Arc 7: Chapter 16: Devils
I walked back out into the antechamber where we’d entered the Inquisition complex, but there was no sign of the doctor. I called her name, and when I didn’t get a response I started to explore. Though she’d seemed certain the hidden sanctum wouldn’t be guarded, I felt skeptical. Why wouldn’t they post some kind of sentry, in case Lias tried to return?
I didn’t trust it, so I moved quietly and was watchful. However, my mind also churned with too much information. Even as I kept trying to keep track of all the extraplanar lore and supernal history different beings kept trying to cram into my brain, I was also thinking about this place, about what had been happening here and what Lias was up to.
I kept thinking about what I’d been ordered to do, and if I could do it. Not just whether I could make myself — I’d long since resolved that meeting Lias again wouldn’t be a happy reunion — but whether I would be capable. He’d become very powerful.
And I thought about the spirits inside the mirror, about what Lias might have been using them for and what they’d said to Delphine.
They’d called her Sister Vera. A nun name. And that last voice… I’d recognized it. I could almost remember from where. The knowledge floated through the fog of my memories, elusive but just there, in reach.
I focused on trying to find her. The clinking steps of my armored boots echoed through the empty halls. The complex turned out to be massive, corridor linking into corridor, stairs rising or descending into other levels. There were large rooms, small rooms, moldering storehouses, signs of some old sewage system that made me guess the old inquisitors had spent prolonged periods down here in the dark.
It must have taken years to build all of it. Decades, even.
There were very large rats, and cockroaches big as my fist. They left me be and I gave them the same courtesy. No living priorguard though. I was wary of them, knowing the Priory maintained a presence in the so-called “Underbarracks.”
The Knights Penitent were based here. They’d been made here. Lias had made them. Him, and Delphine. And Oraise, and once again I considered that I should have killed that jackal when I had the chance.
I saw light in an open doorway and approached it cautiously, my axe held low and ready. It was some kind of workshop. There were benches, hooks on the ceilings to hold something no longer present, something like an oven in one corner.
No… a furnace. There were weapons on the walls, fragments of armor on the tables. Most of it was black iron. There was an abundance of chains, hooks, other deranged looking implements, like I’d walked into some nightmarish union of smithy and dungeon.