The group continued their trek through the twisted, magically warped landscape of the Dire Wood, cautiously avoiding the worst of what Tristol described as “wizard weather” and the largest packs of both the wandering undead and a number of ancient, weathered, and utterly violent golems and other constructs. Still, their caution made the next two miles into the next four as they ended up backtracking at several points.
Outside of the “normal” terrain, the magical weather, and the spontaneous wild magic zones (which didn’t actually seem to affect Nisha in any negative manner), they continued to run across evidence of Taba’s passage. Trees, both sickly and petrified alike, lay snapped or shattered, and vast sections of terrain lay scorched from flame, frozen by intense and lingering cold, corroded by acid, or blasted with lightning and still reeking of ozone. Each such location was littered with the remains of packs of undead who’d swarmed the altraloth lord. Clearly they’d barely slowed the archfiend’s passage.
All the way through it all, Tristol continued to provide a meandering lecture on the history of Netheril and its catastrophic fall.
“If not for Karsus’s profoundly misguided actions, can you imagine what magic on Toril might have accomplished by now?” Tristol put his hands in the air and sighed.
“A gigantic mage war between the enclaves?” Florian raised an eyebrow.
“Or…” Toras glanced at the wizard with a wry grin, “A situation like Thay right now with wizards ruling over a peasantry composed of everyone without magic?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s no way to know now after what happened. Karsus meant well I suppose. He wanted to become the savior of Netheril.” Tristol sighed a second time, “He wanted to protect his people from those damn toothy windsocks lurking under the Anauroch, but rather than just being pragmatic about it, he decided to do something so grotesquely over the top and remarkably shortsighted. Netheril virtually died because of his ego. For all of his brilliance, Netheril’s fall and everything around us now can be laid entirely at his feet. All of this is the fault of Karsus and Karsus alone.”
Tristol paused to take a breath before launching into another half-rant-half-lecture about Netheril’s fall before he noticed that Toras had stopped dead in his tracks and put a hand to his blade, while Fyrehowl had already spun around and brandished her own at something behind them.
“Well naughty word…” Clueless blurted out as he took to the air and saw both the solitary figure that stood only a few dozen feet behind them and also the tide of undead massed and waiting in the woods, almost entirely surrounding their position.
Tristol turned around, noticing Nisha deftly clip-clopping a few steps to put him between her and the thing that watched them.
“You…” The deathknight’s voice echoed across the landscape with a harsh, hollow echo. “What come you seeking?”
Jingleshod’s ghostly, transparent body flickered with a cold light, surrounded by and linked to the corporeal world by the platemail armor that he’d worn in life. Once gleaming and imposing, it still struck fear into those opposing him, but the centuries and the elements had not been kind to its appearance. Gone was the shine of steel and what remained behind was rusted and corroded, though the greataxe cradled in the undead warrior’s arms like a toy remained as sharp as the day it cooled from its birth in the forge. Standing silent as the grave, the deathknight’s eyes gleamed black from within the empty recess of his helm.
“We came here to meet someone.” Clueless called out. “We have no desire to plunder or disturb anything in or around Karse.”
“Is that so?” Jingleshod gestured to the hundreds of undead that surrounded them, “Lie to me and I will command them to swarm. No matter your power I command an army that acts upon my word.”
Florian swallowed hard and took her fingers from her holy symbol. The deathknight was true to his word, and if he called them forward, no amount of prayer on her part could stop them all.
“Might be worth risking the wild magic and just teleport us out of here Tristol…” Nisha’s tail nervously tapped her fiancé in the small of the back. “I don’t want to be eaten alive by zombies. That’ll kind of ruin the wedding plans…”
Before anything hasty occurred, Tristol stepped forward.
“Jingleshod, yes?” The aasimar called out to the hulking, armored deathknight.
The deathknight lowered his axe, more a showing in curiosity than of relaxation, but a positive showing nonetheless.
“You are correct wizard. I admit my surprise at someone knowing of me after all these years. Perhaps you can explain your intrusion then.”
“It’s as my companion explained before, we came here to meet someone.” Tristol put his hands out in contrition. “I would have expected that Wulgreth would have us butchered for simply being here in the Dire Wood. Yet I find you in command on the undead here, not him. What has changed, and what caused it?”
“Wulgreth is indisposed, and in the absence of his will, the undead army he raised after fleeing Hellgate Keep defaults to my command. For the first time in centuries I may act in the entirety of my own will, rather than the lich’s.” The deathknight’s form flickered as his ghostly form lapped within the confines of his armor like a tide going in and out, almost as if the creature had chuckled. “That is my answer for you wizard, so complete yours for me. Who then did you come to meet?”
“We came here at the urging of Taba, a yugoloth lord.”
At the mention of the word yugoloth, Jingleshod slammed him axe into the ground and screamed with rage.
“THEM! THEY HAVE DENIED ME REVENGE!”
Jingleshod’s rusted, broken armor shuddered and crawled with a crackling tracery of green, necromantic energies that crawled across each plate and piece of chain like worms bursting free or and then returning to a rotting corpse.
“Clearly you don’t like yugoloths…” Toras deadpanned, “Welcome to the club.”
“We hate them.” Fyrehowl snarled. “What did they do to you?”
“We came here at the urging of Taba,” Tristol’s ears perked in anticipation of a reply, “Did Taba slay Wulgreth?”
“The shapeshifting monster is your Taba?” Jingleshod asked.
“Shapeshifting monster pretty well describes them, yeah.” Toras nodded.
“It is newly arrived. I have avoided it. The undead outside of my range of control have of course attacked it, much to the results that you’ve seen as you walked through the wood. No, I speak of its kindred who arrived nearly a year ago.”
Tristol narrowed his eyes, joined by a chorus of disturbed and concerned stares from the others.
“Yugoloths came here almost a year ago?” The aasimar’s fox ears lay flat against his head, “Why? What did they do and what did they want?”
“They came in numbers, their trident wielding insects scuttling through the wood before their leaders, the jackal headed wizards and the faceless ones with flickering eyes. I knew not who they were or at first what they came to do.” The deathknight snarled bitterly, “Wulgreth opposed them, but it was a quick battle. I laughed with joy when they slew him. For the time it would take for the lich to reform and reanimate I would at least be free to seek my freedom and destroy his phylactery.”
“Why didn’t you find it and destroy it?” Florian asked.
“I have tried before, more than once, but it is beyond my capacity to destroy.” Jingleshod sighed, “Wulgreth knew this. I suspect that he designed his phylactery in that manner from the start.”
“Perhaps we can help you?” Toras volunteered them all to go hunting a lich, smiling as he made the offer.
“I would have sought the aid of you or any others, but that hope is now beyond me.” The deathknight looked up and off into the distance, staring at the red stone godisle that towered above the Dire Wood and the ruins of Karse.
“How?” Tristol asked, “We have magical resources that you do not. We’d be more than happy to help you if you could keep us safe through the Dire Wood?”
“Because they have stolen it! They have stolen the Karsestone itself!” Jingleshod’s response trailed off into a wail of loss, less anger than misery and disbelief. He’d never chosen undeath, but Wulgreth had imposed it upon him, contingent that he would remain in that state and in thrall to the wizard so long as Wulgreth lived, in whatever state of being that happened to be.
“They what!?” Tristol’s eyes went wide.
“Wulgreth bound his spirit to the great magic-bleeding stone at the heart of Karsus’s petrified corpse. The object was impervious to damage, and so impervious to any attempt of mine to destroy it. Wulgreth would return and mock my attempts, knowing that each rare occasion that I was afforded the chance to try that I would fail.”
“Yugoloths stole the Karsestone?!” Tristol put a hand on Nisha’s shoulder to steady himself as his brain swam with a multitude of questions with no answers. “Why? What could… what?!”
“They came, made for the stone, destroyed all that stood in their way, and then vanished.” Jingleshod turned and began to walk away. “I am resigned to an eternity in my present state. You are no friend of theirs though it seems, and so you have no enemy in me and mine.”
“We can try and help you!” Toras called out as the deathwalk walked away, his army pulling back to follow him.
“Meet your fiendish friend and leave me to my solitude. If you can return what was stolen, seek me out, otherwise I suspect that we will not meet again.”
Silence returned to the Dire Wood and with questions on their mind, they continued their march towards Karse and their meeting with Taba. As they walked on however, Tristol’s eyes radiated fear and worry as he looked up and stared long and hard at the godisle of Netheril’s greatest wizard and the reason for Netheril’s doom, the genius that the elves had mocked as the Ape Who Would Fly.
****
The ruins of Karse hugged about the base of the ruddy stone godisle, the literal petrified corpse of Karsus, dead at the moment of his ascension to misbegotten godhood. Broken by wars, invaders, plunderers, and magical catastrophes, the buildings lay in a mixture of states, everything from abandoned but intact to reduced to their foundation stones like a giant’s dollhouse scattered by the hand of an angry child titan.
Small numbers of the undead crawled about, though Florian’s divine channeling drove off or destroyed most of those that took an interest in them well before they drew into close range. The few that managed to surprise them met swift doom at the blades of Cluless, Toras, or Fyrehowl, and in the case of one particularly silent but grossly unlucky zombie, destroyed when Nisha accidentally jumped off of a nearby column and landed hooves first upon its head.
More of Taba’s path of wanton destruction wove its way into the depths of the ruins, and there settled on her haunches in full, grandiose, and conspicuous sight near the base of the butte itself, sat the altraloth herself.
“It is good to see you again mortals.”
Taba the Infiltrator of the Planes gazed down with her feral red eyes from atop a pile of granite rubble in the massive form of great wyrm fang dragon. Her scales gleamed a glossy metallic black as she spread her wings and momentarily cast her shadow across the mortals below, chuckling as she blocked out the sun.
“We meet in much better circumstances this time even, for I have no Baatezu to slaughter for their complicity in the crimes of traitors.”
“Why did you call us out here to Karse?” Clueless asked, his hand gripped upon Razor.
Taba opened her mouth to reply but Tristol spoke first, interrupting the altraloth with a finger pointed directly at her.
“Why did your kind come to Karse a year ago?”
Taba smiled, a slow rumble erupting from her gullet before she chuckled and inclined her head up towards the top of the butte. Distantly from their position they could see a black stone pyramid situated atop the petrified shoulder of the dead, would-be god.
“Look up above you mortals. Do you see it? Go into the pyramid atop the butte. Go, look, and you’ll find reasons why you should ignore my prior actions, and in fact see them as completely justified.”
Again, Taba chuckled, crossing her forearms like a happily purring cat. A set of eyes sprouted upon her left wing to gaze up at the pyramid even as she kept her primary eyes focused upon the mortals that she’d fought in the depths of Baator.
“What are we supposed to be looking for up there?” Tristol asked, recognizing the pyramid as a distinctly Netherese construction, and likely the demesne of the original Wulgreth. “What does Wulgreth, the original one, have to do with this?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Taba smirked, “The demilich is a curious but incidental player in this all. But no, go up and look for yourself as to what has gone on within, both in the ancient past and much more recently. You have to means to view past events, you or you both at the very least.” Taba inclined her head to Tristol, then Florian, then to Clueless. “Perhaps even you as well. Go in, see what you will and understand a sliver of how my conflict involves your kind.”
Given their previous encounter with the altraloth, they stared dubiously at the shapeshifter. Trust in the words of a yugoloth, even an apparent renegade against the current order in the Waste was not something easily granted.
“Or you know,” Toras grinned, patting a hand on his sword handle, “We could kill you and improve the multiversal balance of Good versus Evil.”
“And just how well did that go for you in the past?” Taba sneered, craning her long neck forward towards the half-celestial, with a dull draconic rumble emanating from her cavernous throat as a dull, red glow seeped between the armored scales of her belly and the smell of sulfur touched the air. “And this time I would not be concerned with the forces of Hell or my own wayward brethren…”
“There is that I suppose,” Fyrehowl swatted a paw at Toras’s hand, “Put that away.”
Baring her fangs, Taba’s eyes turned from the half-celestial and lingered on Clueless. For a split second she pursed her lips and whistled a nightengale’s tune as dozens of eyes flickered open upon Taba’s fang dragon body, forming from suddenly fluid flesh to each focus upon one of her mortal guests. In assorted places her scales parted with the opening of newly formed fanged mouths, each smirking with subtle hatred.
“I came here to inform you of things invisible to you. How often can mortals claim the support of an altraloth with mutual goals? Hmm? Do as I say and you’ll understand this better; especially you wizard.”
Tristol narrowed his eyes. He didn’t know what had happened here beyond what he already knew of the fall of Karsus, why the ‘loths were so interested in it, or why Jingleshod had claimed that they’d stolen the Karse Stone, but he didn’t like the sound of Taba’s implications that it all would mean something particularly to him.
“We’re not your puppets.” Fyrehowl insisted.
“Oh but you are!” Taba beamed, smiling from a dozen mouths. “Count yourself lucky and among the few who’re aware of that fact!”
The lupinal frowned before pantomiming taking a pair of scissors to any invisible strings above her head.
“Now go, you have a mountain to climb.” The altraloth glanced up the sheer Cliffside and the shadows of dead mezzoloths burned into the stone.
“Or we could go for round two…” Toras tapped his sword a second time.
“Oh please! Let us!” Taba’s maw stretched wide as she laughed and leered, “Ask the bladesinger how that worked out most recently.”
Clueless had been conspicuously silent for the duration of their audience with the altraloth. He still remembered the surprise and the pain when she’d slain him in the Beastlands.
“F*** that…” The bladesinger gritted his teeth. “And f*** you too.”
“Your death was delicious mortal and it would be yet swifter a second time.” She snarled, the expression reflected a split second later in every one of her sneering mouths and every narrowed, mocking eye as ever more sprouted from her polymorphic flesh to reflect her mood. “This time mortals I find myself unencumbered by the forces of a Duke of Hell, the nuisance of manifest Law in the air I breath, and fully willing to train my sole efforts on butchering you all in as brutal a capacity as needed.”
“Yeah I think we’re good without a fight here.” Nisha peeped up from behind Tristol. “And really, do you all really need the Xaositect to be the voice of reason here right now?”
“We can take her.” Toras insisted, one moment before Taba sprouted two additional heads, each of their maws dripping a different element, “Or perhaps not. I take that back.”
“So yes… do tempt me to revel in your deaths if you so choose.” The altraloth cackled, “Or not as the case might be. I could have butchered you and your loved ones a dozen times over, but yet I have not. Ask yourself why.”
“Why didn’t you kill us?” Tristol asked, his interest overwhelming his hatred.
“You survived and thus you gained my attention.” Taba pantomimed peering through a spyglass, then scratching her claws, then working a marionette, “I was wrought by the hags to be a spy, both perfect eye and perfect blade, and a gifted spymaster does not dispense of useful tools.”
Fyrehowl snarled, “Oh f*ck you you f*cking ‘loth”
“Careful with your hatred there guardinal. I did not drag your precious Belarion from its moorings and drag it across the planes for my own ends. Direct your hatred at the Usurper and I will direct mine to the same. The false claimant to Khin-Oin and to my race is the object of my hate, though yes, he and I, we do view our eventual victims in much the same capacity.”
“Tools.” Fyrehowl shook her head.
“Precisely.”
A long, pregnant silence descended upon them, broken only by the sparking of broken magic upon the cliff face high above.
“Seriously Taba, you’re claiming to be our ally for the moment?” Clueless glanced up with utter contempt. “Really?”
“Ah finally a thought of truth that begs me to illuminate you and your convictions as to why I am not your enemy.” Taba smiled a dozen different times in sequence, “I wasn’t going out of my way to kill you at any point: not then in the Hells, not then in the Beastlands, and not now on the Prime. You were unforeseen victims of my revenge against tools of the false-Oinoloth. My apologies I suppose.”
“Thank you I suppose?” Clueless remarked with an absence of sincerity.
Upon seeing the bladesinger’s doubt reflected in his features, Taba curled her lips and spat, ejecting a tiny object from the depths of her cavernous throat. The object twirled and glimmered in the sunlight, shining as it arced through the air and then fell at Clueless’s feet.
A large and flawless diamond.
“Consider that my apology for your slaughter. Hopefully you’ve learned something from the experience. Very few can knowingly claim to have been butchered by an altraloth lord and come back to tell the tale. Do be polite though and don’t spread this one, I find it somewhat embarrassing that I didn’t have time to clean up and abscond with your soul for later sale.”
Clueless strongly considered kicking the gemstone and punting it straight into one of the archfiend’s open eyes. The fiend’s poking, prodding telepathy seemed to gradually sift through his surface thoughts and make a mockery of his mental protections, and as a slow grin formed below the eye he’d considered aiming at, he thought better of it.
“Thank you.” The bladesinger replied, stooping to pick up the gemstone. “No hard feelings.”
“I do have one lingering question for you mortals though before you begin your ascent.” Several of Taba’s newly formed mouths exuded tongues of all manner to flit and flick at the air like a sniffing serpent, curious and questioning. “It strikes me to wonder why you were present in the Hells in the first place. Our encounter seemed laughable and for you nearly deadly happenstance, but you don’t strike me as the sort to have been trodding into the estate of an infernal duke without someone sending you there. What were you actually doing there and who sent you?”
“We were sent there to kill you.” Toras smiled, once again patting his sword, and once again receiving a half-hearted swat from Fyrehowl.
“Unexpected.” Taba’s draconic countenance tilted its head and she quirked an eyebrow even as her myriad of other eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“Not that we knew that you were, well, you.” Toras added.
“Curious.” None of her expressions changed as she waited for further explanation.
“We were duped into going there.” Fyrehowl explained, “We were told to find a man meeting with the duke, and that by killing him that we’d end up preventing a string of future atrocities. We were lied to, because they didn’t expect that we’d take up the task if we knew that we’d be fighting you, rather than a particular elf who never actually existed.”
“WHO?” Taba snarled, hissing in anger from her ancillary mouths, “Who sent you after me. Their name. Now! The pretender to Khin-Oin? One of his vassals? The Keeper of the Tower? The scheming b*tch in Sigil? The presently silent Overlord of Carceri, the Pretender’s ragged, bleeding consort?”
“Green Marvent of the Illuminated.” Toras spoke with a shrug.
Always so certain of herself, always knowledgeable and informed, the Infiltrator of the Planes blinked, uncertain of what to say. She knew absolutely nothing about the man or his would-be faction.
“Curious…” Taba muttered.
“I take it that wasn’t the answer you were expecting?” Toras asked.
Taba stared at the fighter and gave no response, even as the wheels in her mind spun wildly. She would have to investigate the matter. First within the Hells and the court of the Hag Countess, and then to Plague-Mort itself. Perhaps the fool was a proxy of some power slighted by her in the past? Perhaps he was a diviner of profound magical insight? Without more information, she was for once absolutely dumbfounded as to how he’d known she would be there and what she actually was.
“No.” The altraloth finally replied, “It seems that you’ve given me a question to ponder and investigate even as I’ve tasked you for one of the same of your own. A fitting start for allies of circumstance.”
“We aren’t allies.” Fyrehowl glared.
“We appreciate you not killing us and we appreciate you giving us something to investigate.” Nisha called out before leaning in to Tristol, “Am I seriously going to be the voice of reason today? That’s scary.”
“So I suppose that we’re done talking then and we have something up above to investigate.” Clueless glanced up and then back to the altraloth.
“Indeed we are, but do watch your step however during your ascent and beyond.” Taba lazily inclined her head towards the pyramid high above. “Karse originally housed not one but two liches as you may or may not be aware, both of them named Wulgreth. Both of them seem to have been indisposed of late. One of them was physically destroyed and so presumably he’ll be reconstituting himself, but the other I cannot quite sniff his fate for certain. In either event, regardless of when one or both return, they left a rather large amount of wards in place, and the detritus of their recent visitations of which there have been several in the past year, may have left their own perils as well.”
Toras pulled out rope and searched the rock for the quickest and safest route, with Taba’s myriad eyes upon his back the entire time.
“I’ll be in telepathic contact as you search through Wulgreth’s effects and the marks left by my kind high above. Until you find what I’ll have you discover, I await your return mortals.”