It was warm. Whatever Aestith was lying on, it was too cushioned to be the cavern floor. He wasn’t lying at an angle, and he remembered going uphill before he collapsed. Something wrapped around him. A cocoon? A web? Was he trapped?
His eyes shot open, and he stilled. It was a blanket. He was lying on a bed. He threw back the blankets, and was horrified to find that he was naked. He snatched the wool blanket back and wrapped himself in it as if he could hide in it.
The room had different furnishings than he was accustomed to. The style was different, the cuts of the furniture more angular, the legs less fluted. He turned from a small table and looked at the bed. Where was he?
The knowledge that he was somewhere other than home, than Enainsi, made him feel cold, exposed as fresh cut emeralds. He sat down, lower lip trembling. He was farther than he had ever been.
His body roiled with sickness, then he noticed a more pressing matter. His stomach growled with want of food.
He found a stone cup with water and gulped it down. If it were poison, there would have been no use in bringing him here. Similarly, he had to assume that if he were a prisoner, he would be in a cage. He tried to ignore the way his hand shook as he set the empty cup down where he had found it. He hugged his arms to his torso and forced himself to think.
Svirniblin were too far from Enainsi. If he had been taken by illithid, he would not be so well-treated. Same with kobolds, goblins, that sort of creature. Which had to leave duergar.
The duergar near Enainsi had an agreement with the drow; the drow would take no further slaves from them and in exchange, there could be mutually beneficial trade deals and shared routes. He imagined there might have been some militaristic reason they had made the agreement, but Aestith was not well-versed enough in it to even guess at it. Perhaps they were just too far to make crushing them attractive, and the caverns they controlled were, his sisters had said, the fastest ways from Enainsi. The thing about destroying one foe so you could move through its territory was that if it was living there, there was a reason, and something else would only take up residence if you didn’t.
He looked about the room for any semblance of his clothing, but could find none. The blanket tight about himself, he pushed the stone door. It groaned, then opened to a small outer room with a ceiling just slightly lower than he was accustomed. The dwarf looked up and grinned under a full beard decorated with braids ending in stone and clay beads. The fiery pits of their eyes shone with what might have been a smile, or a grimace. The dwarf’s skin was a sooty gray.
“You’re awake!” he said and jumped down. His accent was so thick Aestith could barely understand his Undercommon. “Found yer half-dead. Looked like you was tryin’ to make it up here anywho. So we picked yer up. Force fed yer some broth and some water. Yer need some good vittles in ya. Too skinny.” He looked at the pot over the fire. “It’ll be a mite longer, methinks. Let me put the tea on.” He scooted over to the cupboard and rattled about with the tins. “Yer clothes were all a mess when we found yas. Scraped up and tattered they was. I managed to take them apart to use them as a pattern. You elves are all kinds of crazy proportions. And so thin!”
Aestith’s face burned, somewhere between embarrassment and disgust. This dwarf was looking him in the face. The realization that the dwarf thought of him as an equal was revolting, to say nothing of calling him an elf, but maybe that was a translational error. “Yes, but—”
The dwarf set the kettle on the spit. “Now what did yer say yer name was?”
“Aestith,” he said quietly.
The dwarf snorted. “Bellan.”
Aestith’s brow wrinkled. That accent was confusing. “Excuse me?”
The dwarf pointed at himself. “Bellan. Name. Can’t just be ‘dwarf’ to yas forever.”
Aestith stiffened. Could dwarves read minds? Duergar were supposed to have some kind of psionic powers. No, he supposed it was simply plastered over his face, which was unseemly. He could picture his sisters’ disapproving frowns so clearly—Aestith, you can’t let your emotions paint such a picture over your face!
“Now, I like drow smithwork and have some respect for yer blood’s battle prowess. Can’t stand to drink with yer kin though, know what I mean.”
Aestith pulled the blanket a little closer around himself. He shifted uncomfortably. The dwarf had seen him naked and hardly thought anything of it. Maybe he hadn’t really looked. Aestith wouldn’t. But the breasts…
The dwarf busied himself with the tea for a moment before he stopped what he was doing and shuffled to a table, where he removed a set of clothes. “Put this on. Can’t have yas wandering ‘round all starkers.”
Aestith accepted it, then nearly dropped the bundle when the dwarf’s hand actually touched his. The slaves never actually touched the drow, not when they could help it. Aestith had little and less experience with non-drow, only slaves or a glimpse of the occasional adventurer, which were rare enough. Sometimes duergar like this one ventured into Enainsi doing trading, but Aestith had never been permitted to interact with them yet. He was repulsed that the dwarf would touch his hand so casually, and say nothing about it. He took the bundle and hurried back into the previous room. He felt marginally better with a door between them.
All his life, he’d been told that duergar were habitually stupid, which made them violent and near-bestial. Not intelligent enough to plan, and barely possessed of an intellect that made them capable of trade when they could have just attacked instead.
They were simple garments, the sorts of things he would expect from dwarves, who he had hitherto believed slept in chainmail drawers. The garments were wool. The boots were leather with reinforced toes—he supposed that was just how dwarves made things. Bits of it were familiar—whatever salvageable scraps Bellan had managed to pull apart from his clothes had been used, either as reinforcement, or as paneling. The garment lacked any and all creativity or imagination, existing as function over form.
A small, petulant, angry part of him wanted it not to fit. He wanted it to be too itchy. He wanted to fill himself with resentment. This dwarf just presumed everything about him! He presumed his size, the tea, the food! Yes, it was true—but it wasn’t his place!
Aestith sat, fully dressed, staring at his hands.
The clothes fit better than his old clothes, made to conform more to his body shape rather than the shape he should have had, if not for his odd puberty.
He hated it.
#
Bellan, it took Aestith two turns to learn, was a female dwarf. She had a husband, Qelkan, who came home later. Aestith had been sleeping in their child’s room, who had long grown up and had a family of their own. That is to say, their multiple children. They had apparently used to have a larger home, then downsized. They said this was to prevent their family from visiting often and bringing all of their children and grandchildren. Apparently, they had a whole clan of them.
The dwarf woman offered to cut his hair. She might have thought it had been hacked off in whatever fight he had fled from, or perhaps she thought he had done it to hide himself, but she said nothing of the sort, just a tacit invitation to cut it to an even length. It was some turns before he allowed it, but it actually felt good to have it cut, even if he did fight the urge to continue to hack it; the dwarves here had proven they would point it out whereas drow mostly just sneered.
His rent, as it were, wasn’t free, though. While he was recovering from his flight, he helped Bellan with the cooking and baking, which he enjoyed well enough and the chore was familiar to him. The droll physical activity actually gave his body something to do while his mind could wander, and generally a drow elf was relatively safe in their own home.
Culturally, duergar were not given to expressing joy or happiness, viewing it as a weakness, which meant that Aestith, too, learned to eventually school his expressions. He found that his previous trouble experiencing emotions served him well here.
He knew that he would be no use in the mine or around a smithy. This troubled the dwarves not at all, and instead they had him mind the animals, or gave him what they considered to be very light armor and put him on guard detail—something based solely on a drow reputation he initially resented. It may have been a way for them to subtly let him die on his own, but he came back each time. He was careful enough around the duergar not to put himself into bad situations.
They trotted him out any time that a drow caravan came by, which prevented the drow passerby from having secret conversations—and Aestith suspected this was his primary function in the village of Dogh Maldur. During those times, the mercantile training his sisters had put him through, however brief, came in occasionally useful.
He wasn’t shy about work or getting dirty, which Bellan said was a rare gift among elves, and he tried not to take offense when he knew what she meant. He told her, as politely as he knew how, that it was actually very offensive to drow to call them elves. “You can call me a drow elf, but please place any emphasis on the ‘drow’ part.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Liken it to you callin’ me ‘dwarf’.”
He tilted his head. “Excuse me?”
She made a face. “Dwarf.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Our damned dwarf cousins abandoned us. Hang ‘em. The bastards.”
“Couldn’t you go live as they do?” What, after all, was the difference between one kind of dwarf and another? They were all stout, bearded, spent their time drinking, mining, and fighting—and from what Aestith had heard, that was not unique to duergar. They were so similar, why the hatred?
“And leave some o’ the best forges an’ mines? Leave our homes? Fight over new territory? Couldn’t you always just traipse up t’ the surface, drow? Where all that sky above ya will strike fear into your heart before the sunlight blinds yer sensitive eyes?”
Nonsensical terms to Aestith, but he knew the words. “I take your point.” Regardless, they were still “dwarves” to him, just as he was probably still “elf” to her.
He resented quite a lot about living with the duergar. He resented their sameness, the cultural differences that seemed so alien to him, their harsh language he was so reluctant to try to learn but had to. He resented that they didn’t have many books and what books he found were limited to gemstones and architecture, things that would be useful—but they were horrifically dull. It was a downward shift in lifestyle, going from enough money to have anything, to this.
Most of all, he resented that their cultural repression of happiness also led them to be devoid of other emotions. This might have made others flounder, but Aestith flourished in that environment, learning how to conceal his own. He was used to minor slights and brushed such things off. If they had been cruel, mean-spirited, or even a bit spiteful, he might have hated them too. It would have been easier to hate them. Duergar were naturally adept at stealth and he learned from them even against his will.
Of course drow were superior; they were drow. And of course their ways were better. Then he had relented and gave ground. Yes, drow were superior but dwarves made excellent heavy armor, which drow did not use half so often as dwarves, so of course the duergar were better at it. Of course drow produced excellent wines, but dwarves brewed a fine ale, which they claimed they did not enjoy, since joy was tantamount to abomination.
Aestith was angry that, after half a year, he was having trouble holding onto all of his prejudices, and was terrified that it made him less drow. He didn’t want to be like the handful of treacherous drow who had abandoned their people, their faith, and their culture; he wanted all of those things, and wanted to be a part of it. He saw obvious benefit to using tools and machinery instead of only magic. Magic was often defined by the individual and could be difficult for someone else to unravel, much less maintain or replicate; machinery worked by way of small, often simple concepts that others could easily follow. It was similar to cooking, even if Aestith didn’t understand all of it.
There was value in making these things fit to last centuries, especially if you wanted something long-lasting and you yourself lived a long life. He saw benefit in wasting nothing; he saw good in the dwarven culture, but he was a stranger to it and he knew that deep down, he always would be. It wasn’t his culture.
Imagine his shock when he saw a family with nine children—each of them boys. When he made the realization, he could not even speak. Nine boys. What on earth would anyone do with nine useless boys?
It made his head spin.
A yuan-ti trading party interested him—he had interacted with only dwarves for the past several turns, he could do with even seeing someone he wasn’t staring down at. There was a half-drow with the caravan, but it only really made him more lonely. It was eerie how much, and yet how little, she had looked like what he considered “normal”.
In Enainsi, half-drow were called “abominations”. Aestith reminded himself that he shouldn’t be quite so judgmental, considering that he would be considered an imperfect abomination. Come to think of it, drow might use that phrase a bit liberally.
When the caravans rolled through, he was often reminded of how alone he really was. A point of comparison sparked loneliness.
The half-drow leaned against the low stone wall. Aestith attempted to ignore her, legs dangling over the other side of the wall. One of the deep rothé calves’ mothers had died in childbirth, and the calf had to be nursed, so it had essentially been raised in the home. It was old enough to be in the pen now, but still nursing and had to be looked after. Mostly because he had the time, Aestith had been its primary feeder. The dumb creature, as a result, would follow him.
The rothé pushed its big, hairy head against Aestith’s leg. He shoved it back, and it took it as an invitation to play. It butted his leg and danced back. When Aestith didn’t chase, it butted again, then shoved its long face into Aestith’s lap. “Jun, you’re a really dumb animal,” he told it, scratching behind its jaw.
The half-drow quirked a smile. “Aw, he just adores you.” She did not truly look like either of her parentage, but more like a blending of the worst of the yuan-ti traits holding back any of the drow traits.
“Because he’s an idiot,” Aestith said blandly. “The plan is to butcher him when he’s grown.”
The smile turned knowing. “You will not. Look at him.” She reached her arm across to tickle his face. The dumb deep rothé calf butted its nose into her palm and trotted toward her. She flicked a furry ear, and it tilted its head, sticking out a long tongue. She tugged on the tongue and it licked her palm. She laughed.
Aestith snorted, then hopped off of the wall. She hadn’t been intent on seeing the rothé; she followed him into the tavern, and came and sat by him when he was one ale in. She smiled lazily and set her own mug in front of her. “So. You live with duergar.”
He stared at her. Drow women were the ones to select the males, and the males generally had little reason to refuse. Same-sex pairings had a similar power dynamic, but came with less associated risk, so they were fairly common—so long as the male was still willing if a female selected him. He was uncertain enough in himself that he didn’t know how to respond to her flirting. Especially because she was a half-breed.
She tilted her head. “Let me buy you a drink.”
He should have declined, told her and her abomination of a self to get out, but he didn’t. He was lonely, and she was more like him than the duergar, in a fashion, and less in many others. He whispered, “Make sure you watch them pour it—I’ve seen Tormor spit in the cups before, and he doesn’t like… well, non-duergar.”
She stopped, her cup halfway to her lips, then she set it down. “You know. How about a beer instead?”
She took him, both of them drunk, to her tent, and they fell into her blankets kissing.
She was delighted to see him, excited in ways Nier never would have been. He shouldn’t have done it, but he did. He should have rejected her because of her half-human blood. A pure human would have been better than an abomination, but wasn’t that what he was too? Then, as he pushed into her the first time, he thought, Any drow blood is surely better than none.
It was surprisingly difficult to think about his prejudices when he was thrusting into her. She wasn’t as domineering as what he had fantasized bedding a female drow would be like, or perhaps she guessed his virginity and was gentle with him. He almost wished that she wouldn’t be.
He was inexperienced, but she wasn’t, and she didn’t seem to mind. His body’s uniqueness seemed to compensate. In infrared, he could almost ignore the faint brown undertones to her gray skin, her features, her stature that marked her as something different.
Her fingers dug into him, filling and being filled. She pushed into him in a rhythm she wanted him to use on her. He did his best to match the tempo. She fit him in her mouth, wet with her own fluids.
Even Aestith knew that female drow didn’t do this; it was submissive and demeaning, and gave the male too much power. He wasn’t certain that was even true, considering all the teeth. He didn’t doubt it happened sometimes—some of them had to be degenerate enough to do such things—but it, in general, wasn’t done, and so he had not even truly considered it to be an option. She rolled his testicles in her mouth and drug her tongue over the hole just behind them. She flicked her tongue over the relatively small space between that and the next hole, then she seemed to consider his hygiene briefly, before she licked that too. She seemed to like his body more than he did.
He came twice—as male and female—before he felt exhausted and wanted away from her. If she were put out by this at all, Aestith could not properly tell.
He disentangled himself from her and left. There wasn’t a harsh enough soap nor sand with a fine enough grit to scrub off the remnants of shame.
#
He missed Enainsi. He felt like the surface was barely a scratch of the ceiling away and he would be breathing alien air and blinded by the boiling fires above. The metals here were even different. He knew that was lizard shit—he was still a long way from the surface; he just missed home.
Aestith liked the dwarves, in their way. He liked their bluntness and how little shit they tolerated. He appreciated them and came to learn their culture, though he would never integrate with it. He would always be an outsider away from Enainsi.
Enainsi was home. Sometimes, when he felt particularly bold, he would stride off alone in the caverns, in search of either divinity or home. Sometimes, he found it, or something like it, and sometimes it was hard to tell which was which. The first few intersections were as far as he ever quite dared, but his relief when he was there was palpable.
With the right gear, he could make his way down to the small abandoned shrine, where he would fast in prayer. Lolth never spoke to him, but there were other small signs, or things he chose to interpret as signs. It was hard for him to make out sometimes.
Bellan never made any noise about him leaving. She seemed to like having him around—it gave the neighbors a good scandal to complain about, and she liked having his help around the house.
“You’re homesick,” Bellan told him. She gestured. “You’ve been mopin’ ‘round the house for days. I won’t ask why you can’t go home, or won’t—but go for a walk. Get out o’ the house. That’s an order. Come back in a better mood an’ I’ll show you ‘ow t’ bake a pasty.”
He knew the word “days”—that was a bell to him. His nose wrinkled. He didn’t know the other word. “Pasty?”
She smiled under her beard, though being a duergar, it looked more like a grimace. “Go on now.”
There was no use in arguing; he left. The next duergar settlement was a meandering two-mark walk.
Duergar settlements were strange. They weren’t like drow; their population did not naturally produce more women than men, and because they reproduced more slowly, there were fewer duergar than drow despite similar predicaments. As a result, many duergar were slaves to one thing or another, more or less of their own volition. Being enslaved by a fire giant or drow was preferable to being enslaved by illithid or falling prey to some other Underdark terror. Sometimes, the illusion of choice or imaginary control over one’s life was all you needed to keep going; the memories of Aestith’s hacked hair and the scars on his arms attested to the truth of that. The duergar here were just close enough to Enainsi that many monsters avoided it and drow would become aggressive if the illithid got too close. There was a reason the trade agreements were heavily skewed.
The one attempted illithid invasion had met with an alliance of drow and duergar. Descaronan had shown him the caverns when he was young, the scars in the rocks where magic or psychic energies had touched. Duergar, naturally resistant to illithid powers, and drow magic had been a fearsome combination that permanently scarred the caverns.
He walked quickly, as if he had somewhere urgent to be, or as if he were escaping something. He forced himself to slow, to think, to simply breathe and just be for a while. He found a quiet alcove and folded himself into it. He sat down and closed his eyes in an effort to block out the world. Somewhere distantly, water dripped. A blind salamander scampered over the rock surface.
Aestith inhaled the scent of earth and stone. It didn’t smell the same. Nothing was the same. Enainsi was home to forty thousand drow elves and their slaves, the city constructed like a cone with those farthest from the surface the highest class. Every shrine, and there were many, burned incense to Lolth at every mark and the pungent aroma permeated the air thick enough to dull the senses. The markets smelled like cooking meat and Underdark spices, the scent of fabric dye and water. He wondered if he would ever get to even smell it again.
He pushed the thoughts of home away, but they kept coming back to remind him of how far he was, and how lonely.
Something fell across his hand and he jumped. The small brown spider scampered away. He closed his eyes, and thought about spiders. He thought about the Spider Queen and spiders, and nothing else. His mind went into a careful blank where only quivering webs of spider silk existed.
Concentrating on Lolth made him feel less lonely, more connected. They, all drow, were like interconnected joints on a giant web. Everyone was connected, no matter how distant. The weaver wove a grand tapestry, and he would only ever see a small fragment of it. That she had even spoken to him, taken notice of him, struck him with awe. When he unfolded himself, his joints were stiff. Walking felt good. He kept on toward the small village.
The dwarven village was quiet. They let him through after a cursory inspection.
He stared at his feet as he walked, partway out of long-standing habit. Aestith jerked back to keep from crashing into the other set of feet. He looked up to apologize.
“Excuse me, miss,” the dwarf said and shuffled past.
Aestith started to correct him, then stopped. Aestith had never let his hair grow out before. Cutting it had been another small thing he could control, and he had been neurotic about leaving it short. It had been six cycles—months, they called it—since he had bothered to cut it and while it was far from long, it had a natural curl. That, and his shirt, made him look feminine. It was like thinking he was blind and realizing he only had a blindfold on. It seemed so obvious now. Lolth intended him not only to live with these changes, but to use what could have been a life-threatening fault to his advantage. He could be a legend, if only he learned enough to do it.
It had never even occurred to him to pretend to be female. Am I pretending? That thought made him dizzy.
He did not know how to respond to the other. Instead, he made a series of facial expressions, finally settling on what he hoped was “lofty” and tilted his head up. He strode away without further recognition of the man. His palms were sweating, his throat even drier than before, and his heart hammered, but he wanted to shout, to run, to laugh as if he were a child. He felt like he was new, like he had just been born only minutes ago. Every breath of air was for him, the earth beneath his feet supported only him. If he were to speak, he was the only one who knew how.
It was all so obvious.