#bc she doesn't want to face what's waiting for her in the morphic pool

[thedragonagelesbian]

"You are wasting time."

The reminder comes as Yiseeril is soaring over the Lower City, shrouded in night and an invisibility spell. Her psionics part the world before her, allowing her to glide from rooftop to rooftop with but a thought, and when the wind is kissing her cheeks and rushing under her arms, she has mercifully few thoughts other than the exaltation of her body. No future, no past, just dancing under the stars, tracing the patterns of a dozen variant constellations whose names and stories and cultures are, like so many things, engraved into her synapses forever.

"On the contrary, my dear Astral-bound friend, I am savoring every second of it."

"We have all three Netherstones," the Emperor insists, "we've had them for weeks now. Every second spent dawdling gives the Elder Brain another chance to break loose."

Yiseeril lands on the roof of the Counting House and perches between the crenelations. She was here just hours ago with Astarion, cheering him on as he flitted between grates in his new misty form and popped each safe one by one. The wealth of the Lower City to line their pockets for however much longer such mundane concerns as 'wealth' would worry them, in exchange for one very cross mind flayer. A fair trade, no?

"I'm having fun."

"You will have considerably less fun if the Elder Brain overwhelms me and dominates you."

Yiseeril rolls her eyes, a gesture lost on most behind the feathers of her halo but received by her co-pilot. "It hasn't yet."

"It will," the Emperor snaps. "You tempt fate."

"Love, that's what you like best about me." Yiseeril grins as she senses the shift in the tenor of their psychic connection. Still annoyed, unequivocally, but that smug superiority becomes more frustrated, knowing that she's right. "You like zipping around in my pocket, seeing this world, this life, that Gortash and the Elder Brain took away from you. How many sunsets have you seen because of me?" The tether bristles, and she's quick to add, "And don't tell me you don't care, because I know just how terribly sentimental you are, Bal-dur-an."

She sings its old name, lilting and playful. Another detour, another distraction, but how utterly wonderful it was to turn every nook and cranny of this city over. The whole of the Lower City, a tapestry of hundreds of years of magic and secrecy to be unwoven, and Yiseeril oh so loves an unknown.

...At least, she used to.

It responds with a huff that fills her entire mind with hot air. "Yes, I have... attachments to my past selves, but that does not explain your sentimentality. The city will still be here after we defeat the Absolute. There will be time for your juvenile 'fun' later."

Yiseeril's stomach tightens, but she tries to hide it with a smile. "Oh, love, I never took you for a 'glass half full' kind of being. It's so sweet that you think I'll survive this."

"And it is strange that you, for all your bravado, do not."

Suddenly restless, Yiseeril alights from the Counting House roof and sails down to the street. Her feet touch the cobblestone for only a moment before she is in the air again, skipping faster now across the buildings. Away from the water.

"Oh, well, one of us has died much more recently than the other. You may recall it was precisely a penchant for overestimation that landed me in that particular position."

In fact, it had been a conflation of her most troublesome characteristics. Her curiosity to drive her to the Iron Throne. Her whimsy to skate its perimeter on a Potion of Speed, caring less for the hostages and more for the sense of the world warping around her. Her hubris to think she could linger long enough to destroy Gortash's toy before he could.

"And you were reborn more powerful for it."

Minthara said the same thing. The Emperor, the holder of her pact; Minthara, the holder of her oath, and whoever Yiseeril had been before, a bloated corpse floating in the harbor.

"And who's to say I won't be reborn again when we confront the Absolute?"

"Is that what you desire? Or why you have so adamantly delayed this confrontation?"

Yiseeril doesn't respond, not until she's hovering above the Stormshore Tabernacle. She descends so she can look through the stained glass window that frames its generic altar and the equally generic statue that presides over it. Perfectly nondescript down to the blank scroll in its hands.

Of course, the blank scroll is also the holy symbol of Oghma-- god of knowledge and the patron saint of bards.

Her violin still sits on the altar. Unclaimed.

Just as she had been. A partial illithid with a partial soul and only a partial afterlife awaiting her.

"Whatever becomes of you next," the Emperor almost sounds gentle, "it will be as sublime as what you have made of yourself with the tadpole."

"You have hit upon the precise issue of my concern, love, for I do not have to speculate as to what will become of me without the tadpole."

"What do you mean?"

She opens that part of her mind to him: the Ritual of the Passive Voice. Undertaken by the order of Oghmanyte monks who had raised her, it was supposed to transform her into a conduit for His vast knowledge. Too vast for her mundane mind and her mortal body, it rendered her an empty shell for years until a parasitic insertion and an opportunistic siphoning of Orpheus' protection had given her her mind back.

Astarion had ascended and would thus keep the autonomy that the tadpole had granted him. But her? Skull still inundated with more information than any humanoid--even a holy one--could handle?

There is the alternative, of course. The one that Minthara proposed astride Ketheric's throne with Yiseeril curled in her lap. To control a god is to become a god. To become a god is to never bow or fear or die again.

The Emperor can't know about that, though, for surely it, in all the fierceness of its independence, would object.

"I see. I have always sensed something else in your mind. It is for the best that I never pressed upon it and risked breaking the levee that the tadpole has offered you."

There's an inquisitive edge to the Emperor's thoughts, and Yiseeril seizes upon it. "You wouldn't happen to have any idea of what to do about that, would you, oh great cranial expert?"

A sound like a laugh reverberates along their connection. "I am more a master of devouring than of reconstruction... and yet..."

For a moment, Yiseeril sees a flash of something: a tadpole, suspended above the Emperor's hand, yet different from any other she has encountered. Even the Astral Tadpole had not looked like this. Swollen. Gorged. Like a fruit ripened to bursting, and Yiseeril's own tadpole writhes between her grey matter, eager to feast upon its knowledge.

She wonders--with a pang of irony too painful to linger upon--if this consumption too counts as worship, and in that moment of agony, the link breaks. The image vanishes. She is staring again at the marble statue of a god who had twice abandoned her.

"What was that?" she says aloud, a question searching for a direction, floundering in the night before she senses the Emperor once more.

"Inspiration."

#gods least favorite princess #no editing just vibes thinking about yiseeril dicking around for days/weeks after getting the netherstones #bc she doesn't want to face what's waiting for her in the morphic pool