THE FOUNDLING
Charybole was twenty-two years, three months, and six days old when she heard the screams.
She had been grieving, not just recently but for most of her life. A githzerai, her father had been killed by the githyanki when she was seven years old. Her mother had died beneath the awesome gaze of a cyclopean beholder two years later, her body literally melted before the glare of its single eye. Somehow she had survived to adulthood, living in the southern fringes of the Nentir Vale. In the fullness of time she had produced a daughter, a tiny thing on which she lavished all of the pent-up love and attention for which she had never found a recipient.
When her daughter was still an unnamed infant in her arms, she laid her down on the ground, just for a moment, while she filled a gourd full of water with which to bathe her from a nearby stream. She heard the screams a moment later, but arrived too late. An immature, but still heavily armored bulette, that half-snake, half-monster lizard that dwells and travels in the underground, had sensed the infant’s presence and broken through the surface, where it was tearing the child to shreds. She threw herself on the creature fearlessly, but its heavy armor protected it, and after a moment there were no more shrieks from the child. When the bulette finished its grisly feast it turned its attention to the githzerai female who was flailing away at its back and head, and realizing her child was past saving, Charybole backed away. The bulette stared coldly at her for a moment, as if deciding whether she was worth the effort, decided she wasn’t, and disappeared back down its subterranean burrow.
Charybole left the few remains of her child where they were, thereby guaranteeing that some scavenger or other would chance upon them and develop a taste for githzerai flesh. It made no difference to her. Every single thing she had cared about was dead, and she hoped to join them soon, to see if the next life held more joy and promise than this one did.
Yet the same instinct that makes even a prey animal sell its life as dearly as possible kept her alive, made her go through the motions of living, of eating, of sleeping, so that she could live and eat and sleep through another purposeless day. This continued, day in and day out, week in and month out – until the day she heard the wails and discovered a new purpose in life.
It was certainly not one she had anticipated, nor was it one she had prepared for. Had anyone mentioned what she was about to do a year ago, she would have thought they were crazy. But a year ago she had not seen a bulette rip her infant daughter limb from limb.
The cries came from a baby. Curious but cautious, she gingerly approached the source of the sound, and found a baby lying in the grass. At first it looked like a githzerai infant, but then she saw the yellow tint to its skin, and knew it was githyanki. She looked around for its mother, but there was no one to be seen.
They were near a stream, and she wandered over to it to see if the mother was washing herself in the cool, rapidly flowing water. No one was there… but then she saw a single blood-soaked sandal, and she knew what had happened. It was a warm day. The mother had set her baby down in the tall grasses for just a moment while she went to the stream to rinse the sweat from her body. Clearly she had not seen an approaching crocodile as the beast glided toward her beneath the surface, possibly had not known that the local streams were filled with them, and one bite would have been all it would have taken. Most of the local crocs were fourteen to eighteen feet in length, weighing well over a ton, and she’d have been dead, probably bitten in half, before she knew what hit her.
Charybole’s reconstruction of the tragedy was interrupted by increased screaming from the child. She walked over and looked down at it. She had just lost her own baby to a bulette. She knew if she left this one here for more than a few minutes, it would suffer the same fate-or worse, for hideous as it was, the bulette was far from the top of the food chain. It wasn’t its fault that it was born of the githyanki. It needed care, and love, and shelter, and she had all three to give. Finally she picked it up and walked off with it, all but daring any of the creatures of the Witchlight Fens to try to take it from her.
She arrived home, clutching the baby boy. She fed him, and when she went to sleep at night she did so with her arms wrapped around the little foundling.
Come morning the baby cried again, and this time it attracted not predators, but other githzerai, neighbors who knew that Charybole had lost her infant the week before.
“This is a dangerous idea,” said Baryomis, her closest friend, after examining the infant. “You cannot bring a githyanki to live with us.”
“I could not leave it to be torn apart as my own baby was torn apart,” responded Charybole.
“Why not?” shot back Baryomis. “When Zat finds out, she will kill it anyway, or order it killed.”
“He has harmed no one,” said Charybole, “and I will not allow harm to come to him.”
“It is githyanki!” snapped Baryomis in frustration.
“He is helpless, and he needs me,” replied Charybole, holding the baby even closer to her.
It didn’t take long for word of the foundling to reach Zat. It seemed so unlikely for a githzerai to have anything to do with a githyanki, let alone adopt it, that she decided to see what was transpiring with her own eyes, so she made the pilgrimage out to the Witchlight Fens.
“Where is the aberration I have heard about?” she demanded, and while Charybole inspired friendship among those who knew her, Zat inspired awe and even fear among them, and those were strong emotions, more than strong enough to overcome loyalty to the young githzerai. Finally Zat got her answer, sought out and confronted Charybole, and commanded her to bring forth the foundling.
“What will you do with him?” demanded Charybole.
“It is my sacred task to protect the well-being of the githzerai,” answered Zat. “If the babe is what I believe it to be, I will kill it, of course.”
“If you do,” replied Charybole with no show of fear, “I will kill you.”
“Githzerai do not speak thus to me,” said Zat.
“No one speaks thus to me about my child,” shot back Charybole.
“It is not your child,” insisted Zat.
“He is now.”
Zat frowned. “Do you not understand? We cannot allow a githyanki to live.”
“This is an infant,” protested Charybole. “If I raise him, he will grow up to be githzerai.”
“It will grow up to be githyanki, and this I cannot permit. The githyanki are the enemies of our blood.”
“All I know about his blood is that it is red,” said Charybole. “And if you spill it, then I will spill yours.”
Zat stared at her. “You will not let me see it?”
“I will not.”
“Nor slay it if it is indeed githyanki?”
“Nor slay it.”
“You have made your decision,” said Zat. “Now I must make mine.” And she turned and began walking back through the series of portals to the Elemental Chaos and the genasi-ruled city of Threshold, where Zat held court.
Charybole saw the way the others looked at her and the infant, and she moved farther into the Witchlight Fens. She carved a spear for herself, and was never without it. She didn’t know how Zat planned to strike at her adopted child, but there was never any doubt in her mind that sooner or later, probably when she least expected it, Zat or her agents would strike.
Two months passed peacefully, then three, then four. Each day she carried the infant out into the fresh air, each day she fed and cleaned him, and each day they bonded more and more closely. She named him Malargoten after a cousin who’d died fighting a mind flayer, and she lavished all the love and attention upon him that would have gone to her own child had she lived.
And when she had kept the foundling for six months, and she no longer saw horrors and potential death in every shadow, she was visited by just the kind of horror she had once anticipated.
She was sitting on the ground with Malargoten beside her, who was learning to crawl, when she heard the unholy high-pitched screech. She reached out, placed a restraining hand on Malargoten, picked up her spear with her other hand, and looked for the source of the sound-and found it not twenty feet away from her. The source of the cry was a bebilith, a huge, spiderlike creature straight from the Abyss, or perhaps some deranged fiend’s nightmare, staring at the foundling with hate-filled red eyes. She knew instantly that it had come to do Zat’s
