Chapter Text
It all started with a miscalculation. It had been such a long time since the Emperor last allowed himself to grow attached to a human. He wanted to reveal himself at the right time, drop the illusion and show Belynne Stelmane that he was an asset unlike any other at her disposal - she would have been wary, but her brilliant mind would have overcome the prejudice, he was sure of it. She would have seen that he meant her no harm, that all he craved was companionship.
But then the assassin happened. It was a smartly timed attack, no weapons in their private meeting except Stelmane’s ornate dagger, but, well. It’s not like the Emperor needed a weapon. His disguise dissolved like morning mist in the sun and the assassin didn’t live long past the realization that a suitably pissed-off mind flayer could crush a human windpipe in seconds. Stelmane panicked, which was very much natural and understandable, but then the Emperor panicked too, which was very much not. He wanted to take away her fear, so she would listen and see and salvage the first genuine connection he could bring himself to build since Ansur, so he reached out.
He reached too deep.
It took him almost a week to coax her back into wakefulness with the most careful touches of his mind and when she woke up she wasn’t the same. She was not a thrall, not in the traditional sense of the word, but there was a scar on her mind, a notch he could slot himself into and soak up all she was and she wouldn’t - couldn’t - stop him.
It was horrible. It soothed and excited an instinctual part of him, to have a mind he could willingly dip into, and wasn’t that a thought. The Emperor made a mental note to look around among the young troublemakers, pickpockets and street urchins for one he could take on as his errand boy, a mind young and flexible enough to grow around the intrusion of an illithid and not suffer for it, but it was a project for later . The part of him that craved her brilliant mind as a whetstone against his own, the part that starved for companionship, that part of him was saddened and horrified. That part of him wanted to fix her, to mend her shattered pieces until she could forgive him and mean it.
He had no idea how to even begin that. In his overreach he damaged some of her emotional centers and he couldn’t process human emotion anymore. He could understand them well enough, shake them around in his labyrinthine mind until they made sense to him, translated into something he could process, but that wasn’t the same. If he patched some of his thinking into hers it would drive her insane.
He pondered the matter for a few weeks until he came up with what had to be the worst possible idea of his entire existence. The memories and personality that made up Balduran were still part of him - a rather more significant part than he ever cared to admit. It wasn’t too difficult to separate those one day, to add a spare process or two or more to them, test how much he needed to allocate to bring that part to life again. An illithid brain had so much more going on than a human one and roughly 70% of his semi-conscious thought processes were caught up in calculating his own self-preservation, which really was way too excessive. He could repurpose some of those for the sake of an experiment, he reasoned.
What he wanted to make was a mask, a filter, something through which he could touch Stelmane’s brain and not damage it further. What he ended up doing, he realized with slowly dawning dread as the figure materialized in his mental space, was recreate Balduran, the human adventurer, inside his own mind. A man whose first action as soon as the Emperor made himself tangible to him was to punch him in the face, then swear up a blue streak after he split his hand open on the horrifying bear trap that was illithid teeth.
“I can’t decide if this is fascinating or concerning,” the Emperor said, reaching up to touch his aching lower jaw. Figment of his imagination or not, it hurt just like the real thing.
“I’m still a part of you,” Balduran spat back, jabbing a finger at him. “I wouldn’t have been able to do that if at least some subconscious part of you didn’t think that you deserved it.”
“...Definitely concerning.”
“Oh fuck you .”
“More to the point, do you know why I created you?”
“Which part? There has been a lot going on in your head in the last week.” The Emperor glared. Balduran eventually gave in with a sigh. “Yes, I can help Lady Stelmane recover. Good going on that, by the way.”
“What.”
“Wanting to help her, I mean. You…” Balduran seemed to turn the word around in his mouth a bit, testing the taste of it. “No, we hurt her and we acknowledged that it was wrong of us. That she deserves our best effort to make it right. We didn’t have to go this far,-” Balduran gestured all over himself. “- but we did it anyway, because we care enough to damage ourself for the sake of her recovery. And I will make sure she understands the gravity of that.”
The Emperor looked at his old face, sun-tanned and wind-bitten, and let go of the mental threads he was about to yank back out from the mess that was Balduran. He could always unravel it later, if the experiment had outlived its usefulness. He could live with this aberration until Stelmane got better.
It was easier than he anticipated. Not the recovery part, hells no, but living with Balduran in his head. When not needed, he seemed to slip into a sort of slumber, relinquishing the parts of the illithid's brain he occupied. And he was needed more often than expected, either to provide insight into the emotions of his business associates or to be a scalpel where the Emperor was a sword, spinning subtler manipulation.
But the ultimate prize was Stelmane's recovery, however glacial. The Emperor would let her doze against his side while Balduran worked his meticulous healing and when two years later Stelmane startled awake and struck out at him, fear in her eyes when no negative feeling about him could stick in her mind before, he found himself light with unexpectedly bittersweet joy.
He told her all that happened there and then, kneeling on the cold, hard floor, steeling his heart against a rejection that was sure to come, but she just massaged her temples and looked at him like he was the stupidest thing she had ever laid eyes on. She let him bandage her hand, having split it open not unlike how Balduran did, that first time he manifested. She then gathered his tentacles in trembling hands and shook him so violently the room spun with him even after she let go. "Gods, I can't believe you. You have already done enough to make up for your mistake, all right? You can stop hurting yourself for my sake."
"Your mind still has no defenses against me and the physical side effects will take much longer to heal! If I stop the sessions now there is a very real chance of relapse." It wasn't the priority, but he could see small signs of improvement in her speech and her ease of movement already. If Balduran was given enough time, she might recover her full range of movement one day. "There are no negative side effects for me, except for the minor annoyance of sharing my mind with something so human. My kind thinks of our survival over anything else; if this was in any way dangerous to me I would have long abandoned it."
If his thoughts stumbled on the edge where Balduran's consciousness usually rested, never far from waking, she wasn't to know. If his emotions were sometimes too squishy, too human, spilling over from Balduran, it was hardly dangerous . He quite enjoyed being able to look out at the sun setting over the harbor and feeling at peace. If he sometimes let Balduran's voice speak through him while his more analytical mind crunched away at a problem, who would even believe him?
Stelmane came down to his hidden rooms in a magnificent dress and spun around with her steps steady all the way and it was fine.
She came to him after the party, cheeks rosy from wine that was too expensive and not strong enough and let him hold her in what was almost a feeding hold, if only they weren’t both sitting on his bed, her back fully against his chest and his arms securely around her. She laughed with a big glass of his best brandy when he grumbled and adjusted his hold around her head, the many hairpins digging uncomfortably into his tentacles. He lifted his head from her and snatched away the rest of the brandy in petty revenge that should have been much too juvenile for something his age. He drank it in one go, the burn of expensive alcohol grounding him in the moment, Balduran laughing in his mind at her shout of outrage.
“Do you even know what he does?” she asked when they settled down into position again, the extensive contact making it easy for Balduran to slip into her mind even while she was awake.
“Hm?”
“Your brain guy. The one you made up to help me? Gods, does he even have a name? I never bothered to ask.”
“Balduran.”
“Baldu- are you shitting me right now? You named him after the city?”
“No. The city was named after him,” he explained patiently and got a very sharp elbow to his ribs for his troubles. “He is what remains of who I was before…” It was not easy to wiggle his appendages, tightly wrapped around her as he was, but he succeeded. “I didn’t make him up so much as woke him from where he slumbered in my subconscious before.”
“Well, fuck . Now I understand why you never do anything halfway if you are fucking Balduran .” She laughed again and he didn't try to correct her. He wasn’t sure he could in a way that wouldn’t make her hate him, despite everything. “You know, when I was young my mother used to have this dress. Huge and dazzling, every square inch of it hand-embroidered. I was told it was the work of an elven craftsman and took a century to make, but that was probably exaggeration, now that I think about it.” She pictured it for him, most of the details blurry from the decades that passed, but still dazzling with precious gems and metallic threads in her recollection.
“It does look like excellent craftsmanship, but I don’t know enough about embroidery to tell if it’s elven or not.”
“That’s not really the relevant part.” She stretched an arm out and looked at her hand, a noblewoman’s delicate fingers. “When he first appeared in my dream, Balduran was trying to salvage this dress, so very like my mother’s and ripped terribly. I tried to help him, but he said it was for me so he had to do it alone. So with hands more fitting for rope and knots, he took thread and needle and learned, studious like the most disciplined scholar unraveling the secrets of the world.” He couldn’t see her smile, but he felt it against his mind, her joy warm and soft to his senses. “He was quite bad at it first, but he has become something of a master now. And I’m shaping up to be something beautiful again, rather than a tattered rag.”
“You do realize this is a metaphor, yes? A way for your mind to interpret things that are less horrifying than the reality of a mind flayer bumbling around in your head with barely an idea what he was doing.” He was treated to a lot of sharp elbows tonight, but she made no move to get out of his hold, so it was probably fine.
“I did realize, yes. I knew the moment he finished the base of the dress and I woke up able to stand on my own two feet again.” She sighed and patted one of his tentacles, almost absent-mindedly. “But it’s a very nice metaphor. Even if the end result will never be perfect, I can see clearly the care and effort you put into mending me. And this is why I can forgive you.”
The Emperor had no words to say to that. He tightened his hold on her and in their shared daydream let Balduran set the dress aside with a dazzling smile and pull her into a hug that contained all the heart he wished he had.
Whatever the cost, he would gladly pay it for these moments.
Elder Brains never had tolerance for irregulars and the Absolute was no different. It rampaged carelessly through the Emperor’s mind on first contact, sifting through thought and memory to find the source of his aberration and the parts of him that made up Balduran were an easy target, gathered in one place as they were. It hurt, when the Absolute ripped into him, deep gouges in his mind that silenced Balduran’s too-human panic and rent apart his feeble push against the intruding presence as if it was nothing.
The Emperor folded under control as a good thrall should, its mind bleeding and thoughts silent. Thralls didn’t need a sense of self and the Absolute purred contentedly at the taste of its fading misery.
Freedom was so easily ripped away when one was born a slave.
The Emperor was acutely aware that he shouldn’t have strained his mind. His brain was literally still bleeding and he hacked up a mouthful of silver blood when he put up the psionic barrier around his barren rock of choice, but he just couldn’t sit idly and do nothing. Not when a threat like the Absolute loomed over everything he ever cared to call his own.
He fortified his resolve and poked at the deepest gash in his psyche and physically recoiled at the terror and pain that spread through his every nerve. All right, so the direct approach was not a viable one this time. He retreated into his own mind instead, trying to visualize the injuries in a way that didn’t damage him any further.
Balduran was ripped to pieces, the meat and bones of him scattered over the Emperor’s psyche to prevent him from pulling himself back together through some ungodly display of mental power. What was left was little better than an empty husk, a mask he could easily slip into.
It was what he wanted, all those years ago.
It turned his stomach now, losing that bit of his self, even if the Absolute proved much too lazy to expend the effort to completely destroy it.
Still, curiosity got the better of him and he slipped on the thin veneer of humanity that remained from Balduran, groaning from the sudden influx of human emotions. Like returning to a childhood home after a lifetime of adventure, changed by the world into something almost unrecognizable but still a permutation of the child that left all those years ago, he was welcomed by the skin of the man he once was with an unshakable, unconditional love.
It was absolute madness, a perversion against what he fundamentally was, but the bliss of it did an excellent job of clearing his mind. Human thought might be limited, but it was also far more resilient against damage of the mind than an illithid’s fragile mental balance and right now he needed to think fast on his next step, because his luck was wont to run out sooner than later and his chances of survival didn’t look good without a plan.
He allocated a few mental processes to self-healing, then immersed himself in the mask again, peering outside the Prism to find some inspiration as to how to solve his currently growing list of problems.
Time flew differently on the Astral plane and in the span of time it took him to beat back the githyanki and claim his little floating rock, the Astral Prism had changed hands multiple times. The one currently carrying it was a half-elf who was neck deep in the deepest shit of her life, struggling against demons on a nautiloid hurtling through Avernus.
Maybe he should have paid more attention to the outside world because he couldn't even begin to guess how that happened.
Both the elf and her two companions carried tadpoles, pulsating with the Absolute's toxic magic. He couldn't care less about the githyanki and he only had interest in the half-elf as far as safety of the Prism went, but the third one caught his eye. He was a bronze-scaled dragonborn, bearing a passing resemblance to his old friend. The way he carried himself and even the cadence of his voice felt so similar the Emperor couldn't take his eyes off him.
He should probably blame the unreasonable emotions of his borrowed humanity for the way he watched, almost bewitched. For the way he reached out and caught them before they could be reduced to greasy stains on the beach.
It was impulsive and of questionable wisdom to waste his energy on strangers, but he was at a loss for ideas before. He could work with this, if he could prevent them from succumbing to the tadpoles and how fortunate that he was practically sitting on the means to do that.
Prince Orpheus stretched his power to the bounds of the Astral Prism to keep Vlaakith from harassing his honor guard, but he was vulnerable to attack from inside. Balduran's mask obscured his true nature as he sneaked up on the unsuspecting prince, hijacking his power and forcibly extending it over the three who had touched the Prism before.
There would be more of them in the future, a whole group of champions for him to coax and manipulate into marching on the Absolute in the name of their salvation and his freedom.
It was a good start, a running leap towards his goals, even if he had to dress in the broken dregs of his own soul to string them along.
It wasn’t until they reached Baldur’s Gate that he finally had a chance to breathe in earnest. The honor guard no longer bothered him, Orpheus’ protection lay secure over the party and he gained enough of their good will that they didn't fight him when he listened in on their surface thoughts and skimmed psionic energy off the top of their minds, something that was analogous to junk food for a mind flayer like him.
It was finally time for him to mend himself.
If only he had any idea where to begin.
The irony of the situation didn't escape him - he brought Balduran to life to help him mend a broken mind and now he needed to mend Balduran somehow. Oh, how the tables had turned and all that.
He slipped out of Balduran's mask, set it down next to the shattered pieces of his mind that he painstakingly collected since he got away and considered them all together. That fragile shell of humanity still carried an essence of the man he once was, showing where the pieces of him would fit, like the blueprint of a fine siege weapon.
Or a sewing pattern.
Balduran mended Belynne by making her a dress. Balduran was no richly embroidered brocade or flowing silk, but he could still do something similar. He remembered, in a detached sort of way, long walks of window shopping along the boulevard with Ansur, never committing to buying any of the coats on display no matter how vividly he imagined Ansur slowly undressing him from one with the care of someone unboxing a precious present. It felt much too frivolous to spend the gold on something he’d only ever wear on the shore when he spent much of his life at sea.
He could make Balduran a captain’s coat now. From heavy fabric the color of the night sky to match the lilac of their eyes, embroidered in shining bronze thread, a wide brocade sash and the lining patterned with waves, so the sea shall always be with him even in the most desiccated desert.
He could see it clearly in his mind’s eye despite never caring for the fashion of men before, the layers and patterns laid out in detail, and in the realm of his own mind what he could picture, he could make.
He could call upon Balduran’s experience with Belynne’s dress, but it was still slow going, the thread and needle fitting awkwardly in hands that never held anything he could move with his tentacles or his psionics. The fabric creased, the thread tangled, the needle stabbed into his flesh with unerring precision, dotting the midnight-purple fabric with constellations of silver blood. Still he prevailed, stubborn to a fault and sick and tired of having the bloody pieces of him in the corner of his mind, dripping blood into his thoughts and reminding him of his weakness in every waking moment.
He became so absorbed in his work that time and the rest of the world slipped away, his focus consumed entirely by the work of pulling himself back together scrap by tattered scrap, hiding his scars underneath smartly folded fabrics and embroidery thread made of brightly shining bronze.
He missed when Balduran first drew breath again or when he opened his eyes with the soft bewilderment of something that came back from the dead twice now, both times absurd in their own right.
He didn’t miss the quiet, pained laughter or the chin hooking itself over his shoulder to inspect his handiwork, Balduran’s hands solid and real on his back.
“You do realize that I did the embroidery because Belynne had an emotional attachment to her mother’s dress, right?” Balduran’s voice was weak, but it didn’t lessen his mirth at the absurdity of the Emperor doing needlework. “Couldn’t you think of anything else?”
“I genuinely couldn’t. This kind of creative thinking is very much a human trait.”
Balduran laughed, leaning heavily against the Emperor’s back, watching with bloodshot eyes as the illithid painstakingly embroidered a shield and a dragon on the fabric so they would sit over his heart when he put it on. “Thank you for trying. This is going to be the best coat I have ever owned.”
The Emperor couldn't be bothered to answer him in words, the edges of their minds still blurring together when his focus was elsewhere. With every stab of the needle he recovered a sliver of himself, stitched a piece of Balduran back where he belonged.
And when it was all done he would be complete once more.