Spider Queen - love triangle, faith crisis and cliffhanger

Surrounded by heavily armed drow warriors in a drow temple at the heart of the demonweb pits on the 66th layer of the Abyss is probably not the ideal place to have a midlife crisis.

If pushed, Sorrel would – after pushing you back – struggle to think of anything it would be the ideal place for, except teleporting the fuck out of there.

But then, Sorrel was beginning to think this whole mission ranked fairly low on the Sorrel’s Top Life Choices of All Time chart. Or would have done if she’d had a choice.

When Lord Jaezred had asked her to enter the Underdark on a task from the Witching Court he had offered up the Summoning Stone – her gift to him when his money helped her ensure her own death, if necessary. His role in Sarin’s exorcism of the Hunger Spirit, however, had rendered the Stone meaningless. At least for her.

It still ensured the House would supply hostage rescue, VIP protection, reconnaissance, demolitions, prisoner extraction and interrogation, force deployment and arcane intervention should he require such services. Sorrel, however, had made her position plain that night in Toothy’s room.

“My Lord, the debt I owe you extends beyond the highest concept of House and Duty,” she said in a tone that suggested she would accept no debate. “It is a bond of gratitude that extends to death. Ask, and I will serve.”

When he said Oziah would be in the party, she’d felt that dark flutter of unseemly desire that the outrageously beautiful and phenomenally bad-tempered paladin appeared to have on her. She’d dressed up real nice and everything, realised Oziah was fucking Delilah, wondered if she could take Delilah down, suspected not, figured that was a poor wooing tactic and focussed on the job.

But then… ahhh then….

Down in the valley where nobody goes 

As they stood in the blood-stained chamber deep in the Underdark, its walls smeared in gore, its piles of stone and bodies lit by the dull light of glowing fungi, its rough floor dotted with the corpses of the drow mage and archer who’d foolishly attacked them, she had felt the echo of a few faint notes of music, right on the edge of her hearing.

It was fleeting, passing in a moment, and was gone, but for a split second, it reminded her of the music Sarin and the spirit avatar of the drow moon goddess Eilistraee played at her exorcism.

As the notes died away, Jaezred had approached her.

"You...have learned more about Eil-- the renegade goddess since your exorcism?"

She looked around carefully and nodded. "Although I was a little drunk..." she confessed.

"How, then, do you feel about this?"

Her stomach knotted. She prayed he didn’t mean what she feared his words implied – that they were hunting a servant of Eilistraee.

She recited the Honour Code in her head – she served her team, the House and her client in that order. But now that she had embraced the moon goddess Selune her soul was torn.

(*So tortured that this hack has added a flashback, gentle reader, but to keep the flow, it’s pasted below.)

"My lord, I am here to serve you. That is all."

Jaezred nodded and finished flaying the drow corpse. He stood up, holding a bloody piece of marked skin and pulling his left sleeve down with his teeth to show the same mark on his skin.

"These people...are my competition."

"Then they are my enemies"

He nodded again and turned away. At which point Sorrel realised the team was close to collapse.

Love, faith, secrets and lies

Kelne appeared to have reached the same conclusion as Sorrel. “Who is it we are tracking?” the cleric asked Jaezred, steel in their voice.

“You do not need to concern yourself with that, I have hired you to do a job, you help me find them and the rest is up to me,” Jaezred turned away.

Kelne’s doubt was so palpable you could slice it up and serve it as a snack. Sorrel watched them as they began to pack away their equipment, deep in thought, looking back towards the way they’d come. They stopped and stared at their pack, added something, took it out then turned as the voices of Oziah and Delilah rose to a ferocious pitch.

It was hard to be sure of the details, Sorrel found as she tuned in. As the party had entered the room and the archer had shot at them from the darkness, Delilah had run forward into combat. Sorrel, who had to admit she was on form at the moment, almost tore the archer to pieces with three savagely placed arrows. She may have had firm ideas about the curve of Oziah’s hips under her armour but Delilah was Oziah’s and Sorrel had to respect what passed for some sort of true love after all.

As Oziah faced off against the mage – again, if she said so herself, Jaezred’s spells and Sorrel’s bow work did some pretty savage damage too with Jaezred’s disintegrate spell feeling a little bit like taking a battleship to a knife fight – Oziah seemed incensed.

At least, more incensed than she had been so far today, which would have been hard to imagine until Sorrel had seen it. Oziah did not take kindly to Jaezred’s secrecy and simmered like a barbarian sniffing combat all the way into, well, into combat. And then she turned on Delilah about, it seemed, her attacking the archer.

Sorrel couldn’t figure out if it was a tiff or a tear down, but she could tell there was something dark underpinning Delilah’s replies. “What do you want from me?” the nimble half elf said. Then something about staying by Oziah’s side. “It’s about keeping the love of my life alive,” Oziah’s voice echoed across the cavern, dashing Sorrel’s hopes.

She stared at the floor for a second, heard Oziah talk of selfishness and then gasped as Jaezred suddenly sprouted spindly chitin tentacles from his flesh. They tore through his skin like rot grub xenomorphs extending into what appeared to be… Sorrel almost gagged… spider’s legs. They were coated in blood and Jaezred’s face seemed contorted with pain. For a second Sorrel reached for her rapier to slice off the alien extrusions.

Then he… he scuttled… he actually scuttled up the cave wall to examine the ceiling, unaware that the party were staring at him. He returned to the cave floor and the legs retracted, his facing twisting in pain again.

“What… what just happened?” Kelne gasped.

“A blessing,” Jaezred replied in a slightly strained voice.

The cave was so silent Sorrel could hear her own heart beating.

Eventually Kelne sighed. “This is fucking weird. I need to talk to the people upstairs.”

They hauled some incense and a vial of holy water from their backpack and started a low chant that rose in volume until suddenly Kelne’s eyes rolled back in their head and their body arched as if they’d been stabbed. There was a long, pregnant pause then Kelne opened their eyes and surveyed the party.

“We go on,” they said. “But…”

They left the word hanging and rose to their feet, turning to Delilah and nodding politely. Delilah, suddenly remembering she’d been entrusted with the route they were supposed to take to avoid Jaezred’s watchers knowing his destination, headed off along a narrow tunnel, coming eventually to a solid wall of rock that held a hidden door then, after an hour of slow, careful progress, finding a cairn of stones.

“These,” she pointed down.

Oziah made short work of the stack of rock, revealing a crawl space that lead to a dark stone room, empty save for an altar to an unknown god. A red membrane pulsed across one wall, its low warm glow seeming threatening rather than soothing.

Delilah looked around at the gathered party then held her head high and stepped through. Oziah followed instantly and the others clambered after them.

The darkest corners of hell

For a few seconds Sorrel wrestled with her sanity as she struggled to comprehend what lay in front of her.

A cavernous maw stretched in all directions. North and south. East and west. Up and down. Everywhere. The darkness that was sickening, but the red lights that seared through it clawed at Sorrel’s soul. Stretching in every direction along this enormous cavern were webs ranging from the thickness of her fist to the thickness of a castle spire, and suspended in these webs were so many different things from chunks of earth, to buildings of immense size, piles of weathered, sinister stones and the corpses of fallen gigantic beasts.

Boundless miles of these thick webs connected by knots of deadly shimmering rope entwined temples, mountain tops and buildings made in unimaginable dimensions from blocks of dark primordial slate. Shapes of a scale and geometry disturbing to the sanest eye stretched off at impossible angles.

The air was filled with screams and scuttling sounds as distant spider beings and strange slug-like beasts crawled here and there in search of food. Behind her was a passage so cramped that she could barely stand upright in it; before her was an infinity of loathsome subterranean venomous ooze and diseased chittering creatures that fed on horror.

This is not ideal, she thought.

Her eyes were drawn to a distant light across the void. A temple, unpolluted, held captive by these demonic webs but free of the decay that filled this foetid abyss. She didn’t need Delilah and Jaezred’s instructions - she knew this was their destination. A dark dread bubbled up inside her. Part of her knew this place. What happened inside would change this party forever. Something told her they would not all make it out alive.

After Kelne’s eagle landed them on the portico, they advanced slowly through another strange membrane into a pristine chamber with an alter gleaming at one end. Five drow warriors turned to face them.

She strung her bow and moved into stance when Jaezred cried out in a language she recognised as drow. Although the warriors seemed ready to close for battle, a slender drow woman rose from her knees by the altar and turned towards them.

“We have been waiting for you,” she said to Jaezred. “You took your time. But I see you are all hurt…”

Jaezred's choice and the party's doom

With swift movements of her delicate hands she cast a healing spell, and the party's injuries were gone. Sorrel recognised something in her - something of Sarin and Eilistraee - and she ran forward to kneel before her.

The priestess raised Sorrel to her feet gently and placed a kiss softly on her forehead. “Do not kneel, Sorrel Darkfire,” she whispered. “Stand proudly.”

“How did you get here?” Jaezred’s voice sounded hoarse compared to the priestesses gentle tones.

“I am Balpassa, priestess of Eilistraeehere, and I am here to guide drow to freedom,” she turned to face him. “And to help you.”

Her hands moved again and Jaezred’s eyes rolled back in his head, his body frozen, mouth open, breath loud and rasping. His arms twitched and he seemed ready to move towards Balpassa, but whether to embrace or assault her Sorrel couldn’t tell.

She felt darkness at the door of the temple, the scuttling of chitinous legs and the clacking of mandibles. There was something outside, something deadly.

She looked at Jaezred then searched the eyes of her companions. “Lord Jaezred’s soul is being fought for,” Sorrel’s voice was broken. “I have felt that battle within me and can see it in him.”

Kelne’s face was ashen, Oziah’s set grimly and Delilah’s hands moved to her weapons.

If Jaezred chose to attack the servant of the moon goddesses, Sorrel thought, then what happens to my heart that is sworn to both? What happens to Kelne who had the chance to leave but decided to stay? What happens to Oziah and Delilah and their friendship with the drow sorcerer?

It is here, she realised, that we may all be torn apart. It is here that we stand or fall. And there is nothing we can do…

To be continued...

Footnote

* Towards the end of her training, Sorrel had been summoned by Callimar Daevion'lyrn in the Endless Basement beneath the Final Door. The stairs down were fashioned of creaking, ancient wood – presumably as an alarm system, Sorrel thought as she failed to creep soundlessly down.

Callimar’s chambers were exquisitely decorated although the carefully chosen luxuries were difficult to entirely appreciate as the occasional scream rose and died slowly from behind an obsidian door while the ageless drow considered her.

“I need to speak to you about loyalty,” he began eventually, pouring a generous measure of blood red wine into a single goblet in front of him.

“I remain loyal to death and beyond,” Sorrel said, puzzled. “My oath is to my Team, the House and my Client.”

The elegant drow nodded thoughtfully, then steepled his fingers. “I believe you,” he said eventually. “But we are all orphans - in our own way - at this… establishment. Loyalty between us is idealised - it creates our identity and ensures our effectiveness. Loyalty is our emotional connection and our moral compass. But I sense it is not enough for you,” he raised his hand to silence her protest.

“It is not a crime,” he gave a crooked smile. “You joined with 15 other Pledged. Seven died during training, four have been dismissed, one is best suited for the kitchen and of the three survivors Unthril and that short one are meat shields at best. I give them a year. But you are here. And, for better or for worse, I sense you will make your own bonds – love, friendship, all of those things we have tried to drive out of you.”

He smiled and produced a vial of fine grey powder. “I am afraid you are about to discover some of your limits,” he looked wistfully at the small bottle. “It will not be pleasant, and it will seem endless. Few get to experience it, but I warn you… you will, no matter how unlikely it may seem, yearn to feel it again.”

He scattered a little dust on the surface of the wine, stirred it once with a slim silver spoon and handed it to Sorrel. She held his gaze, drank deeply and fell backwards into madness for a thousand years.

Eternity split into an infinite number of possibilities, each one spawning an infinite array of its own. She felt them all – all the lives she could lead, all the universes where she had never been born, all those she destroyed in an unspeakable cataclysm and everything in between. She lived a million lives and died a million times, always painfully, never at home. She felt each wound, each betrayal, each catastrophe with her nerves stripped raw so that even the wind was too much to bear.

All the while, the drow’s long, curved fingernails of glass and steel slid deeper into her soul, raking patterns through her dreams and forcing needle points into every one of her fears – she heard the scissors opening and shutting, the ominous gong, the scuttling things and the clang of the steel room bolted around her so she could never stand or walk again and… and then she passed into a light so bright she knew nothing else.

When she opened her eyes, she found she was crouched in the passata sotto, the fencers all-or-nothing defence, and Callimar Daevion'lyr was regarding her thoughtfully. She sprang to her feet and staggered a few steps as a wave of nausea swept over her.

“It is a little worse than I feared,” the drow said, almost to himself. “It is rare to find so much suffering and so much discipline in a child. You must have built the walls when you were barely eight, maybe younger. They have deep foundations, and you are safe behind them. If you can find them when you need them, of course, which is another matter entirely.”

He picked up the goblet, more than half empty but with a small pool of the drugged wine at the bottom. He refilled it from his flask, sniffing it before taking a sip and wrinkling his nose. “Perhaps a little strong…” then he emptied it at a draught.

“And so, you will struggle to act on loyalty alone and that means…” he started to giggle. “It means you will die soon, or become the next Daiyoshi Master or…” his eyes began to cloud over. “Revolutionary, adventurer, assassin, who can say? But remember the value of loyalty whichever route you choose, Sorrel. In combat, loyalty will be useful. It will prioritise your decisions. If you are prepared to lose your life for a comrade, that is an enviable place to find in the world. I will be fascinated to see how your life unfolds. Now leave me. I have something important to do…”

His last words trailed off into a gasp of pleasure, the goblet fell from his hand and he slumped back in his chair.

Sorrel left quickly, but it was Callimar Daevion'lyr’s words she heard as she decided.