He was endlessly falling, cold wind whipping past him, numb to his features. Pentergost felt incorporeal, almost malleable and without the knots of pain that had littered his dying body. He began to wonder if this was all there was after life, just an endless, cold darkness for him to go slowly insane in. Then, as if in answer to his thought, he felt a sensation of being pulled apart. It felt like his body continued to fall, but everything inside of him was being violently sucked out of his open mouth. His blood, bones, tissue all scooped out of the hollow body and being channeled, pulled away high above him, he tried to scream in agony and found himself unable to. Flashes began to appear before his eyes. A gargantuan bony hand reaching out to him, the hand the size of his entire Empire, attached to a skeletal figure with gleaming green eyes underneath a long black hood, towering over the very world itself. He felt those enormous fingers begin to grip around his body, the coldness of them frightening him to his very core. No, don’t take me. No , please! Then, a sickening slurp as the final remnants of his soul got sucked out of his incorporeal body, and he felt himself racing upwards along a current made from his own innards. Rising higher and higher through the darkness, leaving the grasping Death behind him. 

An explosion rocked the laboratory, sending blue plumes of power outward and destroying countless pieces of valuable equipment. The small laboratory, dark a second beforehand, lit up with power coming from the new form stumbling out of the etched coffin at its center. Pentergost looks around the room for the first time, reborn as a new being. His perceptive eyes caught the destruction of the room and long shards of the metal coffin he had just emerged from embedded within the leaking corpse of Ublux on the far wall. His small form hanging against the wall, embedded several feet up after being lifted and thrown off the ground by the explosion and then pierced with dozens of long daggers of metal, killing him instantly and hanging him limply on the wall like a twisted ornament. Pentergost then turned his attention to himself. He no longer felt the twisting pain of the stab wounds, and he stood on fully formed and intact legs. He stood completely naked, his blue, wet skin now a dry, white replicate of its former self. He raised his left arm slowly in front of his face and studied it, then traced one of his long and sharp nails across it, deep enough to cut the skin. The skin parted with an eerie lack of pain, and soft flakes began to float off the wound but no blood ran. He realized he had begun to laugh. It sounded like a dry cough, being forced out of new lungs with an insane fervor, and it filled the room with its maniacal tone. It has worked. Summoning his psionic powers, Pentergost began to flex and move his new body, testing its abilities. He had full control of it just like his original body, but even when he stretched out his psionic powers to an insane degree, he felt no exertion. A small ring glittered amongst the rubble that drew Pentergost’s attention. He felt an immediate connection to it, and once he picked it up, a feeling of familiarity overwhelmed him. It felt like he was holding himself in his hand, and as he gazed down at the silver ring covered in small markings and embedded with a glittering sapphire, confidence filled his mind. His research had worked, his soul was within the ring and the phylactery was created. He would get his revenge on that traitorous bitch. Pentergost directed his attention to outside of the laboratory walls, sensing the figures moving around outside of it and clenched and unclenched his hands, feeling a calmness overcome him as he prepared himself for battle. Then he attacked.

A small group of elite Elthine warriors, ones that had proven themselves in the gladiatorial ring, had been sent to secure the Emperor’s Spire after the initial assault. They were each equipped with special headpieces that resisted the Illithid’s psionic power, repelling it back at them, which had been created and forged in secret by their leader, Gith, who had access to a variety of covert locations within the Spire due to her role as bodyguard. The headpiece sat on their head like a small silver crown, framing their determined faces. This group of the best twelve Elthine warriors had found the trail of blood that snaked its way through the hallways of the Spire, running from the Emperor’s chambers to the lower sect Laboratory, and were now preparing themselves to break in the sealed door. The majority of the group gathered to the left side of the door as two of them readied themselves at the door, about to knock it down. The large group standing by within close distance to rush inside once the doors were opened. As the two Elthine at the door lunged forward, the stone wall where the others were standing by erupted. Stone rubble shot out in all directions with such force that it instantly killed the ten Elthine at the wall. Each of them had vital parts of their bodies instantly crushed beneath the weight of an entire stone wall smashing into them on all angles, or were killed when their bodies splatted into the opposite wall with such force to shatter them like eggshells. Pentergost felt their souls leaving their bodies as they screamed in fleeting surprise from his initial assault and, walking out of the smoking hole in the wall, directed his attention to the two surviving Elthine at the door. They had stumbled backwards from the blast, their charge halted, but were beginning to pick themselves back up, reaching for their shortswords. Pentergost reached out his flayed hands and felt himself grasping their souls. Two beams of green energy appeared between the flailing Elthine and Pentergost’s outstretched hands, as they screamed in agony and Pentergost felt himself being filled with power. The Elthine’s bodies began to rot away, quickly losing all muscle and flesh and becoming skin-wrapped skeletons of shrieking pain as the green beams writhed around them. After five seconds of Pentergost pulling their souls out of their bodies, he felt the power snap and he quickly assimilated their power into his own. Pentergost grinned, he felt fantastic. The scratch on his arm had fully healed, leaving no trace, and Pentergost felt power brimming within himself, like an overflowing cauldron. Pentergost did not allow himself to dwell on the success of his research however, and felt his mind pulling him back to the idea that had allowed him to live through being left for dead. He must get his revenge. He must make Gith and her people suffer, and now he truly had the means to do it. Not just overwhelming psionic power, but the ability to control being’s souls. With revenge once again on his mind, Pentergost set forth into his city, in the midst of a rebellion.