Petition of Sylvio Overmere

On or about the 30th of Winterfall, 849WA, the Count of Novon, Sylvio Overmere, made a clandestine journey to the Grand Mausoleum. Those events are briefly described in the biography of Vega Spritzer, but were revealed in full to The Ladies' Hiking Club in a shared dream on or about the 14th of Winterfall, 866WA.
The dream was revealed to them as follows:
Six months’ journey north, a fog lies thick and portentious, warning the torchlit procession against proceeding up the narrow pass winding up the white cliffs. There is no path for you here, it seems to caution. It is folly to continue. Turn back. The hollow chill passes through the pilgrims’ silken garments and turns the steel on their cartwheels and chest-locks to ice. The steps of their draughthorses are muffled by the thick of the fog, and it is only by that sound that the ranks of guards in the rear of the train have any sense of the direction or distance of their charge. Even so, the sound carries away further and further into the night as they march more and more cautiously, heads down, watching their steps for a false move that would send them screaming off the Throat, with enough time to catch their breath twice before breaking on the crags below.

From the window above, the tiny torches were the only indication the pilgrims were coming at all. The bishop waved over her retainers, who were placing her mantle back atop the valet and abruptly changed course at her signal. The pilgrims still had most of the night to climb, at their pace, and the regalia was obnoxious outside of ceremony. Still. It had been quite some time since a train of this magnitude found its way up the Templeborne pass to the Grand Mausoleum. The bishop traced a finger along their pleading absent-mindedly. She’d read it enough times to know it by heart now:

To His Holiness Rudiper Tureo, Pontifex Maximus, First of his Name, Warden of Templeborne, Maghena Heim ma’Vehr Heit, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Hell; from His Royal Highness Sylvio Overmere, Prince, Count of Novon, GREETING:

WHEREAS it has pleased Almighty Kelemvor Lyonsbane, Lord of the Dead and Judge of the Damned, to collect unto Himself the Eternal Soul of my beloved Brother, His Royal Highness Ericus Overmere, Prince and Duke of Maulden, in his thirty-fifth year;

AND WHEREAS the instrumentality of the decease of the same remains of pivotal interest in mortal affairs;

AND WHEREAS great and sundry Magick is suspected of obscuring the said instrumentality from mortal knowledge and most blasphemously from the knowledge of the Almighty;

NOW THEREFORE does the undersigned entreat Your Holiness for audience.

SIGNED and SEALED before me, Coristheus Cormo, Commissioner of Oaths, this Third day of Winterfall, in the Eight Hundred and Forty-Eighth Year of the Winter Age. Long may Your Holiness reign, signed,

Novon

“It is midnight, Your Excellency,” advised one of the retainers, wispy blonde hair protruding from below the rippling black oilcloth of her devotional hood. “Shall we prepare your bed, or your quill?”
The bishop set her jaw askew. Come the morning, Archbishop Scheifele may have docked, returning from the front. A procession like this, making an offering of this magnificence, of this magnitude would be a challenge and a coup even for that venerable old hand, and if he had made landfall at Templeborne there would be no excuse for failing to wait. With Archbishop Vogel on a mission to Dartwright and Bishop Schulte still in Hell awaiting elevation, she was the ranking emissary short of the Pontifex himself. At this moment, this fleeting moment in time, she was justified in starting the preparations now.
“Neither. Prepare the reagents for an audience,” ordered Bishop Spritzer. “The Empire calls, and the Kindly Ones will not be found idle.”
Eyes flitted back and forth wordlessly between the retainers. Silence. Then the merest inclination of Vega’s head set them scattering. They had their orders, and it was not their place to have misgivings. There was much to collect to call on the underworld for such a momentous request. The retainers and clerks moved like ants, setting out and returning with crumbs of ruby and chalk. Vega found herself tying her own mantle on like a novitiate as ornate boxes piled up around her. The Yishanim words for the ceremony began to circulate in her head like an earworm. She translated them back and forth to prepare herself. The liturgy flowed like cream from her mind to her scarcely moving lips as she mouthed the words imperceptibly. And yet, the liturgy was invaded every few phrases, shaken off, and invaded again. Four words from her conscious mind came unbidden into every pause, every stop for breath: I am not scared. I am not scared.
Spritzer turned from the window, drawing the shutters in. Three days’ notice, she thought. Unheard of. Disrespectful. Still, perhaps there is urgency. I—we should at least hear them out. The Corran Royal Family will surely comport themselves appropriately.
She began to take an inventory of her lush velvet office as her retainers continued to steam through. The walls, preserved from the days of the Yishamin at the sunset of the Summer Age if the records are to be believed and yet far from the oldest structures in the Mausoleum, still bore their original paint and frescoes. These were meticulously fussed over by generations of retainers born and bred to the role. There wasn’t a hallway in the Mausoleum that didn’t have at least a pair of painters at work scaling the massive walls; painting and gilding the knotwork.
Having been born to the priestly caste, Spritzer never experienced the wonder most do at entering into the Grand Mausoleum. Templeborne, three hundred feet below and twenty miles away, was a proper ruin. The paint had come off the concrete, and time and ocean storms had worn it down to a miserable husk encamped in by the lower classes and surrounded by brigands, hookers, con men and every manner of dishonest creature that sought to scratch off some of the Mausoleum’s renowned treasure for their own. Most feared to walk the Pass through the city and up, spiralling and backtracking up the pure white cliffs to their quarry, and stayed instead at the urban outskirts, content to wait for the next procession coming through laden with jewels; or riches coming down from the towers in barter for firewood and fish.
Those that did have the temerity to venture upwards, walking through the eerily silent city through the wide concrete channel cut through its centre, found themselves through the rear gate and into the necropolis. Yishanim architecture was blended here with timeless Elven masonry and the Kindly Ones’ own, and the rounded, organic shapes clashed in a harmonious discord with the fluting and horizontal planes preferred by the Ladies and the Gentlemen.
Icons and symbols of all faiths were represented here, with statues depicting angels or demigods in hopes of currying favour; or capturing the essence of the deceased in their life. One would have to speak thirty languages to determine if every statue of a dauntless warrior, bow in her hand, was intended to be the goddess of the hunt; or a likeness of the fallen; a guardian over the spirit or the riches of the dead; or simply a family sigil. Fortunately, many in the clerical class spoke at least thirty, and the necropolis was kept in a complex and inscrutable order.
The Path remained wide and empty, but any unwary visitor caught up by the beauty or horror of one of the sarcophagi might make their way down a winding path away from it and into obscurity. Some would collapse from thirst before a clerk would come upon them and guide them back to the Path to the Grand Mausoleum. After that experience, a pilgrim passing legion after legion of paupers, princes, legends of ancient wars, merchants, midwives and seamstresses committed to the Kindly Ones’ care, would find that the blasted, rocky tundra was no reprieve for the last eight miles up to the crags. Typically there, guests tried to rest; only to find that the unforgiving rock did not welcome tent pegs – and those that could not range to find an old fishing shack or a shelter from a previous procession often slept out in the wind, chattering and pale by the time they broached the threshold.
The ascent up the Throat was legendarily treacherous. Often foggy, usually wet, the Path relinquished its concrete character shortly after leaving the mainland and became little more than a simple trail worn into the sedimentary rock of the cliff. Most likely there was no way to pour the concrete reliably on such narrow ground; and the forty yards of uneven pouring suggested that had been learned the hard way, engineers and labourers no doubt having lost upon the salt-beaten rocks half a mile below.

But those that did overcome the climb and faithfully walked the Path to the threshold of the Grand Mausoleum were, to a soul, overcome by wonder. The towers themselves were unfathomably tall, with severe, yawning mouths of arches drawn out into the concrete like wrinkles. The doors, perfectly balanced and maintained, were crystalline, carved with symbols even the Yishanim were too young to comprehend, and the heft of their sixty-foot height could be pulled away easily by even the most elderly retainer. It was impossible to take in the sight for the first time and not to be overwhelmed; to feel out of place; over one’s head. The magicks here at the Embassy of Hell were greater and older than anything imagined by the pretenders at Anthur-Ro.
Even those that could swallow past the dread of the architecture could not avoid the instinctive chill arising from the two companies of droz’ohn-ka standing forth at the gate. Those quasi-mythical figures – the Myrmidons of the underworld, the honor guard of the Judge of the Damned, grim reapers all – stood still as the necropolis statues despite the rain or hail. Their sable and ebony splint armour gave them the appearance of a living darkness with flashes of moonlight, silver sashes distinguishing them as the elite. Their spears, long and thin, topped with a steel leaf coated in noxious paralytic poison, marked them all like gravestones. Bound by duty, they would not move, would not eat, sleep or change station until the pilgrim’s business was done. Almighty Kelemvor would not have his business disturbed by the trivialities of the mortal world. To those that would interfere with a procession’s prayer: death.
The richest men alive, empresses, great tribal kings of kings would stop here, arrested by the physical and psychic gravity of what they sought to do. Most turned away. Recriminations were few. Anyone attending the Crystalline Gate took a measure of themselves and their cause.
Bishop Spritzer took a careful accounting of her reagents, selecting the finest she could identify. She knew only part of the prince’s intentions. In the event that he had a profoundly interesting proposal for the world below, it would surely be best to knock loudly.
Vested and attended by six retainers with the reagents in custody, Spritzer paused for a moment at the office door, the bookshelf catching her eye. The tome of incantations loomed large. No, she told herself, proceeding into the hall. I’m the Bishop Attendant of the Grand Mausoleum. I don’t need a crutch.

In four hours’ time, the Crystalline Gate parted. Like most pilgrims, Sylvio Overmere was taken aback to learn that his journey was far from over. Another mile and a half of splendorous hallways awaited him on the way to the Sanctum. He was young, not yet twenty-five, but blooded in battle. He was a short man, but he wore his office well, his close-cropped black hair recently cut and heavy red rings hanging from his hairy knuckles. His eyes were dark and rarely more than half-open. He moved with the grace of great athleticism, and in sum resembled nothing so much as an attack dog: compact, muscled and hungry.
Unlike most pilgrims, he did not wonder at the radiance of the tapestries or the vivacity of the frescoes on the ceilings. He made no comment about how this place, the intersection of life and death, so determinedly balanced the joys of one with the duties of the other. He was on a mission. He kept his obstinacy and urgency in check as his guides stopped at shrine after shrine, leading him in the necessary obeisance.
At long last, after months of toil and the loss of most of his horses and four of his men, the Prince stood before the Sanctum door. Now the gravity of his mission took him, and he heaved a heavy sigh, steeling himself.
Beyond the door was blackness. Gently glowing crystals placed behind thin-sliced rubies cast a halo of bloody ovals on a floor so dark that the Prince nearly fell taking his first pace forward on level ground. The only relief from the dark was a column of Regni’s light descending on the Siege Mortis. Upon that dread throne, resplendent in regalia of black, silver and white, and attended by eleven retainers and clerks in hooded cassocks, sat Vega Spritzer.
If Sylvio hesitated, it was only for a moment. He knew what offence could cost him here, and he was raised well. He wasn’t expecting a woman, Vega concluded. Neither are the potentates of Hell. It will be a memorable day for everyone.
The doors thrummed shut, and the Prince entered the halo to state his case.
“Your Excellency,” he began, kneeling and tucking his arm beneath his royal yellow tabard, “I come seeking the aid of Almighty Kelemvor. I am nothing, a mere flea before the Lord of the Dead and the Judge of the Damned, and I humbly seek audience, if He will hear me.”
“We are in receipt of your petition. You wish to know if your brother was murdered.”
“Please Your Excellency, no. I wish a dictum to issue under your seal, that you spoke with him and confirmed the identity of his murderer.”
Vega’s interest was mildly piqued.
“And you suspect that would be–”
“His Grace, Emperor Kern Overmere. My eldest brother.”
“A fratricide.”
“And regicide, please Your Excellency. My Lord Father had passed across the country mere hours before my brother’s fall. Unbeknownst to him, he was Emperor for less than a day.”
Interesting, thought Vega. But still mortal politics. That’s a shame. This will go to the Potentates. Doubtful that a Lieutenant would have any interest.
“And what is your offering?”
“There is no price too great. I bring you a full third of the wealth of Novon, stolen away in secret to avoid detection. There are artifacts here that—” he paused for a moment, mindful of the unimaginable grandeur to which he had just been witness. “-- that I hope will please the Almighty.”
He’ll never know you were here, Spritzer thought to herself, wrinkling her mouth.
“Very well,” she sighed, offering to stand–
“Wait!” he shrieked.
The Bishop paused.
“I… can see this is unsatisfactory. I do have another gift to offer.”
Now we’re getting somewhere, thought Spritzer.
“And that is?”
“Service,” he said, rising.
Spritzer’s eye roll may have been visible, even in the dark.
“Not mine!” he hastened, calling over his shoulder. Slowly, hesitantly, a hunched figure came forward. The Prince gestured emphatically but the servant came as though pulled reluctantly on a leash. There was a bundle in her arms. It fussed, its little fingers searching in the dark.
“Hers,” said the Prince, gesturing behind him with an open hand. “My sister. The last scion of Optimus Overmere. I am her legal guardian. I pledge her to your Lord’s service, if he will grant me this boon.”
That’s a new one, Spritzer acknowledged to herself.
“Stand here. Do not move,” she ordered.
Bishop Spritzer commenced the ritual. She had performed it dozens of times before. The incantation was always the same; what Hell chose to do with it was always uncertain. Nearly half the time, there would be no answer. The offering would be too meagre or the request too insipid. As for the other half, Spritzer would be ushered through into the chambers of the Clerks of the Incunabulum. In those vast, numberless arcades reaching endlessly upwards into the heavens and downwards to the inferno, the endless company of Clerks - pudgy, ragged creatures in ivory masks, kept meticulous track of each soul entrusted to them. The minor inconsistencies, exceptions and special cases were negotiated there with the responsible Clerk, in their lobby.
Once, however, Bishop Sprtizer had found them all silent and averting their gaze. Not having been received, she proceeded forth, through their chamber and into the atrium of the Potentates of Hell. The pilgrim was a necromancer, and over the years had attracted the affections of one of Hell’s noble ladies. Vega had left that encounter prideful of her composure in negotiating so clearly with that creature, all limbs of bone, vertebrae cracking violently with every movement and echoing in the dark, her horrible, gaping mouth fixed forever open as words proceeded fully formed from deep in her throat.
This one, she thought, might go further still. One of the dominant potentates, perhaps, or – if Overmere was hiding something – perhaps even one of the Lieutenants of Hell.
The incantation was complete. The darkness parted: a fact indiscernible to anyone untrained in the art. Spritzer heard the Prince start and inhale as she stepped forth into the abyss.
The familiar celestial arcades of the Incunabulum spread out on either side of her. She stepped forward to the threshold of the lobby, awaiting greeting. Don’t look ahead, she reminded herself, eyes downcast. Don’t be presumptuous. Don’t offend the Clerk that will take this matter.
Silence reigned.
At length Spritzer raised her eyes and looked about. No masks were directed at her. The clerks continued drafting. Willing her heart rate down, Spritzer walked forward. Apparently she had business with the Potentates.
The great bronze doors ceased to be before her, and the hollow, haunting music of the atrium once again reached her ears. Silken-clad shinigami danced and cavorted like marionettes in mousetraps, movements sharp, violent and impossible. Vega stepped forward.
The music died.
The faces of the Potentates of Hell, gaunt, beset with rigor, masked with sequins and feathers, turned slowly from her to face the nearest wall. Spritzer looked about her. She was not greeted. At the far end of the atrium, marble doors thin as paper and tall as the Throat itself imposed themselves upon her like a drumbeat. She had never seen them before, and a thrill went up her spine. Who was the last to speak with one of the Lieutenants? Spritzer tested herself. Leipzig, of course. Five hundred and twenty years ago.
She strode ahead. I am not afraid. I am not afraid.
As she approached the marble doors, they ceased to be. A wind picked up, blowing dust in her face and the atrium out of reality. The black floor gave way to primeval stone. Cliffs and jagged rock tuned the howling wind and ruby-red sunlight seemed to fade into the chill as though this was the first or the last day of life on Oa.
And then she looked up.
The scriptures had utterly failed her. Surrounding her in thrones carved as high and wide as the mountains into which they were set, sat the Seven Lieutenants of Hell in council. Their gargantuan, godlike bodies were carved of living stone; their faces, fifty times Vega’s size, were sun-bleached skulls.
Her mind whirled. A vulture - that must be Akram, don’t trust him; antlers, that’s Eph; those two are identical, Min and Ino - I can’t tell them apart, I have to tell them apart! The square head… order! Unum. That’s actually Unum. I’m beholding Unum, merciful God. The two human skulls are Erei and Riz. One’s a woman, did I know that? Did anyone know that?
Her breathing became thready and dizziness began to overtake her. What would happen to the Mausoleum, to Oa, to her if she offended Holy Riz? A pit began to form in her stomach at the same time as a smile cracked on the side of her mouth. What if Unum… speaks? What if He speaks and I’m the one to hear it?
Spritzer knew to speak when spoken to. Her heart gradually began to slow. Her eyes darted from impossible sight to impossible sight. She was the sole focus of the Council of the Eternal. She put the weight of that concept out of her mind, forced every detail to memory. She was a divine figure now, she had responsibilities. She tried to recall everything she needed to know. Sylvio Overmere, a child, the murder of his brother, uh… oh no, what was his name?
But they said nothing. Was she to say something? That went against every protocol. What were they waiting for?
First Eph… turned away. Then Erei and Riz. The twins turned to one another and Akram’s visage sought the sky. At length, even Unum looked down. It wasn’t until that moment that she saw it, even thought to look for it, carved into the stone.
One. More. Door.
With a rush of terror, you awaken. It’s morning on a river in Hundred House. You’re panting and soaked in sweat. Your feet are numb and your breath is quick. But after a moment’s recollection, the world comes back to you. You’re on a boat. You’re with your friends. And coming to your ears from the direction of the nascent sunrise is the most welcome sound you’ve heard in months.
Seagulls.

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  Sylvio Overmere Makes a Petition to Hell