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Three lights in the dark. Red eyes cutting through the gloaming haze of a hundred-year old temple, carved deep into the very belly of Toril. Bones clutter the ground here; the spidery remains of fish and serpents turn to dust beneath the weight of bones from creatures a thousand times their size. A graveyard. An altar.
Deet can never remember much about it—even in his dreams, the chamber is enveloped in shadows and mist and he’s as uncertain as ever if that is his doing, or the creature. He recognizes the dream-fog and the way the bones bite into knees and the hastily-tied rope bites into his wrists. Deet has spent the better part of a year kneeling on these bones, wrists bound with rope twisted from pale water weeds and fish guts. He can never stand, no matter how much he wants to, and his legs refuse to go numb. He can only endure the pain.
This One is waiting, drowling. As always.
“Can—can you repeat the question?” Deet’s voice is hoarse.
Very well. There is a ripple of mirth in his mind that makes Deet shudder. This One generously offers power and freedom to one of you creatures. You will complete your tasks. Pay your portion of your debt. Go free. The other belongs to Ithaamar. Forever.
“No, that’s not—not what you said,” he chokes around the words, his throat tightening with shame. He isn’t surprised it’s doing this, but he’s already dreading how this ends.
“But that’s what you heard, isn’t it?” Deet cannot bear to look at him.
“It isn’t,” Deet replies in a whisper he shouldn’t have been able to hear. But it’s his dream and his punishment, so of course he does.
“Then you’re as witless as ever,” he says. No rancor—just disappointment, like he’s resigned to it. “That’s why it wouldn’t let me speak, you know. I was prepared for this. You never are.”
Deet imagines him shaking his head. In his imagination, he’s as beautiful as he ever is, with white gold hair pristine, elegant horns polished to a sheen, and his face like cut crystal that had caught the setting sun. It’s better than the truth.
“I’ll fix this,” Deet starts to say, but he cuts him off with a laugh as sharp the sneer he pictures on his face.
“You. Really?”
“I will,” he replies, with slightly more conviction. He squeezes his eyes shut to resist the temptation to look at the man beside him. “I’ll strike a new deal with it. I’ll bring you back—”
“Forgive me, Deet, if I don’t hold my breath—oh, wait. I don’t have to anymore.” Deet is suddenly enveloped in long, clammy limbs, sticky with mucous. Once-golden skin that burned like a hearthfire is ice-cold and colorless in the murk of the Underdark. Webbed and strangely rubbery fingers dig into his arms and grip his jaw and still he refuses to look at him. When he speaks, his voice is wrong in Deet’s ear—everything is a new shape, serves a new function. “Admit it, you were afraid of this. Afraid of Ithaamar. You couldn’t wait to run away, back to the surface.”
He can’t deny it. Running is all Deet ever seems to do.
“I love you,” he says, instead. Deet never did say it enough, before things ended. When he speaks again, he sounds exactly like he did that last night by the campfire.
“I don’t think I do.”
And it’s that that finally wakes him up.
* * *
Deet opens his eyes to the shifting colors of late summer, as a wind from the mountains drags its cold fingers through the early-turning leaves. He shakes the stiffness from his body, turns over last night’s fire with the toe of his boot, and pulls up what remains of his austere little camp. A year of these dreams has left him haggard. Deet had really started to enjoy sleeping, living in Baldur’s Gate; he’d had a cozy room there, his own pillow, half a bed to himself, and no reason to get up early in the morning. Still, it hasn’t taken Deet long fall back into old habits out here. A strange sort of homecoming this is—on the road again, after so many years.
He shrugs on his pack and—against his better judgment—lets his mind wander. The era of the “Red Drow” is over. No more jobs; now he’s just… this. He has been away from Baldur’s Gate for so long now, he wonders if everyone thinks he and Kammon are dead. Not for the first time, he wonders if that wouldn’t be easier for them all.
Ithaamar has set him on a long trail that it suspects will end with mindflayers. His instructions are only to gather information and for that, Deet is grateful; he’s never met a mindflayer face-to-face and he’s keen to keep it that way. From the way his patron’s thoughts shudder when it speaks of them, it seems to feel the same.
Eventually, he’ll return to the Underdark in the flesh—back down to Bul-Purrup Trench and the bone temple and to Ithaamar.
Until then, he’ll plan.
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