Zaltys wasn’t crying, but it was a near thing. She was still holding the crossbow, but she wasn’t aiming it at anything anymore. She kneeled down by Julen and began stroking his hair. He was breathing, slowly and steadily. That was a comfort, at least. “I’m human. I feel human. You’re trying to trick me. That’s your nature too. Yuan-ti are treacherous liars and-”
Iraska waved her hand and reclined in her desk chair. “Don’t be silly. I don’t consider myself a yuan-ti anymore. Oh, I am, by birth, like you, but just as you’ve been adopted into the Serrat family-a family of liars, I might add, who’ve obviously conspired heroically to keep your true origins from you, but that’s neither here nor there-just as you’ve become a human by association, I’ve more or less become a derro. Although,” she leaned forward, and stage-whispered, “I just consider them a means to an end. You see, when I returned from Delzimmer, carrying with me nothing but the clothes on my back and a few jewels that proved to be simply worthless shiny rocks in the jungle, I was horrified by what I saw. My sect was ailing when I left, and the hope was that my influence in Delzimmer could turn things around, bring us new human cultists and more resources, but even if I’d succeeded, we were beyond help. The anathema are precious to the god Zehir, and they’re formidable creatures, but they’re also prone to getting out of control. Ours had finally gone mad and killed almost everyone. Whether anyone could have stopped it was a moot point. The anathema are the most holy ones, chosen by our god, and so no one dared raise a hand against it. The old monster finally crawled into a hole and fell asleep, sated after eating half the tribe, and some enterprising low priest had a great heavy stone lid put on top of the hole, so the anathema could be revered from a safe distance, with sacrifices thrice daily. Pathetic. We were a mighty cult once, a power growing in the jungle, ready to burst out and spread our worldview with treachery and knives, but no more. I’d lived among humans long enough to gain a taste for the finer things, and the yuan-ti seemed hopelessly provincial, not to mention religiously obsessed. And why? Why revere a god who doesn’t pay attention to you, who gives life to a great sentient conglomeration of snakes and then lets it eat you for no reason? Mind you, I wasn’t the favorite daughter of the tribe, either, partly because I spoke my mind, mostly because I’m an ape-face. That’s what they call people like us-at least, once we fail the cult, and no longer rate any respect. ‘Ape-face.’ Lovely, isn’t it?”
Iraska yawned. “I don’t usually talk this much. The derro don’t go in for long conversations, at least, not coherent ones. Anyway, to draw a line from there to here, I went out walking in the jungle, got abducted by derro, and figured I’d suffer certain death. But then it turned out I’d learned some useful skills in Delzimmer after all. Politics, mostly. How to pour honey in a man’s ear and make him do your bidding.”
Zaltys frowned. Listening to Iraska’s story at least spared her from agonizing over her own nature, and despite herself, she was interested. “You’re the Slime King, I see it myself, but how can you advance by politics and”-disgusting thought-“seduction among insane people like the derro?”
“The derro are mad, but it’s an almost artificial madness, the curse of some god or another who grew angry at their transgressions millennia ago. All derro are mad, and though the exact manifestations vary, they’re all mad in exactly the same way. And when everyone in a culture is insane in exactly the same way, do you know what we call that? We call that a cultural norm. We call that sanity. All derro are megalomaniacal with delusions of grandeur, and paranoid with persecution fantasies. Those are wonderful qualities for a skilled manipulator to work with. It was easy to whisper my way out of the slave pens, turning guard upon guard, getting the ear of the king-it was an actual derro at the time, imagine that-sowing dissent and treachery among the factions, eventually organizing my own ascent to the top. Or the bottom, I suppose, if you’d like to get technical.”
“Queen of a tribe of homicidal lunatics,” Zaltys said. “You must be so proud.”
Iraska shrugged. “Are you proud to be heir to an empire devoted to giving addicts the drugs they use to kill themselves? Don’t misunderstand-I think you should be proud. Any accomplishment of great scale is worthy of pride, Great-granddaughter. Besides, the derro are just a stepping stone. I realized when I came back from Delzimmer that the yuan-ti aren’t the most powerful creatures in the universe. Far from it. They’re provincial little snakes, to use a human pejorative. Which is why I enslaved your village-my village-our village, and dragged them down here. Because I wanted them to know how pitiful and worthless they are, how uncaring their god Zehir is. I put them in the slave pens by the mushroom fields, where I’ll put your cousin too. If I made them soldiers, they’d all die in some skirmish or another, and why should I want our relatives to have the release of death?”
“So you’re as delusional as the derro, then,” Zaltys said. “You believe they’re superior, and you’ve made yourself one of them.”
“Oh, please. The derro believe they’re masters of the universe, prevented from ascending to their true level of greatness only by the treachery of their million insidious enemies. But that’s nonsense. Derro are degenerate scum. But Zaltys, there are forces in this universe that deserve adoration, beings so powerful their might surpasses mortal understanding. Not the little aberrations that crawl and float here in the Underdark, the beholders and the grell and the like, and not even aboleths, though the aboleths come closer than most. I’m talking about creatures that were ancient when the gods weren’t yet conceived of. Things so old and powerful they don’t even have names, or need them. Entities that don’t even notice our kind, except perhaps for a moment’s fleeting sensation of pressure as they crush us beneath their vast and crawling bodies. On the far edges of the sky, there are sentient galaxies that watch us with hungry eyes made of suns. Things the size of our entire world, the continents of their bodies studded with malevolent eyes. Gigantic serpents made not of flesh and blood but the substance of stars, capable of poisoning reality itself with their venom. Conglomerations of singing tentacles and lashing pseudopods that can entangle the substance of time and space itself. These beings live far, far away from here, but they’d like to come closer. They’d like to be let into this world. And they can give power beyond imagining to the one who opens the door. That’s why I took over the derro, because the savants here devoted their lives to opening those doors, and I needed to learn how. So I did, and now all the other derro who knew how to create these portals are dead, and I’m very close to perfecting my technique.”
Iraska lifted her hands, and a blue and green ball of heatless flame coalesced in the air above the pool of water. “Those beings of power live in a place called the Far Realm,” she said, her voice distant and dreamy. “And I am their herald.”
Since her great-grandmother was busy staring up at a portal to a plane of infinite, unimaginable horror, Zaltys took the opportunity to shoot the old woman in the neck with a crossbow bolt.