Chapter Text
Pain throbbed behind Ferlarys’s eyes. She tried to focus on her husband’s silhouette in the eerie light of the mind flayer brain tanks. His dark drow complexion, deep violet like the fading edge of twilight, was only faintly visible among the shadows of the abandoned operating theater, or the fleshy platform that passed for one.
“You can’t be serious,” Nymzen said. She saw him shake his head by the movement of his off-white hair, stark against the darkness. “Gods, it’s… it’s an intellect devourer! Haven’t we tread this path before? Before, in the Underdark-…”
“They’re a newborn asking us for help,” Ferlarys countered.
“Please, save us,” the plaintive psionic presence between them said, and Ferlarys felt they directed it more at her than Nymzen, as if reaching out deliberately for her heart. Their host choked out a wordless sound, twitching with the last hollow remnants of life as his brain squirmed in his skull. She couldn’t fault them their direct appeal. The poor thing was terrified.
“I’m trying to. It’s all right,” she said, glancing down at the trapped intellect devourer for a moment before returning her focus to her husband. “This isn’t like the larval pool, Nymzen. The deed’s been done. Is it worth destroying this new life? Aren’t you sworn to the ideals of a mother goddess?”
“It is not simply a newborn, Ferlie!” Nymzen snapped, his voice edged with a pained waver of desperation. “You know it isn’t! It isn’t an independent being you can foster and raise with morality. It’s born connected to another intelligence, one that wants all of us to be part of it, with or without our say!”
He sounded as if he was about to cry, and Ferlarys’s heart twinged.
“Free us,” begged the devourer again, psychic noise in the silence.
Nymzen finally spoke again, ragged with pain. The glimmer of one eye vanished under a hand raised to it. “Besides, how can you even say that? I thought you were kinder than that, to say something so…so dismissive of this poor man they’ve cut open and left here!”
“If the devourer is talking, he’s gone. Am I wrong?”
With a fearful stammer, his voice broke. “Can’t you see?”
The pain behind her eyes spiked, and they both grunted, staggering as new information flooded between them, overwhelming their minds with double-sight. She saw herself, glistening silver in low light far more effective to drow eyes, her assertive stance accompanied by waves of instinctual terror. She felt him struggling to find the comfort in the shimmer of her scales and the love that had bound them through all their trials. But it was hard not to see her golden eyes as murderous fire and her angular snout as a sword point.
Decades before they’d met, he had come out of the Underdark a tangled mess of trauma and conditioned fear. While the halfling village that had been his home for his first thirty years of surface life had given him space to grow and peace to mend, there were still barbs left buried deep in his psyche from his abusers. And instead of providing solace from them, she was twisting them. Hurting him.
She sighed, loosening her stance as the headache eased. “I’m sorry, Nym. Please understand.”
“We will all be beautiful together,” said the intellect devourer, quivering in their skull-cage as if turning from one to the other. “No arguments, no pain. Please, free us.” As the connection fell away, Ferlarys felt the surge of revulsion from her husband at the thing writhing where the seat of a man’s being used to be. One violated so heavily as to no longer be himself, ever again.
Nymzen ignored them and straightened up. “I do understand now,” he said. “You can’t see. Here.” He lifted his hand, and an orb of blue light formed in his palm. He lowered it until it hovered over the devourer’s host, and released it to float there, illuminating his face. He was pale from blood loss, and his mouth worked without sound as his eyes stared vacantly ahead, twitching now and then from the thing still attached to him by the brain stem. Perhaps it was more accurate to say the elf was a dead weight attached to the devourer by the brain stem, twitching from its efforts to escape. Tears spilled from the corners of those empty eyes in streaks down his face, and Ferlarys suddenly saw what her husband did.
“Do you mean the tears? A reflexive reaction to the pain; the body still lives. But look at his eyes. There’s nobody left behind them. His soul has moved on already.”
Nymzen let out a heavy, slow sigh in the silence, the dancing light casting his face into stark shadows as he lowered his head. “I can’t look at those tears and say the same. I don’t know if your grasp of medicine tells you something I’m missing about those eyes, but it feels wrong.” He lay his hands on the near-corpse’s shoulder, bowing his head. The devourer pulsed in their cage, mounting anxiety filling the air and making her heart race. She saw Nymzen’s hands tremble.
“Nymzen, is it worth destroying the newborn?” she whispered.
“It is not just an infant!” his head snapped up to look up at her, desperate tears smearing the eyeliner he wore to protect his sensitive eyes from sun glare. “Please, please see that it’s manipulating you, dearest! I don’t know if you’re simply that heavily maternal or if it’s connected to that worm they’ve put in us or-…or something between the two.” He breathed in, exhaled, all of it shaking, and lowered his head again. “If we somehow survive this. If we don’t lose ourselves- …if I don’t lose you. We can adopt a child. Give the triplets a little cousin to dote on. But this abomination isn’t that, it isn’t that at all!”
He swallowed a sob, and Ferlarys reached out to tuck a long, thin braid behind the slim point of his ear, brushing his tears aside with the back edge of her claws as she went.
“It’s not fair to him, either way,” he said, not raising his hands or eyes from the living remains. “Say…let’s say you’re right, Ferlarys. Let’s say his soul has moved on and he’s not trapped in there. Do you really think he’s at peace out there? Do you think this creature made from his brain will do good in the world? Or do you think he’s awaiting retrieval or Kelemvor’s judgment, helplessly knowing part of his remains is now a living weapon? A weapon that only knows how to serve the illithid ideal of obliterating everything we are and love, because they believe all life should be like them? How would you feel, Ferlarys, if your brain were turned into a monster that would try to kill me for simply being not like it? Would you be able to rest? Or would you burn like the hottest hellfire to return to this plane to prevent it?”
“We do not kill,” the intellect devourer protested. “We make perfect. We make beautiful. We strip away the ugly, painful discord. You will see. You will bloom.”
“See?” Nymzen whispered. “Do you hear that? Is that a child, a blank slate?”
Ferlarys swallowed bile, instinct warring with itself and tearing her insides apart. Was that thing twisting her thoughts and feelings? She had only seen two victims of mind flayer infection and both of them had seemed to struggle to voice their thoughts until the end. She’d assumed it would be a more obvious fight against a clear invader. Was she wrong? Would it instead take her own thought patterns and twist them for itself?
“Fine,” she said at last. “But I…” She turned away, folding her arms against a wave of self-loathing she couldn’t even say was from her own mind anymore. “I can’t be the one to do it.”
She heard the clink of plate as Nymzen walked around the table. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, pressing his face into her shoulderblade, flooding her with his warmth and his scent. “It’s all right, beloved Ferlarys, it’s all right. I will spend every breath that is still mine fighting for us.” A tug at her hip, as he pulled her sword from its scabbard. “This will be faster than my axe. All right?”
It’s not all right, she thought, or perhaps her parasite thought for her. She held the backs of his gauntleted hands, silver against Yondallan gold and green, and squeezed the one holding the handle of her sword.
“If I cannot trust my heart, I can trust yours, and your oath.” She looked over her shoulder, and he leaned up to brush his lips against her lower jaw.
“Every breath that is still mine,” he repeated, backing away with her sword in hand.
He turned to the devourer and host body, and Ferlarys turned away, shutting her mind to the thing’s last psychic scream.