“They shall suffer for this,” seethed Nasir n’Rotri, as his orcish and skeletal laborers hammered away at the stone. “They dare displace us from our rightful home? For this… for this indignity, the dwarves shall suffer! Celest shall suffer! The whole of the Basin shall suffer, I swear it!”

“You tell them, sir,” Magda d’Murani said blithely, lounging in a black and gold palanquin. The rest of Angkrag’s displaced population, in varying states of decay, seemed similarly unconvinced.

“You doubt me?” Nasir hissed, glaring about at the others. “You doubt my research?”

“It’s a myth, Nasir,” Aziza said simply. “An ancient myth. You’re trusting orclach historians from before the Celestine Empire to have gotten things right.” She snorted disdainfully, dislodging a maggot in the process. “We’re going to be lucky to get an interesting expletive out of this, never mind the Words of Urlach.”

“The myth is real,” Nasir intoned, with growing anger. “The power is real, the tomb is real. The Killing Words are real! And they shall be ours to command against our enemies!”

The sound of crumbling rock greeted Nasir’s ears, and he gave a thin smile. He turned to look upon the entrance his workers had opened. “Light,” he commanded, and a skeletal torchbearer clambered over the rubble to illuminate the find.

The creature barely got inside before something black and wispy slashed across its torso, sending torch and bones scattering. The orcs scrambled to get away, but weren’t fast enough as an amorphous blackness surged out of the hole and started slashing about with a thin, inky tentacle.

“Inky” was the right word for it, Nasir realized. Squinting, he could make out words along the edge of the tentacle. In fact, the whole creature seemed to be a roiling mass of words, made manifest in twisting ink. The appendage decimating his workforce read, “Your characters are soulless fabrications of pure machismo, formed to champion an ideology which they clearly do not practice or believe.” His orcs and skeletons were being crushed, it seemed, by a harsh criticism.

“Ah. So… these are the Killing Words, then,” Magda noted.

“So it would seem,” Nasir said, watching the flailing mass of ink drawing closer. “A little more literal than I expected.”

“Yes. So… are we running, now?” Omar asked.

Nasir said nothing, but just turned and started into a squelching run as he fled the cave. The others soon followed suit.

----

The cry for help came first from the Tutotophet Hive. The Tahtetso, with other Celestians in tow, arrived first to help their kepheran allies, and immediately regretted it.

“These things are too tough,” Brigh La’saet called, swinging his staff into one of the ink beasts, which just formed into a line of mockery and countered with a sharp rebuttal that slashed across his skin. “You having any better luck?”

“Fire isn’t working… cold isn’t working… weapons aren’t working,” Anyllia McCloud called in frustration. “Marjorie! It’s up to you! Use the power of the Light!”

“What do you think I’ve been doing here?” the Celestine snapped, firing another bolt of lambent energy into the amorphous monsters. “It’s not even touching them!”

“What?”

“That’s… just totally unfair,” Brigh said, crestfallen, before getting clubbed in the head with a blunt put-down.

“Keep your head in the battle!” roared a massive orclach, cleaving through Brigh’s attacker with a massive greatsword. The creature split in two, forming a couple of brief quips before splattering into a black puddle on the floor.

“Rally on Dars!” Anyllia cried, getting behind the warrior. “He’s the only one who’s having a real effect.”

“Totally unfair,” Brigh muttered, picking himself off of the ground.

Behind Dars, the Celestians beat back the vicious insults, weathering the streams of abuse thrown at them. Finally, the orclach’s blade cleaved the last monster into sentence fragments, and they paused to catch their breath.

“So… what the Nil are these things?” Marjorie said, prodding at the pooled remains of a creature with one toe. “Besides rude, I mean.”

“They’re shadowy. But shielded from the Light,” Anyllia said thoughtfully. “Maybe some cruel fae experiment from the Glomdoring?”

“No, these are just… words,” Dars said, jutting his broad jaw out in disapproval as he crouched to examine the creature. “It’s something different entirely. We’ll have to figure out where they came from before we can tell anything.”

“You do that. I’ll take one of these to the Elders, see if They have any idea,” Marjorie said glumly, digging a bucket out of her backpack.

Dars raised a brow. “Are you certain, Marjorie?”

“Yeah.” The Celestine smiled humorlessly. “I wouldn’t be much help against these things anyway. The Light does nothing.”

“That’s just totally unfair,” Brigh muttered.

“Very well. Contact us if you find out anything,” Dars grunted, standing. “In the meantime, forward… let us trace these abominations to their source.”

----

“Foul abominations! Your villainy comes to an end now! In the name of the Light, the heroes of New Celest shall end you!” Dars bellowed.

“Oh, settle down, this wasn’t us,” a pale-skinned faeling said bluntly. The Shadowdancer sat at the entrance of a newly-opened tunnel, idly smoking a long-stemmed pipe. Lounging there, she somehow managed to radiate an aura of casual disdain. It ruined what Dars felt was a perfectly good call to battle.

“What is the Glomdoring doing here, woman?” the orclach muttered.

The faeling, who some poor damned soul had long ago named “Pudding,” rolled her eyes. “It’s Prime, glitter boy. We can go where we want.”

 Anyllia stepped forward quickly, wanting to give Dars a moment to calm down. “Lady Shee-Slaugh, we’re on a mission of some import. We’ve followed the trail here…”

“Yeah, yeah. The word things. They’re inside… or they were,” Pudding said idly. “Haven’t really poked around. But they’re easy enough to kill and they’re good gold.”

“…easy? They’re nearly invincible,” Brigh grumbled.

“For you losers, maybe,” Pudding said, passing her pipe off to the left, where her barghest gently took it between his teeth. “Watch this.”

On cue, a violent argument rolled forth out of the cave, and manifested long whips of convoluted logic as it advanced on the Celestians. Dars stood ready for battle, and Anyllia and Brigh both raised their staffs in readiness, but the battle was over in an instant. With but a glance from Pudding, the argument deflated and fell in a crackle of purple energy.

“That’s… just totally unfair,” Brigh muttered. He paused, looking to the faeling. “Blaow? That’s a prayer to Night?”

“Totally is, glitter tits,” she replied, rising. “Well, they’re back, more gold for me. You poke around all you want. You’re not Glomdoring, so you don’t matter.” And with that, she fluttered into the cave, throwing a rude gesture over her back as she left.

The Celestians stood there staring. “I hate her so damn much,” Dars muttered.

“Yeah, I know. But come…” Anyllia said, shaking her head. “She’s made this quest easier for us. Forward!”

----

“What is this place?” Brigh asked as he raised his torch. The loboshigaru squinted as he peered at the walls, which were covered, top to bottom, in dozens of lines of text.

“Besides boring?” grumbled Dars. He only scowled deeper as he heard the echoes of Pudding’s battle cries from far down the hall.

“I’d say it’s a shrine to the written word,” Anyllia said, tracing her hand over the writing. “But I can read most of this, and it’s…”

“Gibberish?”

“…gibberish would be better,” Anyllia said with a frown. “It’s just… bad. This one’s in dracnari. It looks like a stream of consciousness ramble about the beauty of sand. Except I think the writer was high, and didn’t know words for beauty and sand except “beauty” and “sand.” So you can guess how interesting that is…” She squinted further down the wall. “This one’s… lucidian propaganda. From Lancenti. That’s interesting, in a purely historical sense. And down below that… yeah, that’s just tae’dae poetry.”

“So… someone lined all these walls with crappy writing?” Brigh’s ears perked as a thought occurred. “Hey, Dars, maybe that story you wrote is on here somewhere.”

“Catch fire, mutt.”

“No, all of this is ancient. Vernal Wars,” Anyllia murmured. “I just don’t understand the purpose of all of this.”

“Maybe it’s up here, then,” Dars said, indicating a set of stairs. The writing on the steps was especially dense, and as Anyllia noted as she got closer, riddled with misspellings. But that fact wasn’t the one that caught her interest.

“It’s fresh,” she said, looking up the stairway. “Someone’s been down here. Recently.”

Dars grinned crookedly as he shouldered around the mage, sword at the ready. “Well, let’s go see who, then.”

----

“Something’s come up! Hurry!”

Dars leapt from the tunnel, ready for battle the moment he emerged, but gave pause at the sudden cacophony that greeted him. He’d been attacked by instrument-wielding people in strange clothing before. The idea of a musical attack wasn’t new to him. But this was the first time anyone had ever thrown a full carnival in his path.

A trio of igasho, wrapped in crude dresses made of straw, swayed in a grotesque parody of a sensual dance as they plucked tiny violins and growled out a tune about apples. A group of mugwumps formed a line behind them, each holding a fried item on a stick, like a holy symbol in a gesture of warding. At the front, though, was a tremendous mugwump woman, being cradled in the arms of a lucidian, who for some bizarre reason had little brown ears and a fuzzy nose glued to his crystalline head.

“Oh, woe, Bollikin,” the lucidian intoned, completely deadpan. “Truly, my grief is the grief of all Creation. I am wounded as in the heart by the loss of you.”

“Tekri, it’s not the Words,” the krokani said, staring at the Celestians, who looked utterly bewildered at the scene.

“Oh, thank the gods,” Tekri said, unceremoniously dropping his companion and ripping off the pieces of his costume with sudden fervor. “Okay. Much better. Now.” The lucidian straightened. “You. Interlopers. What have you done?”

Anyllia recovered from the sheer oddity of the situation first. “The Words invaded our allies in the tunnels. We came to find the source… and found you here. What is this place?” she said, drawing herself up regally.

“You stand in Vestera’s Watch, which guards the Tomb of Judgment’s Eye. Our sacred duty, handed down to us by Vestera Herself, is to ensure that the Killing Words do not roam free,” Tekri intoned.

“So… the costumes and the bad singing?” Brigh looked dubiously at the group. “Those are for what?”

Tekri’s face twitched, and his form turned slightly red. “The nature of the Words is to destroy that which is not beautiful… and to flee from that which is truly awful. It necessitates some… undignified tactics at times.” The lucidian sighed. “If the words have escaped into the underground, we shall have to lure them back in somehow. That, at least, will be beautiful.”

“So what are we dealing with, here?” Dars growled. “Vestera imprisoned this thing… what is it? Is it the fragment of some Soulless?”

“No, rather the opposite. But still dangerous.” As the villagers around him started to disperse, Tekri came forward. “Long ago, during the Vernal Wars, all who passed through these mountains perished at the hands of some black monstrosity. It was Vestera who first came to see what plagued these lands, and Vestera who first understood. She saw that it was not a Soulless God that troubled the area, but an Elder.”

“An Elder?” Dars scowled. “Why would an elder kill people like that?”

“Ah, but it was not a sane Elder,” Tekri continued. “It was broken. Malformed. Hurting. Vestera realized this, and she called the Vernal Goddesses Tzaraziko and Menestre to Her. Together, they reached through the ages, pieced together the Elder’s identity, and learned of His fate, and of His name.”

“So who is He, then?”

----

“Eyos.”

Isune smiled grimly as She looked at the black puddle spread before Her. Marjorie fought the urge to run from the goddess; she could feel uncharacteristic vindictiveness rolling off of the Aesthete, and wanted no part of it.

“You knew Him, then?” the Celestine ventured, softly.

“Oh, Eyos? Yes, yes…” Isune said through a smile that reached neither her eyes nor her body language. She stalked about the puddle, looking down at it. “All the Fourth Circle knew of Eyos. He was one of the Primordial Gods, you know. Like Keph, and Dracnoris. Like them, He was a Meditator… but what He chose to meditate on was the nature of beauty.” She gave a little pout. “Funny, for someone who looked like a one-eyed octopus with a stupid mustache.”

Marjorie kept silent for a moment as she mulled that over. “So… it doesn’t sound like He was well liked?” she asked timidly.

“Oh, He was respected. We all respected the Primordials, after all…” Isune said airily. “I mean, sure, He might’ve raised a few hackles, writing about the poor quality of one year’s tulips, or the overabundance of blue in the sky, or how the dress Someone worked on for the better part of ten years was nothing more than a lesser copy of an outfit Drocilla threw together at the last minute. For ten pages.” The goddess’s eyes literally flared in anger for a moment. “But we respected Him,” She finished delicately, as the cold light in her eyes vanished.

“Of course,” Marjorie said, fighting spectacularly to keep the disbelief out of her voice. “So… what happened to Him, then?”

Isune looked to Marjorie, and merely shrugged. “I know the same as You, mortal. It is written in the book of Meridian that when Eyos splintered, They never found the remains. Apparently, He was not so fortunate in His splintering as Dracnoris.” She looked to the puddle with just the faintest hint of a smirk on Her features. “A pity. Truly.”

“Yes. Well, thank You, Lady Isune. I’ll inform the others,” Marjorie said. “Shall I… take this from Your presence, then?”

Isune appeared to consider that for a moment. “No. You know what? No, mortal. Leave Him here. I shall see to it that this part of His essence, at least, is seen to properly.”

“As you wish, Lady. Thank You.”

As Marjorie hurried away, she pretended she didn’t hear Isune cackling darkly. “Oh, You uppity bastard. I bet You’d like being a dirty limerick, wouldn’t You?” the goddess’s voice echoed down the hall.

----

“So… this is the plan then,” Dars said flatly. “We leave a trail of shiny objects to the center and then board it up afterwards.”

“They’re not just any shiny objects,” Anyllia said, setting a diamond-studded veil delicately atop a colorfully-decorated toy chest. “These are artistically-vetted objects. Objects of unparalleled Beauty.”

“My kabob was totally better than these,” Brigh muttered. “I got robbed.”

“Your deep-fried peach, cheese and asparagus kabob was a tragedy, and you fragging know it,” Dars grunted.

“Better than your story.”

“Choke on a Fainite.”

“Anyllia, we’ve got the Cantors ready to go. The song should echo all through the tunnels,” Marjorie interrupted quickly. “And we have Empresses ready to extract them afterwards.”

“Then we’re set. Let’s get this going.”

----

“I really don’t like this plan,” Aneul Serole muttered, staring at the sole entrance into the chamber. The tentacled statue looming overhead didn’t help his sense of ease, even if it was holding a quill and sporting a jaunty little monocle. “How did we get dragged into this?”

“We voted,” Laran said glumly to his brother. “All the Cantors voted against. The final result was 45 to 2 in favor.”

“Whenever you’re ready, gentlemen,” Anyllia’s voice echoed through the aethers.

“Light save us,” Aneul muttered. “Well, hope this works.”

“It’ll work. Just… be ready to switch songs in a hurry,” Laran said grimly. “Well… one. Two. One, two, three…”

The two seasingers strummed harmonizing chords on their pearly lutes, and raised their voices to fill the Chamber of the Eye. Their song echoed through the tomb and into the tunnels of the Undervault, where the melodious sounds found the Words as they passed judgment on kephera, cave-fishers and illithoid.

“It’s working! They’re flowing in!” Marjorie reported.

“Great. Just… you know. Be ready to save us,” Laran grumbled across the aether in reply.

The two bards looked on in horror, their voices and instruments working automatically as they watched the inky beings start to flow in to witness their performance. The Words, formed into phrases of consideration and appraisal, flowed about the room, appearing to admire the fine objects about them, monstrous patrons in a private gallery.

“There’s just a few more. Hold on just a moment,” Marjorie’s voice echoed.

“Hurry it up,” Laran returned in his mind. His eyes widened as he saw one of the creatures taking a special interest in him. He could see, rolling in its shape, certain words: repetitive, unfelt, distracted, inferior. He watched, as they shifted into a sharp-edged tendril.

“Screw it,” he muttered, before shifting into an out of tune, folksy series of chords. “HONEYCAKES! HONEYCAKES! WON’T YOU BE MINE!” the merian bellowed at the top of his lungs.

Aneul followed suit, and the Words recoiled visibly, most trying to escape the room. The largest one, though, merely shuddered, and formed a dozen heavy outgrowths, each made of a blunt dismissal: “Stop. Stop playing. Forever.”

Laran’s lyre crunched audibly, along with several of his bones, as the tendril connected. But instead of being crushed against the floor, he fell backwards into a glowing doorway.

As he recovered his senses, he looked up at the faces of his brother and his fellow Celestians. “Well done,” Anyllia said brightly. “Mission accomplished.”

“Whoo. Go team,” Laran said flatly. “Now someone pass the regeneration salve.”

----

“The Words are once again sealed, brave heroes,” Tekri said grandly, at the entrance to the tomb. “We of Vestera’s Watch thank you. As do our patrons.”

“Your patrons?” Dars turned from the view to the eastern lands, regarding Tekri suspiciously. “What patrons.”

“That would be Us.” A group of robed and hooded figures emerged from the trees, shuffling towards the group of Celestians. Dars and Brigh took to a ready stance immediately… the others merely looked wary.

“Oh, great. Mysterious guys with no species. Not suspicious,” Laran muttered.

“We are no strangers to you, heroes. We are the beings known as the Divine Scholars,” one of the figures intoned. Annylia couldn’t tell which one was actually speaking. “We thank you for containing the pieces of Eyos, and wish to provide you a small reward.”

Dars huffed. “Divine Scholars… bah. Anyone can claim to be one of those mysterious clowns. Prove it.”

One of the hooded figures turned its head as if to look at the orclach. “You, Dars Oerch, are the author of the lowest-rated submission in all of Lusternian history. It pains me to even mention the name, but the ‘Lejend of the Swordsblader’ is a crime against narrative.”

“Yeah, but everyone knows that,” Brigh said cheerfully, earning a quick stab in the thigh from Dars.

“But not everyone knows that Dars Oerch is actually the recipient of a unique award,” the figure continued. “1000 credits, on the condition that he forever forswear the use of the written word.”

“Oh, that’s just mean,” Aneul began, chuckling softly, before noticing that Dars had become very uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than Brigh, even, who was still bleeding.

“I still don’t believe you’re Divine Scholars, but whatever,” the warrior growled softly. “If you have something for us, then so be it.”

“We have but words to give you. I hope you’ll find some of these interesting,” one figure said, producing a book from its robes. “Consider it thanks, for seeing to a part of Eyos.”

“Part of Him?” Marjorie asked, as Anyllia stepped forward to claim the tome eagerly. “What happened to the rest of His splinters?”

“Oh, He’s around,” one figure, or all of them, said mildly, before they turned and headed back towards the trees. Marjorie thought she caught sight of a tentacle slipping back into one’s robes as it walked.

“Well, hooray. Words,” Dars grunted irritably. “Anything interesting?”

“Writings of the Last Nine!” Anyllia squealed.

“Boring.”

“Here’s one from Urlach.”

“Ooh, let me see!” Dars craned his head over Anyllia’s shoulder, peering at the words. “Uh. What’s it say?”

“Let’s see… Dear Dionamus,” Anyllia began, before trailing off for a long while. “Well, that’s an interesting expletive.”

----

“They will suffer. Soon, they will all suffer!” Nasir growled. “The Killing Words are real, and soon they shall be under my control!”

“I don’t think leaving a trail of shiny objects from here to Southgard counts as control,” Magda said blithely.

“That’s not really the point, though. Suffering is the point,” Aziza replied. “There’ll be suffering.”

“There’s suffering already. Someone had to pay for all this art, you know,” Magda grumbled.

“Focus,” Nasir hissed. “Focus… and once more, open the door!”

The Celestians had sealed the breach with stone, mortar, and copies of old news posts. Skeletons hammered away at the masonry as the undead leaders of Angkrag focused necrotic power on the wards. Slowly, the wall desiccated and fell, revealing a number of shadowy figures.

“Yes…” Nasir said, smiling widely. “Come forth, creatures of destruction, and do my bidding!”

His head abruptly exploded in a cloud of rotten flesh and maggots.

“So that’s where the door was,” Pudding Shee-Slaugh said mildly, taking her pipe back from her pooka as she strode into the Undervault, her fae carrying a massive bounty of ink and gold in her wake.