Chapter 7: Choice
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Khalid's limbs were lead, crushed. He saw the priestess, the Deathstalker. The green column of light behind her was bright enough to hurt any who looked on it. It felt the end of all things. As the elf he and Jaheira had once met in Nashkel mines would have said: likely it was.
Yet while there was life there had to be some hope. His plate was twisted into his body, crushed over his flesh; but Jaheira was beside him. Two nymphs and a dryad were by her, in great harm themselves because of the summoning. She wept even as Melissan's fiends had destroyed them. Nature sacrificed in the name of stopping the would-be goddess...
Garrick stood frozen in place not far from him. Khalid couldn't see Safana, who had been fighting a fiendish knight, her acrobatics likely small defence against a thing of its powers. Imoen bent over clutching her stomach, her skin grey stone but shredded by the claws of a glabrezu; and Della stood behind him, burned badly and yet chanting something, here at the last. Her voice was unsteady; but she repaid his and Jaheira's efforts by trying, as Imoen also sought to save lives and souls. Amelyssan the betrayer. He'd been so blind.
He and Jaheira went forth for a last desperate attempt. He could not muster finesse to his limbs; and without that he was of little use, for he was not so strong as gifted humans, not nearly so strong as his wife when she called on the powers natural to her. But his shield hand was intact, and he would protect her against all he could, while she fought. There was no need for them to exchange words; they knew already what they would have said to each other at the last. Harper, druid, warrior, Jaheira and Khalid, here at the end they were nothing but themselves, souls doing battle in a plane of the divine. Amelyssan in the shape of the Ravager grew limbs, grew to a giant; and Khalid and Jaheira went to fight.
What Delythabelle cast was a simple illusion. That there was a Jaheira; that there was a Khalid; that the Throne was one foot to the left-hand side. The avatar struck, and Khalid saw it miss him by several feet; so it gave Jaheira time to press the last of her fire seeds into its leg, gave Khalid the chance to sink his sword below what might have been the limbs of the creature. Then of course it threw them from it, one blow against both. Khalid felt himself airborne. Then it reached to drain again from the Throne, failing by the tips of its elongated claws to touch it; and Della's second contingency of Shadow Door activated before him. Khalid was flying down toward the creature once more, hardly a chance to adjust his motion, Jaheira behind him.
He saw the Ravager's eye, and thrust Daystar to it. Jaheira grasped to the monster and would not let go, all the desperate strength of the bear defending nature and mate against those last flailings of the terrible priestess...
There was a red-haired woman upon her knees, and a solar so bright it hurt to look, her skin the blue of ice against a sun impossible to imagine, her hair yellow like the stars of other planes. He held the arm of Jaheira by his side, and she his. The end of everything repeated itself in his mind.
"It is not over until I say so! I am a goddess—"
"You are not," the solar said, and the red-haired woman was silent. "It is time to accept your fate."
It was time only to watch the children make their choice. One of mortality, available to them, or it could be that pink Imoen or beribboned Della would stand as a human deity...
"Where would we be without them?" Khalid said, his stutter missing in these planes; and Jaheira stared at him.
"Not in the planes, perhaps; not in the hells; and yet I do not know what would have become of us had Della been born with common sense..." Jaheira said. If Della had stayed with them on all their quest against the Iron Throne and learned more from them; if they had been present to try to save her from the wizard the first time... Who knew what could have happened were different chances accepted. His wife gripped his arm fiercely, as if frightened to lose him.
No; one could never know the direction of the fates. The cure for that was only patience, Khalid thought wryly. He was very tired. It would be good to close his eyes for a long time, Jaheira next to him, in a soft and welcoming darkness.
Jaheira seemed to pinch him. "Don't consider it, Khalid," she said. "Stay with me."
They witnessed. "'Course I don't want it," they heard Imoen say, "take it. Yer welcome." She was smiling, her face more full of childish glee than Khalid had seen from Imoen for a long time. She transmuted her wizard's robes to a pink candy-like shade, and danced to herself; farther away Garrick also watched.
Della spoke to the solar, nodding and shaking her head, placing a hand to her forehead and to her hair in intermittent confusion. She turned back to them, alight with power:
"You're going to go back," she said, "safe to Faerun. Jaheira, about Safana—use your Harper's Call on her!" A pair of tears crept down Della's cheeks, sparkling green in the odd light of this plane. "I know she's not a Harper, but she's...balanced, and maybe she needs something she has to do. The solar says that it will work for you if you try. When you fetch her back, you have to tell her that Coran's in Brightwater sometimes, and that Lady Luck's fond of her and would be fonder if she prayed once in a while."
Safana, Khalid thought in sorrow; but in a dizzying hurry the planes were fading away like fragments of a puzzle, flat earth growing under their feet, a tangled confusion of transformation. His body jerked as they came to a stop in the world where up and down were in only two directions, where he could see and understand a green forest around them. He and Jaheira were in good health, suddenly well once more; joy lingered on Imoen's face; Garrick sat alone, and Safana lay still with her neck twisted to an impossible position. Jaheira bent over her, making the chant. Lady Luck: Sayida Sa'adat in his and Safana's tongue. Tymora aid her.
"Get up," Jaheira was telling her, going so far as to slap her face, "Just because I have despised piracy for what it is and your attitude and your ways does not mean I wish you to die like this; you will return and repay the Harpers for this call, or else..."
Khalid would have done his best to heed that tone of voice of his wife. Jaheira continued to work on Safana, straightening her bones, healing her flesh first, concentrating on the chant; such things needed to be accomplished quickly or else all in a person was lost. Safana bint Hasib al-Karim al-Rahman, Safana bint Jaaffier al-Rashid al-Calimport, Safana daughter of pasha Hasib the generous servant of merciful Ao, Safana daughter of vizier Jaaffier the rightly-guided of Calimport; whatever her birth name had once been; pirate and rogue and companion who had remained beside Della and Imoen for all this time.
Safana opened her eyes, and shook out her damp hair like a sandcat. "Darling, the planes are so tedious," she purred. "Thanks ever so much." Khalid was by his wife, and took hold of her as soon as the penalty came to her body for using the Call upon one who had not taken Harper's oaths; Jaheira laid hands on herself and chanted the spells to once more heal. Safana idly sipped at—what would be wine, Khalid supposed from the smell, and raised the vial high in the air.
"A drink for all!" she offered. "That that capricious bitch Lady Death doesn't have us! To Sayida Sa'adat," she added more softly, and drew another long mouthful. It was a spiced red made from a good vineyard, Khalid thought, drinking after Jaheira; and did not ask where Safana would have obtained it. Some cellar of some city they had passed through.
"Or for Della," Garrick said, his head slumped over his knees. "She's up there."
"Honestly, that girl will be a disaster as a goddess," Jaheira said. Moments before, Khalid had felt they would all be gone; he could not help but grin foolishly at her words so...characteristic of her, so much his wife's sense of what was right and proper and how to ensure others behaved so. "Twittering everywhere! No sense of proportion! Ribbons in place of a brain! Vain chicklet! Affected little piece! Feckless flibbertigibbet!"
A delicate and ladylike cough came from behind her. Della put one foot forward, and stumbled across a stray twig on the ground; Garrick was already beside her to support her. Their Della, Gorion's Della: a small delicate-featured half-elf, her hair burned and unevenly sheared to shoulder's height, though blue ribbons still wove through it; her face healed of wounds and her eyes bright and sparkling; her smile the equal of Imoen's for happiness.
"You were right, Jaheira," Imoen said, hastening to her sister; "She would've been a terrible goddess. Dell!"
The forest they were in was Larswood, Khalid realised: a place not far from where it had all begun. Oak and ash and willow stretched far into the blue curtains of the sky, bound by trailing vines that drew life from their support. He could smell the fresh water of the nearby lake. Wild roses grew over a bush in a profusion of red, white-flowered western clovers underfoot.
"And I don't know if it's going to be a happy ever after, but we'll try," Della said, her head resting on Garrick's shoulder. "Imoen's going to move into Ramazith's tower if it's still available, and Safana's going to travel more. It's not much but I want to be normal, and Garrick's going to write songs and we're going to live..." Her eyes dipped down at the ground for a moment. "And I...ran out of those herbs a month ago, Jaheira."
"Della!" Jaheira said, scolding once more, drawing in breath like a mother bird about to reprimand offspring; "Child. We will talk..."
The tones of Jaheira's voice were easy to hear above the wind in the trees on the other side of the Larswood grove. Khalid rested his back against a reassuringly solid oak the age of at least eight lifetimes, and placed his weapons by his side. Habibat, he thought, come to me.
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The cure for fate is patience - Arabic proverb.
the end - thank you for reading!
