[Electrododo]

It still took conscious focus, but looked so effortless; Burmice hovered a couple inches closer to her lover, maintaining her careful poise, a slight grin on her lips. It had been a wild time. From the catastrophe at the Second Escarpment, a flock of particularly vicious wild bulettes stampeding across her, Cliff and Rasha (to the tune of three lost contingencies, a diamond, and ten thousand in temple fees... despite being on a first-name basis with Rhytella), to the pinnacle of arcane achievement the very next day, to a fumbled killing curse almost extinguishing both her life and the shreds of her selfrespect, to the Council, and finally, to this lovely early noon.

The Council's outcome was like plucking a pearl out of a pile of manure someone's wandering rothe left at your doorstep - while civil war loomed and alliances broke, some had mended instead. Most importantly, Mynh was back, a hero of Thay (at least in Priador), it was already becoming clear that the new zulkir (and therefore Drax) wouldn't end up across the lines from her, and, perhaps most important of all...Lauzoril had declared for the Council, also.

Her eyes passed from the carefully scribbling Zulkir (of the anticouncil, led by the self-styled Regent Tam) Balthazar, to Sylth and the Captain Thorculese, still running their mouths about Thayan politics in perhaps the worst possible company to do so. Maybe the mountain of a man (with the heart of a mouse, though, and a particularly squeaky one) was trying to distract from the poignant discussion of his own failings, who knows?

With minuscule telekinetic effort, Burmice adjusted her billowing skirt from showing far too much of her thigh, and sarcastically pontificated on the role of carved and shaped onyx in the economy of undeath. The captain, meanwhile, was reaching an oratorial crescendo of kooky Ilmatari (perhaps. Wasn't it Imrae who founded soup kitchens?) ideas, arms swung in wild gestures, the wind fluttering through his long hair and beard.

"True, but if people did what is in the best interest in life, and to give life that greater purpose... had I a cure for every disease, I'd give it freely. Why not let everyone win?"


The zulkir shook his head, sun glistening from the golden stitching of his robe, his wry grin almost visible despite the enameled mass of his helmet. "I cannot believe one of your ideals is sworn to Thrul."


"I'm sworn to *life*. Omnipotence Thrul happens to be on that side."

The air was thick with moral grandstanding, and Burmice decided to clean it out, borrowing some wind from the captain's sails to do so. Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced Draxigoro, majestic in his red robe and now, helmet, a true red wizard today. "What meaning has victory if it comes to everyone, Captain? What meaning would the office of a tribune have, if it were given to each and every recruit?" A smug little smirk spread across her face as she awaited an answer that the Captain couldn't give.

And in place of the answer, the world had gone black.

The drowess blinked, enveloped in a vast expanse of blackness even ilythiiri eyes had trouble piercing, except for grey, slightly damp rock underneath her slippered feet.
"Webbed pits!" she cursed, suddenly alert, grasping tight the wood of her enchanted staff, bathed in its crimson aura that allowed her at least a sliver of sight. In the dull radiance she could perceive cavern walls emerge around her, heavy cobwebs laden with webknots but curiously dead, gently swaying in nonexistant draught, but she found herself unable to gauge how far exactly any of them stood. She was home, wasn't she... but then this abduction could only be an assassination attempt. Eyes wide open, ears perked up for any tell-tale noise of an impending attack, the real target of her search was the portal stone to Fraaszumdin she had left...somewhere. Once safe, she could...

Her mirror vibrated, startling her, before she eagerly picked it up. Drax is looking for her, no doubt, unless it's a hostile call from an assassin's acccomplice, meant as a distraction. She raised her hand, thumb on the golden onyx embedded at the handle's root, angling the mirror in just the right way to reveal the space behind her in the rim of the transduced image.

"Mistress."  A familiar voice, a familiar face flickered through, unstable and distorted, as if an aboleth had emerged through the calm, silvery surface of an Underdark pool, marring the reflection wiithin, and at the same time...

Something vast and disapproving let itself be known as the image faltered under the weight of her sight. Someone for whom love is not just a distraction in her pursuit of domination of all, but a reminder of her own past dalliances that turned sour and bitter with cursed, undeserving offspring. Someone whose gaze she had briefly felt so long ago, age thirteen, and was found wanting. With dawning horror, Burmice realized that no portal stone - and no lover - is going to help her where she stood, in delightful irony of her earlier exclamationn. The Webbed Pits, invoked with every upset and misfortune had called her in, and there was but one reason the living might be welcome as guests. For the Goddess tests.

"I... I'll speak to you later. I..." she stammered out to the dying image, feeling as if she had never told a greater lie. Wary, more like a creature hunted than a huntress herself, the mage gingerly stepped forth, towards a tall figure emerging from the darkness, preening in front of a vast, faintly glimmering web.

"Burmice val'Lazrien."

The woman's voice resounded through the indefinable space and Burmice's ears. A head and half taller than her, slim and perfect, sleek muscles and unblemished ashen skin on show in a yathrin's ceremonial garb, just as the imperious gaze on her smirking face made her feel like she was the one mostly naked. The apparition could only be of one nature.

"Servant of our Dark Mother." The rather corpulent necromancer bent her neck underneath the presumed handmaiden's gaze in acknowledgement and supplication. This had proved to be a mistake, the first of many, and her counterpart's smirk grew into a condescending smile.

"The Spider Queen wishes your blood be spilt on my blade." A vicious, curved knife, darkness flowering around its edge deftly flashed in and out of sight. "She believes I am to be one of her faithful chosen."

Burmice's fingers hastily traced through her vast array of scrolls, fetishes and baubles, feeling each and every one to be in its place - the cold iron  bottle imprisoning a glabrezu, the golden, spider-stamped medallion of Lolth, a pearl etched with a prayer to Sharess,  a Sarrukh rune carved of unknown stone, the prepared stalk of a beholder, Kharliika's orb and Sammaster's tome, the familiarity of the ritual providing a measure of calm to steady her trembling fingers - even the ones on her unliving hand, as she noted with a measure of dismay. There was only one right reply, for the meek had no place in Lolth's domain but as prey.

"That may be so, but I will it otherwise." she intoned in an over-controlled, faltering voice. "And our Dark Mother favours victory over all."

"We shall see who claims Her love."  The woman - a petitioner, now there was no doubt, offered a place among the holy Yochlol for purging Her flock of the undeserving - still grinned, though rather than contemptous, her expression had turned feral.

"Ultrinne ssinssriggare ultrinnan." Victress desires victory. A prayer, a wish, a little distraction... Burmice felt the odd mixture of crippling panic and utter calm as her dessicated fingers found the tattoo on her healthy wrist, the elongated tail of one of the displacer kittens, and she felt the world slow down around her. Her staff clenched in her increasingly sweaty right palm, she drew her unliving left hand forth, dry fingers arranging themselves in a series of gestures.

"In the sheath of Mordenkainen lies a sword;" the air began to shimmer with cold, blue-white light. "with the hand of Larloch, I draw it forth;" A burning blade, drawn from the sheath of reality itself, soon followed by gauntlets, pauldrons, helmet and plate, the sprite glowing coldly through its visor. "by the rite of Murthrond, I bid it; go forth and slay in my name, for I will it so."

The moment of triumphant creation turned sour as the helmed horror hovered, unblinking and indifferent, watching her antagonist cross the distance between them in the blink of an eye, her curved blade poised to strike.

The first arc caught but air, the mage a swirling mess of wood, spidersilk and limbs to anyone but her own eyes. "Go forth and slay! In my name! Slay!" Screaming ineffectual commands, a hysteric tone creeping into her voice, she interposed her staff to knock outwards a second slash, only to receive a kick to the side of her shin that buckled her knee, and  made her drop her guard. Her enemy was nothing if not a quick learner.

With no time to parry the blow aimed at her throat, Burmice let gravity drag her into free fall, desperately focusing her mind's eye on the shape and sound of a word of power, gleaned from the golden Sarrukk scrolls. The blade deprived her of a lock of hair, and the world around her turned dark at behest of her will, as far as she could see.

Panting, she scrambled back to her feet, digits folded into the mnemonic to make her skin of adamantine, when a blade emerged from the darkness and with increasing despondence, she realized that her opponent had clearly practiced fighting blindfold,  while she had not. Nor, more to the point, did her tattoo bear enhanced vision in its lines, and she had rather missed her chance to cast the spell, relying on her creation's blindsight. She raised her armoured forearm in an upwards arc, meeting the blade, and more watched than felt in horror as it bore a deep furrow in the brass plate, two of her fingers growing numb as the desiccated flesh and bone split underneath.

The petitioner hissed with pain as contact with the unliving flesh burnt her in turn, but it only drove her to greater rage. The second blow was not so kind.

"Slaiiie-!"

Her commend turned into a pained scream, then a gurgling hiss, as the feint, clearly intended against a seeing and ready opponent caught her entirely unprepared. The kukri slid through enchanted swordspider silk without the least acknowledgement and bit deep into the side of Burmice's belly, effortlessly parting soft flesh, from her lowest rib down to and out her upper thigh, nearly disemboweling her and leaving her with a sucking chest wound. The sheer horror of the sensation, the air driven from her lung, blood beginning to gush down her waist and leg, broke her feeble attempts at counter before the crippling pain had even set on, and she desperately hobbled out of the way, healthy fingers already running cold, wound sloshing and bleeding and bubbling with every uncertain step as the darkness mercifully took her. Her opponent's parting, horizontal cut passed but through a mirage of her wounded, leaking body.

Desperately, she pawed for the pearl, squeezing it. The pain went from maddening to merely awful, her heart ceased threatening to burst out of her chest and she could finally breathe, but this was... it. She will die here, like many before, a soul to be pawned off, or at best the hideous form of a drider, now, on the cusp of glory, her Nether Scroll unread and taken out of the Material Realm by the vicious hand of...

The Nether Scroll.

She had already invoked the power it spoke of, the words that had shaped the universe once - but this particular proclamation of dominance over light and shadow could be reversed. Her eyes unseeing, she turned the imagined glyph inside out, concentrating like her aunt painstakingly taught her to by forcing her make a dead rat to dance across a laboratory desk, dragged out of her bed after what felt like minutes of sleep and standing on pebbles (They'll help your flat feet too, treasure mine) until she got it right - for a mage must be able to invoke her art in spite of physical discomfort. When she opened her eyes, she knew that while barely anything has changed, the darkness has become her, her aching, bleeding body, desperately clinging on life, shrouded from passing eyes. Even ones as sharp as that of the prowling bitch, who shall pay.

She more heard than seen a movement, perhaps a shade across the glimmering web whose strands could here and there be seen even through the preternatural darkness, a monument to the Spider Queen's uniqueness in the domain of her own design. The formula this time had been a simple one.

"Thraegix gixustrat!*"

Her enemy had been an accomplished assassin, and the strained, hissing voice resounding through the darkness had been the only clue she had needed to locate her fat, inept and helpless prey and to claim the Goddess's favour. She lunged forth, blade ready to strike... and lunged right into the path of a disembodied, clawed hand of congealed ether, fit for a fire giant's arm.

Even if Burmice couldn't see it, the wet gurgle as the giant palm clenched her opponent, squeezing air, then blood from her lungs and innards was enough to announce her evocation had found its mark, followed by a low drone as her indolent servant finally came around to carrying out its orders, as if finally unable to bank on the fact that the one who has given them would soon be a corpse anyways.

As the darkness she had brought forth earlier had parted, Burmice felt the bemused clicking of divine tongue, a wave of relief as her wounds had knit together, giving way to consternation for she could now see her foe likewise gain a second purchase of life... but the simple gesture of a dead arm rending soul from flesh, followed by a brizant shockwave of two dissimilar palms clapping at the end of a conjurer's chant put a final dot behind any plans of resurgence.

It was over.

Her left forearm bare as her last spell tore off the damaged plate, ulna flashing white among crumbling tissue, sagging split in purple spidersilk revealing a fresh white scar stretching along the expanse of soft flesh still caked with her own crusted blood, exhausted, terrified and oh so very tired, Burmice slowly walked forwards to the mangled corpse of her would-be-executor, step by trembling step, giving her blank-faced 'guardian' one last scolding look.

"Lolth. Victress. I offer you this victory and the blood of this sacrifice."

She knelt and with little regard plunged her hand into the distorted remains of the woman's formerly shapely chest, broken ribs poking through rent skin, dipping them in what passed for heart's blood.

"May it sate your thirst and may you declare me worthy of your grace."

A soft, but all-encompassing chuckle bit her ears, and the body began to fold unto itself, diminishing in scentless smoke  - by the time her palm reached her forehead, it was dry. On the ground, a few potion bottles remained, and the mangled remainder of something metallic became apparent in the rapidly crumbling pancake of face left of her foe's former beauty.

As she picked it up, the thin silver wire reformed, and Burmice found herself staring on a beautiful, delicate circlet, a black widow in its midst, its round belly the biggest black pearl she'd ever seen.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed grass, and when she turned her head, the familiar contours of Night's Embrace resolved themselves where moments ago stood a weathered, grey cavern wall. As she attempted to stand up, something hit the crown of her head and rolled into the grass in front of her.

"Don't litter in my realm." one last, cackling whisper filled her mind as the aspect mirror, now returned to her possession, began to buzz.

"Mistress Burmice. I trust you are well."  A familiar voice, one that put her at ease and offered joy and hope, crumbling the unfeeling facade of suppressed panic that had become her... despite the fact only a male could say something as profoundly stupid as that, looking at her torn, bloody dress and grime-streaked, worn face. But then, perhaps such was love, and Burmice felt that, much like life, it distinctly beat the alternatives.


* - "Claw of air, disembowel!" (Draconic)