First appearance: Pieces of a King Ep 2: The War Council · watch it on YouTube
The Nightingales are the white-masked, veiled medics who follow The Physician, the Mind Flayer who serves the Alliance in its war against The Warmind. They heal the living. Every night they also walk the battlefields and destroy the dead, brains and bodies alike, so the enemy can’t harvest them. The soldiers call this “counting corpses.” Even their own allies are uneasy around them, and nobody has ever seen one of them alone.
Story
Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL
The Nightingales arrived the way bad news does. Calvin the Hob went visibly shaky at the sight of them. “Those are nightingales,” he said. “They’re on our side, but… I don’t know why they’re here.” There were four of them with the Physician, and he explained their purpose plainly. The Warmind “needs materials and knowledge,” so no fallen soldier could be left for it to take and reconfigure. “Every night [we] wander those battlefields. And we destroy every body we can find and leave nothing.” Nehebka grasped the stakes at once: if the party fell and was remade, “It would be the unmaking of The Dread Fortress.”
Muffy asked the obvious question: would the Nightingales come and destroy them too? “Your brain and your body, yes,” the Physician replied, and he added that this was not a promise. He then asked the party to submit to a brief reading of their thoughts, with “no brain eating.” When Grimnar asked what would happen if they refused, the Physician simply looked at his four Nightingales: “Then we will have to ask kindly.” The reading went ahead, and afterward everyone saw the Mind Flayer shudder and pull back, sand falling from his hands and drifting home to Nehebka, who told him the party was there for one reason only. She was a guardian, and she trusted the Nightingales so little that she pushed Muffy and Grimnar back from them with an almost physical force.
The Physician bid them good night and left, his Nightingales filing out after him two by two. Back at the barracks it felt “as if time itself stopped,” and then everyone breathed out in relief. “People don’t normally come back,” Calvin admitted. Grimnar summed up the mood: “Something about them doesn’t feel right.”
Pieces of a King Ep 3 — The Warhead
The next morning, four Nightingales stood outside the command tent with the other guards: two drow, Gund Ashbrow’s ash-browed duergar and Grim’s redcaps. Five of the Physician’s servants were present in all. They are described as still-hearted. Their resistance to mind magic is trained, and some magical source they carry on their persons strengthens it. Inside the tent, the Physician asked whether the party would truly help or abandon the cause. Grimnar, who still distrusted him and his Nightingales, gave the only honest answer he had: “We will do what chaos allows.”
Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind
By the final push, the Nightingales had stopped being a menace in the background and were working alongside the party. Two of them rode with the party inside “the bullet,” a living, carapaced digging creature fitted with a canopy for passengers, as it burrowed through warm, stale tunnels toward its target. Both looked like they had been through the same fight as everyone else. One had a crack running through the center of its mask, and the other’s coat was scorched and punctured. Together with the Physician, they had healed the party, and without them “that site would have been lost” and the casualties would have been far worse. When the bullet reached its destination and the Physician went with the party to arm the warhead, the two Nightingales stayed behind to guard their ride back.
Personality and Abilities
The Nightingales wear white masks and veils, and they do their work at night. They are never seen alone, and they leave rooms two by two behind their master. They are medics in the fullest and grimmest sense: they mend the wounded, and they make sure the dead can’t be turned into weapons. Their minds are hardened against psionic intrusion through training and a magical source they carry. Their reputation among the Alliance’s soldiers is equal parts gratitude and dread.
Relationships
- The Physician: Their master. They follow, guard and work alongside him.
- The Warmind: The enemy whose harvest of the dead they exist to deny.
- Nehebka: Openly distrusts them and shielded her companions from them.
- Grimnar: Felt from the start that “something about them doesn’t feel right.”
- Muffy: Asked the Physician whether they would destroy the party if it fell, and got a straight answer.
Memorable Quotes
- “Those are nightingales. They’re on our side, but… I don’t know why they’re here.” (Calvin, Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL)
- “Every night [we] wander those battlefields. And we destroy every body we can find and leave nothing.” (The Physician, Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL)
- “Your brain and your body, yes.” (The Physician, Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL)
- “Then we will have to ask kindly.” (The Physician, Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL)
- “They call it counting corpses.” (Calvin, Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL)