Connect the Dots (Part 4)
Log Info
- Title: Connect the Dots (Part 3)
- GM: Aftershock
- Place: Leca'fi Amdamu, the Castle on the Edge of Waking
Driz laughs and claps his friend on his back and smiles at Magpie. "Because we've paid up our dues Magpie girl. And when a mage pays his dues, he's entitled to a few things. Like more work than they've put in looking into what happened to the lot of us I'm sure. If any one of us is alive - which I am - they're about to be in a world of pain." The blue robed wizards blue eyes hold a strange light in them that says that the guild is about to have a lot to answer for. Not the least of which is the condition that Albus is in.
"As for this Koz'gon? To be certain you'd have to ask the Herald. But one of three things happened most likely. Either the fiend went back to it's home immediately. It died a terrible death. Or it's currently experiencing a most terrible torture." He smirks. Driz seems terribly amused. "Most goodly Heralds will hold fiends in some sort of capture and... toy with them in some way. But it really depends on the Herald and the mood that they're in and what kind of deity they serve right?"
Auranar looks at Telamon a bit thoughtfully. "So... Maybe if we offer a few... ahem... she might be inclined to answer a few questions for us?"
Telamon chuckles. "Like Father says, the reward for doing a good job is all too often to be given a bigger job to do." He furrows his brow a bit. "But please, be gentle with them. They're not all bad -- and I suspect your death was well-staged."
"Which brings us back to my old friend," Tel says with a wry grin. "I... don't think she's the type to imprison a fiend. She doesn't like cages. So my silver is on either 'banished back to the Hells' or straight up dead." A pause. "Guess we'll have to find out. First things first -- we'll need a proper offering."
Telamon steeples his fingers, his eyes closing halfway. Part of the parlor, further down from where Albus, Dremarim, Magpie, Corey, and himself all sit, shivers, and then begins to move. Stones shifting and rearranging like a set of child's puzzle blocks, opening into a shaft that leads downward. There's a great thrumming sound, and a funny sloshing like water, before a large bowl filled with various fish rises up on a pillar inside the shaft, coming to a stop when the bowl is at floor level in the parlor.
"I really do wonder if I could turn the Castle into a gigantic golem of some kind," Telamon muses. "I mean, I can't imagine why I'd need to do so, but it'd be neat to watch."
Corey's eyes widen with a boyish curiosity and joy as he watches the castle rearrange itself at Telamon's direction. The suggestion of turning the Castle into a giant golem makes him even more excited. "Wait! You could make the castle itself into some kind of... moving castle! Something that morphs into a humanoid shape and is capable of fighting."
He looks deeply excited now. "Imagine! A castle that can fight on its own! And we could be inside of it and instruct it how to move and fight. I mean, it'd take some serious magic, but... Well, you just made the castle give us a lot of fish! I think anything is possible."
"Oh good," Magpie says with a grin, as Driz describes the storm that is heading the Guild's way. "I'm sure you'll have better luck than I did! ... And I kinda want to be there to see what a master at yelling at Guild leadership looks like..."
But then it's suggested that Tanith be fed for info, and everything else just goes away.
Magpie has always been what one might call a nerd about magic. There is, in fact, little that is more entrancing than to see a mortal will tapping on the shoulder of the Laws of Reality, and Reality excusing itself and stepping out of the way.
So to watch Telamon rearrange a room in a castle on a whim, and that whim being he is about to bribe a powerful dragon -- spirit? Drarit? Spagon? -- for information...
...Well let's just leave it at 'Magpie is so impressed her eyes are in danger of falling out of her head.
All it takes is Telamon inquiring politely, "Tanith?" before the small golden dragon appears eagerly, swirling around the fish with whirling golden eyes and a wide grin. "FISH! ARETHEYFORME?" She certainly hopes they are! She wings down to the table and scrabbles closer to Telamon. "Hello peoples! I see you have fish! And other-peoples with you! Many-peoples! Can I help? Iwouldlikesomefish! I can be helpful forafewfish!"
Meanwhile the two mages are having a quiet but somewhat urgent conversation between the two of them that seems to have them quite distracted...
Across the table Auranar can't help but giggle a little at the dragons antics, but she tries to stifle it. She puts her fingers on her mouth and looks at Corey very seriously as if, if she can make him act seriously she can act seriously. "Hello Tanith." She manages to say this seriously enough.
Telamon's face becomes cheerful, split with a broad smile as Tanith appears in the Castle. "Hello, my friend. Yes, the fish are for you -- but we do have questions, and we need your help." His eyes twinkle merrily, the stars glinting there. "There are a number of things in motion, and we're trying to unravel them."
He settles back in his chair, though his posture is upright -- he's clearly giving Tanith his attention. "We need to know if the fiend Koz'gon survived you smashing him, or if he's permanently dead. He's been... involved in a number of things both in Alexandria and in Quelynos."
Corey does his very best to be serious. Auranar is a stellar example of seriousness. After all, his deity has often been accused of being the 'serious stick-in-the-mud' of the three children of Daeus and Althea, so... Merely think of Gilead and how he might react, Corey thinks. Although he's also never been of the opinion that Gilead is nearly as sober and serious as everyone thinks. It's just, in close proximity to Tarien...
"It is vital that we know," Corey says on the heel-end of Telamon's words. "Both for my mother's efforts--you remember Faphinae, yes?--and for my own." As a paladin, he fervently hopes that the fiend has been destroyed. Imprisoning it seems almost like a torture in some measures.
And then there is a dragon. A dragon she has met -- in passing, the way a pedestrian dives out of the way of a speeding grocery cart -- but still A Dragon.
And it is friendly, and helpful, and begging for fish, and Magpie's eyes are just as enormous but now covered in sparkles.
Perhaps illusion magic gets into the bloodstream?
Don't mind her, she's just gonna quietly be entranced for a second.
"Not smash, swallow." Tanith corrects, then makes an odd hurking nose not unlike a cat with a furball. "You want?" She makes the noise again, her whole body shuddering from tail-tip to nose and her mouth bulges suddenly and if one looks one might see a teeny-tiny limb poking around the edge of her now-protracted maw. "Eyyyyyessss eeeaaaasstsss!!!"
Oh, no.
The alarm on Auranar's face is sublime. She's on her feet in an instant. "What? What does that mean? TELAMON?!?" She might be panicking a tiny bit.
And suddenly Telamon is, in a heartbeat, back in his father's study. A discussion -- not a lecture. Telperius is speaking to his son. "There may come a time when it seems like everything is spinning out of your grasp. The worst thing you can do then, Tel, is panic. You will have to take action -- but fear cannot be your master in that instant. Remember that."
Suddenly Telamon is back in the study, with his friends there, and Tanith apparently in distress. "She didn't kill him," he says with a grin. "Good. I can have the honor of doing so. Tanith! Spit him out right there!" He points to a corner of the parlor away from the others -- a corner that is suddenly forming patterns and angles, being drawn into the stone by an unseen hand. Eye-twisting inscriptions designed to hold a fiend. Containment.
GAME: Telamon rolls spellcraft: (15)+26: 41 GAME: Corey casts Magic Circle Against Evil. Caster Level: 14 DC: 17
While Telamon is administering the magic circle, Corey draws his rapier, moving closer to Auranar's side as he sees her fear and fright climb onto her face. "I'm here," he reassures her solemnly, silver eyes filled with a conviction to see his next words through, even if the presence of the fiend inspires unease in him. Every warrior feels fear. It's whether they show bravery in spite of fear that elevates them to warriors. "I won't let any harm come to you."
He murmurs a prayer then. "O Gilead, protect me and my allies from evil, that I might not let any harm come to them." A magic circle emanates from him, his prayer answered.
'Spit him out here!'
"....Uuuuuuh," Magpie manages, eyes wide as she slips off the chair, and sort of sidles up next to Auranar. "...You sure that's a good idea? I mean probably you are, but, like..."
"...Are you really sure?"
Magpie's own experiences with involuntary planar travel aside, there seems to be a marked jump in difficulty between containing a powerful demon on the Material Plane, and on the Border Ethereal. The latter being wispy wistfulness as a law of reality, it feels like 'containment' is pretty far from something it can be made to excel at...
Tanith is eager it seems to comply, and she spits the 'bug' that is Koz'gon out at the circle that Telamon is forming. The moment that the bug leaves her mouth it decompresses and expands into the shape and form of a massive creature of a size that is not meant to be contained inside of Telamon's home. The purple-blue squat creature with orange-red eyes lands neatly inside the circle and hunches there angrily. "HOW DARE YOU!"
"You taste disgusting." Tanith says archly. Sniffing and waddling toward her fishy reward.
The two mages are staring at Koz'gon with a particularly nasty expression on their faces, the pair of them exchange a thoughtful expression but after a moment shrug and return to their conversation as though deciding that Telamon can handle the situation which only serves to enrage Koz'gon further. Fiends - regardless of their type - really don't like being ignored.
Really, it's watching the two mages ignore Koz'gon that settles Auranar's feathers and she allows Corey to settle her further, smiling at him and nodding. She picks up her quiver and arrows and narrows her eyes at the fiend. Unwilling to be unarmed and unprotected against such a creature, but she will let Telamon handle the situation. It seems that he has it well in hand after all. She shouldn't have underestimated him.
GAME: Aftershock rolls 1d20+26: (18)+26: 44 GAME: Telamon rolls knowledge/the planes: (15)+18: 33 GAME: Telamon casts Wish. Caster Level: 20 DC: 30
If it was just him there, Telamon could probably contain this monstrosity indefinitely. Even permanently. But he has responsibilities to his guests -- as a host, as an archmage. Even, as Simony keeps telling him, as a lord. "If you think that was bad, Koz'gon," he says in a cool voice, "I believe when we last met I had thanked Ni'essa for the chance to kill you. And now, here you are again, in the center of my domain, Leca'fi Amdamu." A shiver runs through the entire castle, as it reflects Telamon's will focusing into a needle-sharpened point.
Smoothly, the sorcerer draws forth a gleaming prism, carved from a single diamond. "Koz'gon, you have tainted the lands of dreams and waking for far too long. It is my will, and my wish, that you be rent asunder -- that the days and years you stole from all those hapless mortals be returned to them, or given to the Historian for His judgement."
The prism flashes solid white, blazing with arcane power. "I WISH THIS, SO MOTE IT BE!" His voice reverberates, for a moment not his pleasant timbre but the thunder of an angry angel. The wrath of distant stars and the places between them, all focused on the fiend.
GAME: Aftershock rolls 1d100: (97): 97
Koz'gon steps forward menacingly, laughing, mockery in his mouth-
It never leaves his maw. The creature withers before your eyes as if the hourglass has run out on its life. "No." Koz'gon moans instead pitifully. It dies slowly now, turning gray before your gaze as the lives of mortals that it has devoured are slowly plucked like gray plumes of smoke from its body. Navos is a cruel task master and the Historian extracts every stolen day from Koz'gon until nothing remains. Until the creatures rolling orange eyes are left dry and pitiful, moaning for relief that will not come. For mercy that it never showed its victims.
Even Auranar regains the years that she gave back to Verna, regaining her lost youth though she had lost it through such complicated means. It seems the gods understand.
Koz'gon is a pile of dust at the end of it and nothing more. Nothing more at all. There's an empty plate where fish once were. An offering dish for a golden dragon who has always aided you when you need her. Yet it seems she's not the only one that was answering your call this day.
Corey's eyes are wide as he watches Koz'gon be unmade, unwound, like the sweaters he's watched his father knit being pulled apart, strand from loop, loop from strand, pulled until the garment is only a pile of yarn, still gnarled and set into odd shape from having held a certain shape for so long... Yet with time, it will come back into place. With washing and caring, it will come back into place. Seeing Auranar next to him regain some fullness in the cheeks (that he can certainly see, as a sildanyar himself) makes him smile all the brighter.
"Glory to the gods," he whispers, and tears come up to his eyes. Even as a servant of one, he is always brought low when he witnesses something that is undeniably their doing. He looks to Auranar and he opens his arms for a hug, and when Auranar permits it, he hugs her tightly in that way that friends do.
He lets go of her a moment later (it would be unkind to crush his friend to the point she can't breathe) and looks at Telamon in awe. "Glory to friends," he says. "For all of us, we work with the gods and alongside them. All of us were brave and plucky enough to bring the fight to Koz'gon."
If the summoning of Tanith and the reordering of the castle was a wondrous display of massive power to Magpie, watching Telamon dictate to existence how things will go is... something of a revelation. In that moment, the gnome understands her potential -- out of all order with what she has understood to be her place in the world -- and, for a brief moment, understands why it is that people might come to fear irresponsibly-wielded power.
Telamon can tell existence that the impossible will happen, and a god will help see it through.
And it would be a sobering realization, if not for the fact that she can see the good it does Auranar, and presumably for each and every one of the demon's surviving victims. And it's this that snuffs out her momentary thread of concern, replaces it with blinding joy.
Her friend is better, and a demon has been utterly unmade.
So Auranar gets hugged from the other side as well, and if Magpie is crying and sniffling a little, well...
Are you gonna be the monster who points it out?