[center][b]The Ashen Abyss
Ebony Citadel[/b][/center]

As Xoidea and Kikmeine strolled through the cool dark air, fresher than that pent up in Ebony Citadel, the latter looked about Quse Breche, realized he hadn't bothered to set foot outside in days, and rather wondered why, for the view was as spectacular as ever. Quse Breche, home to the main base of operations for the reth-dekala since that institution's founding, was a large cavern where the labor of countless spell casters, artisans, and slaves had turned enormous stalagmites and other masses of rocks into three extraordinary citadels. To the east rose pyramidal Malarin-Magthere, where Kikmeine and others like him turned callow young demons into warriors. By the western wall stood the many-spired tower of Sorcere, where Xoidea and her colleagues taught wizardry, while to the north crouched the largest and most imposing school of all, Arach-Tinilith, a temple built in the great sphere like shape much like a small moon. Inside, the priestesses of Mother Dark, Demon Lord of hedonism, chaos, assassins, perfection, lust, excess, and greed, trained succubi maidens to serve their mistress in their turn. And yet, magnificent as was Quse Breche, considered in the proper context, it was only a detail in a scene of far greater splendor. The Ebony Citadel sat in a side cavern, a mere nook opening partway up the wall of a truly prodigious vault. The primary chamber was two miles wide and a thousand feet high, and filling all that space was Erelhei-Cinlu. 

On the cavern floor, castles, hewn like Quse Breche from natural protrusions of calcite, shone blue, green, and violet amid the darkness. The phosphorescent mansions served to delineate the plateau of Qu'ellarz'orl, where the nightshades and those creatures nearly as powerful made their homes; the West Wall district, where lesser but still well-established factions schemed how to supplant the dwellers on Qu'ellarz'orl; and Narbondellyn, where parvenus plotted to replace the inhabitants of West Wall. Still other palaces, cut from stalactites, hung from the lofty ceiling. The powerful and favored of Mother Dark within Erelhei-Cinlu had set their homes glowing to display their immensity, their graceful lines, and the ornamentation sculpted about their walls. Most of the carvings featured carnal acts, scarcely surprising, Kikmeine supposed, in a realm where Mother Dark was the only thing close to a deity anyone worshiped, and her clergy ruled in the temporal sense as well as the spiritual one. 

For some reason, Kikmeine found the persistence of such motifs vaguely oppressive, so he shifted his attention to other details. If a night fiend had good eyes, he could make out the frigid depths of the lake called Donigarten at the narrow eastern end of the vault. Cattle-like beasts called al'vur and the human slaves who herded them lived on an island in the center of the lake. And there was Narbondel itself, of course. It was the only piece of un-worked stone remaining on the cavern floor, a thick, irregular column extending all the way to the ceiling. At the start of every day, the First Daughter Night of Erelhei-Cinlu cast a spell into the base of it, heating it until the rock glowed. Since the radiance rose through the stone at a constant rate, its progress enabled the residents of the city to tell the time. In their way, the Master of Malarin-Magthere supposed, he and Xoidea were, if nowhere near as grand a sight as the vista before them, at least a peculiar one by virtue of the contrasts between them. With her slender build, graceful manner, seductive, voluptuous, elegant attire, and intricate coiffure, the nightshade mage epitomized what a sophisticated- and of course alluring- demoness and sorceress should be. Kikmeine, on the other hand was an oddity. He was huge for a member of his sex, bigger than many females, with a burly, broad-shouldered frame better suited to a brutish ogre than a demon of lust. He compounded his strangeness by wearing an ebony breastplate and vambraces in preference to light, supple mail used by most incubi. He also did not have one set of wings, but two, and two sets of horns, the front pair jutting almost seven inches forward with the back pair curled over his scalp. By contrast, Xoidea was unique among Erinyes's in her shorter then average stature for their kind, standing no taller then a human female, with dark furthered wings with crimson edges. She also sported horns, but they were short nubs easily hidden in the long locks of her hair, and unlike many of those who lived within the abyss, possessed ivory colored skin. If not for the wings, talons, and fangs, Xoidea might have passed for a human mortal, maybe even a Velusian. 

Kikmeine and Xoidea walked to the edge of Quse Breche and sat down with their legs dangling over the sheer drop-off. They were only a few yards from the head of the staircase that connected the Ebony Citadel with the city below, and at the top of those steps, beside the twin pillars, a pair of sentries—last-year initiates of Malarin-Magthere—stood watch. Kikmeine thought that he and Xoidea were distant enough for privacy if they kept their voices low. 

Low, but not silent, curse it. Ever the sensualist, the sorceress sat savoring the panorama below him, obviously prolonging his contemplation well past the point where Kikmeine's mouth had begun to tighten with impatience, and never mind that on the walk up, he'd admired the view himself. 

"We fiends don't love one another, except in the carnal sense," Xoidea remarked at last, "but I think one could almost love Erelhei-Cinlu itself, don't you? Or at least take a profound pride in it." 

Kikmeine shrugged. "If you say so." 

"You sound less than rhapsodic. Feeling morose again today?" 

"I'm all right. Better, at least, now that I see you still alive." 

"You assumed Sister had executed me? Does my offence seem so grievous, then? Have you never annihilated a single specimen of our tender young [i]candidates[/i]?"

 "That depends on how you look at it," Kikmeine replied. "Combat training is inherently dangerous. Accidents happen, but no one has ever questioned that they were accidents occurring during the course Malarin-Magthere's legitimate business. The Dark Mother knows, I never lost seven in a single hour, two of them from favoured pets of nightshades with seats on the Council. How does such a thing happen?" 

"I needed seven assistants with a degree of magical expertise to help me perform the Gate summoning ritual. Had I called upon full-fledged wizards, they would have joined the experiment as equal partners. They would have emerged from the ritual possessed of the same newly discovered secrets as myself, equally able to conjure and control a Rift gate. Naturally I wished to avoid such a sharing, so I opted to use apprentices instead."

Xoidea grinned and continued, "In retrospect, I must admit that it may not have been a good idea. The backlash of magic ended up killing them all, the strain proving to much." An updraft wafted past Kikmeine's face, carrying the constant murmur of the metropolis below. He caught its scent as well, a complex odor made of cooking smoke, incense, perfume, the stink of unwashed thralls, and a thousand other things.

"Why perform such a dangerous ritual in the first place?" he asked.

Xoidea smiled as if it was a silly question. Perhaps it was.

“A way around the use of the nexus to offer maximum opportunity to exploit the disjunction on the mortal plane? Could you not imagine the favor I might have gained from Mother Dark?” Xoidea sighed. “I might have avoided the necessity in even setting foot on the mortal plane, thus endangering my own person, alas, it would seem my punishment will force me into possible danger all the same.” 

 “I see.”

 Ambition was an essential part of the abyss demon character, and Kikmeine sometimes envied Xoidea her still-passionate investment in the struggle for status. The warrior supposed that he himself had achieved the pinnacle of his ambitions when he became one of the lesser masters of Malarin-Magthere, for certainly he, born of the seed of a none Demon Lord, could never climb any higher. From that day forward, he'd stopped peering hungrily upward and concentrated on looking down, to guard against all those who wished to kill him in hopes of ascending to his position. 

 Xoidea was a Mistress of Sorcere as Kikmeine was a Master of Malarin-Magthere but perhaps, being of full Demon lord blood, Xoidea really did aspire to assassinate the formidable Zhofaer, their eldest sister, and seize her position. Even if she didn't, wizards and their ilk, by the nature of their intricate and clandestine art, maintained a rivalry that encompassed more than who was a master, who was chief wizard or Sorceress in the Children of Night, and who was neither. They also cared about such things as who could know the most esoteric secrets, could conjure the deadliest specter, or see most clearly into the future. In fact, they cared so deeply that they occasionally sought to murder each other and plunder one anther’s spell books even when such hostilities ran counter to the interests of their allies, severing said alliance or disrupting a negotiation.

"Now," Xoidea said, reaching inside the elegant folds of her robes and producing a silver flask, "I'll have to turn my back on the mortals for a while. I hope the poor lambs won't be lonely without me." 

She unscrewed the bottle, took a sip, and passed the container to Kikmeine. 

 Kikmeine hoped the flask didn't contain wine or an exotic liqueur, or worse a aphrodisiac. Xoidea was forever pressing such libations on him and insisting that he try to recognize all the elements that allegedly blended together to create the taste, even though Kikmeine had demonstrated time and again that his palate was incapable of such a dissection. He drank and was pleased to find that for a change, the flask contained simple brandy, probably imported at some expense from the inhospitable planes such as Fél Válásí or Iíoá Kháldór that lay beyond the nexus, baking in the excruciating sunlight. The liquor burned his mouth and kindled a warm glow in his stomach. 

He handed the brandy back to Xoidea and said, "I assume Zhofaer told you to leave the project be."

"In effect. She assigned me another task to occupy my time. Should I succeed, The First Daughter of Night will forgive me my transgressions. Should I fail . . . well, I'll hope for a nice beheading or garroting, but I'm not so unrealistic as to expect anything that quick."

"What task?"

"I am to leave the Abyss, on an errand to Fél Várást. To act as an envoy to Tyranthos the Exalted One himself."

Xoidea took another sip, then offered the flask again.

"When are you to leave" asked Kikmeine, waving off the drink.

Xoidea smiled and said. “Why, by the next lighting of the spire, I fear it would be a taxing, and of course, boring affair. I can only hope Tyranthos does not gut me the moment I show up at his door, assuming I get that far of course.” 

Kikmeine raised and eyebrow slightly as he turned his gaze back on Erelhei-Cinlu. “I can now guess why you wanted to meet today.” 

"Of course you have. Whatever awaits on such a journey, my chances of survival improve if I have a comrade to watch my back."

Kikmeine scowled. "You mean, a comrade willing to defy the express will of First Daughter Zhofaer and risk running afoul of some outerplane fiend."

"Quite, and by a happy coincidence you have the look of a demon in need of a break from his daily routine. You know you're bored to death. It's painful to watch you grouch your way through the day."

Kikmeine pondered for a moment, then said, "All right. Maybe we can find something alone the way we can turn to our advantage." 

"Thank you, my brother. I owe you." Xoidea took a drink and held out the flask again. "Have the rest. There's only a swallow left. We seem to have guzzled the whole pint in just a few minutes, though that scarcely seems possible, refined, specimens we are."

 Kikmeine shrugged and took the flask, upending it. A moment latter he felt heat spread through himself, and the blood rushed to his groin. He sighed, realizing to late that his devious sister had spiked the drink with aphrodisiacs after all.