Up Like Pyre Smoke
Elsewhere, Time Indeterminate
The way up seems longer than the descent, time indeterminate stretched like the innards of a dying beast, though you do not walk beneath the eyes of the angel, for which you are
grateful to Aakebushu even if the path itself is not one you would have willingly walked.
No windows adorn the walls of the tower and no doors pierce its sides, but a tower it is without a doubt laying on its side against some far wall more guessed than known. It was
built in three tapering tiers: a lower square section with a central core; a middle octagonal section; and, at the top, a circular section, all with a single narrow stair winding along the exterior barely wide enough to set one foot on front of the other. Where you stepped blood pooled black and sticky, as though the tower was sweating or bursting at the seams like a fresh corpse. No skeletal hands grabbed for ankles, no soul leaching cold seeped into flesh, but no matter how carefully you would step the ninth step always slipped, threatening to hurl you back into the depths. The fact that it was always the same, the pattern ironclad made it more frightening not less, giving the colossal structure the looming presence of a cat playing with its prey.
Finally Lydia asks: "Why nine, what's so special about the number?"
"That is how many steps she was forced to take before they killed her," Aakebushu answers distantly, he's the only one the tower doesn't seem to want to trip though to be fair he isn't walking on the narrow path. but crawling on the wall with his fingers and legs bent backwards like a spider.
"Her?" you prompt, a fascinated in spite of yourself. Even though it gives no power you still want to know things, to understand.
"From the street into the Caesareum there are nine steps, I
think she pleaded with them nine times, not that they could hear her of course. Mobs are notoriously bad at hearing, especially what they don't
want to hear."
"Hypatia of Alexandria," Tiffany says when it becomes clear the dark spirit has no interest in answering directly. "Though this isn't the temple of the Imperial Cult, this is the lighthouse. A strange place to memorialize her."
One small hand pulls free from the masonry and points up. "Pyre flame guides the way."
Before today you had known that Hypatia was killed by a mob of fanatics in what is often used as a sort of gruesome bookend to paganism in Rome, though history is rarely so neat. What you had not known was that after being killed and torn apart she had been burned and the ashes scattered, intentionally denying her any rest within the city's walls or beyond it. That one imagines is the reason this forms the one lit bridge between the depths and the the grey world of spirits wandering between one life and the next. Not that there are many spirits to greet you when you reach the apex of the tower set like a head on stony pillow against a great black gate, wide enough to pass an elephant or a giant through. The broken feet of nameless statues stand stand guard over it, just enough of them left to mark their failure.
"Nothing lasts forever," Lydia sighs with a strange ambivalence that brings to mind the darkness below, the 'nothing' that
does last forever, or at least until the last grain of 'something' is finally gone.
As she touches the door you are standing again in the open passage of the forgotten temple, bright arcane lights casting into the void at your back. One mage starts flashing signals from his Sutra terminal that Clippy interprets as a password request fron IRIS... specifically for a key whose answering code is not stored on earth.
Clever... of course they would be given their job. You wonder what they would think of the thinks you roused down below. Generally speaking the troubles of the Labyrinth remained for the Labyrinth, but every now and again some new strain of virulent fungus or rare prion hitched a ride on a poorly decontaminated surface to cause trouble in the Five Cities. In a world where death was not final plagues didn't strike the same kind of terror as they did no Earth, but they could still disrupt the lives of millions, reaping a toll of lost years and memories.
"I'm going to need everyone to step back a, all the way out of the chamber, just to be safe..." you begin, though you never get all the way though the instructions
"Vat... vat did you do?" A familiar voice echoes down from the ceiling where the light doesn't reach, a formless presence filled with dread. Other Bob is nothing but two points of card red light seeping between unmortared stone of the ceiling.
For his part Lamentations of the Void isn't paying any attention to the conversation, he's looking at the revenants slowly raising a hand in front of him as though tracing a pane of glass. "Your doing?" he asks Lydia.
"VAT HAF YOU
DONE!" the dark spirit you had chased all the way to Egypt screams in terror.
As bad as the day's events may yet turn out to be you can't help yourself from answering: "Made a friend."
What do you try to do?
[] Capture Other Bob, you're sure he can be of some use
[] Kill it, it's what Bob would want, that nothing of the part of himself he is so ashamed of could life on
[] Write in
OOC: From Evil Bob's persective he sent you to hell and you came back up with the Devil in tow. 
