The Nether Scroll Chapter 10: Tiep Takes the Lead While the Beast Lord Feeds
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
Chapter 10 belongs to Tiep, and it’s the chapter that made me completely rethink this character.
Up until now, Tiep has been the annoying kid. The petty thief. The one who causes problems and holds grudges. But this chapter puts him alone in the dark with a terrified Rozt’a, a mind-controlling monster, and no wizard backup. And he steps up.
The Point of View Shift
Abbey switches to Tiep’s perspective. The chapter opens with Tiep admiring his new sword, the one Dru pulled off a dead swordswinger. He likes the weight of it. He remembers how Rozt’a refused to teach him swordplay back in Scornubel.
Then Rozt’a shoves him out of the egg chamber and everything falls apart.
The wall behind them starts shimmering like a heat mirage with a dead-black slit in the middle. Rozt’a is hissing “No noise” and shoving Tiep toward the door. Dru is still inside with Sheemzher on the athanor. Then there’s an explosion of light and force that lifts them off the ground and leaves them seeing their own bones through their skin.
When it’s over, they find a solid granite wall where the egg chamber doorway used to be.
Rozt’a Breaks
This is the part that really got me. Rozt’a, the unstoppable warrior, the woman who has laid open more men than Tiep can count, completely breaks down. She beats her fists against the stone wall. She can’t stop. Tiep tries to gently pull her away and she backhands him without even looking.
So Tiep does something he hasn’t done since he was first taken in by this family. He calls her “Mother.”
And it works. She stops. They find each other in the dark and walk arm in arm toward the pool chamber.
But Rozt’a isn’t really there. Her body is moving but her mind is somewhere else. With Dru in the egg chamber, or with Galimer in Weathercote Wood. For the first time, the scrappy kid who grew up on the streets is the one keeping things together.
The Beast Lord Revealed
What follows is genuinely horrifying. Tiep and Rozt’a hide in a fold in the rock wall and watch as goblin slaves and swordswingers file into the pool chamber. Then a tall figure in a spell-covered cloak walks in, dragging a stumbling, newly-hatched swordswinger beside it.
Tiep thinks it’s a man at first. Then it turns toward them.
Mottled purple skin stretched tight over bone. A skull that bulges behind like a burst brain that kept growing. Dull white eyes with no pupils. And four ropy tentacles hanging off its face.
This is the Beast Lord.
But here’s where Tiep’s magic-resistant nature saves everyone. The Beast Lord sends out a psychic compulsion. Come closer. Share. Feed. Open your mind. Every goblin, every swordswinger, and Rozt’a all start walking toward it.
And Tiep just… shrugs it off. The magic slides right off him the same way it always has. He grabs Rozt’a, punches her on the chin to break the compulsion, and holds her in the shadows while the Beast Lord does its ritual.
He has to keep constant physical contact with her because the moment he lets go, she starts walking toward the monster again. So he drapes his arm over her shoulder and watches the whole ceremony while keeping his foster mother safe.
Tiep Puts It Together
And while he watches, Tiep figures it out. The newly-hatched swordswinger. The mantis-like arm positions. Sheemzher’s story about his wife going into the egg with a mantis and a demon coming out.
The swordswingers are goblins fused with Wyndyfarh’s mantis creatures. The misshapen goblins in the bogs are the failed experiments. The Beast Lord isn’t exchanging goblins for demons. It’s merging them. Transforming them.
Tiep is genuinely proud of this insight and starts imagining the look on Dru’s face when he explains it. Then he remembers that Dru is trapped in the egg chamber and might already have been put through the athanor himself.
That cold realization sits heavy on the page.
Reunion and Retreat
Dru finds them eventually, carrying an unconscious Sheemzher over his shoulder. Sheemzher tried to pull the scroll but it threw him against the wall like a lightning bolt. Then the Beast Lord loaded up the athanor for a transmutation. The scroll disappeared during the process, displaced in time. Dru thinks it’ll drift back by midnight or dawn.
They didn’t get the scroll. But they’re alive. And Dru’s magic shields Rozt’a from the Beast Lord’s compulsion, which is the first good news they’ve had in a while.
Tiep’s Secret
The chapter ends by pulling back the curtain on Tiep’s biggest secret. Three winters ago in Scornubel, he tried to pick the pocket of Sememmon, the Dark Lord of the Zhentarim. Instead of killing him, Sememmon recruited him. Not to betray his foster parents, but to do small “favors” now and then. Nothing violent, nothing too terrible. But enough to compromise him completely.
His last favor was in Parnast, where Amarandaris gave him a sealed blue bottle to plant in a specific saddlebag. He doesn’t know what it did.
And now Sheemzher apparently knows about Tiep’s Zhentarim connection, which is why Tiep is suddenly very interested in making sure nobody asks the goblin too many questions.
Surprisingly layered chapter for what started as a kid bragging about his new sword.