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Underneath his appendages, or perhaps just in his tone, she could sense the beginning of a smirk. “You sacrificed the pawn. Fitting.”
Tav straightened her shoulders, her hand releasing the lanceboard piece and letting The Emperor discard it to the side absently. “I must seem predictable.”
“Hardly. But I see the reprise of a melody.”
“Oh?” She watched as he moved the bishop defensively – precisely as predicted. This was going to be a long game, a cold war of lanceboard. Both Tav and The Emperor were fully capable of making the exact correct play with the foresight of twenty turns. The last time they had played lanceboard, the game had adjourned in a stalemate of boredom. Fitting.
“You have not eaten lately.” He moved a piece with apathetic finality.
A small sigh. “I will.”
“You shouldn’t be so resistant to your needs.” The Emperor cocked his head ever so slightly, eyes glittering. “We are partners.”
“Fully aware.” Tav took his knight, a somewhat unexpected early advance. Was he truly so distracted? “Have you considered my notes on the Sorcerous Sundries acquisition? Seems advantageous, and we already have sympathetic connections.”
“Yes.” He moved a piece directly into the firing line of Tav’s queen. It would not be a simple or quick maneuver, but the board was now set in The Emperor’s inevitable demise.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Take it back,” Tav scowled.
“Oh?”
“How coy. You’re opening yourself to checkmate within fifteen.”
“I know.”
A long pause, as Tav expanded her mind with the creaking of illithid growing pains. She finally tutted, her eyes rolling ever so slightly. “What a waste of effort. We are partners. No?”
“You think I mean to manipulate you. For what gain.”
“I don’t know. But there must be something.”
The Emperor matched her gaze, hands folded in his lap. With a slight gesture he raised a clawed hand, telekinetically moving his rook. “Incorrectly assumed. You simply have a narrowed view of victory.”
“If this isn’t victory, what is?” She moved a pawn forward, boxing his rook into a squeeze. As she released the piece, she heard the movement of his leg shifting under the table, his boot now just a hair’s breadth away from her own. Ah. So that’s it.
“You do not have to perform such charades,” she chided. “Trust my lead on Sundries. I will eat when I find a suitable target in due time. And please,” she nudged his foot pointedly, “our relations require no fraught stratagem.”
He tilted his head curiously, eyes betraying nothing. For a moment, Tav felt the practiced pressure on her mind - the telltale sign that The Emperor wanted to know more. But with great restraint, the pressure released, unrealized into a simple longing. “I do miss our games.”
“Your games,” Tav corrected. “I was smaller then. A mouse in your palm.”
For once, The Emperor almost laughed. “You’re joking. Do you really think so little of yourself?”
She didn’t take the obvious, saccharine bait. All the same, in the deepest corners of her mind, she could hardly help but wonder – or hope. What if it was true? What if The Emperor had really fallen from his throne for… her? These were the childish thoughts she had experienced as a human. Now that she was an illithid, they felt foreign and disgustingly naive. All the same, they were enjoyable. Like an old dress she longed to wear once again.
He continued, eyes watching her face with practiced calculus. “Don’t be so quick to paint yourself a victim. You used me too.”
Tav lashed out then, the candle lighting of their subterranean lair flickering and dancing with sharp atmospheric change. “I could never have actually manipulated you.”
“How naive. And do you think me incapable of care?” With a curt gesture, The Emperor telekinetically slid the lanceboard aside, clearing the front of the table for him to lean forward. “You were an investment, yes. But more than anything, I enjoyed you. And your company.”
Tav prepared a mean barb, a defensive rebuttal to the Emperor’s tempered declaration. But it caught in her throat, her long illithid nails digging into the table instead. “I enjoyed you too,” she simply replied after a moment, defeated. As she reached across the table for his hand, she sighed wistfully. “I just wish I loved you the same way as when I was human. I wish I loved anything the same way.”
“You might.”
“But that would be a weakness. To you.”
“It might.”
She retracted her hand sharply. But just as quickly, he tightened his grip, refusing to let her retreat. “I only wish to see my sword wielded well. Affection is a powerful force, and it does not always abide predictability. I..” He loosened his grip, straightening and attempting to recapture some decorum. “Do not forget; I have always enjoyed your contradictory facets.”
She collapsed ever so slightly into the hood of her woolen cloak. “So this is it? Turning our very lives, our affections, into lanceboard?” She shook her head, suddenly embarrassed. “It feels natural now. But there are these phantoms of want.”
“We are not so far gone.”
Tav softened, sliding her hand away from his. "Perhaps you are right. We have only just started the game." For a moment, she seemed lost in thought, perhaps calculating thousands of her own interpersonal lanceboard moves. After a long moment, she turned back to The Emperor and, with a deft turn of the wrist, drifted up to stand on the table, her slim newborn frame towering over the seated Emperor. “I would have had your king the moment I moved the queen to A7.”
“I know. I gave you the pawn on F4.” His breath was ragged as he raised a taloned hand to ghost over Tav’s calf.
“You let me win. Especially by moving the rook to G6.”
“Perhaps.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” He chuckled dryly.
Tav laughed with a performative hollowness, but she was genuinely amused. “So. You were never playing just lanceboard.”
With a telepathic shudder, she opened her mind a tiny crack, the floodgates of her psyche trickling into the ether between them. As her restless thoughts mixed with his ambition in the dry air of their new home, she couldn’t help but wonder aloud: ”I chose this. I wanted this. Right?"
It hardly mattered, of course. Tav knew The Emperor had seen this outcome from fifteen moves prior, an inevitable checkmate that had been written in her illithid, tadpole-infected blood. From the very first move of her pawn unto its inevitable transformation into a queen at the finish line. Maybe she had written it too.
The Emperor could feel her doubts, and he held them gently. “We both wanted this. And we are exquisite for it.”
With a hiss of release, her shoulders dropped, drifting to her knees before him. Like this, kneeling on the table before his seated form, they were two equals, finally meeting each other’s eyes at the same height. Absently, she allowed her tentacles to braid into his, their foreheads nearly touching. “I suppose you’ve earned your victory.”
A small, enamored sigh from The Emperor. “Our victory.”