15 Flamerule
We can see the tower at this point: a dark squat glimpse at the edge of the landscape at the setting sun, clouds of dust billowing at its base like brown ghosts. We no longer travel through green grass. The supplies we carry should be sufficient for the journey within; we should not take long, for no doubt Dalton will perish of thirst or starvation if he remains trapped.
"There will be traps. There will be monsters. You don't touch anything unless you're sure it's not trapped, poisoned, cursed, or about to summon some abomination from the Nine Hells—and if you're sure, you check again. You don't step anywhere unless you know it won't kill you. You don't walk anywhere alone. You listen to orders and you don't screw up." Shar-Teel has—she calls it tomb-robbing—before; ready to keep us in line.
At last I gathered the resolve to go to Viconia in the night, asking her to come away from where the others rested; I was still ill. I think she knew something was wrong, although she did not cure it immediately. I lowered my breeches in the dark, and answered her questions—it would have been worse to ask Faldorn...
"Similar to a variant in the Underdark, occasional among pleasure slaves," she said, too calmly. "They would be culled for possessing such infection, but I am aware of the prayer for the curing. It will take another day or so to prepare it, and three more days to take full effect; you will suffer but not die."
"I see. Thank you, Viconia." It was cold, and undignified as well as horribly uncomfortable to be waiting with bare legs, probably palely obvious to anything that might walk past.
"Males need to be kept in proper control; much like you are." She flexed her long fingers. "That bard of yours needed a firmer whip hand, did he not?"
"I...he wouldn't have known about this..." I said. "This...well, personal illness..."
"That I doubt." Viconia made a sound that I would have almost called a snort, if not for her elegance and grace. "I see I was wise to limit the acts I performed with him; my brief dalliance." She was smiling, admitting it; and there was nothing I could do. "He was very willing to experience the gifts of the drow, your male, Eldoth; entertaining me with his tongue for a brief while under the night, but I grew rapidly tired of him. Does that you had a male I discarded anger you, ligrr?"
Who knew what Viconia expected. She stood cool and remote as a dark star, blended with the night about her. "He isn't here to explain his side," I said. "So this is being unfair to him." I fumbled to pull my clothing back up; one's fingers are always a little stiff and unwieldy when it's cold.
She move swiftly forward; an arm gripped my shoulder with surprising strength, and a hand scraped down the nodes of my vertebrae. "You are not a fleshy tanth, a crawling thing with not a bone in your body, child. Or are you?...Perhaps I have broken you all too well. That almost pleases me." Suddenly she pushed me back against the tree behind me, smiling. "Will you make me some tea? The lavender kind. One of few aspects of the surface I find pleasurable."
I turned to go back to the camp, to find the leaves and make the simple brew; and yet she stopped me again.
"There were no other consequences?" she hinted. One of her hands restrained my wrist; the other became a set of sharp nails running across my cheek. "Surface humans, I am told, breed like kuo-toa beasts..."
That, she meant. Sometimes I imagined what it might be like, when we married; a boy with Eldoth's eyes, or a girl with dark hair like both of us. But I wouldn't be properly able to watch over a baby, not at this time; so it was foolish to imagine it.
"No, I remember you have had your courses since then; human forms lack grace," Viconia said. It's hard to conceal such things on the road. "I do not know the surface charms of protection, but I do have the power to reach inside and end a growing life, if need be." she ended softly.
A dark cleric of Shar—such things are never spoken of openly, in the blackest alleyways of the city—
I pulled away from her; stepped quickly back. "Let's have tea." I'm fond of the lavender tisane myself, though it's too sweet for Imoen's and Shar-Teel's tastes. Simple enough a drink for me to make.
Viconia is our friend.
I dreamed, that night, with that pain tugging at me like a manacle at my ankle chaining me to the world, like a room with a lit brazier that I remember as if it were something that I read happened to another person. I dreamed of bathing in a wide river, or it may have been the sea by the harbour of home; and then a flood came, like a torrent washing away everything we knew. There were currents and eddies, undertows in the tide; pockets of calmness, and violent whirlpools. I dreamed of swimming through, navigating the patterns that I chose; of imagining myself in another place, swiftly taken by the tides. I obeyed, as far as anyone knew, following the whims and finding where I wished to be. Yet no sooner had I swum one way that the current tossed me another. There were rocks embedded in the floor of the sea and rising through the tides, offering secure handholds; one covered in a red moss, a static colour that shone in the light; two more composed of rock that seemed light blue, a colour for some reason deeply unlike the sea; and in the distance a fourth.
I would not seize them; the sea bore me away. The tide swept over me, wave by wave; but of course I was lying on the ground, I was not buffeted as I felt I was. I slept, shifting uncomfortably. In the distance was the tower, waiting. It changed shape as though made of water; an eye that was not an eye watched and waited somewhere deep inside it. We would enter; would face what was there; betrayal and shadow and flame. Something inside the tower was a great creature beyond any of us.
I became a red arrow loosed from a bow, drawn by a taut string, hurling into the sky and flying as far and as fast as I could through the air, through the air alone. It was a form of escaping; but I did not want to use those presents. Not to, my sleeping throat did not croak out. The arrow; the thing that was not a person in the dark armour. Wrapped into the darkness beyond were face-stealers and ghouls and phoenixes.
In the torrential currents I whirled about, and the tide took me to places I did not know. Therella moved her hands across each other while she talked about her son, her fingers intertwined and ever-shifting, as if she needed some task to pretend to suppress her longing, as she wondered if her son had already been killed by someone. Xzar patted the top of my head, a green robe slipping across golden-brown tanned skin, and instructed the rabbit to learn more. Faldorn claimed she would recover the land for nature, a fierce wolf pacing by her side.
"When one deals oneself," Eldoth said, dressed in a fine silk vest, an earring in heavy gold dangling boldly from his right ear, "a pair of finely matched queens from a pack of cards, upon one's next turn one does not make the move of a discard."
"When one is given a diamond ring," Imoen said, Aquerna riding on her shoulders, "pried by another from someone's left little finger, one does not gift it once more, except when one truly wishes to do so."
The flood willed itself along, wiping images and shaking itself through the mind; and then I remember the daylight shining through my closed eyes. It is simply yet another day of what we must do; I have enough sleep to be as ready as I can.
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tanth - worm
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