A Toast to the Damned
Twentieth Day of the Tenth Month 293 AC
Thankfully you were prepared for this, prepared for worse, if truth be told. "Have you, perchance, met Sarah of Pentos, who now teaches at the Scholarium in Sorcerer's Deep? She was once enslaved by Tor before we freed her in Pentos, serving not only as a source of blood to fuel his powers, but forced to use her magic to aid him in his madness, to work alongside him as he conducted torturous experiments which twisted the living and the dead in unspeakable ways."
"The young lady did not look particularly anxious or afraid when I first met her, not like a slave with her chains just struck," Menel interjects. "We have all had plenty of experience with that after all."
"Can't imagine Tor enslaving a proper wizard, even if he did go mad, it'd be too bloody dangerous," Lothos agrees with his friend, his voice grimmer than you have ever heard it.
"That is not what madness is..." Dany cuts in almost angrily. "If you can't imagine it, that is because he was mad, it's not just being heartless or cruel or..." She takes a deep breath to collect herself. "You all know this, you must have seen it in all the years you lived, the question is if you are willing to believe it, if you
can believe it, because if you can't than there is nothing Viserys or I can do to keep you from closing your ears to what happened in Pentos and afterward."
"What do you mean afterwards. You killed him didn't you?" Koron smashes the goblet onto the table, paying no mind to the Arbor Red splashing onto the table that had been set up for a celebration now forgotten.
"We killed him then, but did nothing to prevent his soul from moving on or being restored later, a decision I later came to regret. What we did not know what that Tor had already made a pact with a dark god, a malevolent shadow of Yss. It resurrected Tor in the depths of Sothoryos, among the few remaining serpentfolk in existence. He was irrevocably changed, however, both in body and in soul, remade as the god he dealt with wished. No longer merely obsessed with power and control, Tor arose anew as one who killed for the simple joy of killing, and would have shortly wiped out the remaining serpentfolk had we not intervened."
"Yet they call Lady Lya the soul smith." A flash of resentment posses though you at Menel's insinuation, though quenched as quickly as it had arisen, hearing the sorrow, the heartbreak behind the words.
An uncomfortable silence falls over the room while you consider your next answer. "Do you know what the difference between what Azema was and what Tor became was? Even bound to the Abyss, she wasted to be free and struggled against it where he walked knowingly into the dark. So what would you have Lya do, carve out whichever pieces of Tor the rest of us could live with and stitch them back together?"
"We should have looked for him sooner," Grazdan's voice is rough with emotion, but his words clear just the same. "We should have pushed him harder to speak to us those last few months in Braavos." He almost does not seem to see you and Dany, his eyes going in turn to each of his old friends. None of them have an answer.
Yet here you still are, and explanations need to be given, hollow as they may now sound. "I did not want the last memory you possessed of Tor to be of betrayal and madness. The last embers of guilt I felt at killing a man who gifted my sister nameday presents and told me stories by the fire have faded, but that doesn't excuse holding back when forging oaths with those close to him."
Lothos opens his mouth to speak, but before he can do so you continue with the offer you had decided to make before you even set off for Lorath: "I'll release you from your oaths should you feel scorned by this revelation. I owe you all that much. And I would greatly value your continued, and willing, service, not to mention the wisdom and experience you have gathered throughout your long lives. Either way, should you choose to remain in my service or leave to seek your fortunes elsewhere, I hope that we can remain friends."
If the silence had been heavy before then, now it lays thick as an ocean's worth of unspoken words pressing down upon all of you.
Koron takes another long drink of his wine, then he smashes it into the table to hard the glass shatters in his hand.
Such an easy thing to mend compared to what else may break at this table.
"Tor made his fucking choices and the rest of us made ours. He's deader than dead because of it and we have to live with it..." He trails off. "Fuck, I need something stronger to drink than this shit and lots of it." Almost as an afterthought he adds. "I'm staying. The work's worth waking up in the morning for, the pay's better than we'd likely to get elsewhere."
The shift from 'I' to 'we' is anything but subtle, the request to the others that they follow suite or at least not blame him for his choice.
Grazdan speaks next, looking directly at you. "I do not blame you much for the deception, for nothing could be changed then. What I blame you for was not telling us what Tor had done years ago in Braavos, but you were a a boy then, not yet grown into a king. I cannot name you more guilty than any of us were for not looking deeper, and I for one do not wish to leave this company," he looks around the faces of his friends one by one before settling on Koron "Who else would I drink with to forget... and to remember."
"To Tor, as we remember him, not as what he became at the end," Aubert Flowers raises an unsteady toast.
"Always said he'd..." Lothos shakes his head, the half-whispered words dying on his lips. He raises his own goblet in a toast "To Tor, at least he's not in Hell, which is likely more than I'll be able to say when I die and stay dead."
Menel is the last to speak, his poise for once deserting him as he visibly hesitates between staying seated and glancing at the door. "A fellowship once divided by ambition and blindness does not deserve to be broken again by recrimination. Someone has to keep Lothos out of Hell, after all."
As jests go it's rather terrible. Everyone manages at least a chuckle.
What do you do next?
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OOC: Well here we are, I hope I managed to do the characters justice. Not beta-ed yet.
