Chapter 5-148: The Shriners

“It is the word of Shoul that if you can’t hold onto something, then it is not yours.”

The voice rang through the Shrine of the True End. It was not loud, but it was pervasive, interrupting everything, and making the quiet somehow fuller, brighter, and deadlier.

There was very little light in the Shrine, as those living there didn’t need it, gifted with darkvision or devilsight and able to function perfectly well in darkness. It was a wonderful defense against intruders, too, and helped subdue both prisoners and the normal people working there, who knew that venturing out of the lighted areas meant they would not be coming back.

“You have taken something I call mine... my son, my child. Whatever claim you make on him can never change that fact... but you were going to try.

“Alas, you don’t have enough time. The equinox is not going to be here in time. You are going to die, and I am going to take back what is mine.

“When you are screaming in the throes of your Pacts, when you are wailing in the torment of the Shroud, slaves to the undead forever, you will know a simple and final truth: There are some lines that you should not cross, some things that you should not desire, and some treasures you should not touch.

“You crossed a line when you stole my son. You should not have desired his Bloodline, and you touched the child of someone willing and able to kill you all to get him back.

“Come, with your tamed shadows. Come, with your vampire slaves. Come, with the ghouls you’ve locked in darkness. Come, with the mummified guards of the ancients. Come, with your whining Warlocks and their wheedling Pacts for power. Come, with your false-tongued Clerics and their empty lies and promises. Come, with your skulkers and assassins and cutthroats.

“I am Traveler, and I Bring your Last Day!”

I was sure that they sneered in the dark for a moment.

“TRUTH!”

And there were screams throughout the Shrine.

It wasn’t close enough to actually do damage, but adherents of Shoul being confronted with the purest truth, instead of the lies and delusions they dealt in, was one of those things that are very distracting.

It gets worse when the strike team members come out of your maze of secret passageways and start shooting you.

Their Ward collapsed when I Dispelled it, and if they gawked at the fact someone was able to bring down something Cast at Fifteen by a Greater Daemon, it didn’t stop it from happening. They lost their ability to track their foes, to sense enemy Faith and Pacts... and so, the masters of darkness were blind.

I was tracking everyone through Status and Fellowship links, plotting out the courses, rapidly defining the Shrine even more closely, indexing traps and magic and ambush points as Topaz called them out, and directing people here, there, and everywhere.

The Eyes of Heaven were no longer blinded within here, and not too many of these people had any way to avoid them, especially Master Fred’s at /4.

The undead ran into buzzsaws. The living ran into Topaz and Master Fred.

There weren’t many of the daemons. They glowed like dark suns in the Eyes, even against the undead. Those bastards ran into me.

Perhaps they were supposed to be frightening, fast-moving skulkers in shadows, trying to hit and run, in and out of view.

Ah, before I left Detroit, I had the Angelos make up a bunch of Eternal Lights, Raised to IV.

All their Endless Darkness effects were at III. The Eternal Lights snuffed them out in passing, and Devilsight didn’t make these people immune to sudden very bright lights in their faces.

Master Fred was flitting between shadows into these people, Topaz was coming out of the stone with a nasty smile, and Sir Pellier was quietly ID’ing shooters they weren’t handling.

SeekingDarts and Shards were hunting down my targets behind cover and shadows, homing in on them ruthlessly. Lurking assassins, skulking daemons, waiting undead... it didn’t matter. Them being around corners just meant they had no chance to get a final shot off at me as they died.

They did get a lot of shots off at me, but that didn’t help them much, either. We were moving fast, layer on layer, triggering traps ahead of us or jamming them, the biggest ambushes broken up by the two very senior Warlocks with great spikes of stone exploding up, or roaring flames spitting out screaming, burning disciples who were shot down mercilessly.

The Locate Blood Relative I had up was working very cleanly now that their Wards were down, and we were already inside any residual spell defenses that might interfere.

I hoped they would run. That would just make things easier at this point.

Bodies burning white littered the halls and tunnels, staining the dark rock white.

The primary fane was ahead, and it seemed my inherited son was being brought there ahead of me. Guns roared, arrows thundered, Walls of flame exploded with Wrath, and men screamed and died as they were impaled on living spikes of stone from below.

Both Master Fred and Sir Pellier were pretty clear that the main Evil of this place was waiting for us ahead there. How nice.

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Topaz had a gift for impressive display. She Shaped away the stone from the hinges of the grandiose main doors to the place, and then pounded on the bloody things with a Wrath-enhanced fist. The massive set of artistically malevolent portals went sailing into the room beyond, crushing a few chairs as they did, and setting off some wild purple-black gunfire that whined down the corridor behind us.

A whole bunch of shadowy tentacles dripping some nasty stuff exploded out of the floor... and then promptly exploded wetly as very rigid stone spikes came up underneath them, stretched them out, and burst them apart like wet water balloons from within. The tentacles that weren’t impaled wrapped themselves mindlessly around the stone, pulsing and squeezing, sizzling faintly against the uncaring rock.

The Wall of Flame went right down the middle of the doors and into the room beyond, specifically eating through the thick and cloying darkness, and the poisonous vapors in the room beyond.

There was laughter from beyond, unnatural and inhuman, echoing hollowly and without direction off the stone, coming from nowhere. The people outside the room waited calmly and knowingly.

“Truly you have a redoubtable team with you, Traveler! Or perhaps we should call you Elrii?” mocked a voice from within. “Did you decide on a name for your son, little girl? We have been calling it ‘the sacrifice’!”

“He has a name worthy of his mother,” I answered back, with a sniff that echoed throughout the chamber beyond. “It isn’t like there’s anyone worthy on the other side of his bloodline, rats.” Before they could respond, I said, “One second, please.”

There was a crackling crash and sizzling wild lights creating dancing shadows in the room beyond. “My apologies, your ambush squad needed to get a bit urgently dead. Did you have some irrelevant rhetoric you wanted to keep parroting? We’re patient, we’ll wait.”

The Wall of Wrath in the room blazed brightly, blocking vision even as it devoured the poison mist and threw back the darkness. Beams of enhanced Light swept through each side of it, and washed away the layers and layers of Endless Darkness that covered the room via Valence superiority, so the light from the Wall spread further and further away.

There was a crackle of black and purple, and the Wall was snuffed out, the integral magic pulled apart and Dispelled.

Which was cute, because two seconds later it roared back to life, this time advancing another twenty feet towards the dais visible at the far side of the room... and thirty feet to the left, down the rows of simple pews.

Yeah, Dispelling infinitely repeatable Warlock stuff wasn’t exactly profitable.

One fellow didn’t get out of the way fast enough, and leapt aside, screaming as he burned. There was a clap and boom of a snapshot, and his head puffed white and went away.

“You’re not making any turgid and prosaic lip-flappings. Do the serpents have your tongue?” I asked archly, my voice echoing about the place, also with no clear source.

“We have the child,” came back the sepulchral voice. “What do you think you can do about it? If you advance, he will die!”

“If I don’t advance, he will die, AND you will get what you want. Guess which option makes more sense?” I replied firmly, and then there was a distant rumble and crash. “Ah, my apologies, that was your remaining two escape tunnels collapsing, don’t mind it. Perhaps you might try a little shadow-jumping, or flying about, to pass the time? There’s some important lessons about not annoying Sorceresses with really strong Bloodlines to be learned whilst doing so.”

Perhaps I couldn’t hear the whispers of consternation and horror, but I could at least imagine them.

“Clever, if you think we have but two ways out!” the voice said. “Regardless, you are not going to regain the child alive!”

“Yes, yes, I know, I know, you’re trying to buy time so your Warlocks there can power up a Formation to yank in something big enough to actually give you a hand. I also know you’re not going to kill my son until it’s clearly his life or yours... and I will tell you right now, that only one of you can possibly bargain for his life with theirs.

“Everyone else is going into the Shroud.

“Also,” and here my voice got a bit whimsical, “I’ve been told there’s at least another five Sinbound surviving in there. Hello, there. This is an excellent time for a little TRUTH.” There were definitely screams and curses from inside the Shrine at hearing that, but at the same time, they couldn’t help listening further. “You’ve been told and you’ve seen that if you die, your Pacts take you.

“Well, that’s not entirely true, thanks to the greed of your Patron there. It’s been so successful about churning over Pacts that it’s totally forgotten that it is sitting under a planet-wide soul-devouring Divine-defying Curse effect. In actuality, NONE of the souls that have been dragged away by their Pacts have gone Down. They are, in effect, being held by their Pacts until the moment the Shroud comes down, and then, off you go!

“However, you’ve had a very successful run there, you Shabnodaemon, you.” The spike of its sudden alarm was evident, even if it wasn’t audible. Nope, wasn’t a Matrixoth. “You’ve been turning over Pacts. You DO remember that there’s only five hundred of the things, right?” I let that dangle out there. “Every time you grant a new Pact, it’s gotta come from somewhere... and that somewhere is riding herd on the souls you’ve doomed before. The old Pact has to release them to become some new schmuck’s Pact.

“In other words, only the LAST five hundred Warlocks to have Pacts are totally doomed. Those before? They’ve been swept up by the Shroud... and if the Shroud dies, and they had a decent life, they aren’t going Down at all.”

There was a blistering, stomach-churning curse in Daemonic at that news, and I just laughed softly. “TRUTH!”

The new curses were of a completely different tenor. “That’s right, you’ve spent the last few decades dooming thousands of souls, of which you’ll only be able to collect the last five hundred. Your turnover scheme was pretty stupid, all things considered...”

The empty hiss that arose meant the thing was not my fan. That was fine, I wasn’t its fan, either.

“The rest of you, you still have mortal will. You might be going Down, but you have never been obligated to Sin in the slightest. You have ALWAYS had a choice.

“In the interests of that, Heavenbound Hall is sponsoring a new Penitent Initiative, designed to completely pester the Lower Planes. I’m sure you’d like to hear of it!”