Disclaimer: NWN2 & MotB are property of Obsidian and are used here for pure fun only.
Author's Notes:
-Sorry for leaving you hanging for so long but I had both the exams and had the warp my head around this chapter. There's a wall of text here where Coven is concerned bit it is also an important part of the story.
In another news, I'll be rewriting Chapter 9, parts or whole, I am yet to see but the chapter will be rewritten.
Also, just five more chapters till the end of the story! Yes!
-Enjoy and leave a review on the way out.
-Now edited by Jazhara! Thank you!
--
-- 10 –
"You didn't have to come along, you know."
"Not come," he scoffed, "and miss all the excitement spawned in your footprints? Surly you joke."
"I mean it."
"As do I. Not to mention you require my help to solve the maze of dreams behind which the hags hide."
Aneele frowned and eyed him levelly.
"I hardly needed your help to kill an illithid or win a game of 'demons and devils'."
"Ah, but you did need my help in creating unending amount of gold necessary for gambling."
Aneele looked away from him and returned her attention back to the long contract and Gann thought he might have heard something like 'I could've done it' and grinned.
Throughout their dreamwalking Gann was silent on the matter of his mother and Aneele avoided the subject as well. He for the most part silently followed her through dreams of an illithid, a gentlemen dependant on gambling and now a naïve student of magic.
Unraveling this dream had fallen onto her shoulders and she felt very much like a student with dignified professor Gannayev supervising her exam. Were she her normal self, she would have thought that profoundly disturbing. And strange. And her face would have probably outshone a red apple. But she wasn't, and thus having him around was no different than having Kaji flying around her head.
Vaguely she wondered if removing the curse would return her to that stuttering child, always confused by grand events happening around her. She hopped not, because curse or not, it was mighty good to be able to reduce people to a quivering pulp just by looking at them. And Aneele had grown to be something of an expert on that.
"What are you thinking about?" He asked, just as she reached another paragraph which essentially said noting, but was there for the sake of making the contract look important and long.
"The red woman and Arman."
"About love, about gods?"
"I am stuck in a war between a brother and a lover. Why should I spend any thought on them? There it is," she tapped her finger on the single word in the contract. He leaned over the table to look at the sentence that, no matter that it was upside down, made no sense to him.
"How do you know?"
"I once knew a good lawyer."
"You have committed an atrocious murder I presume."
"I have massacred an entire village actually." Gann blinked, still bemused. He was, in fact joking. She in fact was not. He looked at her as she stood up and proceeded to walk to the devil.
"You and I need to have a long talk one day."
--
Hags were floating, suspended in an endless sleep, and they were still hidden behind the field of magic, still unreachable. Aneele tapped the force field several times, and it bounced back in concentric circles. Yet they had broken their hold on three dreamers trapped here. Was there anything else? She turned towards Gann with a question in her eye. He was the veteran dreamwalker here, after all.
"Any advice?"
"The field has weakened considerably, but I sense another dream nearby." He looked around walking between the sleeping hags and she didn't miss a few glances of hate he threw their sleeping forms. He stooped between two, one green and a deep purple one, and felt around the air until his hand sunk into nothingness.
"Here. This should be our last stop," he gestured for her to pass first. She cocked her head and almost sighed. Emotionless or not, the long tiring search for answers still did not hold any appeal for her.
The place they found themselves in was like no dream she had experienced until now. Color seemed drained from everything, her and Gann included, and a great wall surrounded the city of which only the rooftops could be seen. Yet there was something eerily familiar about that wall, a feeling she couldn't quite place.
She walked closer to it, her footsteps nearly inaudible in the dream world, and dragged the tips of her bony fingers over distorted faces. What was she doing here? What was she supposed to do here?
"Ele'ena?"
Like crack of whip her head turned to the voice. No one had called her that for months now, not even Gann who knew of her birth name. It was a name from the past meant to stay in the past.
"…you …here?" raspy voice asked.
Her step sped up until she reached the source of it.
The man she knew as Bishop lay encased in a quivering greenish mold. His limbs twisted at odd angles, as if they were broken. His face - frozen in a grimace of pain - barely cleared the surface of the Wall, like the face of a drowning man, gasping for air.
His eyes met hers, and she realized that all the color had drained from his hair and his flesh, much like it did form hers. One of his eyes was completely white, and bulging. If she, could Aneele would have laughed at the supposed justice she was witnessing.
She drew closer and leaned over his face with ease. In life he was so much taller than her. And he would always abuse that fact.
"Well, well, well. Quite a predicament you've gotten yourself into, Bishop."
He bristled, as much as a statue could.
"What, this Wall? I knew where I was going when I died. Oblivion is a finer bedfellow than most… though on a cold night, with a roaring campfire, and no words, I might allow for one or two exceptions."
"I bet you would," she whispered coldly, her boney hand skirting around the edge of his barley defined neck, itching to strangle him until even his soul stopped existing.
"Who is this one? He speaks as if he knows you," Gann spoke from behind her. At first he found the interaction curious and intriguing, but seeing the obviously murderous intent in her rising, he had decided to step in. he was also curious about this man from her past. She spoke little of it before, but now she grew silent as a grave.
Bishop's good eye turned towards the dreamwalker, knowing him instantly for what he was.
"Have you assembled a new circus of capering beasts? Does the pretty hagspawn sing for his supper, or does he dance as well?"
Aneele pulled her hand away and straightened up.
"Gann is a trusted friend. More so than you ever were."
"And I dance and sing quite well, I would add," his voice was pleasant and taunting at the same time. Aneele found it was nice not to be at the receiving end of his barbs.
"More trusted than the man who opened the gates of your keep to a horde of undead? You should treasure that compliment, hagspawn, it is clearly heartfelt."
At once, the Wall shuddered, convulsed. The twisted figures trapped within cried out as one as the entire wall shifted. Limbs shudder, bones crack, and the greenish mold expands, covering faces, eyes, and mouths. The smirk left Bishop's face, replaced, for one naked moment, by wide-eyed fear.
"Can you hear it? In the screams... underneath the screams? The reason you're here… they all know."
"Why so serious, Bishop? You're not scared, I hope?"
"No. I made this bed of mold and rot. You never knew me… you thought you could read me, manipulate me, like the paladin or the devil-girl."
Did he really mean this, deep down...? Did he regret it but would never let her see that? In Aneele's, and before Ele'ena's image of Bishop such a thing was never possible. Bishop did not have the word 'regret' in his vocabulary.
"Ah... to forget and be forgotten - that's paradise. It's getting there that's the hard part, but I don't fight it, like these othe-" he didn't finish as suddenly three bony fingers were shoved roughly down his mold infested throat.
"Forget?" Her voice might as well have been made of ice. "Be forgotten?" Her fingers clenched inside and out his jaw. "That's an easy way out you don't deserve." The former Knight-Captain held on to his jaw and started to pull. At first the Wall resisted but the Hunger latched onto the spirit rich bricks eating any possible resistance away.
"No, Bishop. You will return to that rotting corpse of yours and hate me, and this time I will give you a very good reason to." Little by little the Wall around him loosened letting his soul slide out, moss like matter retreating from his body. "You will hate me more than you hated Luskan, hate me more than you could ever hate Duncan, hate me more than you even hated yourself." She kept pulling him easily out of the Wall, it yielding under the onslaught of spirit-hunger, until he could see clearly into one sunken red eye. The eye that held all the traces of madness.
"You will hate me for this second chance I am giving you because Bishop, you owe me."
And in just a split of a moment before his soul turned into nothingness, with his eyes already starting to burn with hate, he lashed out at her. Yet the spirit hunger pushed him, through dreams, back into material world to where his body lay.
The voices in the Wall rose like one, each of them longing for a release, an escape from the suffering. But Aneele wasn't Akatchi and the release of souls interested her little. Yet here she had come to understand something. A secret was revealed to her.
Through it all Gann didn't speak or interfere. Not even now. Finally she broke the silence amidst the moaning of the Wall
"You look shocked," she said facing the structure.
"Admittedly, yes."
"You didn't expect something like that coming from me."
"No, not to that extent," he was silent for a moment. "He was the one to scar your face so?"
Aneele touched the eye patch where the skin was stripped from her bones and her eye gone.
"Yes, he was the one. An arrow coated in acid."
"I know you well enough to say it had nothing to do with misplaced vanity," his voice was quiet but firm and certain.
"You don't know me that well Gann. I am cursed, broken, and mad. I don't know who I am anymore." She looked at the now empty spot in the Wall. It will soon be filled by someone else's soul. "You know, I didn't hate him really."
"A strange thing to say when you inflict more torment on him?"
She leaned on the Wall and her fingers dug into the moss painfully. With her left one she felt something and instinctively grabbed onto it.
"Because he frightened me. Because he was the bogeyman I couldn't stand up to. I was young, clueless and thrown into a whirlwind of events with expectations far beyond my capabilities, and I did not know how to dodge or foresee trouble on the horizon. I was no material for a Captain or a Knight. And they made me both. And he was there, with a knife always ready for my back. He hated Duncan so much that his hate boiled over to me for no other reason but being convenient."
Her shoulders sagged and she turned towards him, an oddly tired expression on her face.
"I wasn't born scarred, starved, soulless and mad! There are situations that can either make you or break you to pieces. A trial that can either force you to grow up or make you crawl in the corner. The war against the King of Shadows was one such event. Three times a guess where I ended up."
"You survived," he pointed out. "Sometimes that is what counts most."
Aneele snorted.
"Even if I turned into a mad spirit-eating monster?"
"Especially when you turn into a mad spirit-eating monster."
Again she snorted.
"That's easy for you to say. You have faced your demons."
"Faced, yes. Killed them, not yet." He looked around sensing the air, "And perhaps we too should go and face those demons before the ones from the Abyss show their ugly snouts here."
--
: Speak :
A change had come over the Chamber of Dreamers. The hideous forms of the Coven were solid now, and whispers filled the room… …hundreds of whispers, resolving themselves slowly into a single voice, which prickled like a swarm of ants inside her skull.
Even before Aneele could say anything Gann stepped forward, confronting the hags who were responsible for his parents' torment.
"You are the Slumbering Coven, the ones who have slept beneath Rashemen."
: Yes :
"The slayers of my father, the warden of my mother, and the ones who punished her never to sleep, never to dream."
: Yes :
"Why? She did not attack you, she did n-"
: She broke our law, spawn :
: The one you travel with - she is the product of such broken laws, as are you. Transgressions must be punished, or they are repeated :
"I agree - and that is why we are here to punish you."
: No, not unless you want this place to unravel around you, to see all dreams, all the chambers of this city flooded and gone :
: To do so would kill you as well, and much farther do we think you have to travel :
Aneele shrugged but did not look at him.
"My father - what did you do to him?"
: Dead and gone, by our law :
: As your mother gave in to her appetites, so was she forced to devour her own mate... in the manner of all hags, piece by piece, leaving just enough alive to scream :
"By your law, you say. Then all I wish is that the same justice be brought upon you - and that you feel its selfsame mercy."
Aneele's face looked left and right impassively.
"Nine hags."
: By weaving together the strands of our dreams. The longer we sleep, the stronger our web. And we take dreams from other minds, adding them to our own :
: From the dreams of mortals, we salvage much... visions and hopes and memories. We take these things and gather them here, before mortal minds can forget them :
"You walk unbidden through people's minds?"
: Yes. Mortals are stupid, forgetful things. We walk in their dreams, and we take what they will only lose :
"And those dreams?"
: We showed you nothing. You showed us, and we drank deep… such was the price of your passage, and of the words we speak to you now :
"Then those dreams… came from my mind?"
: From its deepest places, yes… where dreams mingle with hidden and forgotten things :
: You are a tempest of dreams, a whirling storm, devouring dreams and dreamers alike. They swirl around you like leaves - tearing, shifting, blending one into another. It is maddening :
: We saw you reach out to devour the bear god... and sensed in your hunger the death of all dreams. When such as you walks the land, all that we try to preserve is lost :
Aneele dismissed that with a wave of her hand. Such things were in the past and were not worthy of wasting through now.
"Two women came before you, not long ago. You gave them advice - something to do with me."
: Yes. The white twin, and the red :
: The white twin was Lienna. The red twin was Nefris :
"Nefris? The mother of Safiya?" Gann looked at Aneele in amazement. Disgust poured in both their minds.
: The pretty one… her dreams are scattered, nauseating to look upon. She knows not what she is :
: But yes. The one she calls "Mother" beseeched our advice and offered her dreams for trade :
"And what did they want from me?"
: Nothing from you. They sought to end your affliction… to spare you from your suffering :
The whispers seemed to draw back from her mind, separating themselves into many different voices - for a few moments, they echoed back and forth across the chamber, as if conspiring amongst themselves. Then, abruptly, they resolved again into one.
: We are creatures of dreams, not of words. Telling is cumbersome. We will show you what you wish to know :
Out of thin air stepped two women, one garbed in white, the other in red. Aneele realized at once that she was seeing a dream, a memory… something that occurred here in the past. And a spark of curiosity appeared in her sunken eye. Finally she would get some answers.
"See us, hags of the Coven, and know us for what we are." Confidently, the red woman announced her presence to a powerful coven of night hags as if she was no less in power before them.
"We beseech your wisdom and bear gifts of dreams to trade… dreams of a sort even you have never seen." Both flustered and nervous her white twin held no such confidence.
: We have heard tales of you in the dreams of the living, and reflected in the dying minds of those who perished in our sanctum :
: Your dreams are a treasure, unique in our hoard... like worlds seen through different facets of the same ancient stone :
: Your question resounds across the infinity of your dreams... but in this place, you must ask it aloud. Speak :
"We… we would know how to end the affliction… the curse that the Rashemi call the 'spirit-eater.' We have searched so long, sisters of the Coven, we-" But the red twin cut off her sister, demanding the answers more forcefully, as it was befit of the Red Wizard.
"Tell us how to end the hunger. How can the eater of souls be granted peace?"
Even in the dream, the whispering of the hags seemed to pause, growing quiet for a long moment, as if in reverence… or uncertainty. Then…
: That affliction is a punishment, meted out by one who once reigned as God of the Dead. He alone knows its beginnings, and he alone might bring about its end :
"You speak of Myrkul. But… but he is dead."
"We seek an answer, not a riddle. That God of the Dead has passed beyond thought or dream. He has been slain and his throne usurped - his knowledge is lost."
: Not lost. Myrkul is a corpse, but his thoughts and dreams remain... marooned now inside the rotting hulk of his mind. He dreams endlessly of old enemies come to grief, and ancient slights avenged… :
: As long as he is remembered and feared by mortals - even if they are pitiful and few - his dreaming will persist, and his mind shall endure :
"Then we must speak… to a dead god?" The white twin looked discouraged with yet another seemingly-insurmountable obstacle placed in their path. But the red twin's quiet and resolute voice showed that Nefris knew better.
"It can be done."
"That is all we would know, sisters of the Coven. Thank you…" As they turned to leave, the images of Nefris and Lienna started to fade, and they vanished.
"Then this curse… is the result of one of your Gods? How many Gods of the Dead do your people have?" Gann was first to speak after a moment of silence. He looked at his companion with confusing and frustration. Predictably, Aneele just shrugged.
: "Your" people? The Gods of the Dead watch you, Gann-of-Dreams. All their laws, all their punishments, will fall on you, as well :
: And if you do not believe in them, then one of their harshest laws shall be inflicted upon you - to lie within the Wall of the Faithless until you dissolve as a fading dream :
: So keep your defiance, if you must, but it will not last when death comes for you, dream-thing :
"Did the two speak to the dead god?"
: That is a question we cannot answer. The red twin has returned to Thay - to her Academy - a horror of endless voids and fractured souls. We are blind to all that passes there :
: The white twin - Lienna - kept portals in her secret room, in the shadow of her theater. One of them is open only to those who know where it leads :
: Beg passage from her Keeper of Doors, and he will open the way. Beyond that portal lies the Academy... and your answers :
: But we care not what you do, spirit-eater… we have spoken enough. You have troubled our dream too long :
"Very well," Aneele nodded and Gann hissed by her.
"I say we bring their dreaming to an end. Show them the pain of the waking world." Perhaps it was the sheer amount venom in his voice that made the hags pause and raise their voices in defiance.
: If you end our dream, all that it contains is lost. Imagine… the dreams of a thousand, thousand souls, the knowledge of wizards and kings centuries dead, the hopes and loves of men and women and beasts… all contained within our unending dream :
: Such a trove as has never been assembled, here or anywhere across the planes… this you would destroy, for your own selfish whim :
Aneele cocked her head.
"Yes, that sounds about right."
"So be it. My spirits are ready to fight with us - to their second deaths, if need be.
There was outrage in the air, coming from all the nine hags.
: You have not the power, nor the will! Stupid, arrogant thing… how many hundreds have tried to usurp our place, but we took their power, and absorbed their dreams :
"This one does not stand alone, but with me. I am no novice to the unraveling of the dreams and ambitions of others - together, you will not find us easy prey." He turned to her.
"Allow me to help you. I can unravel their dreams faster than they could stop us," Gann said placing a hand on her shoulder. Aneele leaned on her scythe and looked at him for a moment. There was something unusual in her eye. She wasn't looking through him or somewhere behind his eyes. No, she was looking just at him.
She then reattached her weapon on her back belt and placed both of her hands on top of his head. He closed his eyes waiting for her mind to merge with his but it was the opposite that happened. Her mind distanced and Gann felt being pushed away, pushed out of the dreamscape.
"No!" he exclaimed trying to fight back the fragmenting dream. Aneele shook her head. "I can help you."
"You can get yourself killed," she said evenly even as the sound of drums filled the dreamscape around her. Gann knew what this meant. With one last look up he saw the dream rearrange behind her until the caged Hunger appeared, suspended on chains of her iron will.
"No! I-" He tried to protest but there was no point. With the Hunger waiting in the recess of her mind she easily broke his hold on the dream and pushed him back out into the waking world as the dream collapsed around him.
: You have sent the pretty hagspawn away. One can only wonder why :
: But without the dreamwalkers help you have no chance in defeating us :
Aneele looked at them unfazed.
"There are only so many hags… we can eat at the same time." The presence behind her stirred, as she concentrated upon it… willing the hunger to come forth and be free. It rose like a dark, shapeless thing, always ravenous, groping blindly for food… Even if they didn't move Aneele could sense the hags back away.
"But there were nine tasty hags before us…" She unleashed your spirit hunger upon the minds of the hags.
As the hunger broke off the chains and filled her up, she could sense the powerful minds of the hags… they were gorged with memories and dreams, swollen like bloated worms. The Hunger surged forth…
The hags tried to maintain their grip upon sleep - upon the dream - but they could not, without risking their very souls. But neither could they wake as the Faceless Man surged between them cutting one down with his great scythe and devouring another. Screaming in fury, they were devoured, one by one, and their precious dream dissolved into a million whirling threads...
Aneele did not move from her spot, looking vacantly over the massacre of souls and lost dreams she helped happen.
--
"What happened?!" He heard the voices of his companions but they sounded distant. He remembered quickly the shattered dream and looked around. He found he was lying on the ground supported by Okku. Had he fainted completely?
"I'll ask again, what in the hells happened?!" Safiya raised her voice as she all but shook the hagspawn back to his senses. He freed himself of her hands to look at where the girl stood but it was the sight above that occupied everyone's attention.
Before them the hags twisted painfully and screeched as if something was tearing them up, yet there was no visible force. Aneele still stood calmly before them, hands in pockets and scythe strapped to her back just as she did when she and Gann first entered their collective dream.
"Aneele! By the spirits-!"
"It had started not long after you collapsed," Kaelyn said quietly. "We thought that a dream might have gone awry."
"I have not seen anything like this before," Okku's voice was a low rumble. Even if he was a mighty spirit, he too was very much afraid. "What is she doing to them?"
"Eating them," Gann whispered and the others looked at him in shock. Most noticeably Kaelyn and Okku, the bear god both worried and disappointed at her giving in into her Hunger. "Form the dreamworld, she is picking up their souls like ripe fruit."
As he spoke the hags one by one collapsed on the floor, some still twitching and others still with glassy eyes. And among the carnage the spirit-eater slid on the floor, crossed her legs and sighed contentedly, nine pulsing essences of the Coven laid out before her.
That time only Safiya approached her.
--