Tarlyn laid down his pen and took a sip of his own wine, then flexed his fingers, picked up the pen again, and kept writing. A moment later, he stopped and looked up. "Tell me about Alton," he said. "What kind of man… er, dragon, is he?" He sat, pen ready, watching and listening.
Twirling a stray lock of her own hair around her fingertips, Tali looked pensive as she sat in silence for a few minutes. "He's very strong," she said at last. "Not just physically, though he's definitely that too. There's an inner strength he has, a way of just dealing with what life hands him, without tears or complaint…" A fond warmth lit her eyes as she described her old friend. "Friendly, though. He likes people. He likes to tend bar, of all things." She chuckled softly. "We ran a little tavern together, he and I."
She tilted her head to one side and added softly, "Protective, too. Of me and mine, at least." She shrugged slightly, and looked at the ends of her hair as she twirled them between her fingers. "At first, I think, he thought he owed me. Then we got to be friends, and we just watched out for each other. We still do." A grin spread across her face. "He's incredible in a fight. He doesn't like to fight, though, unless he's forced to."
As his pen scratched across the page, Tarlyn nodded silently, listening until she had finished, then smiled. "You really seem to admire that about him," he said. "That he's strong without needing to show it by force." Thoughtfully, he blinked, then asked, "That's one of your lessons to our people, then, isn't it? That shows of force are not to be confused with strength."
Tali nodded firmly, and gazed silently at Tarlyn for a moment. It hardly seemed possible to her that a cry for help would have led her to what appeared to be the first person to truly completely understand her. After a moment, she smiled approvingly, and nodded. "Well, yes. Force is a last resort when you have no other solution, not a way of life. Strength…" She thought about it for a moment, then continued, "it isn't necessarily being able to defeat by force. Strength is knowing that you don't always have to, that often there is a better way."
Tarlyn's hand speeded again, and he nodded softly, returning her smile. "The surface people consider shows of force acts of desperation," he said. "They motivate only in that they make resistance difficult and risky. They do nothing to convince people why they should agree with a course of action." He shrugged, and laughed quietly. "And if people don't agree, why, they'll never really cooperate, only refuse to resist. It's like asking orcs to build your house!"
"Exactly!" Tali exclaimed emphatically. "Cooperation is everything. No one can live alone forever." Gesturing widely, she pointed out at the city. "And what our people have never realized is that it would be so much easier to work together…" She shook her head and brushed her hair back behind one ear. "We could accomplish so much if we could just stop fighting amongst ourselves, and wasting time and energy on meaningless power struggles, and turn all that effort to working together instead."
She shook her head sadly. "If there's one thing I've learned over the centuries, it's that if you spend your whole life fighting, you'll only die bitter and tired, with nothing to leave behind but stories that will eventually be forgotten."
He turned the page and kept writing without pause as he said quietly, "Perhaps…" even knowing that Lolth was dead, he hesitated to speak the name. "Perhaps she kept things that way to keep everyone too busy to see the madness around them." He smirked faintly. "That's how the warlords of the southlands do it. They keep their servants fighting amongst themselves, too busy worrying about their lives to realize they've been enslaved, or focus any time on attacking their master. Perhaps that was the entire reason…"
Tali stared at the dying light of the pillar of Narbondel for a silent moment, then said, "Probably. It's a tactic people use everywhere. As long as our attention was turned toward each other, we'd never be able to see what she was doing to us." Chuckling quietly, she shrugged. "I only wanted to set it right. I didn't bargain on…" She gestured out at the city again, then down at herself, now laughing. "…this. But here I am…"
"What was it," Tarlyn asked as he wrote, "…that she took from our people, in exchange for the occasional gifts of power?" He was both fascinated and horrified. The goddess was confirming so many of his old suspicions, that life as they had known it had been insane. Was there a reason why, or was it all a sick amusement? "Did you ever find out?" he inquired.
Looking away from the city at last, Tali tilted her head to one side and regarded Tarlyn thoughtfully for a moment. He was asking a lot of questions, she thought, that most of their kind wouldn't dare. It pleased her, and she smiled in spite of herself as she answered honestly, "As best as I can figure, her power came from our belief in her. What she gave to the priestesses was really just a tiny fragment of what she was taking from every one of us."
Tarlyn startled, and almost dropped his pen. Grinning sheepishly, he recovered and kept writing. "The gods need worshippers?" he asked incredulously. From anyone but a goddess, the idea would have been blasphemy. He was astonished that she would be so frank about the source of her power.
She tucked a few more strands of hair behind her ears, shifted in the chair again, and leaned toward him, curling her feet beneath her again. "I still don't know exactly how it all works," she admitted. "Set would be the one to ask about that." She smiled faintly at the shudder Tarlyn failed to repress. "He's older than anything, I think. Maybe older than everything. If anyone knows for sure, he does."
"As I understand it, though," she said as she watched him write, "…yes. It's worship that makes a god strong. I don't think we die if people forget us, mind you, but we become stronger when people think of us. The more people there are, the stronger we become."
Tarlyn simply nodded as he wrote hurriedly. "And I suppose, then, fear counts as much as genuine devotion… and is easier to gather en masse, with little effort."
Tali blinked, a little surprised that he was picking it up so quickly, then grinned and nodded. "It doesn't take much to scare people. You can do it without trying. We both know that." She drummed a fingertip on the arm of her chair, still nodding. "But the flip side of that is that when someone breaks free and defies that fear, you have to work a lot harder to squash what they symbolize. Look at Drizzt. How many died trying to destroy him? Look at me. She started a war spanning worlds and planes trying to get rid of me. I don't know your story yet, but I'd be very surprised if you weren't just as good an example of that."
"Fear…" she began slowly, "…is easy to get in large numbers. But you need large numbers, and you can't let anyone openly defy it. True devotion takes a lot more work to inspire, but true faith is a lot stronger than simple cowering fear."
Tarlyn nodded, his expression a little sick. "Like the illithids," he muttered. "We gave her the energy she fed on. We were fat for her lanterns." It was his turn to sound disgusted now as he spoke, his pen pausing for a moment. "She kept us running and backstabbing and churning in a huge machine of pain and misery. Tore families apart, turned woman against man, old against young…"
"Horrible, isn't it?" Tali said softly and sadly. "All the things we endured, all the pain and hatred and distrust we grew up with… it was all just to feed her fires." She clenched one hand into a fist and rested it on the arm of the chair with a sigh. "I don't want it to be like that anymore. I only wanted to make it right. I didn't know this was going to happen when I decided to take her on. All I wanted was to set myself and my people free."
"What did you think would happen?" Tarlyn asked. He looked up from his writing for a moment, and gazed at Tali quietly while he waited for her to answer. This was becoming much more of a story than he'd counted on, but he didn't mind. He was beginning to hope it would take even longer, and give him a good reason to stay and listen to her.
It caught him by surprise when she threw her head back and laughed for several minutes, then regarded him with a sheepish grin. "Honestly? I hadn't thought that far ahead! I guess I thought I'd kill her and everyone would be free, or more likely, I'd die trying and my worries would be over." Still chuckling, she shrugged and admitted, "It was retribution, pure and simple. Retribution for what she'd done to me, to my mother, to Mourn, to Drizzt, to Dusty… to who knows how many others individually, and to our people as a whole." Smirking, she added, "I wish I could say I had some grand plan, but it was really pretty simple. I wanted justice."
Tarlyn hurried to catch up, chuckling himself. "You knew things would be better, no matter how they turned out afterward." He blinked at the unfamiliar name, then asked, "Who's… Daz'ti?"
"Dusty," Tali corrected, and even a blind man couldn't have missed the fire in her eyes as she smiled, then laid back in her chair and sighed. "Now there's a story. My Dusty… my beautiful wolf…" She chuckled softly. "He is… many things. He is my best friend, my truest confidante, my partner… and my husband, for the last six hundred years and change."
She nodded confidently. "You'll meet him, eventually. He does a lot of good for us on the surface. He's a wonderful diplomat, and a hell of a negotiator. He's always been..." Her brow furrowed as she searched for the right words to describe him. "…extremely charismatic," she finally finished, with a crooked little smile that hinted at much more. Even so, her voice was soft and passionate as she murmured, "I'd die without him…"
"A different sort of love than your dragon, Alton, then?" he inquired, nodding slowly. He took a quick sip of his wine, and then returned to his writing. "And you say he's a wolf?" First a dragon, now a wolf – the lady had unusual taste in companions, it seemed. He smiled faintly as he shook off the disappointment, and supposed he was silly to think she'd be interested in him anyway.
Tali quirked an eyebrow ever so slightly as she caught his self-reproachful thought, and her cheeks colored again. She cleared her throat a little and looked down at her hands, half hoping he didn't notice, and half hoping he did. "Alton is… I guess the best way to describe it is that he's like a brother to me, the way that the surface people see family. The way Mourn saw family."
"And Dusty is…" She closed her eyes and sighed, smiling once more. "He's my life. My world. He's the reason I've lasted this long." She chuckled and nodded softly. "And yes, he's a wolf, but one like a man." She bit her lip as she tried to decide how best to explain it. "Like a werewolf, sort of? Only not. He's… well, as much as I hate to draw the parallel… you saw Set. He's like that, only he's a wolf."
"From another place up in the stars?" Tarlyn asked, then blinked. "Like a werewolf… you mean, something like the beastmen of the Wemic plains?" He was trying to picture this wolf-man, and he was grasping for a starting place that didn't involve the snake-eyed jackal-man who had surprised him on his arrival.
Tali thought about it for a moment, then nodded slowly. "Something like that, yeah. The place where we met, there were so many of them, all different kinds…" She chuckled. "It was like… a bizarre crossroads at the center of a hundred strange worlds. There were wolves, dogs, cats, anything you can imagine, but they were all people. There were other shapeshifters, but none quite like me. There was an entire underground city full of the undead…"
Tarlyn nodded once more, and blinked up at her for a moment before he looked down again. "How did you meet him?" he asked.
Tali shrugged and laughed softly. "It was nothing all that dramatic, at first. I was relaxing with some friends I'd made, in a sort of common area in the center of town, when all of a sudden, there he was…" Her expression went soft, her voice dreamy, as she murmured, "…this tall, beautiful wolf-man. He had long, golden hair, and these haunting eyes… he came over and introduced himself to me." She grinned dreamily. "Dusty Rancourt… Oh, I was positively smitten, but he was married, and I was involved with someone, so we just made friends…"
The image roused Tarlyn's curiosity. "A romance," he said. "Just like the stories." He lifted the book, and began to move his pen in wide sweeps across the page, smiling a little as he asked, "Was it considered strange to love someone so different from you?" He couldn't imagine a place where that would have been easily accepted, but he supposed anything was possible.
Tali shook her head emphatically. "Not there, That was a lot of the reason why Alton and I settled there. It was such an open place. Everyone was different… and that was okay." She grinned and rearranged the folds of her dress. "You could do what you wanted, be who and what you wanted, spend time where you wanted, with who you wanted… and no one ever blinked an eye." Still smiling, she sighed wistfully. "Oh, that… that was true freedom. For the first time in my life, I wasn't an enemy. I wasn't a curiosity. I was finally, for the first time in my life, just Tali."
[ Still more to come… ]
Twirling a stray lock of her own hair around her fingertips, Tali looked pensive as she sat in silence for a few minutes. "He's very strong," she said at last. "Not just physically, though he's definitely that too. There's an inner strength he has, a way of just dealing with what life hands him, without tears or complaint…" A fond warmth lit her eyes as she described her old friend. "Friendly, though. He likes people. He likes to tend bar, of all things." She chuckled softly. "We ran a little tavern together, he and I."
She tilted her head to one side and added softly, "Protective, too. Of me and mine, at least." She shrugged slightly, and looked at the ends of her hair as she twirled them between her fingers. "At first, I think, he thought he owed me. Then we got to be friends, and we just watched out for each other. We still do." A grin spread across her face. "He's incredible in a fight. He doesn't like to fight, though, unless he's forced to."
As his pen scratched across the page, Tarlyn nodded silently, listening until she had finished, then smiled. "You really seem to admire that about him," he said. "That he's strong without needing to show it by force." Thoughtfully, he blinked, then asked, "That's one of your lessons to our people, then, isn't it? That shows of force are not to be confused with strength."
Tali nodded firmly, and gazed silently at Tarlyn for a moment. It hardly seemed possible to her that a cry for help would have led her to what appeared to be the first person to truly completely understand her. After a moment, she smiled approvingly, and nodded. "Well, yes. Force is a last resort when you have no other solution, not a way of life. Strength…" She thought about it for a moment, then continued, "it isn't necessarily being able to defeat by force. Strength is knowing that you don't always have to, that often there is a better way."
Tarlyn's hand speeded again, and he nodded softly, returning her smile. "The surface people consider shows of force acts of desperation," he said. "They motivate only in that they make resistance difficult and risky. They do nothing to convince people why they should agree with a course of action." He shrugged, and laughed quietly. "And if people don't agree, why, they'll never really cooperate, only refuse to resist. It's like asking orcs to build your house!"
"Exactly!" Tali exclaimed emphatically. "Cooperation is everything. No one can live alone forever." Gesturing widely, she pointed out at the city. "And what our people have never realized is that it would be so much easier to work together…" She shook her head and brushed her hair back behind one ear. "We could accomplish so much if we could just stop fighting amongst ourselves, and wasting time and energy on meaningless power struggles, and turn all that effort to working together instead."
She shook her head sadly. "If there's one thing I've learned over the centuries, it's that if you spend your whole life fighting, you'll only die bitter and tired, with nothing to leave behind but stories that will eventually be forgotten."
He turned the page and kept writing without pause as he said quietly, "Perhaps…" even knowing that Lolth was dead, he hesitated to speak the name. "Perhaps she kept things that way to keep everyone too busy to see the madness around them." He smirked faintly. "That's how the warlords of the southlands do it. They keep their servants fighting amongst themselves, too busy worrying about their lives to realize they've been enslaved, or focus any time on attacking their master. Perhaps that was the entire reason…"
Tali stared at the dying light of the pillar of Narbondel for a silent moment, then said, "Probably. It's a tactic people use everywhere. As long as our attention was turned toward each other, we'd never be able to see what she was doing to us." Chuckling quietly, she shrugged. "I only wanted to set it right. I didn't bargain on…" She gestured out at the city again, then down at herself, now laughing. "…this. But here I am…"
"What was it," Tarlyn asked as he wrote, "…that she took from our people, in exchange for the occasional gifts of power?" He was both fascinated and horrified. The goddess was confirming so many of his old suspicions, that life as they had known it had been insane. Was there a reason why, or was it all a sick amusement? "Did you ever find out?" he inquired.
Looking away from the city at last, Tali tilted her head to one side and regarded Tarlyn thoughtfully for a moment. He was asking a lot of questions, she thought, that most of their kind wouldn't dare. It pleased her, and she smiled in spite of herself as she answered honestly, "As best as I can figure, her power came from our belief in her. What she gave to the priestesses was really just a tiny fragment of what she was taking from every one of us."
Tarlyn startled, and almost dropped his pen. Grinning sheepishly, he recovered and kept writing. "The gods need worshippers?" he asked incredulously. From anyone but a goddess, the idea would have been blasphemy. He was astonished that she would be so frank about the source of her power.
She tucked a few more strands of hair behind her ears, shifted in the chair again, and leaned toward him, curling her feet beneath her again. "I still don't know exactly how it all works," she admitted. "Set would be the one to ask about that." She smiled faintly at the shudder Tarlyn failed to repress. "He's older than anything, I think. Maybe older than everything. If anyone knows for sure, he does."
"As I understand it, though," she said as she watched him write, "…yes. It's worship that makes a god strong. I don't think we die if people forget us, mind you, but we become stronger when people think of us. The more people there are, the stronger we become."
Tarlyn simply nodded as he wrote hurriedly. "And I suppose, then, fear counts as much as genuine devotion… and is easier to gather en masse, with little effort."
Tali blinked, a little surprised that he was picking it up so quickly, then grinned and nodded. "It doesn't take much to scare people. You can do it without trying. We both know that." She drummed a fingertip on the arm of her chair, still nodding. "But the flip side of that is that when someone breaks free and defies that fear, you have to work a lot harder to squash what they symbolize. Look at Drizzt. How many died trying to destroy him? Look at me. She started a war spanning worlds and planes trying to get rid of me. I don't know your story yet, but I'd be very surprised if you weren't just as good an example of that."
"Fear…" she began slowly, "…is easy to get in large numbers. But you need large numbers, and you can't let anyone openly defy it. True devotion takes a lot more work to inspire, but true faith is a lot stronger than simple cowering fear."
Tarlyn nodded, his expression a little sick. "Like the illithids," he muttered. "We gave her the energy she fed on. We were fat for her lanterns." It was his turn to sound disgusted now as he spoke, his pen pausing for a moment. "She kept us running and backstabbing and churning in a huge machine of pain and misery. Tore families apart, turned woman against man, old against young…"
"Horrible, isn't it?" Tali said softly and sadly. "All the things we endured, all the pain and hatred and distrust we grew up with… it was all just to feed her fires." She clenched one hand into a fist and rested it on the arm of the chair with a sigh. "I don't want it to be like that anymore. I only wanted to make it right. I didn't know this was going to happen when I decided to take her on. All I wanted was to set myself and my people free."
"What did you think would happen?" Tarlyn asked. He looked up from his writing for a moment, and gazed at Tali quietly while he waited for her to answer. This was becoming much more of a story than he'd counted on, but he didn't mind. He was beginning to hope it would take even longer, and give him a good reason to stay and listen to her.
It caught him by surprise when she threw her head back and laughed for several minutes, then regarded him with a sheepish grin. "Honestly? I hadn't thought that far ahead! I guess I thought I'd kill her and everyone would be free, or more likely, I'd die trying and my worries would be over." Still chuckling, she shrugged and admitted, "It was retribution, pure and simple. Retribution for what she'd done to me, to my mother, to Mourn, to Drizzt, to Dusty… to who knows how many others individually, and to our people as a whole." Smirking, she added, "I wish I could say I had some grand plan, but it was really pretty simple. I wanted justice."
Tarlyn hurried to catch up, chuckling himself. "You knew things would be better, no matter how they turned out afterward." He blinked at the unfamiliar name, then asked, "Who's… Daz'ti?"
"Dusty," Tali corrected, and even a blind man couldn't have missed the fire in her eyes as she smiled, then laid back in her chair and sighed. "Now there's a story. My Dusty… my beautiful wolf…" She chuckled softly. "He is… many things. He is my best friend, my truest confidante, my partner… and my husband, for the last six hundred years and change."
She nodded confidently. "You'll meet him, eventually. He does a lot of good for us on the surface. He's a wonderful diplomat, and a hell of a negotiator. He's always been..." Her brow furrowed as she searched for the right words to describe him. "…extremely charismatic," she finally finished, with a crooked little smile that hinted at much more. Even so, her voice was soft and passionate as she murmured, "I'd die without him…"
"A different sort of love than your dragon, Alton, then?" he inquired, nodding slowly. He took a quick sip of his wine, and then returned to his writing. "And you say he's a wolf?" First a dragon, now a wolf – the lady had unusual taste in companions, it seemed. He smiled faintly as he shook off the disappointment, and supposed he was silly to think she'd be interested in him anyway.
Tali quirked an eyebrow ever so slightly as she caught his self-reproachful thought, and her cheeks colored again. She cleared her throat a little and looked down at her hands, half hoping he didn't notice, and half hoping he did. "Alton is… I guess the best way to describe it is that he's like a brother to me, the way that the surface people see family. The way Mourn saw family."
"And Dusty is…" She closed her eyes and sighed, smiling once more. "He's my life. My world. He's the reason I've lasted this long." She chuckled and nodded softly. "And yes, he's a wolf, but one like a man." She bit her lip as she tried to decide how best to explain it. "Like a werewolf, sort of? Only not. He's… well, as much as I hate to draw the parallel… you saw Set. He's like that, only he's a wolf."
"From another place up in the stars?" Tarlyn asked, then blinked. "Like a werewolf… you mean, something like the beastmen of the Wemic plains?" He was trying to picture this wolf-man, and he was grasping for a starting place that didn't involve the snake-eyed jackal-man who had surprised him on his arrival.
Tali thought about it for a moment, then nodded slowly. "Something like that, yeah. The place where we met, there were so many of them, all different kinds…" She chuckled. "It was like… a bizarre crossroads at the center of a hundred strange worlds. There were wolves, dogs, cats, anything you can imagine, but they were all people. There were other shapeshifters, but none quite like me. There was an entire underground city full of the undead…"
Tarlyn nodded once more, and blinked up at her for a moment before he looked down again. "How did you meet him?" he asked.
Tali shrugged and laughed softly. "It was nothing all that dramatic, at first. I was relaxing with some friends I'd made, in a sort of common area in the center of town, when all of a sudden, there he was…" Her expression went soft, her voice dreamy, as she murmured, "…this tall, beautiful wolf-man. He had long, golden hair, and these haunting eyes… he came over and introduced himself to me." She grinned dreamily. "Dusty Rancourt… Oh, I was positively smitten, but he was married, and I was involved with someone, so we just made friends…"
The image roused Tarlyn's curiosity. "A romance," he said. "Just like the stories." He lifted the book, and began to move his pen in wide sweeps across the page, smiling a little as he asked, "Was it considered strange to love someone so different from you?" He couldn't imagine a place where that would have been easily accepted, but he supposed anything was possible.
Tali shook her head emphatically. "Not there, That was a lot of the reason why Alton and I settled there. It was such an open place. Everyone was different… and that was okay." She grinned and rearranged the folds of her dress. "You could do what you wanted, be who and what you wanted, spend time where you wanted, with who you wanted… and no one ever blinked an eye." Still smiling, she sighed wistfully. "Oh, that… that was true freedom. For the first time in my life, I wasn't an enemy. I wasn't a curiosity. I was finally, for the first time in my life, just Tali."
[ Still more to come… ]