926 - Making It Personal
“I hope you don’t mind my dropping in unexpectedly,” announced Gwynharwyf, one arm coming up to lazily rest her scimitar over her shoulder.
Her voice had a rich brogue to it, the lilt in her words more pronounced than the elves who had summoned her, her words light and unstressed. Her posture was similarly relaxed, as though they were just having a cordial chat. But the intense pressure radiating out from her only grew more intense, as though she’d just sank into a crouch and was getting ready to spring.
“Thilaera is a distant descendant of Sirocco, one of my most ardent followers,” she continued. “When she sent me a message saying she was in trouble, I couldn’t in good conscience turn away.”
And just like that, her harmless, apolitical reason for being here was established. Which meant that she was just waiting for him to sufficiently offend her that she’d be justified in pointing her swords at him.
Avoiding doing so was going to be exceptionally difficult.
Lex had gained a great deal of acumen in becoming a titan, able to process much more information than he’d ever been able to as a mortal. But the Night Mare had expressly left in place his inability to read the subtler aspects of interpersonal communication. And while his ability to read minds – something he was still uncomfortable with, even if open hostility by a credible foe justified its use – and see into the immediate future allowed him to largely bypass that particular defect, he couldn’t use either against Gwynharwyf.
Like so many of the foes he’d recently faced, the eladrin leader wasn’t someone his trans-temporal sense could perceive. Given what he’d learned from the foresight spell that Vystalaran had placed on Loraestil, it seemed likely that beings with the ability to see through time couldn’t use those powers with regard to each other. Which meant that Gwynharwyf likely had a similar power, and that it wasn’t working on him any more than his was with regard to her.
Or at least, Lex hoped so; if she could still glimpse his future, then his attempts at diplomacy would be doomed before they could start.
That would likewise be the case if he even tried to read her mind. Not only did Lex have no hope that such a thing would succeed, but it would almost certainly give her the excuse she needed to lash out at him.
Which meant that he needed to talk her down using nothing but his wits alone.
Forcing himself to smile, Lex waved a claw in Burly’s direction. “If that’s what brought you here, then I’m pleased to say that the danger to your retainer’s kin has passed. I have already defeated the individual who was threatening her and her compatriots.”
Gwynharwyf smiled in return, showing a row of perfect teeth, but her aura didn’t ease up in the slightest. “Indeed you have. But I conversed with my charge and her friends briefly just now, and they said that there were several other nefarious creatures here. A demon of the foulest sort, a drow with draconic features...even a wolf who had command over ice and snow. With such fiends lurking about, the safety of Sirocco’s descendant and her friends is still uncertain.”
Lex’s smile took on a sharper edge, knowing that he was being maneuvered into admitting that he had connections to Solvei and the others who’d directly fought the elves’ forces. “Those individuals are members of my household. I can personally guarantee that if Thilaera and her comrades withdraw immediately and without committing any further hostile and aggressive actions, then no one in my retinue will harm them.”
“And what of the harm already caused?”
“What of it?” retorted Lex. “Those elves you’re so worried about are the ones who came here – to a place outside of their political dominion on this world – not only uninvited and without announcing themselves ahead of time, but opened hostilities without provocation. Any injuries that they took were dealt in self-defense by my people.”
“So you say.” Gwynharwyf rolled her neck then, as though working out a crick. “But I was told that they merely wished to ask your ice-wielding wolf some things – about you, as it turns out – and she became combative and antagonistic, even though they rescued her before that blackguard” – she gave Burly a cold glare – “could take advantage of her. So it seems to me as if your people started this, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’d say,” rumbled Lex, “that you’ve received a slanted accounting of what transpired.”
Gwynharwyf shrugged. “Perhaps. In which case, I’d like to offer my services as a mediator between yourself and the elven powers. Thilaera is a priest of one of their gods, you see, and the other two are individuals of note in their own right. It’s in everyone’s best interests to make sure that this doesn’t get blown out of proportion, lest the Seldarine – you know that’s the name for the elven pantheon, I take it? – come to the mistaken idea that a representative of the pony gods was looking to start a fight with their faithful.”
“Such a thing is absolutely something to be avoided,” agreed Lex, already spotting the trap she’d laid; he couldn’t disagree with the premise she’d made about this being an issue that required resolution, lest he look like he was eschewing a diplomatic solution. The thing to do now was head off her trying to frame any further discussions on her terms. “And I’m quite happy to avail myself of your services as a go-between in resolving this unfortunate incident. If you collect these elves and depart, I can assure you that I’ll be in touch while you confer with the elven gods.”
“These things are best handled immediately, before they can fester,” countered Gwynharwyf. “Why not come with me right now so that we can resolve this matter without delay?”
Lex smiled inwardly. Gwynharwyf was no fool, but she quite literally didn’t know who she was dealing with. “As much as I’d like to resolve this in a timely manner, I’m afraid that my commitment to my government prevents me from accepting your offer.”
Gwynharwyf frowned. “Your government?”
Allowing himself a soft laugh, Lex gave her a nod. “You’re not the only one to command a position of leadership among your own kind. As a prince who oversees millions of ponies, my duties to them must come before all other responsibilities.”
“Hm.” Gwynharwyf’s single grunt came with a sharp look, eyeing him up and down as though she could determine the truth of his words by looking at him.
“One’s duty to their people should always be their primary consideration,” she agreed at last. “But even such a heavy responsibility must be set aside when it conflicts with one’s principles.”
“Principle is what informs responsibility,” shot back Lex, knowing that the eladrin was probing the defense he’d just put forth for weaknesses. “The latter is a construct that serves the former.”
“And yet, events oftentimes conspire to turn one against the other, so that the duties that we’re called upon to fulfill conflict with – or even betray – our principles.” She held her arms out at a forty-five degree angle as she gestured at him with her chin. “I’m curious, what would you do if you found yourself in such a situation?”
Lex could already feel the aura around her shifting, moving around him like a hunting cat circling cornered prey. What was she getting at?
“I wouldn’t,” he shot back, refusing to step into whatever hypothetical she trying to lure him into. “The proper use of authority mandates keeping principles and responsibilities in accordance. Finding yourself in such a situation means that you’ve already failed.”
Her eyes flashed, and Lex had the distinct impression that in trying to avoid a trap, he’d just fallen into one.
“And that’s never happened to you, then?”
The righteous aura that Gwynharwyf exuded flared, engulfing him completely.
And all of a sudden, Lex found himself unable to stop from thinking about all the times he hadn’t been able to live up to his own expectations for himself.
It wasn’t an attack on his mind in any conventional sense. Rather, it was more like Gwynharwyf’s aura had overwritten the way that cognition itself functioned. No longer were thoughts and emotions two separate things; both were now the same mental process.
Because of that, her asking him about the times when he’d been disappointed in himself not only made him remember them, but relive them as well.
In an instant, he was again caught in a rush of horror and self-loathing as he realized that he had forced his anger onto Panuk, wronging the adlet whom he’d murdered for a second time. He saw himself killing Adagio, the guilt and the shame that he’d pushed away at the time sweeping over him now. And what he’d done to Mei Li-
No, my husband.
He’d foreseen that she’d reach out to him, the vixen’s refusal to condemn him only making him feel worse. If not for the fact that he’d seen how much it had hurt her – as well as Solvei and Nenet – when he’d looked at Solvei’s memories, he’d have shut her out again. But then again, he deserved to feel like this; after how he’d violated her-
You didn’t, she insisted again, her telepathic voice gentle but firm. Forgive me for contradicting you, but your understanding of what passed between us when you made me your wife is not correct.
It is. The weight of those two words was heavier than anything Burly Brawl had thrown at him. I lost control of myself, and you paid for it with your freedom.
You offered me a choice, my husband. Do you not remember? I was the one who approached you and expressed my desire to be yours. Even though I acted wantonly and audaciously, you not only accepted me, you made it clear what you would have of me before you did. Please, do not shame me by saying that I was not aware of what our union entailed.
But Lex would have none of what she was telling him. Your actions were motivated by my own loss of control, my desires overriding your will. Any sentimentality you feel for me now is nothing more than the product of Kara’s blessing.
Gwynharwyf cocked her head, her smile still in place. “I’m guessing you haven’t lived up to your own ideals, then? I can’t say that I’m surprised. After all, you talk about being a prince among ponies, but here you are in the middle of the wilderness, surrounded by exotic beauties rather than your own people.”
Under normal circumstances, the words would have earned nothing more than a sneer. But now they hit Lex like a physical blow, causing him to vacillate between shame and anger, unable to separate the memories of everything that had happened from how he felt about it.
Or from how much he suddenly hated the person who’d done this to him.
All around him, the temperature began to plummet, black crystals rising from the ground as the sky began to cloud over. Why was he bothering to restrain himself? Diplomacy only worked if the other party didn’t have their mind made up, and Gwynharwyf had made it clear that she wanted a fight. What she was doing right now was an attack in all but name already, and warranted a response in kind-
My husband. This time Mei Li’s voice was pleading. You are punishing yourself because you think you ignored my wishes and discounted my feelings. Will you do that again now by ignoring what I am telling you?
She hadn’t actually spoken those words yet, his foresight delivering them to him several seconds in advance. But although the contradiction she presented was a simplistic one – the sort that he normally would have effortlessly dismantled – Gwynharwyf’s aura kept him from dismissing Mei Li’s words, his guilt rendering him unable to discount the kumiho’s point.
It was enough to arrest his rising anger, the changes to environment ceasing as he paused, causing Gwynharwyf’s smile to die, her brow furrowing. “What are you doing?”
He ignored her as more of Mei Li’s words came to him. Do you know what my culture holds as the truest expression of love?
She didn’t wait for an answer before continuing, as though knowing that she needed to seize on this chance while she had his attention. It’s not sharing pleasure, nor is it to lay down your life for another. The first is a transient joy, lost as easily as it’s gained, and the second is noble but bittersweet, causing heartbreak to the one who must continue living.
Able to sense her state of mind, it was impossible for him to miss the contentment that came over her then. True love...is simply being together with someone. It doesn’t require words, or touch, or even a shared look. It’s knowing that someone else is there with you, holding loneliness – the worst pain there is – at bay. That they’ve chosen you, the same way you have chosen them by not sending them away.
Mei Li...
When you saved me, I was relieved. When you healed my injuries, I was grateful. And when I saw you with your wives that night – embarrassment shot through her then, comingled with the happiness she felt – I was captivated. But when you told me that you would only accept me if I would be with you forever, to stay by your side in a bond that would join us for all time...
Frowning, Gwynharwyf stuck her scimitars in the ground, her eyes flicking between Lex and the distant village as she reached out a hand.
...that was when I knew that I loved you. And if a goddess brought me to those feelings, then she has my eternal grAaAtTtIiItTtUuu-
The wobbling in her telepathic voice came with a sudden stab of pain that bypassed all of Lex’s defenses, almost driving him to his knees as his connection to Mei Li suddenly twisted and warped. It wasn’t anywhere near as agonizing as when Solvei had died, but it was still enough that he knew that if he’d been mortal he’d have been screaming...the way he knew that Mei Li was right now.
And in front of him, Gwynharwyf grimaced as she made a tugging motion, sending a new spasm of pain through Lex and the vixen both. “A kitsune?” she muttered, her voice low and her expression dark. “No, a kumiho. And this one” – she moved her hand and gestured as though plucking at something, sending a new bout of pain through him, this time via his connection to Nenet – “is a sphinx.”
“Stop,” hissed Lex, thrusting the effects of Gwynharwyf’s aura away as he reached into his dimensional pocket. “Stop what you’re doing this instant!”
The eladrin didn’t seem to hear him, making another grasping motion. “And this one’s a winter wolf-”
She didn’t have a chance to finish as Lex drew Belligerence, pointing the weapon at Gwynharwyf.
He didn’t throw it, nor did he activate the vortex that it could create.
Instead, he used its power of negation.
Immediately, Gwynharwyf’s expression changed to one of shock, her head whipping around to look at him. “What the...?!”
His teeth bared in a rictus snarl, Lex glared daggers at the eladrin. “How dare you!”
“How dare I?!” Recovering from her surprise, Gwynharwyf’s expression morphed into one of rage, matching his own as she took up her scimitars again, her aura swirling again as its bloodthirsty aspect surged. “How dare I?! You arrogant tarse! You enslave women, binding their souls to yourself for your own sick pleasure, and you have the unmitigated gall to say HOW DARE I?!”
Her indignation fanned Lex’s own, the beast within him howling. “You have no idea what you’re talking about!”
“You think I’ve never seen trash like you before?” Her lip curling in disgust, Gwynharwyf spat on the ground. “You talk about duties and principles, but its all just a smokescreen for you to get your pathetic little rocks off, grabbing any girl who catches your eye and using her for your own twisted satisfaction.”
She raised one scimitar then, pointing it at him. “Well guess what? It’s my duty, in accordance with my principles, to cut little men – or stallions – like you down to size. And whatever that weapon you have is, it’s not gonna be enough to save you from me.”
Swinging the other scimitar around, she dropped into a ready stance, holding both blades aloft. “I’m going to kill you, body and soul, and after I do I’m going to drag what’s left of you in front of those women you’ve tortured, so they’ll know that they’re free of you forever.”
If he hadn’t been so incensed, Lex would have laughed. That the eladrin was accusing him of the very thing he’d been feeling guilty over, mere moments after Mei Li had convinced him that he was berating himself unnecessarily, was beyond ironic. All the more so for the fact that negotiations had broken down for reasons that – for once – had nothing to do with his lack of communication skills.
Which meant it was time to use his fallback plan.
“You’re not going to kill me,” he sneered. “You’re not even going to try.”
This time, Gwynharwyf’s smile was vicious, her aura bearing down on him so hard that he felt like she already had her blades poised for a fatal blow. “I won’t have to try. The only thing more fragile than your pride is your defense, and I’m about to cut through both.”
“Only if...”
Reaching into his pocket dimension, Lex withdrew another of the seven treasures he’d been given.
To a casual examination, it was far less impressive than any of the others that he’d previously used, seeming like nothing more than a deep red oak leaf. But a closer look made it clear that there was far more to it than their first appeared.
Forged of metal so thin that it was as flexible as the genuine article, the leaf’s veins were actually formed of flowing runes. Its coloration was that of dried blood, which Lex himself had pressed onto its surface until the entire thing was stained red. And when he held it up, a symbol appeared on its center, shining brightly enough that it was unmistakable:
The personal sigil of Penelope La Gard, superimposed over another rune denoting a marquis of her demesne.
“...you want to start a war between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts.”
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Well, she got Lex to behave exactly how she wanted.
She goaded him into reacting with beligerance.
Wasn't what I was thinking of but I was pretty close.
11852727
I can't event act offended.
You killing me out here man.
Huh, a trump card that doesn't involve death and destruction upon his enemies. That's new, especially since he's relying on the protection of others, politically speaking of course. The closest thing he had to this, to my mind was his brief trip to the Darkest Night but that was because he met the right individual while the other would be all the way back to the start of his journey to become mayor of Vanhoover though the Crown's authority wasn't that strong.
Hopefully that won't be the case here, or for Gwynharwyf to disregard it anyways and assume he stole it or it was a forgery of some kind. Granted, it is probably near impossible for anyone to forge what Lex has unless they're high up on the divine or demonic hierarchy.
On a slightly related note: Is such a thing possible and has it happened before? Both lorewise and mechanically speaking.
11852727 media1.tenor.com/m/N6xoSxUMyjUAAAAC/pinkie-pie-rimshot.gif
11852811 Well, the question now is whether or not Lex's tactic works. Otherwise, there's going to be a stiff fight up ahead.
Again.
11853617 It's been a little while since Lex has actually managed to stop a fight from happening, rather than being forced into combat, hasn't it?
In some ways, that's a product of the game engine that this story relies on; while it's not totally geared toward fighting, tactical combat lies at the very heart of it, and the vast majority of what it can do revolves around these small-scale combat encounters.
...which is what makes your question a little awkward. Presuming that you meant some way of faking allegiance to a fey power specifically (as opposed to faking a political allegiance in general), I have to admit that in terms of rules, nothing comes to mind. As noted, that's largely because the d20 System puts the majority of its player interface toward combat, with non-combat interactions being far less systematized. They're certainly out there (the skill system being the most obvious one, in that you have skills such as Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate), but there's less support for them overall. And even when we do get specific rules mechanics for some sort of allegiance, they don't usually deal with questions of people who're lying about having that allegiance; largely because that stretches something that's already hard to systematize into even more complicated territory.
Which isn't to say that such things aren't out there; just that nothing's coming to mind at the moment.
I should also add that, with regard to the fey in particular, D&D in general hasn't really done very much with them. While the Seelie and Unseelie Courts go back at least as far as AD&D 2nd Edition (appearing in DMGR4 Monster Mythology as two pantheons of deities in their own right), and perhaps even earlier if there's something I'm not remembering, they've always been an awkward fit. D&D's cosmology doesn't really have a "fairy realm" per se (the closest is the "Shadow World" of the old Birthright campaign setting, but it's specific to that particular world), and their otherworldliness and sort-of-human-but-still-very-alien mindset can be somewhat hard to assign an alignment (they usually are flavored as some version of chaotic). And of course, categorizing monsters via overarching "creature types" means that a lot of mythological fey (i.e. goblins, gnomes, sylphs, etc.) were moved over into categories, essentially unmaking them as "fey" per se, hollowing out the archetype the fey creatures occupy.
Later editions of D&D did try to fit in a Faerie Plane (mostly in terms of calling it the "Feywild"), and even Pathfinder has its equivalent (i.e. the "First World"), but these have still been somewhat ancillary to more standard places such as Hell, the Abyss, the Elemental Planes, etc. as far as planar adventuring (or even fodder for where powerful bad guys come from) goes. It's notable that (again, as I recall) the one Adventure Path that Paizo put out which had a strong fey/First World theme to it (i.e. Kingmaker) was also the one that got the biggest rewrite, having so much changed when it was re-released for Pathfinder 2nd Edition (e.g. adding a new final boss) that they actually released an entire book converting the new content back to Pathfinder 1E for fans who wanted to incorporate the new aspects of the campaign. That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the fey per se, but I find it notable nonetheless.
All of which is to say that faeries and fey powers don't have much of a footprint in D&D, and only slightly more in Pathfinder, rendering examples of characters taking advantage of their agency (whether legitimately or not) exceptionally rare in the fiction/lore and similarly lacking in the mechanics. As it is, what I've presented here in this fic is actually a mishmash of several elements, folding in the classic Seelie/Unseelie divide, broken down further into seasonal "courts" in a manner which incorporates a lot of material from Fat Dragon Games' Call to Arms: Mantles of Power, and then shoehorned the eladrin into that system (as they were originally just the race of Chaotic Good celestials, similar to archons being the Lawful Good ones...at least before D&D 4E rewrote the eladrin to just basically be even elf-ier elves).
Since Pathfinder created their own Chaotic Good celestials (the azata), I've repurposed the eladrin into fey-celestial "hybrids" as it were, and used them to tip the Seelie/Unseelie scales in favor of the former (though that required giving them a new name; "Llys Seren" is Welsh – the same language as Gwynharwyf's name – for "Star Court," i.e. the Court of the Stars, which is the canon name for the eladrin's political formation; given that we already had the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, plus the Autum, Winter, Spring, and Summer Courts, one more court was too many, so I sidestepped that problem here).
All of which is more than you asked for, but I hope at least the rambling was somewhat more entertaining than my just saying, "sorry, no."