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“and it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.” (1 samuel 16:23)
Perhaps it was a remnant of her youth and her upbringing, but Iseult had never particularly cared for spiders. She did not like their long, spindly legs, nor the swift way they crawled along walls and floors. As a child, her father would mutter an inaudible prayer under his breath as he squished errant creepy-crawlies under an indigo thumb. She quickly learned not to ask him why he did it - there was quite a bit he did she would never understand, it seemed.
Besides, there was little she could do about the not-spider before her, let alone crush him beneath the pad of a finger. After all, the glow of the Moonlantern he bore was the only ward against the cursed shadows around them. As the creature blinked, she could see the cluster of dark eyes on one side of his face follow suit discordantly. He leaned in close and regarded her curiously, the scent of something like ink and damp caves surrounding her as he did so.
“Majesty has brought this thing to me,” he said, his voice creaking, cadence lyrical as he spoke. “She says you seek passage.”
“Yes,” replied Iseult. “Take me to Moonrise.”
She did not like his legs, how they were as tall as her yet thin as reeds. They allowed him to loom precariously over her, making her feel as trapped as a gnat in his web. And she tried not to stare at the back half of him, with his turgid torso, or the front half for that matter, what with his dangerous-looking pincers and the hard, shell-like appearance of his chest. He muttered and growled to himself as they went, lost in his own half-crazed sentiments of worship and curses alike.
She had read about creatures like him before. As reading about the place her father had narrowly escaped always did, she was left with the feeling of immense pity. Actually gazing upon such a creature in the flesh made the strange empathy oppress her twofold. Would this have eventually been her father’s destiny, had he not left? It seemed the worst fate of them all for a male living among she-wolves as he did - as this … thing had once done.
It was uncharitable, it was cruel to refer to him in such a way. Yet even a well-read woman like herself could think of no other way to describe him. Despite her revulsion, her disbelief, her long-held fear of spiders, Iseult could not outright call him a monster; it seemed uncommonly dehumanizing. Notwithstanding the fact that technically, he wasn’t a human at all; hadn’t been even before the Spider Queen had bestowed upon him her curse.
Nonetheless, he was even less humanoid now, and the inherent animalism of him made Iseult leery as they made their passage towards Moonrise. Behind her, she could feel her companions’ own tension; could see the way Gale even slightly flinched when the drider suddenly raised his voice at them to keep up. The snarling way he spoke was not unlike the lithe way he slithered across the cursed lands, approaching Moonrise with uncanny speed and seemingly unaware of their own restrictions as two-legged creatures.
She tried her best to keep up. She may have had her reservations about their guide, but she was even less desirous of being devoured by hungry shadows.
It all happened so quickly: the Harpers’ ambush; the subsequent battle; and least of all the deep and sudden strike from a blade in the still-fleshy vulnerability of the drider’s side. The Harper was quickly cut down by the creature’s drow sword, but the wound visibly gaped, blood pouring from it. He staggered on his long legs, laughing maniacally even as he obviously grimaced in pain.
“You’re hurt,” Iseult said, unnecessarily obvious, as the last Harper fell.
“It is nothing. Majesty will protect us,” said the creature, yet even as he spoke, he held his side, blood pooling between dark fingers.
“No. You need healing,” she insisted, crossing over to him.
She got too close. The drider reared back, holding the Moonlantern out of reach.
“It is ours! You shall not try and take it, too!” he snarled.
“I don’t want the lantern,” soothed Iseult. She could feel her companions eyes on her back. Their gaze seemed to burn in her as she said the first thing that came to mind. “Come to our camp. We have a healer; she can help you.”
“What?!” Astarion shrieked in disbelief, doing a very poor job of keeping their cover.
Iseult turned back to glare at him as the half-orc cultist beside her added with a growl, “An’ wha’ about us? We need to get to Moonrise.”
Go walk into the shadows, for all I care, she thought uncharitably.
“You’re getting nowhere with your guide bleeding out,” she said. It was an abuse of powers she did not want in the first place, but she flexed the yawning emptiness left by the tadpole and silently commanded him to Return to your camp; the drider will fetch you once he is healed. The half-orc balked, but relented after a moment and began the slow shuffle back with the rest of the caravan. With any luck, the shadows would swallow them up before they got back.
A rather Astarion-like thought for her, but it was redeemed by her thankless charity as she turned back to the drider. He regarded her cautiously, his defenses lowered in his pain. Perhaps it was this very weakness on his part that allowed him to finally relent. Moonlantern still in his hand, she lead him back to her camp.
Her companions were not particularly pleased with this new arrival. Iseult could feel their stares and barely-contained rancor and uncertainty. Objectively, of course, it was a terrible idea: he was tadpoled and thus a fanatical cultist; he was clearly unstable, whether that was due to his… condition, or by merit of being an Absolutist, or perhaps a combination of both; and, even if Iseult did insist on treating him and regarding him with dignity, he was nonetheless still unsettling to look at. He had been formidable in the battle before the Harper’s blade had struck him; at his full strength, he could easily hold his ground in a fight against the camp. And who knew how long and bloody that would be, even if they clearly outnumbered him?
The worst part was that she couldn’t exactly explain why she’d done it, not even to herself. It went against all reason and every impulsive reaction alike. Perhaps it was as simple as she felt sorry for him. Though again, precisely why she felt that way was a mystery.
Iseult attempted to push it all away - every second thought and pervading sense of fear - as she approached Shadowheart’s tent. The young woman’s eyes flicked up to Iseult’s own pale ones, her expression unreadable. Then her attention fully returned to the motion of her hands over the drider’s torso, the pulsing, blue energy steadily slowing the blood and closing the wound.
The hum of magic and the chant of Shadowheart’s healing spell were quiet compared to his mumblings. Iseult could only pick out the occasional “Majesty,” but he spoke primarily in a language she could not speak, and yet she was intimately familiar with its rhythms, its melodic rise-and-falls. She had heard her father speak it before when she was a child.
Iseult sat beside him and settled in, perhaps in spite of her better judgment. That seemed to be the day’s theme, after all. She dug around in her satchel for a moment before producing a canteen of water. She waited to catch his attention out of the corner of three of his eyes before extending it to him in a silent offer.
An ashen hand capped with fearsomely long claws suddenly reached out and knocked it out of her hand. Shadowheart immediately ceased her healing and stood to her full height, hackles obviously raised.
“Wait,” Iseult said, extending her hands peacefully. “It’s ok. It’s fine.”
“We do not need it,” said the drider in a snarl.
“My apologies,” she said, returning her attention to him. She wasn’t sure if he meant it for that moment, or altogether. She needed to brush up on her drider knowledge, it seemed. “I just thought I would check on you. M-make sure you’re alright.” She felt her cheeks burn at her wavering voice. She made a subtle gesture at Shadowheart. The half-elf hesitated before dropping to her knees at the drider’s side once more and resuming her healing.
He regarded her cautiously. The pools of darkness in the side of his face moved and shifted in the sockets as if by their own accord, while the irises of his not-quite-drow-like eyes burned her, flecks of pale amber amidst midnight-colored sclera
“What’s your name?” said Iseult after a beat. She realized she’d never asked it, not even after initially summoning him with the lyre she’d picked off Nere’s body.
He smacked his lips. She was aware of his pinchers moving in concert and tried not to squirm uncomfortably at it. “We are called Kar’niss,” he said finally.
“Kar’niss,” she repeated. “I’m Iseult.”
“You are an under-elf?” he asked her.
The question took her by surprise; she wasn’t expecting his curiosity. “Half,” she admitted. “My father was - is - a drow.”
She wondered what he was thinking as he stared at her, far longer than what would normally be considered polite.
“I have something for you, actually,” said Iseult, cautious, feeling out his reactions and micro-expressions as if weaving with spidersilk. She slowly reached for her lyre strapped to her back. Not the ornate one she’d called him with, but her own, the one she’d meticulously cared for all through school. “A song. I’d like to play for you, if that’s alright.”
He inclined his head, as if listening for something. His white hair fell like fine webbing against his face at his movement. “Majesty? Shall we listen to her?” He was silent for a moment, then nodded. “Yes. We shall. Play, half-creature.”
Iseult breathed a sigh of relief, her shoulders trembling somewhat as she positioned her lyre. She plucked a few strings experimentally, letting the tuneless music wash over them.
It was nothing, it was but a handful of notes, but the change was instantaneous in him. She saw him suddenly straighten where he was perched, his many legs folded this way and that beneath his hefty lower body.
“Do you like music?” Iseult murmured. Her fingers formed the beginning notes of the song idly, but the question could not help but escape off her tongue. There seemed an obvious answer; after all, there was only one way to call to him in the shadows.
“We … perhaps long ago, we liked music,” Kar’niss said. Even his voice was steadier, the timbre of it suddenly flattening from its usual wavering quality.
Iseult smiled to herself. “I think you might still like it,” she teased gently.
He didn’t answer. He just listened as she played the song. After a moment, she began singing the words softly:
With a sigh you turn away
With a deepening heart
No more words to say
You will find that the world
Has changed forever
And the trees are now turning
From green to gold
And the sun is now fading
I wish I could hold you closer.
Her father had not explicitly raised her in his tradition, but Iseult knew the tenants of the goddess Eilistraee - and her discord with Lolth - all the same. She was a fitting patron for a bard like herself, though at one time she had found herself somewhat apathetic to the machinations and manoeuvers of the gods. Seeing the creature before her, she felt less apathy and more keenly a sense of endless loss. It was miraculous, what the music had done to him. He was no longer rigid, but almost relaxed in his posture. There was a distinct stillness to him, the chaotic magical energy that normally surrounded him temporarily quieted. He seemed to be listening attentively, especially as she continued freewheeling with her fingers across the lyre, the music taking her to different places as she plucked away.
Of course, there was another way to verify his calm. As she played, very carefully, Iseult reached out to his tadpole with her own. It was difficult to push far into someone’s consciousness without them knowing, and there was nothing she wanted less than to set him off, but she quickly found she had no desire to be deeply in his mind regardless of his unsteady emotional state. Shadowheart had long since ceased her healing and made herself scarce, perhaps sensing a shift beyond her own capabilities, but the physical wound in his side was but a trifle to the deep scars of his mind. It was an immediate, throbbing headache just to prod at the very borders of such a fractured psyche. He was split, somehow, not unlike his physical form: one part of him a surge of overwhelming, barely-lucid torment, the other fed with primal thoughts that came to him seemingly unbidden: Feed. Rest. Brew poison. Feed poison. Breathe. Smell. Good. Sound. Nice. Person? Mate? Give it a clutch? We bear a clutch? She - it - spiderlings - with it?
Iseult drew back suddenly, alarmed. She flubbed a note in horror before her hands went still entirely, and immediately Kar’niss turned his head to her, the spell of calm broken.
“Play, half-thing!” he growled. “Keep playing!”
“I’m so sorry,” Iseult said, shaking uncontrollably and unusually deferential in her terror. This was terrifyingly dangerous and exceptionally stupid, what she had done - letting this creature into her camp.
Worst of all, she could not tell if her music had truly proved curative for him - or if it had inspired the specific turn his thoughts had taken. How much awareness or agency did he possess over them? Was some part of him utterly powerless to the animal instincts inside?
All the while, Iseult continued to play. Somehow, it seemed decidedly less dangerous to keep playing rather than disturb his temporary tranquility.
She began to talk to him as she played, as the hours grew long, the sun pushing weakly through the clouds and slowly creeping towards the horizon. He did not respond to her, merely sat mutely as he listened to her music and perhaps her words.
She told him of her mother and father. Innocuous memories, no mentions of Eilistraee or spiders. She told him of school - how she had loved reading for hours, of learning to play the lyre. She told him the story of the flower tattoo on the side of her neck, an impulsive moment on a rainy day and a visit to an artist who lived in her dormitory at school.
“Keep singing,” he instructed when she fell silent after a time. “We enjoy your singing.”
Iseult resisted the urge to laugh, not out of malice, but out of the strangest sense of delight. “That wasn’t singing.”
But she heeded him all the same, and told him a story from her childhood, of a spring day with her father. How her father had luxuriated in the sun, despite how it made his eyes screw up and skin burn from years and years of darkness.
Nightfall approached. Distantly, Iseult was aware that it was unthinkable to let him remain in camp while they slept, yet she still played for him, her lyre lulling him to serenity. She played for the drider until her fingertips grew numb and then raw, burning with exertion, and out of the corner of her eye she watched as Astarion, Gale, and Lae’zel slipped into the forest just beyond the borders of the camp, never straying too far beyond the Moonlantern’s glow.
An emergency council was being held, perhaps. Iseult directed her attention back to Kar’niss, who still, inexplicably, listened just as carefully as he had hours prior.
“When did you find the Absolute, Kar’niss?” she said quietly.
He appeared surprised at the sudden question. “We do not understand,” he said after a beat. “Majesty found us. We - we were nothing. Nothing but a monster. An abomination. Before Her embrace.” His words were delicately chosen, though his sentences split erratically.
Iseult considered them for a moment. “You think yourself a monster?” she said finally.
“We are a monster,” he snarled, unequivocal.
The words flew past her lips before she could stop them. “I don’t think so.”
He began mumbling under his breath again, as if in prayer, though his body language remained relaxed. As she continued to play, her fingers moving more from instinct than anything at this point, Iseult regarded him. She subtly squeezed an eye shut so that the clustered eyes on the side of his face disappeared. At that, if she kept her gaze on his face and blurred the edges a bit so she could not see his chitinous chest and shoulders, she could almost see the outline of the man he had once been. Iseult’s mind wandered. Had he been the second son of a great house of Menzoberranzan, desperate to prove himself in a society that saw him as little more than brood-stock? Perhaps he had undergone a bloody and dangerous trial of Lolth. Perhaps he had failed, and this form and its irreparably fractured mind was the result.
Once again, there was that nagging sense of loss. It was so stupid, so senseless, all of it - holding knives to each other’s throats and shoving poison down them, dangling bed-slaves off precipices, being turned into half-spiders by a petty and evil goddess. No wonder her father had fled, and had passed on to her music and love and happiness that set her apart from the murderous bloodkin of the creature before her.
“Are you happy, Kar’niss?”
What an idiotic question. She half expected him to fly into a rage, but he was considerably subdued as he regarded her.
“Happy?” he said, as if the concept were foreign to him.
She nodded, playing on as she waited for his response.
“We have Her Majesty,” he replied finally. “We are in Her embrace. We want for nothing there.”
“For nothing?”
“For some things,” he rectified.
“Such as?”
“Strange things,” he replied, his eyes burning her. “Things we cannot understand.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Astarion approaching.
“My friend needs me,” Iseult explained quickly, her aching fingers plucking all the while. “I have to stop playing for a moment. I’ll be right back.” The placating, gentle words seemed not unlike those used for someone very helpless. She hated condescending to him, but she feared his rage more.
“Very well,” said the drider, sounding defeated. “We will be waiting. We, and Majesty.”
There were very few good options remaining. In her kindness - or, as it increasingly became obvious, her utter stupidity - she had revealed the location of their campsite to a devoted Absolutist. There was nowhere else he could go beyond Moonrise Towers, and being tadpoled, he was entirely under the voice of the Absolute’s control anyway. Even if he wasn’t (even if her mercurial Dream Guardian decided to extend his protection, which he had been markedly silent on), there was little they could do to reason with him. He was too far gone. Or so Astarion told her gently. And there remained the truth of the matter: they needed his Moonlantern. It was unlikely he would give it to them willingly. Even if they convinced him to do so, he would not last long in the shadows without it.
“But the glow around the Harpers,” Iseult kept insisting helplessly, as she stood in Astarion’s tent and argued with him. Her mind kept returning to the faintly magical aura of light that had persisted on the Harpers’ corpses, even as they began to grow cold.
But there was no guarantee that glow, whatever it was, would hold up in the chokehold of darkness around Moonrise.
“The music is helping him,” she added.
“You can’t play all night,” Astarion said. “Besides, it’s a temporary solution, darling. Even you must see that. He’s been like… that for too long to be truly cured.”
It was conjecture, all of it. But so were Iseult’s own theories. Increasingly, their choices narrowed to just one. She hated it. Hated her strange attachment to him as much as she hated the reality of the situation.
“You’re uncommonly kind,” said Astarion gently, and for once, those words coming from him did not sound denigrating. “I don’t understand it, but I understand survival, and I know you do, too. We’ve come too far to let it end like this. We have to press on. And there’s only one way we can do that.”
“You’re wrong,” Iseult sniffled. She was ashamed to realize she was crying. “There’s a way - we’ll find a way.”
Her companions were kind enough to give her space as darkness fell over the camp. She skipped dinner and returned to where Kar’niss still sat at Shadowheart’s tent, waiting patiently for her and her music.
“Come with me,” she said, subdued.
“We cannot stay here?” Kar’niss questioned. She knew he meant where he sat at Shadowheart’s tent, but the question hurt all the same.
She settled on a fallen tree just beyond the farthest reaches of camp. The drider still clutched his Moonlantern possessively. Even from a distance, the arc of its glow illuminated where her companions sat in the center of camp, eating and chatting as if nothing was wrong.
“Kar’niss,” she began slowly. “You’re not a monster. I hope you know that.”
Already he was shaking his head. “We are. We are,” he insisted repeatedly, stubbornly.
“No.” Daringly, Iseult reached out and cupped his face.
The drider’s reaction was instantaneous. He snarled and clutched her wrist, claws digging painfully into her skin.
She watched as blood slowly rose to the surface of the clawed cuts, stinging pain where the venom set in. She needed to make this quick.
“I’m sorry,” she said, crying openly. “I’m so sorry. I think you’re beautiful, Kar’niss, and I wish you knew it. I wish I had told you before. I’m sorry.”
He opened his mouth, pointed teeth flashing as he bared them angrily, and then she found the soft place where his skin still gave from the mostly-healed wound in his side and dug her blade in deeply.
He howled in pain and skittered away from her.
“Traitor!” he gasped, blood gushing from the wound. He was belatedly casting Sanctuary, but already she could see Shadowheart racing towards them, radiant guardians surrounding her and disrupting his spell.
The poison was taking effect already; they needed to hurry so she could avail herself to Shadowheart’s healing, just as she had mercifully given him before soothing his restless soul and promptly feeding him her silver. She was a betrayer of the highest degree; she would never forgive herself for this.
The drider was set upon by the group; they made quick work of him with blades and spells alike. And as he finally went down, he wailed a death cry.
“Majesty! Please...!”
Iseult sank to the ground, staring numbly as her blood rushed and his venom turned her head fuzzy. It was done, and all she could think was how she longed for sleep, suddenly exhausted. Her fingers burned, and her arm ached with his poison. She could feel Shadowheart help her up, the rush of energy as the healing spell pervaded. They were moving his corpse; she watched as Lae’zel hefted him up and dragged him; as Astarion removed the Moonlantern from his clutch, fingers curled around it even in death, the last resort of a desperate man.