Journey Below 31/08 Nessa al-Kiram

Good vs Evil – the diary of Nessa al-Kiram, aged 5,362 ¾

Life During Wartime

I remember fragments only.

A temple. A battlefield. A hospice. City walls.

The sound of warfare off in the distance, I’m used to it after so many centuries.

I have lived in a mansion, lived in a ghetto, they blur into one. I perform my tasks, send the messages to the receiver.

I hope for an answer some day.

I sleep when it’s quiet. I know not to stand by a window. I’ve worked in a shop, captained a guard, looked after babies, slaughtered unbelievers… I’ve changed my features so many times now, I don’t know what I originally looked like.

When I awake for the first time, I start again – I discover my tastes, my desires, I try everything, hoping to find myself one day.

I don’t think about happiness. That has never been my mission. I am a good soldier, a kind healer, a wise teacher and then I’m gone.

Sometimes my mission is obvious. Other times, not so much. This time I have noticed Orianna, Beets, Amble, Boosya. There have been others, but these return. Perhaps they are part of the pattern. Perhaps they are the guides, even if they don’t know it.

Perhaps this is my mission.

Mobilisation

I spoke with Orianna and Beets after we returned from the shame of Madaline’s murder. The Temple of Bahamut had not been cleansed. The strange, scuttling undead that resisted the holy light rather than falling before it seemed desperate to enter a particular cave with the poor young kobold cleric’s torn out heart and pulsing life essence. We agreed to return and investigate.

Orianna was, if anything, more troubled than me. She had been in Kundar dealing with less powerful undead whose fortunes were wrapped up in a strange linguistic puzzle that once solved condemned the triumphant scholar to the savage kiss of life without life.

She had burned all traces but felt there may have been a link between this fiendish trap and the crawling things that had infested the temple.

“Don’t be reckless Nessa, stay alive,” she placed her hand on my wrist and I almost flinched. It has been a long time since somebody touched me. It felt good. I had forgotten that skin loves skin.

I worried that the three of us would not fare well without the muscular minotaur Keros and the endlessly wise Boosya but to my initial great relief the well-connected Beets arrived with reinforcements – Ylana, a tall, slender elf and Lucky, an elderly tabaxi with elegant blue grey fur.

Ylana seemed… flirty, I guess the word is. But weirdly so.

Deploy

After the portal closed behind us, we took the familiar path through the city’s narrow streets past tall sandstone houses with their colour-washed walls and red-tiled roofs. The dragonborn and kobold population regarded us coolly as before and Beets returned their stares with her trademark courage, something I had once seen as excessive but was growing to admire.

The huge temple was still breath-taking the second time around – it climbed high above the hilltop, it’s ornate marble and silver design almost glowing in the light. At the top of the wide stone steps Fra. Cornelius was waiting for us in his ice blue robes.

He seemed uncertain in his greeting. He admitted that he had lost clerics but tried to persuade us that this was normal – dream quests were common amongst the faithful and his priests had received a high number of the them recently, enticing them towards the sunset spines where the answers to all their questions lay.

I don’t know much about Bahamut, but I do know the habits of celestial beings and there are only two reasons for a flood of dream quests. War or a bad hangover. It’s always strangely pleasurable to watch a minor deity fumble to reward their flock when they’ve accidentally summoned them to some unclimbable mountain after fobbing off the morning prayers thanks to a heavy night on the ambrosia.

There was no war, and these quests had been drip fed over days – so I was instantly suspicious.

Orianna was ahead of me, desperate to explore the cavern and faintly irritated that I had insisted on paying respects to Fra. Cornelius. I understood, but Madaline’s savaged corpse and cold staring eyes still troubled my dreams and I had hoped some peace could be found at her temple.

It was not so, although Fra Cornelius was delighted by our presence and offered to pay us if we were able to find out what was happening.

I refused. The shame of my failure was too great. Orianna and Beets also thanked the kindly priest but would accept no fee.

"Cornelius, darling. I would be happy to take everyone’s share, if it would help,” Ylana drawled.

Before we could debate the ethics of her position I realised by insisting on this visit I had given us a new problem – the vast drop to the valley floor had been easy to overcome when filled with battle rage but less tempting in cold blood.

We were lucky. Not Lucky. He was busy flirting. But Cornelius noticed a dragon necklace around Lucky’s neck and dredged up a spell and a sorcerer to cast it that send us safely to the valley floor. While this was arranged I noticed Orianna decorating the cracked room, covering the chipped paint and mending the rifts in the brick work.

I could see she was not only troubled by this strange abomination but emotionally affected by the tragedies facing this temple that seemed to be struggling just to hold its walls in place.

I found this touching. Her light shines brightly indeed.

Echelon formation

After the magic was worked, we arrived at the cave, putting enchantments in place – a prayer to Selûne that would defend us against the flesh rotting teeth and claws of the unholy. Whilst I paced through the necessary steps of the ritual, Lucky recited some draconic poetry, filled with hope and beauty.

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

He has a powerful tongue this boy. And Ylana was trying to find out how powerful.

On the way in I noticed this was a man-made cave – not recently, perhaps 200-odd years ago or more. Perhaps a mine. And it went deep into the rock. We were walking for a good 40 minutes before we heard the sounds something up ahead of us.

We slowed down. I have always refused weapons when sent to the material plane, relying on my lady’s favour, but sometimes I yearn for the heft of something solid in my hand when danger threatens. It is a muscle memory – but of what?

Moving slowly we entered a much larger cavern. There was running water somewhere, we could hear it, and the ground was littered with old, discarded mining equipment - pickaxes, carts on wheels, the detritus of careful endeavour.

And there were traces of blood on the floor. I could feel the soft pulse of its dying life.

There were two separate bloody tracks leading in different directions down two caves some distance apart. The wrong decision now could prove at best a waste of time, at worst fatal.

Fabian strategy

“I’ll scout ahead,” Beets slipped into the darkness before anyone could protest. She moved so quietly she was beyond our sense in seconds.

We took up overwatch defensive positions and waited, the silence deafening. Off in the distance I could still hear the water dancing across the rocks but the weight of the mountain above us seemed to weigh down on the sound, dampening the streams spirits as much as our own.

Finally, I heard a soft rustle and Beets flitted from the shadows.

“I have found a kobold’s corpse,” she breathed as we gathered close. “Its heart had been torn out. And there was a strange foliage on the walls. I’d never seen anything quite like it before.”

“Ewww,” Ylana grabbed Lucky’s arm.

Beets gestured for us to follow, and we fanned out into an echelon formation, in as much as the narrow stone tunnels would allow.

After two sharp turns we reached a rough stone alcove covered in tendrils from a plant that seemed more like a sea creature dangling thousands of tentacles to trap the unwary.

I crouched to examine the body and found the femur completely snapped with bones sticking out through skin. As I tried to visualise the damage, I heard Lucky’s voice sounding surprisingly casual.

“Can anyone hear that chittering?”

And then I remembered he hadn’t been here last time around.

Hold the perimeter. The enemy comes.

We raced to hold defensive positions to the southeast and the north. Beets moved to secure the corridor ahead of us just as a creature, something that may have once been a kobold, with black fire licking out of its empty eye sockets ran screaming out of the darkness so fast that one second there was just silence, and the next blackened talons were sinking into Beets flesh

“Lucky, darling, this isn’t the sort of high jinks I was hoping for,” Ylana drawled, flourished a moon touched rapier and thrust it into the undead kobold.

She is a mystery, this Ylana.

And then we fell upon the creatures as they swarmed towards us.

I called to the celestial spirits for their radiant light, and souls of the enlightened materialised around me, their faces cold with the fury of the goddess at the undead and their crimes against the moonlight.

Orianna glowed with a delicate pattern of stars resembling a holy cup and healing light washed out of her. I could hear Beets howling with rage and glee from around the corner. Fire crackled from my fingertips and waves of force rippled out from Orianna until finally they had fallen.

I saw Orianna examining the bodies carefully. She seemed to be looking for something and I sensed she was more certain of this foe than me.

Then, from the depths of the mountain, we heard a low, harsh grinding of rock on fire that echoed and grew until the ground beneath our feet shook and Orianna whispered “dragon… I knew it.”

Infiltration and enfilade.

Eventually we reached a kink in the cave wall, roughly hewn, that hid the opening to a huge bleak stone cavern. We could hear metallic sounds from a brazen throat—uncanny and inhuman buzzing… like the drone of some loathsome, gigantic insect.

Taking advantage of the strange angles in the cave, we peered from the shadows and vast white dragon, with the waxen sheen of a creature long dead, smooth, whale-like skin, long, slender, curved horns, leather bat-like wings and a face ripped clean off by savage claws.

A hunched humanoid with eyes from the grave and flesh on the edge of decay, leathery grey skin, yellow slit-like eyes, and a stooped, semi-simian posture shambled into the centre of the room holding a staff with five heads.

“We do well, death comes,” it spoke to the dragon with the voice of the tomb. “We do well, death comes.”

In the corner, a kobold corpse lay. The creature stalked to the body, ripped out the heart which glowed with the echo of life, and inhaled hard. I could see the life force, the holy god given spark of existence, pulled into the beast as the heart turned black and crumbled, its essence consumed.

“We do well, death comes,” it leered.

I stepped forward and met its eyes. “Then here death comes,” I spat.

And the Heavens rained fire

I unleashed a fireball, the celestial spark dancing from my fingertips into the cavern and blossoming out in rolling gouts of flame and a roar like the shout of a thousand souls screaming for vengeance. The creature staggered and fell to its knees as the flames consumed it, tearing it to hell where darker, more violent fire awaited.

I shook free my wings and soared aloft, watching as the fire writhed around the shambling creature and desperately fluttering wings of the dragon.

Then I called out to the goddess to end this abomination and the cracks in reality opened to reveal Azrael in their divine wrath, their swords crackling with the unbearable light of creation.

Beets hurtled past me, not one to be outdone by my divine fury, and her blade severed the rotting tendons and foetid flesh of the stunned dragon.

Orianna and Lucky drove forward, finishing what remained and within seconds the fragments of flesh that littered the floor were withering into ash.

Ylana stepped forward, picked up the staff and searing black light burned her hand.

My eyes met Oriannas with a question – what do you know of this?

But the rushing and the reporting and the returning consumed us as we restored the fallen clerics to their temple.

Fra Cornelius said the staff belonged to Tiamat, fiendish goddess of primordial chaos sacred to the filth that opposed saintly Bahamut.

There is more to this, I can tell.

The Dawnlands are a focus of so much anger from the darkness. I have felt the presence of Hell, of the foulest undead, of dragon borne warriors from the black pit and I have been here less than six months.

This is no accident. Something craves these lands with a hunger too terrible to imagine.

I prayed for the peace of the Dawnlands.

I wept to see the violence and suffering as men, women, and children were slaughtered

I called on the goddess to shield the Dawnlands, protect the innocent from bloodshed that her truth and light might shine through the darkness.

I asked for peace for every heart.

But I heard no reply.