A smile crossed Tarlyn's lips as he nodded, not looking up until he'd caught up with Tali's words. "You probably took the Merchant's Road up, like I did," he said as he flipped to the next page. "…through the Duergar caverns, up to the Shaft of Night." He smiled faintly, remembering his own journey, so long ago.
"I think so," Tali said, furrowing her brow in thought, then shrugged. "It's been a long time. Fight after fight, hiding in the dark, desperate not to be seen for fear that everyone and everything in the world was going to want to kill me." Laughing, she shook her head and added, "It all looks so different when you haven't seen it in hundreds of years. All I really cared was that I'd found my way out."
Grinning once more, eyes alight with the memory, she recounted the tale. "It was night when I reached the surface," she breathed. "…that much I do remember. I saw stars for the first time. Oh, the stars… they were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen." She curled her feet beneath her and relaxed.
Nodding, Tarlyn closed his eyes and blinked back tears yet again. "There were so many of them…" he whispered, and smiled over at her as he shared the memory. "And the air felt different, and the ground… and there's grass up by the mouth of the cave…"
Tali sighed, then nodded emphatically. "You understand! You really understand… almost no one here does… The air moved… the grass moved in the wind…" She laughed a little and shook her hair out over her shoulders. "I sat there, touching the grass and just looking at everything, the entire night. There was so much in that one small place that I'd never seen before…"
Grinning understandingly, Tarlyn asked, "And did you panic when by morning it was all wet with dew?" He chuckled as he remembered his own confusion, and flicked his eyes up from the page in hopes of catching her smile.
He wasn't disappointed, as Tali began to giggle quietly, then laugh aloud. "I didn't understand," she managed in breaths as she laughed. "Where was all this water coming from? It was wet… everything was all wet…" She grinned and caught her breath, then softly said, "And then the sky started to lighten…"
"And your eyes burned with colors, the likes of which you'd never even seen before…" Tarlyn breathed as he gazed at her. He stared for a moment, watching the way she moved when she laughed, when she breathed, then forced himself to look back at his page and keep writing.
Tali's eyes watered, then squeezed shut as she remembered the sting of her first sunrise. "Oh, how it burned, but it was a good burn…" she whispered, then opened her eyes. She spoke slowly as she stared into the distance, seeing not the city or even her companion's eyes on her, but that burning dawn as it replayed itself in her mind. "There was so much to see, so many colors, so many things! How could anyone call it horrible? How could our people call it cursed? I wanted to look, and look, and look, and see everything, even if it killed me."
"And the sun felt so good… so warm, so welcoming." Tarlyn smiled brightly and warmly. He'd finally found someone who was like him, who understood both the horror he'd come from, and the beauty of the world above. He allowed himself a small smirk, and muttered, "And you wondered if maybe the stories about how terrible it was were just the selfish whimpers of a race of punished children who shouted back to their mothers, 'Fine, I hate dessert anyway!'…"
The back-and-forth flow of the conversation became easier as the two shared memories, and Tali picked up without missing a beat. "And this tiny little selfish part of you thought that was perfectly okay, because they wouldn't understand anyway, and for that little while, it didn't really matter that you're all alone, because you have all of this to see and explore… Yes! You really do understand…"
Tarlyn twirled the pen between his fingers and grinned, then kept writing as he asked, "Where did you go first?" He was intrigued now, wondering how her journey might have paralleled his own, and growing almost comfortable enough to forget what the woman sitting beside him really was.
Tali raised her wineglass and gazed at it for a moment, then took a small sip. "I wandered in the forests for a long time," she said, "learning to control the changes as best I could." She shrugged. "I finally got at least a rudimentary handle on it. Then I found this small village and tried my luck…"
She winced and rubbed the back of one shoulder. The sting of that first rejection and the gouge she'd taken as she ran away never quite faded. "That didn't go so well," she confessed. "'Kill it, it's Drow.' Well, that seemed to be the gist of it, anyway. I didn't speak the language yet." She shrugged and stretched, then smiled quietly. "So I kept wandering, and I stayed away from people, until I found a city big enough to lose myself in." She smiled proudly. "All the while, breaking my back to master this new ability, learning how to change, how to do it at will instead of when I was angry or threatened, how to hold myself in one form for longer and longer times…"
Remembering his own first disastrous encounters and the times he'd narrowly escaped with his life, Tarlyn laughed and nodded his agreement. "I found my cloak and my gloves were my best friends almost right away."
"Tell me about it," Tali sympathized. "In a way, though, that was good. It actually made me truly thankful for what I was. It took some time, but I found my way to Waterdeep. Gods, what a place that was. So many people… libraries… shops… I learned so much there." She swallowed the last of her wine, then set the empty glass down beside her chair. "And I could be myself there. No one questioned a Drow in the streets. I even heard there were others in the city, though I never saw them, or sought them out."
Tarlyn grinned, watching her out of the corner of his eye as he wrote. Their journeys sounded more and more alike. In an unguarded moment of thought, it occurred to him that perhaps he had finally found a truly kindred spirit. Then, he realized again what she was, and stopped that thought before it could go any further. "It's always the busy places that show you that people who don't have too much time on their hands don't bother to develop prejudices," he said with a quiet smile.
"Isn't it a wonderful thing?" Tali asked. "Places where anyone can go, anyone at all. I started learning magic there in Waterdeep. Then, once I had a really good handle on shapeshifting, I started traveling. There was so much of the world to see. The Dales, the Sword Coast… I learned about the spelljammers, and took to the stars, hiring on as a sailor, or a soldier…"
She grinned crookedly. "I fought in the Illithid Wars. That's where I met Alton. Oh, now him, you'll have to meet. He's a dragon, of sorts. But I digress." She uncurled her feet and shifted sideways in the chair, draping her legs over the side and lying back. "I came back here from time to time. Well, to the surface, not really here. It was my home. I spent a few years in Kara-Tur, once… I met this kitsune named Kenshiro, and he left me with twins…" She shook her head and laughed. "That's a whole different story in and of itself."
Tarlyn raised an eyebrow curiously and said, "I'm going to want to go back to that, when you have the time." He wrote for a few seconds longer, then looked up at her, blinking. "Illithid wars? You mean you did come back to the Underdark eventually?" He knew of the mind flayers, and the rumors of their cities nearby, but he had never seen one on the surface.
"No," Tali said. "There aren't really that many of them, here. Those that do live on this world tend to keep to their own cities, except when they're hunting or doing business. Out there…" She pointed upwards, and shuddered disgustedly. "Out there, they're a major power, in some places. They sail these horrible, ugly, seashell-shaped ships, and they power them with the lives and minds of slaves. Thankfully, the different hives don't usually work well together, because you can't get two of the big brains to get over their egos and cooperate."
Her eyes darkened, and she frowned as she kept speaking, staring down at her hands before she folded them in her lap. "Once, centuries ago, several of the hives finally did band together. They took over a lot of worlds, and enslaved entire races before anyone organized to stop them. When people realized what was happening… it was war. It was a long, horrible bloody war."
She twirled an end of her cord belt around and between her fingers, her smile fond and faraway. "Alton was a slave on a ship we raided during the Wars. I set him free, I guess, by killing the squid that had a hold on his mind, and he's followed me ever since." She laid her head back against the back of the chair again and murmured, "He's a good man. Dragon. Oh, you know what I mean. He's a good friend. He's stood beside me ever since, except for the time I ran away from him for a few years." A crooked little smirk curled her lips as she added, "And I suspect he would have followed me that time, too, if I hadn't threatened to kill him if he didn't leave me alone."
Tarlyn recorded still more carefully, slowing to get the words exactly as he heard them, and fell silent for several minutes until he finished. "You're saying that the illithids exist beyond our world?" he asked. "They must be terrifying. And this Alton… they actually enslaved a dragon?" His jaw dropped, and he shook his head in wonder as he made notes. "What do they use slaves for, on their ships?"
As she recalled the wars of centuries past, and her many clashes with the mind flayers, Tali's brow furrowed, and she frowned a little. "Some say there's a whole world full of them out there somewhere. Personally, I hope it isn't true. They're horrifying." She shook her head emphatically and gestured toward the lake at the far end of the city, and the island in the center of it. "I have never seen any creature so purely detached. They look at everything the way you or I might look at the cattle out there."
Chuckling softly, she continued, "And Alton… ah, but he's amazing." Her voice was soft with obvious fondness, but her eyes were proud. "He's not a dragon like I'm sure you're picturing, but he is a dragon. His people walk on two legs, the way we do, and they're much smaller than the kind of dragons you're thinking of. He stands…" She looked thoughtful for a moment as she quietly counted. "…fifteen feet or so? I'm not sure. He's huge next to me, but tiny beside the dragons of the surface world here. He's beautiful. He's my oldest friend."
Lost now in the flow of the memories, she spoke rapidly as Tarlyn wrote. "And what they use slaves for… the same things they use slaves for everywhere else, including their cities here. Food, labor, menial tasks, brainwashed soldiers…" She slowed, the fear and disgust becoming evident again in her tone. "But their ships… I don't know how it works, precisely, but somehow their ships can link to the minds of certain slaves. The ship eats their mind and their life for power. It's one of the most horrible things I've ever witnessed."
Memories of the captives she had rescued, many half-insane after the magic that powered the ships had destroyed their minds, played through her mind. Sadly, she finished, "If they're lucky, and someone sets them free… well, the odds are their mind is gone, and you have a brainless, insane child who has no brain left lo learn to live again. Otherwise, it drains them slowly, and you have an empty, mindless shell that dies as soon as there's nothing left to take."
Tarlyn's jaw was tight, his teeth clenched, and he had to slow to keep his writing readable as emotion began to overwhelm him. "To them, we're just fat for their lanterns," he said very quietly. "Because your friend Alton was larger and stronger, he was more useful doing physical work for them. It saved his life."
Softly and sadly, Tali nodded. "It's that simple," she said. "…to them, anyway." She shrugged and grinned crookedly. "So, like I said, somehow I freed him, and he's followed me ever since. I guess it's a sort of life-debt, or something. He won't talk about it. He's just there. He saved my skin more than once, in the last few years of the Wars, and later, when we found a place to settle down."
"He taught me what it was like to be able to rely on someone," she said and chuckled softly. "That… doesn't come easy to our kind, but again, I imagine you know that." Her eyes brightened, then she bowed her head and whispered a quiet confession. "I love him so…"
[Yep. Still to be continued...]
"I think so," Tali said, furrowing her brow in thought, then shrugged. "It's been a long time. Fight after fight, hiding in the dark, desperate not to be seen for fear that everyone and everything in the world was going to want to kill me." Laughing, she shook her head and added, "It all looks so different when you haven't seen it in hundreds of years. All I really cared was that I'd found my way out."
Grinning once more, eyes alight with the memory, she recounted the tale. "It was night when I reached the surface," she breathed. "…that much I do remember. I saw stars for the first time. Oh, the stars… they were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen." She curled her feet beneath her and relaxed.
Nodding, Tarlyn closed his eyes and blinked back tears yet again. "There were so many of them…" he whispered, and smiled over at her as he shared the memory. "And the air felt different, and the ground… and there's grass up by the mouth of the cave…"
Tali sighed, then nodded emphatically. "You understand! You really understand… almost no one here does… The air moved… the grass moved in the wind…" She laughed a little and shook her hair out over her shoulders. "I sat there, touching the grass and just looking at everything, the entire night. There was so much in that one small place that I'd never seen before…"
Grinning understandingly, Tarlyn asked, "And did you panic when by morning it was all wet with dew?" He chuckled as he remembered his own confusion, and flicked his eyes up from the page in hopes of catching her smile.
He wasn't disappointed, as Tali began to giggle quietly, then laugh aloud. "I didn't understand," she managed in breaths as she laughed. "Where was all this water coming from? It was wet… everything was all wet…" She grinned and caught her breath, then softly said, "And then the sky started to lighten…"
"And your eyes burned with colors, the likes of which you'd never even seen before…" Tarlyn breathed as he gazed at her. He stared for a moment, watching the way she moved when she laughed, when she breathed, then forced himself to look back at his page and keep writing.
Tali's eyes watered, then squeezed shut as she remembered the sting of her first sunrise. "Oh, how it burned, but it was a good burn…" she whispered, then opened her eyes. She spoke slowly as she stared into the distance, seeing not the city or even her companion's eyes on her, but that burning dawn as it replayed itself in her mind. "There was so much to see, so many colors, so many things! How could anyone call it horrible? How could our people call it cursed? I wanted to look, and look, and look, and see everything, even if it killed me."
"And the sun felt so good… so warm, so welcoming." Tarlyn smiled brightly and warmly. He'd finally found someone who was like him, who understood both the horror he'd come from, and the beauty of the world above. He allowed himself a small smirk, and muttered, "And you wondered if maybe the stories about how terrible it was were just the selfish whimpers of a race of punished children who shouted back to their mothers, 'Fine, I hate dessert anyway!'…"
The back-and-forth flow of the conversation became easier as the two shared memories, and Tali picked up without missing a beat. "And this tiny little selfish part of you thought that was perfectly okay, because they wouldn't understand anyway, and for that little while, it didn't really matter that you're all alone, because you have all of this to see and explore… Yes! You really do understand…"
Tarlyn twirled the pen between his fingers and grinned, then kept writing as he asked, "Where did you go first?" He was intrigued now, wondering how her journey might have paralleled his own, and growing almost comfortable enough to forget what the woman sitting beside him really was.
Tali raised her wineglass and gazed at it for a moment, then took a small sip. "I wandered in the forests for a long time," she said, "learning to control the changes as best I could." She shrugged. "I finally got at least a rudimentary handle on it. Then I found this small village and tried my luck…"
She winced and rubbed the back of one shoulder. The sting of that first rejection and the gouge she'd taken as she ran away never quite faded. "That didn't go so well," she confessed. "'Kill it, it's Drow.' Well, that seemed to be the gist of it, anyway. I didn't speak the language yet." She shrugged and stretched, then smiled quietly. "So I kept wandering, and I stayed away from people, until I found a city big enough to lose myself in." She smiled proudly. "All the while, breaking my back to master this new ability, learning how to change, how to do it at will instead of when I was angry or threatened, how to hold myself in one form for longer and longer times…"
Remembering his own first disastrous encounters and the times he'd narrowly escaped with his life, Tarlyn laughed and nodded his agreement. "I found my cloak and my gloves were my best friends almost right away."
"Tell me about it," Tali sympathized. "In a way, though, that was good. It actually made me truly thankful for what I was. It took some time, but I found my way to Waterdeep. Gods, what a place that was. So many people… libraries… shops… I learned so much there." She swallowed the last of her wine, then set the empty glass down beside her chair. "And I could be myself there. No one questioned a Drow in the streets. I even heard there were others in the city, though I never saw them, or sought them out."
Tarlyn grinned, watching her out of the corner of his eye as he wrote. Their journeys sounded more and more alike. In an unguarded moment of thought, it occurred to him that perhaps he had finally found a truly kindred spirit. Then, he realized again what she was, and stopped that thought before it could go any further. "It's always the busy places that show you that people who don't have too much time on their hands don't bother to develop prejudices," he said with a quiet smile.
"Isn't it a wonderful thing?" Tali asked. "Places where anyone can go, anyone at all. I started learning magic there in Waterdeep. Then, once I had a really good handle on shapeshifting, I started traveling. There was so much of the world to see. The Dales, the Sword Coast… I learned about the spelljammers, and took to the stars, hiring on as a sailor, or a soldier…"
She grinned crookedly. "I fought in the Illithid Wars. That's where I met Alton. Oh, now him, you'll have to meet. He's a dragon, of sorts. But I digress." She uncurled her feet and shifted sideways in the chair, draping her legs over the side and lying back. "I came back here from time to time. Well, to the surface, not really here. It was my home. I spent a few years in Kara-Tur, once… I met this kitsune named Kenshiro, and he left me with twins…" She shook her head and laughed. "That's a whole different story in and of itself."
Tarlyn raised an eyebrow curiously and said, "I'm going to want to go back to that, when you have the time." He wrote for a few seconds longer, then looked up at her, blinking. "Illithid wars? You mean you did come back to the Underdark eventually?" He knew of the mind flayers, and the rumors of their cities nearby, but he had never seen one on the surface.
"No," Tali said. "There aren't really that many of them, here. Those that do live on this world tend to keep to their own cities, except when they're hunting or doing business. Out there…" She pointed upwards, and shuddered disgustedly. "Out there, they're a major power, in some places. They sail these horrible, ugly, seashell-shaped ships, and they power them with the lives and minds of slaves. Thankfully, the different hives don't usually work well together, because you can't get two of the big brains to get over their egos and cooperate."
Her eyes darkened, and she frowned as she kept speaking, staring down at her hands before she folded them in her lap. "Once, centuries ago, several of the hives finally did band together. They took over a lot of worlds, and enslaved entire races before anyone organized to stop them. When people realized what was happening… it was war. It was a long, horrible bloody war."
She twirled an end of her cord belt around and between her fingers, her smile fond and faraway. "Alton was a slave on a ship we raided during the Wars. I set him free, I guess, by killing the squid that had a hold on his mind, and he's followed me ever since." She laid her head back against the back of the chair again and murmured, "He's a good man. Dragon. Oh, you know what I mean. He's a good friend. He's stood beside me ever since, except for the time I ran away from him for a few years." A crooked little smirk curled her lips as she added, "And I suspect he would have followed me that time, too, if I hadn't threatened to kill him if he didn't leave me alone."
Tarlyn recorded still more carefully, slowing to get the words exactly as he heard them, and fell silent for several minutes until he finished. "You're saying that the illithids exist beyond our world?" he asked. "They must be terrifying. And this Alton… they actually enslaved a dragon?" His jaw dropped, and he shook his head in wonder as he made notes. "What do they use slaves for, on their ships?"
As she recalled the wars of centuries past, and her many clashes with the mind flayers, Tali's brow furrowed, and she frowned a little. "Some say there's a whole world full of them out there somewhere. Personally, I hope it isn't true. They're horrifying." She shook her head emphatically and gestured toward the lake at the far end of the city, and the island in the center of it. "I have never seen any creature so purely detached. They look at everything the way you or I might look at the cattle out there."
Chuckling softly, she continued, "And Alton… ah, but he's amazing." Her voice was soft with obvious fondness, but her eyes were proud. "He's not a dragon like I'm sure you're picturing, but he is a dragon. His people walk on two legs, the way we do, and they're much smaller than the kind of dragons you're thinking of. He stands…" She looked thoughtful for a moment as she quietly counted. "…fifteen feet or so? I'm not sure. He's huge next to me, but tiny beside the dragons of the surface world here. He's beautiful. He's my oldest friend."
Lost now in the flow of the memories, she spoke rapidly as Tarlyn wrote. "And what they use slaves for… the same things they use slaves for everywhere else, including their cities here. Food, labor, menial tasks, brainwashed soldiers…" She slowed, the fear and disgust becoming evident again in her tone. "But their ships… I don't know how it works, precisely, but somehow their ships can link to the minds of certain slaves. The ship eats their mind and their life for power. It's one of the most horrible things I've ever witnessed."
Memories of the captives she had rescued, many half-insane after the magic that powered the ships had destroyed their minds, played through her mind. Sadly, she finished, "If they're lucky, and someone sets them free… well, the odds are their mind is gone, and you have a brainless, insane child who has no brain left lo learn to live again. Otherwise, it drains them slowly, and you have an empty, mindless shell that dies as soon as there's nothing left to take."
Tarlyn's jaw was tight, his teeth clenched, and he had to slow to keep his writing readable as emotion began to overwhelm him. "To them, we're just fat for their lanterns," he said very quietly. "Because your friend Alton was larger and stronger, he was more useful doing physical work for them. It saved his life."
Softly and sadly, Tali nodded. "It's that simple," she said. "…to them, anyway." She shrugged and grinned crookedly. "So, like I said, somehow I freed him, and he's followed me ever since. I guess it's a sort of life-debt, or something. He won't talk about it. He's just there. He saved my skin more than once, in the last few years of the Wars, and later, when we found a place to settle down."
"He taught me what it was like to be able to rely on someone," she said and chuckled softly. "That… doesn't come easy to our kind, but again, I imagine you know that." Her eyes brightened, then she bowed her head and whispered a quiet confession. "I love him so…"
[Yep. Still to be continued...]