close starter | @imperitvs
The prisoner whimpers beneath her teasing claws, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps. His wrists strain against the chains binding him to the wooden contraption, his body trembling with the knowledge of what’s to come. Nepharia watches him with a languid sort of amusement, dragging the tip of one claw down the sweat-slicked column of his throat. Not deep enough to draw blood—not yet. Just enough to remind him how easily she could carve him open. ❛ Where is it? ❜ she purrs, voice low. ❛ The Grove. ❜ She doesn’t know who the fuck the Absolute even is, but the words tumble from her lips like scripture, devotion curling against her tongue like the heat of a brand. It should be funny—her, bowing to some nameless, faceless goddess. But it isn’t funny at all. It’s just true. The only thing that matters is the Absolute. The only thing that matters is—
And then, all at once, the world shifts.
A crack, a splinter in her mind, like a shackle snapping in two. The weight lifts, and everything comes rushing back. It slams into her with all the grace of a battering ram. The Absolute, whispering in her skull, a voice she had welcomed without hesitation. No—no, she hadn’t welcomed it. It had simply been. A constant, an inevitability. Her stomach turns. Her claws twitch above the prisoner’s heaving chest. What the fuck. The whimpering man before her ceases to exist for a moment. Her palm itches. Burns. She stares down at it, at the scar seared into her flesh, the grotesque sigil of a god she has never met, never worshipped—never would have worshipped. And then, another sensation. It’s sudden, invasive, a jagged, pulsing thing in the back of her skull. The world darkens at the edges, her vision splitting—not into two, but through two.
( She is falling. Her hands burn—too hot, too fast, magic slipping, failing. A girl’s face. Fear, desperation, love. A last-ditch effort—tucking the girl away, a hidden place, a safe place—before the mind flayer ship takes her. ) The image snaps apart, and her breath catches in her throat. She staggers, breathless from the sheer wrongness of it. Because it was not her own memory. Not her own pain. And someone else had just seen hers. ( A tall devil, attractive. Red eyes, burning like embers in the night. Giant leathery wings carrying her through the skies above the city of Baldur’s Gate—Then pain as a symbol is branded into pale flesh. Nepharia exhales sharply, lips curling as the haze clears. )
Her gaze lifts and she sees him. Ginger-haired, silver-eyed, standing amid a cluster of adventurers she barely registers. Slowly, deliberately, Nepharia lowers her hand from the prisoner’s trembling form and turns to face the group. She tilts her head, silver hair spilling over one shoulder, and lets her lips part into something almost like a smile. ❛ You here to help torture the prisoner for information about the grove? ❜ she drawls, voice smooth as silk, yet sharp as a blade.
❛ What? ❜ she presses, eyes alight with something wicked. ❛ Was True Soul Minthara afraid I’d go too far and spill his guts before he spilled his guts? ❜ She giggles at her own joke—light, airy, wrong. The sound is almost girlish, almost sweet, but it carries something else beneath it. Something jagged. Something dark. And yet, even as she laughs, even as she cocks a hip and plays the part she should be playing, she keeps her gaze locked onto his. Searching. Testing. Because she doesn’t know for sure yet if he’s one of them. But it’s starting to make sense to her as the seconds pass. She remembers the tadpole forced into her eye socket. How could she forget? This must have something to do with that. ❛ You a True Soul too? I ask because of the whole—seeing-each-other’s-thoughts-thing. Apparently all of the True Souls have this disgusting little worm in their heads, but if you tell Priestess Gut that she will swear up and down that she doesn’t have one. Delusional. This is a fucking cult. ❜
Just knowing some cult hijacked her mind with some gross alien parasite is pissing her off. But she can’t overtly blow her cover. Not yet. She’s far too outnumbered without backup. Perhaps this elf and his friends can be swayed if they aren’t in fact under the influence of this bullshit goddess.
