Pellanistra frowned slightly, her legs tucked underneath herself as she examined the map with Sabafae. Mayna was leaning back in her seat, a goblet of wine in hand. "The shore is a nice battlefield—even footing, tightly packed sand...but a pitched battle is not ideal," the Matron said. After the incident at the Fane, the entire city had agreed to mobilize and deal with this threat on the shores of the Sunless Sea. And now here they were, less than a day away.
"As a distraction, it has its uses," Sabafae said quietly, tapping a dagger against her chin thoughtfully. She touched the tip to where the mind flayer city was marked out. "Small force goes in and disrupts whatever's going on inside—organizing or what have you—while the rest of our army meets theirs out here. Head off the snake."
"That's how Zilthae cleared out Lagurno," Pellanistra said, stretching. She smiled when Zezdrin poked his head into the tent, but the expression faded off her face at the sight of pain in her brother's.
"Matron, we found T'risskacha. Yasmur'ss also caught a human spy in the same area," he said quietly.
Mayna's face seemed to light up—the anguish hidden in Zezdrin's expression didn't even register. "T'risskacha is alive?" she said, springing up and hurrying out. Sabafae and Pellanistra exchanged a worried look, following their mother.
Whatever joy Mayna had felt bled away in a moment when she stepped into the tent where her third daughter was laying. T'risskacha was laying on her side, shoulders shaking and trembling with the force of desperate sobs. Her hands were bound so that she couldn't hurt herself, but that didn't stop her from straining at the restraints to try. The right half of her face, especially her ear and right around it, had been clawed at until it was slick with blood.
"Mother," Pellanistra said softly, reaching out to touch the Matron's arm. Mayna pulled away, her expression lost and dreaming. She went over, undoing the restraints and catching T'risskacha's wrists in one hand as she pulled her daughter close.
"My...beautiful daughter..." Mayna choked out as T'risskacha stopped struggling and clung to her, stroking the younger female's hair. "Who did this to you?"
"She doesn't have much longer," Zezdrin said quietly, leaning down to speak in Mayna's ear.
"I will do it," Mayna said softly, looking up at her son. "Tell Yasmur'ss to have that human ready for me."
"Is that wise, Matron? In your anger—"
"Do it," the cleric hissed, something burning in her eyes. Zezdrin nodded, expression stony as he left his twin with their mother, herding Pellanistra and Sabafae away from the opening of the tent.
"Is T'riss going to be okay?" Pella asked, grabbing her brother's arm.
Zezdrin shook his head, giving his youngest sister a tight hug. "The mind flayers left a tadpole," he whispered in her ear. "The Matron needs this. Leave them be."
Pellanistra nodded her understanding, heart twisting at the idea of being without the sister that had been her first and probably best friend. She let Sabafae guide her away, eyes closed tightly.
Back in the tent, Mayna carefully drew her sacrificial dagger, resting it so that the point just barely touched the soft flesh under T'risskacha's chin. "When you were a little girl, you used to have the worst nightmares, T'riss. Do you remember?" she whispered even though she knew her daughter wouldn't be able to hear her. T'riss was too far gone now. "You wouldn't go back to sleep, and Sabafae would come and get me..."
Mayna lost her voice for a moment, closing her eyes and summoning up the resolve to do this. "And I would wait there until you fell asleep," she finished softly. "It's the same thing now, T'riss. I know this is a bad dream, but just give it a little while and it'll all be smooth sailing."
The Matron pushed, driving the dagger up as hard and fast as she could at an angle. This wasn't a time for shaky hands or second thoughts. T'risskacha twitched and then her limbs and jaw went slack, her torso shuddering still against her mother's arm. A dullness claimed the warrior's bright eyes, clouds shrouding the world in misty darkness.
Outside, Pellanistra jumped at the sound of a scream. It was so full of raw pain and anguish the young priestess couldn't even identify the source. Sabafae put a hand on her sister's shoulder. "That was Mother," she murmured softly in Pella's ear. "She will take apart that city stone by stone, with her bare hands even, whether it kills her or not."
"What will we do?" Pellanistra asked quietly, tears in her eyes. "T'risskacha is gone...Mother might as well be."
"We go with her. We do our job, serve our house. What we are supposed to do," Sabafae said with a sigh, sitting down on one of the rocks. "We get up every morning and pretend everything is fine because that is what the House needs from us. What Mother needs from us."
"What's been done to him?" Mayna asked in a murmur, looking over at the human slumped over in the chair.
"Zezdrin beat on him for a while," Yasmur'ss said with a shrug. "He needed to get out some aggression, and I wasn't there yet to stop him. Nothing else."
"And he was with T'risskacha?" the Matron said quietly.
"He seemed to find her state amusing, according to Zezdrin. I'm amazed he isn't dead," her eldest daughter answered. "Don't kill him too quickly, Matron."
"I'll do my damnedest," Mayna said stonily before going over.
The human man was a rough-looking sort with short, greasy hair and thick stubble. His clothes were rough, dirty and spattered with blood from his broken, swollen nose and split lip. He looked up, dark eyes glaring at Mayna. "Are you going to kill me now?" he growled in accented Undercommon.
Mayna smiled widely, teeth a bright white against her ebony skin. "Of course not," she said, almost amused. A darkness had claimed Mayna's heart, a spirit of cruelty beyond anything she had ever experienced before. "What kind of barbarian do you take me for? No, you and I are going to have a little chat. At the end of it, you are going to ask me to kill you. I will again say no. Shall we begin?"
It was hours before the screaming stopped.
Once silence fell, Yasmur'ss and Tebatar stepped into the tent warily. Mayna was there, washing off her hands in a basin. The spy was still in the chair he'd been tied to, his back to the door. "Do you want us to take him, Matron?" Yasmur'ss asked quietly, sensing her mother's mood was still very dangerous. She kept her tone soft and deferential, trying not to set off the older female.
"Yes. He answered my questions," Mayna said blankly, drying off her hands and walking out of the tent past them. "Don't kill him, Yasmur'ss. And don't have him killed, either. I want him to live."
"As you command, Matron," her eldest daughter said, dropping her gaze respectfully when her mother passed by her.
Tebatar went over to the human and turned the chair around. He went as pale as he could with his ebony skin, staring. He had seen a lot of corpses in his mother's wake, but never anything quite like this. "W-w-what h-h-happened to his face?" the male stammered. It hadn't been mutilated—it was gone. So were his eyes.
Yasmur'ss felt a slight admiration for her mother's finesse at that moment, impressed by how delicately the older female had done it and how she'd managed to keep her victim conscious. "I wonder why she put out both his eyes. I would have thought one would be sufficient," she said absently. "I think treading lightly around the Matron is probably wise. At least until her lust for vengeance is sated."
Tebatar nodded numbly, backing away and wiping off his hands. Yasmur'ss sighed. "Honestly, brother, your squeamishness is disappointing," she said, undoing the spy's restraints. Her dark, mirror eyes seemed more void-like than ever, emotion lost in their depths until none remained on the surface.
Meanwhile, Pellanistra sat numbly by T'risskacha's body, watching soldiers scrape together the materials for a proper funeral pyre. Nothing less would do for a Matron's daughter. Sabafae and Zezdrin were with her, silent. They saw Mayna sometimes, able to distinguish her from the army by the clear path she created and her armor.
The plate armor gave Pellanistra something to focus on. It was black like the places of utterdark where light had never touched—not even at the dawning of time, black like the void between stars. Blacker than Mayna's ebony skin. She didn't understand why. Certainly, drow wore dull colors most of the time, particularly their armor. But all the plate she had ever seen in her life down here had been smoked, giving it a dull, dark, gray color that gave only the slightest reflection of light—if any. It blended with the stone. Her mother's armor never reflected anything. It absorbed the light and gave nothing back.
Sabafae leaned over, murmuring something softly in Zezdrin's ear before rising and departing. The priestess went in search of her consort. She could sense just as well as everyone else that battle was just around the next curve of the tunnel. Dimly, distantly, but still there was the faint roar of the Sunless Sea as it cast its waves up on the dark shore.
Zezdrin put his arm around his younger sister's shoulders with a sigh. "It'll be alright, Pellanistra."
"She's going to ask me to do it, Zezdrin," Pellanistra said.
"Hmm?"
"Mother. She's going to ask me to take the force inside the city," the young priestess said, looking up at him. "It should have been T'riss, but it'll be me. What if I can't do it?"
Her brother gave her a wan smile along with a one-armed hug. "You'll be fine, Pella. Just remember everything you've learned."
"I'm afraid."
The admission surprised Zezdrin. He looked over into Pellanistra's wide blue eyes, reminding himself of just how young she still was. She put on a brave face, carried herself as if she was older, but underneath she wasn't even a year older than a finishing Academy student. "We all are, underneath," the male drow said with a sigh. "Most of us are just too proud and vain to admit it. There's nothing wrong with being afraid, as long as it doesn't stop you."
Pellanistra seemed to think this over for a moment, contemplating her siblings' reactions to their own fear if it was really there like Zezdrin seemed to think. She frowned deeply. "Zezdrin, have you seen Talra?" she asked.
Zezdrin searched his memory. "Not since we left Yvoth-Lened. But I don't speak with her much anyway."
The young priestess lapsed into silence for a moment, mind almost stumbling through a line of reasoning. "Sabafae said she studied advanced magic once...I saw her at Arach-Tinilith a few times during my first year there."
"Yes, under Reverend Mother Zilvala before she disappeared," Zezdrin said absently. "I wrote her off as Yasmur'ss's crony some time ago, but she seemed different right before we left. More...focused."
Your sister encouraged me to find my calling in the more...advanced levels of arcane magic. In my studies of the planes, I inadvertently encountered a portal to the Far Realms, and the dark beings of that plane, Zilvala's voice whispered from the back of her memory.
"More focused?" Pellanistra muttered to herself, standing up and walking a few paces towards the south, staring down the tunnel to the Sunless Sea. She knew her half sister would be gone, nowhere to be found in camp.
For three years Lolth had been trying to push her in the right direction with nightmares, showing her visions of the thrall calling to the Eater. And all through that time she'd been too blind to see the way Talra was changing, the way she vanished for weeks at a time and found every reasonable excuse to slip away or simply not attend the rites of Lolth. How she'd stolen books from Sorcere and Arach-Tinilith and spent hours pouring over them. The last time she'd seen Talra at the Academy was the night Zilvala's notes and books vanished from her office.
Pellanistra bit her lower lip. "Talra, what have you done?" she whispered.