Chapter Text
✦
The pod opens, allowing him to slump to the floor. His head throbs and pounds with a splitting headache. He doesn’t know where he is, who he is, only that he is in danger.
Nothing in his skull besides a name and a headache.
Tartaglia takes a deep breath, shakes his head, and gets up off the floor.
Amidst the flames, the ship crumbles and crashes around him. The sounds of destruction ring through his head, but… one sound grabs his attention.
Across the room, someone bangs a fist against the inside of another one of those pods.
He approaches the pod and sees the figure of an… elf, maybe?
Tartaglia investigates the pod itself, then the console near the pod, finally activating the console and… hmm…
There doesn’t seem to be any kind of interface on the console, but the parasite in his skull reminds him of its presence, squirming uncomfortably until he feels… connected to the console?
What now? He wonders. Do I just… open the pod?
A shiver runs through him and the pod opens, letting the elven man fall to the ground.
The man pushes himself off the ground and stands. “Thank you. I was beginning to thinkー”
As they make eye contact, Tartaglia’s brain throbs. Visions rush past. He sees the streets of a city, a sword, his own face seen through unfamiliar eyes.
The vision passes, as does the pain. The elf before him seems to be recovering from a similar sensation, pulling his hand from where it was clutching his head. “Fuck, my head.”
“Same here.” Tartaglia groans. “Where are we?”
“A Mindflayer ship.” The elf responds as he investigates their surroundings. “It’s probably going down… we need to get out of here.” Then he unsheathes a shortsword with an ornate hilt and turns to leave.
Tartaglia reaches for his glaive… which is absent from its sheath. Looking around, it seems he failed to grab it before being picked up by mindflayers.
He reaches for the daggers at his belt, which are thankfully present.
“I’m Kaeya, by the way.” The elf calls back to him.
“I’m… Tartaglia.”
The two fight their way through the illithid ship.
Tartaglia finds himself to be quite proficient with the daggers he found at his belt, thankfully, considering his circumstances.
His new companion isn’t too shabby with his shortsword either. Kaeya’s fighting stance is elegant and fluid, yet he seemed sturdy all the same. He dispatches of the attacking imps quickly and efficiently, while Tartaglia’s fighting style necessitated close quarters for his bloody work.
Over the course of several rooms of adversaries, the two begin getting used to each other’s fighting styles and manage to work well enough together to take down two cambions on their own. They briefly celebrate with knowing smiles to each other, then begin searching the room for anything useful.
Until, suddenly, the ship lurches andー
✦
Kaeya wakes up. His head pounds and his unwanted passenger, unfortunately, still wriggles in his skull.
“Come on, buddy. You’ll be okay.”
He opens his eyes and sees the human man with messy ginger hair from the ship. He smiles back at him. His hands are pressed into Kaeya’s chest. “Welcome back to the land of the living.” He doesn’t move his hands. “Don’t move just yet. You took a nasty hit before the ship went down.”
Right. He looks around. He’s laying on a sandy shore surrounded by the wreckage of the illithid ship that stole him from the city.
“You fight well, by the way. Where’d you learn that?” Tartaglia’s eyes are trained on his hands, which are glowing softly in a way familiar to Kaeya.
Kaeya gathers his thoughts. “I’m a knight in Baldur’s Gate. You?”
Tartaglia hesitates before saying “I don’t know. I was kind of hoping my memories would come back after getting off the ship.”
A beat of silence.
“How unfortunate.” Kaeya muses. “What do you remember?”
“Well…” He starts, unsure. “My name… the worm…” He trails off.
“I see.” Kaeya holds up his sword arm and observes how bloodsoaked it is. He wonders how much is his own. He can feel dried blood and sand clumping in his hair and sticking to his neck.
“That should be enough.” Tartaglia pulls his hands away and it feels as though his own chest is lighter for it. He stands and holds out a hand to help Kaeya up.
Kaeya takes the hand and stands with him. “Thanks.”
Tartaglia smirks at him. “Don’t mention it.” He unsheathes one of his daggers. “Can you fight?”
Kaeya reaches for his shortsword, still reliably on his hip, and unsheathes it. He swings it a few times experimentally. A sting of pain shoots up his arm, through his shoulder, and down his side. He withholds a wince. “Seems like it. You?”
He chuckles. “Always. To my last breath.”
The statement startles Kaeya for a moment. “It’s a good thing you remember that.” He says with a smile.
“How else would we have taken down those cambions?”
Kaeya laughs. “I don’t think we’d be able to take on more in this state.”
“Sure, but I think I saw some more of those brain things running around. We should be ready.”
Tartaglia leads them through the wreckage, and they do end up finding a few intellect devourers before they make it past all the debris.
They find more corpses, though. People of all walks of life trapped in the illithid pods or turned into bloody piles on the ground. It turns Kaeya’s stomach, but he’s seen worse in the underdark.
✦
The two find their way to a grove of druids.
After asking around, they find out what the brain worms are: parasites that will turn them into mindflayers in a matter of days.
They also find a few leads for a cure:
The first lead, unfortunately, says she can’t help them, nearly kills them, then settles for making them promise to drink poison if they feel the beginnings of the transformation.
Their second lead is the archdruid that’s trapped in the goblin stronghold. Kaeya and Tartaglia decide to check it out in the morning.
Their third and final lead is an old woman who lives in a cottage in the swamp south of the goblin camp. The two designate her as plan B, in the event that the archdruid can’t help them.
Before they can follow any of the leads, however, they need to rest. They haven’t been able to rest since they woke up on the riverbank (if you can call that rest) and are still in bad shape from their fights with the cambions and mind flayers they encountered on the ship.
As they lay in their bedrolls, Tartaglia realizes he has a problem.
Something inside him is compelling him to kill indiscriminately. He yearns to rend flesh from bone, bathe in blood, revel in screams of pain…
It’s probably not the damn brain worm. While the parasite obviously bears a terrible fate for them, the parasite doesn’t tend to make their victims into insatiable blood perverts like himself.
He already found himself fantasizing about the deaths of the refugees at the grove, causes ranging from accidental, sacrificial, tragic, and even at his own cruel hand.
He wonders who the hell he is, or was. As the vessel of these violent yearnings, he must have been someone awful. Or maybe he is the manifestation of Death itself. The one thing he knows is that he’s a killer.
Tartaglia’s dreams are vile things filled with pungent corpses, and he finds them beautiful. What could have happened to make him forget what he was?
✦