In the Beginning
The tree was white, as though perpetually encased in frost. Tall it was also, as tall as the lowest cloud. Its canopy was a mass of sensually entangled branches like writhing limbs draped in the softest of silver leaves. Here, enfolded in this shimmering womb of foliage a ceremony was taking place or rather an execution. An elf man and woman knelt in shackles side by side. The man's face was badly scorched the skin hanging in drapes and folds from the extremities like an ill-fitting mask. His swollen eyes were closed, head drooped upon his chest and his body heaved, and shook visibly from the pain. The woman remained perfectly stationary save for her cat orbs, which swung about at the slightest tremor of a leaf. They were surrounded by wan Elvin guards who spoke little and sighed often. A queen stood before them. From a distance one might believe her to be the very emblem of beauty, but when she was close enough to touch it would be observed that that day her sun stained hair was disheveled, her green eyes introverted farther into their dark sockets, everything red, and swollen. With wavering steps she advances upon the submissive figures her face is gray with emotion. Slowly, her hands weave pinnacles of light in the air, voice low and fragile and chanting incantations. The woman prisoner begins to thrash against her bonds, but the man only looks up helplessly at the caster.
"Please, please...reconsider. Don't do this, I can still change, I can still be redeemed please, please!"
She falters at his pitiful entreaties, and the glow fades, her face contorts. Then she hardens again, and carves the spell into a small red berry, which she places in her taunt mouth.
"You are beyond redemption now."
"I can change, please, please, please..."
She kisses him.
In the PresentThe city of Baldur's Gate could only be described as a vast perpetually burning flame, devouring, pulsating like a sleeping dragon sprawled across the rugged landscape, a bonfire of flesh. Thorn was reluctant to leave it, but rumors were beginning to spawn amongst the city's inhabitants. Rumors suggesting that she was a child of Bhaal former Lord of Murder, and if such suspicions were verified it would place herself and her companions in grave danger. Thus a discreet exit was made that brought them about a mile outside of the flourishing metropolis before they halted to spend the remainder of the lucid night in quiet repose...
Chapter 1. The Sentient Miasma
The actual cause of the band's gradual stop was due to the aromatic cloud that obscured their vision until they were groping like blind insects in the dark. The blackness was impregnated with a thick vale of fog that shifted in such ways that each twitch of a smoky tendril seemed deliberate as though a conscious mind was behind it, encroaching upon their solitude. Thorn sniffed the air inquisitively. It was sweet yet suffocating like poisoned honey. She felt strangely sleepy, as if she had been drinking, but she hadn't. By listening to the muffled sounds of Jahiera, and Khalide nestling in their sleeping rolls, Minsc cooing to his hamster Boo, and Imoen's delicate snores she determined that the others were similarly effected.
Suddenly the half-elf felt the brush of something hot against her cheek. She stiffened every nerve quivering in trepidation. A shape was moving in the corner of her eye, she clutched her dagger in its scabbard until the knuckles shone white as moons her fear writhing like an oily snake in her belly.
"Th-thorn?" The girl relaxed when she saw it was only her friend Khalide.
"Yes, I'm here." Her voice sounded dead, dropping like a stone as soon as soon as it left her lips. Another side effect of the sinister fog.
"W-wha-what da-do you make of thi-this fog?" Khalide's face was brown and leathery from exposure to the elements like a saddlebag, and his eyes swam in it like shreds of sky. Thorn regarded him affectionately despite her disquiet, Khalide was one of those remarkable individuals who could cheer anyone with his mere presence.
"I don't know. I really don't know. The way it descended upon us so rapidly, and its sweet aroma makes me want to believe it's the product of a spell, but if so who's? Who could possibly be after us now? Sarevok is dead, and we're still heroes in Baldur's Gate despite the rumors. God, do you know what it reminds me of? It reminds of the night Gorion and I were ambushed. It seems like ages ago..." A shudder like a frigid needle cut her off.
"I'm sorry. S-so you still think about that d-do you?"
"It's not an easy thing to forget."
"I c-can imagine. If I lost a loved one, like Jahiera f-for instance..."
Thorn looked him full in the face, rather alarmed by the strain of melancholy his voice had obtained.
"For Elmister's sake, what you will say sometimes Khalide. You won't lose Jahiera. She'd never stand for it trust me."
His eyes were like blue tempests.
"If so-something ever ha-ha-ha-happens to me..."
"Nothing is going to happen!" Thorn's voice was unnaturally high and thin. Her alarm was inexplicably great, she felt as though they were all on the verge of something wretched.
"If something does." He continued unabashed. "I want you to look out for her. I know that she believes that she is your guardian, but you are her's in so many ways. Please, promise me this now, and then my sleep will be undisturbed." His tirade went unbroken by stutters, there was a luminous intensity radiating from him that night, he seemed to have become someone else, or perhaps a truer version of himself.
Suddenly Thorn felt as though he wasn't there anymore.
"I promise." And her soul was bound.
He smiled, a happy, innocent curl of the lips, then he disappeared into the arms of the fog, and Thorn heard him lay down by Jahiera's side an instant later.
Soon she found herself in a similar position. Curled up in her sleeping sack like a caterpillar in its cocoon, listening to Imoen breath. She was inundated with love for the girl. A sibling's love for a sibling devoted, unquestioning. Throwing her arms around her little sister's slumbering form she rose into the world of illusions that awaited her patiently as a lover every night.
A bat was born. It unfolded its sticky silk wings, and began to fly. It had the head of a baby. The right side of the baby's face was mutilated. Flesh collided and split upon each other like broken watch gears and the eye rolled monotonously like a fistful of blood. The left side of the baby's face was white as cream and the blue eye sparkled like shards of glass. It opened its pink little mouth, which bristled with brown, withered fangs. It opened wide and first it eat Khalide, then it flapped over and perched on her left breast whist kissing her throat with its teeth. Thorn fell away beneath it.
Her slumber was violently arrested by Imoen's penetrating scream. She sat up wildly to see her sister grappling with two burly figures attempting to bind her limbs with silver wire that glinted in the light of the newly visible moon. Her mind charged with fear and adrenaline, Thorn snatched the staff that lay beside her and forced it hard upon the closest one's skull, the latter man collapsed twitching grotesquely upon the ground. Then the small campsite erupted into conflict. Weapons and magic swirled in a volatile vortex, and she cut and slashed the fierce talons latching onto her like leaches. The fighting was so close that she did not have sufficient time to cast a spell of repulsion, that would have cast her enemies every which way like bits of dead leaves, it would have saved them. Eventually the hands became to many and she was forced to the ground struggling and straining against her confines, her pale visage livid with rage, absorbing the pungent aroma of fright and distortion that ringed her round.
A body was being carried. Its face was caked in a mask of black blood and its head swayed limply to the beat of the uneven steps of those that transported it. Who was it? Had somebody died here?
Bound by sharp cords Thorn had the sensation that she was being lifted. The sky passed overhead like a fountain of diamonds, she was vaguely aware of Minsc's ferocious roar and then there was nothing.
The first thing Thorn was conscious of as she slowly returned to life was a piercing stare deeply embedded in her face. She was lying on her back on a pile of foul smelling straw that chaffed her already bruised, and battered flesh. The air was impregnated with moisture filling her nostrils and drenching her body like a tongue licking the smooth contours of her skin. It was as though she lay in the middle of a great salivating mouth. Propping her torso up unsteadily upon her elbows she discovered the source of the searing attentions. A huge man stood on the other side of the bars of her prison. His was a striking figure, heavily muscled like a horse, his sizable pectorals rose and fell visibly beneath a scanty leather jerkin, but his face was even more remarkable. It was hideous and the revulsion that accompanied that discovery made itself plainly visible upon Thorn's bloodless features. Never had she seen a more contorted countenance. The right side of his face seemed to have been torn to pieces and then fused together again with crude, thick, brown stitches. The left appeared to have been unfinished by its creator, the skin there was bone white and unmarked except by the numerous purple veins that crosshatched that region like battered ropes. The eyes were disorienting at best, one black and hard as a beetle shell, and the other pale blue and glinting like a razor. Those eyes were furnaces, holes in a volcano wall. They smoldered unceasingly with a sickly light, yet they were capable of boiling to sudden combustion in an instant if so provoked and they were fastened intensely upon her. This rag doll of a man made the bile rise into her mouth, the caustic liquid washed about her tongue as her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed with a groan of agony.
"I'm in hell."
"No not yet." Countered a surprisingly eloquent and authoritative voice. It was his.
Thorn heard the rattle and squeal of a cell door being opened and she shivered as heavy footsteps rebounded upon the floor and walls of her skull. He knelt beside her. She could see his broken visage, kiln orbs still flaying the skin from her body. The girl closed her eyes tight.
"So you are disgusted by me. I expected as much, and I am pleased. Disgust is the perfect discipline for the mind."
"Where are my friends?" She whispered hoarsely.
"They are safe for the present, but I fear you are not as fortunate. You see safety and other pleasantries are privileges that are now unavailable to you."
"Why? Who are you? What do you want from me?"
"Nothing that in the end you do not desire yourself. I will make you see what you are, what you could become."
Thorn looked upon his face. It was expressionless as a mask.
"You're mad."
"No, not mad merely enlightened." With that he fastened a hand about each of her wrists, the palms were cold as death as she thrashed, desperately trying to free herself from him as he pulled her too her feet. She pressed her face against her breast she bit his fingers, but he gave no more noticed that if they had been feather touches. Her wrapped an arm around the back of her knees and another around her back like bands of iron, then he lifted her as easily as if she were made of vapor. Her head was pressed against his chest she could hear the monotonous beating of his heart like a hollow drum; the skin burned her cheek like fire. She screamed. He looked down at her, and might have been surprised though it did not manifest itself on his face.
"Do not fear me God child I am about to free you, to show you what you posses." Save your strength it is time for the experiments to commence. "