Tag: THE LAST DAYS OF UNHOLY TOLEDO

Trying my best to reel this one in.

The Monsignor pursed his lips, looking backward himself. After a moment, he shrugged. “There may be something back there, yes. As I have said, the spellcraft is weaker here than it should be. Perhaps some spirit has taken hold of frayed magic, and reweaved it into a form more pleasing to it.” He shrugged. “No matter, as long as it contents itself with easy prey.”

The Monsignor turned … only to find Maddox’s arm blocking his way. “Unholy Toledo had a name for showing contempt for the wits of others. Which is why there’s an army at its walls.” The Monsignor’s nostrils flared at the accurate accusation. “We may be underground even now, but I am no fungus, to be kept in the dark, and fed shit. What can we expect from the rest of these miserable chambers? For clearly you know.”“Oh, I do! My circle” — Nat’s eyes narrowed, for that was not a word one liked to hear a mage use to describe his associates — “long had the task of preserving these pleasure chambers. Ha!” he went on, seeing Maddox start slightly. “Not all tastes are as coarse as yours, fighting-man. Those of us with more rarified psyches require subtler delights. But it is fair that you know what you face.”

Getting there!

Nat discovered the reason for those hose-mouths soon enough. “Damn!” he shouted as a stream of gray filth splattered across his shield, befouling it with a quickly-hardening slime. He smashed the shield in the foul attacker’s face, wincing at the fresh screeching. “Don’t let it get on your skin, right?”

“As little as possible!” yelled the Monsignor, his face a snarl of hate as the tip of his staff glittered an evil green. It trailed a brief green mist, too; but when the mist met flesh, the flesh bubbled. “They overwhelm their victims, trapping them in… their spray…”

He stopped in surprise, and perhaps mild dismay. Maddox and Nat had paired up, back to back, and around them was now piled a heap of stinking spider-things. Even as he watched, one monster spouted at Maddox’s head, only to have it intercepted by Nat’s now-encrusted shield. One quick stab later, and it was shuddering in death on the floor.

Nat fumbled with his shield. “Disgusting!” he rasped, and looked wildly for the doors. “We must move. Do these things ‘know their place,’ too?” he asked the Monsignor.

“They do,” the Monsignor admitted. “And they are deadlier than this. I wonder if the spells are failing.”“Maybe they are, maybe they’re not,” Maddox spit. His face and beard had streaks of the spider-thing’s spew smeared across it; but if they hurt, he showed no sign of it. “Either way, run!”

I need to speed this up.

 They gave the sneerers a wide berth, and were avoided in turn, but the deeper they got into the room, the more oppressive its atmosphere became. Oppressive, offensive — and steadily more surreal. “I don’t know why these statues bother me so,” Nat muttered as they cleared yet another set of pedestals. These were empty, and… dusty? It was hard to tell, in the nightmarishly colored air. But there were a few stone figures, each carved to suggest that they were wrapped in linen cloth. “In fact, I almost think that the stone is moving,” Nat went on.

“Those aren’t statues!” the Monsignor rasped. “Keep looking up!”

Nat jerked his head up, and this time he saw something move in the high ceiling above. “Is that one of your monsters?”

“Almost certainly.” The Monsignor hissed frustration. “You two are alive because it cannot decide which of us to attack first. Go off by yourself, and it will strike you, the moment you lose focus. These fools thought their magic powerful enough to let them face and trap the creatures, taking the power for their own. You can see how well that worked for them!”

It’s coming along.

Unlike the first chamber, the population of this one seemed not immediately hostile. Or at least they were not physically hostile; their sneers and supercilious glances shone out, despite the fantastical flickering colors from the braziers. “This is the Mirrorless Maze of Perfect Display,” the Monsignor told the others. “Here stayed those that knew they needed to go no further, for were they not the greatest adornment of any room they were in? I suggest you watch the ceilings as we pass through.”

“For what?” asked Nat.

The Monsignor paused — only to shake his head, unhappily, as nothing at all happened. “The spellcrafting down here must be strained,” he muttered. “Usually a question like that would be directly and drolly answered. I suppose it has been a long night.”

Tough day, will not let that stop me.

At first the two fighting-men hesitated to slay, instead hoping to avoid the crawling wretches. But Nat hissed as one flailing claw struck his foot, chilling it immediately and making him stumble. Only Maddox’s lightning-fast grab of his shoulder kept the other man from falling. He stabbed down with his sword in the next motion, skewering the frothing attacker through the back. “Gah!” Maddox muttered. “I could feel the cold through the blade.”

“It will pass,” the Monsignor told them both. He idly impaled a few crawlers himself as they picked their way to the far door, seemingly indifferent as to whether his strikes killed clean. “They have just enough will to suck up heat, but wound them once and they can think of nothing else. But killing them works well enough, too. I do not suppose you fine fellows would like to wager on who can strike the most? …No? Pity.”

It took five minutes — or an hour; Nat and Maddox found time to oddly flow, down there between the braziers — of fending off the slow-motion stalkers before the three reached the doors that marked the end of the chamber. The Monsignor made no secret of his amused contempt as he watched the other two try to strike only those that came too close. “I tell you again: these creatures are weak. Too weak to be worth consideration. They chose to be here, and this is their reward. Why not amuse yourselves?”

So I didn’t get as much done, but I got it started, and that was the hard part today.

The rooms were oddly proportioned, and worryingly angled. Shapes were wrong, and so were the shadows. The only light in each chamber were from great braziers, set outside the rooms themselves; their baleful fires flickered through tall, yet dirty stained glass windows, bathing each room in fantastical colors. It should have been darker; and yet the shadows themselves seemed to radiate an anti-light that revealed, yet brought no comfort.

This first chamber was all in blue, and the Monsignor made odd, mocking symbols with his fingers as they entered. “This is the Hall of Deserved Languor,” he told the other two, “and we must pass through it quickly.”

“Who would stop us?” Maddox started to mumble, then snapped his head as if fighting off a sudden weariness. “There are no defenders.”

“Look to your feet, fool!” Maddox bristled, but Nat looked – and then he swore, for some of the shadows were moving. The Monsignor muttered and threw up a mage-light, revealing the shadows to be crawling men and women. Of a sort: they were gaunt, with eyes always blinking, and hands and feet that were halfway to claws. Slow they looked and slow they moved, but there was a blind hunger in their faces that was no less cruel for being torpid.

There’s gonna need to be a fight scene soon. Two-thirds of the party rather badly wants to Smite some Evil right now. They’re only not chastising the wicked as they go because the wicked are outnumbering them thousands to one, and some very irate people are going to be coming over the wall anyway. It’s gonna be bad in the city, when it falls – and that’ll be despite the best efforts of the army about to overrun it.

The three of them moved as quickly as they dared through the blossoming outrages and atrocities playing out in the courtyard. Nate and Maddox’s hands were white-knuckled on their weapons by the time they reached the vile temple’s alcove; the Monsignor looked almost bored, not even bothering to leer or chortle. “Prepare yourselves, stout warriors,” he told the two men. “This is where steel may be of some use.”

“How bad will it be?” asked Maddox, flexing his fingers out of the stiffness his ire had imposed on them. “And how many will there be.”

“I have absolutely no idea,” the Monsignor told them with a grin that almost seemed sincere. “There may be fighting, within, unless they’ve all done us the favor of a mass suicide pact already. As for numbers?” He shrugged. “Fewer than the ones who entered the Fane. When rats cannot abandon a sinking ship, they naturally will turn on each other. Men are much the same, only more inventive about it.”

Inside the walls!

Inside the wall?

Inside was chaos, and license. Everywhere the three looked, the minions and the hanger-ons of the See of Iniquity were indulging in every vice known to humanity, and a few unique to Unholy Toledo. There was shouting, and killing, and revelry enough for twice the number of people cavorting in the space between the walls and the Fane, and even this late at night the bonfires were lit, making the scene flicker in a grotesque alternation between greasy shadows, and the pitiless firelight of Hell.

It was well-known that to carry a weapon openly without leave in the Whore’s Fane was to volunteer to be thrown from its highest spire. But on this night nobody challenged them, or even seemed to notice. “Where are the guards?” Nat muttered. “Not that I miss them.”

“The smart ones fled, and the unlucky ones were caught and slain for treason,” shrugged the Monsignor. “The very unlucky ones will be flogged towards the foe when the Babylon Gate is breached. But they will not be at their posts, which is all either of you should care about. Follow me, and stay close! Even now, my presence will keep the prying eyes of this rabble safely averted.”