1. Prologue
Legend stated that the Sphere was formed when the gods turned the world inside out. Other, older texts maintained that the Sphere was partially constructed by those in ancient Netheril, whose magic knew no bounds. There Sphere was the world and the world was the Sphere, and the sun blazed in the epicentre of the sky, encompassed by the Sphere. Ia snapped the tome shut with as much force as she'd intended, sending a resounding echo through the dusty halls and earnt her several disapproving glares. With a slight sniff, she lifted her delicately tipped nose, lifted herself from the shoulders, and turning her head, half sauntered, half slithered away, each little sway of her hips matched by her shoulders, each half step painstakingly slow. Her knees locked in by the sheer dress felt more like a burial shroud than a garment for daily living. Her shawl served as a cowl which at least allowed her to fit in a little better with the other monks in their hooded robes.
Between the long rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves, all but overflowing with books, Ia found her one solace: a window. Shuffling over to it, she gazed through the narrow stone slit and out onto the vast, seemingly endless forest of Cloakwood. It stretched so far that it might have been a sea unto itself, its colossal columns and giant limbs marching across such huge swathes that she knew were she to venture in for more than ten minutes, she would become horribly lost. Were it not for the elevated highways cresting the tops of their viridian canopy, it would take years to cross.
It didn't take long for Ia to locate her favourite spot, where the edge of the forest all but fell into the sea. The 'Trackless Sea', so named, was even greater than Cloakwood, dwarfing the great forest until it might as well be a small pond, or so she had heard. Ia didn't care to put any stock in the words of those around her, in part because they were always contradicting themselves, arguing over trivialities, and always having to be right, but mostly because no matter how many times she explained, pleaded, demanded, hissed and cussed, not a one of them would pronounce her name as 'Ee-er', insisting upon 'Eye-ah' regardless of her wishes. One even had the gall to debate phonetics and linguistic dialects with her. It was her name, wasn't it? Should she not have the right to be addressed as she pleased? It wasn't as if she was putting on airs or insisting on a title. 'Eye-ah' would even be so bad, were it not for the crude rhymes of some of the stable boys, somehow implicating phallic grossness through the use of 'spire', 'dire' and elongated 'ah's, typically rising in crescendo in mimicry of what they imagined copulation to be. Bastards.
The monks weren't much better. Although half of them patently ignored her, she felt the crude, slinking, creeping stares of others, from, what she imagined to be beady, hungry little eyes beneath their cowls crawling all over her chest and hips, whenever her back was turned. She could just picture them licking their withered lips, smirking and envision themselves drooling over her, her tight green torn from her as she struggled and writhed, flailing and moaning. Ia shuddered and tried to push such images from her mind. It wasn't just her overactive imagination; she had run across the journal of one of them, apparently forgotten. It might have been a prank, a deliberate plant, but she couldn't forget the descriptions, so lovingly crafted and uncannily precise. It was as though the scribe had measured her and poured everything that filled his twisted little mind into this, his memorandum to prosperity. In these lustful, dark fantasies, he, presumably a he given the glamorous details of his physique, he described seducing her in her bath, peering at her while she stood beneath a forest waterfall, alone in a creek. He ascribed her to being akin to a tree dryad and water nymph, more beautiful than a sirine on her rock, fairer than a celestial. He portrayed her innocence, her purity, and how, once broken, she would smile, as coy as any incubus in dark leathers. It was so revolting that Ia felt filthy, but couldn't bring herself to shower, lest he really was peeking at her.
It might be excused as the rancid musings of a doddering fool were it not for the second tome she found, left upon a desk, Ia absently leafed through it. To her horror, wedged between several of the pages were sketches on loose sheets. These same sketches depicted her in a variety of poses and various states of dress and undress, with increasingly lewd and compromising positions. Props seemed to be of particular interest to the artist, along with an unhealthy obsession with cord. Why did people want to tie her up so much? As with the 'literature', she confiscated the sketches, and stowed them in the rear compartment of her bedroom bureau. A little later, she uncovered a set of poems hidden beneath the study desks of the library. Then she conducted a thorough search of all the desks and bookshelves, searching for anything that was too loose or crammed too tightly, for secreted compartments, behind the backs of the shelves and frames.
She did, at least, have some mollification, for she was not the only muse of these foul creations. At least one other, Imoen, the auburn-headed daughter of the nightclub-cum-bar, eatery, hotel and hostel manager, was the inspiration for an especially lascivious piece, crafting her as a luscious heroine with delicate and conniving wiles. Imoen was nothing of the sort, as far as Ia could tell, and one of the few females, and the only one even close to her age, it really was a shame they didn't get along. Ia would have liked a friend, but while they didn't hate each other, their interests simply ran too differently. Everything Imoen said bored Ia to tears, and Imoen had even less patience for Ia's longing to visit the ocean and be free of the place than Ia did for Imoen's whimsical fancies. While on paper, there appeared to be a shared desire to roam free, Imoen's idea of running wild involved touring the mega-metropolis of Baldur's Gate, exploring the seediest taverns and nightclubs, falling hopelessly in love while her handsome prince serenaded her, moonlighting as a bard, and paying for everything. None of that even remotely appealed to Ia, especially given what the filthy-minded monks of Candlekeep were like. Of course, Imoen proved that women could be just as vile, if not worse.
Once, Ia caught a peek of Imoen's diary, and curiosity got the better of her. What she read there was as bad as anything she'd encountered up in the library halls. In some ways, it was worse. Imoen evidently had access to peepholes, and she dressed up these episodic escapades as great romantic sagas. She was also a light-fingered little wench who lifted all manner of trophies, if Ia understood her diary correctly. Perhaps it was nothing more than an overactive, bored imagination, but somehow, it held a distinctive ring of truth to it Ia couldn't quite shake. For those reasons and more, Ia just couldn't bring herself to like Imoen. Perhaps, she reflected, as she gazed out at the crashing waves, the true difference between them was Imoen laughed at the poems and sketches of her, as if they were the funniest thing ever. Ia wasn't remotely 'tickled' by such filth. Imoen wanted to Ia to plant similar fictions, fictions that Imoen described in great detail, placing the various monks with one another and with the stable boys.
As the wind-swept waves rose and fell, Ia wondered if there really were sirines and merfolk out there, or if they were merely myth. Genetic mutations and degenerates one tome claimed stemmed from the time of Netheril's experiments, and numerous off-casts were formed as the greatest minds of the empire tried to perfect the human form. Ia wasn't convinced 'off-casts' was a real word, which led her to question the validity of the whole text.
The truth was, Ia hated studying. There were so many books and most of them were written in the most tedious way imaginable, and though there was the occasional snippet of interest, most were so bland they seemed pointless. At least if they were consistent, she might be more inclined to their validity, but so many tomes contradicted others, often citing this text or that, so in order to accurately consume what the author was saying, she had to read an entire library first. The problem was, every work seemed to do this, and there was no common starting point. Maybe that's just how things were. But out here, the world seemed so different to the fragments she could comprehend. There was also such a dissonance between the heights of civilisation the books and monks argued over and what her own eyes saw. What's more, she couldn't understand the fervour. What did any of it matter? But both the texts and their living counterparts, the monks, held such passion; they had to be right, and would bring down anyone, no matter how many hours it took, to prove they were, in fact, correct. Priding themselves as the true authorities, the guardians of knowledge, gatekeepers of lore, and curators of the past age, the monks of Candlekeep, to Ia at least, were nothing more than spectres, wraiths basking in the glories of an already forgotten, shadowed past while history continued its relentless march, written with each passing day. Candlekeep, by its very nature, was passed by as more recent and current events shaped the world, a world the monks wanted nothing to do with, revelling instead in what amounted to the dead. Dead days, dead people. These great minds, these philosophers, engineers, architects, of magic and genetics, of those who served the gods, were about as useful now as the dust kicked up by the hooves of the horses.
She had to get away.
