Each time the gust hissed its secret, the corpses in his walls moaned through rotted lips and decayed arms loose from the wall squirmed to reach bony hands for rotted ears. With each utterance of the unholy word, the entirety of Corpsehaven wriggled like a hive of abyssal ants.
Inthracis knew the word's meaning, of course. He was an ultroloth, one of the most powerful in the Blood Rift, and he was versed in over one hundred twenty languages, including High Drow of Faerun. The Yor'thae was Lolth's Chosen, and the Spider Queen was summoning her Chosen to her side. It infuriated Inthracis that he had not been able to learn why.
He recognized that Lolth, like the Lower Planes, was undergoing a transmogrification. Perhaps she would be transformed, perhaps the process would annihilate her. The calling of the Yor'thae presaged events of significance, and the word was in the ear, on the tongues, and in the minds of all the powerful in the Lower Planes demon princes of the Abyss, archdevils of the Nine Hells, ultroloths of the Blood Rift. All were positioning themselves to take advantage of whatever outcome resulted.
Despite himself, Inthracis admired the Spider Bitch's temerity. Though he did not fully understand the stakes, he did understand that Lolth had gambled much on the success of her Chosen.
Such a gamble should not have surprised him overmuch. At her core Lolth was the same as any demona creature of chaos. Senseless risk and senseless slaughter were her nature.
Which is why demons are idiots, Inthracis decided. Even demon goddesses. The wise took only well-calculated risks for well-calculated rewards. Such was Inthracis's creed and it had served him well. He tapped his ring-bedecked fingers on the polished basalt table, and sparks of magical energy leaped from the bands. The legs of the tablehuman legs grafted to the basalt topshifted slightly to better accommodate him. The bones of his chair adjusted to more comfortably sit him.
He looked upon thecollective knowledge gathered in his library, seeking inspiration. Desiccated hands and arms jutted from the walls of flesh, forming shelves upon which sat in orderly rows an enormous quantity of magical scrolls, tomes, and grimoires, a lifetime's worth of arcane knowledge and spells. Inthracis's multifaceted eyes scanned them in several spectrums. Multifarious colors of varying intensities emanated from the tomes, denoting their relative magical power and the type of magic they embodied. Like the dead in his walls, the books offered him no ready answer.
Another tremor rattled the plane, another wail trumpeted the promise or threat of Lolth's Yor'thae, another agitated rustle ran through the dead of Corpsehaven.
Distracted, Inthracis pushed back his chair, rose from the table, and walked to the library's largest window, an octagonal slab of glassteel wider than Inthracis was tall and magically melded with the bones and flesh around it. A lattice of thread-thin blue and black veins grew within the glass, a byproduct of the melding.
The veins looked like a spider's web, Inthracis thought, and he almost smiled.
The grand window offered a wondrous view of the heat-scorched red sky, a panorama of Calaas's side and the rugged lowlands of the Blood Rift far below. Inthracis stepped close to the window and looked out and down.
Though he had flattened a plateau half a league wide into Calaas's side, he had raised Corpsehaven right at the edge of the plateau. He had chosen such a precipitous location so that he could always look out and be reminded of how far he had to fall, should he grow stupid, lazy, or weak.
Outside, the unceasing winds whipped a rain of black ash into blinding swirls. Arteries of lava, fed from the eternal flow of the plane's volcanoes, lined the lowlands far below. Fumaroles dotted the black landscape like plague boils, venting smoke and yellow gas into the red sky. The winding red vein of the Blood River surged through the gorges and canyons.
Here and there, swarms of larvaethe form mortal souls took in the Blood Riftsquirmed along the broken landscape or wriggled up Calaas's sides. The larvae looked like pale, bloated worms as long as Inthracis's arm. Heads jutted from the slime-covered, wormlike bodies, the only remnant of the dead soul's mortal form. The faces wore expressions of agony that Inthracis found pleasing.
Despite the ash storm and roiling landscape, squads of towering, insectoid mezzoloths and several powerfully muscled, scaled, and winged nycalothsall of them in service to one or another of the ultrolothsprowled the rockscape with long, magical pikes. With