Chapter Text
Floating in the skull of a long dead god, the Emperor glared unseeing at his captive githyanki prince.
His thoughts trailed down various paths of annoyance and ire as the glowing red bands of magic that kept Orpheus tethered never wavered.
The presumption of these base creatures.
To have refused every tadpole that came across their path.
To have treated him with wariness from the beginning when he was their savior.
To have spoken and thought of him with nothing but suspicion since they learned of his true nature, thereby confirming why he’d had to take up a disguise in the first place.
To have rejected the Astral Tadpole for days as if the power it promised was nothing.
The half-elf leading the group was wearing his patience thin.
She had been cautious of him since the beginning.
He acknowledged to himself that he had erred in using a form reminiscent of her deceased mother in the hopes of kindling a familial bond between them.
From the beginning, the illithid had seen what the sorcerer longed for and missed the most was her parents, even a decade later. Taking the physical form of her ideal lover hadn’t seemed prudent. Instead, he had tried to give her something to make her feel as though by saving him she was saving her mother, too.
The girl had seen through it quickly. Too quickly, for the mind flayer should have foreseen that possibility more prevalently. But he hadn’t yet had a chance to delve deeply enough into her mind to see it would only cause her pain instead of fostering trust.
None of the others besides the vampire had responded well to his advice to take more tadpoles either, but the door had been firmly shut once Tavali had pointed out the pattern in the appearances he’d taken for each of them.
It had been galling for her to see through the disguises so quickly, but it was another error on his part.
Ideally, he should have found a form that would appeal to all of them and been consistent. For some reason, it hadn't seemed likely that they would compare the creature of their dreams amongst each other.
And since the battle with Orpheus’s honor guard, what little curiosity even the vampire still had about taking a tadpole had been firmly discarded.
Vexing. Irritating.
But now they’d had the audacity to threaten him, him, over the life of that buffoonish human.
The man’s mind was chaos and risk and pandemonium, but the Harper had insisted on saving him. At her request, Tavali had obliged.
Of course she did, the Emperor thought testily, for the druid half-elf succeeded where I failed.
She had given Tavali another mother figure to heed and respect.
The wood half-elf was painfully simple in many regards. She wanted to be a hero. She wanted to be loved. She wanted to “do the right thing.”
If only she could be made to see that the “right thing” was taking power for herself so they didn’t all fall to the brain when it inevitably broke free.
Night had fallen over his city now. They were all slumbering in idiotic contentment for another “victory.”
Another day with doom drawing ever closer, but it was a day well spent in their heads since they had extorted Minsc’s freedom from him and then defeated the Zhentarim.
That was another source of his displeasure, since the Guild had clearly been losing its grip on the city. Better to ally with the powerful Zhentarim than cling to what was failing.
He had worked with the Zhentarim countless times before being made a thrall again. Tavali’s distaste for them was childish and petty.
The sorcerer’s dreams spun on as he watched unobtrusively. It was mostly half formed images of the city mixed with her worries at the present.
Astarion tranced beside her in the abandoned temple they had bunked down in. The pair slept in private tonight because the vampire had made a fumbling attempt to entice the half-elf into fornicating. The venture had collapsed before he'd even gotten his trousers off. The pathetic creature had been perturbed by his own quick arousal, and so his excitement had doused itself like a snake eating its own tail.
As if the rogue hadn't successfully ploughed the woman mere days before at his gravesite.
Such absurdity in these animals. How pitiful.
The high elf's mind was harder to pin down in dreams, for he did not dream as other mortals did. Elves were strange creatures in that way. They didn’t truly dream at all, and instead entered the intricate mental space known as the reverie.
It had taken some time, but the Emperor had plenty of it each day. He’d managed to use the tadpole to force Astarion into true sleep before, and give him the same dreams as the others in the beginning.
Now, as the mind flayer observed them both resting so peacefully while he sat in this prison of rock and limitless space, something pragmatic occurred to him.
If they would not listen to his rational and reasonable words in their waking hours, then they would listen as captives to their dreams as he designed them.
