Letter 23

[lettersfrombel]

2829 Tarsakh 1492 DR
Near Rosymorn Monastery
Dear River:

I try to be grateful for small things. Like, thanks to Lae’zel, I not only learned about the githyanki, but I got to see one of their creches, an opportunity few non-githyanki receive. Right as we crossed the threshold, and Lae’zel claimed her right to use their infirmary, we ran into a couple of adolescents talking. It does not seem to be a happy place to grow up, but… it is harder to resent a childhood when everyone around you has a similar one. Ask me how I know. Or maybe everyone down to the children are on edge because the artifact Shadowheart stole is apparently Very Important, and the githyanki higher-ups are in everyone’s business about finding it, and even the trainees are feeling the atmosphere.

I am reminded of my own childhood, and not in pleasant ways. I don’t know if I can be reminded of my childhood in pleasant ways, to be fair. We walked in on one of the teachers disciplining a youth, for being unwilling to fight a classmate to the death without a better explanation for ‘why’. No, I was never asked to do that by my uncles, but there was the assumption that if I or my cousins, or whatever promising commoners they brought in to swell our numbers died in training, it was likely our own fault for not being better. I asked Lae’zel about it, and she said the main difference between this and her own creche was that her teachers saw no point in directly trying to murder the students, but didn’t care if the students killed each other, because it would weed out the weak and the overly arrogant. That isn’t exactly better.

Their reasoning is that the githyanki are only as strong as their weakest member, but I have learned there is a strength in knowing that someone won’t try to kill you if you slip up. If you do not tolerate mistakes, that only teaches your students to hide them. Anyway, I managed to be sufficiently annoying to cause the teacher to decide to just order the young man to sharpen the swords, and single me out as an example of why the people of this world are lesser beings. Which… do you know how refreshing it is to be condescended to and know it has nothing to do with me being male or drow?

I did stop to chat with the young man, who told me he had found a hidden book in a visiting warrior’s armor, which told of some legendary githyanki prince who did have traits like compassion, and apparently my silver tongue reminded the young man of him. It… River, I was reminded of my brother Harlkyn so very badly, I think I would have fought the whole damned place for this child I barely met. Because even if I stayed his execution for the moment, he is going to die like my brother did if he doesn’t learn how to at least maintain the facade of what is expected of him, but I didn’t know how to tell him that, or even if he’d listen to some strange outsider. I also imagine that, unlike drow, githyanki do not train their children in deception against their own people — witness Lae’zel’s attempts to lie — though surely some ability to mislead is necessary in combat.

We also may have come into possession of a githyanki egg. No, I’m not giving it to the human we met the other day; I’d rather cut off my own balls and try to pass those off to her. Apparently the caretaker of the eggs and the leader of the creche are having a standoff on if the egg will hatch at all, and the caretaker is aware he is running out of time. Unhatched eggs are destroyed. The man was clearly desperate enough to trust anyone who wasn’t going to kill or sell it, though he was not impressed with me vowing to raise it like my own flesh and blood rather than find some other creche. I don’t know if one would take a random egg, especially from some traveller. (I wouldn’t even know where to find one; Lae’zel’s is apparently in orbit around the planet.).

I gave the egg to Lae’zel, who admits that she also has no business caring for an egg, but at least we both know she’ll keep it safe. I also have some fun facts about githyanki reproduction, which sounds dreary as it apparently is entirely separate from sex, and largely comes down to their queen ordering certain githyanki to certain creches to lay eggs or whatever. I suspect being pregnant, or whatever you call it when you are forming an egg, is a distraction from the warrior’s life, but I can’t say that I’d want to be ordered to become a father, and my part in creating a child is far easier than pushing something that big out of my body.

Lae’zel insisted on trying the creche’s machine for ‘purification’. It didn’t work; it did nearly fry her brain. She’s got some lingering damage, which I intended to take out of the creche leadership’s hide, because from what little I can glean from this, the device may have been more intended for killing infected githyanki than in ‘curing’ them. I suspect if I could get their healer alone with some sharp objects, I might even get her to admit that. Now, River, you know I didn’t take it personally when Nettie tried to kill us in the Grove because she couldn’t do a thing about the parasites. What I take personally is that if the healer told Lae’zel that there was no cure, and the best hope for the githyanki people was for Lae’zel to be killed so her body and parasite could be studied, Lae’zel would have agreed to have her throat cut out of duty to her people. That is what I object to; that it was a lie to someone who didn’t need to be lied to. Despite Lae’zel’s protestations to the contrary, I managed to convince the healer that she was cured, and in her interest in what had just happened, she managed to forget that Lae’zel mentioned the rest of us were also infected.

(Thanks to Junior and the other parasites, I was getting a close to first-hand experience of what kind of pain Lae’zel was in. I tried to use the link to either persuade Lae’zel to leave, or to do something to the machine myself, but I failed. Even if I can do basic tasks to protect people, like the egg and the young man in the classroom, I still am not strong enough to protect my friends. I don’t think I could have stopped Lae’zel from volunteering, but maybe I could have kept her from getting hurt so badly.)

Lae’zel is still convinced that this is all some kind of test of her personally, and that those who stand in her way are either traitors or parts of the test. I think her faith is wavering, which is why she is trying to justify it so hard rather than accept that those she put her faith into do not deserve it. This is after we killed that inquisitor because I refused to give him the artifact that’s keeping all of us sane. And who should appear but some kind of illusion of Lae’zel’s Queen Vlaakith herself, to command us to go inside the damned thing and kill the occupant. She claimed she needed us to do so because it was stopping her from stopping the mind flayers. She isn’t wrong that this new ability, to infect people and then trigger ceremorphosis at some later date makes mind flayers a lot more dangerous: while they can still control people without infecting them with a tadpole, this does seem to have increased the scale. Since I had a few questions to ask myself, I lied and said I’d do it.

The person inside seems to be our friend from our dreams, though he would only speak to me. I suspect because he used a different guise for each of us, and couldn’t do that ‘in person’, and for whatever reason, I seem to be the leader of the group. His story is that Vlaakith can’t replicate the initial feat that freed the githyanki, done by ‘Mother Gith’, the race’ s namesake, but apparently he can. The githyanki think Vlaakith can, of course, so proof she is full of shit would cause a civil war. Lae’zel accepted my memories of the encounter as proof that at least I believed this, even if she is… well, I hope she is on the fence at this point. As for myself, at this point I suspect Vlaakith’s solution is ‘kill everyone that might have a parasite in their heads and expect the rest of Faerun to be grateful’, so for the moment I’m siding with the person keeping us free. I don’t trust him fully, but I trust him more than Vlaakith.

We did escape, though it involved killing a lot of the creche’s leadership and guards, which at least means I got my revenge on what they did to Lae’zel. Between that and Vlaakith knowing we have this artifact, we probably have a target on our back right now. Good thing we’re heading into inhospitable country. Of course the bad thing is that we’re heading towards the Absolute’s stronghold, and they probably would like this thing as well. So, well, if these letters suddenly stop, you know why, dear River.

Your lucky friend,

Bel


PS I’m writing this postscript the next morning. I want to tell you what happened last night, dear River, but it is serious enough that I don’t want to commit it to paper. Suffice to say, I had some of my suspicions about githyanki purification confirmed, enough to suspect that when we encountered Kin’rath Voss, his attempts to have us all killed were to spare us the walk to the creche. My statements about Vlaakith stand. I suppose the flaw in being a deceptive person who wants a loyal army is that one doesn’t realize that you don’t need to deceive them if enough of them are loyal. At least among the drow, we learn young that we cannot expect loyalty from those above us, save for that rooted in practicality or possessiveness, so our own loyalties are rooted in practicality. My own devotion to my companions, past and present, is an act of rebellion.

From the Player:
A lot happened here, and it gave Bel feelings. He already empathized with Lae’zel over growing up feeling like one was worthless until one ‘proved’ one’s worth to one’s superiors, and the idea that weakness must be stamped out (including letting the weak die). Bel was one of those people who fell in line: he never found the beliefs comfortable, but accepted them as ‘this is how things are’. Bel’s younger sibling (assigned male at birth, but actually nonbinary — Bel does not know this) pushed back, and eventually ran off before their defiance got them killed. Hence Bel being determined to save Varrl, the trainee who had found a book about Orpheus and imprinted on him. And feeling uncomfortable that apparently this kid thought Bel was amazing for being able to deescalate a conflict to save him, while Bel is all ‘I can’t stay here to teach you this, and it might not work for you, please do not get yourself killed trying to copy me’ flailing.

Bel feels better about the githyanki egg, even if he entrusted it to Lae’zel. Bel does have parental instincts, but he also figures that while Lae’zel isn’t a caretaker, she at least might have memories of githyanki infants to make some sort of guesses. Or at least some biological knowledge — do we need to leave it in brine like in the hatchery? Can githyanki infants eat solid food when hatched? While Bel is aware that the egg’s odds are better with them than back in the hatchery, he’d stiller rather not fuck it up. (Also, he agrees with Lae’zel; that egg is going nowhere near Esther.)

Bel also feels guilty about letting Lae’zel go in the zaith'isk, because he had his misgivings about the damn thing based on both Halsin and Omeluum being clear that the tadpoles could not be removed without killing their hosts, thanks to the magic on them. He knew Lae’zel did trust her people, and wouldn’t see any red flags, but she is an adult and Bel tries to treat people as competent. Like, logically he knows that she wouldn’t trust him over an expert of her own people, but emotionally he wonders if he could have done something beyond ‘trick the doctor into believing that Lae’zel’s parasite was fried before the zaith'isk was blown up. Also the fact that Bel failed all his rolls so the Dream Visitor had to blow the damned thing up also meant that the party is now out of parasite specimens — Bel had been avoiding using them, but when he gets freaked out by his own weakness, he can be talked into grabbing them. (He still won’t force them on other people, even if they might undo the damage to Lae’zel’s mind.)

Ironically, I lost a save to something stupid where Bel rolled a critical success on the first roll, convincing Lae’zel to get out of the zaith'isk right away. But then we picked a fight with the folks in the infirmary, AND refused to give the creche leader the Astral Prism, even just to get her to unlock the door, and we had Shadowheart with us (so had to deal with her wolf phobia). So Bel got the timeline where no one died (except Lae’zel in retrieving the Blood of Lathander, because I wasn’t careful about where she was positioned), but Lae’zel gets brain damage.

Bel takes personal loyalty pretty seriously, as he notes in his postscript. Honestly, I suspect he’s processing the same feelings he had when he realized that he couldn’t trust the adults in his life to look out for his best interests if those differed from their desired use of him, but was still young enough that he had to depend on adults to not die. And it’s easier to get angry on behalf of someone else.

Bel isn’t including their encounter with Kin’rath Voss as Bel isn’t getting that on paper; he doesn’t think Vlaakith will intercept his mail, but why chance it. He is all on board for ‘let us ruin what Vlaakith has going for her’, and is honored and touched that the thing that seemed to tip Lae’zel over to ‘I am not betraying Vlaakith, Vlaakith has betrayed me’ was Bel confirming Voss’s description of purification with his own observations. Because that was probably the first time Lae’zel showed that she trusted Bel more than one of her own people. Like, as far as Bel is concerned, the Astral Prism and its occupant stays with them until they no longer need the protection from the Absolute, but, sure, let’s have a revolution on the astral plane, and screw over a would-be god.

Death count for characters is so far 3. Karlach slipped off back when exploring the back route to get to the part of the Emerald Grove where Sazza was being held. Wyll was killed when Philomeen detonated the runepowder. Lae’zel was pushed off a ledge while I dealt with the Blood of Lathander puzzles. So far, if we ignore total party wipes, I’m having a lot more problems with gravity than enemies. I might have to do a summary of relationships/decisions for the next post.