"But I'm not broken, in my dream, I win
And I take over, 'cause I'm no loser
And I'm in and you're not, bad dreams don't stop
But I'm all screwed up, a cosmic castaway
In here with no pain, you hurt me again
And I want but have none
I should beat the alien
But hell, I'm no one, a cosmic castaway"
Onboard a nautiloid hurtling through Avernus, pursued by dragon-riding Githyanki, a ceremorphosis pod malfunctioned. The glass cover slid upward with a hiss of escaping pressure, unceremoniously dumping its occupant onto the ship's fleshy deck. For a moment, it looked as if the pod's occupant had also malfunctioned, but then the figure on the ground began to stir.
The young half-drow man, clad in the ragged remains of traveling clothes already a century out of date before they'd been shredded by his recent ordeal, opened his eyes and tried to orient himself to his surroundings. This was made rather more difficult by the awful pounding in his skull. The scars tracing his ashen gray skin told the story of one who was no stranger to pain and injury, but he had never experienced a sensation quite like this before. It felt as though something was wriggling around inside his head, right behind his left eye… But at the same time his mind was oddly blank, free of any thought or directive.
Where was he? The drow had the sinking feeling that something awful had happened, but he couldn't quite remember what. He breathed deeply and tried to calm himself by reciting what he did know. His name was Fidelius: Fido to his master, Eldriss the Ever-Reaching, and Del to everyone else. He had accompanied Eldriss on an expedition to the surface to broker an agreement for a supply of exotic potion components that couldn't be found in the Darklands. Eldriss had insisted on going in person despite the risks, egged on by members of the Ariser creed who had hoped to kill two bats with one stone and gather updated intelligence on the city of Baldur's Gate. Del was allowed to join the expedition as a bodyguard, to protect his master from any threats that could be neutralized without breaking their cover. Everything had been going according to plan, until…
His mind shied away from the thought as if it was a physical wound that touch would aggravate. Instead, Del reached out instinctively for his psychic connection with Eldriss, but found only a blank space occupied by the fading echo of their final instructions.
Go. Run. Defy the Absolute.
The ship gave a sickening lurch, interrupting his train of thought. Del shook his head like a dog to clear it, sending his hair bouncing. It was cut into an odd style that Eldriss liked - shaved on the sides and long in the center, drawn back into a cluster of dyed silver-and-purple dreadlocks that fell back over his shoulders. Del touched the shorn hair at his temple, noting that only a fine stubble had grown in. He hadn't spent more than a day or two unconscious, then.
Del slowly got to his feet, managing to keep his balance despite the odd sensation of the ground moving beneath him.
"All hands to the helm!"
A silent voice called out to Del, its tone intense but the 'volume' faint, as if the sender was projecting from the far edge of their telepathic range.
The helm? What helm?
The room around him was built with the eldritch geometry and organic components that characterized illithid architecture, but the voice spoke as if they were aboard some kind of ship instead of in an underground city.
Oh, this must be a nautiloid. Del had heard the massive spacefaring ships mentioned in passing, usually in wistful or bitter tones, for they were rare these days and served as a reminder of the lost Empire. And now Del was actually aboard one! Eldriss would be so excited, if they weren't...
Again, Del flinched away from completing the thought. Instead, he began to move forward, trying to pinpoint where the call had come from. As he approached one of the round sphincter-like doorways – a rather unpleasant-looking thing, the ones at home tended to be made of glass or stone rather than pure flesh - it opened automatically before him.
Del found himself in a larger chamber full of charred and otherwise mutilated corpses, human and illithid alike. He didn't think of himself as squeamish, but he tried not to look too closely at the mingled pools of red and silver blood as he quickly strode past. What on Toril had happened here?
Several scurrying intellect devourers rushed past him, their little claws gaining a better grip than his poorly-made shoes on the slimy floor.
"To the helm we go. At the helm we are needed!" They echoed the original call in their lilting little voices, ushering him forward as they ran ahead. Del followed them through several rooms in quick succession, but paused when he heard a faint voice from a platform above.
"Help us! We are trapped!" It called.
Del stepped onto the platform and touched the control panel that sent it rising to an upper level. Atop the terrace on which he now found himself, he saw a bloodied sun elf strapped into a chair. As he came closer, he realized that the top of the man's head had been removed, leaving the surface of his brain exposed. It glistened wetly, seeming to pulse and throb independent of any motion from the man himself. What was going on here? Had some illithid been interrupted in the middle of their dinner?
The voice spoke again. "Yes, you have come to save us. Free us from this husk!"
The brain itself seemed to be speaking, not the dead or dying elf it belonged to.
"Who am I talking to?" Del asked. "A man or a brain?"
"A newborn. Born anew from this husk..."
Del came to a sudden realization: This must be how intellect devourers were made! He had seen plenty of the things back at home, but never been privy to their creation. "All right, I'll try to help you out," he said nervously, wishing that his hands were smaller and more delicate or that he knew a single thing about medicine.
Using only the tips of his fingers, he gently pried the brain from its bony encasement. The moment it was free, the brain slid from his hands, and Del winced in sympathy as it hit the floor. A tentacle sprouted from it, and then another, followed by two pairs of legs. The intellect devourer tested its new limbs, quickly gaining strength and balance until it was practically bouncing up and down.
"Freedom is ours, friend! Now join Us, we must go to the helm."
Del chuckled a bit at the creature's single-mindedness, knowing what it was like to have a directive crowding out all else in one's mind. Stepping back onto the moving platform, he followed the intellect devourer as it moved purposefully through a ship it had never seen but seemed to know from the minds of its brethren.
Del was becoming accustomed to being the only living occupant of the ship, aside from the intellect devourers and unconscious or dead occupants of pods similar to the one he had come from. He was so focused on following the creature he had freed through yet another doorway, that he nearly slammed right into the woman who had been trying to get through from the other side.
The two of them jumped back from the door simultaneously, startled by each other's appearance. "Oh, thank the gods!" she exclaimed. "Another survivor."
Del looked the young woman over. She appeared to be a fellow half-elf, but descended from sun elves rather than drow as he was. Her inky-black hair was done up in an elaborate topknot, though the hairpiece holding it together was rather askew at the moment.
For a moment, Del had the oddest sensation – he felt as if he were looking at himself through the half-elf woman's eyes. He saw his own figure as if in a mirror: tall and lean, with ash-gray skin and piercing blue eyes. A long ropy scar split the bridge of his nose and continued down one cheek, but the other side of his face bore raised markings that looked like a deliberately carved set of dashed lines. These marks extended up past his hairline, onto the shaved side of his head, perfectly placed be read by any -
With a disorienting lurch, Del returned to his own perspective. He rubbed his eyes and winced, noting that his fellow survivor was looking rather taken aback as well.
"Sorry," he said, not sure what he was apologizing for. "Got one hell of a headache."
The corners of the girl's mouth turned up in a hint of a smile. "Me too. I'm Shadowheart, by the way. We may as well stick together until we can get off this damn thing."
"I'm Del," he said. "I've got no idea what's going on, but this little guy says we need to go to the helm."
Shadowheart's face twisted into an expression of distaste as she noticed the intellect devourer at Del's feet.
"Ugh, what is that brain thing?"
"We are Us!" The creature chirped.
"Just a temporary ally," Del assured her, realizing that his familiarity with the intellect devourer might seem suspicious. "I think it knows how to steer the ship. Speaking of which, let's go," he motioned to her. "We can talk once we figure out what's going on."
Shadowheart looked like she had more questions, but she followed him all the same, half-jogging to keep up with his longer stride. The two of them passed through another circular portal and found themselves in a section where the outer walls had been torn away, exposing great sections of the hallway to the open air. They continued more slowly now, clinging tightly to the remaining wall at the edge of the narrow walkway. Del tried not to look out at the hellish landscape outside for fear of getting dizzy and falling out into it.
His companion, however, did not do the same. "Holy hells, is that a dragon? With someone riding it?"
Del said nothing, all his attention focused on putting one foot in front of the other.
"No offense, but how are you so calm right now?" Shadowheart asked. "Everything about this situation is absolutely insane!"
Before Del could reply, the girl yelped suddenly. His head snapped up in alarm, half expecting to see his newfound ally roasted by one of the aforementioned dragons or plummeting into the wilds of Avernus. Instead, he looked up just in time to see a green and silver blur shoot down from a perch somewhere above them and resolve itself into the figure of an olive-skinned woman in silver plate armor holding a sword to his throat.
Was that… a Githyanki? He'd never actually seen one in the flesh before, short of a brief glance at the riders of the dragons currently menacing the nautiloid.
Del froze as she pointed the blade at him, not sure what to do. The Githyanki was a threat, but he had no weapons, and she was blocking their way to the helm…
"Thrall! Abomination!" the green woman growled. "This will be your end."
Suddenly, the world lurched in a sensation entirely apart from that of the swaying ship, and their minds merged. It was similar to what had happened with Shadowheart, only more intense. Visions rushed past his mind's eye in quick succession; a dragon's wing, a silver sword, and a flash of his face as seen through the githyanki's eyes. Del flinched as he realized he was reading the strange woman's mind without even meaning to, and wondered if the clairvoyance went both ways. He backpedaled frantically, trying to break the connection….
And then snapped back to reality, staring at the Githyanki aboard the nautiloid. "Ugh," she moaned. "What was that?"
"I don't know, but I'm not their thrall," Del said, which was not technically a lie. "I was kidnapped and taken here by force."
"Vlaakith blesses me this day," she said, lowering the sword but not putting it away entirely. "Together we might have a chance to survive. We must reach the helm before we transform!"
"Transform?"
"Ghaik tadpoles," said the woman (Lae'zel? He thought he saw a name from that brief glimpse into her mind...). "Unless we are cleansed, they will infect our bodies and twist our minds. Within days we will be mind flayers, but nothing can be done until we get off this ship."
Del could feel a pit of dread form deep in his stomach. He was beginning to remember at least part of the Terrible Thing that had happened to lead him to this place. A giant tentacle descending, blotting out the sun... A smear of silver blood on cobblestone... An illithid with dark purple skin dressed in robes of an unfamiliar style, holding a squirming tadpole up to his face...
Go. Run. Defy the Absolute.
"No..." he whispered, the full reality of his situation becoming clear for the first time. Then, louder; "I can't transform here, not like this. These tadpoles are from the Absolute!"
He raised a hand to his face, fingers curled into claws as if he meant to claw out his own eyeball. He might have actually injured himself in this fit of temporary madness, if not for the small hand that clamped around his wrist and pulled his arm away.
"What the hells is wrong with you?" the half-elf asked incredulously. "There's nothing we can do about these tadpoles, not until we land this ship."
Del nodded numbly and let her take his hand away. The girl and the Gith were right. He'd deal with this… abomination later.
With that, the three survivors formed an uneasy alliance as they made their way through a succession of chambers full of angry imps and dead thralls. The final chamber at the front of the ship contained the helm; an empty captain's chair facing the central console, from which extended a mass of tendrils that writhed around in confused disarray.
"Why is everything made of tentacles..." Shadowheart muttered beside him.
"Thrall," a voice boomed from a far corner of the room directly into Del's mind. "Connect the nerves of the transponder."
The voice came from an illithid that was preoccupied in doing battle with two enormous winged devils and couldn't reach the controls directly. Del stopped short and clapped his hands over his ears, even though he knew from painful experience that this did nothing to shut out the volume and force of the command. He took a few stuttering steps forward as his body tried to obey, but then the echo of an older directive flashed into his head.
Defy the Absolute.
Right. The Absolute was a rival, and this must be one of its agents. Had it been the one driving the nautiloid when it snatched him from Baldur's Gate?
"I… I can't do it…" Del choked out, feeling as though he was caught between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Connecting the nerves might be their ticket out of Avernus and back to the Material Plane, or it might lead them somewhere even worse. But either way, he could not directly obey the instruction. Even in absence, a command from his master held more weight than one from this stranger.
"Tsk'va! Istik kainyank!" Lae'zel cursed at Del, unaware of the battle playing out inside his head. "If you are so determined to be useless, I will land this ship myself." She charged forward, dodging the imps that disengaged from the surrounding corpses and swarmed around her.
Meanwhile, the mind flayer dealt one of its hellish opponents a death blow, warding off the first devil with a psionic blast as it wrapped its tentacles around the second's head and cracked open its skull. The devil's brain was consumed within seconds, and the illithid's face was coated in a thin film of blood the next time its malevolent orange eyes met Del's own.
Del found himself trembling as a fiery rage began to course through his veins. The memory played before him more clearly now: a giant tentacle descending from the sky as the nautiloid materialized out of nowhere above them, smashing Eldriss sideways into a collapsing building like a man swatting a fly, before snaking back around to touch Del and teleport him aboard…
Del shrieked a war cry, finally breaking free from his mental paralysis. He paused to grab a shortsword from the corpse of a minor devil, then ran full tilt toward the enemy... only to find his blade clattering to the floor as it dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers. He stopped short and picked it up again, but now found himself unable to even approach the battle between the illithid and the remaining devil.
"What are you doing to me?" He thought in its direction.
The creature paused in its subjugation of the devil just long enough to shoot Del a darkly amused look.
"Absolutely nothing. Your former masters trained you well."
Del groaned as he remembered a dark chamber in the Vaults of Terror, his limbs held down without the need for physical restraints as a command imprinted itself over and over upon his mind…
YOU WILL NEVER HARM AN ILLITHID.
"Fine then!" he snarled in its direction. "But I'm not helping you with that devil either!" Instead, he cut his way through the imps that snatched at Lae'zel's legs, hindering the Githyanki from her goal of reaching the helm. Each small horned creature that fell only further stoked the fires of his rage, and by the time he reached the helm his blade dripped black with devil-blood.
Lae'zel drew two of the helm's tentacles toward each other, and a loud snap echoed from all around them as the deck shook with the force of plane-shifting the damaged ship. Del shook himself off and ran to the open gash in the wall. "We're back on the Material!" he yelled in triumph, but a sudden change in their trajectory told them that it was too soon to celebrate.
"Doesn't matter, we're still going down!" Shadowheart screeched behind him, grabbing onto a nearby console for support.
The ship lurched again, and a wave of heat washed over the three travelers as a dragon breathed a gout of flame onto the already-failing ship. Damn it, how had the Githyanki and their dragons followed them here so quickly?
Del felt himself slammed to the floor, then forcefully pulled toward the open hole in the wall by a whistling rush of air. He dug his nails into the floor, only to feel them painfully dragged backwards as the deck tilted further and gravity threatened to pull him out into the open. For one long, heart-stopping moment, he could see that Shadowheart and Lae'zel were engaged in similar struggles.
And then he could hold on no longer. Del was wrenched free of the ship and found himself flailing through the empty air. For a brief eternity, he knew only blue sky and whistling wind and the far-off landscape below. It was the purest, most absolute form of terror Del had ever experienced. As the approaching coastline below gained size and clarity, he shut his watering eyes, not wanting to see the exact moment of his demise...
And then, as if directed by an angel of mercy, a piece of debris from the ship slammed into the side of his head at just the right angle and velocity to make him lose consciousness.
Author's Note: This fic was vaguely inspired by the Oryndoll Thrall Collection, written by Squid_Fuker1. It's basically "What if Tav, but mind flayer thrall?" This brainworm has seized control of my mind and won't rest until I write something, but pls be patient with me since I haven't written anything longer than a oneshot in over 5 years. This will follow the plot of the game closely in some parts, and diverge in others. Chapter titles are inspired by songs in my Spotify playlist. Like and comment if you want to see more!