"Angry over our faith. But after getting angry, then what? Didn't we still obey Lolth's wishes, loudly proclaiming that we would arrest Kling and offer them as sacrifices?"
"Damn it, I almost got swept up in that. We need the truth about that day. The truth!"
"She still hasn't mentioned the most important part: did a god really descend upon this land? Wasn't that Spider Tide supposedly the work of the Mind Flayers?"
Questions rose and fell like waves, overlapping, advancing and retreating.
This time, the Spider Silk Matron Mother did not explain in person.
Instead, she stepped aside, and a Mind Flayer with his hands and feet restrained by two guards was shoved before the crowd.
An uproar immediately broke out.
For those who had not taken part in the campaign, the Mind Flayers' squidlike tentacles had existed only in hearsay.
Even upon seeing them in person, they could not resist commenting, "Pretty ugly."
"A bunch of inferior races with no sense of aesthetics."
The Mind Flayer asked Tang Qi telepathically, "Do I really have to speak aloud?"
"Can you broadcast your thoughts to everyone without an Elder Brain's help? Or do you intend to explain this so-called 'truth' over and over to the twenty thousand people down there?"
"Forget I asked."
With his life in Tang Qi's hands, he could only let the tentacles around his mouth writhe as he said, "Stupid Drow. You're nothing but castoffs abandoned by the gods—"
Smack!
Tang Qi slapped the back of his oval head. "Watch your mouth."
"Ahem. What I meant was, the gods stopped paying attention to this corner of the world long ago."
The Mind Flayer used psionics to fabricate an illusion, conjuring a brilliant, beautiful ocean that looked woven from rainbows and sending it toward the crowd. "The