NOW
"Stop."
I don't know what surprised me more; that it was my voice that was echoing throughout the cavern, or that anyone — everyone — was listening.
Including the dracolich, Vix'Thra.
I held the glowing orb — the dracolich's phylactery — above my head, my arms shaking with their burden, sweat making my fingers slick.
"What are you doing?" Nathyrra hissed.
What was I doing?
"One wrong move, and I smash it!" I warned.
The ruby red eyes of the dragon considered me, a feline tilt to its massive white skull.
I lifted the orb higher, planting my feet.
Valen was trying — and failing — to push himself upright. Shadows fell across him, the creature's foot posed to crush him.
And then…
And then Vix'thra withdrew. Not by much. But enough that I released the breath I'd been holding.
Everyone was silent. Waiting.
"Withdraw your support of the Valsharess," I continued through laboured breaths, arms straining. "And we'll leave."
The dracolich's tail lashed out, smashing against the stone wall as he replied with an angry roar.
Then the roar became words.
"Leave the phylactery." Vix'thra commanded.
His voice was deep, booming; magic flaring from the hallows of his chest cavity with each word.
I bit my lip, before taking a step towards Nathyrra.
Her crossbow was attached to her hip once more, her deft fingers hard at work disarming a trap I couldn't even make out amongst the gold and bones.
"I can't do that!" I shook my head.
Nathyrra's eyes shot in my direction, her expression incredulous.
"We need some guarantee that you won't kill us." My eyes darted to Valen. "That you won't support the Valsharess."
Nathyrra gave a nod, and moved forward in her crouch, starting on another trap.
A deep booming chuckle; so dark and vile that the hairs on my arms rose at the sound.
"You won't get far," Vix'thra vowed. "Your Seer's city will burn for this."
I bit my lip harder at his words and I saw the lines of Nathyrra's body tense up at the threat.
"We cannot let this creature live," she hissed, moving onto the next trap.
"We need to live," I snapped.
I stepped forward, eyes on the dracolich's foot as it moved it to languishly to rest upon the struggling tiefling.
The dragon considered me over Valen's body.
I lifted the orb higher, holding it in a two-handed grip.
"Kill him, and we kill you," I promised — the unsaid permanently hanging in the air.
I don't know how long we stood off against each other, but it was long enough for Nathyrra to finish with the traps.
Long enough for her to turn to me with desperation in her eyes.
And long enough for her to make up her mind.
She dove at me, reaching for the orb and snatching it from my weakening grasp.
I don't know what was louder; the dragon's roar of outrage, my scream, or the phylactery as she smashed it on the stone floor.
The next bit I experienced in flashes.
Nathyrra reached for the club at my feet.
Levoera summoned the light of her divine god.
Valen watched me with a weak smile, forgiving me as Vix'thra lifted his foot.
He closed his eyes — swirling red with pain.
And then the dracolich's foot crushed him with a roar of anguish that matched my own.
THEN
The first thing I noticed was how blue his eyes were.
The hair. The horns. The tail.
I'd expected it all.
But his eyes?
They were the most otherworldly thing about him.
NOW
I'd charged alongside Nathyrra.
Her with the club, me with my bow.
I'd never been one for shooting whilst running, and it showed.
A crack of thunder and the shot went wide with a fizzle of wasted potential.
I reloaded.
Another boom tore through the chamber.
This one struck true.
The arc of lightning hit, the dragon's screech drowning out the thunder. Zaps of light travelled over his body for a moment, so bright I had to squint. But it didn't last long, and it only gave him pause, before he shook it off like a dog coming in from the rain.
I threw my bow aside.
I wouldn't need it.
Nathyrra continued in her charge and I didn't have time to check how she fared. We would need Valen for this. The deva.
Nathyrra and I weren't important.
I didn't want to see Valen's body, but I couldn't help it. I saw it all. I couldn't not.
His armour held most of its shape, but his body — and his face; oh god's his face — were broken. A mess of skin and flesh, pain and blood.
I slipped on the slick floor, coming to kneel beside his broken body as I sucked in a breath at the sight of him.
THEN
His face was harsher than I thought it would have been, wisps of red hair only barely softening his lean, grim expression. His blue eyes, set narrowly in their sockets, watched me for any sign of hostility as the Seer resided over us. A frown line creased his forehead, the single crease the only true sign of his age.
His long, regal nose flared through each huffed breath, lips turned down in a scowl that looked like it could never possibly break into a smile.
He shifted to get a better look at me — eyeing the weapons on my hips, the bow on my back — and I realised it was the lighting that didn't do him justice.
I froze, my breath hitching ever so slightly.
The shadows shifted and his strong jaw drew my eye, then the gentle slopes of his pointed ears, the almost quizzical curve of his eyebrow.
His eyes, whilst narrowed in suspicion, sparkled with a deep intelligence belied by his warrior's frame.
The Seer pressed me with a question and I tore my curious eyes from the gentle curving of his horns.
NOW
One of his horns was snapped clean through, his skin — what wasn't stained in red — was as white as shock.
My hands were shaking as I pried the rod from my belt with slick fingers.
I heard the deva cry out, and then it was suddenly cut short. There was a thud, a roar of delight, all followed by the fading of her holy light.
Nathyrra screamed with effort, but what good could one drow with a glorified stick do against a would-be god?
I was pulling the resurrection rod free when I felt the heat of the dragon's attention.
I curled in on myself, reaching a hand out for someone, something.
I felt the cold reassuring metal of Valen's armour under my slick fingers.
And then I felt the pain.
I reached for his hand and held it tight.
THEN
Valen lent again the wall, his forehead slick with sweat from our fight. He assessed the room critically, before his clear blue eyes rested on me.
I held a cloth against the wound on his side.
Valen's much warmer fingers shocked me out of my musing, replacing my hand on the cloth carefully.
We held the gaze for a moment, and I was the first to break it; pulling my hand away from his warmth.
NOW
Hot. Searing. Too much!
I opened my mouth to scream, but I couldn't hear it, I couldn't see. Everything was dark.
But the pain — holy shit, the pain!
And then, it wasn't as sharp, wasn't as harsh. I needed to lay down and rest. Just for a moment.
When had it gotten so cold?
I opened my eyes slowly, and realised with a shudder that I was dead.
The Reaper watched me with that cat-like tilt to his hooded head.
My vision cleared in stages as I used the lip of the mist-covered well to help me stand on shaky feet, the memory of the dragon's rage-filled roar still ringing in my ears.
I grasped the rod of resurrection in a white-knuckled grip. My other hand felt cold and empty, ripped as it had been from Valen's slack fingers.
"Hail the dead," the Reaper said by way of usual greeting.
As always, I could detect the barest hint of humour in his dry baritone.
"Reaper," I replied with an exasperated sigh.
I took a deep, centering breath.
"It's been a while," he said wryly.
"Not long enough," I offered him my usual flat reply.
I gave myself only a scant few seconds to catch my breath, blinking as the long dark hall we resided in came into focus.
As always, I tried my best to ignore the glowing door at the end of the hall — the one currently barred from me.
Cania.
I shivered, clutching my middle and wondering if that was where the lingering chill was coming from.
I turned, doing my best to ignore my bedraggled reflection in the well's waters — shit, I need some sunlight! — as I reached within the cool depths and retrieved the last healing potion I'd stashed in this surreal waypoint between life and death-death.
"One of those days?"
If the Reaper had eyebrows beneath the black depths of his cloak, one was almost definitely raised to match the smirk in his voice.
"One of those days," I repeated, clutching the healing potion in one hand and the rod in the other.
I must have looked a sight; hair wild and free of its usual ponytail, grey eyes bloodshot from screaming, and skin covered in ash and blood.
"Now send me the hells back," I ordered with a grimace, closing my eyes against the disorienting rush I knew was to come.
I gritted my teeth, preparing for the onslaught on pain my body was about to be in.
Afterall, the Reaper was a resurrectionist. Not a healer.
I felt the lurch of teleportation and the rush of air, and suddenly I was curled up on the stone floor.
I opened my eyes, confronted once more with the sight of Valen's body.
A surprised gap was the only outward sign of my passion, as I pushed it aside. I pressed the already outstretched rod to Valen's temple, the tip glowing white, and the hum of powerful magic echoed around us. My burnt skin was raw on the cool metal, but I forced myself to ignore it all as the magic swelled around us.
Nathyrra shouted for the dragon's attention — her voice too far, too weak, for me to clearly make out.
The light encompassed the tiefling's battered body as it healed him back to only the brink of death.
A gasp, and he was white with shock and blood loss, but he was alive. Blessedly, thankfully alive.
And we didn't have any time.
Valen's eyes searched for me.
They found me, and focused with a snap — a whiptail snap when our eyes met — and my own opened wider, and he was telling me things with his look, but I couldn't understand, the words were missing, there was only the urgency.
Then he reached out with a hand, and I reached out with a hand, and I was cupping his head, and he was drinking the last of the potion.
A potion I'd died to get to him.
As I watched, his sunken cheek — the bone knitting back together — filled in, his horn curled back to its full length, and his arm rearranged itself with a crack of bone and a grunt of effort.
Then he was pushing himself to his feet, reaching for his flail.
Between one step and the next he was completely healed, charging at the dragon with a roar full of promise, anger, purpose.
I fell onto my hands — the pain from my recent death staved off only by adrenaline, by purpose— and that purpose had been fulfilled.
Too weak to do anything more, I watched.
I watched as Valen, face alight with vigor, forced the dragon's attention away from Nathyrra. I watched as he struck time and time again, against the hulking monster. And I watched as — impossibly — he brought Vix'thra to his knees, crushing his skull with one, two, three, swings of his great flail.
I had the clarity to realise laughter wasn't the appropriate response, but lacked the capacity to stop myself.
There, in the cavern of a now dead undead dragon, the laughter poured out of me like a language.
And in the fading light of the dragon's dying magic, my laughter faded into a desperate, airy chuckle — too tired to do anything more — as Valen rushed to the felled deva's side, his expression pinched with determination and concern.
My vision was blurring at the edges and I had to look away as he knelt down, reaching for her and searching for the healing potion — our last of the potions.
Another bust of laughter, but this one held none of the surprised joy of the last, as I felt my vision starting to narrow.
If only I'd stashed more potions in the Realm of the Reaper…
My arms gave out and I fell to the floor, my laughter turning to gasps of pain, as I rolled onto my back. I watched the dark ceiling above as it spun in and out, and in and out of focus.
Breathing as deeply as I dared, I closed my eyes against the moving ceiling, swallowing down my nausea.
I waited for the chill of the Reaper's hall.
He was going to get a kick out of this…
All the rogue stones in the world, but nothing left to heal me.
Would I be trapped in the Reaper's halls forever; a horrible limbo interrupted by the occasional trip into a broken body minutes from death?
Or would I evanescence away day by day, with a sentient sword and Reaper my only company?
But then there were footsteps, and I cried against a fresh burst of pain.
And then my eyes snapped open with a surprised gasp.
The spinning ceiling had been replaced by Valen's concerned frown, the floor by his lap.
And this time it was his hands on the back of my neck as he coaxed the last of our healing potion between my parched lips. I didn't have the discipline — or energy — to do anything but drink.
And as I laid there — my burnt flesh knitting back together, wishing that I'd been a little less distant, a little more open with him — I looked up at his wide blue eyes and thought that, as far as deaths went; this was my favourite.
THEN
I glanced up across the public house's table, spoon poised at my lips in surprise, as Valen chuckled at his own joke, the corners of his eyes crinkling with laughter.
That's when I knew; frozen in panic, mouth agape.
I realised with a sudden clarity how easy it would be to care for this man.
So — excusing myself, I left him and Nathyrra to their meal, waiting out the night in my little empty room with only a sword and a notebook for company.
NOTEBOOK EXTRACT
This page is a list of flora found in the underdark, placed illogically between a list of song titles, listed alphabetically with the title 'Remember:', and a hastily drawn map of the maze of tunnels leading into Lith My'athar.
Both the handwriting and the chaotic scattering of thoughts are irrefutably Jane's.
Blackroot
A sketch of a thin vine with small dark leaves.
Location: found near water, growing in sunlight or near phosphorescent moss.
Use: the root can be ground into powder to create blackroot poison.
Darkthorn
This sketch is of a mushroom, with long and rigid tapered tendrils standing upright.
Location: dark caverns and caves.
Use: can be replanted at the bottom of pits as a spike trap.
Dragontongue Mushroom
The stout stalk of the mushroom is a pale yellow, transitioning to a darker colour at the top, before splitting into six black protrusions.
Location: Anywhere muddy and dark.
Use: hallucinogenic.
Light of Mystra
This illustration Jane has spent some time colouring. It's a collection of small mushrooms with thick heads, coloured a pale emerald. The head is littered with small red bumps and within the bumps of the cap is a scattering of cerulean blue spores.
Location: the darkest tunnels in the lower depths of the Underdark.
Use: glows, to mark the way.
Author's Note: The THENs have caught up and future chapters will be set only in one timeline.