[Hlaeth] Ch 31 - Variations on the Yellow

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            The dwarves hacked them down in gory displays of steel. One grim soldier had the bright idea of ramming his helm into one of them, and setting it on vivic fire. The thing squealed and thrashed as its flesh started to fall apart, whatever planar energies empowered it devoured, eaten away, and the foundation below unable to stay together without it.

            Soon enough the whole stack of a dozen creatures, ranging from the size of a dog up to a nine-limbed beetle-thing the size of an ogre with serpents for two legs, fires on one warped shell side and patterns of shimmery crystals on the other, were being felled with care and teamwork, and definitely some crossbow bolts to the heads.

            The corpses were carefully stacked up and it was all set on vivus, the gauntlets of those who did so bathed in the vivic fire to many poofs and pops. The enthralled dwarves watched the carcasses crumbling down, like wood falling to ash, and hummed deeply in approval as they did so.

            “It may or may not mean anything to you, but you really did rescue these things, Rockborn,” I informed them, staring at the unnatural mess. They all turned polished, gleaming eyes on me, curious. “They were in pain. All of them, in maddening, psychotic pain, wrenched in mind and body and soul into something unnatural. They may have sought to share their pain, inflict their pain, spread their pain, but now, they are not in pain.

            “They might have numbered some of your own, but they are now at peace, and the Land is taking them home, wiping the crap that was done to them from flesh and soul.

            “Well done. These are not pests, Rockborn, nor invaders. They are victims of a great Evil, and you have released them from it. I… I do not see another way to save them. I am sorry. What was done to them, I do not have the power to undo, and the Land, it can only Cleanse in this case, it cannot unmake and restore.”

            The dwarves grunted, but had the presence of mind not to say anything curt or blunt about enemies killed. These weren’t enemies, they were victims.

            “Winged inbound!” the sentry outside called out loudly.

            “Magos, summat the Yellow seem sensitive to the deaths ov their own, or the intrusion ov outsiders,” the Leutnant explained, as we turned hastily about and led the way back outside at a trot. “The winged, they oft be the worse ov them.”

            The creature was making its way straight for us, and screamed out something when the Lighted helms of the dwarves came out and arranged into a perfectly disciplined shield formation down here.

            My Masked sight zipped out to survey it at about a half-mile out.

            Three randomly feathered and scaled wings, not even equally spaced, but beating nonetheless, a sign of Air’s influence. A single large hind claw trailing mist, multi-spiked, a sign of ice, but twisted, half-insectile, half-avian. Four other limbs, looking like the heads of serpents in different colors and hues, hissing out faint clouds of different energies. The tail was more… octopoidal than anything, although in bright pink and diseased gray. Its head was an amalgamation of avian, reptilian, and… I think it was ooze.

            What it had once been, I had no idea. I debated killing it out there or waiting until it got closer, as it was pretty sizable, probably the size of an adult dragon…

            With a whoosh, it ignited. If I could have, I would have blinked.

            About a third of its body abruptly transformed. Some of the prior mutations went away, others spontaneously manifested. Skin blackened to the shade of oil, tinged with green. Two of the wings became fully leathery, with multiple spikes along them, and the tail spontaneously grew a poisonous stinger. Green-yellow bones erupted out as spikes across its skin, and the jagged line down what could be a spine was burning with actual balefire.

            The amalgamate head split open, and the jaws now forming the center of it screamed in pain and fury as a new eye burning with demonic flames fixed on us.

            “Sometimes they do that,” the Leutnant noted grimly. “Just transform, one after another…”

            “It didn’t transform,” I corrected him. “It went through something!”

            “What?!” the dwarf asked, frowning.

            There was a hiss and a flurry of Greater Shards speared out at the target still a quarter-mile away. It had just about enough time to cut short its scream before the volley of Greater Shards sprayed what remained of it across the sky in vivic spray… and highlighted the edge of something behind it.

            I pulled up a fist-sized ball of stone from the ground and sent it shooting out there under Magnus’ TK, aiming for that point in the air.

            I let go of the TK just before it went through, and then grabbed it again on the far side.

            The fact it was now visibly burning with balefire as it swung around and came back this way was perfectly obvious.

            A lot of dwarven eyes were looking at it as it came back and hovered in front of me, just out of the range of the vivus shielding me.

            Solid mountain granite had transformed into something not found on the mortal plane. Demonic Sin seethed over half the surface of the sphere, yellow-green fires leaking through slick black rock that was definitely not mortal.

            “What is it?” Leutnant Hrimgor asked after stepping up closer to study it, his revulsion apparent.

            “It’s Greedstone. You only find it in the lower demonic planes, where Sin accumulates,” I informed him softly. “That mutate went through the aperture there and a chunk of its body was spontaneously converted into something native to that plane.” I brought the rock closer, into the vivus, and mistflame promptly ignited on it, spreading over it quickly and starting to eat the stone away.

            The dwarves and I watched it flake and crumble away quickly, like oil-soaked wood instead of stone, and what was left behind was a malformed remnant of the former granite sphere, mangled and distorted, stained with vivic white that would go away at sunrise.

            “This bin important, Magos, but I see not how,” the dwarven officer confessed, looking from the remnant of the stone to me and back.

            “Apertures to other realms, causing planar-based bodymorphing related to the source plane. Apertures you cannot see or sense, and so you blunder in and through them, one after another. You think it’s a curse come upon you, but it’s just something you can’t see, which may or may not be moving slowly in motion itself.” I stood there and looked across the horizon in front of me. “Picture something like this, Leutnant.”

            I waved my hand, and in front of us all, the picture to the south changed.

            To the limits of vision, the area was filled with Apertures, windows to elsewhere. They didn’t seem to be in lines, or any predictable pattern, and were present across the surfaces of the land, as well as everywhere in the sky. Thousands of the things.

            Leutnant Hrimgor shuddered, for some of them were nearly abutting the Ward of the Mountain itself!

            “And Leutnant, the wind is always in motion, blowing through these things, one after another, after another, and carrying the planar contagion with them as it goes.” I took a deep breath. “Your superiors were entirely correct. It’s not just the dust and the grime that is changed. The very air is going to cause changes in you, if you breathe it in too often without vivic cleansing. The mortal plane’s own bias will slowly erode that, but the multiple changes likely make what is left behind too weak and warped to survive without those biases bleeding into one another.”

            “Creatures of the Yellow go mad und die when removed from the Yellow,” Hrimgor repeated, yet another fact he’d told me. “The world grinds them down from within...”

            “They breathe in the tainted air, with the essences of all the worlds and realms they need, and are sustained.” I stared at the tableau of that imagination laid out before me. “But the stories you’ve told me don’t match up to this. Sometimes you’ve seen hordes of creatures moving through valleys and change, and sometimes they don’t, or sometimes they change differently, yes?”

            The dark-bearded officer nodded shortly. “Aye, seen it myself over the years. Never seen a flyer erupt into flames like that here, und the same changes never happen once they change once.”

            “So the Apertures are either moving, or changing position and where they lead outright.” My illusion of colored windows began to drift around slowly, sometimes phasing right into and out of the stone ahead of them, as if it didn’t exist.

            And then there was a blur, and suddenly some of the Apertures were gone, and others in new random places, positions, and colors replaced them. The dwarves watching murmured in disquiet at the implications.

            “Ye can see all this, Magos?” Leutnant Hrimgol asked with a choke of disbelief.

            “No, Rockborn, I cannot. I am inferring, based on the accuracy of your own stories and what I just witnessed. And I very, very much hope to be proven wrong… but I don’t think I will. I’m pretty good at this divination style of magic.”

            “Is it growing?” Leutnant Hrimgol asked the important question.

            “I think it is, based on your stories, those of the Aldari, and the expansion of the Yellow. It may be the mixed planar pressure pushing back against the Veil of the mortal plane is what allows it to grow. The Wards of your mountains will stop it, but who knows which will endure longer without knowing the source of such a catastrophe.”

            I rounded upon him. “You’ve never received any reports of actually seeing the Apertures, seen them yourselves, or had your Runecasters claim to perceive them, Rockborn? Any of you?”

            The eyes looking back at me, gleaming like polished stones, were grim and wary, but the silence that answered me was enough, although all of them were trying to recall if they’d heard such things.

            “Then we’ve taken an unwarranted risk, marching you all out here. If there is an Aperture, the first thing you have to do if you encounter it is back away and determine where it is, knowing that it likely is not going to stay there. And if you can’t see or sense it, the only way that is going to happen is if a soldier stumbles into it and is horribly transformed.

            “Leutnant, I strongly advise returning to behind the Ward over exactly the path you used to reach here, and not doing this again until you can see the Apertures.”

            The dwarven officer looked over his men, saw the agreement in their eyes, and nodded curtly. “Form up as we came down, and stick to the trail! Double-time until we reach the Mountain Ward!” he ordered, and if his men were always as precise and seasoned as warriors of the clan were, there was speed and energy in their taking up the right formation, and a definite eagerness to be out of there in them.

            I spent a Detect Dimension VIII+1, going for veracity instead of range, as I joined them on the march back up to the Mountain Ward.

            The air around me suddenly felt like liquid goo on my thoughts, as faint echoes of every conceivable dimensional resonance I could imagine were suddenly everywhere around me, except for the first few feet where vivus was boiling at them and eating them in surges and waves of mistfire.

            I swore silently, peering around without moving my head, but saw no major distortions in the quarter-mile range of the spell, and could only pray that it was sensitive enough to spot an Aperture if one was indeed in range…

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