The heart of Coveya Kurg'annis was better lit. Water poured from every ceiling, cascading down the walls and catching the light, scattering rainbows over the flagstones. They danced, met, dissipated, again and again in a great swirling pattern. She caught herself tapping out a rhythm. They moved like a strathspey, all grace notes and lilting. Safiya looked at her sternly, and she sheepishly followed her further into the chamber.
The inner chamber was something to behold. The ceiling, which had been low and damp, vaulted up. It was as though it were a chimney that soared above the surface of the lake to tap into the sunlight above. That meant the night had passed while they had scurried around the Skein like rats in a maze. On a plinth above the rest stood a series of platforms. The hags hung suspended above them like some kind of magic, alive but asleep, in rays of light, curled up like fetuses.
It wasn't until they drew closer that they saw the corpses. Almost a mountain of them.
"They must have gotten caught in the dream," Safiya said.
"They slept, and then died," Gann said gravely. Indeed, the corpses - githyanki and human, elf, and orc, all emaciated. They had died of thirst, or hunger, or exposure, and their corpses littered the ground. All except for three. Two humans and an illithid, who stood, entranced. They didn't look too good. They were thin, their skin sagging from their bones. They must have been like that for days, if not weeks.
"As for us?" Adahni said, "How do we access their dream world without meeting the same fate?"
Gann reached into his pocket and took out the eye that Gul'kaush had extricated for their benefit. Now that she looked at it, it looked less like organic tissue, and more like a jewel, a star sapphire, flat like a disc. Gann fitted it over one of his eyes like a monocle. "A gift my mother gave me," he said, "An eye of a night hag will allow you to haunt others' dreams, give you the power I already have." He took it out and handed it to Adahni.
"Keep an eye on us, will you?" Adahni asked, "Pun not intended."
Safiya nodded, "All right. How long do we give you?"
"If you hunger or thirst, chances are we do too," she said, "Gauge it as you will." She took the eye from Gann and put it over her own eye. Gazing through it, she saw a warped version of the world she was in. She reached out, and Gann took her hand. Together, they stepped forward towards the slumbering hags.
She felt the world swirl around her as it had in the Wells of Lurue. At first she felt as though she was stepping into a warm pool, and then the current took her, a vortex bearing her down below the world.
They hit bottom in a world that looked a hell of a lot like the backstage area of the Veil Theatre in Mulsantir. The colors of this dream world were muted, but not as black and white as in the shadow plane, where she had been the last time she'd laid eyes on the room.
A ghostly Magda rushed to her, "Hurry. Adahni! Or you'll miss the final scene!"
"Final scene? What are you talking about?"
"Don't you remember? We composed the play for you, like you asked. It's a fine work, and an old, old story. The Betrayer's Crusade."
"There is something deeper in her request, an undercurrent - we should follow its pull and see where this play leads," Gann murmured in her ear, too close as usual. She slapped at her ear, trying to end the itching.
"Great time for stage fright," Adahni muttered.
"Go ahead," Magda said, opening the stage door and ushering her through, "Go ahead, step up on stage. We've reserved the Betrayer's part for you. You remember your lines, don't you?"
"Uh oh," Adahni said, "Better refresh my memory there. Though I've the feeling this tale has been following me as much as my own has..."
"Tales are messengers of sorts, though they bring different tidings to all who hear them," Gann said, "If a tale is persistent, then you have not yet heard all it has to say. Now, your lines?"
"I never knew them," Adahni said.
"Of course," Magda sighed, "The forgetting's in the script too. I'll set the stage, and you can make up your lines as you go along."
"Couldn't have picked a better improvisor, my lemming," Gann said encouragingly.
"The Crusade has failed... the Betrayer's army is crushed, and he must give his final commands to his lieutenants - the blue dragon Ser'ryu, the angel Zoab, and the lich Rammaq. The dark god Myrkul is close at your heels. You must make these orders count... they shall be your legacy... perhaps all that shall ever remain of you."
"All right," Adahni said, "I have told tales in my time, I'll play along."
"Ah, you have a dreamwalker's heart - you swim with the currents, not fight them," Gann said, clapping his hands in delight.
"Not a dream, a play. Or perhaps there's little difference," Magda said, "No matter, get up on stage. The audience is getting restless."
She approached the door hesitantly. She looked back a second, and Gann gave her thumbs up. She grinned, and strode out with all the bravado she felt the part deserved. An actor, gloriously decked out in the white robes and arching feathered wings of a celestial, was mid-speech.
"I am Zoab, of white wings and golden brow, born in the radiance of Celestia. For mercy, and for justice. I swore to bring down the Wall!" he intoned.
"I am Rammaq, the old, the dead," rasped another, in wearing the skull of a boar as a mask, its tusks tipped in glinting steel, "Thrice have I glimpsed Godhood, and thrice has that prize been snatched fro me. For the knowledge I was promised, I swore to bring down the Wall."
"The God of the Dead draws near, and our battle is lost. What would you have of your generals?" Zoab asked, turning to her. After a pause, she realized it was her turn to speak.
She put herself in the shoes of the Betrayer. He was righteous, no matter how doomed his fight, he believed in it even unto his own doom. "Stand and fight!" Adahni commanded, trying to embody the spirit of the Crusader, "The Crusade may have failed, but we won't be taken alive!"
The other actors looked at her in confusion. The audience shifted uncomfortably.
"Erm," Adahni cleared her throat, "I mean... we flee! There is no valor in death, there is valor in living on to Crusade another day!"
"That's not in the script!" the actor playing Zoab hissed.
"The fuck is wrong with you?" whispered Rammaq. T
The actress playing Ser'ryu shook her head, causing the blue dragon head she wore to bobble dangerously.
"Something is wrong with this dream... it is not coming from you. But..." Gann said. He had rushed out from backstage at the first sign of trouble, Magda at his heels.
"Ahh, perhaps we should skip to the final scene, where the Betrayer is captured and tortured and punished. She won't need to know any lines to play that scene properly," the dwarven dramatist said.
"She'll only need to know how to scream," Zoab giggled a little too loudly..
A wave went over the audience as it would over the ocean. She saw the people sitting on the bales of hay dissipate and coalesce into two monstrocities, ten feet tall and with arms so massive she couldn't imagine it being able to walk anywhere else but a dream. She tried to do what she had before, manipulating the environment or its ddenizens to suit her. She willed the monsters to shrink, but unlike previously, her will had no effect.
"It's not your dream!" Gann cried, leaping to her side with his spear at the ready, "We've got to do this the old fashioned way."
"I'm good at that," she quipped, drawing her rapier. They stood, back to back, thrusting and parrying at the monsters. They were strange things, Adahni could see the individual faces that made them up, as though they were trapped in the muscular flesh that bore down on her. She went for the eyes, and found them squishy and vulnerable, and soon they fell.
"The Betrayer will return!" Zoab cried. As she looked at him, it was as though he had ceased to be an actor playing the part of the angel, and embodied the part entirely. He stood before her, taller and more glorious. He was Zoab, just as the others were Rammaq and Ser'ryu, the man utterly disappearing into his skull mask and the actress's mask having fused to her neck, the lapis inlay that gave it its color having melted into glittering azure scales, "And we will wait for him, as promised."
"We will watch for the opening of the Gate," Rammaq said. His voice was no longer that of an actor but the unearthly tones of the undad.
"Look for us on the day the Betrayer returns," Ser'ryu added. She spoke with the voice of a dragon, not in her throat but with her mind, "We will storm the City of Judgment at his side, and our oaths will be fulfilled at last."
With her last word, the world began to melt again.
"Powerful dream," Gann commented, as the scene faded around them, "There was much truth in it, I think."
They reappeared in a reflection of the plinth on which the slumbering coven lay sleeping. The hags were not there, however. There were, however, the three entranced individuals they had seen. In this world, they were not dessicated and near death, but robust. One human wore the armor of a bard, and carried a mandolin over his back. One wore the robes of a wizard. The third, the illithid, who had seemed in the worst shape back in the mortal plane, stood closest to them.
"Some of them may yet live," Gann said, "They live, and they are trapped here in a prison of their own minds."
"Can we free them?" Adahni said.
"I believe we can, and perhaps glean from them some information we need."
Gann approached the illithid, and reached back for her hand. She took it, and they traveled further into the dream the poor thing was dreaming while his body rotted around him on the mortal plane.
Did Ilsensine send you to rescue me, or are you with the githyanki?
The words echoed around them in the prison of his mind.
Her surroundings became more solid, and she saw that they were in a maze that had once been a mine. Ahead, she saw a ghostly githyanki, pacing the halls.
He has been pacing these halls for weeks, I dare not confront him in my state. I cannot see him, I cannot hear his thoughts here. But you, you can see him! Take me to the exit forthwith, and I will reward you if I can.
"Well, it's our only way out too," Gann said, "Can you distract the gith?"
"I'm good at that," Adahni said. "Get the mindflayer to the portal, I'll deal with the green slimy one."
She drew her blade as Gann and the prisoner scurried off to the left.
"Hey! Githyanki scum!" she cried, "The Lich Queen's a whore!"
The gith reared up and whirled, "How dare you insult the Lich Queen!"
"Yeah, that's what I said! She's nothing but a fraud. You follow a weak creature, just like yourself!"
He fell upon her with a wicked-looking blade. She feinted and parried until she could see, out of the corner of her eye, that Gann and the captive illithid had made it to a shimmering portal behind her. She lashed out and kneed him, the padded joint of her armor connecting with his unprotected chin with a sickening crack. He fell, and she ran to join her companions. Stepping through the portal, they reemerged, sans illithid, in a parody of the temple of Myrkul.
"I'm never going to get used to these skeletons," muttered Adahni. In full color, the spidery bones, the huge skulls decorating the walls, were even more unsettling before.
"Hopefully we don't need to see so many of these again," Gann said, "I wonder what those creatures were when they lived."
"I prefer to imagine them as sculptures, Wood and stone and paint, the handiwork of an artist with some very deep-seated mental issues," Adahni said, She looked up and ahead. "There's someone ahead. A red wizard."
She pointed to where a bald man in the red robes of Thay stood before a black portal. He spoke then, loud enough for her to hear, but not particularly to her. He seemed to be addressing the door itself.
"This black door, it is not of this world. It began here," he said. He was a middle aged man, Adahni saw, but his voice was aged and stooped, "I stoood that the Betrayer's side - at my brother's side. They were gathered around us... celestials, dragons, mortals both alive and dead. Did the room expand to hold such a host? Or is my memory too small?"
"This is the lower level of Myrkul's vault," she said, "Where does that door lead?"
"We stand before the Betrayer's Gate... a door that should not be. Rest your eyes upon its edges and its grooves, watch them carefully and you can sense the wrongness. Death and life flow together in that simple slab of rock. Pass through it, and you will see the place of final judgment."
"You mean the Fugue Plane," Adahni said, "The City of Judgment."
"Yes, the gray city, and its walls of screaming souls. Passage to that forlorn realm is granted only by death, but this Gate provides another way, a forbidden way... a way that my brother opened with his silver blade..." the wizard bowed his head and drew a long rattling breath, "I swear to you, if I could take it back... if I could make him see..."
She turned as she heard footsteps behind her. At first she saw Tenisha, the healer from Bezantur. Then Safiya. Then...it was neither, and it was both at the same time. This woman was the same height and build, with the same features, but something in her essence was different. Stronger, older. And angrier.
"It only seems to be her," Gann said, "But so close... so..."
"You? Make him see?" she shouted, her voice lower than Safiya's and booming with outrage, "Araman, you flitting shadow... you were nothing but a leaf borne by a great storm."
Adahni had a vision of herself in the third person, being felled by the yard and falling to the sea like so much rainwater.
"An apt metaphor," she observed.
"Araman, why do you hunt me? You would destroy everything your brother strove for, render his sacrifice meaningless," not-Safiya said, striding up to at once she recognized the Red Woman that had come to her in her dream beneath the moss stone. She looked back to the man, and realized that he is what the boy who haunted her at the Wells of Lurue had grown into.
"Not to destroy. To set things right!" Araman protested, "How could I choose my brother over my god? Yes, I was a feeble, flitting thing when I passed through that door. I was borne by my brother's storm, but I learned from my folly. He set mortal love above the gods, so he paid the price. And we paid with him, you and I."
"Be cautious," Gann warned, "I think choosing one over the other will lead to bloodshed in this dream."
"You are both suffering," Adahni said diplomatically, "But the fault is not your own. Would the Betrayer have wanted this strife between you?"
"No," the Red Woman conceded.
"What my brother desired... how can that matter?" Araman countered, "My brother wanted to uproot the planes and tear down the gods from on high. Suffering cannot be avoided - it can be minimized, yes, but the universe cannot be torn asunder for the sake of one soul!"
"Let the gods fume and rant... we mortals have nothing more than love," Adahni said, "If a god would deny us that pittance, they deserve none of our patronage."
Gann cackled with glee and clapped her on the back, "Anything that makes pretender gods fume and rant warms my heart."
"Spoken like the Betrayer himself,"Araman chastizd her, "Always selfish, always believing that his dreams were grander, that his loves were stronger, and not to be denied! And she is selfish too... she sows suffering in love's name. Let the heavens fall and roast in the pits of hell - if love was served by such as this, she would care not."
"Neither would I," Adahni announced, "I care not for gods or for order, they have done precious little for me but brought sorrow to myself and those around me! They pretend to hold some higher ideals, but they are nothing more than petty lords bickering over souls like mortals bickering over land or gold!"
"Bloodshed it is then!" Gann said, clapping his hands and drawing down a lightning bolt to roast Araman where he stood. It was a gruesome sight, his skin first glowing yellow and then bursting in red veins and falling from his bones. His remains fell in a pile of ashes on the floor. Adahni lookd at him, a little surprised at the power he was able to summon - and the delight he took in the red wizard's demise.
"And love overcomes, as it always must," the woman in red said, satisfied.
"That felt good," Gann chuckled, "Look, his death has opened a portal behind us. We may venture further into this dream."
"The only way out is further in, huh," Adahni said, "All right then, let's go."