere god's heart would have been, had it been human. "At the very least we can keep it safe and out of anyone else's hands, whatever it is."
"Do you think it's wise to just pluck it out?" Fyrehowl's tone was markedly nervous.
The bladesinger shrugged. Without any other objections forthcoming, Clueless braced himself against the altar and tentatively touched the blade's hilt. It was cold to the touch, more so than it should have been in the ambient temperature, but otherwise nothing was out of the ordinary. It neither shocked him, shot a jolt of horror and agony through his mind, nor did it drain a portion of his life purely by touching it. To all impressions, it was just a dagger roughly chipped out of volcanic glass.
Others might have recognized a vague similarity to the obsidian blades crafted for the promotion ceremonies of greater yugoloths, but that knowledge was itself a closely held 'loth secret outside of the fact that it involved ritual suicide and dramatic pre and post-mortem bodily mutilation. But even if they had, the resemblance was only in the most basic outline, and the blade lacked the identifying, unique markings of one that they might find prepared to advance a nycaloth or arcanaloth. It was simply a dagger.
Shrugging at the lack of ill effect, Clueless gripped the blade and pulled. Buried in the dead god's heart there was a moment of resistance, and then it wrenched free.
"Mind if I take a look at it?" Tristol asked, pointing to the blade.
Clueless shrugged and handed over the dagger. Nothing odd occurred. He didn’t refuse to give it up, it didn’t magnetically stick to his person, nor did it compel him to attack in a mad bloodlust. Whatever purpose it had been used for, the dagger seemed entirely benign.
Tristol whispered the words to a fairly simple spell of magical identification. "Huh..."
"Huh? What does ‘huh’ mean?" Clueless looked at the dagger in Tristol’s hands and then to the aasimar’s reaction to whatever the spell had told him.
Tristol didn't respond and instead began the intonations of a much more powerful divination spell. The wizard stared at the dagger for several long minutes, turning it over in his hands and trying to determine its properties, power, and perhaps its origins. His expression grew more and more frustrated and finally he handed it back to Clueless.
"Again, what does that mean?" Clueless accepted the dagger back, albeit warily.
"Well, it isn't magical." Tristol shrugged. "And by that I mean that it doesn't have any magical aura whatsoever. But it sucked out the life of a god... yeah... it's unique."
By unique, he meant artifact, though he couldn't immediately prove that assumption without taking some time to be certain, time that as I turned out, they didn't have.
"That isn't good." Fyrehowl pointed towards the tiere god. Where the dagger had been plucked free, the black flesh around the wound had begun to crumble, collapsing in upon itself. The dead god was releasing whatever transient grip its remaining, ephemeral essence held upon the world.
A heavy shudder ran through the Cathedral.
“Oh come on! This sort of thing only happens in bad, drunken adventuring stories.” Toras threw his hands up in disbelief. “You kill the horrible evil thing its castle, lair, or domain starts to implode and you barely get out with your lives.”
A shower of ragged chunks of marble fells from the ceiling, then larger pieces, then one of the massive ornate keystones began to tremble. In the absence of the tiere god, the domain was collapsing, and with it, the Cathedral too.
“Trope in drunken, grandiose recollections of adventures yes, far too often,” Florian called out as she was already sprinting towards the exit. “But it seems to actually be the case right now. Everyone run!”
The keystone was already breaking free as they bolted for the exit, and as they reached the entryway it fell. Horrified, looking back over their shoulders, they watched it plummet in slow motion, knowing that the central chamber’s collapse would follow on its heels.
“Run run run!” Clueless shouted out, sprouting his wings and flying as quickly as he could.
Unable to fly, Fyrehowl dropped to all fours, leaping forwards and actually outpacing the bladesinger.
Tristol whispered a spell and immediately began to run nearly as quickly.
“Think you can share that with the rest of us?” Toras shouted as he dodged a falling column that broke and showered them all in shards of broken stone. “That would really, really be useful right now!”
“I can’t!” Tristol grimaced. “It’s a simple spell, but I can only affect myself! I’d share it with all of you if I could! I… how the hell are you running sideways on the wall Nisha?!”
True to his word, the tiefling was indeed running on the right wall as they hurried for the exit, completely perpendicular to everyone else. Bizarre yes, but she was keeping up with the rest of them,
“I don’t know!” Nisha shrugged and kept on running in blatant, terrified disregard of gravity.
There wasn’t much time to speculate or really do anything else but madly scramble for the entrance. A hundred yards later the Xaositect jumped from the wall to avoid a falling row of statues, somersaulting to the opposite wall and continuing to run sideways, muttering ‘runrunrunrunrunrun!’ to herself in frantic, clipped tones.
The main entrance was open and light poured out, welcoming them with safety and escape as behind them, the entire structure collapsed in a building, growing torrent of imploding, collapsing stone. Seconds slower and the following wave of destruction might have caught them, trapping them under tons of rock, but it didn’t.
Gasping and shouting cries of relief, they burst from the exit and didn’t stop running till they reached the rim of the domain. Turning back, they watched in amazement, confusion, and a small bit of horror as the saw not a collapsing building, but a hungry void of nothingness at the domain’s center, slowly distorting space and drawing in everything around it: rubble, the ancient bones of the dead, piles of broken golems, piles of rusting armor and weapons, and thousands of staggered, weeping gautiere. Their god was gone and along with it their only chance of redemption, and now oblivion called.
“There isn’t anything we can do.” Toras lamented. “I’m not sure that they could have been helped by anyone but themselves. They might have one day, but Leobtav took that choice away from them. We did give them some measure of justice however.”
“For what it’s worth I suppose.” Clueless frowned.
Fyrehowl snarled, “Leobtav deserved worse than what he got.”
Nisha, now returned to normal, mundane gravity’s tyranny, sighed and looked at Toras. “I’m going to miss Ficklebarb...”
“I think we all will.” Toras sighed along with the tiefling. “We did what he asked us to do though. We saw this through and gave him what he needed. We should smile at that.”
Clueless nodded his head, “It’s over at least.”
The future would prove that statement oh so very wrong.
****
Meanwhile in the city of Portent in Gehenna, a contingent of yugoloths wormed their way through the city's labyrinthine streets, marching towards the structure at the city's beating heart. Nearly three hundred mezzoloths and half that many heavily armored nycaloths flying overhead guarded a core of two dozen arcanaloths and the solitary figure at their center who needed no such protection at all. Unconcerned with the petitioners and others that made their home in the city, they marched through the tangle of streets that resembled veins and arteries of some great slumbering beast whose chest was ripped open by a god and then transmuted to the urban biology of a city rather than flesh and blood.
Venrisala ap Krangath internally whimpered as she approached the side of the figure leading their procession. Bits of frost perpetually clung as a rime on her chocolate brown coat, and she brushed back an errant strand of hair that had fallen from her otherwise immaculately coiffed hair. She had to look her best in the presence of her better. Walking in his shadow, the archfiend's presence caused whirling eddies in space, budding off and spiraling away as motes of darkness like some artist's impression of plague spores. They were cold. Walking so close to him also caused her heart to flutter, and she wasn't sure if it was from desire, jealousy, or some deep seated primordial fear. "Oinoloth..."
Vorkannis the Ebon, Oinoloth of the Waste turned and smiled, "I presume that you have already purged the Great Hall for my arrival there?"
Reflexively she bowed before replying, "Yes Oinoloth. A dozen of the city's petty barons, gangleaders, and self-proclaimed lords now hang from the eaves. None of your servitors were harmed in the process, which runs counter to Portent's nature. Most perplexing."
"Not at all," The Oinoloth chuckled, "They acted on my orders."
Venrisala waited for a further explanation, but none was forthcoming.
"Laughing Jane however..." The arcanaloth winced and paused. The prophetic tiefling that lived within the Great Hall was one of the two reasons why the myriad lords of Portent wished control over the building: her and the bizarre throne at the very center of the hall that was carved from the bones of a creature that had never been identified, but which radiated a sense of power and control. "None of the nycaloths wished to execute her, given what she said to them. She addressed them each by their true names and..."
"No matter," The Ebon sneered casually, dismissively. "Laughing Jane is irrelevant."
Venrisala glanced at the Ebon as they approached the gate of the Great Hall. The corpses of those put to death swung gently on the breeze, filling the air with the occasional creaking of the rope used in their execution. She paused, waiting on further orders as the mezzoloths stood at attention and the nycaloths perched on the roofs of adjacent buildings. "Oinoloth?"
"It isn't Laughing Jane that I came here to speak with." The Ebon flashed a smile of ivory white fangs and looked at his attendant with luminous, scarlet eyes. "All of you are to wait outside until I am finished. This should not take long."
