Chapter Text
Of the two, Miles’ crown of chains is by far the most difficult to find.
Retrieving Oswald’s is, by comparison, rather simple: Efink helps him fish it from the gelid pool of blood in the Tomb of Ultimate Evil. The blood itself, more enchantment than fluid, makes its way slickly back into the basin but the tufts of troll hair and gore that have wrapped around the circlet are more stubborn. Leiland picks the scraps free and lets them spiral down into the unending void that yawns beneath the Keep.
“Are you sure you want him back?” Efink asks, gingerly testing her range of mobility. The obsidian splash tiles around the rim of the pool seem like fair game, but her hands press against an unseen wall when she tries to move them just beyond. Leland gives it about a day before she starts to tug seriously at her leash, and a week before she starts gaining ground. It is strange to be thinking in the timeframe of days or weeks now, rather than the heat of the immediate moment.
Leiland lets the chain circlet slide through his fingers, feeling each cold iron segment click against his bronze-gauntleted talon tips. Oily black smoke filters from the deep grooves and creases, just wisps now, but they’d grow thicker over the next few hours, reforming the Vinguri shard by infernal shard. Well, probably. Maybe. He’s making some fairly large assumptions here; uncharted territory, as it were. “In the end, he knew his true Dark Lord,” Leiland says, although Oswald’s profession of fealty struck him as the least bit suspect, given as it was just after that Leiland ripped Toby’s immortal soul, thin and wailing, from his physical form and clenched it twisting in his fist. “And he always had an admirable appreciation for fine art.”
Efink isn’t really listening. “I do hope they don’t mean to string those miserable bridges all over everything,” she mutters as the first of the goblin repair teams make their way to the chamber, their wide lamplike eyes backscattering the faint glow of the pool, spindly fingers clenching nervously around such scraps of wood and chain and debris as they’d scavenged from the rest of the citadel. Upon his crowning, the Lord of Shadow’s powers -- unpracticed and instinctual as they were – had largely quelled the looting and mutiny, imposing an uneasy kind of peace. Lilith’s scuttling brood had handled whatever goblins and orcs had resisted their Lord’s compulsion, which was good, because even Leiland could see that the kids really needed a snack after so much excitement.
“Skull pillars don’t just install themselves,” Leiland points out, although the floor at least is doing exactly that, one flagstone at a time. “Load bearing or otherwise.”
“Oh, I suppose,” Efink sighs, studying the little cluster of goblins as if counting up the number of heads between them. “You there! Start with a platform over here. I’ll be damned if I’m going to try to sleep on this boat. And can we get a cage? A cage, anyone? Oh come on. A chain then, at least.”
To be fair, Olag doesn’t seem much inclined to escape. His ghastly, half-peeled form is still sobbing in one of the few fully-intact corners. His ragged nails claw and clutch at the floor as he writhes in undying anguish under J’er’em’ih’s many watchful eye stalks. “As a dammed thing,” Leiland points out, “the frailties of the flesh may be beyond you.”
Efink gives that some thought, studying the blood that streaks her outstretched arm. Her skin is pale, almost translucent, perfectly normal for the high elf. “Does it take a while to settle in? Because I could just *slaughter* some chocolate and a nice glass of wine right about now.”
Leiland wasn’t sure about the chocolate, but the wine – “No, that’s pretty normal, at least in my experience.” There are enough flagstones now, floating unsupported in their places, to make the walk back to the tomb’s entrance a relatively easy one. Only one or two of the goblin repair crew had tumbled into the endless black so far, although the day was still young. Leiland pushes himself up from the rim of the blood pool, slipping the thin iron crown over his gauntlet. “I should really help Sokhbarr drive the last of the invaders from the borders.”
“Mmn, well, make sure to be back by this evening, or you’ll miss the champagne,” Efink says, trying to squeeze fluids out of her sleeve. Apparently giving up the whole thing for a lost cause, she starts to peel herself out of the sticky robes. “Oh, and I see a snapping pennant over frost iron, where crimson flowers fade to black.”
Leiland hesitates. “That’s… good to know. Thank you.”
Efink waves him away, distractedly. “Have fun, there’s no rush!”
There really isn’t. Because around the time Leiland’s boots crunch down into the flowstone and pumice of the Scary Volcano’s slopes, bronze on gray, it occurs to him that Oswald’s crown really hasn’t made much progress. It still smokes. But even when he gives the iron circlet a firm shake, there’s no familiar glimpse of shards of demonic flame or non-Euclidian realms of madness and despair. Leiland is here to pick up Hamhead’s trail; it has been just more than twenty-four hours since Oswald collapsed into ash. He should be seeing something.
Tossing his plaguebat’s reigns over a broken upthrust of stone, Leiland makes his way down to the ravine where he’d found bare halfling footprints, once before. Blowing ash has wiped them away now, but between the mountain’s sulfuric belches, a trace of scent lingers – green growing things, bacon, sunlight. Leiland circles wide around the trail, ranging in quartermile loops across the cragged and steaming landscape. The terrain is difficult, and even with the liberal use of levitation, jagged pumice snatches and squeals at his boots. Pieces of airship litter the hillside, some burned and some burning.
Near a slow, blebbing flow of lava, where scraps of torn canvass fan the billowing gasses, he finds it. There’s nothing left of Miles by now except his crown of chains. Thin fingers of frost radiate around the segmented black iron, drawing tattered white runes out onto the smoking pumice. But the crown hasn’t begun the familiar process of spinning armor up out of frost and hatred, imbuing those frigid plates with unlife. Maybe it’s too dry here. Or too warm. Leiland doesn’t know.
He lets the grooves and curves of the pact-seal slip between his fingers, lingering on the smoothness, the spiked links. Then he slides the crown over his gauntlet, lets it click against Oswald’s at his elbow, and turns back for his plaguebat.
Leiland’s never been on a hunt alone before, and to be honest, he’s not sure this even qualifies. He’s even less certain how to go about asking a boon of the Lord of Shadows, Worm of the Worldcore – it was really difficult to tell if the Dark Lord was getting cranky. Also, both of these Vinguri had battled the Lord of Shadows’ mother and tried to keep the newborn Lord from his throne, so there was that. And… and yet they’d fought by Leiland’s side for centuries, growing stronger with every goodly or disobedient thing they'd ground beneath their boots, working side by side in service of something beyond mortal understanding, for the final peace of a last gasping breath, for the physical embodiment of domination itself. He knew these men. Or... he thought he'd known them.
So. You know. There was that, too.
But naptime or no, the Dark Lord would surely be more receptive to a plea if it came on the heels of a victory. Surely. Leiland drives the hooked point of his boot into the armored stirrup with perhaps a little more determination than necessary, drawing a high-pitched howl of protest from his mount. Massive membranous wings thrash unhappily as the sole remaining pactwraith swings himself astride the lightweight saddle, sawing back on the corded reigns.
“To the Door of Doom,” Leiland intones, jerking his bat’s gnarled and folded muzzle to the sky, resolution burning blue hoarfrost in his breast. His vow is a resonant hiss in the sulfur air. “Galfast Hamhead, your time on this plane grows short.” The circlets around his arm chime as the bat’s wings lash out, lifting them up and into the gloaming skies.
The accursed halfling gardener was on foot, on terrain like this, a hundred miles of poisoned wilds between it and the relative safety of the starforged lands. With any luck, Leiland would be back in time for snacks.