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The first night, Minthara does not rest.
They offer her a room in the towers, because they know that she has little option but to accept. They all smile and laugh in polite whispers under the pretense that this is more a political exchange than a kidnapping, and Minthara retires to her quarters with the distinct feeling of malaise dogging her heels. The horror of the situation does not set in until two hours after she closes the door behind her, sitting in the half-shadows of the bed she has made for herself.
If anything, she is only so upset because her disappearance from Menzoberranzan will be conceived as failure.
Yet, isn’t it just that? The thought is a dissonant toll of the bells reverberating around the cold walls. She’d come here to kill Ketheric Thorm and has little to show for it save the corpses of her men littering the dining hall. The afterimage of rot-black lips painting a pretty smile against silver skin. The voice of the Slayer, “I want this one,” directed not at Minthara (who may as well have been a doll to be swaddled by an overly-needy child) but to Thorm at her right. The memory of a stone-sharp dagger pressed delicately against a reddened eye, her own blood pooling in her sockets.
Nobody blinks at the dinner table. Everyone has their part to play, and she’ll play hers duteous to the denouement.
Minthara will not scream. She will dig her nails into the soft bed of her own flesh until the tips run bloody, she will grit her jaw until she tastes iron in her mouth, but if she must fail in every other aspect of her being, then at least she will not scream. If looked at charitably, she is a bargaining chip for some ulterior plan she cannot make out. Without the veneer of optimism, she is a victim in the making.
Ketheric called her Orin. Orin called Minthara ‘mine’.
In circumstances where Minthara is not reduced to some simpering shell of her former self, she might’ve flayed Orin to shreds for such a slight. How long has it been since someone had taken Minthara off guard like that? When she closes her eyes, she still feels the pinprick of Orin’s needle pressed against her lids, like a trinket taken under the finger, caressed to tarnishment.
Once upon a time, her mother tried to kill her. Minthara came to Moonrise expecting war.
She is not a stranger to death, nor the prospect of its proximity. Love and loss smother one another in their cradles, so Minthara bears her scars with acuity. Dying may as well be the same thing as mercy, so long as Orin’s tongue is red with the gore of her men. “Corpse-slick,” Orin had said, almost derisively so, and swiped her blood-sticky thumb over Minthara’s lower lip. A stake driven through the earth as a form of claimance. If she focuses on the sensation, Minthara can still taste the iron in her mouth.
The drop off the tower is one-hundred and twenty feet to her freedom (or death, depending on convenience) and Minthara considers it with all the weight of a weapon thrust into her palms. Introspection turns to resentment without proper guidance. She flies between fits of pacing and leaning over the window, and takes to watching the guardians of the tower crawl underneath her like ants.
She will not take the drop off the tower, though not strictly because Minthara knows it’s the coward’s way out. Orin has a plan for her, by virtue of the fact that her head is still attached to its ligaments, and the realization settles to her stomach like a cold stone. Mercy is a show of thoughtfulness, which is a display of power. Mercy like a threat uttered in little more than strokes of the flesh. Orin pulls the dagger back, and the implication of the knife remains.
Divined demarcations set in the land. Minthara once slit a woman’s throat for insinuating she’d gone soft. The drop to the foot of the tower is steep. If she’s lucky, it’d only take a second.
What are they going to do to her?
They break their fast in relative silence, in a way that can almost be considered pleasant. Pleasant, barring the stiffness with which Ketheric cuts into his meal. Pleasant, barring Orin, to his right, whose passing glances across the table could be misconstrued for something approaching hunger. She doesn’t eat with them. Minthara finds it terribly rude.
“And how do you find your accommodations?” asks Ketheric, which strikes Minthara as particularly funny given the roles they find themselves playing. Still, Minthara is angry, not stupid. She can play nice in front of Ketheric, despite the proximity between the two.
So, she looks up at him with a deferential shrug. Placid and declawed; how else is she expected to act? “As well as anything else to be found upon the surface. Thank you, General.”
“High praise from one hailing from the Underdark,” says Ketheric, polite.
“She must join me after she’s finished,” says Orin, who is decidedly less so.
Of course it would be too much to ask that Minthara go more than a few hours without being reminded that she is a prisoner at every turn. She does not immediately respond, instead opting to pick apart the small space between the crust and meat of her pork pie. Under normal circumstances, she might’ve attempted to put her utensils through Ketheric’s eye and let the cards fall as they may, but this does not constitute normal circumstances. There is still a reddish-brown stain on the table from where Narlos' head had hit the corner, split open like a rotting fruit. Some extant reminder of her own looming fate.
Disobedience serves as her collar, and Ketheric holds the leash. Then he and Orin can pass it back and forth while Minthara is made to watch.
“It would not do to see our honored guest waste away in her quarters all day,” he murmurs. She does like the way that Ketheric speaks, a ruminative lilt that leaves the words to spill from the corner of his lip. He has the cadence of a true General, and the fact that she continues to see likable traits in him irks her to an unreasonable degree. “Orin has been aching to find a way to make up for her frankly boorish behavior the other night.”
Orin’s lips split into a lazy grin, looking every inch the cat who’d gotten into the cream. If she is trying to convince Minthara of any remorse for murdering her company in cold blood, she is doing a horrendous job of it.
Because refusal may as well be the same thing as signing a warrant for her own torture, she puts on a show of grace. “Of course,” Minthara says, tipping her head forward, “It would be my pleasure.”
She had known somewhat that being alone with Orin after everything that has happened the night prior would have been somewhat uncomfortable. Ketheric leaves them at the dining table, citing matters with his pet necromancer, in more or less the same verbiage. Minthara occupies herself by cutting her knife down the side of the half-eaten pie, trying to slice down as thinly as possible. Orin is long-limbed and graceful, peering over the wooden edge of the table to catch a glimmer of Minthara’s attention.
Orin says, “I think you are afraid of me.”
The food crumbles under the weight of her knife. It is not sharp enough to cut clean slices. Orin’s blade is as red as the crimson flowing from an open wound and could cut through flesh with nothing more than a mere thought behind it. A company of twenty men is reduced to nothing, and then suddenly, like the panic-scramble of a body bracing to make impact with the ground, Minthara is alone.
“Caution should not be mistaken for fear,” Minthara replies, testing the syllables around her mouth, “And you have given me more than enough reason to be cautious.”
“Maybe. Yet caution and fear are not two ideas that happen to shake hands when appropriate. More that they are evolutions of one another.”
“How fortuitous for me that you are so learned in the ways of philosophy,” she says, doing her best not to let the sarcasm bleed through her voice.
Orin tilts her head at the pulpy mess Minthara continues to poke away at. “It looks like corpse-meat, though artlessly so. Rearranging. Do you play with all your food like this? ”
Her lip curls in disdain. “Nothing like that. I’m simply not hungry,” she says, which was true before Orin had opened her mouth, and truer still after the fact. It doesn’t help matters much, the fact that surfacer food is torturously bland, nor the fact that Orin had more or less compared her morning meal to a rotting cadaver. “But thank you for the unwarranted critique of my knifeplay.”
“Do not look so sour, it spoils your features. And my sensibilities.”
Minthara cannot help herself, and so her scowl deepens. “Is it considered artfulness when you kill a legion of men in the time it takes to draw breath? That we continue to dance around my autonomy for the sake of — what, exactly? You’re a murderer, and little more than that. Is this what passes for sophistication on the surface? Any child in Menzoberranzan could do the same.”
Orin smiles. “Is the lambling unimpressed? It questions the sanctity of my devotion, and yet watches in rapture as I slice and slit and remake to my delight. It scowls, spits at me even, like it is somehow beyond the shedding of skins.”
The accusation eats away at her, in the way that a bulette tears through the earth. Instinctual. She’ll come out angry and blind.
“You are the one who takes pleasure in it. I do not.”
“Oh, but don’t you?” Orin tilts her head from one side to the other. As though the idea of enjoyment derived from senseless death is commonplace, as though Minthara’s disgust is somehow the anomaly between them. “It came to the towers with the intent to kill the General. I saw the murderous intent in its eyes, even as it stood on the furthest edges of the horizon. Even still, I see fantasies of dying reflected in its reddened gaze. To tell the truth, I think it enjoys the bloodspill more than it lets on.”
There’s a drowidic word for creatures like Orin. The executioner without purpose. Duk-tak. The Slayer. An unholy thing, through and through.
“Is that why you spared me?”
“All you need is a guiding hand,” Orin says, with something in her expression that may sickeningly be called affection. “My little lamb already has the makings of something great — and I shall be the one to reach inside of you and tease it out.”
Orin, true to her word, does not leave Minthara alone for very long after that. There is worse company in the Towers (albeit not by much), so Minthara bears her annoyance with grace and attempts to derive whatever small amounts of commiseration she can from her visitations. Today, Orin lounges on Minthara’s bed with all the decadence of a born nobleman, hair billowing around her head like the glow of the divine.
“You were a warmonger, were you not?” Orin asks, eyes fixed on the gleaming edges of her nails, “How many have you killed, I wonder?”
As though Orin can’t tell just by looking at her.
“Many, though the exact number escapes me,” Minthara replies. She writes letters on the desk that will never make it back home, letters that pile up on the corner of the wooden expanse whose only fate is to be torn up to small pieces, or tossed into the fireside. “It was only ever in the service of House Baenre.”
“Ah, so it is sentimental,” Orin says, twisting her body over the spread. She moves her body like it is an extension of the knives she wields, with such grace to her that it leaves Minthara with the distinct impression she’ll never be able to match it. “Then tell me, was it necessity that drove your hand?”
“My duty is all that I have to me. I am given an order and I carry it out. Lolth favored my hand over the others — nothing more, nothing less.”
“So the faithful pray that their goddess will save them. So pious you are, staring down towards the Abyss, that have not yet noticed the jaws’ descent, snip-snapping around your pretty neck. If not so inspiring, one might think it pitiful.”
Privately, Minthara agrees. But she would never give Orin the satisfaction of knowing.
So she keeps it tucked under a thin lip, her dotting another i over her ink. She’s writing to the Matron Mother, who she is almost certain would look at the darthiir Minthara has become and curl her lip in disgust. She’s unsure whether she wants the tone of her letter to be damning or apologetic — but, then again, she supposes it doesn’t matter anyhow. An unsent letter will only ever be just that: a glorified thought.
Orin gives a sad sigh, “Your goddess has never once looked back, has she?”
The fireplace crackles and pops and dissipates. Ash in the air. Lolth is a cruel and vicious goddess, and demands repetition from her devotees in turn. Cruelty, like a shattered stone, is beautiful against the sharp edges. Cruelty demands blood. Orin demands a truth. Silence is an answer in and of itself. Minthara can’t defend herself with nothing in her hands.
“As long as it makes you feel better,” she says, her smile unkind.
“My devotion is not immaterial,” Minthara counters, voice kept low. “Imagine, demanding reciprocation for your faith to mean something! I am not as base as you.”
“It is sad. You’re being wasted, and you don’t even know it.”
Then Orin is suddenly off of the bed, and Orin’s arms are wrapped around Minthara’s shoulders, and whatever she had been writing (a laundry list of her failings as a person, now ripe with new material to add) is forgotten by the wayside. Orin, sticky-sweet and burgeoning with interest, whispers into the cold shell of Minthara’s ear, “If I were a god, I would not let my faithful wander. I will not let you languish.”
Lord Enver Gortash arrives a tenday later, with all the pomp and circumstance that a Lord’s presence normally dictates. She is permitted to eat at their dinner table on the night that he arrives, and she finds him just as charismatic as any woman of his stature — that is to say, it gives her pause. Minthara has always been more comfortable with a blade in her hand over words on her tongue, so she regards Gortash with the appropriate amount of resignation. He is not there to gawk at Orin’s playthings (which is, she supposes, what she amounts to now) so they stay out of each other’s way for the most part.
Minthara has taken to occupying herself in the library during nights when Orin is off doing gods-knows-what. Nobody else cares much for her presence, either for fear of Orin or by way of sheer apathy. General Thorm has already discarded her like an unbeloved toy. It is something that might’ve infuriated her weeks ago, but is a boon to her now, and survival means cherishing what little she is given.
Unimportance is the far less threatening cousin of significance. Ketheric could bash her skull in against the stone stairs leading up to his quarters, but she doesn’t mean enough for him to do it. Orin, capricious thing that she is, could suddenly decide that Minthara would be far more handsome as a corpse, and what would Minthara do then? A dog rolls over and shows its belly as a display of deference. Minthara gives whatever is demanded of her in service of a woman who won’t even say her name.
Pride has no place here. Minthara knows the story well.
“Apologies,” calls a sudden voice, butter-smooth and with a certain air of ease, “but I do believe you’re currently in possession of the text I’m looking for.”
“Oh,” says Minthara, turning her gaze to Lord Gortash. The book is little more than a philosophical account of divinity and dialectics, so vacuous in its nature that Minthara is almost certain Gortash has no true need of it. Still, it wasn’t as though she’d been actually reading the damn thing anyway, so she closes the book shut and holds it out towards him. “No, the apologies are mine.”
“My thanks,” he says, smiling easily, and tucks the tome under his arm. “Say, you must be Orin’s new…”
“Pet?” Minthara’s voice comes out wry.
“I was going to say obsession, but hey. You’re self-aware.” He taps the corner of his temple, looking up at her conspiratorially through his eyelashes. “I can see why she likes you.”
“I’m flattered,” she says, without even an inch of gratitude to her, “Truly.”
“Oh, gods, don’t do that,” he mutters, waving her away, “That blasted complaisance. It’s enough that every other contemptible fool between these walls bends over backwards trying to earn my graces. Please, speak freely around me.”
Minthara forces her lip into a straight line. She will certainly not, but she does like that Gortash does not talk down to her. And then the idea strikes her as so incomprehensibly funny, that the smile peeks back around anyway. What a ridiculously low bar to clear! The Matron Mother would well and truly roll over in shock at what Minthara has reduced herself to.
Then likely behead her for the shame of watching. It would be almost a preferable existence to this.
“What do they plan to do with you, I wonder?” he asks, then. It’s more a question to himself than one aimed directly at Minthara, but it is a question that she has posed to herself various times since her arrival to the Towers. She flinches, anyhow. “She said you were from Menzoberranzan. So I suppose they’ll make a commander out of you.”
She wonders what that means. Is it better to know and live the rest of her days with the knowledge that some fate beyond death exists for her? She’d half-expected to turn up in a ditch at this point, but death is far from the worst thing that could be done to her. Minthara will not ask. She is not sure she could bear knowing.
“It sounds like an honor,” she says instead.
“It is,” Gortash agrees, but there is very little sincerity behind it. His smile smooths into something far more grave. “You’re the bait, you know. Your House will hear of the drow who’d spurned Lolth for some shiny new god and it’ll plant a seed of doubt. Maybe they’ll have you wage wars upon your old home, I don’t know. I don’t like it, really, but this is the game that the other two want to play.”
“If you do not like it so much, then you need not entertain them,” Minthara spits. She hardly imagines that she could be coerced into fighting wars on their behalf, but Gortash speaks so certainly that perhaps the idea is not so absurd after all. “I have spurned nobody, and even if I did, House Baenre would not care. They will brand me a traitor. They will not be fooled.”
Gortash nods thoughtfully. Like Minthara is a wounded animal liable to take his hand off with her teeth. Like he’s trying to placate some monstrous hound who doesn’t know the damage it’s about to do to itself. “Of course, of course. We know that, you see… But Ketheric and Orin? They’re a little simpler than you and I. I just thought I’d warn you.”
“That’s awfully considerate, given that you’re in league with them.”
“I’m just the messenger,” he smiles, shrugging. “You are the victim, no? You still have time to avoid your fate.”
The drop off the tower is one-hundred and twenty feet of stone-laden brick to the bottom of the gates. If she’s lucky, it’ll only take a second. Orin gets her blood from the base of Minthara’s skull, and everyone goes home happy. The guards crawl over the cobblestones like ants and she squishes them down with her thumb. Death is your only chance at freedom, so claims Enver Gortash. Justice in the form of cruelty. Her goddess has never once looked back.
( But Orin did, though. Orin called her ‘mine.’ )
“... Thank you,” Minthara says after a moment’s silence, and makes a note to avoid the library for the rest of Gortash’s stay.
Orin’s eyes are pale stones that glitter in the dark. She does not blink often, barring dramatic effect and the pretense of humanity. Minthara maps the tendrils of blood-red ink that flow through Orin’s skin and hates herself for finding it enchanting. Orin is beautiful in the way that a burning building is the shape of freedom, beautiful in the way that a mercy killing is righteous, beautiful in the way that an apostle loves their god.
Minthara is bereft of duty and is horribly empty without hope. Orin takes what is left and talks sweet to her in the hopes of making up the difference.
“I have always wondered what it feels like to die,” Orin says, lips brushing against the sensitive juncture beneath Minthara’s jaw. “The crimson-wet second before it all ends and they are taken to be held within Father’s embrace. I suppose I might be jealous.”
“One day, you will know the feeling,” Minthara says, her breath stilted. She imagines it, the face that Orin might make in the split hair-thin moment that it takes for a life to end; the rapture, the cataclysm. Her hand runs down the curvature of Orin’s back, slender and lithe. Cold, like stone. “Death is the sole certainty in this life, isn’t it?”
“He will reject me as I am now.” A light nip against her throat. Minthara makes a noise of want that she detests on principle. “In truth, I believe He resents me for what I have taken from Him. But all I have done is balance the scales. After all, was it not I who had been stolen from first?”
“Obligation ties us to family more than blood,” she says. It’s a shame Minthara has taken to nervously biting her nails as of late — she might kill for the opportunity to rake her claws down Orin’s unblemished skin. Make her shake and writhe for once. Let her do the marking, instead of being marked upon. “And obligation is always the variable between us.”
“Mother dearest tried to slit her poor daughter’s throat,” says Orin, pouting, “all for the want of recognition.”
“Funny. I wonder if all mothers are destined to resent their daughters at some juncture or another.”
“Yet we survived.”
(Minthara was only thirty-two at the time, freshly an adult and too far too tempestuous to realize her shortsightedness. Her mother had rationalized the act of murder as something derived from love, that she had loved Minthara enough to want to take her life before anyone else could. Love, at its most tangible, demands obsession. Minthara had always thought her mother to be full of shit, but it is only when she feels Orin’s heat against her waking body does she realize there may have been a grain of truth waiting to be uncovered from within the dust.)
“May her scars never fade.” It’s the beginning of a joke.
(Her silver-skinned neck shudders in anticipation when she swallows. Reciprocation in total perpetuity. Beauty seeks cruelty because they like to hold hands.)
Orin kisses her then, full-mouthed and hungry. Want through recognition of the other expressed through little more than teeth. Minthara sees her desperation for what it truly is — that is to say, loneliness — and pulls her closer anyway. Acquiesces to the tongue that shoves itself down her throat, acquiesces to the whims of the woman who had seen in Minthara a mirror. Because you’re like me, you surely must understand, and because we understand one another, that must be love. It has to be, because if it isn’t, then what am I?
Then what are you?
Minthara awakens somewhere far away from the Towers. It is skin-warm and dripping wet, eclipsed by the faint scent of rot and rust. There is a half-second where she wonders if Orin had swallowed her whole, with all her teeth and tongue, and this is the coveted five-second flash before death; another one of Orin’s inane gifts to her.
Oh, how wonderful it would be to die, to hold knowledge that Orin will never possess over her head! The fantasy is shattered when, five seconds later, a drow marches into the room, parting the flesh doors with little more than her presence. Then she is looked at, and they are looking at each other, and Minthara finally sees herself for the first time since she’d left the Underdark. Gaunt and cruel and pathetic all at once.
“You know I hate it when you do that,” says Minthara.
“But you are so beautiful,” says Orin, smiling in a way that gives the stark impression of a leather canvas stretched in all the wrong places. She supposes then, that this is what Minthara looks like to others. Some extant madness that lingers beneath the pretense of personhood. Orin had claimed them to be of the same stock once, and oh, Minthara had laughed and laughed and laughed.
She wants to close her eyes, but Orin will not let her. Soft fingernails dig into the flesh of her eyelids, prying them open. An ant is squashed with the broad width of a thumb. A spider with its limbs ritualistically torn off, one by one. Cruelty exists for the sake of cruelty. Orin claims to love her but has never once said I love you.
The truth is that this was inevitable from the start; but Minthara had always known that, hadn’t she? From the first time that Orin had revealed herself, it had been an admission. I see you. I know you. A hundred thousand permutations with roads that lead and end at the same place; here, in this room, with Orin by her side. Minthara, with her affections and her weaknesses dogging at her own heels.
She should have taken Lord Gortash’s advice. She should have taken the drop.
“For what it’s worth,” Orin says, pinching the wriggling worm between her fingers, “I am sorry.”
Sorrys mean nothing at the end of the cattle-line. Minthara, versed in death and versed in betrayal, knows the story well. She’s always known the story well; that at the end of the way, she would have always found herself at this place. At Orin’s mercy. Orin, whose outstretched hands are meant only to placate the vicious animal on the other end. What a pair they make.
“If you must do this to me,” Minthara says in lieu of struggle, because she knows full well that there is no reasoning to be had when they speak the language of war, “then at least let me see you. At least grant me this one mercy.”
There is a long moment where Orin considers this (and what an observant a lover she is, even adopting Minthara’s lower lip-bite as she thinks!) before she sighs. Affectionately. In a second, the illusion disappears into ash and dust, and Orin — silver-skinned and pale-eyed, beautiful Orin — obliges her. It is the most tangible expression of faith Minthara has received in all her two-hundred years of living. Armies could have marched to their deaths for less than this.
The one thing that men will beat each other to death for is simple, really. That is to say, they all want to be understood.
“I suppose I am your god,” Orin says, with a sudden fondness that stirs something vile within Minthara, even at the depths of her hatred, “How could I deny such a show of faith?”
An ersatz god comes bearing the divine, thrashing in its grasp. A scrap of salvation shrieks and cries and wants to be known, to be safe, to impart and imprint and be loved for once. Orin opens her eyes for her, and forces her to see the world as experienced by the other. Minthara, in all her sudden understanding, accepts the grace she is given.
You know what’s funny? The word absolute is trapped in the word absolution. Absolution implies forgiveness, and more importantly, a desire to be forgiven. The words don’t mean the same thing — one demands finality, the other suggests fluidity — but they come from the same place, and that’s what’s important. From the root word absolvere, meaning to complete.
In other words: absolution and totality are the natural endpoints of perfection.
Is it possible to be whole without being set free first?
A bird might go the entirety of its life without knowing that it is spent within a cage. A candle drips wax down its own sides, eventually unmaking itself, only to be built back up again. Take a ship, strip it of its wood, replace it with something else; is it still the same as it started? Tell me this: is it still murder if someone has to die in order to survive? One of us has to make the sacrifice, lest we both drown at sea.
Do you go first, or do I?
At the end of the day, love is saying, I want to know you in all the ways that a person can. I would stick my fingers in your gaping wounds just to know what your insides feel like. I would kill you just to deny others the pleasure. They say that obsession and love are not the same thing, but why does everything else pale in comparison? Gods, this must be it. It has to be.
The truth is this: we don’t have to die if we don’t really want to.
But of course, you already knew that.
“I do love you,” Orin says, kissing a slow line between each of Minthara’s knuckles. The touch feels like dying, or else something divine. “More than anything.”
Devotion is the curved end of a dagger slipped neatly between the ribcage. Devotion is the breath at the end of a declaration, soft and weightless. Devotion is Minthara, watching the crown of Orin’s head dip lower and lower as the kisses spill over her stomach, her thighs. Devotion is the way that she waits, endlessly, for her name on the other’s tongue. Devotion and love come from the same place but are not the same thing, and that is why it is so easy for Orin to lie.
Minthara is not the same as Orin, and so she can only ever feel the way she is told.
“Do you love me?” asks the deceiver.
“Endlessly,” replies the supplicant.
EXT. THE SHADOW-CURSED LANDS. NIGHT.
Out of the darkness, the screeching howl of a dying beast, yet unseen. A small light uncovers the face of MINTHARA BAENRE, mid 200s, who makes her way back to the lone tower shrouded by the mist. There is a sprawling darkness in front of her, but MINTHARA is peerless, and makes the stride. It is a somber, quiet return.
EXT./INT. MOONRISE TOWERS. NIGHT.
MINTHARA enters the towers and we follow her as she makes her way to the main hall. Occupants of the tower flit in and out of view: a HALF-ORC COMMANDER scolding a group of MAGES, a YOUNG WOMAN followed by a pack of DOMESTICATED GNOLLS, a group of ADVENTURERS tucked away at one of the corner tables. At the end of the hall lies a grandiose throne, where KETHERIC THORM looks blandly upon the proceedings. KETHERIC acknowledges her with a glance. MINTHARA stands to attention.
KETHERIC
You have returned, Nightwarden. Just in time, it seems. (smiles, all curt business) Status report.
MINTHARA
Yes, General. Missionary contact has been made successfully in both cases, I suspect we will see results within a tenday or two. It is possible the goblins will need to be plied with alcohol - or bloodsport, but neither should be an extenuating problem. The Absolute promises them both.
KETHERIC
And the perimeter?
MINTHARA
Movement near the monastery. I’ve sent scouts to the area - kobold sightings, though they believe there may be another presence alongside them.
KETHERIC
(thoughtful)
Your verdict?
MINTHARA hesitates. She does not want to speak plainly in front of him, because of the vast differences in their rank and her respect for his opinion. After a beat, she dips her head forward, hands massaging one another.
MINTHARA
Noteworthy, but ultimately unimportant to our current cause. I would send another scout to reevaluate within a fortnight.
KETHERIC tilts his head and smiles, seemingly satisfied.
KETHERIC
Oh, little lambling mine. You do know how to satisfy.
KETHERIC’s body twists and turns, sickening noises of bones breaking and re-aligning reverberating throughout the room. MINTHARA winces but forces herself to look on, suddenly aware of the game that is being played with her. KETHERIC transforms into ORIN. This is not the first time this has happened.
ORIN
(gleefully, amused with herself)
Are you unhappy to see me?
MINTHARA
The General would not appreciate this.
ORIN beckons towards her. MINTHARA approaches the throne.
ORIN
I do it for you.
ORIN takes MINTHARA’s chin between her fingers and pulls her down for a kiss. ORIN makes a show of it - MINTHARA is clearly embarrassed, because of the other CULTISTS flitting in and out of the hall. Nobody pays them any mind - they know better than to gawk at the Chosen’s pet.
They pull apart, and MINTHARA hovers. ORIN looks brightly up at her, and then snaps her fingers.
INT. MOONRISE TOWERS. MINTHARA’S ROOM - NIGHT.
The pair embrace one another - though we see it as more of MINTHARA held within ORIN’s grasp. She strokes the hair of the woman underneath her, like preening over a show dog or some other valuable object. MINTHARA is surprised at the sudden shift - she is still not used to ORIN’s whims - but she is quickly lulled into a sense of contentment. This is where she belongs.
ORIN
The warmonger is apparently off dealing with his moon kin. Searching. Isn’t that awful? She died an entire lifetime ago, you know - but the warmonger knows only how to deal with things in terms of conquest, so it makes sense that he sees loss as such, too. Such impetus! Don’t you agree?
MINTHARA
(she isn’t listening, content to be with her chosen)
Mm.
ORIN
(suddenly harsh)
Now, pay attention, little lambling.
ORIN’s grip on MINTHARA turns rough. She leans into the drow’s ear and whispers:
ORIN (CONT’D)
I have plans for you.
The rest is unintelligble to us - it is a special mission meant for MINTHARA’s ears only. She looks at the audience, past us - she is receiving a divine revelation from God’s chosen. It is not the most important task she will ever carry out, but because it is ORIN who delivers it, she becomes resolute. ORIN is the one who saved her, after all.
MINTHARA
I would not fail you.
ORIN
Do you only do things for me, love? (amused) This is for the sake of the Absolute. She is your god, isn't she?
MINTHARA closes her eyes. She reflects on a moment prior, from before she had seen the light - but it is imperceptible, out-of-reach.
MINTHARA
Yes, I…
ORIN laughs, and gently pushes her away - out of her grasp. MINTHARA stands to her feet, and paces around the room before she looks at ORIN, lounging on her bed. She likes seeing her this way - happy, relaxed. Utterly in control. She would go to the ends of Faerûn and beyond for ORIN’s sake, if it meant small moments like this. The mission is trivial, in comparison to the depths of her devotion.
ORIN
I know, Minthara. I know.
ORIN has said her name. MINTHARA stops in her tracks, at a loss for words.