Chapter Text
“I’ve seen that!”
It had been pulling books haphazardly out of the shelves for HOURS . It was emotionally elevated, but positively for the moment. Where before the heights of its emotions were terrifying, for the moment they were FASCINATING. They cautiously crept over to look at what it was excitedly pointing at.
There was an illustration painted in sharp ink strokes of a temple overlooking a market. The book’s depiction was sharp and precise over the architecture of the temple, and became frantic and imprecise over the moving bodies of the market below. A matching image of its own memory flashed in its mind, matching the columns and the slope of the temple roof. The market was ALIVE with what they now knew was music and vibrant TASTES and COLORS and SOUNDS (other than music! …sometimes voices themselves were interesting or nice?) and TOUCHES that were soft or sometimes not soft but interesting to the fingers or shoulders or even the face
They saw a glimpse of that web across its vision, the same one that used to make it panic. Instead of black it was BRIGHT and SILVER and the movement it made was ALIVE and the way it VIBRATED and SHOOK said to the subject’s mind that it was DANCING. They caught the memory and gently induced it again curiously because this version was beautiful and glad and alive.
INSTANTLY, every elevated, high, happy emotion crashed and twisted sideways into the equally high but far more terrifying feelings of fear and panic. It refused to acknowledge the memory of anything to do with that web, silver or no. It SCREAMED at them with all of its verbal and psionic existence. Its thoughts returned to the air and the light and the desert and the sawing and the tearing off of-
-its wings. It’s delicate, fundamentally elemental, no-longer silver wings. What did they call a humanoid air elemental?
that's just the shape of my container
They saw the room light up with glowing orbs on the tip of every unlit torch, on the tips on either side of the backs of chairs, and on the tips of the equipment scattered about the room. Even the tip of their ink pen sitting up in its well had a small, faint blue halo.
At the same time they felt an odd lifting sensation, like climbing maybe? but fast. They could feel the air rushing. They rolled up off the surface of a pond and over a lip of rock then splashed over something with a prickly texture. As they fell down into it they realized they were rushing past leafy branches. Those tiny pinpricks were… trees …and that pond behind them was an ocean.
They felt an odd gnawing pull in their chest like their body was being stretched apart just trying to understand the size.
The prickle wasn’t just in their memory. It was pulling energy out of the air. They weren’t sure if it was about to try to kill them because it was angry or because it had just forgotten how small it was supposed to be.
So they ran. They ran. THEY RAN.
They locked themselves in the feed room and pinned themselves between a cistern and a wall. They curled up their hidden corner in a locked room and listened to it SCREAM audibly and psionically for what felt like HOURS.
“Surface fae.”
They tried to think of a better label and the thought kept sliding. It wasn’t a creature. Creatures had sizes. You could say a creature was large, the way you could say a mountain was tall, and it would be a strange thing to say but it would parse. This didn’t. They kept reaching for a comparison and coming back with nothing…
…and someone had been poking at it for several months now because it was “interesting.”
They made themselves small. They made themselves quiet. They hoped it could not find them. They hid behind a cistern in the feed room behind a locked door.
Is it better or worse to be small in a storm?
She was exhausted when she finally broke open the right door and found it cowering. She barely remembered why she had been angry before, but knew that she had questions.
“…what was in the big cage before me?”
The thing had been stuck, pinned quivering up in a corner. Her words took a moment to register, then it tensed like it always did. The tentacles of its face curled tight the same as every time she asked such questions. After a long pause it fell forward, limbs limp. It collapsed out of the corner of the room between the wall and the tub of… something. It collapsed limply out of the corner like one of the chunks of raw meat it had been responsible for processing. The tentacles on its face curled and uncurled rapidly loose and tight. The muscles of the rest of its body did the same. It twitched there, loose and tight then loose and tight then loose and tight. She grabbed it by its face and refused to let go.
“TELL ME ABOUT THE FUCKING DRAGON!”
Its whole body tensed entirely and stayed there. …like when she let the lightning flow, but she wasn’t doing it. She SWORE she wasn’t! But it’s back arched like she had. Then it began jerking completely forward and backward with its whole body thrashing wildly and acid poured out in bubbling foam from …its mouth? Her hand burned and she jerked it away.
It stopped for a second. Its eyelids opened and the pupils focused on her by coalescing from roundness into their odd, irregular shapes. The acid kept dripping from its mouth.
She didn’t let up,“…tell me about the dragon.”
Its irregular pupils became circular again a second before it convulsed again. The acid from its face and mouth pooled in the hole it had worn in the floor.
There was only one train of thought left that made sense enough to communicate. Everything was gradients of thought and emotion fading in and out like an endlessly billowing psychic fog. That was funny and honestly actually HILARIOUS because the subject was fundamentally air itself, right? That meant it would understand, though, perhaps. That would be good. Hopefully that would be good. They communicated their thoughts to the air.
It will come to eat me while they eat you, then it will eat them too. In the end all are consumed.
“If you’re with me will they let me go?” she asked.
It drooled uselessly onto the floor for some time before listlessly thinking AT her . It was a listless, confused burst of raw emotion that she could only interpret as “I don’t know.”
“Let me try to save us! Just tell me which way to run.”
Its acidic drool continued boring a hole into the floor.
She violently shook it by the shoulders,“WHICH. WAY. DO. WE. RUN.”
…away.
She grabbed it by the tentacles on its face. It burned her hand and she didn’t care. She gripped tight and thrashed its head side-to-side. “WHICH. WAY. DO. WE. RUN???”
Its pupils finally coalesced again into their odd squiggle shape and met hers, west, past the farms.
She saw an image in her mind of cavern footpaths through mushroom farm fields.
“Alright. We’re going”
She stood, then dragged it up with her and slung its arm over her shoulders. She pushed them both up with her legs and marched towards what she’d always known was the exit but hadn’t dared approach until now. Its legs alternately moved and dragged beside her.
They faintly recalled being physically dragged. They recalled having to coordinate combatants when the dwarves intruded. The subject had their arm over its shoulders like an incapacitated combatant. It dragged them and their legs were sometimes able to cooperate. They vaguely remembered something was trying to hurt them, but this time it wasn’t dwarves. They vaguely remembered telling the subject to head west. They remembered what the path through the mushroom farms looked like. They faintly recalled being physically dragged.
She distinctly remembered pulling it into the first empty cavern beyond the farms. She remembered because that was when it started to wake up. The other things had barraged her on the journey. There was a constant question of “who are you, what are you doing, what are you doing, WHAT ARE YOU DOING.”
She answered every time “mind your own business, mind your own business, MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.” Its own brain lacked the consciousness to fully engage and she did her best to do so on its behalf. LEAVEUSALONELEAVEUSALONELEAVEUSALONE .
With every mental intrusion she pushed off from one leg and set the other forward. She used them pushing in to judge the passage of time she needed to continue each step forward.
She prayed that if she moved fast enough with it that the rest of them would allow them passage.
When she made it to the first empty cavern beyond the farms and it began to wake up, she felt it start asking what was happening. She kept it over her shoulders and kept pushing forward as far as she could go.
There is a city on the other side, it finally said.
“A city?”
Eryndlyn. The drow live there.
“What are the Drow?”
They’re more like you than me.
There was a long pause while she waited for more information, but it never came.
“So I should keep going west?”
It didn’t answer.
She kept dragging it west, or, what the pictures it put in her head told her was west. She didn’t have any better ideas.
After the second cavern, it got dark. She could see a little in the low light, but not like it could. Not down here with the rocks pressing down on stale, unmoving air. She would have to shake it awake every once in a while to see the path ahead. This was not an impossible task. For the most part she would drop low and drag it along. She just needed to shake it awake to see the next cavern’s exit and in the meantime she could feel along the cavern floor. Between being able to see she would feel with her hands and blindly drag it across the expanse. For the longest time, it was too helpless to do anything else.