[Mage: The Awakening] Dead Air (Part 2)

Out of Character (OOC):
Chronicle: Mage: The Horseman
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler 
Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum

This is part two of a retelling of the final plot of our LAST mage Chronicle, which concluded in December of 2012.  End of the world and all that, obviously they succeeded.  It is chock full of insanity...  Also I lifted the Denarians from the Dresden Files to use as antagonists. It was so much fun.

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3

Mage: The Horsemen
Death: Resumption after the events of our doom (Story: Dead Air)
By Casstiel, Lorekeeper of the Horsemen (Dec 2013)

((Jack Text))

((IndraText))

((Kairos Text))

CHAPTER 2 – Erebus

CANTO I – First Steps

We were pretty shaken up.  Loudon could no longer be trusted, moreover the demon in him could take over at any time.  Nevertheless he needed to be involved in the next part.  Loudon was so distraught at the creature in his head now laughing at him and showing her true colors, then promising to help again.  She said she wanted the plan to succeed but she didn’t want Nico in change anymore, could we use that to our advantage?  She got people through their greed for power, she was a thing of greed herself.  And our own personal Judas, Seraph was pretty much set to Loudon the next time he acted out.  Seraph, being heavily set against all things Abyssal was also extremely mistrusting of Nergal who used an Abyssal wraithblade and Prodigy who showed the ability to befoul his magic and practically reeked of Abyssal taint already.  In our quest to be ready to take on the Denarians we had all in some way, great or small, compromised our morals.  We all had made soulstones too, only Indra, Rook, and Jack mostly remained un-jaded up until now. 

I was torn – I figured if the time came to stop Loudon, he’d be 100% minted Denarian, Lashiel would have completely consumed him, and that might make it easier…Screw that, saying something and doing it are two completely different things.  And now Loudon is Loudon, but Lashiel can control him whenever she wants.  How do I deal with that?  I trust Loudon…but…I can’t trust him.  If I were a third party, I’d totally support Seraph’s view; if I were detached, reading from a book, the best thing to do would be to eliminate any potential threats.  But how could I say that?  Loudon was my friend.

I was angry at the fact that our friend was being used to further plots by the Denarians. I was angry because there was nothing we could truly do to help. I also felt deepened sorrow for my friend. I know what being in that position feels like, having been there so many times before. I don’t believe that Loudon was our own true Judas for he didn’t betray out of his own will. Lashiel was planted to force what looked like a betrayal. Being a puppet master and Loudon her own personal marionette. It was too disgusting.

Maybe I was too busy with Loudon to realize what Prodigy was really up to.  Even with my minds seeped in the universal subconscious and honed to a razor blade, I knew nothing of my friends new Familiar.  It looked like we were taking a trip into the Underworld, a dangerous trip to the very bottom, the suicide mission of our lives.  But we had gone all the way to the shores of Orouboros hadn’t we?  Destiny would see us at least die at the hands of our archenemies in the depths of the deadlands right?  Prodigy was firm in his belief that he needed to stay behind, guard the Sanctum, keep the other five Denarians from sneaking up behind us from the surface.  This could be a trick.  He would do his role as the Door Warden and guard the material world while we were gone.  It really wasn’t like him to miss the final boss…

Something seemed off with Prodigy… I didn’t know what it was, but something just felt…different.  I suppose it was an okay plan to prevent the remaining five Denarians (which we had just finished running off) from sneaking back around and ambushing us.  But would one person remaining behind even make a difference?  Sure it’s Prodigy, but despite all his brashness, I had my doubts when it came to going up against five Denarians alone.  I think it would make more sense to stick together – if it came to it, we could just beat them back again.  We didn’t really have the time to debate, though, and when Prodigy wants to do something, he does it.

It does seem fishy that Prodigy decided to not fight along with us. Out of everyone he was always the first to use the fight or flight method. Okay he really just liked the fight method. Something felt off with Prodigy as of late. However, I’ll trust him to keep my back. He hasn’t disappointed me yet and always took matters into his own hands for the benefit of the group, no matter how extreme they may be.

We confirmed with divinations that what Tessa had said was true, dissecting this new information.  We as a group voted to head into the Underworld.  But not unprepared.  We were still key’d up on all our spell prep for at least the next 24 hours and the clock was ticking on the Apocalypse.  But first we needed information.  Only my fiancé Persephone had ventured into the Underworld before, Nergal, our resident death expert was not all that well versed in the Death Dominions.  This was going to be a crash course for everyone.

To safeguard against Lashiel’s tricks we worked a powerful Geas on both her and Loudon, he would not surrender his coin.  Too dangerous, too easy for the demon’s shadow to get in your head.  I wasn’t sure I believed him, even though he and her could not lie.  I wasn’t sure how well the Geas would even work, Inferals have a knack for lying… and ignoring spells.

The only person I was hesitant to take with us was Loudon.  After that stunt that Lashiel pulled, how could we be sure that she wouldn’t do it again when we were vulnerable?  I was really against his coming – Lashiel was probably communicating with the other Denarians anyway, was practically a spy!  It was painful to see the effect on Loudon – he clearly had no control over her and was mortified that Lashiel had betrayed us, could essentially do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted.   ~Or at least, that’s what he appeared to be feeling.  What if it was all Lashiel playing us again?  What if she’d been doing that this whole time?  What if that wasn’t really Loudon?~ that’s what the nagging voice inside my head kept thinking.  We couldn’t afford another betrayal.  But we needed Loudon and his healing magic.  There was no way we’d get far without him.  I wanted to bang my head against the wall with these two conflicting views.  I wished this wasn’t happening.  The only thing I could do – if my brain couldn’t tell me what to do, was to trust my feelings.  I felt Loudon was on our side.  But Lashiel was most definitely not.  Loudon had to come, but I knew that Lashiel would come back to bite us later.

Research on the Underworld, there is plenty of Fallen Lore and things Nergal glimpsed in his visit to Stygia, certain things ring true.  But we needed more.  We scoured Gabrielle’s library and our own, we had STARK correlate and compile all online sleeper texts without compromising his existence anyone, including other supernatural IT assets.  We started pulling favors within our limited access to the Mysterium of lore on the topography and nature of the Underworld… it didn’t really get us very far.

I went into my Onerious and read the Book of Lost Fragments, letting my mind go blank so the pages would fill up with something useful.  The Astral Artifact revealed to me that there is a library in the Underworld, a vast death dominion in which all knowledge incomplete or dead resides.  This is an expansion upon the Astral Codex I was using, which shows me lore which was destroyed forever.  If we could get to the library, we might be able to find out how to get to the bottom or how to stop the Hellmenth.  It was a partial solution, a direction.  What was most discouraging was that there supposedly was no bottom to the Underworld we could find out about.  “Below the depths is another deep.”  If we could “Follow the Owls to the Athenaum we may be able to find out what and where Tessa was talking about.  “Below the bottom,” and “Sheol.” Further into the Lower Depths? Closer to Abandon perhaps.

Kairos took $25,000 out of the bank and paid the Scholomance for a rush-order book on maps of the Underworld and traveling guides.  They mostly only trafficked in Abyssal lore but had delivered on other subjects before. True to their mysterious nature the book showed up in a few hours. It all boiled down to the following facts we pieced together:

1. Ferrymen can help you find your way for a price
2. The river Styx can actually take you all the way to the bottom of the Underworld, but it’s length is impossibly long and may loop back, reverse direction, and touch hundreds of realms before getting there.
3. Below the Autochtonous Depths are the Dead Dominions with Old Laws, Kerberoi Guardians and talk of mysterious Death Lords further down of godlike power.
4. The borders of these realms are rivers, almost like a honeycomb seen in a few maps, but they can be changing and non-Euclidian.

CANTO II – The Path

We went to the closest Underworld Gate we knew about, the Beulah Cemetery care-shed.  Every graveyard has a Underworld Gate, you just have to find it and know the key. We didn’t know the key to open the gate by Nergal forced it open with his Mastery of Death.  We all said a few final words: that we were saving the world, that this was the suicide mission we always knew was coming.  Most likely this was a one way trip, but if we were going to face the Doom we were going to face it head-on.  It was our way.  Our only mission: to stop the Denarians final release of the Hellmenth, maybe get some payback.

I should have told Persephone and Nanashi where I was headed, maybe I should have said goodbye to some folks.  I was worried they would try to stop me if I did.  Goodbyes are hard and I didn’t want to lose my nerve.  Everyone dealt with it in their own limited way with the time we felt we could spare on it.  Magic was used to speed along the affairs.

I contacted my parents, Steph…all the friends and relatives I should have been more in touch with and wouldn’t want to leave without saying hi.  Of course that’s all I said – hi, how’re you doing, some small talk.  I had to have STARK synthesize my voice through transmission to make it sound normal.  And then…I took a step back from everything, focused my thoughts.  This is ridiculous.  You can’t go into a challenge expecting to fail, and that’s exactly what we were doing.  I can’t deny anyone talking to their loved ones… but we had to shake out of the mindset that this was the end.  If you expect to fail, you’ll fail.  We were here for a reason, and that reason is because we can stop the Denarians. 

I hate goodbyes with every fiber of my being. Goodbye is something you say to someone when you have no intention of talking or seeing them again. I had every intent on coming back to everyone I knew, WITH everyone I went with. I just hate that this was one of those moments where no one was absolutely sure that we would get out of it alive. I was confident in my abilities but at the same time terrified. If we did get through it, nothing would be the same.

I offered to copy anyone's minds into my soulstone in case someone didn't make it back.  Only Loudon accepted but it was likely the shadow in his mind of the demon would still be present there.  I also copied my mind, I used this later to normalized with what happened in this timeline against what I remember from my own.

We strode in with all our spells, tech, equipment, assets, knowledge, everything we had and everything we were.  Prodigy wasn’t there to see us off.  STARK immediately lost reception with the mothership and was limited what memory it had on our cellphones.  Azazel was still very useful.

Magic functions very differently in the Underworld as you can imagine.  Death works better, Fate affects Laws, Forces can affect ghosts marginally, Life is all but useless on anything but ourselves, Matter marginally affects the ephemeral landscape, Mind works marginally on human ghosts but needs some death to truly be effective, Prime is normal but the only source of Mana is us, Space is wonky as all hell but can still be used (no teleportation or portals), Spirit it pretty much completely useless and nothing but what we brought with us can have a spirit.  Time functions intermittently, a timeless quality of the place awash with thousands of deaths and memories can overwhelm even a simple working.  We noticed these effects throughout our endless night.

The way magic worked felt disgusting to me. Matter was kind of confusing and Time was…the worst thing to do here. I had a queasy feeling in my gut about this adventure of ours. A feeling of uselessness set in almost two steps in.

The start of the path down was in the Autochtonous Depths, still close to the material world which models off of the local beliefs and landscapes of the dead in the phemoral world.  Coming from within North Dakota side we passed through tunnels of frozen hard dirt, coffins and tombstones written in German and other languages jutting into the path and Christian religious symbols.  This was quickly replaced by Native American symbols and tombs as we continued.  The dead here were recent and sparsely spread-out, hunkered half-naked in the tunnels.

I was thankful with my experience with dead things that I had gotten through Nergal, but even so, they creeped me out.  It was definitely not something that felt pleasant to deal with, at least not here.  Ghosts were more real here, they retained their minds and personalities like manifested ghosts didn't without the aid of Creepy's magic.

Navigation was immediately pretty dicey and we brought all our wit, maps, and magic upon it.  Fate I felt I could trust, space not so much…  Nergal used spirits to map out tunnels around us.  Nevertheless we found ourselves in various annoying pinch points, slick frozen areas, freezing cold muddy water, and pockets of toxic gas.  Slow going for a big group.  Thankfully Life magic provided by Seraph and Loudon kept us in good health and spirits.

I scattered pebbles linked sympathetically with the pouch I kept them in. They wouldn't be much good finding the way there, but if we got lost, they might help.

Eventually we had to bribe a few of the ghosts wandering the tunnels by giving up some of our less important gear.  Nergal also made various Offrendas and baubles, sacrificing precious Mana to create ephemeral gifts.  All refused to take us down to the Death Dominions.  One of these despits told us that a Ferryman named Xolotl would take us to the bottom.  We just needed to get to the first river to get our bearings.

I hate it down there. The whole place feels like it's constantly leaking something that can't ever be renewed.  When you are the only beacons of life, you get a lot of attention.  Everyone is desperate, the dead have stories and need so much.

We kept proceeding in a downward direction, it took hours and looking back may have been the longest part of our journey.  As we approached older more primal scenery we suddenly found us being chased downwards by a mass of ghosts that had congealed into one colossal mist of death.  This swarm of howling dead could not be stopped, fought, or reasoned with.  We had to collapse a few tunnels to get away from it.  We were lost now, cut off from our mapped portions.  We soon hit a dead end and turned back.

CANTO III - Corporeal Eschatology

But there was now a large wall behind us was actually a massive gate.  A gate of hooks and blades with ghostly body parts impaled upon it.  The writing declared it one of the Seven Gates.  From our research we knew of the legend of Ishtar’s trip to the underworld and how she had to leave part of her jewelry at each gate to proceed.

It was pretty clear what needed to happen, but none of us were willing to cut off a limb to pass through the gate.  Fate, Death, and Life mastery allowed us to ceremonially cut off and replace a body part for each of us.  We each chose and endure the pain and bloodshed but it was a life-generate facsimile which was placed on the gate hooks.  It didn’t open.  Indra tried playing the Lyre of Ishtar (The Artifact she retained from the Temple of Sin), a song which hurt Azazel and Loudon substantially.  The gate shuttered and opened.

We passed through a few strange sights and Tableauxes before finally arriving at our first river.  Kohan-IL… the River of Pus.  The smell of putrefaction was unbelievable.  A sloshy sickly greenish white river so foul even the dead avoid it.  Angry mushrooms which smelled worse grew along its shore.  It seemed to burp and bubble tiny currents and splashes as if something wormy was slithering underneath the surface. 

Nergal and the Cabal decide the best thing to do rather than to swim or wait for a boat would be to do a powerful ghost summons which should work on a Ferryman.  We knew the name of one now after all – Xolotl.  The spell completed using our various correspondences and a shallow and dangerous looking Aztec style boat rides up on the crest of filth.

Xolotl was a cowled dog-skulled Ferryman with a long oar.  He agreed to take us in exchange for an animal sacrifice once we are topside again.  Strange payment but he seemed more like an animal Phychopmp than a regular Ferryman.

Bitch-hound.  The ride does slow and about how you would expect.  If not for the spells we would have thrown up everything into the pus.  Sometimes a larger wave would rock over the side of the shallow boat, weighed down heavily by all of us…. Just gross.  The Ferryman doesn’t say anything, he has to be foreboding after all.  Through the murk and tunnels we finally see some light, a massive glowing stone brick shape and lava flows.  Our first Death Dominion, and according to the map its already pretty far down.  This is when it becomes clear why Xolotl was so cheap, he wasn’t a real ferryman, he was a head-hunter.

The fucker immediately flips the boat and jumps onto the shore, flies to shore actually, dumping us into the pus until some spellwork can get us up.  We are about crawl ashore and kick Xolotl’s bony ass when Rook tells us to wait. This is a trap.  Xolotl tells us it’s inevitable, the second we swim to shore and touch the lavarock shore we will be prisoners of the Lowgate, and be taken to King Yama’s prison forever.  

Turns out flying is temporary when it comes to crossing rivers.  It just doesn’t work, swimming has its cost and ferryman have their costs but crossing is not for free.  We sink into the murk… spells again, spells against drowning but there are no true spells against gross-out… my mind magic can only go so far.  For spite Karios and Nergal obliterate the skull-man on the shore… what happens when you kill something that never lived btw? Thought experiment for another time.

The pus was disgusting; it’s like swimming in a river full of popped pimples. I shudder every time I think about the pus river. Let me tell you ‘killing’ him was one of the most satisfying things so far. He may have not been living before we killed him but you know punching bags are meant to be hit.

Through ingenuity we fashion ourselves solidified rafts down the mighty river of pus until we reach another Death Dominion that looks at least marginally safer… a massive junkyard far deeper into the Underworld. 

Bathing in the river takes its toll… using fate and death we determine that ghosts will not attack us for seven days, the filth sees to that, the metaphysical stench drives them off.  But wounds won’t heal for seven days either…. That is a problem. 

My skin felt like I'd been burned, and it got under all my clothes, too. Not pleasant.

Just as lucky… since we ended up in the Underworld version of free-for-all Robotwars.

CHAPTER 3 – The Death Dominions

CANTO I – The Junkyard

Okay, not exactly a free for all.  While sometimes obscured, the rules to any death dominion we entered tended to have the rules posted somewhere obvious.  From our research we had a vague notion of what happens when you break the rules of any realm.  This massive Junkyard was apparently where ancient ghosts eventually found themselves to continue some kind of soul-perfection through the usual Underworld means… torture.  In this case the ghosts were turned into machines, souls broken down into ephemeral components and piecemeal reconstructed as fighting robots which had to adapt by using the fragments of other ghost parts and fight other ghost machines.  Only one on one combat was allowed with no interference.  The fight was to the death and the winner cannibalized the loser, making itself better.  The reigning champion could be seen tromping around from a mile away and in the other direction from the river we could see a hellish light of a massive crusher.  In this case, the laws were carved on the side of the Crushers, we used space to read them from our vantage.

To find another river and other bordering realms we needed to cut across this one.  Navigating the seemingly endless junkyard was again the hard part, Life spells and other magical assistance allowing us to run across the debris without much trouble.  Even better, with the filth of the River of Pus on us none of the wandering mechaghost wanted to even get near us.  Some of them were dueling, it was grotesque to watch.

We were passing through the heaps when our spider senses started going off.  Anti-magic bubbles dropped down all around us and over the heaps I saw a familiar hulking bear-like form.  Urshiel, my old demonbear-buddy, a Denarian who once slammed me into the ground so hard that I thought I had died.  The six-armed, horned, four-eyed monstrosity was not alone.  His Denarian friends were the best of the breed, sent to slow us down or assassinate us no doubt.  Perhaps Tessa had him know we were coming.  Maybe they knew through prophecy or any number of Time or Fate spells which you can only shield yourself so much against.

Regardless, here they were charging in.  And I knew all their names form Vatican text and description.  Here was Magog the destroyer, The Crone herself, without her hounds this time (thank the gods).  Urshiel of course and the fabled Thorned Namshiel.  Namshiel was the one who freed a third of the coins from the Vatican archives not but a two years ago.  The thin reptile thing was a crafty bastard.  Lastly  Rosanna the Succubus.

Ursiel

Inverted pentagrams filled the ground, suppressing all magic as we spread out.  This was a special Infernal trick which we originally wasted a little precious time trying to despell the first time we met them.  Turned out that only Indra and Jack using Holy Fire and Loudon using Hellfire could destroy these spells once they took hold.  Meanwhile Rook and I tried to support the main assault with our various faltering spells.  Seraph went toe to toe with Magog and Kairos tanked the Crone while Nergal kited Ursiel best he could.  Thorned Namshiel had to be stopped, he and Rosanna were sitting back hurling blasts of hellfire and darker curses at us.  I was on curse removal duty.  Once the anti-magic fields were down, Indra, Jack, Rook and Loudon turned their attention on the ranged attackers.  Turns out we were pretty evenly matched at 5 Denarians vs 8 of us… a depressing fact.

Wait…how can you have an inverted pentagram on the ground?  Just look at it from a different perspective and it’s right side up.  Okay okay, I’m sure there’s more to it than that….  Loudon and I stood back to back, burning through the infernal symbols on the ground.  Holy Fire blended with electricity arced from pentagram to pentagram, using their own magic as a conduit.

It probably has to do with the orientation of the pentagram with relation to ley lines, cardinal directions, and the like.  They looked inverted to our angle of movement we were traveling when we were attacked.

Magog

Karios was pretty good close up against the Crone’s blade but once he got a little distance with an explosion of surrounding metal he brought out Famines Bow and started blasting her apart.  Frankly, Magog hit hard but Seraph had regeneration, healing, and lots of armor.  The Hornsounder decapitated Magog and I never saw him bleed once.  Loudon, Kairos, Nergal, and myself teamed up on our old buddy the six-armed bear and Nergal ripped the coin out of his head with his shadows, parts of the brain still attached.

Against the Crone, who would have thought that all those years of martial arts practice with my friends in lofts and basements would pay off? It felt good to go back to some roots. Good ol’ physical beat down and then she gave me some room. Rather than let her breathe and think about the situation I bombarded her with arrows.

Rosanna and Namshiel were pretty fucked up and tried to make a break for it.  Rosanna couldn’t counter spell the rain of attacks and fell. Nergal collected the coins with his living shadows and placed them in a shadow container without touching them.

Literal Holy Fire rain, left over from my firecrackers with the safeties removed.  I lit that golden crane and sent it flying into the Denarians like a Klingon bird of prey; they didn’t even pay attention to the tiny paper bird until it exploded in the middle of them, whistling and shrieking, covering them in a burning torrent.  Gandalf would have been proud.

Namshiel was very crafty and good at deflecting spells and countering with powerful curses, knocking a few of us silly for a few crucial moments.  It looked like he was going to escape when a massive hulking mech stomped him dead.  It was the Victor… the perfected robot who had gone unbeaten in this realm for centuries.  Whoever wins the fight becomes the Kerberos of the Junkyard… the guardian and god of the Dominion.  And we had broken the laws by not fighting in one-on-one duels… it was something we attempted but quickly forgot in the heat of the battle.  After all, we needed all 8 to not get killed by their 5.  That was likely part of their trap, and even in death they now gave us a bigger problem.

I am sure a few of us were tantalized by the possibility of beating this thing and becoming a death god.  I am sure it crossed Nergal’s mind.  But this thing was Godzilla in power and proportions, I reminded the party of our fight with Da’ath and how he had been toying with us.  This thing was coming fast.  When he was only a few massive strides away Rook got the idea that maybe we could change the laws somehow, exempt ourselves.  The two of us quickly worked a powerful spell of Fate which I cast on our group.  It worked. We were exempted from this law for a time… it wouldn’t last forever.  The Victor turned away and started heading in the direction of the ever pounding Crushers.

I could have taken it. ... in a few years. Okay maybe decades.  But we would have exhausted ourselves when we had more Denarians we had to be ready for.  When the Fate spell wore off I am pretty sure that thing is still gunning for us.

We made haste again, adding Time Accelerations to our bodies and reach another river as quickly as possible.  Another journey out of time.  Perceptual relativity and the progress of time was really fucked here.  I couldn’t tell you if it took a few minutes or a day before we hit another river.  Our spells had not expired, perhaps key’d to real time up above… I don't know.

We found a river… but it was more like a lava-flow.  It was the fabled Phlegethon from Dante’s Inferno.  The river of fire. The water boiled and glowed orange, moving at a sluggish pace… like I said more like Lava than water but not as dense.  It’s heat was intense.  No way we would be swimming this time.  

Nergal worked up another summoning of a ferryman using his understanding of Spirit and Death, this time more generalized while we kept our distance from the boiling air around the river.  This ferryman was a skeletal being aflame, his price for taking us to the Library deep in the Underworld was to consume something of value.  We each had to pony up something of emotional significance in order to board.  I allowed him to consume in fire the memory of my first kiss.  He pressed his hand against my forehead and seared the memory away.  I also lost my eyebrows as a result… we were looking more ragged all the time, even our spell-empowered clothing was in tatters from travel and combat.  Some of us wore bad bruises from Paradox.  That’s right… Paradox still works in such a fantastical place.  Perhaps because it is more fallen than the Astral Realms… can’t catch a break.

Most of my emotionally charged memories are necessary so I don't make the same mistakes again. It took me a few minutes to pick one: the multitool my dad gave me. I sold popcorn as a Cub Scout to earn one of the highest prizes available, but our family reunion meant I couldn't make the final popcorn sales, and my dad said he'd do it, since he knew I would have made the goal if not for family business.

Down the Phlegethon we passed by another realm wreathed in lava and flame.  Not the blasted landscape around King Yama’s prison but molten metal lakes and several large structures.  The ferryman, he never said his name, could have been Charon for all I know, told us it was the Forge of Orcus.  We watched the fiery slag of run-off souls from the forge feed into the river as we passed.

Mercury is far more likely than Charon.

CANTO II – The Athenaum

The ferryman dropped us off at the mouth of a cave.  Allowing no questions regarding where the library was the ferryman had us get off.  We went into the cave and the darkness with its switchbacks.  It was time to get lost again in order to be found, being lost forever in the bowels of the Underworld, never to find your way out seems to be a re-occurring theme in this place and it was getting old.  But before we got lost we spotted our first Owl.  Just like it said in the Codex we chased the Owlings, not precisely owls because their feet were flapping books. 

We came upon a rusty gate, broken open and passed that a stone archway with an ancient seal upon the floor.  Two Sphinxes on pedestals and we hesitated to pass by.  They recited the laws, they were pretty simple.  In order to enter the Athenanum we needed to give the library something it did not already possess.  We needed to present some dead knowledge.  In order for knowledge to be dead it had to be destroyed and forgotten.  We each made our sacrifices… so many on this trip already... gifts of memory and stories never written, dreams never shared, songs never sung and passed through the arch.  The only other rule of note was they we could not take anything out of the library, that was to say we could not remove any of the dead knowledge… but we were only making copies of the knowledge in our heads if we read something.  We had to remember it. Thankful Mind magic would help with that.

I thought a library realm would be really cool, but once we were inside the endless rows and levels, stairs, and books books books so many goddamn books it was kind of overwhelming…  Owlings flitted around in the massive open spaces and balconies and below and above the floors of books twisted endlessly in a mad spiral that defied gravity.

What do you mean 'but'? Booooks! I might or might not have moved a few books around while we searched, doing my best to speed-read them as we walked from one destination to another.

We followed the esoteric and confusing directories and proceeded to the most likely place where what we needed might be.  We passed the Hall of Silence, a place of perfect meditation for the soul. And the Lost hall.. the hall where things were lost twice and forgotten forever… including the tantalizing possibility that Atlantean lore might be down there.  But we didn’t like the look of it and Fate said “bad juju”… god I love my cards sometimes. Avoided a hot mess of troubles and lost time that way.

In the hall of words we split up looking for various topics.  Nergal, Loudon, and Kairos proceeded to the hall of Words, were anything written and now dead is contained.  Rook, Jack, and Seraph went to the Hall of Time, where things were contained that died without being written.  Indra and I also went to the Hall of time.

Splitting up the party in a seemingly innocuous place is sort of a bad idea.  But our spells and oaths bound us together and if that wasn’t enough I don’t know what would be.  It was a library what could go wrong?  I was worried that at any seconds the Owlings would grow sharp teeth or tentacles and we would be re-enacting a Lovecraftian version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

What could go wrong? We’re in the Underworld’s library. Have you ever tried to imagine what the librarian looked like before we found it?! Hope no one made any unnecessary noise!  What would the librarians be like?

Apparently if you focus hard enough on what you truly seek and pursue it you eventually find your way to the right books.  We had a lot of questions answered here at last.  Kairos, Loudon, and Nergal found lore on the actual existence of the Five Horsemen.  Obscure heretical texts about the Death lords and other supernatural gods creating pacts to empower supernal mantles. We saw their five seals (same as from the Temple of Sin) and the five armies of the dead who all had died in certain ways aligned to the Horsemen.  Their symbols matched our symbols… that was the scary part.  When you create your own shit and find out you have been channeling knowledge from beyond.. maybe from mysterious benefators...  It was pretty shaking… Kairos was a bit peeved that if he was a vessel of Famine and we were in the Underworld, couldn’t these patrons help us a little bit?

When I read this I felt even more overwhelmed than I already am. Take having all the questions you have about yourself, your clustered awakening and everything in between. Then multiply it all a hundred fold. It did kind of give me a bit of hope though. That if we were to die our journey wouldn’t end quite yet, though I don’t like the thought of a Geist sharing my subconscious. I suppose I could live with it when or if the time came. I wonder if I could have used my skin as a medium to copy over the text. Almost like a full body tattoo.  Would that be copying?  I didn't chance it.

Loudon and Seraph teamed up in the Hall of Time after that, I think Loudon split off from the group and Seraph broke off from his ground and followed him.  They found what Loudon was looking for… lore on the origin of the Denarians.  How  the Archdemon Amon begot Astaroth who made a deal with the ArchScelesti Nicodemus the Betrayer and had his 30 most powerful Lieutenants possess the 30 pieces of silver that killed the “Oracle” who was Christ.  With the coins in the hand of mages the Archdemons could better effect reality.  Seeking power as mages do.. they quickly were influenced into using Abyssal magic.  

Apparently there was a pact between Abaddon and the Abyss through Astaroth and Nico.  Nico, who had strode into the Abyss himself and created his own watchtower.  He was an Aswadim.  His nilistic goal was to save the souls of mankind from the lie by causing reality to fall into Hell and for the Abyss to consume the Supernal.  Then when the souls of man were purified they could ascend into the Abyss and use their will to create their own paradises in a place of infinite freedom and possibility.  It was gut-wrenchingly sick, and it almost could make sense if I was a vile Scelesti Motherfucker.  This lore was heretical to reality itself.  Turns out Nicodemus had won and destroyed reality a few times… well almost.  Since it violated the Archmages Pax Arcana they usually reversed it but were unable to destroy Nico and his brood because of the powerful pacts between the Inferal lords and the Aswadim.  This time he had a plan that could not be reversed so easily.

Indra and I found some lore on the Hellmenth. If the gatekeeper, one of the Deathlords did not open the way after the seals were broken the Hellmenth would not be allowed to leave Sheol and the 144 seals would reset themselves. The Hellmenth had been trying since they were locked away like the Titans in Tantalus. They would rise if we couldn't stop the Scelesti cult at the bottom of the Underworld. They sent their ghost Operators to Earth broadcasting their Number Stations advertising great treasure and lost lore to idiot supernaturals who could crack the codes.  Plenty of seals and broken by accident before.  The Deathlord protocol was something put in recently in an attempt to circumvent the release of the Hellmenth, a being who could overwrite reality and repair the seals.  Big big god politics going on all around.  So Nico must have had to come to the Underworld to subvert the will of this Deathlord gatekeeper and to release the worms themselves.  The Hellmenth’s larva were smaller and could wriggle through the outside into pockets of space close to reality.  These are the gateworms like the one we encountered in the Temple of Sin.

Jack and Rook really came through.  Jack wasn’t distracted by the library and stuck to our objectives in his mind.  He found information on a route to the “bottom of the Underworld,” a place called the Ocean of Lost Fragments.  It was a massive lake in which all Underworld rivers flowed.  The most direct route was on the River Lethe, the river of memory which bordered the library on one side.

Yep. Not distracted at all by this tome which looks like its paper is made from processed clouds and contains a story someone imagined of a magical being who lost her face and the mortal who found a mask. Not distracted at all. I certainly didn't make judicious use of One Mind, Two Thoughts. Nope. Not me.

Once we found each other again it was against difficult hard to find our way out.  Apparently the more time you spend perusing the Library the harder it is to climb out from under the mountain of books on top of you (metaphorically).  We found ourselves in the Bowels of the Athenaum, a dungeon for books, dangerous books and where guardians and servants to the library patrolled.  Nergal helped us be sneaky… though the Shadow didn’t exist and the Twilight and reality were the same thing in this place Nergal found he could create a pocket of shadow for us to hide in as we snuck through the Bowels.

By the by, thanks for double checking to make sure I didn't accidentally smuggle a book out, Indra. It was a real worry for me, s'why I asked before we left.

Through the caves again we found our river.  It was the River Lethe, the River of Memory.  A bluish grey of drowsy "water" and bubbling flow with whispers of a million voices wafting from it.  This time there was a Ferryman waiting for us.  A cloaked crow called Muninn, Odin’s fabled Raven of Memory.  Not sure if he was actually ODIN's fucking raven but he seemed pretty legit.  Another river another price to pay, hopefully one of the last.  Each Dominion, each ghost, each ferryman wants something you have.  This is the truth of the Underworld, and they will take take take until you are like them.  I gave him one of my dearest memories, I don’t remember which one because I also wanted to forget that I lost it.  I just remember crying on the boat...  

As we traveled down down down into the dark caverns along the straight path of the sluggish river I scrutinized the waters.  Each drop was a memory, drinking the water would grant you all sorts of random knowledge… but it would also take some of your actual intelligence.  We weren’t much for drinking random Underworld water anyway.  If not for Nergal’s nercomantic protections the water would only take and give nothing.  I hope the legends of mortals traveling into the Underworld are exaggerated… we would have had an impossible time without our Master Necromancer.  This was really his scene.. and Nergal never seemed bothered by it all.  Maybe it paled in comparison to his short Astral trip to Stygia.  With him in the lead we pressed on.