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The babau snorts and obeys, scrabbling over the edge of the wall. It pauses, seeming interested in the runes, but certainly isn't harmed as it scurries down and out of sight.
~Very strange, Master. The soil is strange. This is a place of rot. Strange. Strange. Hm! What's that? A darkness lurks up near the peak of this Spire, two hundred heads above and no higher. Strange place to hide, high, beneath the sun's eyes. Ah, and there I see a pawn, looming, lurking. Here are the doors. Here is the steeple. Open your eyes. I see the people. Above in the highest level this strange sort lurks, a hundred heads higher, hidden in murk. And he is not alone. An armored man is up in at the church's top floor, accompanied by great scarabs. I see them. I do not think they yet see me. But it is so very far, Master, and I am but one. Do you wish for my personal involvement?~
Eben blinks a few times. "Can we spend a moment discussing the fact that Astraden is summoning demons now? And somehow I'm still getting guilt tripped over having been a doppelganger once?"
Carina gives Astraden a dubious look as she summons a demon from the planes beyond.
"Well... look at it this way, Eben. This way, if the monster gets ambushed, nobody will feel sorry for him." She nervously giggles before abruptly stopping.
"Although, that's a good point... are you sure you couldn't have summoned anything else, Astraden?"
"Are you sure that was a demon? It looked like a thin guy in black leather to me. He wasn't much skinnier than Eben really."
"Why does it matter? As long as Clunk's not here to get mad at her, it's just another tool."
Astraden's response is hushed, in light of what the babau relays. "Babaus are great at stealth. And recon. I thought about summoning something like Celeste, but the truth is they're not as good at seeing past illusions."
"Anyway, as you can see the wall is climbable. It's telling me that there's two somethings lurking in the darkness about 200 feet up the spire. One might be our vampire. Then a hundred feet above that, some humanoid. And at the top of the spire is an armored man with a bunch of giant beetles around him?" The priestess tilts her head. "It's kind of hard to understand it."
She looks at the group. "It doesn't sound like there's anything inside the wall that's not also in the spire. Do we still want to go over?"
"Might as well go on over. Though I'm not above saying 'I told you so' when we accidentally unleash Kyuss."
The party ascends over the wall. As they reach the top, they begin to experience brief flashes in their vision. Spots appear in their eyes. Their retinas sting and nostrils burn at the stench of carrion. Apparitions overtake them.
They see strange, robed, many-armed shapes, mere shadows against a row of bright, luminescent beings. The robed silhouette at the head holds up a single shard of black stone, displaying it before the beings.
They see hordes of undead fleeing before a host of the luminescent humanoids. The beings look not unlike Celeste in the ghaele eladrin's true form. The undead are fleeing into the Spire, dropping like flies as fire rains down. But as the angelic beings seek to pursue, the undead rally, and the beings that draw too near the Spire are quickly overwhelmed. There is no ring around the Spire in this vision.
They see the many-armed robed figures gathered at points around the Spire. The glowing beings have formed a circle, totally surrounding the structure. Both groups raise their arms. The angelic forms begin to glow bright red.
With a flash of darkness, the visions end. The members of Spiny's Six find themselves back on the wall. The pain quickly passes, and the stench fades away.
As they actually pass over the obsidian ring, the party members feel an odd, but not unpleasant, tingling sensation. Eben and Carina find that while they are above this barrier, thoughts of the worms just don't seem to bother them like they usually do—not because they're being compelled to not mind worms, but because something about this ring just feels entirely incompatible with the very existence of Kyuss. It is a very comforting wall.
As they reach the other side, the feeling is replaced by a sensation of persistent dread. The soil on the other side feels tainted and porous, squishing unpleasantly beneath their feet.
"Well...that was unpleasant."
Carina feels a surge of elation upon seeing the angelic beings in the vision slaughtering the undead in droves... it quickly turns to dread when she sees the damned rally and push them back.
She's still pondering the vision when her foot touches the dirt beyond the obsidian ring. Immediately, she can tell that something is... wrong.
"Oh, oh, eww, eww eww eww eww..." Carina winces and whimpers as her boot sinks into the soil. "There's something seriously wrong with this soil--it's not supposed to be this squishy, is it?"
"Maybe the animals all come here to do there business", Tanith muses. "It might help explain the smell."
"No, it's not that." Carina shakes her head. "Believe me, I've walked through my share of animal s%*~. This does NOT feel like animal s@!~. Whatever's making the soil so... weird, it's not natural, whatever the hell it is."
"It feels like the ground is rotten. Like an apple after you've left it in out for too long."
“Or like sponge cake left soaking in tea for too long,” Cuetzpalli frowns. He walks over to Eben. “I wasn’t trying to guilt trip you, like I said at Magepoint, the dopplegangers weren’t your fault. I’m just really paranoid that if we separate something bad like that might happen again. Sorry for hurting your feelings,” the olman says, putting his hand on the bard’s shoulder in a reassuring gesture.
"Yup, this is what my vision before was like too, guys. Except different stuff. This is more ancient battle of good versus evil-ish..."
Eben clambers down and lightly jumps up and down in place on the spongy soil. "Kinda like a gross trampoline..." he says, then nods to Cuetzpalli's apology. "It's okay. Trust me, I beat myself up about that plenty." As soon as the Olman's back is turned, though, Eben hisses sibilantly in a stage whisper that's intentionally loud enough to be overheard by all, "It touched me of it'sss own free will! Now I can take hissss form too!"
"Stop that at once." says Forzamele. "Jokes of extremely questionable taste aside, what if he believes you? Have you seen the size of his sword?"
"Stop that at once." says Forzamele. "Jokes of extremely questionable taste aside, what if he believes you? Have you seen the size of his sword?"
Tanith laughs.
Cuetzpali chuckles along with Tanith.
Carina sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose while pulling out a flask of body-mutating fluid.
She uncorks it and takes a swig of it, feeling her reflexes sharpen.
"Yup, this is what my vision before was like too, guys. Except different stuff. This is more ancient battle of good versus evil-ish..."
The babau winks out of existence on the Material as the group descends.
Astraden squints up into the darkness under the spire's branches. "Guess we're doing this," she mutters, and then swirls a hand over the shoulders of herself, Cuetzpalli, and Eben. She then begins trudging through the muck, towards the ziggurat.
"I think it worth mentioning..." the talking string adds, "It seems likely this wall is formed from my celestial kin. It may have been a planned sacrifice on their part, or else an action of last resort, but I believe the wall is infused with their essence, keeping this corruption of nature hedged within it."
"Huh," says Eben. "Maybe that's why there was that eyeball carved on the tree outside the wall. Like, the wall's a kind of guardian watching over the nasty."
"How powerful could these monsters have been that an army of angels had to sacrifice themselves to contain them rather than wiping them out?" Tanith ponders. "And why didn't they ever come back to finish the job?"
"To the spire, then?"
"Yeah, let's go see what a legion of angels died to keep contained..."
Carina starts handing off extracts in preparation for a delve inside.
Everyone except Tanith catches a faint, shimmering glimpse of something dark at the peak of the Spire.
"Um..." Carina warily looks up at the top of the spire and points. "...did anyone else notice that dark shimmering just now?"
"Yup. Must be the ones Astraden's pet unholy spawn of the Abyss mentioned to her." Eben pulls out his bow and mutters something over it. The fine polished wood cracks open like a walnut, to reveal a hollow inside. Eben places a wand within this hollow, which immediately seals itself shut without a trace. He then stows the bow back in his quiver and once again readies his magic rod.
"How powerful could these monsters have been that an army of angels had to sacrifice themselves to contain them rather than wiping them out?" Tanith ponders. "And why didn't they ever come back to finish the job?"
"I dunno, Tanith. If Eben and Carina aren't going to be offended, I'll try summoning something tomorrow that can help us answer those questions. And we can try the Apostolic scroll."
In response to Carina's question, Astraden elaborates, "The armored man, plus his arthropod allies."
As the group begins climbing the largest set of stairs, Astraden sprinkles a few pinches of silver around herself and begins to emit an aura of anti-law, on the off chance anything in the spire is aligned with Hell.
The party ascends to the top of the Spire. It is a long walk—the steps are high and numerous. They see no more sign of the shadow at the Spire's peak.
As they pass by the upper enclosure, however, they do hear something distinctive—a rapid, unsettling rhythm of clicking noises. These noises are accompanied of the sound of slow, ponderous footsteps—metal boots striking stone. In the top enclosure's massive enclosure there appears a tall humanoid figure.
The figure wears dark armor that hides much of her form from view, but her skeletal visage and horrid stench reveal that she can be nothing but some kind of undead. Small green worms, their mouths filled with row upon row of jagged teeth, writhe along her armor, crawling under its plates and panes. Her most gruesome feature are her eyes, which have been replaced by the ravenous mouths of two bloated worms.
She points her bastard sword at the party, and they hear words in their heads—or memories of words spoken long, long ago. Their ears sting like mosquitoes are buzzing inside. Nezzarin. You . . . are worthy. You . . . have been chosen. You . . . will be one of my four. You . . . will be my eyes . . . and ears . . .
Behind her appear a pair of bloated scarabs moving with unnatural speed, their mandibles clicking and clicking and clicking in a maddening rhythm. The rotted and pitted shells evoke thoughts of ancient decay and unfathomable corruption, and tiny green worms, each a wriggling abomination of terror in its own right, squirm through these holes in the exoskeletons.
The Kyuss Knight strides downwards and swings her sword in a vicious arc at Farrukh. Farrukh is barely able to raise his klar in time to block the blow, and there is a tremendous grinding sound as his klar forces off her attack.
"You know, Astraden, it was really sexist to presume the armored figure was a man. You might want to have a talk with your demonic help about that in the future, if that was where the assumption came from." Eben says, his rod making a sound like humming glass as he activates it.
Immediately following that he tosses a little pinch of something on himself and then begins a recitation of the party's prowess in hybrid Common and Flan. Accompanied by his now-trademark fancy footwork.
Cuetzpalli steps towards the "knight" and roars with angelic fury. He puts his hand back on Kelmarchen as his eyes begin leaking multicolored chaotic light. "Back to the darkness beast!" he swings the angelic blade in a wide arc at the thing's head.
(-3 AC)