pages/acl.cool/site/draft/umbral4.dj

# Umbral Gaze 4: Candle-head

On the heels of their seafaring victory over [the Cyclone](/writings/umbral3/), the party takes a portal to Neverwinter[^neverwinter], "the City of Skilled Hands", lying not far from the next beholder. The settlement offers plenty a nook and corner store from which our heroes can obtain much-needed supplies, and they stock up with vigor. Clementine is lucky enough to find some gilded acorns; Gottlob replenishes his stash of components for "revivify". Come dawn, members of the Wintershield Watchmen[^ww]--- at Tasha's behest--- brief our heroes on their quarry, and the burly dwarves who explain leave the party with an impression of otherworldly absurdity.

The beholder's lair is known to the denizens of Neverwinter as Brog Burgest, "cake pile", for to call the dulcet travesty a "mountain" would be an insult to mountains, but "pile" fails to capture the scale of the topography. Brog Burgest's peak vanishes upward among clouds. A beholder is known by the locals to have taken up residence at the pile, and since it arrived, townspeople and passers-through have vanished at a terrible pace. A correspondence must be assumed.

{.thematic}
***

The party departs with haste, though the journey to the mountain is not long, and soon a warm, sweet wind--- as from a baker's oven--- tousles the party's hair and delights their nostrils. Boots squelching in buttercream frosting, they rock back on their heels to regard the meeting of caky cliffs and gulleys with azure sky. Now at the mountain's base, our heroes discuss what path they should take to the peak, at which they can only assume a dessert-obsessed beholder tends a gargantuan oven. Dutifully, flight-capable Louisa goes ahead by air to scout the narrow path that meanders its way upward along the mountainside--- clearly not laid for easy passage--- but as she ascends through quickly gathering clouds and roiling mists, the solidity of her surroundings wavers; temperate farmland replaces slopes of sponge, and the wizard senses powerful dimensional magic permeating an otherworldly scene before her.

Humanoids--- dead-eyed humans, mostly--- labor in fields of blue-topped grain. Gnomes in bright red hats[^redcap] keep the workers in line, their sickles and whips employed eagerly to _encourage_ any slaves who seem to fall behind. Chained manacles at the ankles of the fitter of their charges seem aimed to prevent escape, though where a runaway could escape _to_, Louisa cannot tell; all is only fields and cliffs as far as she can see.

Rendering herself invisible with a spell, the llama swoops closer to investigate, but cold fingers of dread grip her heart at what she discovers. The wizard's own body, her _human_ body, threshes indigo grass at the edge of the nearest plot; the gaze of a scythe-wielding slave master fixes... her? it..? in cruel contempt from a flanking position. The intensity of labour demanded by the redcaps shows itself in her body's condition. Thin, trembling arms beat the grain at increasing intervals, just today's hours of hard labor taking their toll of strength. Her dark brown hair sports bits of straw and chaff among its tangles; her olive skin is caked with dust and sweat. Whether the glassy, unblinking eyes are a product of exhaustion or of whatever magic moves her presumedly uninhabited form, Louisa only wishes she could tell.

The wizard pauses here, for a moment, to consider her options. She knows that all the desperate longing in the world cannot overcome the tactical reality of the situation on the farmland below--- there is no way she can rescue her human form right now--- but her nature won't allow her to leave without some sort of consolation. Taking a diving pass, the llama spits upon the redcap slave master that pokes mirthfully at her vacated flesh, but as she does, a twisted and ancient three-armed woman appears, black cloth obscuring all but her hands and the dome of here spiral-horned head[^hag]. Locking eyes with Louisa, the creature strikes with a hammer of pure arcane force that sends her flying back down the mountainside, but as she plummets, a single thought fights its way through shock and pain to the forefront of her mind: that twisted hag is the very same figure that slunk away on the night that she was trapped in her present form, cursed to wander Faerûn a llama.

Back on the ground, the rest of the party are alarmed to see their friend come punching through the cloud layer more quickly than any flight could allow, so quick they cannot possibly react. They're subsequently relieved, if surprised, to see her plow into a meters-high bank of frosting from which she emerges apparently unharmed. Visibly shaken, but steady of foot and voice, she explains to her party the unnatural vista that lies above the clouds. The prospect of recovering Louisa's human form emboldens the party, and though Almuth detects some traps on the path ahead, they forge onward, upward, headed to the peak of Brog Burgest and--- with luck--- to the rescue of their companion's original form.

Despite their cleric's apprehension--- the traps he detected having been neither identified nor disarmed--- the party makes steady progress; they encounter few obstacles. Some way up the mountain, perhaps half by Gottlob's reckoning, the path underfoot widens to an overlook. There on the mountainside, a troupe of dancers carve a half-dozen interlocking circles in rhythmic starts and stumbles. The grooves are deep--- it's plain they've been at this an inhumanly long time. Frosting coats their every inch of skin, and the heroes to wonder whether their path is blocked by monsters or by men.

The party has no wish to engage, and Clementine's "pass without trace" should be more than a match for the figurants' perceptive abilities, but Gottlob and Almuth pass far too loudly, boots squelching in dulcet slop, and a thrall pulls each into their fiendish waltz. Gottlob shows uncommon agility and grace, practically flitting between partners as he leaps his way free, and Almuth too escapes with just a bit more effort. The party carries on, followed by a sense that they've escaped a great danger with undeserved ease.

Coming finally to the oddly-flat top of the Brog Burgest, party members are struck by expanses of smooth, solid cloud that extend in layers both above and below as though to sandwich the peak between two massive sheet cakes. The path gives on to an open-air enclosure in which torches of purple and orange burn atop plinth-raised statues of dragons in various states of noble contortion. In the opposite corner to the party's ingress, a beholder--- a conventional beholder, apparently--- erects yet another statue and torch, its back to the middle of the room. 

Party members are wary to attack, and anyway hope to carry out Tasha's mission, so after Almuth checks the its alignment--- Lawful _Neutral_; now there's a boon--- he announces their presence. At once, the beholder is all anger and anxiousness. If the interlopers don't leave _right now_, he says, they will surely die! He wishes them no particular harm, but no particular safety either, and if they fail to heed his warning, he shan't feel the slightest remorse except that their presence should interfere with his plans, and so, in any case, so as not to spoil to fruits of his meticulous labors for the pleasure of his good friend Themberchaud[^dragon], to cause his chum wicked indigestion, but just as much so as not to die in fits of horrible, flame-wreathed screams, they _must_ leave at _this very instant!_

Alas, the heroes are too slow to escape what follows. Before the blustering beholder can be convinced to make his motivations clear, a great rush approaches from above. The hole its source punches in the cloud layer puts that of Louisa's fall to shame; an adult red dragon alights at the far end of the summit-plateau in a solitary column of Sun, engendering instant panic. There is nowhere to run on the peak of a mountain from a fully-grown dragon--- but the adventurers need not fear! As Almuth reaches out to his Goddess in a last ditch, hail-mary effort to save his party, his Goddess reaches back. {% Some visual here with Almuth interacting with Eldath would be pretty sick. %} Hearing the cleric's words[^divine], she plies her power to a subtle adjustment deep within Themberchaud's psyche, a faint push in a new direction, a slight reshaping of how he weighs investment risks, and a sigh of divine peacefulness washes over the monstrous creature.

As Themberchaud and Cogyth--- so the dragon addresses the party's quarry--- get to talking, all becomes clear. The "cake pile" is just a cake, baked by Cogyth for the occasion of his close friend's birthday! The purple and orange torches that paint the peak in lurid dichrome flickers are just candles! The strange fact of the party's continued survival before a plainly very hungry red dragon is just down to Eldath having put him on a strict no-people diet, _per_ Almuth's desperate request! The dragon asks Cogyth to let the party leave in peace, and the beholder exclaims in wonderment.

> Themberchaud has finally respected my wishes about... his _health!?_

Assured for the moment of their security, but acutely aware of their need to depart before the dragon gets to devouring the cake underfoot, the party question their orbic interlocutor. As Carmal explains the chaos brought about in the surrounding country by Cogyth's _festivities_, conversation turns to the vanished villagers and to the farmland Louisa saw, now nowhere to be found. By way of answer, the beholder calls out a name, "Cheshira", and the same three-armed hag from the fields appears at his side. Party members glean the situation in snippets of heated conversation between the fiend and the aberration.

Cogyth employed Cheshira as security, to prevent interference by townsfolk with his celebratory preparations, but, in attracting an adventuring party to his abode, the hag has gone too far. Were their business not concluded, she would surely be fired, but as it is, she should take her things and get out of Cogyth's sight. The beholder's anger suggests he was unaware of the people going missing in the area, and his conduct tells the party they needn't worry about him repeating the phenomenon; willfully sowing chaos in the northern lands would run counter to his lawful nature.

Though some questions still burn on party member's tongues, it is not long before the dragon's desire to eat cake overcomes his enjoyment of companionable conversation and he leaps up to shovel untold quantities of sponge down his smoking gullet. Not even Themberchaud could possibly consume the whole of Brog Burgest, but our heroes aren't ones to stick around in the face of such barely-bridled ravening--- party members split as best they can. Louisa takes to the air with Gottlob in tow. Clementine, polymorphed into an ancient winged beast by Carmal, carries the rest of the party cloudward. Cheshira, for her part, makes haste down the mountainside, hoping to escape before the party notices her absence.

The hag has no such luck. Adventurers so reputed, so accomplished as these, would never let a fiend escape unmolested; certainly not a night hag that cursed one of their number and holds a score of people in glassy-eyed servitude. Dropping from the air in amongst a cluster of cottages that lie at one outlet of the path to earthen ground, party members cut off Cheshira's escape on all sides. Almuth encases her in a resilient sphere before she can so much as object. With flight denied to her, she turns to a hag's most trusted and potent weapon: talk, deception, her corrupting tongue. Addressing Louisa directly, Cheshira spins a tale in which the curse she laid was a boon, an impetus to struggle and improve that pushed the wizard to far greater heights than ever she could have achieved on her own, in that school of small-minded hacks she used to attend. The llama is unconvinced; a wizard knows better than to fall for a hag's tricks, and Louisa reads disdain in Cheshira's eyes. Cornered, as Almuth's spell expires, Cheshira turns to her last resort: battle. 

Leaping atop a snug hovel, the bedeviler shutters reality under a crimson sky. Wavering bands of tinted cosmic force--- a product of Cheshira's casting--- surround the cluster of cabins to cut them free of their worldly tethers, letting and their surrounds slip down, unhindered, into the falsity of the Hag's domain. Far above, misty, distorted images of Themberchaud and Cogyth appear as reflected in a pond during high winds. They dance like anguished spectres nearer and nearer the field's delimitations--- the hag grasps at the wispy forms as they come into focus. Her twisted trio of arms weaves two into one[^make_eyedrakes]--- an eyedrake condenses in the red-yellow mists--- but before the mass of droplets can form solid flesh, the hag cleaves it down the middle. _Two_ eyedrakes are born.

Surprised by the eyedrakes' sudden appearance and the _disappearance_ of Faerûn's firmaments, the party are too slow to prevent Cheshira's next move. Her minions unleashed upon her enemy, she seals herself again in an impenetrable sphere, now of her own device. Unable to access their true foe for now, the party manages contends admirably. To handle the combined might of two eyedrakes would be a tall order on any day, but Louisa is incensed; she sees no world in which the party's victory is not assured, in which her human body is returned to her. The first beholder catches Almuth about his face with a wave of anti-magic breath, wounding him badly, before falling to the llama's evocations--- the second breaths its retaliation across the battlefield, but in its haste to recover from the loss of its twin has made a fatal mistake: the cone of anti-magic shatters Cheshira's barrier.

As off a spring, Louisa acts. She knows exactly what spell the situation demands, a spell only she can cast in this moment. Chesira's glances round in wild dismay as her barrier falls catch Lousia's glare of determination; the sounds of the party clashing with the remaining eyedrake fall away, and for a moment the two lock eyes in their own yet-smaller pocket of reality before, at a word from the llama's mouth, the hag is gone with a pop!

The main threat dealth with[^banish]--- for now, at least--- Louisa turns her attention to the final, nearly fallen eyedrake as it winds up for another bout of anti-magic breath, but the cone of numbing force never comes; the wizard _spits_ a fireball that puts an end to all of that, the eyedrake crashing dryly to the ground, body singed and shrunken like a burnt piece of toast^[toast].

[^neverwinter]: [Neverwinter](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Neverwinter) is a northern city of craftsmen and artisans regarded as among the most cosmopolitan metropoleis in Faerûn.

[^ww]: The [Wintershield Watchmen](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Wintershield_watchmen) is a local volunteer militia that polices the city of Neverwinter and sees to its interests in the surrounds.

[^redcap]: [Redcaps](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Redcap) are evil, bloodthirsty fey--- gnome-like in appearance--- known for their brutality and need to kill for self-sustainment.

[^hag]: A [night hag](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Night_hag), a hag from the Hells.

[^dragon]: [Themberchaud](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Themberchaud), the Wyrmsmith of Gracklstugh, the Father of Flame, the Everburning! What a pickle...

[^divine]: Almuth's player rolled `20` on "Divine Intervention" (in his birthday session, no less)

[^make_eyedrakes]: Extrasessional information: "Through the nature of a beholder's dreams, the lingering sentiment Cogyth felt while wishing to reunite with Themberchaud crossed into the feywild, and Cheshira gives it the shape of an eyedrake[^eyedrake]. Just before making it flesh, she splits it in two."

[^eyedrake]: An [eyedrake](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Eyedrake) is a lesser beholderkin that comes about when beholders dream of a dragon.

[^banish]: Lousisa casts bannishment, sending the night hag directly to hell.

[^toast]: Faithful to the scene as it happened.