A Downward Spiral

[Archival reference:

The following is an excerpt of a chronicle of the immediate affairs of an unidentified prime material entity, apparently recorded by same. It contains numerous accounts that appear statistically anomalous. However, other details of the record contain brief mentions of the habits of certain influential Abyssal entities, and therefore may be worth closer analysis. All earlier entries not submitted for archival have been discarded in accordance with protocol 599f1a2.17; the contents were irreparably corrupted, were wholly within the knowledge pool of the One and the Prime, or lacked necessary context for comprehension.

Ambiguous headings have been grouped together to avoid confusion. The writer appears to have often made several entries on the same date.

Registered for archival, 33:207:8709:ee4

Series number 28

Base modron Om Nod, catalog team 7740295

Parsed and transcribed, 33:207:8712:12a

Primary registry - c5

Secondary registry - 5f711a0a91da49

Tertiary registry - not available: no known valid coordinate system for target layer

Base modron Emon Tog Uma, stationed Acherus-88 processing facility]

1207, Marchfast 11*****

---Dawn is bright today. Much yawning and stretching in camp. Days getting earlier and birds louder. Hogar won't stop talking about how much he loves an early start on the day. He keeps spouting crap like 'Early mornings beget early warnings', but some of us may have been up til the wee hours, doing private things. Mina thinks we woke up the rogue, now she won't look anyone in the eyes, keeps blushing when someone calls her name. If anyone didn't know about us, I'm certain they do now... Bot that I mind! She's probably just embarrassed, being a member of the clergy and all. Can't stop thinking about her. Ears so much fun to play with!

---Hogar, being our advocate of the morning hours, offered to cook some breakfast. But by the time he'd returned from a foray with a hard-won clutch of eggs, Iggy had already awoken and conjured some sweet breads and fresh coffee. Look on his face is priceless. Mages good for something after all, it seems.

---Breakfast raised everyone's spirits. Even Hogar stopped grousing after his belly was full. Auspicious start to day. Today we begin the delve into the ruins of the old Temple of the Pale. Much danger, lots of undead. Rogue says traps not likely, news generally accepted with smiles and cheer.

1207, Marchfast 13*****

---Two days in, now. Making good progress. No deaths, but Mina got bitten by something. We killed it, but it turned to dust and no one else knows enough about undead to identify what variety it was. Hope it was a ghoul, she'll be fine by this evening. Worried about her. No one eager to continue without cleric. Setting up fortified position in room above stairs to second level, keeping fires and voices low so as not to attract more undead.

---Been keeping Mina company, feeding her water when she wakes up, keeping her warm. She's shivering now, incoherent when she wakes up. Face maybe pale, hard to tell by torchlight. Kara-mei giving me dirty looks. Not sure if she thinks I'm taking advantage, or if she's jealous. Hard to be sure with monks. Don't really care, worried about Mina.

1207, Marchfast 14*****

---Mina is gone. Kara-mei was on watch, she swears she saw Mina just get up and run off suddenly, into the darkness. No one has seen her since. We need to go after her. Hogar and Iggy are trying to talk the rest of the party into leaving. I know it's a long shot, but I don't want to g

[Parser note:

This entry is complete as originally recorded, however certain non-literary artifacts present on the medium suggest that the recording process was interrupted suddenly.

For detail regarding foreign objects and non-literary artifacts present in, on, or with this document, refer to associated items, items 2a-4.]

1207, Marchfast 15*****

---Strange to be writing this. I don't feel so different, just... cold. Mina is cold too. I don't know what to say. Is this how it's to be, now?

1207, Marchfast 19, I think...*****

---Time is hard to keep track of. It's taken me several days to come to terms with my new... situation. Five days (I estimate) ago, Mina vanished into the darkness. Our monk woke everyone, and I was writing my morning entry in my journal when she returned. I tried to make it to my bow, but she saw me going for it and kicked it down the hall, into a pack of ghouls that were creeping up behind her. My armor was across the small room where I'd camped, as was my sword, and I was of little help.

I watched with a horror that I remember now only as an academic fact as Mina's new friends tore into us. Unprepared and confused, my allies were all paralyzed or dying in moments. I thought I was to share their fate when Mina approached me and grinned savagely, showing off a new set of gleaming fangs.

She caught my gaze with her beautiful green eyes and I don't remember what happened next, only that I woke in a room somewhere deeper in the catacombs, saturated with hunger and cold.

I have to go.

---Mina moved us again. I don't know what she's looking for. I found her holy symbol. It hurts to touch it, but I wrapped it in a cloak and stuffed it in my pack when she wasn't looking. Maybe it will be of some use. Her body is changing. Her adorable plumpness is vanishing. Her stomach looks hollow now, as do her cheeks. The points of her ears are cold to the touch, even to my dead hands. I wonder if the same thing is happening to me, but some how I don't have the courage to ask her. Her attitude has changed, she's crueler now, and sometimes violent, but I love her, even more than I did before. I wonder if it has something to do with what she did to me.

I don't feel cruel. I don't feel the hunger like she does either, it's there but I can ignore it. Maybe it has something to do with an incident where I lost my soul a few years ago. It was recovered, and I keep it with me, safely bound to a glass bead that I shoved with no little effort and pain into my sinuses, where I still feel it rattling around from time to time. Maybe the degree of separation is sparing me a measure of the effects of my undead state. I am no arcanist, and who would bother to help a... vampire... solve it's existential quandaries?

1207, one week (approximately) since event*****

---Keeping track of the days seems silly to me today. I don't know if it's day or night above ground. I suppose I will need to figure out how to tell before I try to leave. If we ever leave. Mina is searching for something. She keeps talking about the altar. I fear she means the inner sanctum of the Cult of the Pale, where once vampires--like us I suppose--were worshiped by their thralls, and sacrificed to their blood god. I do not want to see this place, and I'm afraid of why Mina seeks it so desperately, but I know without doubt that I will follow her into the depths of hell if I must. She is my mistress now, I have accepted this. I am glad, in a way, that she is as kind to me as she is. She lets me sleep with my arms around her, and a few times she has even allowed me to make love to her. Though neither of us finds the passion in this that we did when we were among the living, there is some strange comfort for me in the act, like for a short time I can pretend that things did not go so terribly wrong. I think for her there is some memory of happiness that soothes her newly spiteful heart.

She is looking at me now. It is time to move.

---Just now I did a foolish thing, I asked her if she loves me. She looked at me so intently I feared she would strike me, but a strange look came over her, as if she wanted to correct me, but wasn't sure how best to do so. She stared into my eyes until I looked away in shame. I will not speak of it again.

1207, one day since last entry*****

---She says we are getting close. She drives us harder now. Not that we tire. Things lurk down here. Large things. Things that scare Mina, and she scares me. We hide like rats in holes when they approach, and we hide our eyes until they pass and we can continue on. I don't want to know what frightens her.

---Not much time. Altar room just ahead. Very afraid.

1207, somewhere*****

---The holy symbol I carried was our damnation! I should have listened to the mistress, and left it behind. We made it to the inner sanctum intact, and the creature chasing us stopped at the doorway, as if afraid to enter. A strange look came over Mina, and she let out a low moan of dread as she walked forward, almost as if compelled by some unholy force. She fell to her knees before the altar, and I heard an evil voice whisper to her. She listened intently, then suddenly whirled to pierce me with her eyes. "You fool!" she cried desperately, and the ground opened beneath us and we fell for what seemed like ages.

Below us yawned a craggy nightmare landscape. Green orbs of flame soared through a blighted sky in the distance in all directions, and the ground far below was jagged and dry, lit by a malevolent bloody light with no apparent source.

We landed with a tremendous impact, surely enough to extinguish any living mortal, but within a quarter hour our bodies had knit themselves so that we could stand. Chasms and crags obstructed our progress and our view. The ground was red with powdery rust that worked into our skin and clogged our eyes. The landscape was dotted with pools of rotting blood and strange claw-like protrusions, almost like trees, that jutted from the ground, made of segments with the appearance and feel of knuckle bones, but much larger.

I avoided speaking to Mina for hours after our arrival, afraid she must be furious with my failure, but when we finally found an overhang and sat underneath to consider our bearing and course, she dug through my pack calmly and pulled out her old holy symbol, shattered by something into a thousand blackened fragments, and apparently devoid of any holy energy. She looked at the fragments impassively, then let them clatter to the damned ground and repacked my things. Strangely she does not seem to be angry.

Day two in the wastes*****

---We found the tallest crag we could and scaled it, hoping to find some landmark to navigate by, but just as we reached the peak some alien fiend plummeted from the sky on mangy wings and snatched Mina off the rock face. I leapt after it but missed, then gave chase along the ground as she struggled with her assailant. Eventually she managed to injure one of it's wings, and it spiraled slowly towards the ground, where together we finished it off. It's blood was acrid, like old copper coins, and burned like fire going down, but it slaked our thirst. Mina, though gouged and scratched by it's talons, seems better for having fed. Her mood has improved. She has decided, however, that we will avoid high points from now on.

---Several hours later we stopped and sheltered for a time, more for a change of surroundings than for rest. Mina let me lay beside her, and even hold her for a little while. I feel better when I am near her. There is a terrible strength in her cold heart now, and it comforts me to know that she is my master. She will do what she must to ensure that we survive. She is all I have now, but she is enough.

She spoke to me while I held her. She said little, but I understand that things would have been different were it not for her holy symbol. The voice at the altar wanted her to resurrect the Cult of the Pale, but the symbol frightened and angered it and cast us into this pit to be rid of us. Though she didn't say as much, I suspect the voice planned to enslave her, and through her me, for it's own ends. Such things do not even bear thinking about.

Day twelve in the wastes*****

---We have wandered for days unknown, I say ten but this is vague guess at best. Neither of us has felt the need to sleep since we arrived, which while convenient, makes the passage of time difficult to track, doubly so with the lack of a sun in the sky. We have traveled far, untiring, unsleeping, but the landscape remains the same. I fear that there is no end but rather that it stretches for ever. Doubtless we are trapped in the abyss itself. Food is scarce. Miles behind we spied a man-sized figure wrapped head to toe in layer upon layer of dirty muslin cloth until it's most basic features were all but indistinguishable. We set upon it, thinking to feed, but it fought us off with a sword of terrible fire. it did not seem to belong here, wandering much like us, but there was no common ground to be reached and no victory to be had, so defeated we moved on. My mistress's demeanor grows more desperate by the hour, such that I think that I can recognize the creature who attacked her in the catacombs in her expression, and the way she walks. In my own mind, too, the hunger is growing until it threatens my control, I believe I can understand how a desperate vampire might attack an armed party of adventurers that vastly outnumber it, blinded by the need to feed. I pray we can slay and devour another demon soon, before one of us loses our minds and turns on the other.

Many hours*****

---No more counting time, waste of time. Sighted something moving through the wastes miles left of our bearing, coming in our direction. Looks large. Leaving now to hunt it. Gods have mercy on us, if such a thing is possible now.

*****

---Again, spared from certain death by strange fates. The prey we sought was Az'atormith the Architect of Agony, would-be queen of this layer of the Abyss. Catching sight of her and taking careful note of her path as she moved purposefully through the waste, we crept and slithered into place, and prepared for our ambush. We had seen that our target was larger than us, we took utmost care not to give away our location. As Az'atormith passed below us we leapt from our position, screaming with frenzy, landing on her upper body, trying to bear her to the ground with our weight and the element of surprise. I knew we had made a terrible mistake when my finger nails, thickened and hardened by my transformation into ragged claws, scraped off the snake-woman's fair skin without so much as a red mark. She turned to look at us with a look of incredulity and amusement, and brought her six arms to bear on my mistress and myself. In no time at all, she had us pinned against the rocks, helpless.

Perhaps the gods heard my plea, or perhaps hell takes care of it's own. For whatever reason, Az'atormith bothered to run through a significant number of the three hundred seventy one languages she speaks to find our common tongue, in order to demand that we explain ourselves. Mina was frighteningly incoherent, the hunger was strong on her and she only spat and hissed, but fear was my most immediate concern and I answered each question, desperate to appease this unknown deity we had dared to attack. Learning the brief and frightened version of our recent history from myself, Az'atormith decided that our resourcefulness in sneaking up on her, and our fearless naivete in assaulting a being so supremely mighty with our bare hands, were quite charming, and ideal qualities for a pair of brand new pets.

So it came to pass that my mistress and I sit now at the foot of queen Az'atormith's great throne, an architectural sin against the laws of physics, a twisted mass of black iron ribbons arranged cunningly that the queen can slide and coil her great snake body onto and around the mass and rest comfortably, knowing just the right angles and positions to avoid the great wicked spikes and bladed edges upon which she impales and dismembers those who displease her.

My mistress and I each wear a heavy iron collar, menacing with spikes, which was permanently forged by the queen herself around our necks. Chains link our collars to a single brass handle which hangs beside the throne, heavy enough for a creature my size to use as a great club. We have been promised a life of eternal bondage at the whim of our demonic captor, but such a thing seems almost desirable compared to the desolate freedom of the wastes outside the walls of Az'atormith's citadel.

So far she has left us mostly to our own devices. She has fed us, and she does not object to my keeping my diary, the one thing that now holds any connection for me to the human life I once led, what seems like so very long ago now.

*****

---It has been some time, perhaps a week, perhaps three, since the Lord Queen took Mina and I. Life as her pet is not so onerous. I think I feared that she would treat us like beasts, but I realize now, why would she? She treats us quite like the little sentient minds we are, for mortals (even in the immortal grip of undeath) are to a demon queen like her as dogs are to men. For her to keep a beast at her beck and call would be like a man feeding and housing a worm - demeaning more to the owner than to the owned.

Every few days she brings us some hapless demon, terrified and struggling, and watches with interest as we subdue and devour the doomed creature. Some times when she is restless, she will entertain herself by taking us to the pits where she keeps her Lemures, and orders us to slaughter them. She watches as the pathetic beings try impotently to fight back as we murder them en-masse.

I think perhaps if they were human I might still find the capacity for remorse in me, but the Lemures are barely even alive, just mindless husks, eating and shitting and milling about. It pleases the Lord Queen to watch, so we slaughter and flay and make as best a show as we can. She interacts with us little but to watch us. She is watching me now, as I write. I think we must be an exotic curiosity for her, cold mortal husks that not only walk but speak and think... there seems to be little here but rust and rock and hellspawn.

*****

---The Lord Queen has discovered the ritual copulation in which the mistress and I occasionally engage. She finds it hilarious and fascinating, some times ordering us to have at it on the floor before her throne. I recall that there is a time when the idea of such a thing would have been abhorrent to me, but that was when my heart beat and Mina's body was pink and plump and soft, and we both knew how to laugh. Now, it makes little difference to me when and where and why we do such things. If it makes the Lord Queen happy, we are pleased to perform.

Odd as it is, I think the Lord Queen feels some of the passion that I only remember. Yesterday, after Mina and I had rutted each other for perhaps an hour, the Queen separated us with her tail, then ordered us to climb onto her throne and lay with her.

We pressed our cold bodies against hers and pleasured her for quite some time before she finally grew bored and pushed us away. I must admit I am curious about her interest in our mock mating, and furthermore there was something undeniably exciting about laying with the Queen, her warmth was delicious and she fairly reeks of blood. It makes the shadow-puppetry that much more vivid for me, and I believe for Mina as well, almost enough to awaken the passions of the living. Not quite, but almost.

It is with some surprise but no uncertainty that I say that I hope she finds our attentions pleasing.

*****

---It has been considerable time since my last entry. I have not endeavored to trouble the Lord Queen to help me discover the current date, it hardly seems important any more. Against all my expectations, I have come to accept my condition, and I am oddly content. Mina sees me as the only familiar thing in a strange world, and she is kind to me, sharing her food and company with me as a matter of course. The Lord Queen seems to be fond of us as well; she takes us with her as a status symbol when she departs for matters of state, and it pleases her to have us spend our idle hours reclining against her great serpentine body.