Te, kto molod, slab ili glupo. Zashhitite sebja bez razrushenija. Zashhiti drugih bez gospodstva.
Eleven days, eleven nights.
Korotkoe vremja.
Terezio had reached the end of his patience six days before, and had left Aleksei completely alone since then. Druce, indefatigable, had insisted on bringing food, sometimes even while the man of the house hollered against her doing so. Her care for the Dragonborn became so consistent- porridge and fruit with milk near noon, then bread with fish or beef stew and water in the evening- that Aleksei cautiously began to tell time by her appearances.
Ona ochen' podobna moej Mamoshka.
At first, Druce made little conversation besides the improvement of her arm, since she easily noted that he was less than pleased at having been the cause of its damage. No matter how she attempted to convince him that she had simply been impatient to show her husband that it had been a foolish idea to bring the enchanted blades into her house, the polite distance in his one functioning hazel eye told her that she may as well have been speaking to the stone walls. Not to be disheartened, Druce decided to drop hints about how Bahlzair was doing, thinking that this information would encourage the test subject-turned-prisoner.
I jeto bol'she, chem ona dolzhna sdelat' dlja menja.
This eleventh day, Druce had been on time with the afternoon meal, and had spent a pleasant fifteen minutes describing how Terezio had turned away a second Purple Dragon messenger earlier that morning. Aleksei asked what the messenger had wanted, and Druce simply shrugged.
"How should I know?" she'd responded smilingly. "He likes to keep me as ignorant as he can, and sometimes I even pretend I don't notice. There's something to be said, you know, for not dumping the loo bucket in the marriage bed."
Esli vy spite v der'me dostatochno dolgo, vy ne budete chuvstvovat' zapah ego.
Strangely, this evening- for the first time in nearly two weeks- Druce was late. Since he always stopped training his bare-handed fighting skills in time for the dutiful woman to find him resting, Aleksei noticed her tardiness immediately. He waited for a full hour before deciding to resume his training, wondering what could have happened. As it turned out, he would have the rest of the entire night to ponder the question.
So early on the twelfth morning that even the roosters had not thought to call the wee hour a new day, Aleksei sat cross-legged, with both eyes closed, stranded between the folded bedding he'd been using and the insanity of Terezio's desk.
In the darkness far corner of the cellar-turned-laboratory, radiant crimson eyes opened. The Dragonborn rolled his left shoulder, feeling a familiar prickle in his chest.
"Why are you leaving your bed to come to me?"
There was a pause that anyone else would have mistaken for silence. Neither the one who gazed nor the one who was being gazed upon treated it that way.
"You come only to torment my soul. I am having so much time to myself that I am losing no strength here."
There came a strange, light, ringing sound- one that was wholly out of place in the otherwise silent room. Aleksei, knowing what it was and where it was coming from without having to turn around, simply reached his left arm up and out, his readied palm facing the wall. A half second later, a cold, solid cylinder hit the flesh of his hand. He closed his hand around it, turned on his left knee and raised his right arm, hand readied. It was absolutely no shock to him when the flesh of that hand hit Bahlzair's neck.
"Already I am telling you that you are no good contest. Still you are hurting, yet you wish so much to torture me. You happily risk that I have not enough control to keep myself from killing you."
Bahlzair's wheezed chuckle sent a spike of temptation diving deep between the larger creature's ribs. Under his skin, he felt the current of his blood surge from his heart, through his arm, into his powerful hand.
Moshhnost'.
Aleksei breathed deeply, feeling the solid, chilly cylinder in his other hand. After a few moments of absolute silence, he picked Bahlzair up, walked him over to Terezio's desk, and put him down on top of it, causing a few of stacks of paper to fall. The dark Elf reached his hands to his neck immediately, looked around himself briefly, then nodded.
"Ah, you are coming to tell me something," Aleksei sighed, opening the bottle. "And I hope this is not at the cost of either woman's life."
Bahlzair smirked, then produced another paper- a missive in an opened envelope.
The Dragonborn felt the irritation in his body begin to fade as he drank. At the first taste, the same visions came to him- the blood, the bodies, the exposed bones, the flies and worms...
Ser Dresan Hawke-
Forgive my lack of greeting, as I find myself unable to properly address a grandson of whom I have been made aware in no other manner than hearsay.
Please make your way to Suzail, Cormyr, with all haste. Any one in the city will know of me, and will point you toward the College of War Mages, where once I worked. I shall there receive you, and know what sort of man you are, for other than that you exist at all and that my daughter, Trizelle Ranclyffe, is your mother, I know nothing. I wish to remedy our shared want of information, for I imagine that you of me are likewise ignorant. I send with this missive a small purse of coin, that you may not be turned away at the border with that dross that passes for coinage in Sembia-
"Which you are taking and hiding somewhere," Aleksei interrupted, pushing the cork back into the frenzywater bottle. "It is not a large house, and the son of Gospozha Ranclyffe may be like her. He and his grandfather will know that you are rewriting his letter, and then you will be fighting two mages. You are rushing blindly into the arms of death."
Bahlzair stopped reading and looked up.
"I will not fight these mages for you. Already I am spilling too much blood to drink. Eunice is alive, yes?"
Bahlzair raised an eyebrow at Aleksei as though the Dragonborn had asked an unbelievably stupid question.
"You are a jealous creature. Leave Eunice alive, or I will break your knees." Aleksei thought better of closing the bottle, and reopened it to prepare for another swig. "And Druce is very much distracting you, I know this."
The dark Elf looked down at the missive again as though he were going to read again, but Aleksei quickly snatched the letter away from him.
"This is an older man's wife of many years," he said sternly, leaning forward slightly so that he could catch Bahlzair's suddenly wandering gaze. "Does Graz'zt so hate fidelity that he must court a woman nearly as old as he?"
Bahlzair leaned forward suddenly, catching Aleksei's left arm with his right. With his free left hand, he wound his finger up in one of the Dragonborn's fleshy tendrils- a familiar sensation that the recipient had to steel himself to ignore.
"It is a long time that this is not working," he breathed. "I am jealous creature, too."
The Drow stretched his hand farther so that he had a good hold of Aleksei's hair, then brought the caress down his face. Aleksei's reflexes, strangely sharpened by the alcohol whose influence had begun flowing through his blood and reaching into his brain, brought his right arm up and against Bahlzair's left arm, knocking it away from his face.
"Never is this true. You only torture my soul, delighting in every second that it burns. Tell this to your patron, that you cannot do this over and over expecting me to believe you every time."
Aleksei took a step back and turned to his left as though he would leave Bahlzair on the desk, only to discover a figure standing in the doorway.
"I heard you perfectly well myself, Bloodtalon."
Aleksei didn't move an inch, frozen in place by the immediate wave of soreness that spread from his heart to the rest of his upper body. When the figure stood away from the shadow of the door frame into the meager light of the one candle in the room, the Dragonborn was chilled to the bone.
It was Druce- or her body, at least.
"I had wondered why Shadowfire was so... occupied, let's say... with this creature. It took me some time to understand how to properly manipulate his fixation. But now? Ah, now. Now, you will do as I ask, won't you? Unlike Shadowfire, killing one mother was quite enough for you."
Aleksei ground his teeth and sighed. Graz'zt was quite right- as usual.
"What do you want?"
"I would quite like to put a bit and bridle into Dresan Hawke's mouth. And if I can't get it in there gently, I wouldn't be above simply breaking his teeth, as it were."
"Already you can do this to his mother's mother," Aleksei argued quietly. "Why are you asking me anything?"
"He is Tiefling, but he isn't as happy about that revelation as could have been hoped. His distrust of the infernal cost Trizelle much to lay in his heart, and it may cost me a great deal to tear out of it, especially with Terezio in play. As you have so astutely noted, Shadowfire is not even fit for a distraction. You, on the other hand, have had a bit too much time to yourself."
"I do not wish to do any more favors for the Hells, or anyone in them," Aleksei replied.
"Funny you should say that," Graz'zt smiled with Druce's face. "You surely realize, my favorite enlightened drunkard, that I would quite enjoy wiping this barren husk of a woman out of existence. And that the tender little virgin you just threatened Shadowfire over might quite easily be made to bear a child or two for me. Whether or not she delights in the duty is entirely up to me, and I have been feeling particularly sanguine lately. You may choose according to your reason, according to your honorable standards, according to the dregs left in the bottom of whatever flagon you drain, but in your heart, you know that no matter what you choose, I'll still have exactly what I want. As always, yours is not to choose whether or not I get it, merely how much collateral damage I cause while I do."
"Get out," Aleksei demanded, turning his back on Bahlzair and Graz'zt.
"Excellent; I'll put her right back where I got her from. Not a scratch- well, nothing worse than you caused, anyway."
"Out," came the second warning, an icy anger weighting the single word like an anchor.
"Such power- that has always made you endearing to us both," Graz'zt began, turning Druce's body around and snapping at Bahlzair as though he were a pet. "For your trouble, I promise that the next creature you lay with- male or female- will give you more than enough opportunity to put all of your abilities to the test."
And with that, both figures were gone.
Alone again, Aleksei sat down heavily on his bedding. The cold bottle of frenzywater was still open in his left hand. With a sigh and a shrug, he took a long drink- it seemed he would not be resting well again for quite some time.
Miloserdie i proshhenie ne sushhestvuet, i demony zhit' vechno.
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