Chapter 4: Orchids and Choices

Ilyrana

The dawn saw Ilyrana and her companions leaving the last bit of forest before entering the stretch of dry, rocky land leading towards the Marching Mountains. It would take three days of walking to reach them, not accounting for any surprises.

Ilyrana maneuvered over a house-sized boulder, leaping lightly from it to another one settled against it. Her eyes flicked over the landscape spread out around her. Behind, to the west, she could still see the tops of pine trees, and the smoke from the inn's cooking fires coiling lazily up into the coral and azure sunrise.

There was no sign of the mercenary army that Valygar had spotted. Not yet, anyway. A force of that size wouldn't travel as quickly as Ilyrana and her companions could. Still, there would be scouting parties sent ahead, and she would prefer it if they weren't seen before they could disappear into the mountains.

Ilyrana turned her attention to her group, moving at a steady pace below her, winding their way through the boulder-strewn terrain. She watched Valygar bound ahead atop a jutting rock formation parallel to her. Together, the two rangers kept slightly ahead of their party, scouting out the easiest routes, and searching for any potential trouble. Behind them, Sarevok and Keldorn had taken rear-guard. They kept this pace up for the better part of the day.

"See anything, Rana?" Imoen called up to her, later in the afternoon, when Ilyrana had dropped back.

"Aye. A lot of rocks."

"Oh, gee thanks, bufflehead. I'm sure glad you're up there, putting those keen elven eyes to good use."

"You're welcome," Ilyrana called back down.

"I fail to be seein' why ye did nae let our wee halfling tag along with ye up there," Korgan said. "Would have been right nice of ye to give her the chance to see the world from above four feet off the ground."

"Says the dwarf," Mazzy shot back at him.

"Oh, I have no need to be seein' what's up there, lass. The only thing worth lookin' at, fer me, be right down here," Korgan said with a leer and a waggle of his bushy gray eyebrows.

Mazzy gave the dwarf an icy stare before pushing ahead to the front.

"Careful, Bloodaxe," Valygar hollered down from his rocky perch. "Mazzy might be a hand shorter than you, but I'm not."

"Oho! Yer paltry attempt at a threat does nae frighten me, human. Besides, I was only trying to pay the lady a compliment by letting her know that me eyes can't be tempted away from following the sway of her-"

"You should just stop, Korgan, before you bury yourself deeper," Imoen chimed in, trying unsuccessfully to stifle a giggle.

"Leave the sweet nothings to the experts, my persistent hound," Haer'Dalis agreed.

"Expert? I hope you're not referring to yourself, Haer'Dalis," Imoen replied.

"In fact, I am, my wildflower. You doubt me only because you have not given this poor sparrow a chance to sing you the praises that your beauty and wit deserve."

"All of this chatter is going to bring anything nearby down on us," Jaheira interjected.

"It's also going to make me drop a fireball on you simians if you don't stop interrupting my spell memorization!" Edwin snapped, then added in a mumble, "I may just drop one anyway, it would be far more entertaining than trudging through this wasteland, listening to you monkeys."

"Shut yer whining trap, ye puffed up, pox-ridden, gender confused-"

"Gender confused?! Just because I had one small accident with a nether scroll and had to piss sitting down for a few months-"

"-dress wearing, bat shit smelling-"

"Alright, children, that's enough," Keldorn sighed as he and Sarevok rejoined the group. "Korgan, you and Anomen take rear-guard now."

"Ach! Yer goin' senile if ye think I'm gonna walk with that pompous, bratty, long-winded-"

"Mind your tongue, dwarf," Anomen snapped.

"This is your disfuncional little family, abbil, shouldn't you intervene?" Viconia asked irritably.

"And deprive myself of the entertainment you all provide me?" Ilyrana answered dryly.

"That's very unleaderlike of you, sis," Imoen chuckled.

Ilyrana didn't respond, having not heard her half-sister, because her attention was focused, instead, on her half-brother.

She had been avoiding him all day. Had avoided thinking about the earth-shattering conversation they had had only hours ago. Pushing herself to exhaustion by scouting ahead, and falling back to report, trekking further on, then doubling back again. Now, though, as she stood trapped by his gaze, unable to tear her eyes away from his, she realized that he had been letting her run from it. From him. And, that his benevolence was beginning to wear thin.

This sudden epiphany came as his part of their shared soul brushed against hers. Ilyrana shook her head, breaking the stare, and slammed down the shields around her thoughts to block him out.

She wasn't ready for another confrontation with the Deathbringer. Not yet. Not until she could look back on what he had told her and feel nothing. Not until she could convince herself that his touch hadn't briefly stirred something inside her, whether that something was the taint, the soul they shared, or just her reaction to human contact when she so rarely had that nowadays.

Turning, Ilyrana began putting as much distance between them, again, as she could.

Sarevok

Sarevok watched Ilyrana turn her back to him and flee. So, the little coward still couldn't face him. He had expected her to have found her spine by now, perhaps he had misjudged the girl yet again.

When she had so foolishly resurrected him, Sarevok vowed not to make the same mistake of underestimating her again. He had watched her, noting the differences in her personality, her morals, her leadership. Differences meaning what he had assumed her to be, or what she may have been once, compared to what she was now.

When he had still been alive, Sarevok thought he had Ilyrana pegged as another self-righteous meddler, much like her foster father, and the Harpers, making every wrong and injustice in the world a personal affront that she could not allow to go unchallenged. Why would he have assumed otherwise?

The whispers of her deeds that trickled into Baldur's Gate told of a young, and beautiful, elven ranger who was fighting her way up and down the Sword Coast, saving farmers from troublesome ankhegs, rescuing children from gnolls, bringing mad men to justice, ferreting out Mulahey, the supposed perpetrator behind the iron shortage, fetching lost family trinkets, and delivering the scalps of bandits to the Flaming Fist by the dozens. Everything that the average adventurer, with a lust for public approval and an insecurity that can only be assuaged by the songs of their heroic exploits, is made of.

Sarevok may have been correct in that assumption, but Ilyrana had been far more than just another do-gooder, and it wasn't just because of their shared heritage. She had proven to be remarkably resourceful; uncovering his plot to push Baldur's Gate and Amn into war, finding, and flooding, the hidden mine that had propelled the iron throne, and himself, to the head of political power in the city, escaping every assassin he had sent after her with apparent ease, discovering that he had had the merchant guilds' people replaced with obedient doppelgangers, and so much more.

She had done all of this with only a small circle of mismatched companions. No powerful organization to back her, no network of spies and loyal followers, and no knowledge of the prophecy or of her divine parentage. All of this, Sarevok had possessed, and more. Yet, he had watched as all of his carefully laid plans, years of work, crumbled around him.

It still galled him, remembering his defeat. The resentment and hate that he still carried had been his only sources of comfort in the abyss.

Images of Ilyrana dying with his hands around her pretty throat would keep the tiny spark of his will, all that was left of him, alight in the yawning darkness of the void.

Allowing the agony of his eternal damnation to fuel the need for vengeance against the one whom he had once deeply cared for, who went on to be gently, lovingly raised by the very man who had torn the two of them apart, leaving Sarevok alone, unable to remember anything more than his name, to beg for food from strangers until he eventually caught the attention of Rieltar Anchev.

Rieltar, who had adopted Sarevok into the iron throne, given him a home, an education, wealth, and a stepmother who doted upon him. Rieltar, who, one night, in a fit of rage over something Sarevok couldn't remember, began beating his stepmother in front of him when he was still a child. Rieltar, who hadn't been pleased when Sarevok tried to protect the woman who had shown the boy more kindness and love than anyone he could remember, and decided to teach the child a lesson in disloyalty by taking a cord of leather, wrapping it once around her throat, and pulling with all his strength. Rieltar, who had forced Sarevok to watch his stepmother be garroted, then lashed the boy with the same piece of leather, until there was almost no skin left on his back.

Sarevok's thoughts were interrupted by the reappearance of Ilyrana.

"Hot springs, half a mile ahead, unless you guys wanna keep going-"

"Hot springs? Of course we're stopping for that. Merc army be damned, I need a bath, outta my way," Imoen began elbowing her way to the front of the pack.

She's calling a stop already? Sarevok thought, disbelieving, until he noticed how long the shadows had become, and the indigo and rose that now streaked the darkening sky. He cursed himself for his inattention.

Ilyrana dropped from the shelf of rock above them, landing with hardly a sound, and began walking with her sister. Sarevok continued to trail at the back of the group, preferring to observe the inane interactions of the motley assortment of races, alignments, and varying degrees of ineptitude that were his sister's companions.

He watched her, his face a mask of indifference tinged with boredom, the mask he had donned so often at political functions in Baldur's Gate. Ilyrana's hand absently went to one of the small knives she kept tucked into the laces of her thigh high boots, pulling the blade free from the leather and beginning to twirl it between her fingers. She did this when she was lost in thought, or agitated, he had noted. The cotton shirt she wore, the same one she had been wearing last night, since the appearance of a small army necessitated the swift return to their journey, hung loosely on her slender frame, one sleeve fallen from her shoulder. Her long hair was tied up in a high tail, so Sarevok could clearly see three of the silver X-shaped scars that were cut down her back, the top one sitting just below the back of her neck, and the other two descending in a line down past the back of her shirt.

There were twelve of those scars cut into her spine. Sarevok had counted them as he watched Irenicus carve them into her pale skin, unable to intervene or turn away, trapped in the dream that was a flashback of what the mage had done to her.

He knew that the reason he had shared her dream was their shared soul. That was obvious. He also knew that those scars were nothing but ornamentation compared to the ones burned into her thighs.

In his youth, Sarevok studied the art of intimidation, and the cruelest and most brutal styles of combat in order to become a Deathbringer, a powerful warrior possessing the ability to paralyze an opponent in melee battle through fear alone, as well as to kill the most powerful of opponents in a single, massive blow. He had sought out, and received, training to become versed in nearly all known forms of torture. His own back was completely covered in scars from his stepfather's infrequent scourging when he was a child. Sarevok had still found it difficult to watch what Irenicus had done to Ilyrana.

Even in his most fevered fantasies of exacting his revenge on the girl, during his time in the abyss, Sarevok had never once allowed himself to imagine raping her. He had seen enough of rape, growing up with Rieltar, to be repulsed by the mere thought of it. Had, in fact, executed men who were loyal to him for doing it. The fact that it had happened, because she had been too weak to resist capture, was due to the wound he had inflicted upon her during their fight. Which meant that what had been done to her, all of it, was partly his own fault. He wasn't an altruistic man, nor was he a masochist, so he didn't enjoy the discomfort that shouldering that kind of blame brought, but he couldn't stop thinking about it.

"I hadn't healed, because I was dying. Of sorrow. Because, watching you die, as I remembered the first several years of my life, and you, who was the only good part of that time, made me want to die as well."

There it was. Those few sentences that made it nearly impossible for Sarevok to just shrug off what he had seen in the dream. Made it so that he couldn't, instead, take what he had learned, and fashion it into a weapon to be used against her. He could use that information to begin gaining her trust. Get close to her. Get her far enough away from those who protected her. Get his hands on her long enough to snap her neck, ensuring she died too fast to summon the Slayer. It was all there, the plan laid out before him, the only part missing was his desire to do it. That, and, when imagining his hands on her, it took an annoying effort of will to focus on the thought of killing, rather than exploring.

Before he could push those thoughts from his mind, Sarevok remembered the last few moments from the previous night. The way her amber eyes reflected the candlelight, looking haunted, yet still managed to look proud and angry. The softness of her skin beneath his fingers, discernible even with as little contact as he actually made. It was her scent, though, that plagued him.

He remembered it from when they were children, laying on the branch of a tree, watching the moonrise, his arms wrapped protectively around her, her head resting on his shoulder. Wrapped in a frayed, thin blanket, they shared their warmth, and their dreams, as they pretended they were anywhere other than trapped inside the temple walls of a cult of Bhaal, high up in the boughs of the Tree of Life in Suldanessellar, or atop the crow's nest of their very own pirate ship, perhaps.

After she'd fall asleep, full of whatever meager food he managed to scrounge up for her, he would rest his nose against the top of her head and breathe deeply, inhaling the exotic scent that was unique to her alone, some combination of jasmine, orchids, and other night blooming flowers. It would soothe him, calm him enough to get a few hours rest beside her. It would linger on his clothes, his hands, so that, when Ilyrana's mother took her away from him, he could find some shred of comfort in her smell until she snuck back to him.

Alianna, her mother, had despised Sarevok, loathed the human boy who had fixated on her elven daughter. She would vow that he would be the first child sent to their father, when the time came for the sacrifices, vowed that she would be given the honor of cutting his throat from the High Priest who oversaw the temple and it's inhabitants. One of the many reasons he had hated that woman far more than she had hated him was the reason behind why the High Priest might bestow any honors upon her.

High Priest Jorval was a manipulative old man who had a taste for young flesh. He had convinced some of the mothers that Bhaal would show them favor, after his resurrection, for allowing their daughters to be "blessed" by him before they were to be sacrificed.

Alianna had been insane. Some days she challenged the High Priest and his obvious ploy to sate his sick desires. Other days, Sarevok had to fight her, tooth and nail, to get Ilyrana away from her before she could bring her daughter before Jorval, so desperate was the woman for her beloved god's favor. The hypocrisy of not wanting a human child near Ilyrana, but allowing a grown human male to have her had not been lost on him. Sarevok had succeeded, though, that was all that had mattered. The High Priest never touched Ilyrana.

A shift in the wind brought the very scent that he had been dwelling on to him. Clenching his fists, he tried to ignore it, and the memories it conjured, even as he couldn't help but notice the difference that he had noticed last night, the slight change in the smell from when she was a child. There was a muskiness to the orchids and jasmine, now, and it did not calm him as it once had, it did, in fact, have quite the opposite effect.

He needed to end her soon, before his need for vengeance turned into a very different kind of need. Before she could get any deeper under his skin, and rule him as she once had, unknowingly, as a child.