"I don't know where you're going
But do you got room for one more troubled soul?
I don't know where I'm going
But I don't think I'm coming home
And I said, I'll check in tomorrow if I don't wake up dead
This is the road to ruin and we're starting at the end..."
The mood among the party was still hushed and uncomfortable as they set off on their travels that day. Shadowheart kept shooting Del side-eyed looks, and Gale looked grim as he continued to ponder the implications of their dream visitor being an illithid.
Del had the strange impression that they were all silently talking about him, but he couldn't tell if it was his own paranoia or a real mental conversation that he wasn't privy to. He doubted it was the second, since the others still weren't fully comfortable with telepathic communication. So he tried to ignore the paranoia and stuck close to Scion, since at least the dragonborn's silence lacked the pointed edges of the others'. At least by some blessing he hadn't seen anything last night. Now that would've been a great way to make a first impression on a new traveling companion...
Not long into that morning's sojourn, as the group traced old roads and trails that led only to dead ends and ominously shifting shadows, they heard an odd clicking noise from up ahead. The path before them was buckled and broken; a mess of loose bricks and twisted roots shrouded in such thick gloom that it was impossible to see what was approaching. Everyone's hands went to their weapons, and Del slipped Scion his spare dagger. "Here you go," he whispered. "Be ready."
The clicking grew louder, and now they could hear that it was also accompanied by several pairs of human-sounding footsteps.
Out of the shadows emerged what Del at first thought to be a giant spider. Nothing he hadn't dealt with before. But then the thing came fully into view, lit by the pale glow of the lantern it carried in its human... looking... hands...
"Shit," he swore. "A drider." He'd never seen one in the flesh, but had heard plenty about them from drow thralls in Oryndoll – and none of it was good.
The creature was a male drow from the waist up, and an enormous spider below. A dozen midnight-black eyes blinked in unison from one side of his face as the eight skittering legs stopped in their tracks at the sight of Del and his party.
Three goblins and a human had been following the drider in a grim little procession, but now they reached for their own weapons as they took in the sight of the armed adventurers blocking their way.
The two traveling parties stared each other down for a long, tense moment... And then Scion broke the momentary bubble of stillness by charging at the drider with teeth bared and brand-new dagger outstretched.
Del threw himself into battle after him, feeling a protective sort of anger at their party's newest member. Why had Scion attacked without waiting for anyone's signal? That idiot was going to get himself killed!
Dragonborn met drider in a clash of black carapace on white scale, which soon escalated into metal on metal as the drider drew a sword from a scabbard hanging at his waist. The creature attacked Scion on three fronts simultaneously, wielding the sword in one hand and simultaneously slashing with the front two of his eight legs, each of which was tipped with a wickedly barbed claw. The dragonborn ducked and dodged with surprising nimbleness for someone with his large size and recent head injuries, and even managed to get a few of his own strikes in.
Del joined in and helped as best he could, slicing off one of the drider's front legs at the joint just in time to prevent it from slashing Scion, and then jumped out of the way of the other.
Behind him, the rest of his companions were similarly entering the fray. A volley of Gale's magic missiles slammed into the drider's chest, knocking him off balance. In the next moment, Shadowheart cast a blinding bolt of light in his direction, which went wide but luckily managed to hit one of the goblins instead.
Del blinked furiously, as he'd been unable to shut his eyes in time to block Shadowheart's light show and was now left half-blind as a result. Before he could fully recover his senses, what felt like a trail of fire scored across his right shoulder, capitalizing on his distraction - though he couldn't tell if the blow was from the drider's blade or its remaining front claw.
His arm went numb almost instantly. Del was forced to relinquish his two-handed grip on the greatsword, wielding the blade clumsily with one hand on which he could only properly feel his thumb and three fingers. Wait... he thought desperately, dodging an arrow that had come from another combatant off to the side. A permanently numb pinky finger was just one of the prices he'd paid for illithid powers – powers he could now use to...
"Stop!" he yelled at the drider, putting as much power behind the command as he could muster.
The goblins and human were unaffected, but the drider shuddered and then stopped in his tracks. "True... Soul," he groaned, all ten limbs twitching as he struggled against the compulsion. "We are on the same side… Help us spread Her light."
Scion, who Del had lost track of in the commotion, took the drider's hesitation as an opening to leap onto the creature's back and begin stabbing at its swollen arachnid abdomen. The drider spasmed, twisting his humanoid torso around to try and get at Scion, but his range of motion was too limited to dislodge the dragonborn before he managed to strike a lethal blow.
"All right, that's enough," Del said nervously, eyeing the reckless abandon with which Scion took to his task. "I'm sure he's dead by now."
Scion slowly unclenched his hand from around the dagger's hilt. His arm was coated up to the elbow with blood and other unmentionable fluids from the drider, but he seemed not to notice.
"That felt… good," he said silently. "I've been wanting to kill one of those damned cultists ever since I first woke up as their prisoner."
Nearby, Karlach finished dealing with the last goblin. "Hey, Del," she said casually, coming over to where he stood near the drider's corpse. Del perked up at the sound of her casual tone, but then the one-horned tiefling stiffened again, seeming to remember the events of the previous night and that morning. She gave Del a once-over, and then merely said, "You're bleeding."
There was something strange in Karlach's voice; something else aside from the flatness that signified she was still angry at him. Del looked down at his shoulder and arm, expecting to see a serious injury based on the odd feeling of concern that emanated from his companion. But aside from the persistent numbness - whether from a severed nerve or some poison in the drider's claws - the gash across his upper arm appeared no worse than many other wounds he'd suffered before.
Del puzzled over Karlach's reaction for a moment more, before he noticed something strange about the blood dripping from the cut. It was a bit lighter in color than it should have been, and shone oddly in the light given off by their torches and the drider's lantern - which had somehow stayed lit even after being dropped by its dying owner.
Thinking back on it, Del realized that he hadn't been significantly injured in the battle with the shadow creatures the day before, or by the duergar in the Underdark… Or at all, really, since his partial ceremorphosis. Great – so this thing with his blood must be another new change he hadn't noticed.
"Hey, uh, Shadowheart?" he asked, calling over their cleric. "A little healing here?"
Despite Del's request and the fact that he was losing rather a lot of blood, Shadowheart saw to him last, after making sure everyone else was okay. After she took care of his injury, Del tested the feeling in his hand by reaching down to pick up the drider's lantern. There was something unusual about the way the ever-present shadows shrunk back from its pale unwavering light...
"Stop right there!" a voice said, and Del looked up to see that another group of travelers had come down the path, approaching so silently and so shrouded in shadows that no one had noticed them coming until it was too late.
"We don't want to hurt you," warned the olive-skinned elf with the crossbow pointed directly at Del's head. "Just step away from the lantern."
"Could've fooled me," Del replied sardonically as he put up his hands and took a few cautious steps backwards.
The elven man was joined by two human women, who both held crossbows to match their companion's and wore tunics pierced with identical pins in the shape of a harp. Another man – not much more than a boy, really, with a skinny frame and patchy attempt at a beard - came up behind them holding a torch in each hand. The shadows lay so thickly around the path that they'd completely swallowed the light of the twin torches until he had gotten close.
"Are you Harpers?" Karlach asked, noticing the pins at the same time as Del but proving better able to interpret them. "We don't want any trouble... unless that drider there was a friend of yours."
"Friends? Hah!" barked the elf, shaking his head a little at the absurdity of the idea. "We've been watching his convoy for days now, looking for the best place to set up an ambush... only to find you've beat us to it."
"You were pretty good out there," said the younger of the two women, whose curly hair floated freely around her shoulders in contrast to the other's tight bun. "Made short work of the drider. Jaheira will be glad to hear we've got the lantern and interrupted the flow of cultists into Moonrise."
"Jaheira?" Karlach gasped. "Don't tell me you work for the Jaheira? Is she around here?" She looked around as if expecting this Jaheira person to emerge from the shadows at any moment.
"Now look what you've done, Lassandra," the elf with the crossbow grumbled. "Learn to hold your tongue." To Del's party, he said, "Yes, we work with Jaheira. If you want to talk to her, she's holed up at Last Light Inn with the rest of us. It's our only stronghold against the darkness, and now that you know about it,I suppose it'd be common courtesy to invite you in. But if Jaheira thinks you're lying, or untrustworthy for any reason, well..." He mimed a throat-slitting motion.
"We're going, right?" Karlach asked excitedly. "Why am I even asking? We're totally going."
"And Jaheira knows the way to Moonrise Towers?" Shadowheart asked the man. "That's where we're headed, to find out more about this Absolute cult and see if there's a hope of stopping it."
"Indeed," said the man. "Follow us to Last Light and stay close to the lantern. The drider's been using it to grant cultists safe passage. Nothing attacks them while it's lit, and now we have it for ourselves."
He picked up the lantern and started off down the path, flanked by his fellow Harpers. Speaking of which... "What's a Harper?" Del asked Karlach telepathically, not wanting to admit to the others that he'd never heard of the organization, especially since he was still embarrassed from that time he didn't know about the goddess Shar. "You seem to know a lot about them."
Karlach flinched a bit, still not quite used to this mode of communication. "All right, I guess I'll tell you. But let's talk like normal people, okay?" And then she began a long-winded explanation that reminded Del of Gale's lectures on magic, though with far more colloquialisms and a bit of profanity thrown in for flavor. He was just glad she was talking to him more or less normally again.
Del listened to Karlach as he walked, keeping an ear turned toward her and his eyes on the shadowy path ahead. By the time she had finished her explanation of the Harpers' founding, breakdown, and eventual reformation, they were crossing a bridge beyond which Del could see the twinkle of lights in the distance.
As they stepped off the bridge, Del felt a curious sensation of lightening- both in the sense of the world around them getting brighter, and an invisible weight lifting off his shoulders.
"No shadows here," Astarion noted. "Something's been keeping them at bay."
The four Harpers led them past the bridge to the gate of a walled compound. The walls themselves seemed hastily erected, thrown together from whatever fence posts and stone slabs happened to be lying around when the shadow curse had descended. But beyond the gate, Del could see a more permanent structure. The Last Light Inn certainly lived up to its name, glowing from a hundred lit torches in addition to a diffuse pale glow emanating from its windows that reminded Del of moonlight.
But before Del and his party could enter this oasis from the shadows, they were stopped at the gate by another party of Harpers who didn't seem thrilled with the first set for bringing intruders into their sanctuary.
"You lot!" called a man's voice. "Step forward slowly and keep your hands off your weapons."
Del approached slowly and held up his hands in an exaggerated gesture of non-aggression. The guard's torch visibly wavered in his hand as its light illuminated Del's face for the first time. "Get Jaheira," he hissed to the tiefling standing beside him.
"Easy there," said the Harper beside Del, one of the women who had led them to Last Light. "These people helped us out in the shadows."
The two groups stood staring at each other for a long minute, during which Del had to shoot Scion a series of stern glares to keep him from doing anything stupid. "Wait," he thought toward the dragonborn, whose hand kept twitching toward the knife that Del was beginning to regret giving him. At least he was showing enough restraint to keep it looped through the belt of his borrowed clothes. "If these people accept us, they could make good allies, and we can stay at their inn instead of the temple..."
The growing crowd of Harpers parted as a silver-haired elf woman strode toward Del and the others at a deliberate pace. Judging by the steely expression on her lined face and the twin swords strapped to her back, Del realized that this was not a woman to cross lightly.
Jaheira's eyes narrowed as she held her torch up to Del's face to examine him more closely as the guard had done. She clearly didn't like what she saw there, and her features twisted from suspicion into outright hostility. Without even a greeting, she raised her hands and said a brief incantation, which raised a circle of vines that surrounded and entangled their entire group. Del saw the spell coming, but managed to tamp down on his instinctive urge to flee the trap. The rest of his party did the same, steeling themselves for the expected interrogation before they would be allowed inside.
Scion, however, did not display the same presence of mind. When the vines came up around him, the dragonborn hissed in distress and began to thrash around wildly in an attempt to free himself. "Unhand me!" he roared in a deeper voice than Del had heard him use before. Scion's violent struggles managed to loosen the vines around one arm, and he immediately went for the knife at his belt.
"Stop, Scion," Del warned. "They just want to talk!"
The dragonborn ignored him.
Del, who was still fully bound by the vines, could do nothing to stop him. He watched in horror as Scion's hand closed around the hilt of the dagger and began to rise up as if in slow motion. Del followed the trajectory of the dragonborn's crimson gaze and saw that, rather than using it to cut himself free of the remaining vines, he was aiming to throw the knife at Jaheira. She would likely be able to dodge the attack, but what then? The rest of the Harpers would be on them at any sign of hostility, and Del's party was at a significant disadvantage at the moment. He had no desire for another fight, especially not with people who were supposed to be on their side. Couldn't they just talk to someone for once?
The dragonborn cocked back his arm, preparing to throw… Their companions looked on in horror, and the Harpers aimed their crossbows in Scion's direction…
"NO!" Del bellowed, putting the force of the tadpole's illithid power behind his words. It worked for the drider, didn't it - so why not on Scion?
Scion hesitated before throwing the dagger, but made no move to put it down. Del realized that if he didn't get full control of the situation right then, the Harpers would shoot the dragonborn dead within seconds.
So Del tried harder. He hated to force anyone to do anything like this, but gods , did something about it feel satisfying, as he sensed Scion's will give way to his own. "Stay still! Put the knife down! Don't attack them!" He found himself barking orders as if possessed by the spirit of a drill sergeant, unaware that he hadn't spoken a word of the second commands aloud.
Scion let out an animalistic growl, but his hand opened and the dagger dropped to the vine-covered ground. His arm dropped to his side after it, and then a curiously blank expression washed over his reptilian face.
As the brief moment of euphoria wore off, Del reeled back in shock at what he'd done. Somehow he'd done more than just influence Scion, but had used his more evolved tadpole to actually dominate the other's mind. He tried to ignore the implications of that power, which would only lead to the question of whether his actions made him any better than his former master. He couldn't afford deep introspection right now. All he could do was hope that the Harpers stood down, and that the effect on Scion was temporary…
The Harpers kept their bows drawn as they watched this exchange, but made no move to loose the arrows as they looked to their leader for answers.
"Branthos?" Jaheira snapped at the elven Harper who had led Del and his party to the Last Light Inn. "What is the meaning of this? What manner of monsters have you brought into our midst?"
Author's Note: Ah, it feels so weird to be done with all the prequels for now! I have vague ideas for others but want to focus more on this main fic for now. I'm plotting and outlining the later parts of the story and keep having more ideas for characters and scenes to include, so it could end up being as long as 50 chapters in the end. That'd make me 40% of the way there! :)