Joining the Party — The Polymorph

You come back to consciousness in stages.

First: sound. The murmur of voices — multiple, overlapping, some tense, some amused. The crackle of a campfire. The soft, rhythmic clicking of a beak.

Second: smell. Roasting meat. Wood smoke. The herbal tang of a healing poultice that isn't yours — more refined, properly prepared, the work of someone with actual training. And underneath it: pine needles. Iron. Mama.

Third: touch. You're lying on something soft — a bedroll, you realize, not the cave floor. Your head is propped on a folded cloak that smells like leather and something faintly floral. Your shoulder has been bandaged. Your face has been cleaned.

You open your eyes.

You're in a camp — a real camp, with proper tents and supply crates and a fire ring built from river stones. Forest above. Stars beyond. The blue-white light of the Underdark is gone; wherever you are, it's surface-level, nighttime, and significantly more civilized than anything you've experienced in the past week.

Mama Owlbear is curled around the supply crates like a massive, feathered barricade, one amber eye open and tracking every movement in the camp. She clicks her beak when she sees you stir — the good, you're awake, stop worrying me click.

You crawl out of the tent. Every muscle in your body has filed a formal complaint with management.

And then something small, round, and aggressively fuzzy launches itself at your chest.

You go down. Not because it's heavy — it's barely twenty pounds — but because your reflexes are shot and your balance is the balance of a person who has recently fallen off two elevated structures in one week. You hit the ground on your back, and the fuzzy thing lands on your sternum and starts chirping.

It's an owlbear cub. Tiny, round, covered in downy brown-grey feathers, with oversized paws and a stubby beak and eyes that are miniature copies of Mama's — bright amber, wide, radiating the unconditional enthusiasm of a creature that has decided you are its favorite person in the world.

"Hi there, mini-Mama," you breathe, and your voice comes out rough with something you refuse to identify as emotion. "Did you see that your mom's better now?"

The cub chirps again — a high, warbling sound that is objectively the most adorable noise you have ever heard — and burrows its face into the crook of your neck.

Behind you, Mama's tail thumps the ground once. The owlbear equivalent of finally.

A shadow falls across you. You look up from the cub and find the tiefling — Karlach — standing over you with a bowl of roasted boar and potatoes, grinning like the dawn.

"Figured your stomach was completely empty after that spectacular display," she says. "Eat up, kid. You earned it."

She's — big. Close up, even bigger than she looked during the fight. Broad-shouldered, muscular, with curving horns and a mane of dark hair and skin that seems to radiate warmth from within, like embers banked under ash. Her smile is enormous and completely uncomplicated — no angles, no calculations, just pure, undiluted friendliness.

You like her immediately.

"Thanks," you say, taking the bowl. The cub immediately sticks its beak into the potatoes. You let it.

"So," Karlach says, dropping to a crouch beside you. "You're the crazy lady who rode an owlbear into a goblin temple and threw up on the spider pit."

"I threw up into the spider pit. Important distinction. The spider pit was below me. Gravity was doing most of the work."

Karlach's grin widens. "I like you. I like you a LOT."

The introductions happen around the fire. The party — Tav's party, you learn — is a collection of people who have absolutely no business being in the same room, let alone the same adventuring group.

Tav is the anchor. Calm, competent, tired in the way of someone who has been holding everything together through sheer willpower and is keenly aware that willpower has a shelf life. They explain the situation with the economy of someone who has explained it too many times: nautiloid crash. Tadpoles. Ceremorphosis. Find a cure or become a mind flayer.

"You guys have a tadpole in your brains?!" you blurt. "Eww, also why?!"

You lunge forward and grab the nearest companion — Astarion — by the jaw with both hands. Tilt his face toward the firelight. Peer directly into his red iris, squinting, looking for the telltale wriggle of the parasite behind the pupil.

The entire camp goes very, very still.

Astarion is — frozen. Not the performative freeze of someone playing along. The real, full-body rigidity of someone who was not expecting to be touched and whose entire nervous system just hit the emergency brake. His red eyes are wide. His jaw is clamped between your palms. For one half-second, something flashes across his expression — not amusement, not charm, something older and rawer — before a slow, wicked smirk slides into place like a visor coming down.

"Darling," he says, and his voice is silk over ice, "usually people ask before getting this intimate."

"Ugh, gross," you mutter, letting go and wiping your hands on your pants as if touching him contaminated them. "I was looking for the worm, not propositioning you."

"A common confusion, I'm sure."

You file him under annoying but pretty and move on.

Tav asks if you want to join.

"Sure," you say, through a mouthful of boar. The cub is asleep in your lap, one paw twitching. "If we run into more of those multi-eyed freaks, I'll help you smash them. We'll just wing it."

"No terms?" Tav asks. "No demands?"

"Why would I? You guys have food, my big bird friend got a nice nap, and you didn't try to put a worm in my eye. Good enough for me."

Gale, who has been observing this entire exchange with the expression of a university professor watching a rat navigate a maze by headbutting the walls, says: "Splendid! Simple, straightforward cooperation. How refreshingly uncomplicated."

"I'm a simple person."

"You pulled a section of cave ceiling onto two people with your mind."

"Yeah, but simply."

You try to walk to camp under your own power. You make it three steps before your knees buckle — not dramatically, not with a graceful swoon, but with the sudden, total collapse of a body that has run through its adrenaline reserves and found the account empty.

Mama hooks her massive beak under your belt and yeets you onto her back.

"I can walk," you protest, already sliding sideways in the feathers.

Mama clicks her beak. Sit down and shut up.

You sit down and shut up.

The rhythmic swaying of her gait is — hypnotic. The warmth of her feathers seeps through your clothes. The pine-and-iron smell fills your nose. Your eyes close, open, close again, each blink lasting longer than the last.

Behind you, the party follows at a respectful distance.

Astarion: "That is certainly one way to travel. No walking, no blisters, and a giant body shield. I am officially envious."

Gale: "Her mind is forcing her into an arcane slumber to repair the neural pathways. Fascinating — the somatic feedback from that level of raw channeling must be —"

Lae'zel: "Reckless. Inefficient. But she chose her battlefield and refused to yield. There is honor in that."

You hear none of it. You're asleep before the camp is out of sight, your face buried in Mama's feathers, the cub a warm weight against your stomach.

For the first time in a week, you dream of rain. Just rain. The ordinary kind.

End notes for Chapter 6: Content warnings — minor violence aftermath, exhaustion. No sexual content.