The Nether Scroll Chapter 14: Weathercote Wood, Lady Mantis, and Trading With the Zhentarim
Book: The Nether Scroll by Lynn Abbey Series: Lost Empires, Book 4 (Forgotten Realms) ISBN: 0-7869-1566-8
The final chapter opens with Druhallen putting one foot in front of the other. That’s literally how he describes it to himself. Pushing his companions through empty tunnels with a dying goblin on his back and the taste of violation in his mind.
Coming Back to the Light
When they stumble through the dwarf-carved gate at sunrise, Abbey gives us a quiet moment where Dru raises his eyes as if the light could heal his face. It can’t. The Beast Lord’s mental assault left marks deeper than the scars on his nose. He experienced cruelty and degradation on a scale he hadn’t imagined possible. Were it not for Rozt’a, Tiep, and Sheemzher, he would not have come back.
That’s a heavy admission from the man who spent the whole book being the responsible one.
Tiep walks apart. He saved Dru’s life by charging the Beast Lord, and his reward was having his mind invaded. Nobody knows what to say. They collect their horses and leave Dekanter behind.
Facing Lady Mantis
Days later they reach Weathercote Wood. Wyndyfarh is waiting at her temple. Galimer is not beside her.
The confrontation is the payoff for everything. A week ago, this woman intimidated Dru. Not anymore. He’s faced the Beast Lord. He’s had an alhoon’s tentacles drilling into his brain. Wyndyfarh is arrogant, but she’s not evil. He’s seen evil.
“If he can’t walk out here or if he’s not the man he was, then we’re leaving… with the scroll.”
She backs down. Galimer walks out from behind the waterfall. Rozt’a grabs her husband. And here’s the gut punch. Galimer says, “I didn’t dare hope.” Because Wyndyfarh didn’t expect them to succeed. She sent them on what she considered a fool’s errand.
When Dru confronts her about Sheemzher, she says, “He wanted so much to be the hero for his people. I told him his people would not listen. He was a goblin and would not listen, so I encouraged his dreams.”
The coldest line in the book.
Answers
Wyndyfarh takes the scroll and it vanishes. She’ll plant it in a tree, protected by her oath to Mystra. Then she answers questions.
The mind flayers in Dekanter were from a colony called Llacerelly, hunting the Beast Lord as part of an Underdark conflict. The Beast Lord had been trying to recreate the gith, an ancient slave race, using the Nether scroll to power its athanor. It thought success would earn forgiveness from the colony that exiled it.
She reveals Dru’s glass disk is Netherese. Carry it openly and you won’t be noticed by those who don’t expect to see you. The scryers at Candlekeep couldn’t figure it out because they’d never read a Nether scroll.
Dru looks up at the sky. The moon is the wrong phase, wrong size, wrong color. Wherever Wyndyfarh’s glade truly exists, it’s not entirely in Faerun.
“I’ll sleep outside, where I recognize the sky.”
The Final Trade
They leave Weathercote with gold, safe passage, and Sheemzher, healed in body but not in heart. He asks to travel with them. Dru says yes.
But twelve armed Zhentarim wait outside the forest. They’re escorted to Parnast for supper with Amarandaris.
Here Dru plays his last card. Tiep’s shirt absorbed a perfect copy of the scroll’s text. Dru quietly cut a strip and offers it to Amarandaris. Not the magic, just the words. In exchange: Tiep’s freedom from the Zhentarim.
Amarandaris threatens to have him killed. Dru doesn’t blink. “And lose the rest? This is trade, not robbery.”
The Zhentarim agrees. The boy will be free. A clean slate. And the book ends with Dru walking downstairs at sunrise, thinking about Amarandaris’s parting words. The Zhentarim called Tiep “the youngest son of Bitter Ansoain.”
Her youngest son.
Two words that reframe the entire book. If Tiep is Ansoain’s biological child, he’s Galimer’s brother. Dru has been raising his dead mentor’s secret son without knowing it. Everything snaps into a new shape.