The mere knowledge of what this power actually was made Aestith’s spine straighten with pride. He was a cleric of Lolth, despite that he had been born male, and despite that Valanxal had named him an abomination. No shame could live in him as long as that pride.
Aestith was not a particularly skilled cleric, as of yet, and certainly not a learned one, but he was devout to the point of obsession, and maybe that was all that mattered. He had never been taught all the subtle intricacies of the Church of Lolth, and maybe that was to his advantage, because he would be whatever Lolth shaped of him, with no preconceived notions on how things ought to be.
While browsing a bookstore for novels, he came across a diary from a cleric of Helm. A quick glance told him that she had been meticulous, and in the margins, she had written notes. It was a completely different deity of course, but some of the concepts were similar and Aestith could pray for guidance or make up the rest of it. The spells, which is what he was after, were detailed, and what mattered.
He justified this with simple logic—no spells simply came into being. Someone had to write the first one, had to figure out how to do it the first time. Those people laid the groundwork, and everyone else built off of it and perfected it, but the original wasn’t wrong. It was the same with religious rituals. Over time, the guesswork was perfected and eventually, it became a tradition. Each deity’s followers did things slightly different, but the spells were the same.
Familiarity with the diary bred a dull contempt; she could drone on about some boy for pages before she would say anything useful. Aestith read it anyway as an interesting study on how a human mind worked. Apparently, it involved a lot of whinging.
He ultimately dissected the diary, splicing out what was useful from what wasn’t and disposing of it. He kept the useful bits in a bundle.
Books were expensive in the Underdark. Paper wasn’t exactly in high supply, though there were things that could be made into it—it was usually vellum. Aestith resented the surface its ease of resources. No wonder the trade routes were so coveted, and small wonder the people here were so vulnerable.
And with the family assets divided between his sisters, it was a small wonder Virabel had wanted to consolidate it. If it actually had been her; Aestith realized that he didn’t really know. It could have been any of them, and Virabel had just become infuriated and stomped off to defend the caravan herself. Was there more to the story he didn’t know? Would likely never know, come to think of it.
He missed home.
He resented that too.
How could he go home? He had been on the surface, not just for raiding, but for an extended period of time! What they don’t know isn’t my problem, he told himself. Worked all the time in a number of other situations—deny, deny, deny. Or, favorite, so what? Aestith was out discovering new things, finding things of use, proselytizing at runaway drow—what were they doing?
What were his sisters doing?
There was still so much he didn’t know.
His own ignorance burned like a flame in his mind, bright and scorching. Like the pyre the humans were building. Aestith watched them from the inn’s window with dull fascination. The weather was what humans would have called “dreary” and Aestith thought of as “as pleasant as daytime ever gets”. He should buy a hat at some point, except that would be terrible for his meticulously cared for hair.
The pyre was for burning a person on a stake. In Enainsi, murder wasn’t exactly strictly illegal. If you stabbed someone, no one would look into the matter. If you publically stabbed someone—that is to say, left witnesses or other evidence—that was a problem and the mighty hand of the matrons would come down hard upon an entire house for such misgivings. Keep your family in line. He personally thought Tith'Rix had it right; there was a great deal of strength in family if the family worked together.
Humans punished the individual, which was slightly misguided but Aestith attributed it to a human’s strong desire for individuality and cultural norms. All of which was fine. Individuals were punished all the time in Enainsi too. But he couldn’t shake the sour taste on the back of his tongue at the horrifying thought that an entire town came together to lash someone to a stake and would stand around jeering and spitting as they burned alive. If they thought the other had committed some crime, why not just give him to the family of whoever had been wronged?
Absolutely vile, and they looked at him as if he were some murderous villain. He had never built a pyre and burned someone at the stake for what passed for public entertainment. Drow tortured their slaves, certainly, and there were expositions that did it for entertainment purposes, but that was a test of skill on the torturer’s behalf. Moreover, drow at least weren’t hypocritical about it.
He hated hypocrisy.
His fingers twitched in the beginnings of a spell. He took a deep, calming breath and let it pass. What should he have expected? For other races to be civilized?
He picked up his pack and made his way to the door before they had begun lashing the victim to the pole. The begging from the victim didn’t bother him so much. It was the barbarous cheering of the crowd that made his skin crawl. Aestith had once sat on the roof of the family home with Jaele, while a House opposite and a level down from them was razed. He remembered watching it indifferently. They certainly hadn’t cheered, even though the family had committed murder.
If a Tith'Rix murdered someone from Innis, you could easily assume the whole family was in on it. It wasn’t that different. Except that drow didn’t insist on a horrifying farce of a rigged trial, public humiliation, and a torturous death before a jeering crowd. Drow might capture and torture them, but usually the murderer went down fighting. At least they died like drow lived.
Let these sun people keep their petty vengeance and call it justice if it pleased them. Aestith could see no difference between one and the other.
Outside, the noisy crowd was not filtered through a wall and dulled. The whole spectacle made bile rise in Aestith’s throat. How dare they judge me.
“Not to your taste, drow?’ someone sneered.
Aestith suppressed a sigh, but didn’t take the obvious bait. It wasn’t worth his time, and he didn’t want to stick around for this. After the burning, the villagers’ blood would be up, they might drink, and Aestith thought it was in his best interest if he were elsewhere.
The man, perhaps offended by Aestith’s ignoring him, snapped, “Thought this would be right up your alley.”
The man’s yelling had drawn a few onlookers. Aestith kept walking, but the man staggered after him. He reeked of drink and piss. Aestith knew better than to reply; that was a debate he wasn’t interested in. He didn’t care about the raiding, and he cared even less about the raiding “victims”. If they weren’t strong enough to stand on their own, let the weak be culled. Humans did it to one another all the time, and worse.
If drow were half as barbaric as humans were, there wouldn’t be any surfacers.
Leaning against the wall, the man gave a last antagonizing shout, “That’s right. Crawl back into your cave, rat!”
The rock the man threw went wide, but the next one might not; Aestith quickened his pace.
The temperature dropped rapidly by late afternoon. Aestith was in no mood to try camping and thought, if he just picked up his feet, he might make it to the next town over. The clouds, when he looked up at them, were a deep violet shade, which meant snow. Snow. This late. Aestith hated the surface. More accurately, he misliked the sky. Why was it so blue? Blue was a lichen color, a mushroom maybe. It was an eye color, something found in dye, jewels, maybe paint or an exotic feather. It was sickening that the sky was so blue. Blue was for decoration.
The snow fell before he made it to the town, and the world quickly turned white as he stomped his way down the road. He shivered, glancing again at the dark sky. Pinpoints of cold and colder. If he looked up too long, it gave him the strangest sensation of falling. He stared downwards instead, head bent against the weather. Snow collected on his hood and stuck to his eyelashes. It melted on his cheeks.
The sound of a mouse screaming made him glance upward as he crested the hill. He stopped, his spine rigid.
Aestith was tired of looking at snow. You see one horrible, blinding sunset or sunrise over a snow-capped landscape, and you’ve seen them all. The same oranges and yellows and sparkling white with a pale sky. Each was just as optically offensive as the last. This one was somehow worse.
He faltered, then stepped uncertainly forward on a shaking leg. He shook his head, unable to comprehend the vast emptiness. The sky had been huge when he had first seen it, this giant thing that went from side to side, but it had boundaries and obstructions by mountains, forests, hills. Something interrupted it, even if it were bigger than he was accustomed.
His mouth felt dry. The sky was huge, even bigger than he had realized. It was this giant, empty space hanging above his head like a weight ready to drop. Blue. He hadn’t known so much blue even existed before he came up here. Blue should have been a special, rare color. Color should be more sparing. It should be rare and vibrant, flashy. He knew that color was everywhere anyway; it was just that in infrared, he rarely saw them as such. So much space, so much emptiness between himself and it. His skin crawled, the breath tightened in his lungs. It was a ceiling with no walls. What was holding it up? It was a canopy hanging in the air with no supports, falling gently and slowly downwards. For how long could it hang there? How long before it fell down and covered him?
He reached out to steady himself. His gloved hand brushed the boughs of a tree. The branch creaked at his touch and offered no support.
The earth ended.
Aestith had seen rivers, lakes and ponds. He had even tromped through a swamp. This was like a lake, but it wasn’t. The water rolled and splashed against the land. The waves foamed like a frothing deep rothé and left a vomit of green tangled vines and bleached sticks like bones on the earth. Aestith’s breath frosted. The cold stung his eyes as surely as the sun did.
The sun…
He had had the misfortune to see it many times, and learned quickly not to look at it directly as he might a candle or a cooking fire. It squatted low on the far side of the sky, where the water seemed to touch it. The water—the huge, endless expanse of water—held its reflection.
“Why is it so big,” Aestith gasped. His heart hammered in his chest. He clutched at his throat. It felt too tight.
The knitted snow mask threatened to suffocate him. The oppressing sky bore down on him. Each rise and fall of the waves made his stomach clench. He staggered back, away from the sight, and ripped the snow mask down to his neck. He choked on gulps of snow-cold air, then collapsed to his knees. Cradling his stomach, he heaved its contents onto the white snow. The smell of his own vomit made him seize again. He spit and wheeled back from it. He rinsed his mouth with water from a skin, spitting several more times.
When his head stopped spinning, he searched his pack for the wineskin and rinsed out his mouth with a gagging cough. He kept his eyes on the ground as he stepped, lest he see the horizon again.