#if i'd known i was gonna write rakha like this maybe i should have made her a berserker lol

[blackjackkent]

Lae'zel succeeded in wresting the enormous ship from the Hells, sending it careening headlong through the Astral Sea before finally jolting back into the Material Plane to the sound of a tremendous explosion.

Rakha slowly emerges from her rage-induced haze to find herself clinging to the edge of a massive hole in the ship's hull. Silver blood covers her hands; next to her sits the mind flayer she was attacking, bleeding out of a wide hole in its gut.

Soft, warm air - nothing like the hells - drifts through the hole in the hull; below them she can see a carpet of shifting green leaves getting closer all the time. The ship is still crashing, a headlong rush towards destruction.

She feels dizzy with the letdown of adrenaline from the mad rush of fury she could not control. "What the fuck--" she starts to say, but never completes the thought, as a stray bit of shrapnel flying past cracks her across the shoulder and sends her careening out into the night sky.

She screams. Magic pulses out from her in all directions, bursts of aimless, formless energy swirling around her, and she screams in rage at the universe, that it brought her into being with no memory at all, as if birthed from that terrible pod, and only meant to let her live this short, horrifying existence before ending it in a splattering mess. The ground rushes up to meet her and she screams, and rages, and--

A new pulse of magic wraps around her and jerks her to a halt; her body swings sharply with lingering momentum and her head cracks smartly against the hardpacked sand. "Ow-- fuck--" she chokes out; blackness hovers at the corners of her eyes.

The magic twists around her, lowers her gently. It is unlike the magic she used on the ship; it has a strange gentleness to it, a softness like silk that resonates with the energy under her skin. Carefully it deposits her on the sand and disperses back into nothing, leaving her gasping and shivering uncontrollably on the beach.

She stares blankly at the sky, her eyes rolling slowly up into her head. Did I do that? she thinks vaguely, and then passes out.

-----

She comes awake several hours later and at first is conscious only of the overwhelming pain in her head. Her temple throbs where the worm sits and the back of her skull throbs where she hit it on the sand and there's a heavy bruise over one eye where the mind flayer struck her.

Other pains filter in more slowly. A scratch on her arm. The gnawing of hunger in her stomach. Sand... somehow inside her robes, scratching, itching, maddening. She pushes herself slowly to her knees, then her feet.

Around her in all directions is wreckage of the crash, the smell of smoke and burning metal and flesh.

Narrator: You half-expected your memories to return once you were free of the mind flayer ship. But your past is still an aching void. If you don't find a way to remove the tadpole burrowed in your brain soon, your future will be as blank as your past.

Narrator: Your head whispers vengeance. You cannot wait to slice your way forth, seeking whatever wrought this tragedy upon you.

Yes. Some of the mind flayers may have survived. She will fix that. The rage bubbles under the surface. She remembers the way it blanked everything else out on the ship, the way it took her over like a living thing within her mind.

It felt right. Natural.

Didn't it?