R. Salvatore - Archmage

Minolin Fey blanched and fell back against the door, knowing well from his tone that he was not speaking idly. The archmage’s eyes flared with frustration and rage, and he sneered and growled again.

But then he sighed, the moment passing.

“She is not merely Quenthel any longer,” Gromph calmly explained. “She is not weak, nor is House Baenre.”

“We can do it through proxies,” Minolin Fey started to add, but Gromph cut her short with a glare that froze the blood in her veins.

“Never speak of K’yorl again,” Gromph warned. “Are you so foolish to miss the small matter that the matron mother now has an illithid at her disposal? Methil El-Viddenvelp serves my sister as he once served my mother.”

“As he has served your child,” Minolin Fey reminded him.

“Do not presume to understand anything about Methil. And I say again, for the last time, never speak of K’yorl again.”

“As you demand, Archmage,” the high priestess said, deferentially-and wisely-lowering her gaze to the floor.

“Get back to House Baenre and our child,” Gromph ordered. “You dare leave her unprotected in this time when demons haunt the ways of Menzoberranzan?”

Minolin Fey didn’t look up and didn’t answer, other than to slowly retreat back out the door, never turning her back to the archmage.

Gromph took little satisfaction in hearing her footsteps and the rustle of her robes rushing down the hall. Despite his outward anger, Gromph knew that her fear of Quenthel’s growing power was correct.

The old archmage looked back out the window, shaking his head. Quenthel had been brilliant in so locking down the city-perhaps that was what galled him most of all.

And Gromph had erred, he knew. He had come to hope that Yvonnel, his child, possessed of his mother’s memories and soon enough to be crowned as Matron Mother of Menzoberranzan, would serve as his ladder to ascension against the dark realities of Lolth’s failure to secure the Weave, and the Spider Queen’s apparent indifference to him even had she succeeded.

Soon enough, Quenthel would have Matron Mother Zeerith begging her to keep the city of Q’Xorlarrin as a Baenre satellite, and now, with the constant demonic threat lurking in every shadow, any movement by House Barrison Del’Armgo, House Melarn, House Hunzrin, or any others, had surely been halted.

“Brilliant,” he admitted, staring out at the city as another demonic fireball erupted.

He glanced back at the door, at where Minolin Fey had been. Perhaps it was time for him to go and speak with the Matron of House Fey-Branche, Minolin’s mother Byrtyn.

One of the former conspirators. The one who had found K’yorl Odran.

A gray and ugly fog blew in, sometimes thin and blurring the giant mushroom stalks into ghostly figures, other times so thick as to block Kimmuriel’s vision for more than a few feet in every direction. A great stench was carried on that steaming wind and fog, the aroma of rot and death, of burning flesh and hearty vomit.

Kimmuriel was too disciplined to let that bother him. So many who came here to this wretched plane of existence grew distracted by the grotesque sights and smells, and that distraction often led to violent ends.

The drow walked steadily, his eyes and his mind’s eye probing all around him. He would not be caught off guard.

He could hear her now, calling to him as she had done when he was a child-not with her physical voice, but psionically.

Kimmuriel Oblodra tried to hold his calm. He came in sight of her, of K’yorl, his mother, then, as she leaned against a mushroom stalk, looking every bit the same as she had on that awful day more than a century before, when Matron Mother Baenre had wrenched the whole of House Oblodra up by its stony roots and dropped it into the Clawrift, the great chasm that split the cavern that housed Menzoberranzan.

K’yorl had gone over with that tumbling stalagmite house, and Kimmuriel had thought her dead.

That notion hadn’t bothered him too greatly, though. He had already all but left House Oblodra to join Jarlaxle’s mercenary band, and he was not one to be bothered too greatly by such destructive and useless emotions as grief.

Or elation, he pointedly told himself as he once again looked upon his mother.

Gromph had sent him to Byrtyn Fey and she had directed him here, to the Abyss, to the throne of the great balor Errtu.

To K’yorl Odran, Errtu’s slave.

“My son, you are all that remains,” K’yorl greeted.

“It would seem that you, too-”

“No,” K’yorl interrupted. “I am dead in every way that matters. The Prime Material Plane is beyond me now, my mortal coil no more than an illusion, a manifestation here to keep Errtu amused.” She paused and shot him the slyest of looks as she added, “For now.”

Kimmuriel couldn’t miss the seething anger in her voice and behind her fiery eyes-orbs that had not lost a bit of their luster in the century and more of her imprisonment. After all these decades, the fiery and vicious K’yorl had not cooled.

“Matron Mother Yvonnel Baenre is long dead,” he said, to try to calm her.

“Cursed House Baenre just replaces her, one after another, but House Oblodra, our House, all that we had built, is no more!”

“You erred in the Time of Troubles,” Kimmuriel bluntly replied. “You reached too high and when the divine powers returned, you were punished for your hubris. We all were.”

“But you survived.”

Kimmuriel shrugged, as if it hardly mattered.

“And what have you done to repay Baenre?” K’yorl demanded sharply.

“I?” Kimmuriel replied incredulously. “I have served myself, as I please, when I please, how I please.”

“With Jarlaxle.”

“Yes.”

“Jarlaxle Baenre ,” K’yorl said pointedly, for she was one of the few who knew the truth of that strange, Houseless mercenary.

“It is not a name he uses.”

“He serves House Baenre.”

“Hardly. Jarlaxle serves Jarlaxle.”

K’yorl nodded, digesting it all.

“It is time to pay them back,” she said at length. “Quenthel is a weakling, and she is vulnerable.”

“She has tightened her noose on the city.”

“And when it loosens? A dragon is dead, the Darkening has been defeated, and the fledgling city of Matron Mother Zeerith hangs by a single strand of a spider’s web.”

“I am surprised that you are so informed of the-”

“I have nothing but time,” K’yorl interrupted. “And Errtu torments me by showing me the turning of Menzoberranzan without me.”

“Then you know that Matron Mother Baenre will see to Matron Mother Zeerith’s troubles as well.”

“With demons.”

“You know much for a slave in the Abyss,” Kimmuriel said again, even allowing a bit of sarcasm into his normally impassive tone.

“I know much because I am in the Abyss! Errtu does not fear me, surely, and so he does not fear letting me know of Menzoberranzan.”

“Demons, yes,” said Kimmuriel.

K’yorl gave a little laugh, a wicked one indeed. “You must be my conduit, Kimmuriel. You must exact the punishment House Baenre rightly deserves.”

Kimmuriel dismissed that foolish notion even as the matron mother spoke it. He wasn’t about to go against Matron Mother Baenre and her vast array of powerful friends. Still, he heard and sympathized with every word. He hated Quenthel Baenre. Despite any logical protestations to the contrary, a simmering rage burned within Kimmuriel Oblodra for all that he had lost, for all that House Baenre had taken from him. He watched again in his memories the tumbling structure of House Oblodra, pitching over the side of the Clawrift, so many dark elves, his family, tumbling into oblivion.