Mortal Chains | Chapter 1

[sunlit_skycat]

Title: Mortal Chains
Rating: Teen
Major Warnings: Implied/referenced sexual harassment
Genre: Crossover, transmigration

Summary: As an ex-apprentice of the Belanger Circle, Nicolette knows what it is to be on the wrong end of power. Then she is kidnapped across realms and implanted with a mind flayer tadpole — like she doesn’t have enough strange Others slithering around her head already. Now a True Soul, Nicolette has access to authority beyond anything she has ever known, and it will be up to her fellow tadpole victims to persuade her not to use it. Good thing they all are such paragons of responsibility.

 

 

Nicolette woke up on a beach with her glasses askew and a stabbing pain behind her right eye. She drew herself up silently, rubbing the stiff muscles in her neck. This wasn’t the worst headache she’d ever had in her life, but it was within the top ten for sure. It was better than she expected after falling off of that realms-hopping tentacled ship.

Where was she? Long ago, Nicolette had performed a ritual that allowed her to always know where she was, and some sense from that told her that she was nowhere in Canada. Possibly not even on Earth. The sparse grasses dotting the shore around her looked foreign and unknown.

She didn’t have any of her standard tools on her, except for what she had been wearing when she was taken. That meant most of the information gathering Practices she knew couldn’t be performed until she found a way to stock back up on resources. At least she was wearing something moderately sensible for the outdoors. The weather was warm enough for her crisp dress shirt and pants, and these loafers were better for uneven ground than heels. The glossy raven feathers fanning around a pearlescent orb clipped to her hair were mildly battered from the kidnapping. She didn’t have any replacements on hand, so she would have to cope with the lowered mental defenses until she could purify this one or make another. That might become a very nasty problem.

She fixed her glasses on her face, touching the groove on the side that activated her Second Sight.

The world changed around her. Dark omens popped into her vision, marking out the potential for future pain, discord, and doom to happen. That wasn’t useful right now. She touched her glasses again to switch to her other Sights, five in total, before landing on the fourth. This one tracked the flow of everything: water, electricity, blood, and more. With it, Nicolette could See anything that had a circulatory system, even if it was behind cover. She might be able to find her way to civilization faster, too.

Everything was equally unfamiliar, so she picked a random direction along the shore and walked.

There was a series of dead bodies on the beach. Many had clearly pancaked on impact from the fall. For once, it seemed that luck had protected Nicolette over anyone else, which was an inherently suspicious situation that no doubt was going to end soon.

A short distance away, there was a woman with a mace searching through a pile of smashed boxes. She wore finely decorated chainmail armor, and had a long, black braid swinging down her back. With getup like that, she couldn’t be Innocent, shielded from all the magic of the world. The only question was if she was Practitioner or Other.

Nicolette stepped on a branch, and the woman turned around. “What? Stop! Not another step or I’ll…”

Nicolette reached for a steel-nibbed feather quill tucked away in her pants pocket. It was much, much shorter ranged than the mace the woman held, but one prick of the skin would be enough to ensure her future doom. Hopefully fast enough to secure a retreat.

“Wait. It’s you. You’re the child who tried to free me on the ship,” the woman said. “At least, you made the effort.”

Something surged in Nicolette’s mind, and suddenly she could feel the emotions running through the other woman. Confusion. Resolve. And a slight hint of gratitude. Nicolette pressed the hair ornament on the side of her head into place, gritting her teeth as she tried to push out the foreign influence. She was Nicolette Belanger, 16, an independent augur who had gotten over her previous problems with possession, and not anyone else.

She swayed where she stood, pointing accusatorily at the raven-haired woman. “Are you doing this? Answer me.”

The connection died as abruptly as it began.

“Not deliberately. They put a tadpole in my eye too. I assume that’s what caused our minds to… cross,” the woman said apologetically. “But that’s the least of our problems. These things are going to consume us from the inside and turn us into mind flayers.”

The green-skinned warrior on the ship had said something similar. In the chaos of their escape, Nicolette had nearly forgotten.

She leaned against a rock, still off-balance from the mind meld. This close in, she could see that the woman had pretty green eyes, and her age was oddly hard to place. Her ears were pointed at the tip. Definitely an Other. Nicolette suppressed a shiver.

“Tell me everything you know about these mind flayers. How do we become purified?”

The resulting conversation was grim. Their best hope was to get to a settlement and find a healer powerful enough to extract the tadpoles from their heads with magic before their time ran out. If not, they could say bye bye to their minds and bodies as they were turned into more of the squid-like Others that had kidnapped them.

“Whatever lies ahead will be a little less daunting with support. You can call me Shadowheart,” the woman offered.

Something about the situation felt far too convenient. Nicolette’s eyes narrowed.

“Are you in any way responsible for how I was brought onto the ship, infected with a tadpole, or transported into this realm?”

“No,” Shadowheart said.

“Do you plan to cause harm to me?” Nicolette asked.

“Not unless you turn into a mind flayer,” Shadowheart answered, frowning.

That was good enough for now.

“I’m Nicolette. Let’s get going.”

Shadowheart persuaded Nicolette to scavenge a quarterstaff from the corpses around them, even if she didn’t know how to use it. She tied a quill to the end of it as a very makeshift sort of spear. They wandered through the rest of the beach, searching the area for supplies. It looked like the tentacled ship had fallen directly onto a small fishing group; a tragedy for the dead fishers, but good fortune for them. Nicolette snagged a leather backpack, a bedroll, and a bucket of slimy fish.

Then the snake-shaped ring around her finger tightened, metal teeth scraping against her skin. There was danger nearby. Using her fourth Sight, Nicolette spotted three brains that had incongruously sprouted legs, identical to the ones on the tentacled ship. She carefully waved her arms to get Shadowheart’s attention.

“More of those wretched things,” Shadowheart spat.

Within seconds, the walking brains were on them. Shadowheart charged into the fray with her mace and shield, Nicolette following behind with her spear. Together, the two of them whacked the brains until they stopped moving, and then whacked some more. Blood pooled around the defeated brains. Intellect devourers, Shadowheart called them.

Nicolette nursed a large gash she’d taken on the shin. These intellect devourers were small, but had sharp claws. She hobbled away from the sad pile of brain matter, trying not to show how much it hurt.

“Let me help you,” Shadowheart said. She held her hands out towards Nicolette, not quite touching the injury itself. “Te Curo.”

There was a blue flash of light, and the flesh on her shin reknit itself. All the pain of the cut was gone. In fact, Nicolette’s headache had eased and the perpetual stiffness that plagued her neck had disappeared, too. The only evidence that her wound had ever happened was the bloodied tear in her pant leg.

It was like a weight that she had constantly been forced to bear had suddenly been lifted. Nicolette hadn’t been this pain-free in the last six years.

“You said we need to find a healer. What was that, if not healing?” she said, flabbergasted.

“I’m a lesser cleric of — a little-known goddess,” Shadowheart said. “My favor with her is not enough to ask for a full cure from the mind flayer parasite, for either of us. I can only cast a few more spells like that before I have to rest for the day.”

That was still more powerful than most of the Practitioners Nicolette knew. As a rule, the Practice was not good for providing consequence-free healing on demand, especially on repeat.

“What do you want for this?”

“Nothing. Just watch my back when the next nasty creature comes around,” Shadowheart said.

They exited the ship, back onto a different part of the shore. It wasn’t long before they found a white-haired man dressed in an aristocratic sort of getup, flagging them down. Like Shadowheart, his ears were unnaturally pointed.

“Hurry. I’ve got one of those brain things cornered. There, in the grass. You can kill it, can’t you? Like you killed the others,” he said.

Shadowheart readied her mace, while Nicolette turned her Sight onto the grass. There was a medium-sized animal that she couldn’t identify from the shape of its pumping blood alone, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t it. Maybe she just had to look harder…

The snake-shaped ring on her finger tightened. It was just in time for Nicolette to spot the flash of a dagger and raise her spear in response.

“Not so fast, backstabber.”

“Please, I was going for your throat,” he replied.

“This is a poor way to treat someone you just asked for help from,” she said. Obvious, but it never hurt to lay a foundation for why she was in the right before using offensive Practice. “Don’t tell me you’re in league with the intellect devourers.”

“Oh, that? There aren’t any here,” the foppish man said. “Now, I saw you scuttling about the ship. You’re the one in league with them, aren’t you? Those tentacled — argh!”

Memories flashed through Nicolette’s mind: curtseying before Alexander, her master, as politely unthreatening platitudes fell from her lips — pouring Chase and his friends a drink while they leered, one of them asking what her cup size was — staying up late to perform augury for a client, her servitude to Alexander ended but not her need for money, when she saw a strange tentacled ship appearing out of a portal. Unlike before, it was harder to sort out the white-haired man’s fear from her own.

“You’re not one of them. They took you, the same as me,” he said, lowering the dagger. “And to think, I was ready to decorate the ground with your innards. Apologies.”

Nicolette kept her spear leveled straight at him. “Who are you?”

He gave some spiel about being a magistrate named Astarion from somewhere called Baldur’s Gate, but it was hard to know if he was telling the truth or not. The fundamental rule that Nicolette had learned, that Others couldn’t lie, had just been shattered several seconds ago. It was difficult to fathom. Others were supposed to be able to trick, mislead, deceive, and bamboozle as much as they wanted, as long as they never made an untrue statement. Astarion had bold-facedly lied to her face.

“What do you say to stowing that weapon, Nicolette? I don’t enjoy getting into unnecessary fights,” Shadowheart suggested.

“He lied to us!” Nicolette said, outraged.

“It was a clever ruse, unorthodox introduction aside,” Shadowheart said. “I might have done the same if I was in his place.”

Alarm bells rang in Nicolette’s head. Was Shadowheart saying that she could lie too? Nicolette wracked her brains for an explanation of how this could be the case. A long time ago, Bristow had lectured on the existence of pocket realms that contained a mutated type of humanity, empowered by the realm to have Practice-like abilities without needing to commit their Word to truth. Many of them were physically twisted by the effects of the realm, which would explain things like the pointed ears and white hair. Subhumans, Bristow had called them, but there was a newer term too, oddfolk. If that was what Shadowheart and Astarion were, she would have to be much more careful. She wished she had her notes from Bristow’s lessons with her.

Meanwhile, Shadowheart was catching Astarion up on everything she knew about mind flayer tadpoles. He wasn’t taking it well.

Harsh laughter rang from Astarion. “Of course it’ll turn me into a monster. What else did I expect?”

The despairing anger in his voice rang truer than anything else he had said earlier. He hated their situation as much as she did. Nicolette lowered her spear.

“Our odds are better as a group,” she admitted grudgingly, catching Shadowheart’s eye. “We could travel together temporarily while we search for a healer.”

“You know, I was ready to go this alone, but maybe sticking with the herd isn’t such a bad idea,” he said. “I accept. Lead on.”

Nicolette gave him a hard little smile. “No. You’re taking the front. Shadowheart and I will bring up the rear. Maybe you can put those knife skills to good use and slice up an intellect devourer for us.”

 

---

 

They broke into the cliffside door of an ancient chapel to rest in overnight. The room they unlocked was dusty, the air stale enough that it seemed like nothing had been here for a long time. Nicolette wanted to stay put near the entrance, but Shadowheart insisted on searching for supplies.

“Who knows how many days of travel we are away from civilization?” she said.

“It’s always good to have more valuables on hand,” Astarion said. “It may be useful for persuading any healers we come across, hm?”

If Nicolette went with them, she could at least prevent outright graverobbing, she told herself. Still, she didn’t like it. On Earth, desecrating sacred ground usually played poorly with the spirits, and in this new realm where the rules were different, she had no idea how immediate godly retribution might be. The whole thing felt like a trap.

Her instincts were vindicated when a group of skeletons rose from the ground and started conjuring rays of ice at them. Astarion stabbed one harmlessly through the ribcage: fatal to a human, but ineffective against a creature without important internal organs. Nicolette’s quill-tipped spear was only a little more useful. She scratched a skeleton with it, lacing it with omens of doom, and it tripped onto the ground. Only when Shadowheart raised her fist to the air, eyes blazing with power, did the tide turn. Whatever she did made the skeletons run away, which gave them time to gang up on the lollygaggers one by one.

By the time they finished, the room was covered with scattered skeleton bones. Just in case, Nicolette kicked the pieces into the nearby cave river.

“Ugh, there had better be a soft bedroll in my future,” Astarion whined, inspecting a large bruise.

“Said like you weren’t the one that set off these skeletons in the first place,” Nicolette sniped.

“These had to be guarding something. Look!” Shadowheart said.

She pressed a button on a column, which opened up a hidden door leading to a small room.

“A lot of effort to hide one sarcophagus,” Astarion remarked.

Before Nicolette could say anything, he proceeded to get his grubby hands all over the stone lid. Then it began opening by itself, and a desiccated body with golden decorations over its skin floated out in front of them.

It spoke in a slow, grinding voice. “So he has spoken, and so thou standest before me. Right as always. What a curious way to awaken.”

Astarion had the temerity to run behind Nicolette and Shadowheart as the undead Other approached.

“Now I have a question for thee: what is the worth of a single mortal’s life?”

Nicolette knew how this worked. Avoiding the question for too long would cause the Other to attack, but answering wrongly would also cause it to attack. Still, she couldn’t be anything other than honest.

“Depends on the mortal. That’s how the world works. Some are given everything, and others are allowed nothing,” Nicolette said, a tinge of bitterness coloring her voice.

“I am curious by what standards thou shalt judge,” it said, cocking its head. “Very well. I am satisfied.”

Then it walked away, ignoring all other attempts to speak to it.

After that, it seemed foolish to stay in the chapel a second longer than they had to. Nicolette persuaded the others to camp out in a nearby grove of trees, using the materials they had found inside the chapel for shelter. She didn’t trust Astarion, as a man, to sleep in the same space that she did, so he was exiled to set up an improvised tent on his own.

“We don’t have time to gather a lot of firewood,” Shadowheart said. “Let’s cook our food and sleep. We’ll need our energy tomorrow — assuming we don’t sprout tentacles by then.”

Astarion was able to conjure up flames from his palm with nothing but a word, starting a small fire. Beyond that, nobody knew how to cook, so it was everybody for themselves as they roasted Nicolette’s skewered fish over the fire. Without a way to prevent it from spoiling, there was no reason to try to ration it for later. Nicolette forced down as much as she could. The fish wasn’t very good, simultaneously burnt and undercooked and entirely unseasoned, but she had experience ignoring the finer points of taste back from her dumpster diving days.

Soon, the campfire guttered down to nothingness. Nicolette sighed, already missing its comforting heat. Across from her, Astarion was sprawling across the dirt like he owned it, leaning in to where Shadowheart sat primly.

“I’m in no place to rest yet. I need some time to think things through. To process this,” Astarion said in an oddly low tone. He smiled at Shadowheart. “You rest. I’ll keep watch.”

“We should all stay on watch,” Nicolette cut in. “Divide it up evenly.”

A flicker of irritation crossed his face. “As you wish. I just wanted to save you all some exhaustion.”

The other two filed into their tents as Nicolette took first watch. Unknown birds called gently. The night was strangely bright under the light of the full moon. She didn’t recognize any of the constellations blanketing the sky, which was to be expected for a pocket realm, but it only hammered in how lost she was.

Carefully, she removed the raven feather hair ornament clipped to the side of her head, exposing the area that had cracked many years ago in the head injury that changed her life. Despite what the doctors said, the patch of skull around it still felt unnaturally soft to her fingers, liable to cave in if she pressed too hard. Whispers flooded in, filled with doom and death and impending transformation.

Her companions held deadly secrets. One of them was going to betray her. She was going to die in this pocket realm, away from everything she knew.

She hadn’t been able to hear anything else out of her right ear since the injury. The ornament was supposed to shield her from the worst of it. Without it, dark things would slip into her head, twisting her senses and wrecking havoc upon her emotions. The problem was, these Others weren’t able to lie any more than she was, and occasionally she could snatch good advice out of the paranoia and terror. Back in her room at the Blue Heron, she had multiple ornaments tuned to filter what entered her head to different degrees, but here she only had the one. Against a physical parasite embedded behind her eyeball, it seemed laughably useless.

Nicolette slowly smoothed the damaged feathers out, staring moodily across the camp. Tonight, she’d sleep under unfamiliar stars. Tomorrow, she’d hopefully have hair to put the ornament on, instead of losing her body and Self to the mind flayer transformation.