Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Desmond opens his eyes and sees he’s got eight legs instead of the usual two, his first thought is: huh. His second thought is: huh, again, but with more feeling. Then he has no more thoughts for a good long while as his stomach crawls up his throat and he becomes aware of the excruciating agony in every part of his body.

If he had to describe it, he’d say it's maybe similar to being boiled in lava, or being crushed under a skyscraper. There’s not an inch of skin that feels unbruised, unburned, and he only very narrowly avoids throwing up.

He breathes through it. After a moment, the worst has passed and he stops twitching pathetically on the floor and pushes himself semi-upright to lean sideways on a stone wall. The awful pain doesn’t stop, but it shrinks, radiating out from his right arm, and that’s more manageable.

Arms. He’s still got them? Desmond cracks his eyelids open. Yes, and hands and fingers too, hooray for opposable thumbs! They’re more grey and chitinous and clawed than he last remembers them being, and the right looks a little crispy, but at least it’s the right number. Two human arms, eight very spidery legs, with two little forelegs coming out of his lower torso. He clacks them together experimentally.

Desmond blinks, and then again, slowly, and counts many more eyelids than usual. He feels around up there and winces when he accidentally pokes an eye on his forehead. Five new eyes, all clustered unevenly on the right side of his head.

That’s pretty weird, he thinks, and sets it aside to worry about later. He can see, which is the most important thing, even if everything is looking a little more lopsided than usual. He tries to stand up.

He tries stand up again.

The third time’s the charm, except it isn’t, and he falls right back down. There’s a tinkling laugh from one corner of this frankly pretty dingy room, and he stops stumbling about to look for the source. It’s not a large room. He’s in a nest of torn bedding, and the wooden frame of a bed and several chairs are splintered in a pile in the corner near the door, on top of which a lantern casts the only light, all glass and dull silver filigree. “Dickhead!” it says in a tiny voice when he crawls closer to look at it, and there’s the sound of a disproportionately loud raspberry being blown.

Desmond taps the glass, and the ethereal white light the lantern’s emitting briefly glows brighter. “Stop that!” it yells, and the glow subsides enough when he stops tapping that he can peer inside a little better. There’s something inside the lantern, buzzing angrily. Desmond peers closer. It looks like a fairy.

“Are you a fairy?” Desmond asks the lantern thing, and it shrieks in wordless offended rage and hammers her tiny fists against the glass. “Guess not,” Desmond mutters, leaning away from it so his ears don’t ring quite so much. Are his ears different? He’s getting distracted again. “Are you trapped in there?”

“Spider, spider, ponce supreme, you shred my wings, you make me scream. The more you prod me the more you’ll pay, when I’m free of my cage one day!”

“I’m not doing the rhyming thing,” Desmond tells her.

“Drider, Drider, you better kill me quick, ‘cause when I leave, I’ll explode your dick!”

“No, seriously, I can’t do poetry. It’s genetic. Can you understand me?” He tilts the lantern a little to get a better look at it, and she shrieks wildly when he tries to take a look at the base. Desmond lets go hastily, and then grabs it again just as quickly to stop it swinging, dangerously close to unhooking from the handle to shatter on the hard stone floor. His thumb brushes a little latch on one of the glass sides. “Does this open it?”

The fairy looks at him suspiciously, out of one eye, but she stops making threats. Desmond thinks she probably does understand him.

“I can let you out if you promise not to hurt me after,” he offers. The fairy glances between his face and his thumb, still on the latch. Hesitantly, she nods.

She’s out before the glass door even finishes swinging all the way open, and flits in wide circles around the room, screaming, “FINALLY!”

Eventually, she stops to flutter in front of his face. Somehow, the glow surrounding her is much less eye-watering than it had been in the lantern, enough that Desmond can see much more of her. She really does look like a little fairy, with dainty wings coming out of her back and wearing a dress fashioned out of what looks like a very shiny leaf. Her skin and hair are both purple, but that hardly seems important compared to the rest of her.

“You’re very… vivid,” he says, and she narrows her eyes, unsure whether to take it as compliment or insult. Desmond's not too sure himself.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asks plainly, crossing her arms over her chest. She’s not rhyming anymore, which makes him wonder if it’d ever been necessary in the first place. “Had enough of the ‘oh mistress’ tripe and moved on to pretending you’re normal?”

“I don’t know how normal I can pretend to be, considering I’ve got the lower half of a spider,” Desmond says. “What was I like before?”

“Odd as a box of cuckoos. All majesty this, my queen that, muttering like a right creep at all hours.” She makes mocking bows and curtsies, pretending to be Desmond, or whoever used to be in this body. When Desmond fails to react in any meanigful way to this news, she hovers closer, right at the edge of his nose to peer into his many eyes. "What's wrong with you?" she asks again, a little more mystified. "Don't you remember? Aren't you angry?" Desmond pulls back until he’s no longer cross-eyed looking back.

“Nope,” Desmond admits, seeing no reason to lie. “Whole new person, me. I’m Desmond.”

“Dolly Dolly Dolly,” the fairy returns.

“Any chance I could shorten it to just one Dolly?”

Dolly Dolly Dolly ignores that. “Hmm. You sound different. Your eyes look different to. Less insane. And you did let me out. Hmmm.”

Desmond lets her think for a little while, and tries to leverage himself up again, one hand against the wall this time. He wobbles precariously but manages to stay standing even when he lifts his hand. Improvement!

“Fine,” Dolly Dolly Dolly says. “I won’t kill you. And I’ll even throw in a gift, just because I’m so nice. One good turn deserves another. Tell me what you want.”

Desmond opens his mouth to say, nothing, really, but teeters a little bit too far and makes a controlled descent back to the floor. His chitin is pretty tough, so it doesn't bruise anything except his pride. “You know,” he says, looking down at his splayed-out spider legs. “I’d actually really appreciate it if you could teach me how to walk.”

Chapter Text

Dolly Dolly Dolly, despite being a three-inch tall being of magic and pixie dust, seems unable to just magic the information on how to successfully pilot spider legs into his head.

In fairness, she had warned him. On the other hand, her best solution to this was to turn him into a more manageable animal, like a sheep, or maybe a frog. “Four legs must be easier to use than eight,” she had said.

“Impeccable logic,” Desmond had returned. “But I don’t actually want to get any less human than I am already, thanks.” He'll have to figure it out the old-fashioned way, through time and practice. In the meantime, a favour from a pixie seems like something that'll come in handy one day.

First order of business was getting out of the cramped room into a place with a flat floor and square-footage larger than two of him, so Desmond could have some actual space to practise moving. Well, no, actual first order of business was getting him standing, which involved squeezing the legs either side of him close together, like an accordion, and teetering precariously on the (very sharp) points of them, and then second order of business was opening the door and performing an odd manoeuvre where he had to both straighten his legs so the splay wouldn’t make him too wide, and bend at the waist so the extra height wouldn’t make his head collide with the doorframe.

Third order of business was sitting down again and staring around corners.

“Are we in a castle?” A creepy, broken down, cobweb filled castle, but a castle nonetheless. And full of people in really suspicious cult-like robes patrolling the corridor. “Are we in a cult castle?” Desmond amends. Thankfully, none of the cult people see him peeking. They all looked relatively human, so no colony of spider-people like Desmond had been half-expecting.

“Yeah. Right old windbags, the Absolutists,” Dolly Dolly Dolly tells him from where she’s hiding in his (white! Desmond hopes he’s not inside a spider-pensioner or something) hair, masking her glow enough that she’s down from flashlight to a more reasonable shaded lamp. “We’re in Moonrise Towers.”

Desmond squints at a pair of cultists wearing very tall hats, one a woman of average height and the other a very tall man with green skin and tusks. He wonders if…

After a moment of effort, Eagle Vision does flicker on, turning the world a familiar muted not-colour with only the faintest outlines of texture, and turning the people into ill-defined blobs of red. A very deep, dark red. Hooray for the resilience of mystical Isu bullshit! He’d have survived without Eagle Vision, but it’s good to know he doesn’t have to.

“They’ve killed a lot of innocents,” he mutters out loud, and Dolly Dolly Dolly scoffs in his ear.

“Killed a lot of innocent pixies, definitely. Shredding us up for our dust.”

That reminds him, actually. “Are there more of those lanterns? We should go and free them.”

There’s a strange silence before she answers, and event then her voice is uncharacteristically subdued, nearly bitter. “No. All the others are dead. Glorified lamp oil.”

Desmond considers giving her a comforting pat on the shoulder, but the danger of crushing her with his comparatively massive hand is too high when he can't even see her. He settles for an awkward hum, instead.

“Hey,” he says after what feels like a respectful amount of time has passed, “you should hide somewhere that isn’t my hair for a little bit. I’m gonna go kill those guys.”

“What?” A tiny hand pinches at his earlobe. “Really?”

“Yeah. Seems like I should.” Standard tutorial baddies, medium empty space, starter sword. It’s such a familiar set up that Desmond’s getting nostalgic – any moment now, he expects Rebecca in his ear explaining the new Animus update.

It’s a pretty simple set up. He can’t go to them, so he makes them come to him. He clatters the big fuck off longsword he found in his room against the wall a couple of times and then crouches just around the corner (though even crouching is nearly equivalent to his old standing height). The Green Giant is the one sent to investigate, and when he’s close enough, Desmond yanks him around the corner by an arm and pulls him chest first through the blade.

Somehow, it doesn’t kill him immediately. The Green Giant’s flailing and gurgling is loud enough to attract the other cultist, who shouts, “Hey! What’s going on –” and then rounds the corner and sees her buddy being stabbed and immediately throws a handful of fire at Desmond’s head.

It doesn’t take much effort for Desmond to turn the sword and also Green Giant, still flailing on the end of it. The fireball hits him in the back before it can even mildly singe Desmond, but this also means that Desmond doesn’t get to see the fireball.

“Woah,” he says, pulling the big guy cultist closer towards him (and incidentally, pushes the sword further through him, which still doesn’t kill him, wow is this guy hardy) to peer over his shoulder to see the flames start to spread across his back. “Do that again!”

She's already preparing another one, and Desmond ducks back behind his meat shield to watch the fireball sail over his head and dissipate against a stone wall. Awesome, he thinks, and absently yanks his sword out of big guy’s chest and shoves him hard towards the fire lady. She dodges to the left, not even glancing towards where the other guy’s toppled over like a tree, and pulls out a crossbow. She’s not a very good shot, and Desmond doesn’t even have to duck the bolts as he swings the longsword at her.

She doesn’t manage to dodge that, though neither does her head roll off of her shoulders like Desmond had been aiming for. The air around her is weirdly sticky, like a magnetic field repelling his blade, and though the swing still connects, it’s a much shallower cut than it should have been. She stumbles, crying out, and Desmond uses the opportunity to drive the sword through her chest, compensating for the field this time by adding the full force of his weight behind it, and then she’s dead.

By this point, the green guy’s managed to get standing again, somehow, and bellows, “Dolor!” and a big bolt of black and green lightning hits Desmond squarely in the chest.

It looks sick as hell, but ow. Desmond hooks one big spider leg behind green guy's knees and pulls, sending him toppling again, and stabs him right through the face.

Desmond coughs and chokes a little bit while Dolly Dolly Dolly comes down from the rafters to cackle madly and maybe dance on the corpses, he’s not really paying attention.  

Harder than expected! Not tutorial level at all! But dead is dead, and Desmond is evidently not useless in a fight even without his legs, so that’s something. He pats the corpses down, takes anything he thinks will be useful, shoves them into the room he woke up in and closes the door.

Two small coin purses and a crossbow richer, he teeters further down the hallway and to a window.

“What’s up with that?” he asks Dolly Dolly Dolly, who’s back in his hair. The sky is dark and yawning, and everything fades into a sickly haze almost as soon as where the lights around the castle stop. It’s the most unnatural darkness he’s ever seen, suffocating and absolutely still. Nothing moves, nothing shifts, except for faint pinpricks like anaemic stars flicker sometimes from the depths of the mist.

“Sorry, I keep forgetting you’re addled,” Dolly says, much cheerier now that there’s been bloodshed. “The Shadow-Cursed lands. Nothing grows and nothing survives, except the worst of the worst. It’ll eat you up and spit you out stranger. Unless you have pixie light to protect you, of course.”

“Spooky.” It's still kind of awesome, in a terrifying and dangerous way, but the prospect of actually going into the mists is not one he's looking forward to. Desmond turns away from the window. “So, what’s the rest of the –” he starts to ask and then gets distracted by the big purple eyeball approaching them, whirring quietly but intensely.

“Oh, fuck,” he hisses, and teeter totters away from it as fast as he can down a random hallway. He glances back. It’s still following, unblinking and weirdly shiny. “Oh, fuck, I don’t like that at all.” It looks weird and gives him bad vibes, which are objectively ridiculous reasons, but Desmond's gut-feelings are finely honed and have never failed him, so: fuck that thing, whatever it is.

“Down the stairs!” Dolly urges, and Desmond’s already got four spider feet on the first step before he even considers how bad of an idea that is, and by then it’s too late. He rolls down the stairs gracelessly, onto a landing with yet more cultists and spindles past their shouts of surprise down another random hallway. At one point, someone tries to stand in front of him, only to bounce straight off of his carapace.

“Is it gone?” he whispers urgently, but Dolly just giggles. He barrels into a blessedly empty room and collapses against the door.

The whirring noise moves through the hallway outside without stopping.

***

Sneaking around as a massive spider is pretty difficult, actually. It’s even worse when he can’t reliably walk in any one direction for more than five paces without falling over or listing massively to one side.

It takes a lot of standing around corners and waiting for opportune moments, but somehow, Desmond manages to clear out his entire floor of enemies. There’s one scary moment when he hears someone coming around the corner towards him and reaches out to grab them, only to miss by about four feet, and look down to see an actual, literal, pointy-eared goblin staring at him, eyes growing wide as she opens her mouth to scream. He’s only just quick enough to close a hand over her throat.

Spider body is very strong, he learns.

Next floor down is impassable. By now, the cultists have started to notice something's up, and they keep sending more and more groups up the stairs to fetch the others who haven’t come down, and there’s a medium sized cluster of what Desmond assumes are their annoyed superiors tapping their feet on the landing below.

Ten minutes after they send goon number five up and he doesn’t come back, they send an actual giant. Giantess? In any case, a Very Big Lady.

Desmond, peering through the keyhole from inside his corpse-hiding room as the VBL clomps around, dragging a club the size of his torso behind her, is not confident in his ability to take her out quietly. It’s not only that he’s less effective like this, though he absolutely is. Close quarters fighting is difficult to do when he’s so large and his only weapon is a zweihander, and his mobility is a joke when he’s essentially fighting sitting down, but even with those handicaps, he could get by on strength alone for most enemies. But something is fundamentally different here.

A stab in the throat, heart, head, all of them should be a death sentence, swift and quiet. But they’re not. Here, with these enemies, no one is dying like they should, taking too many hits to too many vital places and shrugging it off, and the problem only grows relative to size. There’s a general trend – the bigger they are, the hardier they get, even when it just doesn’t make sense for them to be able to fight through a sword to the carotid.

Maybe he could kill VBL. But it would be loud, and long, and send twenty other people running to get him, and he wouldn’t live through that.

“Any ideas?” he mutters to Dolly. He doesn’t think it has occurred to the VBL to open doors yet, even the ones with very large and obvious bloodstains leading to them, so they have a little time to plan.

“Dolly?” he asks, turning away from the door. It takes him a moment to locate her glow near the floor, hovering over a hole in the ground, and he drags himself closer to look down it with her. They’re above what looks like the fantasy equivalent of a meth-lab. A very fancy, evil meth-lab, with wall sconces and big bookcases and a treasure chest in the corner, but also a lot of crystalline build up on beakers and glass vials connected by jumbling, twirling tubes. On the desk, there’s something like a pentagram – and what must have caught Dolly’s eye – dishes and dishes of dead pixies.

***

It takes a good long while to chip away at the eye sized hole in the floor, and even then, Desmond only gets it wide enough to fit his arm before he’s forced to call it quits. The mortar is loose and crumbles easily, but the flagstones are almost completely whole, and solid enough that he’d need a lot more force and better tools than the hilt of his sword to get through.

The ceiling is too tall for Desmond to reach the even the top of the tallest bookcase, let alone the chest or the table, but Dolly flits down easily. They don’t speak. VBL is shambling slowly around in the hallway just outside the door, and Desmond doesn’t want to risk it, so all he can do is watch silently as Dolly lands on the edge of one dish and touches a tiny hand to one of the pixies and pops it out of existence. She goes around the pentagram and then flits to a corner Desmond hadn’t noticed and vanishes a couple more tiny bodies from there too, before landing in front on a particularly twirly tube and staring at a shelf of bottles on the wall. She picks one of the smaller ones, which is still a little bigger than her whole body, filled with a pale swirling liquid, and flies back up through the hole to drop it in Desmond’s hand.

“Drink it, and move quickly,” she whispers in his ear, and then floats up to the ceiling.

He glances dubiously at the bottle and back up at Dolly, who makes a fully body ‘hurry up!’ gesture at him. Eagle Vision makes both the bottle and her glow gold, which doesn’t necessarily mean that Dolly isn’t tying to feed him poison, just that if she is, it’s a very important poison. But she’s been remarkably helpful and only turned her obvious sadism against people who aren’t Desmond, so it’s probably fine. He drinks the potion.

It's like someone threw a cold egg at his chest. Desmond drops the bottle, tries to catch it, misses completely because his hands are invisible, and it shatters noisily on the ground. The Very Big Lady shoves the door open hard enough to take it off its hinges and scans wildly about. “Who’s there?” she grunts, eyes skipping over him completely.

Invisibility potion. Awesome.

As the giantess pokes about at the corpses, Desmond very quickly and quietly shambles out of the door and down the hallway, Dolly following above him. He half-slides, half-topples down the stairs, which is impossible to make completely silent, but only one guy notices over the noise of conversation to frown through Desmond. Desmond doesn’t stop. He can nearly feel the time limit ticking, and it’s not going to be enough to get him to the next floor down. He rushes through the first door on his right into a library.

There’s a single green, tusked woman with electric blue hair sitting at a desk who looks up and frowns when she hears the door close, and Desmond stumbles quickly past her to try to get through another door. But he's out of luck - it’s firmly locked, and the rattling of the handle makes the woman spring out of her seat in alarm. She’s cottoning on, reaching for a weapon and Desmond maybe panics a bit and jumps on her.

It’s more of hard fall, really, but it does the job. Just as the invisibility wears off, Desmond crushes both her and the table, driving the breath from her lungs and turning what would have been a shout of alarm into a wheeze of surprise.

“Really sorry about this,” he says as he tries to bash her head in with the hilt of his sword. It dazes her enough that he gets three hits in before she can do anything. Her left hand is somewhere under Desmond’s thorax, but her right is open, and she manages to leverage her upper torso up off the floor to grab the axe strapped to her back and swing up at him. Desmond leans his upper body out of the way, which tilts his weight just enough she can roll him off of her completely.

There’s a very undignified moment of scrambling as they both get upright (half-spiders apparently can’t get stuck on their backs like regular spiders due to the human spine getting in the way, but it’s still not easy) and then Desmond throws his sword at her. She dodges, and Desmond uses the movement to scramble to the right, cornering her in the angle between a bookcase and a wall.

“You fucking worm!” she yells hoarsely, as she gets him in one of his front legs. “You insane bastard, Kar'niss!”

“And how is that supposed to make me feel?” he yells back, catching her wrist and wrenching till he hears a crack.

She grits her teeth around a scream and tries to punch him in the face. Instinctively, Desmond snaps his teeth around her wrist, just grazing the skin. Nearly immediately, the edges of the thin cut go black and start to shrivel.

Venomous fangs. Neat.

She yanks both wrists out of his grip and leaps over the ruined remains of the table, making a break for the door, and Desmond sticks out a big spider leg to trip her, aims wrong, and stabs her through the calf instead. She topples to the floor, rolling immediately on to her back, but Desmond’s already on top of her again.

“No, wait –” she says desperately, and the sharpened tip of Desmond’s leg plunges through her throat.

Desmond surveys the damage and winces. He’s bruised and battered, and this corner of the library is too wrecked to hide, desk splintered and ink pots shattered. The noise is undoubtedly going to bring someone to investigate at any moment. Her corpse has a key and several pieces of parchment, all of which Desmond snatches before stumbling to the locked door. The key turns, thank fuck, and just in time – a floating eyeball phases through the door he entered from, staring unblinking, and shrieks an ear-splitting alarm.

Chapter Text

“So,” Dolly says, perched at the edge of an inkwell that rattles every now and then along with the thumping behind the door. “What now?”

Desmond grunts with exertion and tips another bookcase over in front of the door. If he wasn’t so busy picking his way around all the bits of gore and viscera to go get a desk to put in front of the other doors, he’d glare at her. This room really sucks. He thinks there’s an actual human heart on a pedestal over there. It seems like someone lives here – there’s an elevated corner of the room for a bed, almost fastidiously clean apart from the rumpled sheets. Whether the room’s occupant had become the hacked corpse or caused it is unclear – Desmond isn’t in the mood for investigating, either, even if he wasn’t on a time limit.

His barricade will only hold for so long.

“This is new record – not even twelve hours being alive again, and I’ve already got angry mobs after me,” Desmond huffs, mostly to himself, throwing a chair at the pile when he passes it, and the desk it was in front of too, for good measure.

“Mob is a little small,” Dolly muses, remarkably unbothered by the proceedings. “I’d say it’s more of a throng. Maybe a horde.”

Desmond ignores her, narrowly avoiding slipping through someone’s innards. Two of the three doors are rattling against their hinges, and Desmond tries the third – locked fast, of course. Something splinters and he glances back. He can hear indistinct yelling, and through the gaps in furniture, can see the doorframe is starting to give way. Fuck.

Desmond jiggles the doorknob one last time, then sits down and pulls out everything he’s been carrying to lay them on the floor. He scans them quickly – a note about someone named Balthazar, two scrolls with a circle of unreadable sigils etched on them, and a tiny pouch of coins. He has a crossbow and a handful of bolts left for it. The zweihander is probably still embedded in the bookshelf outside from his failed throw. It’s looking like bad odds: Desmond’s a good shot, but a crossbow is not his preferred weapon by any means, and it certainly won't be enough to take on a crowd.

“Ooh, Shatter. That’s useful,” Dolly says from over his shoulder, pointing at one of the two scrolls.

Desmond puts everything else away and holds up the scroll she’d pointed out. “You can read this?”

Dolly sighs deeply, like his idiocy is wearing at her. “Just rip it and think about where you want it to hit.”

It sounds pretty silly and like it's going to leave him holding a piece of ripped paper and nothing to show for it like an idiot, but what does Desmond know – he’s only been in fantasy world for a day, and nothing here has made sense. Exhibit A, spider-body.

The barricade behind him is only growing weaker. He focuses hard, and rips the scroll, which burns to ash and disintegrates in Desmond’s hands like flash-paper.

Immediately, the door in front of him explodes into woodchips.

“Jesus Christ!” It’s so loud – like the sound of a chainsaw taking on a small tree compressed to an instant of simultaneous noise. The splinters glance harmlessly off of his chitin, though Desmond can’t stop himself from jumping back and covering his eyes on instinct. “Literally how,” he mutters, reaching out to drag his fingers across the empty frame and powdered grout where the door had been as he passes through it.

Outside, on the battlements, it’s still dark. It hits him again just how strange and oppressive the sky feels. There’s no indication of a sun at all, and though there are sickly, bioluminescent pockets of light scattered about the landscape, it seems to Desmond that nothing should be able to grow here.

Desmond glances back behind him. The barricade has started to burn, the furniture falling away in chunks, and through the gaps he can see the faces of the mob. Desmond leans over the battlements to look down at dark, glinting water. He estimates the distance in his head. Spider-body is strong. Spider-body is hardy. He can make that. Probably.

“You’re going to split open like a tomato,” Dolly giggles, looking down with him.

“That is not helping!” Desmond hisses through his teeth, hefting his front legs on to the edge.

“Go on, do it. I’ll laugh till I’m sick.”

“You’re the worst. Has anyone ever told you that? That you’re the worst? Because you are.”

“Do it, do it, do it,” Dolly chants, and Desmond glances back again – the barricade has fallen apart, and the cultists are pouring through. He curses, turning to look back at the water. He’ll make it. The universe owes it to him to make sure he survives this, after all the karma he’s built up saving the goddamn world.

Desmond takes a deep breath, and lets himself fall.

***

The pervasive air of misery is as inescapable as it is wretched, and it shows no sign of abating anytime soon. Things have only gotten worse since stepping out of the Underdark, to Lae’zel’s great distaste – and the Underdark hadn’t exactly been easy.  

Nobody is enjoying the Shadow Curse, except maybe Shadowheart, who is being very obnoxious about her my lady’s and probably praying under her breath right now, the fool. But even her idiocy is not quite so potent to make her comfortable. She watches the darkness, same as they all do.

Light keeps the curse from reaching them, and between Lae’zel’s torch and Karlach’s glowing mace, there is enough to reach the whole group without forcing them to squeeze tight. Despite this, they are never very far from each other – the very air is oppressive, the darkness heavy. It’s both too loud and too quiet, with no birdsong, no wind in the dead air to dampen any noise. Their own footsteps sound thunderous as they crunch dead leaves and shards of bone under their boots. Nobody wants to wander from the group.

It’s the type of place to set one’s teeth on edge.

It’s the type of place that makes you wary of the sound of movement up ahead.

“Stay together!” a voice barks. “Stick to the light!”

Wyll, at the head of their group, ducks immediately behind an enormous trunk, and everyone else follows quickly behind, Lae’zel securing a position just behind. She douses her torch, better to have her hands free for a real weapon – Blood of Lathandar will cover them in light in Karlach’s hand, and the woman they heard shouting is lighting a brazier that reveals their surrounding better, standing in the middle of what must have been a main road, now broken cobble and upturned carts.

The group they spy is armed and armoured and badly organised – half of them look a moment away from swinging wildly at their own shadows, despite clearly pretending to amount to some sort of militia, with matching symbols worn in brooches or engraved into pauldrons. It’s hard to see if the four in view are the extent of their numbers; the path they’re on is broken up by a massive twist of black vine, and more could be hidden around the bend of the path. Lae’zel leans a little further to get a better angle on their positions, and the shift makes Karlach adjust her footing, which makes Wyll shuffle a little to make space.

A pebble skitters. The woman who must be their leader snaps her head towards the noise like a bloodhound. “Stop!” she orders her party, and then, “Who’s there!?”

They all press themselves closer against the rock, holding their breath. Karlach makes some sort of hand signal, and then gives up when she notices the look of blank incomprehension on everyone else’s faces. Nobody dares to speak first, not even Lae’zel – though the others would likely try to gag her the moment she made the attempt. They do not admire the impression she makes on strangers. Wyll stares long-sufferingly at the sky, ignoring Shadowheart’s pointed glare. Lae’zel can’t imagine he finds anything interesting there. There aren't any stars strong enough to penetrate the cursed night.

“Come out!” the woman shouts, and Wyll winces like he is imagining his next words and already regretting them, but starts moving to step out anyway – and then stops. Everyone stops, even the woman, to listen.

Someone is singing. A deep voice, masculine, is singing from the shadows, a rich and ghostly sound.

The woman and her group all turn to face the direction it emerges from, raising their weapons shakily. Instead of falling into formation as they should, they spread even further out, some drawn to the sound and others stumbling away from it. As the singing grows louder, the words grow clearer. Despite the adult voice, it is clearly a children’s rhyme: a warning, set to an uncomplicated tune.

With the strangers facing the dark, there’s no point in hiding so carefully – everyone leans out from behind the tree to watch the threat to come into view. It’s still humming the same tune as the shadow of it sways closer, listing alarmingly side to side. He has a tall figure, though it should be too dark and too far away to make out anything at all. Some weak source of light makes his outline barely visible, though she cannot make out details – long-haired and proportionally humanoid in the torso, before suddenly ballooning outwards from the waist down.

A strange shape, and an even stranger gait, Lae’zel thinks to herself, frowning. She is adequately aware of most of the creatures of Faerûn by now, and the look of this one is not like any of them. And moving so unevenly as if drunk, or half-dead, though the words are not lisped as if from the mouth of someone exhausted or intoxicated. Very strange indeed.

“Halt!” the woman says, hefting her sword, and the figure obligingly halts, just out of clear view. “State your business here!”

“… just passing through,” the voice says, deceptively light and oddly accented.

The woman snorts, though it’s a thin sound, clearly posturing – she is afraid of him. “All on your own? Through to where?”

“Not sure yet.” Neither Lae’zel nor the woman miss how he dodges the first question. “I’m just a traveller. I’ll pass peacefully if you let me. The opposite direction from you, if you want.”

“Step into the light,” the woman orders, suspicious. Smart of her. Lae’zel would not trust such an accommodating stranger in the Shadowlands either. “Let me get a good look at you.”

“I’d rather not.”

The woman narrows her eyes and steps forward, regaining some of her earlier bravery. “Why? You got something to hide?”

“Nothing at all, if you let me leave.”

“And if we don’t?”

There’s a tense silence, only sounds of someone’s torch hissing quietly and the slow, careful shifting of hands to weapons.

The tension breaks suddenly: One of her men, the farthest from the light, screams in pain and falls to the ground, and blades are drawn before they even finish turning to face the threat. Someone particularly stupid looses an arrow in their shock, which sails harmlessly over the prone form of their fallen comrade, who does not even seem to notice, still wailing.

“Yonas!”

Yonas writhes on the floor, clawing at his own face, and the group are distracted enough by him to completely miss the looming shadow, formless and vapour-thin, approaching the bow-woman. It glides, legless, across the cracked ground, hands clawed and reaching towards her unprotected back.

Wyll launches himself from their hiding spot, rapier raised, before anyone can stop him. “Look out!” he yells, and the bow-woman snaps her head up, alarm transmuting to panic as she sees him running at her with a weapon. Several people also yell, jolting forward. Perhaps the only thing that saves Wyll’s life, and by extension her own, is the fact that her fingers fumble on the string, nearly dropping the arrow, for just long enough to let Wyll reach her and cut through the talons about to rake across her spine.

The shadow yanks its hand away, shrieking like the wind through dead trees. The bow-woman looks wildly between it, Wyll and finally at Yonas, who has stopped his noise to push himself falteringly up off the floor. “Yonas?” she says, in a trembling voice.

Yonas opens his mouth to scream the same long, wailing cry as the creature, eyes dark and skin cracked. The fresh drawn blood from the scratches on his face is already a dark and putrid colour.

“No, no!” the woman moans desperately, backing away, bow hanging forgotten from her fingers.

Yonas is cut off sharply by a crossbow bolt through his cheek. Lae’zel whips her head around to find the source, greatsword already in hand – it must have come from the stranger, though she still can’t make him out clearly, she thinks she can see he has his arm outreached to aim.

There’s no time to examine that, or let the woman and her soldiers examine them, though they clearly want to, wavering suspiciously in the direction of the many strangers. She backs quickly towards Wyll, Shadowheart and Karlach following her, their own weapons in hand. There was some psychic component to that scream, she can tell. It rings oddly in Lae’zel’s ears, settles behind her eyes, and others are beginning to notice too – they look anxiously out into the darkness, finding the odd solidity of a few dark shapes in strange corners.

Lae’zel bares her teeth, hefting her greatsword higher. “It’s summoned more – it’s an ambush!”

***

It’s just his luck, Desmond thinks, that as soon as he finishes killing the last of the evil smoke, one of the soldiers gets a clear look at him and screams, immediately making everyone else whip around to face the danger.

He gets it, he really does – he hasn’t managed to find anything like a real mirror, but he can see and feel enough of his new body to imagine. The multiple eyes, the thin white hair, and of course, the star of the show, everything about him from the waist down.

Nearly drowning in the river isn’t likely to have helped matters. It tasted bad, and smelled worse, still dripping wetly down his spine from his soaked hair. Dolly Dolly Dolly had found it so offensive to her tiny nose that she refused to hang around anywhere she could still smell him, which was a great excuse to fuck off back to Neverland and leave him with nothing more than a bell that makes him glow faintly and an IOU.

The smoke falls apart in his hands, losing density as the forelegs emerging from his hips slice upwards through where the guts would be on a human, but Desmond does not dare move to put his hands down. Slowly, he uncurls his claws and turns his palms outwards.

Surely even a fantasy world must understand the universal signal for ‘I surrender!’

Some people falter for a moment at the sight of his burned right hand, but no one backs down, so if the concept does exist here, they’re not going to honor it with him.

“Kar’niss,” a dark-haired woman spits, and Desmond recognises her voice as the same one that had questioned him earlier. “I should have known you had a hand in this.”

That’s the second time someone has called him by that word. A name, it must be, though not one that’s familiar to Desmond. And not one that follows any convention of any of the languages Desmond knows, either. It certainly sounds spider-y enough to match the aesthetic.

Desmond tries not to sigh. For all that spider-body is awesome and strong, it really sucks that the previous tenant had been such a massive dick and saddled Desmond with the fallout of his reputation. How’s he ever meant to have an actual conversation with anyone, if they all want to jam him full of blades for things that some completely different person did?

“I’m just passing through,” Desmond says placatingly, to very little success going by the way the woman’s mouth twists. “I didn’t call those things here any more than you did.”

As far as Desmond can tell, there’s two groups here – the woman and her crew in silver brooches, and four people in a team of their own. It’s not immediately clear to Desmond if they have a leader, or what their connection is to the other team – they stand together at a defined distance from the other group, and don’t seem to recognise him at all, and look at worst apprehensive and surprised by his presence, instead of incensed or pants-shittingly terrified like the brooch-gang.

Not one of them has a distinct colour in Eagle Vision. The silver team flicker between a hateful red to a passive grey, like they harbour evil feelings towards him, but aren’t actually awful people who kick puppies for fun and murder lots and lots of innocent people, like maybe they’re mostly normal people, generally not that important to Desmond in the grand scheme of things. The quartet are in the blue shades of potential allies, so light that it borders on barely visible – except for the spot of gold in every single one of their skulls.

Desmond frowns at them, squinting to try and see if the gold resolves itself as a mirage or something. It doesn’t. Usually, Desmond wouldn’t bother trying to make allies out of them - it would take a lot of work to turn that shade into the deep blue of real trust, a lot of time and effort he’s not particularly interested in investing, right now. But he’s interested in that spot of gold. He’s really, really interested in it. What could it mean, for four people to have that exact same object of interest lodged in their brains? It’s the type of mystery he’d love to latch on to – the kind that smells like conspiracy. Ah, nostalgia.

Besides, he’s not exactly swimming in options here. He can’t afford to be choosy about this the way Ezio could, picking his disciples out of the downtrodden and wronged of Italy like sieving through silt for gold nuggets, and it’s not like Desmond’s attempting to rebuild the Brotherhood from the ground up out of these people. He just needs someone willing to do him a solid every now and again, maybe explain a few things about where the fuck they are and what the fuck is happening. If he gets a meaty mystery to solve in the meanwhile, even better.

“Liar,” the woman accuses, face growing dark with rage. “Liar.”

“Fine, sure,” Desmond says. “I did it. I called all those monsters to murder you and then helpfully stayed behind to fight them off. Does that make more sense to you?”

The woman blinks, startled out of her rage. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks, eyes flitting to his right hand. “Why are you – talking like that?”

Desmond really wishes this situation was less tense so he could groan into his hands without getting stabbed in the stomach for it.

“Where’s your lantern?” she asks suddenly, straightening like her spine’s been electrified.

Well, saying he freed the pixie he found inside it is probably just going to get her to shut down and call him a liar again, isn't it? “I left it behind when I escaped.”

“Escaped? You escaped the Absolute? How? Why?”

Desmond shrugs. "Felt like it."

“Who is he?” a tall, red-skinned woman interrupts. “What’s his connection to the Absolute?” She’s one of the group of four, the ones with the something in their heads. She’s got one horn, curving smoothly out of her head on one side of her face, with a few inches of the base of another on the opposite side, the surface of it mostly smooth like it had been cut, or ground down. She’s glowing a little bit too, though in a flickering way, like a flame – and Desmond realises that that’s exactly it, that a few dozen tiny round holes in her skin each let out a candle sized bit of fire that shrink and grow just the same as her chest rises and falls.

There’s no other word for it – it’s cool. It's really, really cool in a not-quite-real, comic book character sort of way. Desmond's grown quite attached to his spidery self now, but he's definitely considering her as a close second on his ranked list of 'bodies to be transported into when you die.'

“He – was the torchbearer,” the woman answers vaguely, still concentrated on examining Desmond, like she thinks she’ll find the answers in his face, or many eyes. “Kar’niss could ferry the cultists safely through the curse, and killed many of our Harpers while he was at it.”

“Desmond,” Desmond corrects.

The woman looks baffled. “What?”

“My name.”

She doesn’t seem to know what to do with that, still staring at him oddly. One of her people, a Harper, shifts his footing nervously and steps towards her. “Lassandra, we shouldn’t linger here.”

Lassandra nods absently, then seems to come back to herself a little more. “Right. You’re right.” She turns to face the group of mystery. “My thanks for your help – we would have died without it. There’s a safe haven we can show you, the only place for miles where you can sleep without fear. I can lead you to it, as soon as we –” she turns back to Desmond, “– deal with him.”

“No need to deal with me,” Desmond says, rolling his eyes. He pitches his voice louder so everyone can hear him say, “I surrender.”

Quietly, a shorter woman with her black hair in a high braid laughs, turning her face and covering her mouth with her hand. As the red-skinned woman elbows her, Lassandra's eyebrows climb up her forehead. Whatever it is Kar’niss would have done, it certainly wasn’t that.

A thought occurs to him, and Desmond grins. Lassandra shudders – right, spider fangs of venom – and Desmond tones it down a couple of notches. He doesn’t quite manage to wipe it off his face. He’s too excited. He’s always wanted to use this line!

With great relish, Desmond says, “I surrender. Take me to your leader.”

Chapter Text

Their leader, as it happens, is an older woman named Jaheira who wraps them all up in thick ivy the very moment they pass through the glowing dome that surrounds Last Light Inn.

Making plants grow instantly out of nothing but packed road dirt – agriculture must be absolutely wild here.

Jaheira raises her thin brows, coming to a stop a few paces away from Desmond, close enough for Desmond to notice her pointed ears and her tailored robes. They’re nice enough to make Desmond that much more aware of his own nakedness. Not that his modesty suffers much, what with all the natural armour covering him up, but damn, does he miss the Assassin get up.

Or better yet, his hoodie. He barely stops from sighing wistfully. He misses that hoodie. That hoodie had gotten him through some tough times – getting kidnapped, having his brain fried, the end of the world…

“For fuck’s sake,” mutters the dark-haired woman who’d laughed at him earlier. He thought her friends had called her Shadowheart, but maybe he’d been hearing things. “A simple hello would have sufficed.”

“Hello,” Jaheira says pleasantly, and the vines squeeze tighter around them. “Who are you, and why is the Drider with you?”

Fuck, okay, maybe they just squeeze tighter around Desmond in particular. The pressure crushes his arms to his sides, the chitin scraping against itself with an unpleasant noise.

“He’s not with us,” Shadowheart insists. “We don’t even know who he is.”

Lassandra steps forward nervously. “He surrendered, High Harper, and asked to be brought to you.”

Jaheira raises an eyebrow at Desmond. “Did he now? Well, Drider, what do you have to say?”

Desmond doesn’t hesitate. “I want to defect.”

Jaheira’s other brow goes up to join the first. “Excuse me?”

“I want to defect away from the cultists to the other side. You are the other side, aren’t you?”

“… I suppose we are.”

Desmond nods. “Great. I’ll help you kill those guys and then I’ll leave.”

The vines have loosened up considerably, enough that Desmond could probably pull them off entirely, if he wanted. He stays exactly where he is.

“You want to – kill Absolutists?”

Desmond shrugs. “Sure.”

“Why?”

“They seem evil, and you seem like you won’t let me leave alive unless I do something for you. Plus, I already killed a bunch of them back in their castle, so I’ve pretty much ruined whatever I had going with them before. In for a penny, in for a pound, and all that.”

Desmond can’t really make out the expression on Jaheira’s face. “How? How is it possible?”

“I had a big sword. That helped.”

Jaheira doesn’t even seem to hear him. “The tadpole should make you unable to even think of…” She pulls a round, stoppered flask out of her pocket, as big as her fist. Inside it, a strange worm floats in viscous fluid, pink and lumpy with a circular mouth of needle teeth. “It’s impossible. I have seen those with iron wills bend under the Absolute’s influence to commit horrors they condemned in the harshest terms, all the while believing it is of their own choosing.” She shakes the flask, and the worm twitches, starting to circle.

Desmond watches it suspiciously as Jaheira steps closer, holding the thing out like a beacon. The worm circles once, then stills.

Jaheira pulls it back, shakes it, pushes it towards him again. It does even less than before, barely deigning to twitch. In frustration, she shoves it in the direction of Shadowheart – and the thing perks up immediately, bumping up against the glass like it’s trying to chew its way through.

Pointing it back towards Desmond, and it plays dead.

Desmond blinks into Eagle Vision. Jaheira is, surprisingly, the light blue of a potential ally, and the worm a faint red. He looks back at Shadowheart as she grimaces – she remains the same blue with a spot of gold as the rest of her companions, though the gold is sort of… shifting.

Squirming, even.

Oh, god.

Oh, that’s so fucking disgusting. How did it even get in there? And for all of them?

“Well,” Jaheira says, consideringly, though her eyes are narrowed and her shoulders tight with tension. “It seems that someone is playing a very odd trick. Care to explain?”

It’s Wyll who takes control of the conversation. “We are infected, I won’t lie to you. But we are protected from the effects by –”

“Don’t!” Shadowheart hisses, but Wyll continues over her.

“– by an artifact. It shields us from the Absolute’s command.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t take you at your word,” Jaheira says tightly, and Wyll nods like he was expecting this. Shadowheart glares at him, furious, but moves to reach into her own pockets, which Jaheira allows, though the vines remain looped around her wrists, ready. She pulls out a strange box slowly, orange sigils etched on its many black faces, and cups it in her palms. She doesn’t whisper to it, doesn’t close her eyes and concentrate on a spell – she simply watches it, like they all do, and all on its own it rattles once, lifts a few inches in the air, and starts to glow.

The worm in Jaheira’s grasp goes into a fit, writhing terribly. Curiously, Jaheira holds it out, and it gives a nearly audible shriek before it just – pops. Like a slug in salt.

The blob in Shadowheart’s head makes a slow little wobble, curling up comfortably.

“Christ,” Desmond mutters, and shuts his second sight off. Shadowheart snatches the object as it starts to lower and shoves it into her pocket, grimacing.

Proof seems only to make Jaheira momentarily more angry. She throws the flask aside with a grunt, twisting her other hand to send the vines holding the party back into the earth. Desmond, of course, stays wrapped up tight.

“How does it work?” Jaheira asks, lips thin.

“It just does,” Shadowheart says shortly, and remains stalwart at Jaheira’s unsatisfied look. “We know as much about it as you do, believe me.”

Desmond doesn’t buy that that's anywhere near the whole story, and going by her expression, neither does Jaheira. But she visibly lets it go in favour of other matters.

“And you can promise me this protection won’t fail at any moment, knowing so little about it as you do?”

Shadowheart doesn’t get the chance to answer – a high, childish voice yells “Wyll!” and three little devil children come running. They look like that tall, buff woman, same red skin and long tails with spade shaped tips, but their horns are only little nubs, and they don’t have the candle flame like she does. Their size really does make them look like little cartoon devils – give them a pitchfork each and they’d win any Halloween costume competition, easy.

“You’re here!” one of them exclaims, bouncing up and down and pulling on his arm.

“You know him?” Jaheira asks, and one of the kids turns to frown at her, like, obviously.

“He helped save the grove! Didn’t leave a goblin standing!”

“Well,” Jaheira sighs, after Wyll has had his moment to reunite with the children and promised them he’d find to them later, but right now he was a little busy, “you have been vouched for. This earns you the benefit of the doubt.”

Wyll smiles at her, relieved “Thank you.”

“Which leaves only you.” Jaheira turns back to Desmond.

“Me,” Desmond agrees. “I don’t have a worm in my head, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“But you did have one, before. You would never shut up about your mistress, the Absolute.” Dolly Dolly Dolly had mentioned something similar, actually. Do the worms talk to their hosts? And Kar’niss thought it was, what, the voice of god? If Juno had had a line of communication direct to Desmond’s brain – well, maybe it isn’t so surprising Kar’niss turned out the way he did. “Am I meant to believe you simply removed it?”

Well, he obviously can’t say he just woke up and it wasn’t there, even though that would be the truth. What would be a believable lie…

“They experimented on me,” Desmond says, after a moment. He tries to keep his expression suitably hardened, maybe a little traumatised. “I don’t even remember what they wanted, but they didn’t get it. Things went… badly. When I woke up, the worm was gone – and so were the voices.”

Jaheira’s eyes flick to his cracked right hand, and Desmond tries not to curl his fingers reflexively. It’s better to let her look, to let her draw her own conclusions.

She looks back to his face. “And now, you come to us to help you enact your revenge?”

“I come to you to offer a mutually beneficial arrangement. The revenge is a bonus.”

This is the correct thing to say. Jaheira’s eyes give it away, even before she twists her wrist and the vines unwind. “Fine. Perhaps against my better judgement, I will – agree to hear you out. But there are terms to your stay here. You will not be permitted to carry weapons, and at night you will sleep in the cells, watched by guards. If I hear even a single word of threat leave your lips, I will kill you myself, understand?”

Hey, better than what Abstergo has given him. At least he gets to walk around outside during daylight hours, such as they are in a place like this, without sun. “Sure.”

Jaheira nods tightly. “Then, Kar’niss –”

“Desmond,” Desmond interrupts. “My name is Desmond.”

She inclines her head. “Desmond. Welcome to Last Light Inn. Do not make me regret this mercy.”

***

Nobody quite knows what to do with the Drider in their midst, and Wyll fares no better than anyone else. Most of Last Light is staring at the great bulk of him folded up at the bar counter, seemingly blind and deaf to his unsubtle watchers.

Nobody has seen anything quite like him before. “Nor should they have,” Gale says once he and Astarion have arrived and settled in with the rest of them at the table to drink and stare. “Driders are a rare sort, hardly found in the Underdark, which is their home, let alone on the surface, which is very much not.”

“I’ve seen one before,” Astarion says, tilting his goblet with a single finger on the rim.

Gale turns to him, eyebrows raised. “Truly? Where – and why?”

“Well I must retain some mystery, or otherwise where’s the fun?” Astarion’s half-smile falls from his face, and he lets the goblet clatter back onto its base. It’s already empty of wine. Wyll cannot be too astonished at his speed – he’s deep into his own cup, and it has been a very long day. “Lolth’s abominations have reputations. And, from my own experience, I have found they often earn them.”

They watch the Drider ask politely for a mug of beer from one of the terrified Tiefling children serving drinks behind the bar. The poor child’s hand shakes so much setting it down that half the contents slosh over the counter, and he’s scrambling away as soon as the coin is in his palm. The Drider sips at his drink and sighs.

“The Harpers say he’s an insane murderer,” Karlach muses, chin on her fist. “But I don’t think he seems the type.”

“He is certainly – very big,” Shadowheart says. Lae’zel grunts in agreement. Indoors, his massive size is even more noticeable against all the doorways and furniture, with him nearly as tall as two men and twice as wide – at least, his spider-half is wider.

Wyll has hardly met a person bigger. Monsters get that size sometimes, but not people – though on which side of that delineation the Drider falls isn’t quite clear. Monsters were predictable, for one: either you killed them, or they killed you. They didn’t just – sit at the tavern, drinking ale.

“Should we… talk to him?” he asks helplessly.

Astarion looks at him sharply. “Are you mad?”

“He must know something about the tadpoles that he didn’t tell Jaheira. We can’t just ignore him and move on.”

Astarion scoffs. “Oh, can’t we now?” But his heart’s not in it – even he can’t really manage to look away for long, and they’ve all travelled together long enough to recognise that this has all the markers of turning into a whole thing, and they’d better get ahead of it before it gets ahead of them.

Even so, Astarion still protests. “I say we leave well enough alone. Every single time we’ve met someone claiming to be able to remove the tadpole, it did not go well for us.” He points at his milky green eye, and then Karlach’s blue one savagely. He does not point at Lae’zel, likely because he assumes (correctly) that she’ll attempt to bite it, though the glare he gives her speaks well enough. Lae’zel bares her teeth at him, flushing. Wyll privately feels she deserves this. It was her own hard-headedness that had kept her in that machine far past the point of reason.

“Fourth time’s the charm?” Gale says, wincing.

They watch the Drider drain the last of his tankard and then begin shifting each individual leg into place, bending them at each of the many joints until they sit correctly and aren’t about to knock over several barstools and a table behind him, very carefully and deliberately pushing himself up. It looks a very involved process, and he’s clearly thinking hard about the mechanics of it – correcting his balance from the bottom up, like stacking blocks.

He turns and lumbers in an odd sway across the hall, to where Jaheira stands at a table of maps, watching him just as openly as everyone else.

Wyll drains the rest of his wine and goes to follow. Behind him, he hears the scrape of chair legs on flagstones, and Astarion hiss, “If it turns out badly, just remember – I was against this from the beginning!”

***

“So,” Desmond says, trying not to react to the fact that the whole bar is watching his every move. “What now, captain?”

“High Harper,” Jaheira corrects. Clearly, they aren’t at the nicknames stage yet, despite her persistent blue glow. “First, I thought we might share a toast.”

Desmond raises his eyebrows. “Are we celebrating something?”

“I’m old and wise enough to recognise a sliver of hope when it crawls out of the dark. If the tadpoles can truly be removed without killing the host… well. You might signify great change.”

Shit. That sounds uncomfortably familiar. He’s done the great change thing once before, and it really, really sucked, for almost everyone involved, but especially for Desmond. He’d rather not repeat that history if he can help it.

He picks up the goblet.

“To your very good health,” Jaheira says, taking up her goblet.

“Cheers,” Desmond replies, and drinks.

“Well over a century old and yet it hasn’t lost a hint of flavour,” Jaheira says after taking a sip. She sets the goblet down again. “The same cannot be said of you, however. Illithid tampering has changed you significantly. Thought he question remains at which point the most significant change took place – when they set the tadpole in your skull, or when they took it out again?”

He almost chokes on his mouthful of wine. No lead up? Not even a token effort at softening him up? “Does it matter?” he replies, picking his words carefully. “I am who I am now.”

Jaheira huffs. “Do not act as if what you did before has no bearing on you now. Even the tadpole only explains so much, and you were particularly – sadistic.”

Jesus, Kar’niss, what the fuck did you do to these people? “… like you said. I’ve changed a lot.”

She searches his eyes for a long moment. “Even more than first impressions would imply, I suspect.” She shakes her head. “But I suppose we have more pressing issues. Now, to business: you must know that we want Ketheric Thorm dead. How much do you know about the source of his invincibility?”

Desmond didn’t know that, actually, and doesn’t have a fucking clue who Ketheric Thorm is, but he senses that he probably shouldn’t admit that. “It isn’t the sort of thing he’d discuss with someone like me.”

Thankfully, this does not seem to surprise Jaheira. “It was mostly wishful thinking to hope otherwise, but… well. Thorm keeps his secrets close to his heart. Is there any possibility of returning to your post at Moonrise at a time? A spy in their ranks would be invaluable.”

“Not a chance. I didn't exactly make a clean getaway.”

“You killed many?”

“Enough that they won’t be forgetting about it any time soon. Besides, I would be a very conspicuous spy. People tend to notice me.” Exhibit a: this entire building full of people, none of whom have stopped staring and whispering for even a moment.

Jaheira tilts her head. “I see your point. This leaves me in a predicament, however. Not many of my Harpers are happy with my decision to allow you asylum at our safe haven, and more still will show their discontent if I do not soon prove that you can be more than a drain on our already limited resources. I cannot afford to keep you here until the inevitable but uncertain time of our raid on Moonrise towers. Even if I could, I’m certain several of my Harpers would take it upon themselves to ensure an unfortunate 'accident' befalls you before then.”

"Great. Awesome. I'll keep an eye out for knives in my back, then."

Jaheira smiles. “Just as my Harpers will watch for claws in theirs, I'm sure. My question is this: what can you offer us that would be significant enough to prevent such an outcome?”

Usually, when people demand things of Desmond, he's not the one who has to come up with what it is they want. They come to him and say get in the Animus, or go kill some Templars, or put your hand on the artifact. Having to choose what someone wants out of him is honestly a bit of a new one. “I could provide training for your soldiers?”

“I doubt you'll find many students willing to be taught by you. And we already have teachers of our own.”

“Put me on scouting, then, or patrols.”

“I could,” Jaheira concedes, “though I am not sure that will be enough. And an awful lot of things might happen out there in the dark.”

Spider-body sucks quite a lot, actually, if he's going to have to deal with all the shit Kar'niss did for the rest of his life. "Then I’m all out of ideas.”

“As am I,” Jaheira admits. “Personally, I would rather keep you alive. Your combat ability alone makes me unwilling to simply execute you, if the number of Harpers you’re credited with killing are to be believed, but I will prioritise the safety and sanity of the good people here over your life if it comes to it. It is a problem I advise you to think on.”