REM sequence #49,342
We were ready. We had made a number of preparations. The closer to the time for us to travel into enemy territory, the more things Eldredge tried to do. He tried to Get Verizene to trade him a full grimoire for the one he had purchased in the marketplace.
He asked me if it was okay to make a Simulcrum of me. I didn’t know what that was but I trusted him. Eldredge had taken Gael’s place way back months ago and though he was annoyingly superior, I always believed in him. I believed he was one of us. He was pompous but he was very clever. In the last few weeks, I felt we had all grown closer. Thorand performed the ceremony that allowed me to become a follower of Torm. Huldir kept trying to find ways to give me stronger armor. And Kromdar always tried to make sure I was safe. I was the rogue. I had come into this adventure like everyone else. No, that’s not true. Only Thorand, Huldir, and I remained of the original group who had escaped the chains that bound us in the underdark where we were being prepped to be sold as slaves by the Drow who had captured us.
We had escaped our chains with help from our own captors. It had been risky, difficult, and desperate. Through the year, so many things had happened that were both good and evil and sometimes downright funny.
We had become close. When we had agreed to go back into the underdark at the request of the Dwarven King, it hadn’t been an easy decision but we were all loyal to each other mostly and of course the three dwarves were very loyal to their king.
I had nothing to go home to, nothing to go back to. My people had been dead for years. I had been born on a pirate ship during a great flood that killed my people. The captain had taken me in and adopted me, giving me the name of his ship. He thought I was a good luck charm. I suppose I was. Most pirate captains don’t die of old age.
When he did, we burned the Jinx, toasted our captain, laughed and cried and told tales until I was drunker than I had ever been.
When I awoke next, I couldn’t tell if it was daylight or evening. I wasn’t even sure I wasn’t dreaming for I had awoken in chains with nothing but my underwear on. I remember now, looking back, that I was surrounded by strange folk. Mostly dwarves. I saw no other elves. There was a gnome named Karzak. There was Menrin, Thorand, Huldir and several others whose names I’ve forgotten now.
We escaped together by throwing our skills and means together. We survived much. Just after getting across a small cliff like ravine, we met Gael, a Ranger who hunted in the underdark. He was a human. He hadn’t suffered the loss and humiliation the rest of us had but he aided us in our escape and joined with us to try to get above ground.
It was Gael and I who had opened the casket and found Dawnbringer. It was Gael who had said he thought I was meant to have the sentient sword. I had been too humble to claim it for myself.
Right from the start, we all looked otu for each other. Thorand had fallen in love with a red haired dwarven girl named Elridge. She was sweet and would do anything for us. She was lost to us when the fesswriss caused the wizard’s spells to become something different than it had been and his fireball killed Eldridge. We lost Karzak too. We woke up one day and he was gone.
Menrin had cast a spell that went awry and a powerful celestial unicorn came to our aid. He had been luckier than Karzak or Elridge.
We had had so many adventures together when Gael proposed that I lure the mechanical Drow warriors out of a cavern so that he and the others could kill them off. And then the creature appeared out of nowhere and turned Menrin, Thorand, and Gael to stone. They were petrified and only Huldir and I remained. I drank our one potion of invisibility, then went to the creature called Medusa and used my thieves tools kit mirror on a stick basically, putting it in front of her face from behind her so I wouldn’t be petrified by seeing her eyes.
Huldir and I walked into Gracklestug feeling defeated and grief stricken. The Duerger had been kind to us. They told us where a Basilisk lived in a cave and that if we could get the contents of its stomach, we might heal our friends.
We did the task, bringing Gael and Thorand back to life. But when we tried to revive Menrin, it hadn’t worked. Menrin who had always made me laugh, and was kind and thoughtful, Menrin who had shown me my first unicorn wouldn’t be coming back.
I was determined to take his petrified statue into Gracklestugh and leave him in the light but when I tried to pull him, the statue was so heavy that he fell and crumbled to pieces. I was horrified. All I had left of him were two goodberries that were in my pocket.
I found a tinkerer in Gracklestug who dipped them in silver and made a necklace for me that I have worn since.
Gael decided he had had enough and was going to go off by himself to do what he loved best, hunt. I hated to see him go but respected his decision. It was not long afterward that Eldredge came to us. He was a half elf and at first, I thought he would be like Gael. Humans are almost as tall as elves and he was as tall as I was. He carried a banner around and treated us all like servants. But he was useful with his spells and his ideas. We tolerated him at first but he grew on us. We came to believe in his inherent goodness in spite of his strange fascination with evil artifacts. When we had explored the maze engine, he had known what he was looking for. And I, a fool went along with it because it reminded me of my old pirating days where we never lost.
The maze engine nearly killed me but I survived.
We now had all the ingredients required for the thing that Verizine was going to make, a black heart. Every time I tried to ask the Drow archmage about the black heart, he parried my questions away and Eldredge would interrupt. But that was typical of Eldredge, to be rude and disrespectful to those he saw as his inferiors, ignorant people like me.
While Verizine worked the days building the black heart, Eldredge spent his time scribing spells from Verizine’s library.
In the weeks after the Maze engine and before arriving back at Arage, Eldredge had seemed to change, to become more like one of us. Instead of constantly working to create things for himself, he actually spent the week making healing potions.
I believed in him. He made the simulcrum of me and ordered it around all week.
I spent my week in the library of Verizine reading the history of the area because I was truly ignorant of all things not of the sea. I didn’t want to be ignorant anymore. Eldredge had said being ignorant was the worst thing you could be. But he was the son of the God of Knowledge.
He convinced us that he was no longer on this adventure merely to uncover the complete knowledge of all the secrets of the universe and was committed to helping us with Verizine’s plan to get the Demons to fight each other and close the portal that the current Archmage Drow of Menzanbaran had opened. They were great rivals.
As the week progressed before we would go to the city and the tower where the archmage lived, Eldredge grew ever more frenetic in his efforts to get things that would help us in our desperate attempt to take the present archmage’s grimoire from the tower in Menzenbarran. The night before we were to leave, I pondered aloud if the apprentice that Verizine was sending us with would indeed turn out to be a turncoat and betray us. We were to travel into Menzenbaran under the disguise of being Grin Oustyl’s slaves.
Everything went as planned until we got inside the tower. Suddenly Eldredge’s voice was lost from my mind. He had been using telepathy to keep us all communicating.
I wanted to ask aloud if anybody had seen Elddredge but knew I risked our discovery if I spoke aloud. But we had been counting on Eldredge’s voice to guide us with our consequent steps as we reached the office of the highest archmage of the Drow and steal his grimoire. My simulcrum had it and we were hidden, or so we thought. And we were taking turns moving stealthily through the darkness to get the thing back to the courtyard. I took the grimoire from my twin and began moving quickly when I heard a voice say, “She’s following the thrall, it has worked.” Or something to that effect.
And suddenly we were under attack and we didn’t know the locations of each other at all. I wasn’t frightened then. I was worried that Eldredge had been captured and was possibly even dead when suddenly a voice said aloud in the darkness, “She’s yours now, take your reward.” And suddenly I saw Eldredge sitting in a chair across from me and straps held me tightly, stretching my hands apart as I struggled to understand what was happening.
Just before the flash of light, I realized that Eldredge had betrayed us but I couldn’t fathom why. Until I saw him mutter words and cast the spell to kill me and take what it was he wanted all along, Dawnbringer.
But it all went wrong for Eldredge. The bolt of arcane power that hit me was reflected back to him and to the smirking Archmage and Vizerine’s apprentice. The arcane spell hit them instead and they were dead.
I felt the heat of the energy that had hit my neck. No, not my neck, what was strung around my neck, Menrin’s silvered goodberries on a chain. Thorand and Huldir were shouting but I couldn’t hear them. I threw up the Daern’s fortress, I knew it was foolish but I crawled inside and fell to the floor hugging myself and weeping with the betrayal I and the others had been dealt.
I knew I couldn’t stay there long because already, there were noises of other Drow coming to see what had happened. We needed to get back out of Menzenbarran and I didn’t see how we would but we had to.
Type
Journal, Personal
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