Umbral Gaze 6: The Monoeye
Arriving back in Waterdeep after a hectic day at work, our heroes stop at Laeral’s home to discharge their mission’s final obligation; Cisconian’s corpse goes through the sallyport. A note arrives late that evening by household courier— Lord Silverhand is pleased, her words carrying a tinge of sympathy for the party’s predicament. Ambling to their rooms through narrow streets, cloaks cinched and jackets buttoned against spates of dusk-born drizzle that force vermin and adventurer alike to dart from overhang to lamp-lit awning in trying to keep dry, the party are surprised to find Tasha— dressed in the robes and pointed hat of her profession— lurking in the lobby to accost them.
The witch expresses exasperation heretofore heard only through Almuth’s letter, and is slower today to move on to more amicable matters than in writing before. The interaction reminds the party unfavorably of the speech Laeral gave yesterday under similar circumstances, and— as then— indignation plays at the backs of their minds; the choices their patrons force upon them are not easy ones. Conversation finally turns to Cisconian, and Tasha debriefs the adventurers.
Word from Tasha’s informants in Silverymoon, received through magic while the party traveled, tells of a network of pre-existing traps that the still-unusually-intelligent Cisconian coopted for his own purpose. Now that the monster is excised, librarians have uncovered regions of the basements long-forgotten in which great treasures and ancient histories rest to keep scholars busy for many years to come. Further and more immediately, wizards of Silverymoon believe the six recovered artifacts of Cisconian’s gauntlet to be multifarious fragments of a powerful magical item1, a mantle left by the very founder of the city untold centuries ago, thought lost until now.
Few historians remember and fewer can perform the procedure to join the fragments, but our heroes are in luck; one such mage works in Lord Silverhand’s employ, and Tasha is confident that she will help. Of the party, only Clementine has the skills and knowledge needed to make full use of their prize, and Tasha promises to send a message to Taern Hornblade on her behalf requesting permission to borrow the artifact— at least until the beholder threat is vanquished. This is promising news, but a less fortunate development arises too: Tasha aims to purloin the party’s clerics for some outside business, her need for divine assistance diminishing their numbers by a third; the two are in no position to refuse, Almuth agreeing eagerly and Warren with a moment of trepidation that vanishes in the thrums of a hearty and resigned chuckle. The party will take differing paths in the morn.
The war-chamber of Lord Silverhand’s mansion is as our heroes remember, but for a stark emptiness of the desks and seats in its periphery. Laeral and Tasha stand together on the dais ahead of the great, low table, which reflects the light of a chandelier in sharp and dancing relief. The pair halt their conversation as the party approaches, and Tasha speaks up to Clementine before the meeting starts in earnest. She has Taern’s reply: Silverymoon is glad for the ranger to have the cloak.
Laeral explains the party’s next task: they must travel to Lantan2, where the Monoeye beholder secrets itself away from Waterdeep’s prying eyes. Though common understanding holds that Toril forgot those islands in the time of the Spellplague3, merchants of the Sword Coast have recently known self-proclaimed Lantanese to come bearing technological marvels, shield golems and their like, which they offer readily in trade. For reasons undisclosed, the party is not to mention the history of Lantan, nor what they may find in the course of their journey there, beyond these war-room walls.
To get to Lantan will require the use of a planes-shifting device— Almuth gives Carmal the Amulet in anticipation of his own absence. At Laeral’s command, her table recedes into the floor on whirring mechanisms to make space for Tasha to blow a hole in the atmosphere; a portal to the trackless sea five-hundred miles south thunders into place with a rush of wind that shakes the great doors of the war chamber on their hinges even as Gottlob braces them with all his meager strength. Under instruction to use the Planes’ Amulet only when the thinnest eddies of fog obscure their hands before their faces, the party passes trepidatiously through the witch’s gate.
The party need little time to appraise the island on which they land— waves crash no more than a few strides off in any direction, and impenetrable fog occludes their vision to distances beyond. A canoe with seats for twenty lies halfway in the washes of the surf, oars in locks, waiting to carry the heroes onward. Climbing aboard and casting off, they row until the fog hangs heavily in the air and resists the returning strokes of their oars like a lesser stratum of sea, whereupon Carmal— with Louisa’s expert help— shifts planes as directed.
Another beach greets the party now— silver-colored sands, gouged deeply and thrown about like the dross of some crazed and careless excavator, keep the boat upright by its keel. Though the sky gives no sign of the sun’s position nor even of clouds that cover it, a flat, diffuse glow from above paints the scene in watery shades of gray. Adventurers step overboard onto solid ground, and shore becomes verdant jungle as they move inland toward a confusion of cables that wrap and knot about boles and branches too far off to make out clearly. Nearly at the horizon, a trio of cylindrical towers— columns of glass and straight-sided stone— rise defiantly toward the heavens in peaked punctuation of the landscape’s brilliant but monotonous green. Some of the broad-leaved trees that crowd on all sides appear strange to the party; close examination reveals roughly one-in-three to be a false, metallic, manufactured replica of its organic neighbors. Trees both real and artificial teem with dog-sized spiders; some give the party a start when they approach, but all behave peacefully, or at least with reluctance to attack. Further scrutiny of the creatures makes clear that whatever constructed the trees must also have built these, delicately wrought automatons of copper and steel— not spiders at all— that clatter and click as they move like drawers full of cutlery.
As they near the edge of the forest’s heart, where trees grow wider than a dozen men and a hundred times as high, the adventurers discover again the tangled mess of wood and metal they saw before from afar. At this near vantage, they make out rows of buildings suspended dozens of feet overhead, patchwork structures of steel cables and solid, organic plates anchored securely into the jungle canopy, their layout suggesting dense inhabitation. Louisa, Clementine, and Carmal teleport straight to platforms above, wary to climb the disused and dangling ropes that seem the only way to access the city from underneath; Gottlob “levitates” for safety before hauling himself hand-over-hand up one such rope with ease.
The party find themselves in what passes for a street; they pause for a moment to take in their surroundings. Many and varied automata make a flurry of activity everywhere they look. Rock gnomes and the occasional human work on dismantled machines in street-side stalls while others ride atop examples that stride down the boulevard with all the sense of place as a horse-drawn cab in Waterdeep. Spiders cling to walls and strands of cabling strung between sloped rooftops, watching and getting on with who-knows-what from their raised positions. An especially large robot stops in front of the party, cutting their reveries of sightseeing short— it extends a hand on which stands a gnomish woman, small even for her kind, who greets the party in an unintelligible tongue. After some moments of confusion, Carmal casts “comprehend languages”, and does his best to translate.
The woman introduces herself as “Inoho”. Apparently, it was through her report that Tasha learned the Monoeye’s whereabouts— she asks if the party constitutes the response to her plea for help in evicting the aberration. Though Carmal’s magic does not allow him to speak her language, he nods the affirmative, and negotiates their conversation with well-placed gestures, dutifully conveying the woman’s meaning to his compatriots. The towers in the distance, Inoho communicates, are the complex of the Sky Forge. The forge itself lives in the leftmost tower. Standing far closer now to the trio than when they looked upon it before, our heroes make out in greater detail the bases of the vast columns. Each is founded at the center of a huge, beveled gear— intermediate gears link the whole apparatus together— but among the teeth of the leftmost tower’s base permeates a blockage of cloudy glass fused among pins and joints as though poured there hot and left to harden. The beholder they seek took up residence in the Sky Forge to appropriate it for the manufacture of its own, glassy variety of golem.
A plan is formed: the party will travel to the tower, sneaking past any glass golems they encounter, to evict the Monoeye from its stolen headquarters— ideally, by diplomacy; if necessary, by force. Before they get going, Inoho bids they follow her up a ways to a squarish construction of benches, nooks, and lockers: an armory. Most of the armor is sized for gnomes, but scores of human-appropriate weapons gleam reassuringly as she opens one locker after another and presents their contents to our heroes, offering them their choice of arms. Gottlob and Carmal take a rapier, each, as Inoho explains the fruits of her scientists’ labor to improve the swords— through advanced mechanics and metallurgy, the blades shake when they strike4 to bring extra might to bear against brittle materials like the glass of the Monoeye’s minions. She shows them more advanced weapons too, strange metallic rods that throw fire and lead, but the party cannot fathom how to conduct effective battle with such implements, and leave them to their makers.
Across the forest that intercedes the Lantanese’ ramshackle cramming of their whole city into half and the glass-enrobed base of the tower in which their evictor works the forge, our heroes reach the foot of their destination. A cohort of glass automata— humanoid, like all the rest they’ve seen— patrol tall iron doors set flush into the wall, their numbers and vigilant gazes rendering stealthy entry a perilous endeavor. Though the party sneaked through the bulk of the occupied city undetected with the aid of Clementine’s “pass without trace”, they will need a different approach to surmount this next stage of their challenge. Peeking furtively over the ridge behind which they hide, Gottlob looks around— the remains of destroyed and dismantled spiders, among other sorts of Lantanese machines, decorate carpets of moss on the forest floor; perhaps he can extricate some useful items thence. The satyr slinks back the way the party came, into the city, to find a spider corpse somewhere out of view of the Monoeye’s guards and, locating such a machine, begins to pull at plates and wires until he exposes the innards of the arachnid’s thorax, wherein a steel-cable net, festooned with little spheres, sits nestled in among the mechanisms like an oyster’s pearl just begging to be levered free. Gottlob can only oblige; tugging mightily at his prize, he rips it free with a surge of effort that sends it flying from his hands as he falls backward with the sudden disappearance of resistance.
As the net lands, a few spheres bounce free, and a start goes through all for a mile around as they detonate with sharp, short retorts that echo off the eaves of buildings high above. Lantanese spiders are apparently designed to launch bomb-laden nets at their foes. The party is unharmed, but not for long if they allow themselves to be discovered by the golems that respond to the commotion. Gottlob scoops up the now-bare net, and they hightail it back toward the tower before a foe can catch them at the scene, taking cover as needed to avoid their enemies.
Knowing that a stealthy ingress will be all but impossible now, after explosions set the door guards on high-alert and alarmed their glass bodies with splashes of color like a bunch of walking pictorial windows, the party decides to turn the situation on its head: they will fly up to the top of the tower, break in from the roof, and fight their way downward as circumstances require. Thus, they should catch their target unawares. Carmal “polymorphs” Clementine, turning her into a quetzalcoatlus, and he and Gottlob clamber aboard her leathery back as Louisa casts her own flying spell. The llama takes one stubby talon between her teeth so that one might tow the other at great speed to the roof, and they take off, flying more quickly than guards on the ground could hope to target.
Up top, a polished discus of equal diameter to the tower levitates– perfectly still, as though resting on invisible beams— fifty feet off the floor. No wall or windows connect it to the rest of the tower. Beneath lies a banquet pavilion complete with feast, food laid out atop a rectangular table like something from a painting. Three gleaming prisms are scattered with no apparent pattern throughout the room, tall as a man and twice as wide; they ripple strangely in the sky’s unfiltered light. Glass golems and inscrutable machinery decorate the end opposite to where party members peer covertly into this incongruous union of manufacture and merrymaking. They step gingerly off of Clementine’s back onto a raised ledge within, careful not to make more noise than necessary and, gathering their bearings, hear an imperious voice that orders unseen lackeys to their tasks at the far side of the room. Our heroes catch glimpses of the monster from their oblique vantage— a stalk-less head floats facing a bundle of glass columns.
The adventurers slink up a wide and gently curving stairway to take positions on a mezzanine that overlooks the room. It affords them the high-ground advantage and a dramatic position from which to initiate the confrontation that follows. Carmal announces their presence with a shout, and the beholder turns to engage the tower’s uninvited guests.
Questions abound on both sides. Interlocutors hurl “Where did you come from?”, “What do you want?”, and like demands at one another. The beholder’s name is Rwntincer; he is not surprised that the lords of Faerûn would send a kill squad to clean up his mess. Still, he explains, his aims are ultimately peaceful. He came to Lantan to be far away from his dreary home in the outer planes and from the interference of strangers— in the latter, he may have misjudged. Rwntincer has the air of a solitary, socially disinterested character, and the party are inclined to believe his claims that he wants to be left alone. His work in the sky forge is of academic interest— the gnomes’ methods of automaton construction far outstrip his own, so he labors in the tower to reverse-engineer their process that he too might produce manners of golems beyond the humanoids that are all he has managed thus far. He pushed the gnomes out of their city only because, when he first took up the Sky Forge, they attacked him unprovoked!
The Lantanese see the situation differently, as the party explains. Of course they attacked the Monoeye when he showed up from nowhere to insert himself in the mechanisms of their critical industry and displace them from the sites of their work. It is they who acted in self defense by retaliating against such an outrage, not he by responding in kind. In the course of the debate that follows, the beholder confirms a suspicion that took root in the party’s minds at the notion of “his mess” and his unsurprise at their arrival: Rwntincer’s egress from the outer planes produced the fissure through which all nine beholders entered the Sword Coast. Carmal “sends” Tasha the revelation alongside a report of their current situation, piquing her interest and prompting an immediate response. The witch didn’t expect to uncover the cause of the progenitor rift so easily; even as she formulates her reply, she silently formulates a plan to end the conflict between Rwntincer and the Lantanese.
Though the task demands much skillful parley, Rwntincer eventually seems to comprehend the natives’ position, and some convincing calculus from the mouth of Gottlob persuades him that his time and effort would be better spent on research elsewhere than on the tower’s constant defense. An agreement is reached: the party will fetch representatives of Lantan and bring them to the Sky Forge to negotiate in good faith for the reclamation of the complex and relocation of its operator. Naturally skeptical of the party’s intentions, eager to dissuade them from any thoughts of double-crossing, the beholder makes a show of force— a lance of pure heat, the intensity of its light washing out all other qualities, makes a searing triangle between the crystals our heroes noticed earlier. The beholder’s laser cuts blinding bars into our heroes’ vision as it punches a hole in ceiling directly above their heads; superheated metal forms little rivers and faintly glowing pools that cling in stringent tension to the boundary of the wound. Flashy— if pointless— posturing complete, Rwntincer binds two of his glass golems to the party’s will to act as tokens of legitimacy and good faith in their communications with the Lantanese. With hope in their hearts, our heroes set off toward the populated city.
As they descend toward the ground-level door and the guards they so boldly skirted earlier, they take care to observe the layout and inner working of each level from the roof to the ground. If negotiations go poorly, they may have to fight their way through. The first level down, pipes of melted glass that poke through the ceiling where they meet interfaces above join with machinery that cools and molds the tacky liquid into unidentifiable shapes. Down again, an army of little golems joins the pieces together with torches and knives to form recognizably humanoid fragments. Lower still, machines assemble whole golems, more of the same little workers putting the finishing touches before bringing them to life. The lowest level is a whole suite of security— it was a good move not to fight through that— and beneath gives onto the plaza and the forrest floor beyond.
Back on the Prime Material plane, as Almuth completes the work that kept him from accompanying his party to Lantan— a novel countermeasure against the Umbral Tyrant known as “Necromaniac”— Tasha gives him another set of instructions. Painting in broad strokes a picture of the party’s situation, she requests that he join them and bring them news of her newly-formulated plan. Unwilling to waste time on the boat-in-fog method, Tasha expends a substantial share of her power to deposit Almuth directly onto the silver sands of Lantan’s gouged coast, leaving him with a message repeated several-fold.
Trust in me and, even more, trust in yourselves. No matter how bad things may seem to get in the coming hours, it’s just smoke and mirrors; know that they will never reach the terrible conclusion circumstances might suggest.
Unsure where precisely on Lantan his party members lie, the cleric wanders inland with only a vague sense of direction; vegetation closes densely around him, obstructing his view. Like a miracle, Almuth finds his companions beneath the treetop city, where a serpentine automaton prepares to help them ascend. They are glad— if surprised— to see him, and a quick exchange of words brings everyone up to date. The snake, like the rest of Lantan’s machines, is a dense beast of steel and copper filament glimpsed between armor plates welded at spots to a sinuous body of interlocking metal parts. It gestures for the party to mount its back and, when they do, ascends with a screw-like motion over the protrusions of a twisted tube that extends to the heights of the forest’s canopy.
Disembarking in the raised city once again, Gottlob finds a disused crate and, placing it in the middle of the street among automatons and pedestrians that zip by far too close, hops onto his makeshift stage. He shouts a desperate plea for a translator in the Common tongue— they must be able to communicate with the Lantanese; this language barrier is intolerable.
A passerby, a squarish gnome, hears the satyr’s cry; he makes himself known to the party. In the relative tranquility of the streetside, the trader introduces himself; his garb is familiar to the party, but seems out of place among that of his fellows, and where the digits of one hand should be, the tools of a tinkerer protrude from his palm. Many times a sailor to the Sword Coast, he is willing to listen to our heroes’ plight and to convey what they say to anyone who needs to hear it. Gottlob asks about dimensional travel5, and Carmal begins to explain the situation, but a sudden stampede of all manner of beasts interrupts his speech. The beats and patters of a thousand wings and tiny feat make a maelstrom of sound that startles the bard into silence as the wildlife of the forest canopy depart in synchronized frenzy. Clementine shouts to a squirrel as it passes overhead. Why is it fleeing? What does it fear? It pauses just long enough to squeak its reply.
Something in the ground. Don’t know; can’t explain. Very bad. Gotta run, run.
As the rodent vanishes between layers of foliage, before Clementine has even a chance to explain its words to her party members, the suspended platform of the street lurches beneath her hooves (and Gottlob’s, and Louisa’s, and everyone else’s feet). Wooden cracks and metallic pings from the distance tell a story of falling trees and snapping cables, but the surface underfoot remains stable, at least for now. In the confusion of people scrambling through the streets for any semblance of shelter this high above the ground, the trader just has time to shout “the volcano!” before the current of his fellows sweeps him away. The party looks out toward the Sky Forge and the shield volcano behind; a plume of dark steam and ash rises ominously from the mountain’s summit.
This must be part of Tasha’s plan, the one that Almuth spoke of. Surely… it can’t be coincidence that she would warn the party not to fear disaster mere minutes before the volcano roared to life? Our heroes can only presume as much. Hopes of negotiation dashed for the time, they turn on their heels; down the ropes, and back to Rwntincer they go— they’ll stop this eruption, and if they’re clever, they’ll use it to their advantage too.
Arriving at the Sky Forge amidst aftershocks that send new waves of birds squawking into the air with every tremor, the party and their golems find Rwntincer at the base of the tower, where the guards that were at the door seem to have abandoned their posts. Whatever animosity might exist between he and the Lantanese, this disaster cannot be allowed to destroy the Sky Forge and the city that surrounds it, the party posits and Rwntincer agrees. The beholder shares a useful observation: when the first quake struck, he investigated the crater from on high. From that lofty vantage, he noticed a strange artifact resting on a newly raised platform of basalt in a lake of lava— perhaps this item is to blame for the volcano’s sudden change in attitude? Pressed for time, the group quickly forms a strategy. The party will head into the volcano to remove or destroy the artifact while Rwntincer uses his laser to carve channels that should carry lava away from the city and his golems cut firebreaks on the mountain’s slope. Each cohort sets off to fulfil its respective duty; mortal danger hardens the party’s hearts and wills against lava’s heat.
At the vertex of the mountain’s shallow slopes, the party peers into a chasm of liquid fire. A boulder rests on a raised platform at its center, just as Rwntincer conveyed, a hundred-fifty feet away by sure reckoning. Rivulets of lava climb the sides of the pillar like ferrofluid to an electromagnet. There is our heroes’ target— now they just need to get to it. Louisa first flies Carmal across. As he steps onto an island of relative safety nestled in an ocean of molten rock, nothing moves at all; there are no traps here, at least. Pulling a dagger from his belt, the bard prods at the boulder, and is surprised to find the tip come away white hot. He waves the weapon about, making sure it’s just red hot before sheathing it again. Unsure whether the rock itself constitutes the party’s target, or if it is merely shielding the artifact from them, he casts “detect magic” and, peering intently through the several feet of stone, determines that magic suffuses the entire boulder; nothing hides at its core. The skein of the weave flows and bubbles within the rock in a strange, lively way, and leaves Carmal with no doubt that there is something of the animate there.
Doubtful that either he or Louisa can break the stone apart, what seems the surest way to prevent the catastrophe it promises, the pair return to their comrades at the crater’s edge. Gottlob hops aboard this time at Carmal’s suggestion, the hardest hitter of the group by a good margin. Deposited before the boulder, he searches for a weak point, a crack or imperfection in the stone by which he might cleave it with a single blow, but finding nothing so promising, the paladin thrusts his clockwork rapier into the center with all the strength he can muster— perhaps it will be enough, anyway. The party’s luck is not quite so unbounded: the boulder goes soft at the touch of Gottlob’s weapon, the blade plunging in to its hilt and threatening to burn the satyr’s gloved hand as he hurriedly tugs it free. The boulder appears unscathed— rock flows like hot putty, filling the wound in seconds— but a group of lava elementals that spring from the floor between the satyr and his target attest to the artifact’s opinion of its attacker.
Flame-fisted attacks that follow singe the satyr’s beard and the fabric of his gambeson; flecks of lava that fly from the spirits as they punch and stab leave tiny blisters on every exposed patch of skin. More rise to replace those dispatched by the party’s weapons, and the outlook if Gottlob remains, fighting hand-to-hand on the artifact’s cramped platform, grows only more grim with every passing second. The situation calls for a change of position; hopping aboard Louisa’s back once again, Gottlob suggests that the pair remain just out of reach. From the air, they can dart around the edge of the pillar’s face, hurling ranged attacks, while the elementals flail helplessly on their little island. Skirting the island’s perimeter, diving at the platform in aggressive staccato, Louisa casts “phantasmal killer” upon the mass of rock. The spell takes hold, all but confirming suspicions of the target’s sentience. Clementine also gets in on the action, firing arrow after arrow into the body of the boulder, an onslaught from which its minions can offer no protection. The elementals, for their part, are cleverer than Gottlob assumed. As he and Louisa flit overconfidently about the limit of the molten monsters’ range, they climb on top of one another with frightening speed and agility, each securing to its shoulders the feet of the next until a tower stands four spirts tall at the platform’s precipice. With a careful eye for timing, the tower tips itself over the edge toward its master’s harassers, and the highest of the group takes a wild swing as it plunges by. The attack finds its mark, and Gottlob reels for a moment as pain and shock threaten to dislodge him from his place on Louisa’s back. The elementals plummet toward the volcano’s open mouth below, but lava holds no ill effects fo their kind; their sacrifice is well-worth the trouble.
Returning to the fray, Carmal transmutes himself into a Quetzalcoatlus, the only sure way he has to cover the huge distance between the artifact’s platform and the crater’s edge. He returns to human form upon reaching the pillar, and joins Gottlob at once in hacking at the boulder and what few elementals remain. The artifact, golem, spirit, or whatever it may be, is clearly feeling the effects of the party’s furious efforts. Cracks extend like spiderwebs from impact points; chunks of outermost stone slough off in handfuls. At last, with a surge of strength, Carmal strikes at the boulder’s center, and the whole assemblage comes undone, a neat cleavage of the party’s foe in two. A smooth gemstone of cherry red, pulsing weakly with the light of Abeir’s mantle, lies cracked on the basalt floor where touched by Carmal’s blade. Louisa recognizes the little rock as a type of earth elemental6, a creature that strengthens itself by gathering material from its surroundings, building its body larger and larger with time and effort. In its current, weakened state, it is no threat to anyone, but it would be wise to deliver the creature to one who can contain it before it recovers— Tasha should be willing to fill that role.
With the eruption’s apparent instigator subdued, the mountain’s fury begins to subside. Magma pools drain into the earth; vapor disperses on gusts of hot wind. Returning to the Sky Forge, the party encounters great cuts in the mountainside where Rwntincer’s laser bored channels away from the city, ragged edges of those that carried lava still glowing with the residual heat of their contents. The city-folk will have seen the beholder’s efforts to save their city from miles off— the party hopes that such a show of compassion can move their hearts toward reconciliation. At the volcano’s base, glass and copper golems stand together in silent solidarity, the kilometer of firebreak behind them a testament to their cooperative labor.
In Lantan’s city streets, Glass golems mingle with metal automata; the party locates their merchant friend again. The walk back from the Sky Forge afforded ample time to consider what favorable version of the day’s events Laeral might most readily believe, and they ask of the gnome a simple favor: to write a document, an official looking letter on behalf of all Lantanese, to thank the party and their Waterdhavian patron for eliminating the beholder threat. Our heroes will present Lord Silverhand this document as proof of the story that Rwntincer perished in a lava flow during their furious battle atop a shield volcano. As they make the journey home, over mist-bound waters to the grandeur of Laeral’s war-room, Clementine and Gottlob play the scenario over in their heads; they owe more to the Open Lord than the rest, and the deception they plan to carry out tugs at their consciences, but they know there can be no going back now. They committed to remove a threat, and remove the threat they shall, but in their own way, with Tasha’s backing and their party at their side.