Apostles of Doom

Beragamos shook his head. He quickly reached out with his mind, following his links. He had no links off-plane! He could sense his team members: Hilda, Stevos, Dashgar, Inethya, Teragdor. They were here, they were fine, but he had no access to anything off-plane. Tierhallon, his HALO and the god pool were gone!

He blinked and tried to stop the sudden onset of hyperventilation. Tierhallon could not be gone! That would be inconceivable. And besides, he could not seem to reach anything off-plane. None of his old links to priests and illuminaries on other planes that venerated him.

No, it is not Tierhallon that is gone from me, but rather I am gone from Tierhallon, Beragamos thought as he stood to quickly get dressed. He needed to find the others. Whatever was happening, this overrode Tiernon’s instructions.

Tierhallon

Sentir Fallon was enjoying a glass of wine while reading reports from the local archons and prophets, when something suddenly seemed off. He could not place it. He set his wine down and began searching among his links and illumination streams, both those on his HALO and those he held directly. Dashgar and Inethya! They were gone, gone along with all of Nysegard. The primary illumination streams from Nysegard ran through them. Yes, there were plenty of secondary streams, but the main ones were missing. Even from people who were currently here in Tierhallon, but reported to Dashgar or Inethya.

Suddenly some of the Nysegard links came back online. Dashgar’s and Inethya’s HALOs were going autonomous. This was something he understood full well from his trips to the Abyss. Before traveling there, he always made sure all of his links, including personal ones, were transferred to his HALO so no one would notice a short absence on his part.

In this case, however, Dashgar and Inethya had not transferred their primary links to their HALOs, and so there had been a brief time before the HALOs’ logic systems had detected their absence and failed over their still-active links. There was only one explanation.

“Tiernon damn those liches,” Sentir Fallon swore. Somehow, the Storm Lords had managed to reproduce the Dark Apostle’s work.

This was a variant of the warding that had blocked Orcus from the Abyss. This one, however, was blocking access to the Outer Planes — perhaps even all planes. The Dark Apostle’s first version had blocked all planar contact; it had taken him several more centuries to be able to be able to exclude the Outer Planes. That had been a critical factor in their timing.

Certainly they would not have been able to block the entire world, but with Dashgar and Inethya at the Citadel, which they had been trying to block, all of the illumination streams running to Tierhallon through the two of them would have been broken. They would have their illuminaries on Nysegard, the vast majority of them, but would not be able to relay them off-plane.

It would be only a matter of minutes before Dashgar and Inethya would pull their local illuminaries back from their HALOs. The HALO would then lose access to those streams. Essentially, all of Nysegard would go back offline again. That was going to show up downstairs. An entire world disappearing would impact the charging of the god pool. This would show up as far worse than an accounting glitch. Damn liches!

Another cold thought struck him. Dashgar and Inethya had reached out to their Torean counterparts; had they accepted? Had the two reached out to their other Sibling counterparts? How many other attending archons and prophets had just vanished?

This was bad, very bad. He needed to get on this immediately!

Citadel Command Center

Teragdor was feeling rather queasy with his connection to Tierhallon lost. Fortunately for him, his patron saint had his back. Stevos was actually behind him at this moment, looking over his shoulder at the map.

“Vicar General!” a voice called from over by one of the mirrors.

“Yes?” Grob called back.

“The aerial attack has begun. Catapults are firing as we speak, to take out the ground support,” the mirror’s operator told him.

“Very well; tell them to hold back on sending Wardens into the air,” Grob ordered.

“Kargen!” Grob yelled to someone else in the room. “Scramble the enchanters and aeromancers; they are going to have to be our first line of defense in the sky. We need to keep this a ranged battle. I want to keep casualties down until we have more healing support.”

“Aye, Vicar General,” Kargen’s voice came from the crowd.

Grob turned back to the rest of the people around the map table. “We are going to rely on ranged attacks from wizards and animages for the moment.”

“Vicar General!” another voice called from the mirror region. “Ground assault has begun. The pyromancers are using the fire canons on those attempting to bridge the moat!”