Chapter Text
They finished the task Rhea had requested. The house had received a shipment of fresh laborers from the surface. By the way Rhea told them about this they suspected that there was something mildly illicit about the way they’d been obtained, even by Drow standards. That plus some kind of factional conflict. The drow herding them into the holding pens gave off a feeling of unease, like they didn’t want to get caught in this part of the city.
Rhea wanted the laborers sorted into skilled artisanal laborers (weaving, fine metalwork and the like), vs unskilled manual laborers (mining, farming, or moving things). She said this normally took about a week to sort out, but was hoping Xotchtil could cut it back to two or three days. Given that this had actually been their primary job for over a decade, the entire task, beginning to end, took most of the morning.
They went to find Rhea to tell her they were done, but when they found her she was busy talking to her brother about a shipment of some kind of luxury magical good. They didn’t want to interrupt, and as the conversation progressed, it became apparent that neither had noticed them.
Rhea smiled,“–and Narala is coming back next month with more. She says the flower essence is actually back in season now. You know she says it also makes a very potent pheromone.”
“Not that she’s ever needed it to get whatever she wants out of you.”
“What I do in my free time doesn’t affect–”
Tazennin snapped,“What? Doesn’t affect what? The rest of us!? ME? Except it DOES, actually.”
“How?”
“While you were curled up in bed with her last month, I apparently got sold to a woman who’s going to torture me to death.”
“That’s a little dramatic.”
“Everyone knows about her mother’s little ‘parties’”
“That’s just her mother, who’s dead now anyway! Also I can probably talk mom out of it easily enough.”
“What so I can get sold again next month when you’re not paying attention again? Mom’s like 600 years old. Isn’t it time you put her out of her misery?”
“It’s safer and easier to use her as a buffer. She’ll die one of these days on her own, I may as well get some use out of her in the meantime.”
“No you’re thinking about ditching me and running off to the overbright with Narala.”
“…so what if I did?”
“Oh fuck off.”
“No, seriously! You could come with me! Or if you really want to stay here Noime or Castre will take over. Life will go on with or without me!”
“Noime’s an idiot, Castre’s insane, and the overbright is a fucking fairytale. You’re the sister that’s not going to kill me or get me killed and you’re hanging me out to dry.” Tazennin stormed off.
Rhea sighed and turned to walk in the other direction. She spotted Xotchtil and froze, eyes wide. There was a long silence between the two of them, during which she got her face back under control.
…I finished the task you requested.
At this she was taken aback,“Wait, seriously?”
I used to do that all the time. It was actually most of what I did both where I was born and in my second colony.
She looked thoughtful for a second,“How good are you at like… making people do things. Mind Flayers can do that, right?”
Decent. I don’t think I could do it to you easily, but most of the workers you had me evaluate I could work on individually. Crowds are difficult and risky, like you saw yesterday.
“But one person is easy? Maybe especially if they weren’t all there?”
Depends on what you mean by ‘not all there.’ Insanity can be a mixed bag.
“But you could try?”
She had been aiming for the terrace again but at least managed to find herself in the open courtyard. It had been well cleaned since yesterday’s incident; the blood had been scoured from the paved stone and the pillars had been redressed. The burnt flora had been either righted and treated, or, more often, replaced with freshly glowing decorative fungi.
In the open courtyard, a drow woman sat with another of those broad, forty-string instruments carved from something that looked like wood but didn’t resonate the same way. Beside her, a goblin tapped a small hollow block of the same material with hardwood sticks. Click. Click-click.
The drow’s voice and plucked strings pushed out eleven squished, off-pitch notes that didn’t fit into any musical scale she’d encountered on the surface. Surface music was very tidy. The notes were cleanly calculated so that the sound waves locked together in smooth, comfortable pockets.
Instead of blending together neatly, these sound waves bumped into each other out of sync. It made the air tremble with a weird, fast buzz–like a web of tiny vibrational wobbles expanding through the room. Down here, trying to play a normal surface-style third felt completely wrong; standard notes slammed clumsily against this strange drow scale.
The drow plucked a string and let her voice slide downward, dropping just a fraction of a note. The sylph matched her, ditching distinct step-by-step notes entirely to glide her voice down then upward across three string pitches at once. Bending her voice through that tight scale created a strange kind of friction in the air, as if the mismatched sound waves were physically rubbing against one another.
The drow eyed her curiously, then stopped singing entirely. She handed the melody over and focused completely on playing the instrument itself. Her thumbs swept the low bass strings to shift the underlying sound while her fingers flew across the high ones.
Without the drow’s voice masking it, the instrument’s sound became distinctly… strange. Back in the workshop, the instrument the craftsman was working on was finely made, but the sound was a bit muddy or dull when pushed through the damp cave air. This frame looked like it was made of the same material (a bit older and more worn maybe), but didn’t sound like it. It didn’t blur, soften, or lose its edge. It was almost like it was too precise, even within this scale of notes that slid more than stepped. It was like the notes were able to ignore the quality of the air they rippled through.
The sylph glided her voice through the narrow gaps of the eleven-note grid, riding the goblin’s dry, rhythmic beat. The instrument’s eerie frame vibrated with supernatural perfection, throwing every tone clean down the stone tunnels without a single drop of muffling or distortion.
They played for a few hours until the drow stopped, either having something better to do or just having gotten bored. The sylph looked towards the terrace and tried to figure out her way back up to it.
When they realized she was missing from their room they only panicked a little. It felt like she was still nearby somewhere, and that she felt contented which ruled out both her being hurt or being excited enough to accidentally hurt someone else… probably. They could feel a sensation of air on skin which could really be good or bad all things considered.
The roof hadn’t been their first guess, but it wasn’t exactly their last either. They did check the terrace, but mostly because it was on the way anyway. From there it was more of a game of hot and cold as to where they felt her presence the most strongly, working their way up through the floors until there weren’t any more to work up through. Of course she was on the roof. Why wouldn’t she be?
The very top floor of the manor had a slanted ceiling to accommodate the slope of the roof. There was a dormer with a window poking out onto it and they were able to see her after leaning out a lot farther than was comfortable. Where did she get fresh clothes? They decided they were better off not knowing.
They decided to try a gentle suggestion to start. It was nice and warm inside. It would be nice to maybe just come inside instead of lying out near the edge of the roof.
She rolled over onto her stomach, picked her head up, and glared at them.
No, of course not. Obviously.
Can you please come in? What are you going to do if you slip? Sometimes it’s like you don’t realize you don’t have wings anymore.
Her anger spiked–again, wrong thing to say.
They really hated being honest; I’d feel safer if you came inside.
The anger immediately shifted into playfully dismissive amusement.
No, really. Every new thing I learn about this place makes it seem less and less safe and–
They let out a low, rattling sigh.
–and my odds have always been better when we’re together.
She also sighed, then slowly crawled back across the roof towards them.
She was dreaming of the desert again. They were just conscious enough themselves to try and figure out a way to redirect her nightmare when–
–her left hand slapped the knife down in the dirt next to her head. Her other hand finished pulling the chunk free and slapped it down into the dirt in front of her face. The veins still dripped poison out of the ragged edges; she’d have to keep going.
She reached back and dug her fingers in to pull the wing taut before she started sawing again. She pictured someone else’s hands doing it, but trying to picture a face made her head hurt. Someone else was doing this TO her; her hands weren’t her own right now. It was true enough in spirit and she needed to believe it wholeheartedly to finish this.
She managed to pull another chunk free. Still poison. Fuck this, she wasn’t getting caught and she wasn’t going back. Not this time. She flipped her grip on the knife and started digging directly into the skin of her back where the base of her wing met her spine. There wasn’t any point leaving them in shreds anyway.
She wasn’t getting caught again, and she wasn’t going back, no matter what it took.