Right’s hooves are used to city cobbles and polished oak and thick rugs. Like most tieflings, Right learned young that letting them go unchecked is a recipe for sore hocks and poor balance. They were only a little older when they learned that unkempt hooves can snag and trip. Poorly maintained, they will get you caught.
So Right keeps them clean and trim. Like most tieflings, they have a basic understanding of the art of the farrier, and a few sets of shoes for different purposes. It’s a nuisance to hammer on one’s own shoes, though, and Glee’s fastidious nature means going to them for aid can turn a ten-minute activity into an hour-long one. When Right must wear shoes, they prefer the sort they can keep aloft with strap or tie.
Right was, in fact, wearing shoes on that fateful day they went to market in search of amberthroat. Those were lost about a week into this mess, and in truth they can’t even remember what did it. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are once more picking their way through another gore-covered floor, thinking anxiously about the sore spot on their left frog and hoping it isn’t about to be infected with some horrendous goblin disease. Between the filth and the new corpses, they aren’t holding their breath.
Or, they are, but for different reasons.
Another day, another bloodbath. This one comes in the form of the goblin king’s antechamber, laden high with skull and bone and rot. Right’s nose has gone mostly deaf to the rank smell of the tribe’s environs, but freshly exposed offal and newly emptied bowels never becomes more pleasant. Above, in the rafters, they had been mercifully spared from most of it. Descending back down the ladder had been like walking into an abattoir, sinking into a wall of warm reek. Now Right breathes with their shirt collar hiked up over their face. It does little.
Near that massive hole in the temple’s floor, Karlach impassively rolls over the body of one Dror Ragzlin with a booted foot. She crouches to start picking through his pockets, which fills Right with a weird twisty feeling that they cannot decide if they like. Casting about for the others, Right catches sight of Fray carefully burying his sword-point into the throat of another goblin, which seems unnecessary to them, due to the fact said goblin is nearly bisected just above the navel. He places both hands on the pommel and closes his eyes. Something to do with his insane god, no doubt. Right imagines him doing the same to themself, or to Karlach, or even to that froufrou elf. The image is grim enough that they must shiver to get it out of their head.
Gale, thankfully, is not interested in the dozen bodies that now lie inert across the antechamber. When Right arrives at his side, after giving a wide berth to the lifeless illithid laid out in the middle of the room, he is examining a grimy basket near to the bone-laden throne. He’s so taken with it that Right must make even more noise than they usually do when they are trying to keep from being stabbed by a startled companion. It doesn’t really work, but then, they’ve only ever seen Gale hold a knife when it’s for filleting fish. “Find something?”
“Crivvens,” Gale says with a flinch worthy of being caught with one’s pants down. It’s not a curse Right has heard before, but then, they’ve never been to Waterdeep. Nor been around many wizards, for that matter. He straightens and looks them over with comically wide eyes, clutching what looks to be a scroll. “Good heavens. My utmost apologies for my language, Mar Bajpur. My nerves are quite rent from the battle! I almost thought you that drow woman, and feared I would be viewing my insides from the outside in a moment.”
If Gale and Astarion had a competition to see who could turn the simplest sentiment into the most complicated set of words imaginable, Right thinks, there would be no winner and a great many losers. “Just ‘Right’ is fine,” says Right.
“Of course. You know, from the moment we joined forces I’ve meant to ask you from whence you acquired such a moniker.”
“You know, I don’t see anyone asking Shadowheart why she’s named that.”
Gale makes that supercilious smile of his again, the one Right can’t quite decide if they find annoying or not. “Ah, but neither do we say ‘shall I turn left, or turn Shadowheart?’” At Right’s blank look, he clears his throat. “Regardless! These goblins have gotten their hands on some most curious items. Courtesy of their beloved Absolute, I shouldn’t wonder. Tell me, do you know what this is?”
He waggles the scroll at Right before unspooling it for their review. Its interior is tattooed with rich purple ink. Looking at it makes something low in Right’s torso spasm and quiver in a distinctly unpleasant manner; worse, the script starts to slither off the page before their eyes, snaking toward the many bodies. They screw up their face in distaste for the familiar effect. “Lets you interrogate the dead.”
This time Gale’s smile is genuine, at least. “Just so! They’ve got two or three of the things here, and this is certainly not handwriting I would expect from one of their booyaghs. Furthermore, I don’t much like what they were planning to do with it.”
Right says, “Which is…”
“I trust you recall that there was only one corpse here when we made the mistake of walking in.”
The details of three minutes ago are lost on Right. They shrug. This, in turn, causes Gale to cast his gaze over their shoulder. Right turns to look, and is greeted with the ever-jarring sight of a mind flayer. They have not yet made up their mind as to whether they find the things more disquieting dead or alive. Something about the six-foot tentacles lying perfectly still makes their brain crawl with anxiety. It could be the tadpole lodged in their brain, unhappy with seeing one of its kind this way. It could also be their brain itself, ever vigilant for an ambush.
Gale continues picking through the baskets. Right roams, ultimately finding themself following the scavenging Karlach. “Scout,” she greets them with a smile, and politely swipes some of the blood from her face. “How was the view up there?”
Right shrugs. “Dunno, but it smelled better,” they say, and Karlach laughs. “Find anything good?”
“Cool hammer,” she says, hefting a bloody thing Right vaguely recognizes as the weapon the bugbear had been wielding. “Been wanting something better for smashing, so lucky me!”
“Axe won’t do?”
“Sometimes I want precision smashing,” says Karlach.
It’s around this time that Fray hoarsely calls out that he’s found a treasury. As this is one of the words that inevitably leads to Right being called for, they are up and moving almost before the others so much as register what he’s said. While Gale and Karlach hustle over, Right unlocks the door; they exchange no words with Fray. They back off from the gate as soon as it’s open, content to let the other three swarm in to loot the place. Right has a different prize in mind.
The scroll Gale had brandished at them feels oddly warm in their hand. Just as he’d said, it’s tucked in among other scrolls, all with the same disquieting warmth and smooth texture. Parchment, maybe, though from what sort of creature Right doesn’t quite like to think about.
Mostly they’re glad for the distraction of the treasury. The heaps of gold and treasure will keep the others busy, hopefully long enough for Right to start and finish here. The moment they unfurl the scroll, the ink inscribed on its surface begins to wriggle and push itself toward the edges of the page. They ignore the way their stomach shifts uneasily and pick the least-gory path they can manage toward the body of the dead illithid. So close to a corpse, the magic of the scroll seethes and crawls, its animated words looking like nothing so much as a bouquet of snakes trying to slither over one another to get at it. Right does their best to keep them from touching their skin. It’s perfectly safe, but that makes it no more appealing. Casting anything always feels dreadful for them, like running their fingertips over one of those textures that makes their skin crawl; crushed velvet, maybe, or corduroy. Like that, but twice as uncomfortable.
They steel themself against the vile sensation, and speak the words on the scroll. When they are done they are not quite sure what they have said, which seems to be the way with magic. Gale probably has an involved explanation that they would be deeply bored by. They’d rather not know the words of this spell, anyway. It feels like it might get lodged in their brain and stick there.
It does not, thankfully. Instead it lunges toward the body, even more akin a nest of vipers than before. The ink unspools and twists itself around the mind flayer’s form like so much wire. It attaches itself to tentacles, wrists, ankles, biting deep to keep hold as it hauls the whole corpse into the air. Right watches it uneasily, though the behavior of the magic is not all that different from when Shadowheart does it. Those corpses float, though, suspended with a green light. This one shudders and is rotated forward until its feet touch the ground. For a moment its whole body crumples in on itself. In another, it is upright. Its limbs (tentacle and otherwise) shiver and waver, kept aloft by the magic that has attached itself to its joints. It is exactly like the puppets Right remembers from street-shows as a child; or it would be, if those puppets had been taller than a man, and watched them with a vague dispassion from half-closed eyes.
Right looks it over, willing themself not to shy from it. It is dead. Tadpole or no, it can do no harm to them like this. Furthermore it is animated by whatever magic Right themself could call from the Weave, and though it is boosted and focused by the scroll, it poses no danger to anyone. What it does do is push into their mind, the formal laws of the spell outlining themselves to them. Five questions. You speak to a body, not a mind. Be swift.
Right clears their throat. The dozens of questions that had swirled in their head when they laid eyes on the scroll seem to lie dead and inanimate before them, each one inadequate to be chosen for one of their five. Big picture, they think. Find out as much as you can. “I have one of your parasites in my head,” they start, unsure if a corpse needs context. “How do I remove it without dying in the process?”
The mind flayers on the nautiloid ship did not speak. The rare few things Right had heard from them were not actually heard. They had instead simply known what was being said to them, similar and yet wholly different to the way the spell had given them its rules. Psionics, Lae’zel had said, and they suppose that same thing is why they are answered not in words, but in images and emotions, pressed into their mind like leather bossing. It makes their back teeth ache and their vision swim, their mind trying to follow the rapid-fire telepathy. <not a parasite>, it tells them, the pride and love for the tadpole swelling like a boil against their thoughts. <not a parasite not a leech not an undesirable. utmost. gift. pitious thing. a moment’s pain a lifetime of powerbeautywisdom. gift. gift. gift. you know not what you would deny yourself.>
Right bites at their knuckles, as if that will ground them. It does, perhaps. They manage to push the rising static in their head away long enough to ask their second question. “Tell—what—what is the Absolute?” they say around their own fingers.
Another surge of thought, alien and discomfiting. Their thoughts are eclipsed by a peace and joy they barely recognize as such, a unity unlike anything they know. Other illithid faces flash through their mind’s eye as if from their own memories, each one regarded fondly. Total power; total connection.
<absolute absolute absolute>
Right tastes copper. They’ve bitten too deep into their hand, but they barely feel it. They lick at the drops of blood and shove the image that turns in their head like a child’s mobile away. Two of five. How long does this spell last? Can they stand here as long as they like, trying to think of the right combination of words that will give them something that will help them?
Somewhere behind them, they hear Karlach give a triumphant shout. It jars them out of their stupor, at least long enough for another question to spring forth. “Are there more of you?” they say, and then hastily append, “Nearby?”
There is a wound in the sky. Right sees it as if overlaid with the ruined temple around them, unbroken clouds and evening blue-gold, except for the hole, ripped cleanly but no less viciously in open air. They suppose, later, that it was a kind of portal, but never have they seen one that looked so much like an injury to the plane itself. The image itself is so bad a shock that they cannot at first process the swirling violets and white-golds inside it as anything other than infection, like the wound weeps pus and bile. Their gorge rises at the sight before shrinking back down entirely as the churning resolves itself into the tips of long, grasping tentacles. The tendrils pull themselves through, lathered with magic like a hard-run horse with sweat. Behind them—part of them—a ship, a nautiloid, the first good look Right has gotten at one. Of all the impossible things they have seen, this half-alive vessel might be the worst. At once it hurls them back to the packed streets of the city, the panicked screaming and the trampling crowds as people fled from those tentacles reaching down, down, pressing the grasping, paddle-shaped tips in among alleyways and markets. Right watched folk of every kind be snatched away, vanishing in a bloom of steaming black mist when the fleshy nodules that line the paddles touched them. They remember the hot, rancid smell of the one that swiped lazily at them, and how they thought they had just dodged it, when it brushed the end of their tail, and there went any hope of escape they might have had. They are roused from the memory only by the sight of a second nautiloid clambering through the portal, followed by a third, a fourth, fifth, ten, two dozen, fifty—
<grand design>
The illithid thinks it with such yearning and anticipation that Right recoils altogether. They actually drop the scroll, and for a moment panic that it’s somehow broken the spell. The puppeted monster remains as it is, tentacles being jerked hither and yon by the tendrils of magic in a mockery of life. Right snatches up the scroll again, trying to force the images from their mind. They manage, but at the cost of once more revealing the memories beneath. The ship’s tentacles had slithered through the masses of people, but it chose its victims seemingly at random. Right had actually watched one grasp what looked like a firbolg, and then release it again before turning on a middle-aged orcish woman. They fixate on that memory, the firbolg’s yelp and the orc’s frightened howl that was cut short as she vanished. Why had it been choosy? What had it been looking for? What did the firbolg lack that the orcish woman and Right possessed? They turn this over and over in their head, trying and failing to find an angle, a foothold from which they might ascend to better see the whole picture. Nothing comes. That woman is likely dead, either by the crash or the hells’ denizens, and unless Right feels like picking through wreckage on the off-chance of finding her body they’ll find no help from her. Is that it, then? Picked for gruesome death and assimilation by invisible criteria? Made to extend this cut-short life by degrees, spending hours each day interrogating every headache, eye twitch, sore throat in case they might hail from the damned worm in their head?
It isn’t fair.
It isn’t fair.
“Why me?” they demand of the suspended corpse and its unfocused orange eyes. It’s louder than they mean to be, and their voice warbles uncomfortably with it. They can’t bring themself to care. “I’m nothing to something like you! Why me?”
Their voice scatters the near-silence. It sticks to the rafters, frightening the spiders that live in the shadowed corners. In the silence that follows they hear footsteps above and behind them, and Karlach’s half-raised voice calling to them in question. They scarcely hear it. The magic that animates the body continues to curl around its target, slithering, laughing.
Right sees themself. Themself, here, now, tense and frightened and angry, their claws biting into the heels of their palms. Themself, from the eyes of this dead aberration. They watch as they fall to the floor, clutching their head until their neck snaps backwards with a hideous violence. Tendrils ebb from their open mouth. Right watches Right struggle, impotent and inconsequential, for only a few seconds longer.
When the illithid bursts forth, with glowing lamplight eyes and skin the color of a bruise, Right finds themself fixated on the way their feet, no longer beautiful, elegant black hooves but gnarled and fleshy claws, have left behind shoes they aren’t wearing.
<perfect you>
Before them, the illithid floats. It takes Right too long to realize it is the reanimated one, the dead one. That they have not undergone ceremorphosis, that they are still all tiefling, even when they realize they can hear the edge of one hoof tapping the edge of a stone as they tremble. The illithid awaits their last question. It may wait forever. Right cannot think of anything to ask. Right cannot think of anything at all.