There is much groaning when Shaddar kicks the hobgoblins and slaves awake after their extravagant rest.
“Up! We have much to explore and discover!” he urges.
A thought he had as he awakened is that Felinxtrath may have created a stash of powerful arms, weapons, or magical items for his own personal use in this world. If so, he would have hidden it somewhere in the city. If such a trove exists, Shaddar will have it for his own!
Even if this thought is a vain one, the work of centuries of illithid study were done here in this ancient city – stored away as a gift to ‘the long-tentacled one’. Shaddar feels a burning need for the results and research that would have been collected. He looks forward to finding it and… What was the term the drow elders used? Ah, yes… Harvesting the knowledge.
These thoughts encourage him to be even more blunt than usual with his minions.
“We leave now,” he states simply and then walks off with Toothsnatcher. The hobgoblins and slaves have to run to catch up with him, but none of them want to be left alone in this strange ruin.
As he stares at the fearful creatures while they run towards him, Shaddar takes a moment to stroke the brainmate and ask if it knows where any of the items that he seeks might be in the city.
To his surprise, the brainmate responds at once, “You will go to the hall of records – the building that is just visible to the west. It has four pillars reaching into the air like tentacles and is at the very edge of the city.”
“Very well,” Shaddar responds, “Why must we go there?”
“Inside will be a place with a method for syncing the passage of time flow. I must see this in order to validate the exact rate of temporal differential.”
Shaddar leads his group to the west – thinking furiously. The brainmate seems to have quite a bit more information at its disposal than he originally thought. But it is not sharing all of it all at once. His tentacles writhe with gestures of uncertainty as he has a most distressing thought: “The brainmate has an agenda of its own! What are it’s plans for me and this world, I wonder?”
It takes a half-hour of walking to reach the building. One of the tentacles that used to adorn the roof fell or was pulled down long ago, but the building is mostly as the brainmate described it.
Upon entering, Shaddar feels that the place has been decorated more as a temple than a mere house of records. Small altars and nooks for private study (worship?) run down both walls of the main chamber. Toothsnatcher is wary.
“What is it?” Shaddar queries mentally.
“Don’t know. Some kind of noise. Low. Rumbley,” Toothsnatcher says quietly. Shaddar motions for silence and then he hears it also: a faint, almost sub-sonic sound. It comes from the next chamber, behind a set of smashed open double doors. Shaddar moves boldly forward.
The room beyond is not like any that Shaddar has even seen or even heard of before.
It is cut directly into the rock, a huge hall going straight back for as far as he can see. The room is aglow with magic to Shaddar’s second sight.
At first, Shaddar thinks that the entire length of the hallway is lined with bookshelves, but he quickly sees that it is far stranger than that. There is a construct system at work here that has a link to the elemental planes of fire and earth. The low-pitched sound comes from a huge slit in the wall near the front of the room; it is glowing with heat.
So slowly that Shaddar can barely perceive it, a sheet of pure obsidian is being extruded from this slit, moving on granite rollers into the room.
Looking behind this marvel, Shaddar sees that each of what he thought at first were shelves are sheets of this same rock, their rollers rotated such that they move backwards down the length of the hallway.
All of his group is totally silent as Shaddar investigates this magical apparatus. But what is it for? The obsidian seems perfectly smooth and there are no marks at all on any… Wait... On the fifth slab of obsidian, Shaddar sees a raised line that runs from the top to the bottom of the stone. Other than that, it looks blank.
He strokes the brainmate and asks, “Are these the records you were looking for? It seems rather light on detail.”
“Walk to the beginning. Something is very wrong here,” the brainmate responds.
Shaddar begins to walk down the long hallway, examining each slab as he passes by. The vertical lines appear on other obsidian sheets, but in an almost random fashion. He can feel the brainmate’s agitation at this. After passing hundreds of the huge rocks, Shaddar notices that the vertical lines have become regular – one marking every fourth stone. Other than this however, he sees no real record. Nor does he see any end to this hallway.
“It is a record. It has recorded the passage of time. The time dilation in this world has been random for thousands of local years,” the brainmate explains, “But at this point in the record it was the proper rate of one second equaling 1 year.”
“Random?” Shaddar asks with a trace of alarm, “What do you mean?”
“Walk to the beginning,” the brainmate repeats cryptically.
Minutes pass as they walk down the hallway of obsidian without any apparent change in the ‘record’.
Suddenly Shaddar stops and stares. The next section has been smashed to fragments. The stone rollers have dutifully moved the shattered bits of rock along, but there is nothing to see here. Could this be the point at which the city fell? Did the invaders do this damage and then left?
Shaddar continues onward and is rewarded with another surprise at the next vertical and whole tablet: there are markings! Qualith has been scratched crudely into the shiny surface. It is faint, but unmistakable. He moves as if to read it, but the brainmate stops him.
“Walk to the beginning,” the brainmate says again, “We must read the history from the very start.”
Shaddar humors the brainmate. It certainly seems to know more about this place and what it is for, but starting at the beginning is almost always a good practice. These is plenty of time to explore.
He quickens his pace in his haste to learn what this all means. He can’t help but notice as they move at a near-run, that the hand-carved Qualith writings continue on many of the stone slabs. And then the writing is no longer carved by hand, but has been extruded and etched right into the stone like the regular vertical lines are. But the four lines seem sporadic and jumbled, even without reading them.
The Qualith style changes again into neat and orderly lines. Shaddar can see what he thinks must be the end of this huge record. He is not disappointed. He brings the panting group of weary hobgoblins and slaves to a halt next to the very first obsidian slab.
“Rest,” Shaddar commands. “I will take my time to study this.”
The writing is just as pretentious as the carving made in the arena. Shaddar sighs wearily and slogs through the thick, flowery writing:
“This world is mine,” it reads, “All that it is and all that it can become belong to me. It shall be a sphere – 1000 miles wide! Mist shall protect the boundary and none who enter may leave. For all of this world’s contents are mine.”
Typical selfishness of his ex-master.
“The twilight of the sky pleases me. Never shall the light of day reach this world! You will remain constant in fulfilling your tasks. This city is at the very center of the world and the city will be called after your glorious master: Felinxtrath!”
Shaddar rolls his eyes, but continues his reading…
The next section is made of very long dashes and gaps. It doesn’t look like Qualith at all.
“Is it broken here?” Shaddar asks the brainmate.
“No. This is a recording of speech that Felinxtrath uttered while controlling the experiment. It is drawn out, but legible.”
Shaddar understands. He runs his tentacles along the long lines and gaps and holds them in his mind as he reads. It takes up most of a slab, but he finally is able to read the word.
It reads: “Yes!”
Shaddar recalls that this was, in fact, something that Felinxtrath said, just at the moment that the crystal on top of his iron chair began to spin.
The next three slabs are used to record: “Increase the mixture!” Yes. That was when the experiment really began to drain the four slaves that were powering it. Shaddar nods in recollection.
He returns to the easier-to-read writing that follows. It lists out the nature of the world, the drow city that will be allowed to grow and develop while the pygmy illithids settle into their own new city and world. Shaddar laughs aloud at the description of the smaller mind flayers that his master outlines – his master wanted to be sure that none of this world’s inhabitants every forgot their place!
“Although you are the Elders of this world, know that your master is greater than you in all aspects: size, intelligence, power, and appetite. Revere him and serve him in all things!”
“How glad I am that Felinxtrath is dead,” Shaddar thinks while shaking his head in memory of his ex-master.
The record continues. It is very specific and outlines the nature of the city, its main buildings, how the pygmy illithids should spend their time. It goes on in nauseating detail, reading like some kind of twisted combination of a laboratory experiment record, bad poetry, and the ravings of a narcissistic lunatic. Shaddar almost feels sorrow for the poor beings that had this sole record to give meaning to their lives – it must have been a hellish existence. Thinking back on his own life under Felinxtrath’s thumb, Shaddar empathizes.
The command is given for the pygmy illithids to travel to the surface and collect the human and hobgoblin slaves that Felinxtrath has brought for his workers. The instructions are given as to where the pygmy illithids can go to find and conquer the drow who have been “ripening”.
With the control over the three slave races that Felinxtrath has given them, the commands for research and the collection of power are given. It seems that Felinxtrath had the ability to observe what was happening anywhere in the world. There are several places where he commands that a “traitorous” spawn be executed or answers petitions that apparently had to be submitted for years before he would notice and answer them.
“No wonder my master was such a pompous malcontent,” Shaddar muses. “If this is how he spent his free time? Being worshiped by pygmies of his own creation?”
As Shaddar has been reading, he has slowly been walking back to the beginning of the hall. Toothsnatcher has quietly answered the questions Kug asked and all of his group now knows that he is reading some strange form of writing. They are doing their best to not disturb him – Kug has to knock a few heads together to break up some loud dicing games, but Shaddar is satisfied with his minion’s behavior overall.
It has taken hours, but Shaddar reaches the last slabs of records made directly from the extruder. It is a record of drawn out words: “Curse these so-called heroes! They seem to be everywhere.”
And then the rest of the slab is blank.
Thinking upon the events of that morning, Shaddar recalls that right after his master broadcast these words, he stood and walked as if to leave the room. His callous command to shut down the experiment! What would that have done had it been possible? Would the pocket dimension continue its existence? Maybe. But it’s also possible that such an abrupt cancellation of power would have ‘popped’ the bubble of this world and killed all who lived in it.
“Not a very caring deity, was he?” Shaddar thinks coolly.
The next slab is a hash of random vertical and horizontal lines. Shaddar has no idea what this might signify. A break in Felinxtrath’s connection? The mental surge of power from the Elder Brain’s death throes? Mental static? No way to know.
For the next several slabs there is nothing but random lines and gaps. It’s not proper Qualith, but seems like fragments of thoughts. Alien and confused. Every once in a while Shaddar recognizes a word or concept on a single line, but without the other three lines, it is meaningless.
“Darkness”
“No”
“Light”
“No”
“Pain”
“No”
“Why?”
“No”
“Mole Pie”
“No”
“No”
“Never-ending”
“No”
“No!”
“No!!!”
Shaddar leans back from the muddle and questions the brainmate.
“What is this?” he asks it.
His only reply is a feeling of confusion and unease. Shaddar jerks his tentacles in a gesture of annoyance and continues to attempt to make sense of the damaged record.
Slowly, over the course of a dozen tablets, the Qualith resolves into something that he can read. Barely. It has all four lines of text, but they are usually disconnected from each other – like four minds all fighting to write different thoughts as a single idea…
Wait…
The four slaves!
The only minds that were still connected to the throne once Felinxtrath left and was killed were the four slaves that powered the experiment!
Could it be?
Shaddar applies himself most carefully to the mass of mixed-up thought-streams and begins to see patterns that support his theory.
Yes! The first two rows are the two drow males, both of them stoically attempting to divert their minds from the torture they were enduring. The next line is obviously the old gnomish woman. And the last line… Oh, dear. The last line is the dwarf who was completely insane…
Shaddar is stunned. “And this composite mind-flow of shifting confusion was describing the world? No wonder the world changed and went mad! No wonder it is still filled with the deranged!”
Chapter 1 < Chapter 42 Chapter 44 >
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