Chapter Text
The first thing he knew was pain.
Not the sharp kind. Not the kind that bloomed like fire when you were cut or beaten or burned. No, this was older. Deeper. Like his very soul had in been gnawed hollow by rats and put back together with wet twine. A cold pulse throbbed beneath his skin, like something crawling in his veins, and the inside of his skull… gods, it screamed.
He opened his eyes.
Or rather his body forced them open, like a marionette tugged awake by a string. What little vision he had was warped and warping, filtered through a membrane of thick greenish fluid, like he was staring out from behind some kind of grotesque lens.
There was movement. Flickering lights. The slow, sloshing churn of liquid.
And then a sudden pressure, tearing, his chest arched, his mouth opened, and the pod vomited him out onto the floor.
He collapsed in a heap, gasping like a fish dropped on hot stone. The floor was warm. Wet. It pulsed beneath him with the thrum of a heartbeat, a rhythm that didn’t belong to him.
The room was alive.
He knew that without knowing why. Everything in here breathed. The fleshy walls twitched like muscle. The ceiling… No, the membrane above dripped with some amber resin that stank of copper and bile. Veins. Tubes. Chunks of half-digested metal. And the smell… gods, the smell, sweet rot and ozone, blood and scorched hair, shit and smoke and something like burnt bone marrow.
His hands slipped in something red.
He blinked rapidly, trying to shake the fluid from his lashes. There were bodies. Dozens. Some still trapped in pods, suspended like meat in glass, others were splayed across the floor like broken puppets. Some charred black. Some pale and bloodless with their spines poking through their backs like snapped fishing rods. One of them had its jaw unhinged, as if trying to scream even in death.
He crawled.
Not far. Just enough to reach the edge of the nearest brine pool, murky, bubbling, thick with psychic sludge. His reflection rippled at him.
A stranger stared back.
There was blood on his face. No, they were scars. Old ones, branching like lightning across skin he didn’t recognise. His hair hung limp and long, soaked through with brine. His eyes, he couldn’t look directly into them. Couldn’t accept them. They were wrong. All of it was wrong.
Then a pull. Not physical. Internal.
Something deep within him snapped.
Magic spilled out like breath. Instinctual. Desperate. The surface of the brine shimmered, and the reflection changed.
Gone was the scarred face. Gone was the filth and rot.
In its place, a man. Young. Pretty, almost. The kind of face that might make strangers smile on instinct. But it wasn’t his. He knew it wasn’t his.
Still, he reached down, past a burned corpse, past shattered glass and pulled a mask from the floor. It was thick and crude, made of something dark and matte. It fit over his face like it had always belonged there.
Better.
No one would see him.
No one should.
He rose to his feet slowly, legs trembling like a newborn fawn’s. Pain lanced up his spine with every breath. The ship shuddered and groaned. Something enormous screamed in the distance.
He looked around the room once more.
The pod he’d come from still twitched, leaking thick green tears. Around him, the corpses began to twitch.
He turned away from them, still not knowing his own name.
But one word surfaced in his mind. A name without context. No memory. No warmth.
Just a whisper in the meat of his brain:
Thae’ryn.
And for reasons he could not explain, it filled him with horror.
The corridor outside the pod chamber was worse.
It stretched like a throat, lined with twitching veins and chitinous rib-like arches. The walls throbbed around him, squeezing wetly like something digesting. Somewhere far above, metal screamed against metal, and the floor beneath his boots bucked hard enough to throw him against the wall.
He barely caught himself, gasping, clutching a fleshy outgrowth that pulsed like a second heartbeat. It spasmed in his grip.
“Not real,” he muttered hoarsely. His voice sounded dry and brittle, like it hadn’t been used in months.
He didn’t believe himself.
The smell of sulphur was stronger out here. That, and fire. Smoke drifted through an open passage ahead. Open, though the metal lining it had twisted and scorched inwards like it had been clawed from the outside. And beyond it, faint orange light flickered. He could hear something, too. Crackling. Growling. Screaming?
Thae’ryn pressed forward, boots slipping slightly on the warm, sticky ground.
The ship bucked again. He hit the next wall with his shoulder and stumbled onto what could only be described as an open-air platform. But it wasn’t air. It was hellfire.
The sky, if you could call it that, was red, angry, wrong. He could see wings. Dragons, maybe. Githyanki? There were shapes slicing through smoke and flame, barbed and alien, spewing fire at the organic wreck he stood on.
Avernus. The word slipped into his brain unbidden. Like someone had carved it there long ago.
A guttural scream ripped through the noise and something lunged.
He spun just in time to see her.
A blur of metal and fury, blade drawn, teeth bared. The creature… no, a woman rushed him with inhuman speed and tackled him hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. She slammed him against the twitching wall, forearm across his throat, blade crackling with psionic light.
“Thrall!” she spat, eyes glowing gold. “You stink of the ghaik!”
Thae’ryn choked. He reached for the dagger at his hip, he didn’t remember picking it up, but it was there, and it felt right. But before he could draw it, something shifted.
In his skull.
Not pain this time. Contact.
Like a thin thread pulling taut, connecting one mind to another.
His and hers.
Her eyes widened. She reeled back a step, sword lowering only slightly.
“You… carry the parasite.”
He staggered upright, coughing. “Parasite?”
“The worm,” she growled. “The ghaik’s seed. It’s in you. Just as it is in me.” She looked disgusted. Or perhaps betrayed.
“Lovely,” Thae’ryn rasped. His throat ached. His brain ached. Everything ached. “I was hoping this day couldn’t get worse.”
“You are infected,” she hissed. “And yet you are not a thrall. Curious.”
“I’ll add it to the long list of things I don’t understand.” He straightened up slowly, hand still near his dagger but not drawing it. “You were about to stab me. Are we past that part?”
“Temporarily.” She looked him up and down with obvious disdain. “You are weak.”
“Thanks.”
“But not useless.” Her blade lowered fully, though she kept it tight in her grip. “I am Lae’zel of Crèche K’liir. You will assist me.”
Thae’ryn blinked. “…Will I?”
“The helm is ahead. If we reach it, we may seize control of the vessel. Escape. Survive.”
Survive.
The word burrowed under his skin. Made his fingers twitch.
“I’ll take those odds,” he said finally.
She turned without waiting for a reply and marched ahead through the carnage.
He followed.
He didn’t have a name. Not really. Not one he wanted.
But survival? That, at least, made sense.
Even if the floor bled beneath their feet.
Even if the walls screamed when they touched them.
Even if something in his head, something ancient and monstrous, began to whisper again.
The next corridor groaned.
That was the only way Thae’ryn could think to describe it, as if the ship were breathing through crushed lungs. Every step he took down the passage sent tremors through the fleshy floor, and every tremor came with the faint suggestion of a heartbeat beneath him, too fast, too frantic.
Lae’zel strode ahead, her movements sharp and purposeful, blade raised like she was daring anything to come near. He followed at a slight distance, blade drawn now not because he trusted her, but because everything else on this gods dammed ship definitely wanted him dead.
He wasn’t sure how long they walked. Time was hard to measure when the walls were pulsing and wailing and occasionally vomiting lava from overhead.
Eventually, they reached a sealed chamber. Thae’ryn didn’t know how he knew it was a pod room. He just… did. The knowledge sat rotting in his head like spoiled fruit.
Inside were rows upon rows of strange, glass-like pods lined with what looked like umbilical cords, some leaking. Some twitching.
Some… moving.
The air was thick with brine. The scent of salt and rot hit the back of his throat and stayed there like a threat.
Lae’zel barely paused. “Ignore it,” she said. “We waste time.”
But something caught his attention.
A soft thud. A faint banging.
There was a pod in the back. Different. Smaller. Lit by flickering red light.
And someone was inside.
A woman, half-curled, palms pressed against the inner shell. Her face was contorted in pain or effort or both, and her eyes snapped open when she saw him. She mouthed something.
Help.
“Oh no,” Lae’zel said flatly. “Leave her.”
Thae’ryn turned toward her. “What?”
“She is locked. Thrall-caught. A trap.”
“She’s not a thrall yet,” he said, before thinking. His voice sounded oddly sure.
“Not yet is not never,” Lae’zel snapped. “We have no time to waste freeing weaklings.”
She moved to turn away.
Thae’ryn hesitated. Something in his head twisted, not with instinct but with memory. Not a real one. More like a scent of memory, a stain left behind.
A woman. Screaming from behind glass. You watched her drown. You did nothing. She deserved it. Didn’t she?
He shook it off. Hard.
“I’ll be a minute,” he muttered, approaching the pod.
Lae’zel growled, but didn’t stop him.
There was no obvious mechanism. Just more of the sick, alien console-flesh the ship loved so much. But some part of him, it wasn’t intuition not quite, knew what to look for.
A rune. A piece of the ship’s mind.
He scanned the chamber. More pods. Most were occupied.
One held a man with blue skin. Another, a woman slumped sideways, unmoving. They all looked familiar somehow. He hated it.
And then, there it was a pulsating node at the far end of the room, connected to the woman’s pod by a thick, twitching cable.
He approached. Reached out a hand.
The second his fingers touched it, the flesh hissed and split, revealing the rune embedded within. The console beside the locked pod lit up.
The woman inside gasped as it hissed open, spilling her onto the floor in a slick splash of brine. She gagged. Cursed. Rolled over and vomited onto the fleshy tiles.
Thae’ryn crouched, reaching a hand toward her shoulder before thinking better of it.
“Welcome back to the worst day of your life,” he said quietly.
The woman blinked up at him, dark hair plastered to her face. Her eyes were sharp despite her state.
“Who—who the hell are you?”
He opened his mouth. A name formed on his tongue. Not one he wanted. Not one he chose. It made his stomach twist.
“…Ryn,” he said finally. “Just… Ryn.”
She wiped her mouth and stared at him like she didn’t quite believe him.
“Well, Ryn,” she said, voice still ragged, “thanks for not leaving me to rot.”
“You’re welcome,” he muttered, helping her up despite the pounding in his head.
Lae’zel approached then, lip curled. “We will regret this.”
“We’ll regret a lot of things,” Ryn muttered. “Might as well make it a list.”
Another shriek tore through the hallway beyond. The ship shuddered again. The very air seemed to curdle.
He looked at the woman, at the pod she’d come from and for a moment, he thought he saw it refill. The tendrils grew back. The brine pulsed like breath. Waiting.
Alive.
This place wasn’t done with them.
But he was done with it.
The corridor ahead pulsed with that same queasy light. Ryn squinted against it, hand resting loosely on his dagger, not drawn, but ready. Everything on this ship was either leaking, twitching, or on fire.
Usually all three.
He’d stopped trying to tell where the machinery ended and the flesh began. The walls breathed, faintly. Veins ran through the floor like rivers of light. Somewhere above, metal shrieked as the hull was torn into followed by the unmistakable roar of a dragon.
The whole ship shuddered, and the ceiling vomited fire through an open wound.
Lae’zel didn’t flinch. She stomped ahead like the fire answered to her, shoulders tight with fury and urgency.
The woman they’d just rescued, Shadowheart, apparently, was still panting behind them, brine clinging to her skin, her robes in tatters. She hadn’t asked again what they were doing or where they were going. Just followed, muttering prayers under her breath when the flames got too close.
“Where are we?” she asked, ducking low as sparks rained down.
“Lae’zel says the Nine Hells,” Ryn muttered.
“Technically, the first layer,” Lae’zel corrected sharply. “Avernus. Keep up.”
“Oh, lovely,” Shadowheart said. “I was hoping to take a scenic tour of actual damnation before breakfast.”
They moved forward as the path curved, wider now, an exterior bridge of some sort. The abyss of Avernus yawned beneath them, red and endless and full of screams. Fire rained from above. A red dragon soared past, too close, its wings nearly tipping the platform.
And then came the imps.
The first one burst from the wall with a squeal like torn parchment, claws outstretched, fangs bared. Ryn sliced it in half on instinct. Its body hit the floor in two smoking pieces, still twitching.
He didn’t have time to feel anything about it.
Three more followed.
Lae’zel met the charge head-on, snarling. Shadowheart conjured a wave of divine light, staggering one of them long enough for Ryn to drive his blade into its face. Green blood sprayed up his arm, hot and acidic.
He didn’t even notice the burn until after.
He wasn’t sure how long they fought. The ship screamed. The imps screamed. Ryn screamed once when one of the bastards clawed into his shoulder, but even that came out more like a laugh than anything else.
He was getting used to this. Too used to it.
Once the last imp dropped, twitching, the silence hit hard.
The corridor ahead sloped upward. Ryn could see the distant shimmer of a control panel, and something behind it, something large, pale, and writhing.
“The helm,” Lae’zel said, wiping her blade clean on a broken imp’s wing. “We take control. Or we die here.”
“And what happens if we do take control?” Shadowheart asked.
Lae’zel didn’t answer. Just kept walking.
Ryn hesitated.
His arm was bleeding freely now, and his vision was swimming again. Not from blood loss, at least not only that. Something behind his eyes was scratching, digging.
“Dying for me. All of them.”
The thought wasn’t his. The voice wasn’t his. But it came through his throat. He swallowed it down, bile rising.
“Ryn?” Shadowheart asked softly.
He blinked. Realised he’d been standing still too long.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Just… fine.”
A new room. Circular. The air was hotter here, somehow. More frantic.
The central helm was glowing. Two mind flayers were fighting something at the far end githyanki, from the looks of it, with that same silver armor Lae’zel wore. One of the mind flayers stumbled, its tentacles half-severed, blood sizzling on the floor.
There was a moment where it turned and looked at Ryn.
Not just looked. Recognised. He froze.
You were mine.
You were beautiful.
You ruined everything.
Then it was dead. A gith blade pierced its skull from behind, and the flayer dropped like a sack of wet meat.
Lae’zel didn’t stop. “To the console! Now!”
Ryn stumbled forward. The helm felt wrong under his hands. Like touching a wound, or a memory.
But he did it anyway.
The ship lurched.
Everything went white.