Griffie's party and allies were pretty sure they'd done a good job of hijacking the Alghollthu gate system, and also that it only led to other locations on the network.
But apparently, both of these assumptions were false.
Griffie has no idea where ey is, or where the rest of the party is, and isn't even underwater anymore.
Ey is standing on the ruined flagstones of an ancient crossroads, sinking slowly into a foetid swamp, under a lost and lonely hill.
Directly in front of her, in fact, where she kneels on a prayer rug, spear in hand.
She does not flinch. It's important not to, it lets them in.
"Repent. It is not too late." Her voice is quiet and firm.
"…Of what? I'm, uh, sorry about teleporting into the swamp, it was unintentional?"
Griffie puts eir 'arms' in the air, not that this really means much in elemental form.
"...You poor bastard, that's incredible bad luck." Possibly this is just a trick, but the answer remains the same, that's her dignity. "This is a secret and dangerous place, but there isn't long to go now. Do not show fear and do not listen, they will lie to you."
"You are not supposed to know this place exists, still less that it's dangerous, and certainly not that I am here. Who are you, and where do you hail from?"
It is difficult, but not impossible, to convert water elementals, presumably even strange ones like this.
"I'm Griffith, a druid from the Erlonn demiplane and more recently from the Temda region of, uh. I don't know if it has a name, the Alternative with the Unon Islands? My party was trying to use an Alghollthu gate system and it went wrong. And I have no idea who you are, if that's reassuring at all."
How can a water elemental be a druid. If this is a druid why is it using words and being polite and not even a little bit trying to rip out her tongue and eat it.
Possibly she's missing something.
"...I see. I have never heard of any of those places. You address Her Deliverance Beryllia the Most High Priestess of Sirenna. What does druidry mean, to you?"
What Griffie meant by "I have no idea who you are" is "if you want to not admit to being here, you have the easy option of just not telling me, so that all I can say is 'I saw someone using a Mind Blank, and I can try to tell you what they looked like if you care about their taste in illusions', and you don't need to do anything to silence me". This is not worth saying aloud, though.
"Being a druid is kind of like being a cleric, except instead of being empowered by a god, I'm empowered by an aspect of nature. It is a bit more complicated in some ways than being a cleric, because gods are usually intelligent beings who can help their clerics shape spells. Different druids can be empowered by different aspects of nature. My aspect includes a concern for the well-being of animals, plants, and nature spirits, but someone else's aspect might include a belief that only the best species should survive. So they'd want to introduce a beetle to a region where it would be very successful at the expense of the local forests and farms, while I would want to stop them, but we'd still both be druids. Does that help answer your questions, High Priestess?"
(Yes, there are conflicting duties here, but on this occasion there's a less-hostile druid from a demiplane, which suggests it doesn't even hate wizardry, and that's important. Besides, it doesn't actually worsen things very much in this case.)
"...That is... extraordinary." Possibly a lie, though it's a flatly bizarre lie to tell. Possibly a sorcerer telling themselves stories to explain the inexplicable. Probably a heathen cultist with a creative 'god'.
She really will not be any good at this, especially not as tense as she has to be in this place but, very well, she can try to speak sense to the probable cultist.
"Why do you think there is an aspect of nature that cares for the wellbeing of animals and plants and nature spirits?"
"A kingdom is made of peasants, but it need not care for them. It doesn't, in most places. You are the one who cares."
"It would be unwise for a perfectly selfish king to completely ignore the well-being of peasants, no? If they all die he's going to have a serious problem, and if they all hate him his life will be more difficult. I suppose I will say that it seems to me that since I continue to get spells every day, and I can even draw a little bit on the Upper Planes for a few of them, nature clearly does not disapprove of my worldview."
"Often people do not meet that happy standard of perfect selfishness and would be selfishly better off caring more. Even then - usefulness only happens incidentally to relate to wellbeing. If he could get more from them by binding them to agonising servitude beyond death, he would. Believe me, I would know. Just so with nature, left to itself it is uncaring of what horrors it produces. That is why we are entrusted with its stewardship. May I ask how you know there was an aspect of nature that cared about this, and gave you this power?"
"I am well aware. I am not fully confident, but the tradition I studied in which in fact led to me getting spellcasting and has produced other druids with a similar ethos claimed such, and also I can, say, empower my… my animal companion to mimic a celestial animal with a spell I cast using the power of nature, or shapeshift into a celestial animal myself. And the priests I've talked to haven't contradicted me, and people who were trying to pick selective truths to screw with me also haven't contradicted me."
That... is not usual for pagans, admittedly. It sounds more like wizardry, of a strange kind. "What sort of priests?" This certainly sounds like someone from distant foreign parts, it's not anything she recognises at all, but the answer will be illuminating anyway. "And - there was nobody you spoke to, to get this power? No ritual or visitation?"
"The local high priestess of Aiyuna knows about pretty much everything I've been up to. A chalkost of Torag – kind of like an angel – knows much of it and was mostly concerned for my health. Clerics of a variety of good gods were displeased when they heard a bunch of druids had been kidnapped, and the druids who were kidnapped seemed fairly normal to me. I can try to go through every celestial-aligned priest I've met but it'll be a while."
"I didn't speak to anyone. I'd rather not comment on rituals, we keep a lot of magic details secret."
She isn't stupid, this is sounding noticeably alien.
"...I see. Do you know what - Aiyuna and Torag and the... good gods... actually teach?"
It would be foolish to hope that somehow somewhere they have allies, but it's possible that "druid" simply means something different to this person. If there actually is some way of gaining great magical power without being Chosen or learning wizardry or consorting with horrors...
"Aiyuna is known as the Goddess of Good Tools. As with other celestial gods, she cares about mortal welfare, which means she likes healing and freeing slaves and such. In addition to that, she is interested in inventions, technological advancement, and, of course, existing tools also being good, both in the sense of amoral quality and in the sense of being used towards good aims. Torag is another celestial deity. Like Aiyuna, he cares about craftsmanship, but he's more conservative about technology. He has a focus on communities, honor, diligence, mining, and dwarves."
...Is it possible to imagine there are some virtuous heathens somewhere with a corrupt understanding of... maybe Mystra, and Moradin? Moradin favours technology, it's hard to imagine in fact what craft without technology means, but it's an understandable... would that technically be heresy, if they are believers but unbaptised... for a heathen to come up with.
She cannot disrupt the Rite to ask Sirenna just now.
"And... you are a druid and you worship nature but you are - on good terms with gods and priests like that? That seems to strain belief to breaking point."
"One of the core messages of the Upper Planes is that there are a lot of different good things, and people whose visions of the good are different should offer people choices, not fight over who gets to impose their vision on everyone. And, you know, if used responsibly technology can actually reduce incentives to expand into the wilderness. If you only have as many children as you want and your food situation is adequate, there's less incentive to convert more forest into farmland. So yes, I'm on good terms."
"That... is one of those things that sounds kindly and wise until you ever actually meet some people with different visions of the good. Yours - mostly just sounds at least compatible with the Word. So far. Which is startling, to say the least. Though I admit I find it hard to imagine why you would want people to not expand into the Wilderness - unless you mean it's so risky it should be banned for their own good, that would make sense. We... typically don't like to forbid people from willingly taking risks."
"The celestials refuse to let people join their coalition reasonably often! It is just the case that, say, members have different stances on when you should break laws to help others, or whether in general knowledge or ignorance is better, or whether working with as little rest as possible is the best way to accomplish things, or such."
"And, uh. If people expanded into all of the wilderness, then where would all of the things which aren't particularly horrible but which most people don't want to have right near them go? It seems difficult to build a farm or a city around, say, a dryad grove, unless you kill the dryads. And unwise to let children play outdoors somewhere where coyotes are near."
...It's talking about doctrinal disputation. Seriously.
(Working with as little rest as possible is the only feasible way to accomplish things, right now, they are subtly burning through resources by doing it but hopefully they can change something before they lose that way.)
"That was... very distinctly not what I had in mind." If, impossibly, this virtuous pagan / maybe member of a bizarre cadet branch of the Church somehow has managed not to know what she means, well, she'll hold off on explaining for now, this of all places is not somewhere to speak of such ill news unprompted.
"All of the wilderness?" That's like asking what you'd do with the stars if you were to fill all the Cosmos. "If we were somehow in a position to do that - it wouldn't be the Wilderness any more, we'd be able to safely arrange places for dryads and - 'coyote' is not familiar, some sort of predator? - beasts and so on in the world. We would be close to Heaven Itself, if we could do that."
"I am starting to wonder if we mean different things by wilderness. I would count a section of forest where the strongest creatures are, say, some bears who mostly try to avoid humanoids because humans killed the previous bears who tried to eat humans, as qualifying. And that's the sort of thing that's easy to destroy if lots of people, say, just want to cut down a few nearby trees, because they just need a bit more space for their farm, and then oops, the bears aren't getting enough food in the forest anymore, and the trees aren't creating a windbreak, and now you don't have a nice forest and your farms have problems."
"...I have not ever heard of that being a problem. The Wilderness is generally much, much worse than that. It's hazardous even to follow roads, often. One cannot fight the Wilderness simply by hacking at it, I wish that were possible. It's... smaller and nobler things. The gate, the hearth, the church bell, the little hollows in the world where children can sleep and not be eaten or worse."
"Maybe you should talk to your gods about what it would take to borrow what my Alternative is doing."
Griffie pauses for a moment.
"Hang on. Would you be willing to tell me if any names from a list sound familiar?"
"I intend to, on my return."
"Yes, though if they are familiar but secret I will just say 'no'."
"All right."
"Dai-Kitsu. Asmodeus. Thyslin. The Axis Alliance of Order. Fandarra. Torag we already discussed."
Of fucking course they have Asmodeus and none of the others. That's fairly extremely bad news, but she keeps her expression level and grim. ...It is arguably the case that if this 'druid' already knows about Asmodeus they would be better served knowing that He is still an active danger, but other concerns predominate.
"No."
"Well. I am very far away, then. These powers all predate Aiquzall splitting into Alternatives, and if you've managed to become a high priestess while hearing of none of them, you probably aren't in an Alternative of my world."
"...That would make sense of certain things, yes, if - your world is fundamentally and deeply different. I am struggling to imagine wanting to protect the Wilderness. Most druids see us more as a blemish to be wiped out."
"No. They think language is an abomination, too - even saying they think that would enrage them, I think, I suspect they hate thought itself. We do not know as much as we'd like. There have been... some heathen converts who once had dealing with them, that sort of thing. They seem to act as if everything civilised violates the natural order of things."
"Civilizations are part of the natural order of things. Getting upset that some hairless apes are pretending to be rational agents is like looking at mound-building termites and saying 'well, I don't want the entire world to be mound-building termites, so my only option is to eradicate the species entirely'. Sorry. I shouldn't argue this with you, you're not the one advocating against language. Communication is a great tool and a significant part of my toolbox is being able to communicate with animals! Do they even use Speak with Animals?"
"...We are more than hairless apes. Or - more than flying snakes, in the case of dragons, or more than ice and snow, in the case of one interesting creature I know, or more than swirling water, in the case of you, I mean we in the broad sense. We are rational creatures, in the image of God, we have responsibility and dignity and reason. But I take your point. I'd invite you to take it up with them, but I wouldn't want to put you through that. ...How does speaking with animals work? If an animal could use language it would be a person. Druids can influence animals, I think, but they don't talk to them. They only talk to each other as much as they need to."
"I agree that we have responsibilities, and we conduct reasoning, and … I have mostly encountered 'dignity' in justifications for stupid decisions, but I also haven't heard that much about it. It is just that it is very easy to overestimate how far we are from creatures without these things, and to say 'no, I am a creature of reason, surely I would not conduct worse reasoning merely because I have refused to sleep' or such. Also I'm just in a water elemental form right now, I'm a plant most of the time. Anyway."
"Speaking with animals involves using magic to convey things to animals in concepts they understand, which are generally far more limited than concepts humans understand, but … many animals can communicate to each other where a good food source or a hazard is, or a desire to reproduce, or such. Magic lets me join in on that."
"Often those decisions are less stupid than they appear. They pertain to - visibly being dangerous to mistreat. But I agree, it rarely leads anywhere good. ...In point of fact identifying what is and is not wise regardless of circumstance is extremely important, to me, I do rest enough to be functional. That sounds much more human* than druids ever are, speaking with animals, they typically do not care for anything beyond their own kin. It's unnatural, you see."
* The word in Gospeltongue is more like 'characteristic of a rational creature', but there are limits to translation.
"If you would like to discuss it I would be willing to hear more about your understanding of dignity later. And I don't see why nature would want to empower people who care only for their own kin. You can say 'oh, this evil god likes harming others to benefit themself, so they will empower me if I also do that', but usually they want people to offer some of the gains to them. Also, speaking with animals is just useful on a selfish level. You do not usually see selfish people going 'I will never ask anyone any questions, or purchase anything complex, or make threats more complicated than brandishing a weapon and gesturing'. I suppose maybe your world's 'druids' do that."
She does not have much experience but she still knows this is an astonishingly reasonable and open-minded heathen, for all that its manner of discourse is - at once deeply familiar and alien.
"I appreciate it. ...Caring only for one's own kin is perfectly natural. Druid clans are at constant war for territory. Insofar as animals can care, they care only for their own group. I wish I could say people did not often think that way as well, our lot would be far easier."
(Discussing the mechanics of how and why people are given foul boons by the Powers Below has... a very particular moral and social valence to Beryllia, let's put it like that, and she is most wise and exalted and has ever spoken with heathens before but even she blinks at putting it like that.) "...That is... an idea that demands extraordinary care even to entertain, and I warn against it in the strongest terms."
"Druids are not selfish, there is a tiny grain of righteousness in self-interest, for you too matter and you too are made in God's image. They do not make threats, they simply carry them out."
"It's natural to care for one's own kin, but nature surely has plenty of plants and animals to choose from if that's really all it wants in druids… I'm sorry, I should not be heated in an argument just because I have discovered your world exclusively has inferior druids. I understand that powers can exclusively empower people who hate language and thought and such without being literally fiends, it's behavior that strikes me as evil but there are degrees of evil. I didn't mean to imply otherwise."
She shrugs slightly. "Fear not, I am not easy to offend. It is indeed evil. ...If, somehow, you have an alternative they might somehow heed... supposedly there is a Grand Druid, somewhere, who can be killed and so replaced."
"If we manage to get in touch with where I'm from we can look into it. As it stands, I'm the only representative of my tradition and I'd worry about losing."
"I don't know how well it would work to gain respect if I clearly only won because I was being backed by third parties? If I had my adventuring party, that might be different, but I'd estimate you as around eighth-circle" because of the Mind Blank "and I don't know that winning because a church likes you better than other candidates earns the same sort of respect as winning by your own strength. It might work if they wanted an excuse to go along with you."
"But if we're thinking about interworld contact we could potentially bring in stronger druids with a similar worldview."
"Ha. Interesting estimate. I don't know if druids would or could think that abstractly. But it was only an idle thought." She shrugs. "I admit, I am curious about your creed. It doesn't sound much like anything I've ever heard before. Normally heathens are, ah, very distinct in that way."
"You seem to have a Mind Blank up! That's eighth-circle. So you plausibly don't find it particularly expensive to get castings of it, plausibly because it's a domain spell for you or because eighth-circle wizards are your peers."
"Anyway. I have historically been more likely to pray to Immonhiel, whose focus is on medicine and healing, but in practice my party includes … I don't want to say 'included' but it might be more accurate … the high priestess of Aiyuna, so Aiyuna has been more likely to ask things of my party specifically. But that doesn't help you much."
"In general, I think it's better when sentient beings have things that they like and want. This is a common viewpoint, but rather vague. In practice, I'm an adventurer, so I often run into really obvious problems that many different moral systems would agree are bad. 'Is it good to free a bunch of slaves and kill or subdue the demon cultists enslaving them?' is not a hotly debated topic among people who credibly claim to be trying to do the right thing."
"If that's true, your world sounds like a very pleasant place to be. Let us just say I have heard things. ...What is your world like, come to think of it? I mean - what is it like for you, for a nobleman, for a commoner, for a priest."
"For me: When I'm not adventuring, I live in the Temda region, which is known for its cities composed of massive intelligent trees. The trees allow dead wood to be removed from their trunks to make room for inhabitants and also tolerate grafted food plants. My understanding is that they find us entertaining. I share a nice condominium with my adventuring party and some other people. Usually being home is nice, but occasionally we get obnoxious hate mail, or or angry people showing up at the door, some of whom are threatening. Oh, and there was also the scammer, that was kind of funny."
"For a nobleman: I'm not sure he consistently lives in a more expensive house than I do but even if he doesn't he plausibly lives in a nicer house. He has servants. He probably has some magic items. He's probably doing politics with other nobles and cares a lot about what other people think of him. He's probably concerned about economic fluctuations, when I helped with something that improved crop yields in a region some noblemen got upset. He probably tries somewhat to maintain good relations with local nonevil churches but probably does some things they don't approve of, too. He's more likely to hire artists and musicians and such than comparably wealthy adventurers. He's probably expected to help with various local threats."
"For a commoner: They are probably farming. If there's a bad year they might starve. They might be able to get access to water and Channel Energy from a local cleric, but they might not have one. Even if they do, they probably can't afford more advanced healing spells or alchemy, so they're pretty vulnerable to disease. There's various difficulties they deal with based on region – in Plowana they tried to recruit the brighest kids to learn to be battle-mages, and now that Plowana isn't doing well they're plausibly at more risk of bandits or such. In Temda they have plumbing, which is good, but it's also more crowded and they have to navigate the parallel societies, which is complicated."
"For a priest: If we're considering a fully empowered priest, they're probably first circle. If we're talking about a priest of a decent god, they can probably channel positive energy, so they can heal a lot of people in bursts a few times a day. They probably do that, and they probably also create a lot of water. They might have an associated church building. They might be apprenticed to a more senior cleric, if there's one around. They might have students who aren't clerics at all yet. They probably give sermons, they're probably asked for advice, they might be asked to mediate some disputes. They probably have a better life than a commoner would, but they're probably not as rich as myself or a nobleman. If we're considering a trainee: they probably have a lot of temple chores. If they can channel even a bit of positive energy, they probably have to use it at the graveyard a lot to keep the dead from becoming undead. It's possible they've ended up a village priest despite not being fully empowered, if there's enough of a shortage in the area. It depends on the god, their policies vary."
"Ah. ...The elves used to have those, the tree-cities. As far as I know, they're all dead now. I am curious about why you specifically get threatening messages."
It's not lost on her that quite possibly the fact that the not-druid sounds nice doesn't mean it is nice. Maybe the cities that aren't owned by (and helpless before) the druid's giant tree friend all mysteriously burn down all the time or all get cancer at once or get devoured by their own mutated dogs or whatever the hell else they come up with.
...Although...
"Improving crop yields is absolutely not something a druid as I know them would do or even dream of. Are your druids... extremely rare, or are you uniquely decent, if your lands are nonetheless always starving and plagued like heathen lands usually are anyway? I imagine the... churches... have other visions of the good than doing anything to help with that." There are quite a lot of ways to fall into terrible heresy even if they have blundered somehow into some knowledge of Moradin or something, and that's the optimistic case. Probably the 'nonevil' churches are still running around torturing confessions out of people to sacrifice them or something.
"You make churches sound more like... different guilds or fraternities spread out across different cities, than anything I had heard before. And using them to make water everywhere... well, that part is rather confusing."
"There are plenty of more amoral druids. I just usually don't run into them."
"The good churches are absolutely helping. Other nonevil churches also sometimes help. And yes, they are different organizations spread out across different cities. Some churches do have high priests, but it's a lot of work to make sure every cleric actually is aware of what the high priest says, let alone actually listening. Travel is expensive, especially intercontinental travel." And Griffie's party wizard is trying to fix that, but the social implications of that have not been fully explored, and everything will plausibly blow up before they are.
"Anyway, the problem is that if the good gods were more interventionist, the evil gods would match them, and then if everyone kept it up we'd have a godwar again, and the last one went extremely badly. We did get a plague god and one of their favorite diseases killed, a while back, but it was a complicated project that required a lot of secrecy at the time."
"As for water: clerics and druids get a spell called Create Water as an orison, meaning that if we prepare it, we can cast it as many times a day as we want. The water only persists if someone drinks it, but people drink a lot of water, so it's still pretty useful. This isn't an ecological problem because the gods constantly have to add more matter to the world to make up for stuff that gets annihilated anyway."
First thought: she would love to believe they're simply good but incompetent, but more probably they don't actually care enough to do anything more than look sad and make speeches. Still, she'll take it, that's still extraordinarily good by the standards of horrifying heathen cultists.
Second thought: ...creating unlimited water like that - that only persists if drunk, what, seriously, why - does not in fact sound like something a cleric could do. ...Is Griffie, possibly, from a Far Realm in which there are entirely different gods and entirely different magic.
"I see. The true Church is a single body - made up of all of the faithful, but organised by the hierarchy of priests and acolytes and spread all across the known world as far as it can reach." And, hopefully, beyond. "It is... admittedly a lot of work. I can well understand those cults not bothering with it."
...On the other hand. That sounds like a fairly sophisticated - if wrong - notion of the nature of gods and how They affect the world. The clues that something is very strange here are mounting rapidly. ...Also, killing an evil god is not something she's ever known heathens to consider, for some insane reason, it's one of the most obviously reasonable and sane doctrines.
"...All right. A great deal of what you've said is quite strange, everything from the - orisons - to druidry to the gods. May I ask what you think is actually happening here, with where you are from and how you arrived here? I have guesses, but would hear you first."
"My theory is that I've left the set of places derived from Aiquzall, which my world is derived from, entirely. Your gods are Outer Gods by my standards. I haven't heard of benevolent outer gods that are as cohesive as yours sound, but that doesn't mean much, there's plenty of reasons for me to not hear of them. I arrived here during an attempt to hijack aboleth Gate infrastructure, and while I didn't expect to be sent this far away, it's not terribly shocking that something went wrong."
There are no benevolent Outer Gods. Why do you think we are kept imprisoned here?
(She does not seem to have noticed it.)
"Mm. It would explain it. The Far Realms are not... normally accessible at all, still less wise to visit."
Thaaaaat's one nasty undeath setup right there.
"There's some highly regulated opportunities to engage with outer gods, at home. I got some snake summons subsidized by one."
She blinks. "That is more... more mercantile than I would ever have expected such things to be."
+21 perception makes it hard to not listen, but ey won't engage aloud. Ey does mentally note that Yig's had a golden opportunity and he mostly didn't take it, and if Beryllia was going to attack em, the best time would have been while ey was more disoriented.
"It really is. My understanding is that Yig in particular views fitting into existing social structures as an expression of his domains, in the same way that a snake fitting inside various crevices is."
"The fact that those come across as existing social structures - this is a peculiarly abstract way of thinking - is itself quite striking." Generally heathens tend not to trust merchants.
"Please. You don't know the truth. Please, please say you can tell something isn't right."
"I'm not usually who you want for not listening. Do you mind if I make general statements?"
"That I'm better at."
"In general, when I am convinced of arguments, it's because the arguments have some form of supporting evidence."
"You know, that is uncommonly wise of you. I wish it weren't."
"What does she think of anyone who does not obey her?"
It is not terribly surprising that souls stuck in torment do not make very good arguments.
"Have you already checked whether killing these frees them?"
"You would? Please - please - they won't and nobody else is allowed to come here, you can ask her that -"
Griffie can drop the subject… for now.
"All right. We can go back to discussing Yig."
"The summoning system is as follows: Every summon is supposed to go through Axis wards. Plenty of summoners don't do that, but they are supposed to. The wards slow down summons a bit. But Axis can screen some specific creatures in advance, for a fee, and if Axis likes what they see, the creatures can go through the wards faster. I don't think Yig is necessarily buying Axis Currency Units to then subsidize snake summons with, he's plausibly just making snake screening easier in some way."
"I told you." In its voice is deep and real anguish.
"... That's... An impressive achievement of whoever set up the 'Axis wards'. Axis is - some kind of state? I'm surprised it's worth it for them."
"It's an outer plane, like Heaven. It's not a god, but in some ways it has the influence of one. It can empower clerics. It gets support from gods, because, say, if anyone could summon anything they had the raw power for, the local gods would not like the results."
All right, this somehow just keeps getting more bizarre - "How can anything be like Heaven?"
Optimistic case, someone somewhere has made more progress, somehow. More likely case: it's another Acererak situation.
The other part makes sense, though. "Testing assumptions - what would happen if anyone were allowed to summon whatever they could?"
"Uh, when I say it's like Heaven, I mean it's doing some similar activities, not that it's Heaven's moral equal. Also, we might both be referring to different things, when I say Heaven I'm referring to the more Law-aligned regions of the Upper Planes."
"Axis is a plane strongly associated with various principles, which gets power from those principles being practiced on the Material Plane. It's not rare for people to go there when they die and then become more like the plane and do work associated with the plane."
"If anyone were allowed to summon whatever they could, some people would probably summon an outer god who accepts summons, and who would probably cause a lot of problems on the Material Plane. Or they'd summon demons who weren't themselves prevented from summoning more demons and end up with a lot of demons. Things like that."
She holds up a hand. "What do you understand to happen to people after they die, and how common is it to go to Axis in the end? And who made Axis?"
Becoming more like the plane and then doing its work - is there any way that could possibly be something benign? No, probably not. Maybe the Church could seize it and fix it- let's be realistic, they have a Crusade on their hands, don't they. ...Maybe worse than that. Well. For all the danger and horror, it would be an enormous mercy.
"When people die, their souls break into pieces. Often a rather large piece moves towards an Outer Plane. The natural movement of the soul is based on various influences it was exposed to in life – deeds are one, of course, but simply being in the wrong place can also be an influence. Sometimes outsiders will grab at souls, but this can't happen for all of them."
"When the chunk of the soul arrives in an outer plane, it usually needs some material added to be functional, and that material comes from the plane, which has the obvious effects of making the creature reflect the plane's nature more. Soul senescence unfortunately continues even after death, so the creature eventually needs further patches. The more benevolent planes allow for self-direction here, of course, and would prevent soul senescence if they could, but there isn't any known ethical methodology for doing it at scale."
"I would estimate maybe 10% of people end up in Axis. Not more than 50%, not less than 1%. Axis predates the last major godwar, so little is known about its origins."
Fuck.
Hopefully, hopefully, this is just pagan superstition, but she doubts it, somehow. This isn't... normally how people sound when they labour under a superstition, it's more like how wizards sound, a different sort of insane.
So, someone has invented a second form of death, and built a little Hell.
'Axis' is clearly mutilating people and then slowly torturing them into personal insults to God. 'Allowing self-direction' is not reassuring when they're claiming souls can die in the first place. ...She might in fact be in need of a certain scroll, a rat, a condemned prisoner, and a Gate, but first she needs to complete the Rite and make sure 'Axis' isn't on the same plane as anything important and make sure she hasn't somehow misunderstood.
Not too long, though. It's happening right now.
"What happens to the other 90%? And... what do you know of what it is like, to be... patched?"
"I've performed a somewhat analogous procedure and received it myself, for my species' reincarnation process, but we aren't conscious during it, so it's not 'like' anything. Still, I would expect it's not that hard to prevent pain when doing it for outsiders? If it were unavoidably painful, someone would have told me. It's the sort of thing you'd tell someone if you were trying to use selective truths to turn them against the upper planes, and therefore also the sort of thing you preemptively tell someone if you think your enemies are going to use selective truths with them later."
Power Word: Heal Be sensible. "I see. Thank you for clarifying that, I appreciate your honesty. What were the differences, for you, before and after the soul mutilation? Do you expect it's very different in Axis?"
"I lose almost all of my memories, skill, and power each time. We've improved it a bit. You have my permission to take a look at my soul if you have the ability. My species' process is unusually optimised for maintaining core personal traits in a way that I think would not be doable for arbitrary dead people with the outer planes' currently available capabilities. I expect almost every outer plane to at least want the option to preserve more of the dead than they do, even if they wouldn't all use it."
"Anyway, I expect that Axiomites keep more memories and skills, but are more likely to lose personality traits and attachments. I don't actually know. I know that the Upper Planes usually makes preserving positive interpersonal relationships a priority. I've worked a lot with a lantern archon who has a close relationship with her sister that carried over from when they were alive."
Who talks like this. About their soul. Even wizards normally aren't exactly that - flavour.
...Someone who isn't really the person they were any more, someone who has been shattered and mangled and interweaved with the stuff of Hell like a druid mixing slag into gold, that's who.
"But even in the Upper Planes, they are not meaningfully the same person they were before. ...Who established this system?" It might not actually be the Upper Planes' fault, that might not actually be the target. "I will state plainly that the entire system sounds like a grievous insult to God and a horror on such a scale as to worry even me. ...Would you like me to restore your soul, when the Rite is finished."
She hopes ey'll say yes, because she's really not sure if one can meaningfully make that choice.
"I would blame Charon for soul senescence prompting all this, personally. Anyway, that sounds like very generous of you and I probably would like it, but I'd ideally want to know how your spell works, see a healthy local person's soul, and get you a diagram of mine or something, so we can estimate compatibility first. I'm not going to die of this tomorrow or anything."
Well, that's a relief, at least, not so far gone that ey can't feel what's missing.
They will have to do something about Charon, clearly.
"It's - a miracle, not a Spell, it is in a sense misleading to imagine it working, it rather - recapitulates your creation. But... yes. You had better come with me."
"I can go with you."
Griffie attempts to make a noise like sucking in air, but it's weird and wet-sounding.
"If it recapitulates my creation, that was a multi-step process. If everything got returned intact you might end up with a lot of plant spirits. Possibly even an entire elf, she removed pieces of herself to make us. Now, this might be a good deal even if that's how it goes. I expect a version of her with an immortal soul could do a lot more good than I can with the limited time I currently have. But ideally if we get her back we'd do so at a lower cost to me."
She is talking to a Necromantic horror stitched together out of multiple tormented souls and it isn't even Tuesday.
"...It won't cut pieces away from you, that isn't how it works. What... happened, to that elf?"
A likely story.
"Do you know exactly what she did to... make you? There were others?"
"There are others. We have a little village."
"So, there's a standard process for creating leshies, which involves growing bodies like, uh. Like my base form, which you haven't actually seen, but I expect you'll see it later. Plant bodies, smaller than humans. They need nature spirits to function, and nature spirits are cooperative as long as you do the ritual correctly. Erloria, the elf druid in question, did a modified version of this process involving small pieces of her own soul. She didn't involve any other people, and nature spirits are often fine with integrating with existing structures in a way that more complex souls aren't – part of the reason people are so reluctant to switch from one staple crop to another is a bit of integration with crop spirits."
All right. Deep breath.
Clearly it is impossible to destroy the immortal soul. It is not a substance. Death is the great enemy - it's difficult to imagine this second death, the death of the soul, insofar as the soul is the essence of a person, and perhaps she should not try to imagine it too hard.
Possibly there is something like that.
More likely - Charon has invented some sort of creative binding and twisting and torturing of the soul.
Imagine, then, that plant souls and this "elf druid" have some sort of faculty, costly to exercise. That could well explain it.
Really it makes little difference, anyway. Charon needs to die still, and healing cannot defile a person still, and those are the concerns of the moment.
...Possibly "soul" just means something entirely different to Griffie. Like "druid". Damn it, she should have caught that sooner, a lot of her attention is elsewhere.
"Do you know how this... ritual actually affected Erloria? What does all this feel like?"
"I don't know. I have extremely few memories of her. She seems to have done some good things, but also been more vengeful than I like to think I would have been. I don't think that's necessarily a side effect, though, plenty of people are vengeful sometimes. And, uh, you'll need to be more specific with your second question, unless you just want to hear that I feel fine right now."
"I would be amazed if you felt fine under these circumstances - ah, if you do, if you are now incapable of fear or pity," that would make some sense, wouldn't it, "that's what I meant - what the... soul manipulations... feel like."
"No, I mean, I'm not ongoingly in pain from the process, or such. Obviously I'm not pleased with the current situation and can feel fear and pity. The thing is, I have no memories of having a different sort of soul, so it's hard for me to answer your question. I've heard there are spells for sharing memories, though?"
"Mm. That may be possible to arrange." She is not sure there are any wizards she would trust with that, though. "Or perhaps it will be more apparent after I heal you."
"I still think I should at the very least look at a healthy local lifeform and draw you some diagrams of my configuration before we try that."
Draw diagrams of the soul. Right. This really is sounding more and more like dangerous Necromancy - possibly she is only convincing herself, here, that is a danger. It could be something more innocuous. And it's not impossible that the circumstances don't help. Speaking of which -
"The Vigil is complete. You would be well advised not to think of this place again. Come with me."
Gate.
Griffie looks concerned.
"I didn't realize we were leaving the plane! I want to return if needed to go home."
"We aren't - I'm not sure why you would think that. This leads to a safer place on this plane."
Beryllia seems honest and also could probably force the matter. Gates don't last forever, either. Griffie follows.
An august and severe and beautiful chamber of frescoed marble, wide windows overlooking a great white plaza full of pilgrims and a vast complex of palaces and basilicae, the Holy Citadel.
There's a cheerful fire and a couch set before a throne, which Beryllia sits in. White-robed pages and attendants file in on no visible signal, bringing food and decidedly not looking twice at the animate mass of water all over the carpets.
This girl is willing to let em examine her soul, if such a thing is possible.
This temple was almost certainly not built within the past few years, unlike the most major temple to a certain goddess Griffie adventures with the high priestess of. It's impressive.
People trying to not look twice at Griffie is still noticeable.
To Beryllia: "Your deliverance, do you think people would be reassured if I reverted to my smaller base form with a more humanoid body plan?"
To the girl: "Thank you. I don't expect the process to feel like much, since it's just a divination. If this feels more uncomfortable than any other divination, just back away. If I back away, please don't follow me."
"People shouldn't be. But that may be wise, yes."
Griffie transforms into a plant creature. Ey's about the height you'd expect for a halfling, if this world has those. Eir skin is a light, desaturated blue, fading to pink and then red at the tips. Eir hands have four fingers each and no fingernails. Where others might have hair, ey has a rosette of succulent leaves.
On eir head, ey has a bronze headband with green etchings, sprouting a few berries, with a moderate transmutation aura, and green glasses with opaque-looking green lenses and a faint divination aura. Around eir shoulders, ey wears a dark cloak with a faint abjuration aura. Eir armor looks leafy at a first glance, but is in fact leather lamellar whose scales happen to be green and somewhat leaf-shaped, and has a moderate transmutation aura. Under it, ey has a vivid chartreuse vest with a moderate transmutation aura. Under that, ey has auraless shirt and pants. On eir hands, ey has golden handflowers with a faint evocation aura, a ring with a faint conjuration aura, and a ring with a faint abjuration aura. Around eir waist, ey has a leather belt with an attached pouch, both of which have moderate transmutation auras. Ey also has an auraless sheathed weapon. On eir feet, ey has steel-toed leather boots with a faint divination aura.
(Unlike in the image, Griffie doesn't actually have a spring-loaded wand bracer equipped, because ey's been adventuring primarily not in eir base form as of late.)
Griffie gets within 60' of the volunteer. What does her soul look like? In particular, does it look genuinely immortal, with nothing eating away at it?
creak-CLUNK-creak...
The delay might possibly be just barely noticeable.
There is nothing eating away at it. It is genuinely immortal, at once ancient beyond age and brand new. She is human and in generally good spiritual health. She is not a cleric or anything like that.
...Those do not look like any sort of Wizardry she has seen before at all.
There's a vague sense that the functions might somehow be familiar. Transmutative or divinatory or abjuring effects.
That's impressive. Griffie is not going to make a comment about her being lucky, that would be rude and probably locally inaccurate.
Does it look like a normal soul aside from the immortality? (A normal soul, by Griffie's standards, is made from positive energy, attaches at the brainstem, and has various subcomponents.)
No. It is not made of positive energy and does not have subcomponents as far as this magic can possibly detect, nor does it attach to the brainstem; it is present, in its entirety, throughout the corporeal body. It isn't really like a thing at all, it has no substance or quantity.
That's very strange. In Griffie's experience, cognition requires complex structures, and obviously your soul does a lot of the work because, well, it's your soul.
"Would you mind if I also looked at your anatomy? This would be another divination without side effects, somewhat like Diagnose Disease."
Here in the Holy Citadel, her anatomy looks normal. She's a female human, nearly twenty, in perfect health - actually quite surprisingly perfect health. She doesn't even have the lice or intestinal parasites or severe tooth wear you'd expect to see in nearly everyone.
...It's subtle, but her brain is shaped a little differently from what Griffie might be used to. It obviously does not possess the faculties of reason and will, there are limits here, but it seems to be doing more than ey might expect.
"Thank you. So far as I can tell, you appear to be in perfect health and in possession of an immortal soul, though not of a type I've ever previously observed."
Thaaaat really sounds like a conversation for Her Deliverance and probably a secret one, how about she tries to think about other things and bows and thanks em and leaves discreetly.
"Did that help? What... differences did you notice?"
It remains bizarre to be talking about souls like there could be types of them, but also this is clearly important.
"It was extremely informative. I would have expected a soul, even an immortal one, to be a Positive Energy structure with various recognizable parts, connected to the brainstem. Instead, hers seemed to be present throughout the body, unstructured, and with no obvious substance. Also, her brain was more developed in some areas associated with cognition, which makes me wonder if her soul is contributing less to the process."
"...I am not sure what you mean by Positive Energy. A soul is not a body - and it feels wrong in some way to suggest that a soul contributes. Your soul is... like the shape of you, the thing that makes you you, body and mind and whatever, but its faculties are expressed through the body - ah. If what you know of souls is a... structure of some kind of... I'm not entirely sure what you mean by 'energy', it sounds like a fluid or some such thing - are you able to think in your sleep? Can you be - left unconscious by a blow to the head, can wine make you sleep or lose focus or anything?"
"Positive Energy is a substance strongly associated with life and healing, somewhat like how fire is a substance strongly associated with heat and burning things. When I cast a typical healing spell, it takes Positive Energy from the Positive Energy Plane and applies it to a person, healing them."
"I dream in my sleep sometimes. I can be left unconscious by a blow to the head. I haven't tested how alcohol interacts with my body since I expect it to not be helpful, but that would be normal for humans. A normal living creature's soul is not good at cognition without the brain."
"But some creatures don't have brains, at least in my world. Have you ever encountered an intelligent item, like a sword or shield or such? Or a real elemental, one of the ones developed enough to learn to talk?"
"Yes. There are many people in this world with a drastically different physical shape, lacking arms or legs or - brains, yes. A person is... a composite of soul and body, if you like, both at once - in humans the brain is important for some faculties, but it needn't be. There are analogies to being able to play the same song on a number of different instruments."
"Anyway, my point is this. Local humans evidently have souls which are completely different from mine. They're not the same substance, they don't have the same components, they don't perform the same functions. So I am rather concerned that a healing spell designed to help people like that with soul problems could harm me."
"Healing is not like... repairing a device or even like setting a broken bone, it is a different skill altogether. It's a personal thing. It is - making-right, restoring wholeness."
"Spells don't work that way. Even Miracle doesn't work that way, it's just that the relevant god handles the details."
"It is not a Spell. And it does indeed work that way. I am... confused by your confidence, on this. Why should it not work that way?"
"Every healing effect I've seen involves some combination of positive energy and detail-focused repairs to the structure of something. Your Deliverance, I believe that this has worked when you've tried it before. I believe there's a decent chance it would work on me, and if I'm too busy dying to communicate and using my Cure wand on me won't cut it, it's a reasonable thing to try."
"But I need to emphasize that from my perspective, any god local to this region is an outer god. The last time an outer god used an effect on my party which seemed to just evoke eir domain directly, it almost killed multiple of us, even though eir domain didn't sound like it would do that."
She grits her teeth. It may somehow have escaped Griffie that she is very important and busy and there is not much slack in her day.
- Is she possibly just frustrated by having just come out from the extremely long and arduous Vigil and learning that the state of the Far Realms is probably worse than they thought, why yes she is, is that a good reason to act all angry, no it is not.
She wouldn't trust a foreign god either. In fairness, she would be right not to do that and Griffie isn't, but still.
"I understand. Would you like to see me heal someone, for reassurance? Do you have similar senses for that as you do for souls?"
"Sure. I'm … also quite willing to leave you alone, it is just that you seemed to want to persuade me. I don't mean to disrupt your schedule."
"I do want to persuade you, and also - you are a visitor from the Far Realms, this is important." And she still might have to destroy Axis, and if she does then time is precious. "I am almost always under time pressure, this is not new."
"How about I draw the diagrams I wanted to show you and you have someone let me know when you next plan to use the relevant healing effect. I'd also be happy to demonstrate the familiar sort of healing to one of your assistants."
"I would like to see the diagrams, yes. ...The sort of healing I had in mind for you usually has people on a waiting list for it. We may as well shorten the queue a little." Especially because it is actually important to know what the hell is going on with Griffie's 'soul', what it's actually like for all the prisoners of Axis, and how they can go about fixing it.
She's hoping that what Griffie is calling a 'soul' is some kind of complex curse Charon cooked up that specifically deceives and confounds the actual soul, in which case regeneration should just pop it like a bubble.
"...And I think in fact I had better watch this 'healing' personally."
Probably Necromancy and almost definitely magic from the Far Realms, so better that she be there to intervene.
"Your Deliverance, the simplest healing spell I have on hand, the one I can cast all day, is called Stabilize. Its intended purpose is to make a dying creature stop slipping further into death. If I cast it on myself right now, it will do nothing, but you might still be able to see it. If you want to see it in action, I could give myself an extremely shallow cut first. I don't think we should test it on anyone from here without more information."
She turns her greater sight on em. "Please do. On both counts."
...And ready her own healing, in case this is in fact as mad as it sounds, which is doubtful but would make sense of all this.
Griffie doesn't have an immortal soul of the local sort. Ey has something intangible made of some sort of energy attached with a stem to around where eir brainstem probably is. There's a complex core piece, and some simpler pieces glued onto it.
Something deeply embedded in the pieces is slowly degrading them. You could compare it to it burning or corrosion, if you wanted. The system is arranged such that the simpler pieces are taking the brunt of the damage.
"I'm going to cast Stabilize in three, two, one…"
Griffie casts a 0-circle Conjuration (healing) spell with no material or focus components, targeting emself. This conjures a very small blob of energy, which Griffie's body absorbs and does basically nothing with.
"Now I'm going to give myself a shallow cut."
Griffie draws a small scimitar and does so, then puts it away again.
"And I'll cast Stabilize again in three, two, one…"
Griffie casts the same spell with the same target. This conjures a very small blob of energy, which Griffie's body absorbs. The wound mostly closes.
- All right, to her senses Griffie looks bizarre but... this is not totally incompatible with eir 'soul' in fact just being a complicated curse. Actual souls aren't the kind of thing that has substance.
...The possibility that Griffie is right has to be acknowledged and is deeply, metaphysically terrifying. Fuck.
Maybe that really is it. Maybe there is no Griffie in the cosmic sense, somehow, just a weird pattern of energy and flesh - how does that even make sense - what, would Mordenkainen's Disjunction just utterly and permanently destroy anyone from Griffie's world? Something will have gone badly wrong if that ever comes up, apparently she is just pointlessly generating worst-case-scenarios now. The swamp does make her like that. She stops it.
On the positive side, healing corrosion seems eminently doable, as does doing something about the pieces. ...Sirenna's Name would do it but has the disadvantage of probably also destroying Griffie. ...She was already doing this, obviously, but it is extremely important to keep Griffie very far away from any sort of magical danger, good gods it's like ey're going around with glass bones but so much worse.
Or maybe there is some kind of trick going on.
Heaven will still make it right in the end, somehow.
Well, it doesn't look like any kind of Necromancy she's ever seen. It mostly just looks like some kind of blob of Mysterious Immaterial Fluid. Why.
...She heals herself, just in case she's hallucinating all this under the stress. She is not. She should still talk to a confessor in case somehow she's erring more subtly or only imagined healing herself, but too far down that path lies madness.
"Thank you. That is indeed... very different from anything I would have imagined."
