Chapter Text
Howler awoke with a clear mind; lucid, present in the moment, no matter how loud or blinding or choked with dust that moment was. Sunlight seared her in a way that only her masters would describe: white-hot and blinding in her eyes, a presence beating down on her bare head. The stench of inhuman blood and cephalithic mucous permeated the air. She heard an unfamiliar roar, constant and ebbing. Rushing water. The sea.
Scrunching her face in irritation, she tried to squint in the dizzying brightness of the surface. Blurry through tears, the viscera and wreckage of the nautiloid surrounded her, arched over her in a precarious manner. The rudder-tentacle, though stiff from rigor mortis, groaned dangerously in the wind. Survival instinct drove Howler to her feet to escape the inevitable collapse.
The tentacle crashed into more mangled carnage and alien metals. All unfamiliar to her, in all of her life spent in the sept. This was beyond anything the Overmind could have warned her of; this wasn’t a rival colony, this was an invading force.
How ironic it was, that the only thing to ‘rescue’ her from her masters was another, arguably worse kind of illithid. An extraplanar retinue, no doubt. They held technology that the Creatives of her sept could only dream of, found only in ancient, fragmented archives. The warships of the Old Empire. She would be in awe, had she been connected to the psionic web of her sept, engaging in the rare inquisitive delight of individuals she knew would have loved to see this.
But now, she could fully revel in her own disgust.
As her eyes slowly began to adjust in the shaded parts of the wreckage, Howler breathed in the acrid surface air with a hoarse, delirious laugh. It was gone, Qualia was gone - possibly miles away, still marinating in its fetid bowl surrounded by sycophants and hollowed meat. Did they manage to bring her beyond the limits of its psychic reach? Did it lose its grasp on her entirely when the ship began jumping planes?
Then something stirred behind her eye, and that precious moment of mental solitude was lost. The real reason behind her freedom acknowledged her with a faint signal, no more than a fetal kick in the womb. Her heart dropped to the pit of her stomach.
Was this still freedom, marked for subsumption into yet another hive mind?
The wreck was so recent that its biomass was still bleeding; her infection from the parasite had barely begun to set in. There would be a brief period where she could still function enough to fight back, seek healing or divine purification before it began consuming her.
Howler was familiar with the incubation chambers of Vis’Madra. She saw the hosts of gestating neophytes in their chambers, still thrashing and screaming with what little of themselves they had left. It would be no less horrible to endure it alone, without other illithid to tend to the ceremorphosis. If anything, it would be petty retribution if the neophyte she would turn into was left here alone, separated from its colony and left to die lost on the surface. Let her freedom become its future torture.
For now, her freedom was her own. Whether it would last a few days or a full life span was unimportant.
Stranded in alien wreckage on an unknown beach, her freedom seemed… underwhelming, so far. But there had to have been other survivors intact, though maybe not thralls or victims. As Howler began to explore the crash site, she started focusing her psionics on any presence nearby.
There were notes of humanoids still alive, beginning to stir whether from pods or from rubble. There were intellect devourers still scattered about, though they would likely die without their masters. But beyond those psychic signatures, Howler could pinpoint an unfamiliar illithid presence. Its signal was weak, and in distress.
Most of the illithid on the nautiloid died upon impact. No amount of psionics were enough to shield their fragile bodies from the force of a crash like this. In the chaos of the plane-hopping and the assault on the ship, it was doubtful if any managed to teleport out of danger in time. Any survivors still couldn’t count themselves as ‘lucky’, injured and so far away from their colony. So far away from the guidance of their Overmind.
The one survivor Howler found was a pitiful example, unable to perform so much as a psionic push to free its exhausted body from the wreckage. When their eyes met, she felt the familiar sensation of its psychic presence mingling with hers, acknowledging her mental conditioning the way an aristocrat acknowledges the presence of a butler. She still read as a servant to it - but surely it would have recognized she didn’t belong to it?
The gestating tadpole stirred behind her eye again. Though its own psionic signals were weak, there was undoubtedly an exchange between it and its elder. The illithid conveyed its last bit of mental focus into pure domination, and scratched at her mental defenses with faltering strength.
“Thrall, release me.”
It was interesting to hear such succinct desperation in the illithid’s command. It was not steeped in flowery deliberation or merciless demoralizing like their commands often were, even when they clearly needed Howler’s help. The corner of her mouth perked up in a sly smile.
“Who is your Overmind?” She engaged with the stranger illithid with an interrogative edge to her telepathy. Howler entered the city for answers, after all, even if now they were more personal than the orders of the sept.
The illithid looked as hateful as it could, with its inhuman grasp on once-human features, remaining silent as it knew even an errant thought may give away sensitive information. The grinding of rubble above it as the wreckage continued to settle made its free tentacles jerk and flail reflexively.
Howler feigned assistance by halting the cascading bulk of the rubble by hand. She was strong enough to hold it in place over the illithid, reminding it that it should hope not for her obedience, but for her mercy.
“Who is your Overmind?” Howler questioned it again. “What is your colony, your ‘sept’? Are you from the Astral or the Material?”
“Help me and I will speak.” The illithid’s tentacles twisted with frustration. It was met with her unwavering glower, looking down her nose at it in a reversal of the life she once lived.
“Say please.” The tone of Howler’s thoughts turned cold. “Beg for it.”
She weakened her grip on the rubble, and made the heavy chunks of debris shift over the illithid. It let out a sharp, rattling exhale, unable to properly vocalize its pain.
“PLEASE.”
Please help me, please save me. It hurts, I can’t move. The panic of the illithid welled up in Howler’s head until its pleas were a fearful cacophony. Fear it probably never had a chance to feel before, in all its life under whatever Elder Brain kept it. Completely and utterly helpless, at the heel of thrallstock it couldn’t control.
This freedom, this power over her would-be subjugator was sweeter than anything Howler had ever dreamed of. She slowly raised a foot, and placed it on the illithid’s head. Its pinned claws scratched against the carapace-like surface of the ship’s floor in vain.
“The mercy I spare for you is more than you deserve.”
There was a distinct, cut off crescendo of emotion and pain that stopped the moment her heel breached the soft part of its elongated skull. This colony had tapered crowns dominant in its gene pool, and those had many incomplete seams and weak spots in their skulls that were prone to injury. More vague evidence that this was a foreign colony. The mystery deepened. Milky, viscous, translucent blood and gray matter squelched underneath Howler’s foot. She felt a strong note of disgust that wasn’t hers…
… and the mental reactions of the other onlookers behind her followed. A more muted, relieved distaste. sad*stic delight, a spark of amusem*nt. Four survivors, similarly ragged and disoriented from the crash. A pallid elf began to clap sardonically at the illithid’s life snuffed out, though the others seemed to reserve their outward reactions. A githyanki, still in her silver half-plate, spat hatefully at the sight of it.
With a sense of immense awkwardness, the scruffy man that stood at the forefront of the group put on a good natured smile, seeing any enemy of the illithid as a potential ally. “Well, that thing couldn’t have met a better end.”
The gith held up a halting hand to cut off his comment. “Caution. I know these markings: this is a thrall - and a very prized one indeed.”
Howler kept her chin high, weathering the venom in the githyanki’s tone and the curdling disgust in her mind. The gith never spared thrallkind when they made successful raids on colonies; they saw every servant complicit in their own cruelty, and every slave as brainwashed into loyalty. The worst part was that Howler wouldn’t be able to deny that, when it came down to it. All she could do was claim that she was free.
Thankfully, it didn’t come down to that, as the albino that lurked behind them made a show of scoffing at the gith’s suspicious look. “Oh c’mon, we just watched her crush that squid’s skull like an overripe melon, I doubt she’s on their side anymore.”
“These were not from my colony.” Howler’s telepathy was, understandably, met with some surprise. Even if her mouth retained the muscle memory of vocal speech, she knew her voice would be too weak to use anyways.
The gith reared back, her reptilian eyes narrowing into hateful slits. She put a restless hand on the hilt of the sword slung over her shoulder. The curse in her hissing tongue was held back only by Howler showing her open palms, free of any weapon or threat.
“I am no thrall, not anymore!” She said defiantly, “They will never take me again, I am free!”
“No one touched by the ghaik to your extent will ever be free!” Though she was small and wiry, the gith held her longsword with trained confidence. Howler could feel tension within the githyanki girl as she took a few confident steps towards her. Duty only just overwrote apprehension; that quietest note of doubt in gith protocol that came from someone too young to have it beaten out of her just yet. When the worm in Howler’s head tensed up, the gith’s own apparent parasite stopped her in her tracks.
As the two larvae communicated in a way too subtle to parse, Howler saw flashes of the girl’s life unbidden. The excitement of the hunt, the shame of being captured, the immense fear she swallowed in the face of meeting their shared terror come to light. The domination of the tyrants that haunted her dreams, merely fairy tales to a contemporary Daughter of Gith, was a reality she saw reflected back in this thrall before her. The gith winced in discomfort.
“T’skva - you’re another infected!”
Howler tried to shake off the disorientation of their psionic exchange. Feeling the tadpole squirm made her heart sink all over again. “The parasite… must have negated my conditioning, somehow… I knew I shouldn’t have been able to say no to this one, even if it wasn’t a part of my sept.”
She gestured to the burst skull of the aberration she taunted only moments before. The gith went silent, almost stunned by seeing the light in the former thrall’s eyes for what it was. It was the scruffy human whose expression lit up with a shared enthusiasm of discovery.
“Truly? Well I can’t say I’m an expert on illithid psionic conditioning, but I haven’t exactly heard good things about the people they manage to pull out of their nests.”
“Most thrall are cattle. I am not.” Howler’s telepathy rang a clear declaration of her psionic strength, honed by the decades of her servitude. “I can only assume my natural psionics have contributed to keeping my faculties intact without the Overmind’s presence.”
“So you were a telepath, even before being infected?” The man gestured, touching his temple before pointing in her direction, to indicate her method of communication.
Howler scowled. “You don’t see me gawking at your ability to use your mouth to make sounds.”
“Enough, “ the gith interrupted, “we’re wasting time. We must find a creche immediately if we are to cleanse ourselves of these parasites.”
The rest of the group’s ambient thoughts held a sliver of hope as they agreed with her. She seemed to be the only one with a plan - a plan that gave Howler pause.
“I thought the githyanki gave no mercy to the afflicted and enthralled of their ancestral enemy?”
“Those faithful to Vlaakith are granted her purification.” The gith straightened her posture proudly. “It is the only cure we have.”
The human held up an interjecting finger. “That we have so far. I wouldn’t rule out finding a proper healer before the day is out.”
“One or the other has to happen soon. Within forty-eight hours, the parasite will start causing permanent damage.” Howler could feel the fear that the certainty of her words inspired in the group. They hadn’t even seen the gestation chambers of a sept. They knew what would be the result, but they had no idea just how horrible the ordeal would be.
The parasite, however, knew. And it knew Howler’s psionics could pick up on its delight.
The fourth survivor, a dark-haired girl who kept silent and still in the shadows of the wreckage, finally spoke up in a small voice. “We should get moving, then. If not to get us out of this place and away from those… things.”
It was odd, to Howler, to hear someone speak of the illithid so disdainfully. It was stranger still to finally be able to agree with them.
“Now, how did the servant of an entirely different mind flayer colony end up in this mess?”
The human - Gale ‘of Waterdeep’, as he titled himself with pride - seemed to have an academic fascination with Howler, stronger than the ambient distrust she felt from the others. If nothing else, it was grounding for her to talk about herself. She used to remind herself of her intact identity often.
“The Overmind of my sept noticed the presence of these raiding parties entering its psionic peripheral. It’s not unheard of to have colonies encroach on one another’s territory, but these felt… different.”
“Are they, now?”
“The sept of Vis’Madra and its predecessors has not seen nor heard of a functioning nautiloid in many hundreds of years. I have reason to believe this is an Astral colony. An invading army seeking a foothold on the Material.”
The disdainful “chk” from the gith, Lae’zel, turned the attention onto her. She begrudgingly relented an answer she was more suited for.
“My people still chase the remnants of the ghaik empire throughout the Astral, yes. This colony could be from anywhere; your kind on the Material Plane cannot fathom the sheer enormity of the Astral Sea.”
Neither did she, as Howler’s cursory brush against the gith’s mind revealed. Lae’zel was the youngest of them, and this was the first time she set foot outside of her home creche in any significant capacity. No wonder she held such fear and disdain for Howler, the living example of a life living under illithid rule. The githyanki made sure that their origins were never forgotten, and their future generations would never fall into complacency.
“Yes, but this is still a significant threat. My sept is of a much smaller scale, of a different stock with… less impressive technology. Most underdark colonies are like that; threats on a local scale, rather than planar scale.”
“You seem to be downplaying your own colony quite consistently.” Shadowheart, the dark-haired girl of some surface elf stock, had a healthy distrust of everyone in the party. Howler could feel the gnawing anxiety over something she held in her pack - which had its own subdued psionic signal. Curious.
“I’ve lived with them for over a hundred and fifty years. I know full well their shortcomings.”
Howler could hear the man lagging behind the group scoff quietly to himself. “Only a hundred and fifty years?”
Astarion was a thin and gaunt-looking man, dressed in frayed finery, carrying himself like a noble pretending he wasn’t bankrupt. Howler observed that he breathed consciously, deliberately. Perhaps a grounding habit of his.
He stared at the back of Howler’s head, where the black tentacles curling around her skull and brow ended with the stylized illithid head. Faintly, she felt his curiosity mingle with a stirring dread. A sickness of memory, a shared discomfort in her back - the tadpole in the woman’s eye started writhing again, and Howler abruptly cut off its instinct to commune with its broodmate.
Was this a normal symptom of ceremorphosis, left unobserved under normal circ*mstances? She didn’t take the thrashing, moaning ceremorph hosts kept contained in incubation chambers to be in a state to commune, however one sided it may be. Perhaps the pool-tenders spoke to them during the ordeal, soothing and reassuring both parasite and host in their painful union. That union had not come to pass for her so far, hours later. Still, the parasite remained… alert, and waiting.
Waiting for what?
They didn’t get very far before the sun began to sink in the sky, and exhaustion from the compounding ordeal sunk into the bones of the group. Howler would have preferred to keep moving well into the night. Her eyes still burned, watery and irritated from the light of the surface. Her bare head felt like a haunch of roasted rothe until she could fish a dingy old hat out of a crate, a bit too late before she got sunburnt.
It was hard to truly rest, knowing what the clock was slowly ticking down to. But as it got dark, the human-blooded and extraplanar of their little retinue found the shadows of night too foreboding to press on. Camp was set, with what little supplies they salvaged. Food was shared, and passed around.
Howler ate bread for the first time in over a century. Nourishment for thralls was often enriched but disgusting slurry, consisting of the ‘table scraps’ of their master’s meals. The company she kept didn’t need to know that. They didn’t need to know many things she considered normal. Though all in all, this little group was hardly conventional. Perhaps she was just as much the odd elf out as any of them.
Settling down in a lean-to a fair distance from the others, Howler could finally sit down, clear her mind, and weep.
When looking inwards, she found true clarity. Uncontaminated by the influence of the Overmind and the conditioning of her masters. Freedom not only in body, but in mind and soul. Freedom. Freedom. To even think of this word would warrant punishment.
Just a day before, she bared her crown to Master Vegh-na, letting it lavish and slobber over her bare scalp, reminding her of its physical and mental ownership. She pressed her brow to the cradle of Qualia, and allowed the elder brain to scour her for impurities. The day before, she served Vis’Madra with utmost dedication. Unwavering loyalty, unwavering love for the sept and its members.
Gone, all gone. The servant they made of her was gone… yet it was still Howler that remained.
“Istik.”
The hiss of the githyanki shocked Howler out of her meditation. The psion rubbed hastily at her wet eyes. It was harder to mask her irritation in her fatigue. “What do you want, Lae’zel?”
“If you are not ‘cattle’ as you say, then why would the ghaik leave a thrall intact in the first place?” She had a hand on her sidearm, ready to attack at the wrong answer.
Howler rose to her full height. She wasn’t much taller than the wiry little gith girl, but she was certainly broader by comparison. The training of her body in tandem with her mind made her as capable with her bare hands as anyone with a weapon. If it was going to come down to a fight, so be it.
“I am a psion by nature. My sept had more use for me as a functioning individual, so they spared me of being ‘hollowed out’.”
“I find that hard to believe.” Lae’zel had good reason to, as the horror of a truly hollowed-out thrall was still fresh on her mind, from the nautiloid. “If you are truly free, why would you still refer to the colony as yours? Why would you speak so candidly of your captors?”
“BECAUSE IT IS MY HOME.”
The full, intense volume of the psion’s telepathy made the rest of the camp flinch. The eveningtide birds stopped singing. Lae’zel’s bones shook.
Howler closed her eyes tightly, and took a deep, centering breath.
“Perhaps… I will come to hate it, in time. Perhaps even my better memories will leave a sour taste in my mouth. But my freedom doesn’t come with that reprieve, so I must separate myself from my old life by hand.”
The two of them stared hard into one another’s eyes; the tadpoles in their heads thrumming gently in whatever crevices they burrowed into. Lae’zel’s stare was one of disciplined intensity; a trainee soldier’s resolve against the harsh hand of her instructor. Howler’s was simply tired. She looked through the girl.
The githyanki already held some residual psionic prowess; Lae’zel probably would have been able to connect to Howler’s mind on some level without her parasite. But it did help her there, seeking its broodmate. Lae’zel’s immense fear washed over the older psion; dread and horror and gut-churning revulsion was behind the ever-so-subtle tremble of the gith’s hand on her dagger. Her fight or flight response had peaked, but the githyanki only ever taught their youths to listen to the former.
Howler could see that even that principle was at odds with the girl. She didn’t come here to put down a ghaik’s servant at all. She came here for reassurance.
“Please, Lae’zel, we share the same fears. I don’t want to be meat, and I don’t want to be a body for their young to nest in. If my Overmind reclaims me after our purification… do not hesitate to kill me.”
Lae’zel sucked in a subdued, ragged breath. She squared her shoulders, straightening out of the tense posture of someone expecting a fight. “...Understood. May that not come to pass.”
“May that not come to pass.” Howler nodded in agreement, and gave her a hopeful smile that the gith didn’t seem to expect. Lae’zel was taking note of the life in her eyes, and the warmth in her expression - all things she was certain an illithid wouldn’t have been able to mimic.
Though they parted under favorable circ*mstances, the psion still let out an exhale of relief when Lae’zel strutted off to her own end of the camp.
An irritating drawl spoke up somewhere in the rocks above Howler’s lean-to. “Damn, and I was hoping to see the gith in action.”
Howler flinched. It seemed Astarion was already learning to hide his own psionic presence. That, or she was so exhausted she could no longer give a damn. “...Sorry to disappoint.”
The scrawny elf hopped down from his perch with a bit of a pained grunt, not exactly being in the shape for any feats of athleticism. Still, he managed to save face immediately. Astarion carefully adjusted his hair to hide where it was thinning out in patches.
“You know a great deal of all this… illithid nonsense, correct?”
Ah. More reassurance. “I do. I am familiar with ceremorphosis, too. Do you… have questions?”
The elf studied her carefully, cautiously. Prepared to sniff out any lies. “So, when will we start to feel any changes? It's usually gradual, isn't it?”
Howler acknowledged the tadpole in her head, alert but unmoving. Still in the same place. “Well, by now my parasite would have begun moving to the back of the brain, to feast on the movement and speech-granting parts first. So far I feel… not much of anything?”
“Me neither. Not that I'm complaining, but there's no way we all have duds, right?”
As Astarion restlessly fussed with his hair, Howler found herself mimicking the motion by running a hand over her tattoos. “A lot of this doesn't add up, honestly. And they've captured us so… randomly, so indiscriminately. This is a delicate, carefully monitored process, usually.”
“So what, we're just… fodder to them?”
“Illithid don't have quite that much disdain for their fellow cephalith. Unless their Overmind commanded it of them.”
It was troubling to think about. Elder brains enthralled their illithid spawn just as they enthralled everything else they could. A particularly nasty one bent on conquest couldn’t be ruled out.
“In any case; I'm glad at least somebody here actually has an idea of what's going on.” Astarion glanced back at the rest of the camp with a hint of wariness. “And what do you think of our githyanki friend's proposal? Do you think that will work?”
“I know they've developed tools and weapons to specifically hunt illithid, but a cure for ceremorphosis is certainly new to me.”
“Ah well, guess we'll find out soon enough, won't we?” Astarion stretched out long, bony arms and feigned a yawn. When he turned his attention back to Howler, he seemed to… try to give her a charming look, marred by dramatically sunken cheeks and bruised eye sockets.
“Also… should your loyalties come into question again, from one recently free elf to another: I believe you. At least.”
The mask he wore so poorly in his sickly state faltered. Freedom was as fresh on his mind as it was hers. The two of them exchanged acknowledging glances before the pale elf slunk back into the shadows.
Howler didn’t expect to fall into the company of others, much less those who would hear her out and even accept her, with all that she had done and all she represented to them. She had value to them, not as a tool to be used but as…
As a fellow victim.
A kindred spirit, in some respects.
It was comforting to lay down for the night and still feel the low, subtle psionic presence of them all. From a lifetime in the sept, Howler grew used to the presences of other psychics; she found comfort, amongst her former masters. The only beings that she thought she could relate to, with her mind warped to fit their use and her body conditioned to suit the darkness. They told her that this could never happen. She could not survive ‘freedom’, adapted to servitude to the illithid.
But they never accounted for… this.
Howler awoke thinking she was back at the sept. This surely was all a long, bizarre dream; another of Qualia’s eccentric whims, entertaining itself with her. It coveted her emotions, her sensations, her experiences it couldn’t have in its piteous state. Did it want to give her a taste of ‘freedom’, only to discipline her later for indulging in it?
With her eyes closed, the darkness was no different than the darkness of the underground colony. Her bedroll back home was just as thin against the hard ground, and just as cold. She dreaded opening her eyes to see the bare, carved stone of the ceiling in her meager living space.
The stirring of waking minds and the sounds of people rummaging through their belongings snapped her back into reality. The mage was up, groggy but spurred on by a natural zest for mornings. Not too far off, the githyanki stretched out taut, lean arms and yawned.
The birds were starting to sing. The gentle breeze wafting into her tent picked up the fresh, earthy scents of a forest in summertime. The sun, irritating as it was to experience, shone through the canvas in many pinpoints of golden light. There were people outside - the infected survivors, silhouettes on the side of the tent. Howler overheard Gale asking Shadowheart if she wanted breakfast.
Again, she searched her mind and found no presence of the Overmind, nor any of its individual illithid. In its wake was an emptiness, a sense of a space carved out and left vacant. And what was left was the physical discomfort of the tadpole between her eye and brain.
Freedom. Freedom was an emptiness, a loneliness they tried to frighten her with. But when Howler extended her psionics to the rest of the infected, she felt the faint acknowledgment of their own just-formed psychic abilities. Though her companions reacted with delayed revulsion when their own tadpoles stirred, Howler allowed herself a soft sigh of relief.
Then her tadpole made its presence known once more; a repulsive squirming behind her eye, reminding her of the stakes at hand. A chill ran down her spine.
If Qualia could see her now, she knew it would be laughing. No matter how far away she could be flung from its influence, no matter how much she could salvage of her altered mind, the tadpole was a sick twist of fate that drove her folly home. ‘Freedom’ was an illusion, for as long as this thing was in her head.
