Chapter Text
They woke up late in their old quarters next to the laboratory. The thralls and livestock would be getting agitated if no one had fed them yet. They pulled on overclothes and their boots and activated the flesh golem that handled the manual labor for them. It had been a gift from… someone. It was someone they liked and had actually gotten along quite well with, but they couldn’t remember their name or face and trying was starting to give them a headache.
Or maybe it was her headache? Or maybe both. They did their best to untangle their thoughts and limbs and sat up. They had fallen on their side during the night and she had apparently spent quite some time tossing and turning. She was now partially facedown with her shoulders tilted opposite the side they’d left her on faceup.
She wasn’t all the way awake yet, and was sleeping somewhat fitfully. The main thing seeming to keep her from panicking was that her brain hadn’t settled on any one nightmare. It kept flicking rapidly between the starts of various different ones.
They tried to remember the sound made between her and the other wind as they first hit each other. It was a moderately high pitched whistle with an undulating volume and pitch. They did their best to imitate the input of that noise. They were pretty sure they had failed to recreate the noise they were intending to, because she heard herself call out to a canyon instead, as she bounced side to side off the walls down the length of it. Either way, it pushed her in a better direction.
There wasn’t a lot of water left in the bottle the goblin had dropped off. They walked out of the room and tried to make it back the way they’d come the previous night. They still hadn’t adapted to the missing chunk of their left tentacle, and they had to stop about once every third hallway or so to lean on a wall for balance, and it made it hard to navigate from memory.
Fortunately it didn’t take long to come across one of the goblins they kept for labor. They pulled the information they needed out of its head then remembered what Rhea said about doing that, and briefly went back to make sure the goblin wouldn’t remember. It wasn’t difficult but the goblin also wasn’t very smart. They made a mental note to try to stop doing that.
The nearest water pump was back on the terrace they’d landed on last night. Between having been there and the goblin’s spatial memory they made it there and back in a reasonable amount of time. The sylph’s mind was grinding its way back into consciousness.
She groaned. One side of her head hurt a lot more than the other. They were pretty sure this was a normal side effect of what they’d done and that it would probably go away, but they eyed her face as they settled in next to her. They reached over to turn her face up towards them and her face screwed up in a pained frown. She swatted at them with both hands. Yup, everything was symmetrical.
Your head will hurt less once you drink some water.
Thinking at her was exceptionally painful. She had covered her ears partway through the statement but it obviously hadn’t done anything since the sound wasn’t actually entering through her ears. They tried the sensation of cold water in her mouth, which turned out to be less offensive. They uncorked the bottle and handed it to her. She sat up and tipped some of it into her mouth with an uncharacteristic amount of caution.
“What happened?”
You–
“uUAugh. Too loud.”
They sighed
–you got drunk and had one of your bad memories.
“What was it about?”
if I told you it would come back
They thought for a second.
…also I don’t actually know what it was about. You wanted it to go away enough that you actually let me MAKE it go away.
A trail of thought began that was promptly thrown off the side of a cliff by a spike of pain through her left eye. She folded over onto the floor where she was hit by a wave of nausea. They quickly grabbed what appeared to be some kind of waste container stashed under the bedframe for her to vomit into. When the pain and nausea faded enough for her to sit back up she turned on them,“what the FUCK did you do?”
You WANTED it to go away!
“I wouldn’t let you do shit.”
I don’t even think I c–
She grimaced and swatted their shoulder.
–sorry. I don’t think I could’ve if you hadn’t let me.
They felt a surge of indignant pride under her discomfort.
She drank some more water.
Her headache started fading around the middle of the morning. At least she was pretty sure it was morning. The lights outside had gotten a little brighter, and she could see down the cliff the manor was on into some kind of river. The priestess (‘Rhea?’) came to see them, looking exhausted. She asked Xotchtil for something to do with checking over imported slave labor which they were happy to help with, that being what they had been doing for… years? Probably decades now that she thought about it. She supposed they had to earn their room and board somehow.
They told her to stay in the room–something about her ‘not knowing how to behave’ or ‘if they realize you’re a force of nature I don’t actually have any control over they’ll probably kill us both to be on the safe side.’ That logic lost whatever appeal it had by noon.
She was actually just going to find her way back to the terrace for fresh air (no, really!), but a scent caught her at a turn in the hall–sweet oil and spiced wax cutting through stale tallow and stone dust. She followed it up three steps and through an archway carved with spiderwebs.
Inside, the room was soft with low couches and thick carpet. A brass burner gave off purple smoke. On the far side, a visitor sat waiting on a bench of carved bone. Her bare feet sank into the pile.
A servant stepped out from behind a silk screen holding a pitcher of wine. His eyes went wide. He set the pitcher down with a sharp clack, grabbed her tunic by the scruff, and dragged her back. He shoved her out into the hall, shouted a string of quick words, and slammed the heavy wood door.
Warm air pulled her down a set of stairs at the end of the hall. She followed it through a door cut straight into the stone. Inside, the room was narrow and hot. Three stone workbenches ran parallel down the space. Small oil lamps hung from overhead iron chains, casting amber light onto dark rock. The air smelled of carved wood, resin, dried glue, and oil.
At a central bench, a drow artisan sat on a wooden stool, working alone on a long, narrow stringed instrument. Dozens of small metal tuning pegs were already set along its neck, and a dense, silvery web of wire stretched across its dark body. He plucked them individually in sequence to test their tone against each other.
She stepped toward a crack in the ceiling over and behind him to feel a cold draft rolling into the heat from the fire. Her shoulder bumped a wooden rack holding carved instrument necks. He jumped to catch the rack before it fell and snapped a quick, angry string of what mostly sounded like curses in Drow. With him glaring at her, she stepped back out into the hallway and worked her way back up through the stairs to the upper floors.
In a room at the end of a high passage, a strip of black silk hung from a wall peg over an air vent. The breeze caught it. The fabric floated horizontal, weightless, rippling like dark water. She stopped and stood there, watching it move. She held her hand under the weave, feeling the current lift the threads.
A drow tailor stepped out from behind a paper screen carrying a measuring stick and long iron shears. He looked her up and down. She was still wearing what she’d crawled through the caverns in. He clicked his tongue three times, shaking his head.
He disappeared behind the screen and came back with a folded stack of clean, coarse grey cloth, the same she saw the house servants wearing. He shoved them against her chest, gesturing sharply from her rags to the clean pile, then pointing behind the screen.
She’d never really liked what the illithids had put her in anyway.