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.He looked back to the giant snake, to the huge head swerving tantalizingly side to side, to the black eyes looking back at him, looking right through him, mocking him with their power.Many heartbeats passed.It occurred to Drizzt more than once that Dahlia was correct here, that they couldn’t fight this great creature.The snake was far above them, far too great a foe.And it didn’t want to kill them.That truth seemed obvious, and made perfect sense—until Drizzt managed to step back from the obviousness and actually think about it.Only then did the drow widen his view around the great serpent, to see a half-dozen other people flanking the snake, contentedly.Contentedly.There they were, human citizens of Neverwinter, along with a pair of Shadovar, all unarmed and standing beside the serpent as if it was their friend.Or master.Drizzt glanced left and right.Dahlia had dropped Kozah’s Needle, and stood shaking her head helplessly, and Entreri, perhaps the most fearless man Drizzt had ever met, a warrior who only got angrier and more ferocious when faced with a seemingly hopeless situation, rolling his sword and dirk nervously and hardly even looking at the giant creature.Drizzt knew then that there was no need to fight this creature.Indeed, they couldn’t hope to win, or even survive, if they engaged in such a futile battle.Nay, the better course was to simply surrender to its obvious godlike qualities, to accept the reality of their inferiority and live happily beside this living deity.There would be pleasure and peace.Drizzt felt his scimitars slipping down by his sides.He was lost.All was lost.Her thoughts were pried open and flying free.Dahlia recognized this, but it seemed natural, and the intimacy created in such a shared moment seemed somehow warm and inviting.This creature before her, this god, understood her.It saw her deepest pain and greatest fears.It stripped her naked before it, for it and all to see, and there, open and without secret, she felt.free.This was no enemy.This was salvation!Her pain lay bare before her, the rape, her guilt, her terrifying and evil choice to murder her child, the source of her rage, the multitude of dead lovers—and wouldn’t Drizzt sit atop that pile of corpses?Or wouldn’t he be strong enough to kill her instead, and free her? That was the point, after all!But perhaps, she realized now, she didn’t need that extreme, that suicide-bylover approach to ending her pain.Perhaps the answer was here, before her, within reach, in the dark eyes of this knowing, brilliant creature.His thoughts were pried open and flying free.Entreri recognized this, but it seemed natural, and the intimacy created in such a shared moment seemed somehow warm and inviting.This creature before him, this god, understood him.It saw his deepest pain and greatest fears.It stripped him naked before it, for it and all to see, and there, open and without secret, he felt.free.This was no enemy.This was salvation!Entreri, ever guarded, instinctively recoiled, though.How could he not? He, who had lived a life of lies, even from himself, he who had lived in the shadows of fabrication and denial, suddenly found an abrupt reversal—and not just from this creature, as he had with Charon’s Claw, but opened to all within the collective “family” the creature was now offering to him.His guards went up without a conscious thought to them.His memories floated before him anyway: the childhood betrayal by his mother, the ultimate betrayal of his uncle and those others, the dirt of Calimport’s streets.He felt a violation, as he had known as a child, of the most intimate and damaging sort.He faced it again, or tried to, but he realized something.something quite unexpected.Entreri lost his own contemplations to a moment of surprise, and glanced over at Dahlia, and she at him.Naked, joined, with no place to hide.His thoughts were pried open and flying free.Unlike his companions, though, Drizzt Do’Urden knew this type of intrusion, and recognized almost immediately the subtle trickery, the willing slavery.During his days wandering the Underdark, after abandoning Menzoberranzan, Drizzt had been seduced in just such a manner—logical promises and wondrous carefree visions of life in Paradise—by the illithids, the wretched mind flayers.Obediently and lovingly, Drizzt and his companions had massaged the hive mind of the illithid community
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