Chapter 8 – Part 7

Ois left that night on the Lyrandar ship. Now wearing the form of a half-elf, she approached the captain as the crew was unloading supplies, and they softly haggled over price. There was no bound elemental powering this ship, but it seemed seaworthy enough.

Orphan jumped down from the battlements, to the shocked oaths of a half-orc sentry that he had been practicing the orc tongue with. Lightly touching the wall as he fell, the warforged tumbled gently to the ground without the slightest scratch, and somersaulted up to Ois.

“What the Keeper –” The Lyrandar captain put his hand to a rapier, then relaxed. “Somebody ought to program this Tharashk tinkertoy that charging up at people isn’t the healthiest thing!” the half-elf captain snapped.

“So you’re leaving, are you?” Orphan asked Ois, ignoring the Lyrandar officer.

Ois looked at the half-elf, said something in elvish to him, and the Lyrandar turned and walked away, muttering deprecations about crazy golems. Once he was decently far enough away, she turned to Orphan with cold eyes.

“For someone who was going to leave me in the demon capital, you pick an odd time to care if I leave,” she said coldly.

“I care about Delegado,” he told her bluntly. “And I think you should at least say good-bye to him.”

“Go f’test yourself,” she said to him. “Take your morals, your piety, your certainty about what everyone else needs to do, drill yourself a hole, then shove them all in there.”

“Don’t tell me that you don’t care about him,” Orphan said. “Don’t tell me that you aren’t aware of what your leaving will do.”

“I’m not telling you anything,” she snapped. “You came to me, remember?”

Orphan began to realize that he’d picked the wrong tack to take with her. Belatedly he realized that his bluntness would be expected by an orc, but not by a changeling. “I know you care about right and wrong,” he pressed.

“I’ll not have a creature without a soul lecture me about right and wrong,” she snorted.

“I am alive,” he stated.

“You’re alive,” she agreed. “But that doesn’t mean you have a soul.”

He could tell she was saying what she was saying in order to get at him, to hurt him. “You obviously think I do, else you wouldn’t have tried to convert me in the Wastes,” he pointed out.

“We’re still in the Wastes,” she countered. “And I’m not trying to convert you, or anyone.”

Orphan considered this. “Ois, look, Delegado –”

“Has his extended family,” she said. “And for all of his frustrations with them, they’re what he needs. So we’re done with him needing me.”

“And what about what you need?” Orphan pressed. “You don’t need him? Really?”

“Apparently not,” she said.

Orphan looked at her, watched her eyes. She was serious, in a way. But also she was not. But then she was a trained Thranish intelligence agent, so perhaps she could fool him.

“Ois,” he said again. “Are you sure? Are you blaming him? Is that it? Like you blamed him for Droaam?”

“No, I’m not blaming him,” she said. “Now good-bye.” She turned away from him and began to walk towards the Lyrandar ship’s gangplank.

“What were you promised?” he called after her, playing a hunch.

“What?” she asked, turning around, a puzzled look on her face.

“We were all promised something to get us to go to the Wastes,” Orphan said, remembering a conversation that he’d had with Delegado while the two contemplated a flying wall of volcanic shards. “What were you promised?”

She stared at him, and for a moment he thought she wouldn’t answer. “The truth,” she finally answered.

“Of what?”

“The truth of my relationship with the Flame,” she said.

“And you found it?” he asked.

She dug into a pocket, producing the silver arrowhead holy symbol that he had seen her use. “I did,” she said.

Then she tossed the arrowhead into the water, and boarded the Lyrandar ship.