Present, Luskan
It was a dark and stormy night in Luskan. The weather was cold enough to be dreadfully uncomfortable, but not cold enough to turn the pelting rain into snow. The cobblestoned streets were sure to be a treacherous mess. Eshuar Stecklet of the Circle of Blades peered out of the peephole onto the street. He'd heard the footsteps blocks away, thanks to some very clever acoustic architecture underneath the floor of the entrance he guarded.
He caught sight of them as they turned the corner. Three cloaked and cowled figures struggled through the windy streets of Luskan. The first consulted a map every couple of blocks until, satisfied that she had found the correct way. She led the other two to what from the outside was an unremarkable door set into an unremarkable building.
She knocked with a rhythm. Tok tok TOK TOK tok.
Eshuar opened the door a crack, "The fuck you want?"
"The moth of innocence perishes at dawn," the leader said. Her voice was raspy and she pitched it low. He thought he could detect a Neverese accent, but it was difficult to discern beyond the screaming of the wind. She used the passphrase that they had leaked several years before for the purposes of luring pilgrims to their door, starting rumors that if you wanted to do something really wild, you could say that and a real live assassin would let you into the temple of a real live evil god.
"All right, come on in."
The door swung open to reveal a firelit room. The figures doffed their cloaks, revealing a tiefling, and elf, and an old woman. Eshuar eyed them warily. They didn't look like aspiring assassins.
"What's your purpose here?" He asked, "What business do you have with the Circle of Blades?"
"We seek to worship Cyric in his temple," the leader said. With her cowl down, he could see that she was red-eyed and in possession of two short, curved horns that thrust up and back from her upper forehead.
"You're Neverese," he commented.
"Aye, this is the closest temple in the Sword Coast," the tiefling said.
"So you seek to commune with a dead God," Eshuar said, chuckling. "Well, I'm not a religious man myself, but if you don't have a job for us, a job you'll pay for, access to the temple is on a strictly discretionary basis."
"We… ah," the elf interjected, "Are prepared to make a most generous donation. For the upkeep of the house of our most beloved God."
"I'm glad to see we speak the same language," Eshuar said, "That'll be ten thousand gold for Cyric and, erm, half that for me."
The elf rolled his eyes, but handed over the money. Eshuar congratulated himself silently. He really wasn't much of an assassin, but could eke out a living just on the gullible pilgrims that happened by. He took a torch from a sconce on the wall and led them, down and down. There were entrances to the Temple of Cyric all over Luskan, some covered by the Circle of Blades, some abandoned and left to time since the old god's demise. There were, of course, some cultists left among their number, but Eshuar and a growing number of the young assassins were happy to shift their allegiance to the much more orderly worship of Kelemvor. He wondered what these tourists' story was. It was odd to see a tiefling, elf, and human travel together, but that the tiefling was young, the elf middleaged, and the human aged, stranger still.
Doesn't matter. Gold is gold.
"Here we are," he grunted, having come to the entrance closest the altar. The sanctuary itself was entirely underground and lite by some magicked torches that burned eternally and with just enough smoke given off to make the place seem mysterious and ancient.
"Thank you, young man," the human said, and tucked something into his hand. As he turned to go back to his post, he saw that it was a wrapped hard candy. Tourists, he thought to himself.
"OK, so I got us here, now what?" Neeshka asked, crossing her arms over her chest. She felt oddly at home in the temple of the dead God, though she couldn't say she enjoyed the artwork - relief sculptures of bodies in various stages of torture and dismemberment - overmuch.
"I have a very clever little relic here," Sand said, producing a smooth, black stone from his sleeves, "If you ladies would take my hand, we should be able to see… oh yes! There it is!"
As her hand closed on Sand's elbow, Neeshka could see in the corner, to the left of the altar, a gaping portal.
"What in the hells is that?"
"Apt question," Kailana said, "That would be a portal to Shadow Luskan. Sand has it on good authority that there exsts a door therein where we may pass to the Boneyard of the Gods, and beyond that, to the Fugue Plane and City of Judgment."
"I've got to start vetting these quests more thoroughly," muttered Neeshka.
"Oh hush, you're loving this," Sand said.
"Beats dirty diapers," she conceded, "So, you're absolutely sure that once we get there, we get to come back? I mean it is the City of the Dead, after all…"
"As a student of the metaphysical my whole life, I assure you that we will return in one piece," Kailana assuaged her.
"Onward then!" Sand announced, and the three of them stepped through the portal.
"Did we just step through into…"
"Yes, this is the shadow plane," Kailana said, "Wouldn't mistake it for anything else."
"It looks the same as where we just came from," Neeshka said, looking down at her normally red cloak and seeing it lacked color entirely, "Except… yeah OK. So how… exactly does this work?"
"I've heard tell that there is a vault underneath this temple through which we may walk to enter the Boneyard of the Gods. Beyond that, we can access the City of Judgment."
"I'm glad we didn't think to bring along any fighting men," said Neeshka, "I'm rusty with a dagger." She found the hilt with her hand and felt an electric jolt through her hand as it met with its oldest friend.
"I've got some potions of invisibility for if it looks like it's about to get dangerous," the wizard said. "Now, if you were the Mad God, where would you keep your vault?"
"A crazy place for a vault," mused Kailana, "What would I do if I were off my rocker?"
"We should have brought Aldanon. Too bad he broke his hip last week…" Sand lamented.
"It's not like Cyric actually built it," Neeshka corrected them, "This place, like all temples, was built by men. Even the maddest of men is still bound to the laws of gravity and architecture. We're pretty far underground now, to go further would probably have us running into groundwater. Therefore, it must be a lateral move, and one that is not in the direction from whence we came."
"How did you…?"
"Superior extrapolations," she shot back. She went to the wall and, taking a torch from a sconce on the wall, began tapping at the stones with the heavy oak handle of it. She took it round and about the room until a hollow noise came from one rock. She took a small crowbar out of her pack and started to try to dislodge it. First one rock came out, then another, then another. It took them an hour or more to disassemble the wall to the left of the altar. When they had finished, the tiefling, who had stood before many such threatening doors in the past, was awestruck.
They stood before a door that was strange and wrong, even for the shadowy realm in which they stood. It was blacker than black, but as she gazed long at it Neeshka began to discern shapes in it. A great fight between a man and a God, the man victorious, but… at what cost. At the center was a hole like a keyhole, but wide enough that the hand of a small person could pass through it. Her nature overcame her trepidation at that point, and she thrust her arm is as far as it would go, searching for a mechanism within. She found none, no gears or pins as there were in normal locks. She withdrew her hand, confused.
"So how do we open it?" She asked.
"Don't even ask me how much this cost," Sand said. He opened the pack on his back and took out something wrapped in silk. He put it on the floor with a clank, and gingerly opened it up. Lying within, gleaming and glowing even in the colorless torch light of the Shadow Realm, was a Githyanki sword.
"I won't," she said, picking it up. It was the opposite of the feeling she had handling her old dagger. This weapon was strange. She took it, and thrust it into the hole in the middle of the strange door.
With a groan, the door slid open, and beyond they could see a blue lit path under a darkened sky, leading up and away up a hill and disappearing. Silently, Sand reached into a pouch at his waist and produced three vials containing some sickly green liquid.
"It looks like bile," Neeshka protested.
"Do you feel like tangling with a bunch of doomguards?"
"I suppose not," she grumbled and reluctantly drank hers down. Despite its appearance it didn't actually taste terrible, and she awaited the familiar floating sensation she got when under the influence of an invisibility spell. It came, and the three of them stood there in the shadows, waiting for the disorientation one usually experienced when one could not see ones body to pass.
"All ready then?" Kailana's voice chirped, "All right Neeshka, I've got my Veil of Seeing on, I'm going to take hold of both of your hands so we don't get separated."
"Yes mother," Sand's voice quipped.
"Oh please, you could be my great grandfather and you know it," she replied.
The three of them walked through the eldritch door, careful not to make any noises. Neeshka at first thought they were passing through a petrified forest, the stone trees reaching to the sky. As they passed, though, the pattern of trees was too orderly, too consistent. As they made it further up the steep hill that led to their destination, she realized that they had been walking through a massive ribcage. She stifled a shriek as she saw below them, the doomguards - the souls of the faithful ever cleaved to the side of their god even after the lot of them were long dead - came upon the trail that the three had left. Kailana squeezed her hand, and they quickened their pace.
After what seemed like eternity - time seemed to be still in this place - they had reached the top of the hill. There, in the ruins of a giant hand, was a portal. She felt herself dragged through by Kailana's invisible hand.
The three of them - Sand, Kailana, and Neeshka, tumbled out on the other side. The spell that had hidden them in the Boneyard of the Gods did not follow them, and she again had to get used to being able to see her limbs. Once she had adjusted, she stood and looked around. It was not cold, but it was snowing, slowly. Before them, soaring upwards into the low, blue sky, stood an enormous wall. Straining her eyes, she could see the faces of the wretched dead that made it up.
"So…" Neeshka said, "You're telling me you brought us here to check for one or two shades amid the Wall of the Faithless - the Wall that contains all of the souls of every dead antitheist the world over - and there's no directory?"
"Good thing that while we're here we have ceased to exist in time," Sand remarked, "Better start walking."