- Messages
- 17
- Character Biography
- Link
With a buttoned, fur-lined cloak and her cloaker-leather mantle covering her spidersilk robes and weapon-belt, freshly shod in a barely broken-in pair of warm, sturdy leather boots, and her wide-brimmed spidersilk hat pulled down as far as she guessed decorum might allow, Vel’duith Voiryn stood uneasily before Warden Gabriel Sionoma in the Crobhear Keep courtyard. Her usual aura of confidence always waned a tic in his presence, and this moment indeed found her mentally stuffing her nerves back into their overfilled closet. Indeed her mind was once again racing, twisting itself into loose, partially baked pretzels of induction, by necessity pulled too soon out of her logic-oven.
The tall, grizzled rivvil’nesst had consistently treated Vel’duith with an unexpected polite kindness ever since the very day she first arrived. In spite of this, she found herself not one clue closer to unraveling the nagging riddle of his proficient though crude grasp of ilythiirra, the drow’s mother tongue. The drow generally only ever spoke trade-tongues to most slaves they took. Her suspicions had the shakiest of foundations, but she had only ever heard slaves serving directly within a House’s compound, surviving for unusually long amounts of time - why, months, perhaps even years - speak her actual tongue in the manner the Warden had. She had even tried to imagine him as a younger man, without the beard, wrinkles, and scars weathering his face. She wrestled down her paranoia as best she could, but there was no suppressing the self-preservation instincts that had kept her alive for 154 years. She knew perfectly well what most drow would do in such a person’s shoes, if they suddenly found themselves in full control of a former captor, or even some kith or kin of that captor, even if the person at their mercy was completely oblivious to the whole situation. And no one knew better than a drow that revenge tasted sweeter the colder it was served. Vel’duith was irked to discover her fingers beginning to fidget with the hilt of her shortsword, and she promptly fought the childish impulse back with a slight grimace. Scanning all the faces ringing the pair, as near as she could tell without squinting against the cloud-filtered morning anyway, all eyes seemed to be set solely upon her.
The shadow-dweomer Vel’duith had devised to subtly dim the light passing below the brim of her hat helped somewhat. Over the past couple weeks, she had counted among the perks of braving the sun at least some part of each day that her magic, especially her luminancy, had never felt more powerful, more eager, and more available. Her embeddings gleamed bright silver most of the time - not that anyone could see them at the moment with her bundled up against the cold. The idea for the dweomer had come whilst making herself as useful as possible in the library, copying messages, preparing tallies, all in between copying herself a map of the vicinity and reading the laws and history of the Noct Yaegirs and Crobhear Keep itself. Wherever she felt she could add a counter-perspective, additional insight, or related knowledge, she would insert a leaf of footnotes in her graceful, economical hand, the ink always diligently blotted so as to not bleed clean through the leaf, or worse, onto the fragile, ancient texts.
Finally - mercifully - the Warden spoke, in his husky yet commanding baritone: “The hour has now arrived, Miss Voiryn: speak the laws!”
Vel’duith’s voice immediately rose in reply, clear and shrill: “Never shall a Yaegir attack another Yaegir! A Yaegir shall heed any call for her aid, whether from the great or the humble! All Yaegirs are peers: none better, none worse! Every keep and den is a trusted sanctuary! When a monster is slain, trophies must be taken to claim the reward, and all Yaegirs who took the risk share the bounty! The word ‘monster’ is easily spoken, but a Yaegir must always be diligent to only hunt true monsters! A true monster thinks only to destroy, and kill! If words may dissuade it, it is not truly a monster to be hunted! A Yaegir shall not interfere with the various sovereigns, meets, and moots of the world! Their wars and plots are none of her concern! A Yaegir shall plan her hunts to avoid needless slaughter, and she shall defend any who lucklessly blunder into harm’s way!”
Hardly verbatim, but ‘rote is for rothes’, she inwardly reassured herself. Why, surely demonstrating understanding of the laws was superior to the simple, mindless cribbing of whichever clerk had once transcribed them to parchment. She realized with a subtle half-grimace that she had once again balked at using the word ‘innocent.’ It was a completely nonsensical word to her, but it seemed to hold particular weight to the warden grimly staring her down. She met his gaze fearlessly yet unaggressively, telegraphing both her full ownership of her words and her determination to face whatever came of them. Yet a memory, a very old memory, clouded her consciousness as the syllables of that odd human word reverberated inside her mind.
For who was truly innocent? Why, even a babe in the womb might already be a sororicide by her birth. Every soul shelters some tenebrous secret or other. Vel’duith was indeed rare among her kith and kind for having never once murdered another in cold blood. That is not to say, however, that she was innocent. Vel’duith’s heart harbored guilt for a series of tragedies felt by both complete strangers and those who had once been the closest to her of anyone ever, for thirteen long decades. As if on cue, the specter of her impious, mischievously smirking cousin Kre’thil - his name rather ironically meant “regret” - appeared in her mind’s eye.
Kre’thil, a rail-thin, rakish young elementalist, a second-son born the same winter as Vel’duith to a junior cousin of her mother’s, had been a willing accomplice in many of Vel’duith’s childhood schemes, revenges, and pranks. They shared a passion for reading the constant stream of ancient books that passed through their house, early-manifesting aptitudes for magic, and an uncanny knack for running afoul of Vel’duith’s mother, Ilharess Kyona Voiryn. They were enrolled in the same cadre when they had grown old enough, often teaming with each other on training missions, particularly towards the end of the training when over half of the cadre had met early, unfortunate ends, and each mission was deadlier than the last.
Vel’duith could not remember Kre’thil without a second tidal wave of phantasms drowning her soul: the memories of Orebith, her first abill: ‘trusted ally,’ in her native tongue, which lacked any words for ‘friend’ or ‘lover’ in any sense beyond the purely physical or strictly transactional. Orebith was a swordswoman of equal years to Vel’duith and Kre’thil, formidable and intimidating, tall and powerfully built, lightning-quick, cat-agile, with an unpredictable, mercurial temperament. She was common-born, but few of the surviving members of their cadre ever dared to remind her of it, fearing a sound thrashing or worse. Through their decade in the cadre, Orebith had been Vel’duith’s fiercest, most vicious rival, one of the few to defeat the young trickster’s infamous combinations of snares, sudden pitfalls, and ingenious illusions. The two battled to a standstill numerous times recently, with one girl or the other somberly yielding to whichever exhausted combatant was left holding the dagger to the other’s throat.
In the final year of cadre, a sprawling altercation between them, prompted by Orebith spying Vel’duith mocking her sparring form, spilled over into an indoctrination reverie for new pupils entering the cadre. Incensed by the interruption, the yathrin in charge of the cadre ordered them to pair up together for an upcoming weeklong, deadly training mission, confident that both reckless pugilists would thereby meet horrible, fitting ends for their transgression. Constantly squabbling as they entered the out-tunnels, Vel’duith and Orebith nearly stumbled into certain death within moments, ambushed by a hulking hook horror that Vel’duith spied just in time. Thinking fast, she threw her full weight into Orebith’s abdomen, folding her over just as the first razor-like claw sliced off half the young warrior’s hair, where her neck had been an instant before. Both girls’ minds immediately collided into the same proverbial brick wall: the stark realization that survival depended on cooperation with each other.
From their dozens of prior clashes, each knew the other’s strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies intimately, leading to an instant, nearly effortless synergy. Weaving in and out of each other’s attacks with frightening precision, Vel’duith and Orebith overcame the hook horror. Over the week, they defeated or evaded all the remaining perils of the out-tunnels, and even thwarted a sneak attack by an overconfident rival team. At the very end of the mission, Orebith saved Vel’duith from being swallowed by a cloaker, even though they were within sight of the mission end and there was truly no longer any benefit for her to risk herself to save her rival.
The girls’ change of hearts toward each other continued after the mission, as Orebit and Vel’duith continued to hone and exploit their newfound advantage in training sessions. Soon, this cooperation expanded to warning each other of gossip, rumors, and plots. While there was no greater motivation for a young drow than self-preservation, both Vel’duith and Orebith soon realized their connection was growing far deeper than that. Before long, Vel’duith introduced Orebith to Kre’thil, and the trio formed a fast coterie of abillen. Their jeering cadre rivals often called them ‘the Folggash,’ implying a naive closeness akin to that common among surface-elves, completely devoid of the ruthless rivalry, unflinching competition, and wanton betrayal so treasured by the drow. It was in truth a fairly aimed dart, for the trio indeed looked out for each other unfailingly, each doing all they could get away with under the yathrin‘s oversight to ensure all three of them survived the deadly series of training exercises that came, one after another, during their final year. Opponents trying to take them down were faced with the fury of Orebith’s twin sabers, dodging into a flurry of Vel’duith’s darts, staggering into an icy blast of Kre’thil’s freezing magic, swinging at an opponent that vanished into mist, before the exact same figure struck deadly blows from behind. All too quickly, Vel’duith, Kre’thil, and Orebith’s team success had seen them through to the penultimate cadre ritual itself - the Blooding.
This last horror started with half a day spent in complete isolation and deprivation, followed by the ritual masking, a rally and swearing of oaths, a long run through predator-infested tunnels, all culminating in a midnight raid on a surface village. The yathrin had spoken of defeating a force of powerful enemies before they could strike, but the raid obviously had nothing but carnage as its object, with unarmed people roused from sleep running every which way in panic while Vel'duith's cadre mates hacked them down left and right. The three abillen brought home from that raid not grisly trophies of scalps and hands, though, but a formidable tome of arcane lore and powerful spell formulae, and a handful of potent magical relics which they stole from a mage’s tower during the chaos. Upon receiving such grand gifts, the yathrin declared them to have all passed the trial, and even spoke special words of honor for them at the blooding ceremony. This of course led to a renewed firestorm of jealous, hateful whispers about the trio’s embarrassing degree of cooperation.
In the aftermath of the Blooding, Vel’duith had been all but ordered by her mother to present herself to the youngest scion of the second-house - a veritable Adonis of a physical specimen. He was also possessed of a violent temper, inclined to cowardice and the whingiest blame-shifting imaginable, and boasted the intellect and curiosity of a rock. When the moment for choosing their partners arrived, Vel’duith seized Orebith’s hand and led her to Kre’thil, leaving a breathy, fawn-eyed, beckoning illusion of herself for her mother’s preferred suitor to overconfidently trip straight through, smack into the cavern wall.
Vel’duith, Orebith, and Kre’thil secretly continued their ill-starred ménage over the next few years, until Orebith bore Kre’thil a son. Kre’thil officially presented both his commoner-mate and their boy-child to Vel’duith’s mother, naming the child “Kyonil” to honor her. The thinly-smiling matron made quite a show of accepting the unexpected new additions to her house, even saccharinely complimenting Orebith on her powerful physique and emphatically wishing her many future daughters. Behind closed doors, however, the incensed matron furiously explained her true position on the matter to Vel’duith in a stormy, hour-long lecture, each adjective and epithet driven home by a painfully placed stroke of the silk-padded adamantine rod she carried for just such correctional conversations. She raged at length about how the foolish young Voiryn scions’ aberrant, selfish folggash had made a mockery of all her long efforts and best designs to raise up ‘the two least worthy runts of her house’ to some degree of respectability. She saved the hardest, most humiliatingly aimed blows for admonishing Vel’duith’s choice of bed-partners, reminding her of House Voiryn’s precarious predicament and its urgent need for her to direct her attentions exclusively upward.
Shortly after Kre’thil had moved Orebith and their infant son into House Voiryn’s complex, Vel’duith discovered a freshly-penned assassination order sitting prominently atop her mother’s desk. Vel’duith immediately realized that it had been left exactly where she would notice it. The instant she finished reading the order, she began to creep away, intent on warning her abillen to flee, only to be surprised at the doorway by the umbral silhouette of her mother, who had been laying in wait. The well-prepared matron promptly webbed Vel’duith into place with a throaty cackle of bittersweet triumph and an exaggerated clench of her fist; a spell for which she knew her daughter had yet learned no counter. Gagged and bound fast into an off balance, mid-stride pose by the spell’s thick, sticky, throttling strands, Vel’duith watched helplessly as her mother folded the order into an envelope, sealed it, and gave it over to the waiting mandibles of her loyal spider-servant, who duly scuttled off toward the Assassins’ Quarter.
Vel’duith knew without a shred of doubt that both her abillen and their infant boy-child were already as good as dead. Her frantic conscience screamed at her to struggle, to find some way to escape, to warn them. They would do it for you! You could all run away together! But the steel-strong web tendrils were inescapable. The knowledge that she had already been found out by the very worst person possible had crushed her momentary optimism within the very eggshell of its birth. Before long, the utter, complete hopelessness imbued by decades of cynical, transactional, and ruthlessly reinforced upbringing successfully shouted down the feeble, childish voice naively cajoling her to impossible fantasies of heroism. If she did somehow escape and make it to them in time, what then would they do? Where could they even go? The only possible result she could foresee was four heads lain at her mother’s feet instead of three, mayhap within the week instead of the hour. And then, when all hope had completely fled, a final, cold whisper hissed into her ear: There would be no revenge for her abillen if she died too. So she bit back the urge to weep; she dared not cry out for help, for none would come and things would only get worse for her. She doubted neither the complete resolve nor the vicious imagination of her mother should she fail to ‘learn’ this twisted, bitter lesson. Brick by brick, she walled away her tears and her guilt in the back of her mind, thoroughly defeated and resigned to the inevitable.
For several days, Vel’duith had half stood, half dangled in the dimly lit office, a doomed fly trapped fast in a spider’s web, with naught but the whimpers of her devastated conscience, stabbing pangs of hunger, haunting hallucinations from thirst, and the jeering hisses of her darkest fears as companions. She only let her mother see the smoldering, burning hatred in her eyes when she finally came to free her. The matron dissolved the web as she strode in with a dismissive flick of her fingers, then nonchalantly tossed a tray bearing a bowl of mushroom broth and a drink onto the table nearest Vel’duith’s collapsed, splaybent, emaciated form. Nearly spilling completely over, the steaming, frothing liquids overflowed onto the tray and splattered onto the floor. The statuesque, wirily-built matron smiled appreciatively down at the much more appropriate expression she had finally scriven onto her stunted, gawky runt of a daughter’s face. “At long last! My diminutive disappointment of a second-daughter is now fully mine once again - a possession, and, assuming you have finally learnt what is best for you, soon an asset; no more foolish folggash to distract you from finally performing some useful duty to this house!” She then slowly, lingeringly strode behind her, silk-wrapped rod slapping slowly, rhythmically, inevitably into her hand, pointedly avoiding stepping in any of the fresh floor stains. Her voice exultant and menacing all at once, Kyona Voiryn delivered her thoroughly humbled second-daughter one last command before leaving: “Drada’dalharil! do NOT! fail to clean up every drop of your clumsy meal-mess, and every smelly trace of your filth. Now get up!”
With the reverberation of those words, the dull thuds of the merciless rod blows accompanying them, and her own whimpers and cries, Vel’duith’s attention snapped a century, a score, and nine years back forward to the present - straight into Gabriel Sionoma’s piercing gray eyes. The whole recollection had taken perhaps ten seconds of waking-time to careen through the memory-theater of her dark-elven mind, but the ever-perceptive Warden couldn’t help but notice the glazing over and subtle watering of her pinpoint-pupiled garnet eyes, held within their met gaze. To the drow’s surprise, the man’s steely gaze softened slightly, a bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrow arching.
“Vel’duith Voiryn, you have spoken our laws… well, in adequate enough of a manner. You are hereby apprenticed to Yaegir Sigrun Flintfeet. Prepare yourself, for you shall soon leave on your first mission. We shall await here news of your success- or, should you fail and fall, the litter bearing your corpse. Heed Yaegir Flintfeet well, lest it be the latter!”
The tall, grizzled rivvil’nesst had consistently treated Vel’duith with an unexpected polite kindness ever since the very day she first arrived. In spite of this, she found herself not one clue closer to unraveling the nagging riddle of his proficient though crude grasp of ilythiirra, the drow’s mother tongue. The drow generally only ever spoke trade-tongues to most slaves they took. Her suspicions had the shakiest of foundations, but she had only ever heard slaves serving directly within a House’s compound, surviving for unusually long amounts of time - why, months, perhaps even years - speak her actual tongue in the manner the Warden had. She had even tried to imagine him as a younger man, without the beard, wrinkles, and scars weathering his face. She wrestled down her paranoia as best she could, but there was no suppressing the self-preservation instincts that had kept her alive for 154 years. She knew perfectly well what most drow would do in such a person’s shoes, if they suddenly found themselves in full control of a former captor, or even some kith or kin of that captor, even if the person at their mercy was completely oblivious to the whole situation. And no one knew better than a drow that revenge tasted sweeter the colder it was served. Vel’duith was irked to discover her fingers beginning to fidget with the hilt of her shortsword, and she promptly fought the childish impulse back with a slight grimace. Scanning all the faces ringing the pair, as near as she could tell without squinting against the cloud-filtered morning anyway, all eyes seemed to be set solely upon her.
The shadow-dweomer Vel’duith had devised to subtly dim the light passing below the brim of her hat helped somewhat. Over the past couple weeks, she had counted among the perks of braving the sun at least some part of each day that her magic, especially her luminancy, had never felt more powerful, more eager, and more available. Her embeddings gleamed bright silver most of the time - not that anyone could see them at the moment with her bundled up against the cold. The idea for the dweomer had come whilst making herself as useful as possible in the library, copying messages, preparing tallies, all in between copying herself a map of the vicinity and reading the laws and history of the Noct Yaegirs and Crobhear Keep itself. Wherever she felt she could add a counter-perspective, additional insight, or related knowledge, she would insert a leaf of footnotes in her graceful, economical hand, the ink always diligently blotted so as to not bleed clean through the leaf, or worse, onto the fragile, ancient texts.
Finally - mercifully - the Warden spoke, in his husky yet commanding baritone: “The hour has now arrived, Miss Voiryn: speak the laws!”
Vel’duith’s voice immediately rose in reply, clear and shrill: “Never shall a Yaegir attack another Yaegir! A Yaegir shall heed any call for her aid, whether from the great or the humble! All Yaegirs are peers: none better, none worse! Every keep and den is a trusted sanctuary! When a monster is slain, trophies must be taken to claim the reward, and all Yaegirs who took the risk share the bounty! The word ‘monster’ is easily spoken, but a Yaegir must always be diligent to only hunt true monsters! A true monster thinks only to destroy, and kill! If words may dissuade it, it is not truly a monster to be hunted! A Yaegir shall not interfere with the various sovereigns, meets, and moots of the world! Their wars and plots are none of her concern! A Yaegir shall plan her hunts to avoid needless slaughter, and she shall defend any who lucklessly blunder into harm’s way!”
Hardly verbatim, but ‘rote is for rothes’, she inwardly reassured herself. Why, surely demonstrating understanding of the laws was superior to the simple, mindless cribbing of whichever clerk had once transcribed them to parchment. She realized with a subtle half-grimace that she had once again balked at using the word ‘innocent.’ It was a completely nonsensical word to her, but it seemed to hold particular weight to the warden grimly staring her down. She met his gaze fearlessly yet unaggressively, telegraphing both her full ownership of her words and her determination to face whatever came of them. Yet a memory, a very old memory, clouded her consciousness as the syllables of that odd human word reverberated inside her mind.
For who was truly innocent? Why, even a babe in the womb might already be a sororicide by her birth. Every soul shelters some tenebrous secret or other. Vel’duith was indeed rare among her kith and kind for having never once murdered another in cold blood. That is not to say, however, that she was innocent. Vel’duith’s heart harbored guilt for a series of tragedies felt by both complete strangers and those who had once been the closest to her of anyone ever, for thirteen long decades. As if on cue, the specter of her impious, mischievously smirking cousin Kre’thil - his name rather ironically meant “regret” - appeared in her mind’s eye.
Kre’thil, a rail-thin, rakish young elementalist, a second-son born the same winter as Vel’duith to a junior cousin of her mother’s, had been a willing accomplice in many of Vel’duith’s childhood schemes, revenges, and pranks. They shared a passion for reading the constant stream of ancient books that passed through their house, early-manifesting aptitudes for magic, and an uncanny knack for running afoul of Vel’duith’s mother, Ilharess Kyona Voiryn. They were enrolled in the same cadre when they had grown old enough, often teaming with each other on training missions, particularly towards the end of the training when over half of the cadre had met early, unfortunate ends, and each mission was deadlier than the last.
Vel’duith could not remember Kre’thil without a second tidal wave of phantasms drowning her soul: the memories of Orebith, her first abill: ‘trusted ally,’ in her native tongue, which lacked any words for ‘friend’ or ‘lover’ in any sense beyond the purely physical or strictly transactional. Orebith was a swordswoman of equal years to Vel’duith and Kre’thil, formidable and intimidating, tall and powerfully built, lightning-quick, cat-agile, with an unpredictable, mercurial temperament. She was common-born, but few of the surviving members of their cadre ever dared to remind her of it, fearing a sound thrashing or worse. Through their decade in the cadre, Orebith had been Vel’duith’s fiercest, most vicious rival, one of the few to defeat the young trickster’s infamous combinations of snares, sudden pitfalls, and ingenious illusions. The two battled to a standstill numerous times recently, with one girl or the other somberly yielding to whichever exhausted combatant was left holding the dagger to the other’s throat.
In the final year of cadre, a sprawling altercation between them, prompted by Orebith spying Vel’duith mocking her sparring form, spilled over into an indoctrination reverie for new pupils entering the cadre. Incensed by the interruption, the yathrin in charge of the cadre ordered them to pair up together for an upcoming weeklong, deadly training mission, confident that both reckless pugilists would thereby meet horrible, fitting ends for their transgression. Constantly squabbling as they entered the out-tunnels, Vel’duith and Orebith nearly stumbled into certain death within moments, ambushed by a hulking hook horror that Vel’duith spied just in time. Thinking fast, she threw her full weight into Orebith’s abdomen, folding her over just as the first razor-like claw sliced off half the young warrior’s hair, where her neck had been an instant before. Both girls’ minds immediately collided into the same proverbial brick wall: the stark realization that survival depended on cooperation with each other.
From their dozens of prior clashes, each knew the other’s strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies intimately, leading to an instant, nearly effortless synergy. Weaving in and out of each other’s attacks with frightening precision, Vel’duith and Orebith overcame the hook horror. Over the week, they defeated or evaded all the remaining perils of the out-tunnels, and even thwarted a sneak attack by an overconfident rival team. At the very end of the mission, Orebith saved Vel’duith from being swallowed by a cloaker, even though they were within sight of the mission end and there was truly no longer any benefit for her to risk herself to save her rival.
The girls’ change of hearts toward each other continued after the mission, as Orebit and Vel’duith continued to hone and exploit their newfound advantage in training sessions. Soon, this cooperation expanded to warning each other of gossip, rumors, and plots. While there was no greater motivation for a young drow than self-preservation, both Vel’duith and Orebith soon realized their connection was growing far deeper than that. Before long, Vel’duith introduced Orebith to Kre’thil, and the trio formed a fast coterie of abillen. Their jeering cadre rivals often called them ‘the Folggash,’ implying a naive closeness akin to that common among surface-elves, completely devoid of the ruthless rivalry, unflinching competition, and wanton betrayal so treasured by the drow. It was in truth a fairly aimed dart, for the trio indeed looked out for each other unfailingly, each doing all they could get away with under the yathrin‘s oversight to ensure all three of them survived the deadly series of training exercises that came, one after another, during their final year. Opponents trying to take them down were faced with the fury of Orebith’s twin sabers, dodging into a flurry of Vel’duith’s darts, staggering into an icy blast of Kre’thil’s freezing magic, swinging at an opponent that vanished into mist, before the exact same figure struck deadly blows from behind. All too quickly, Vel’duith, Kre’thil, and Orebith’s team success had seen them through to the penultimate cadre ritual itself - the Blooding.
This last horror started with half a day spent in complete isolation and deprivation, followed by the ritual masking, a rally and swearing of oaths, a long run through predator-infested tunnels, all culminating in a midnight raid on a surface village. The yathrin had spoken of defeating a force of powerful enemies before they could strike, but the raid obviously had nothing but carnage as its object, with unarmed people roused from sleep running every which way in panic while Vel'duith's cadre mates hacked them down left and right. The three abillen brought home from that raid not grisly trophies of scalps and hands, though, but a formidable tome of arcane lore and powerful spell formulae, and a handful of potent magical relics which they stole from a mage’s tower during the chaos. Upon receiving such grand gifts, the yathrin declared them to have all passed the trial, and even spoke special words of honor for them at the blooding ceremony. This of course led to a renewed firestorm of jealous, hateful whispers about the trio’s embarrassing degree of cooperation.
In the aftermath of the Blooding, Vel’duith had been all but ordered by her mother to present herself to the youngest scion of the second-house - a veritable Adonis of a physical specimen. He was also possessed of a violent temper, inclined to cowardice and the whingiest blame-shifting imaginable, and boasted the intellect and curiosity of a rock. When the moment for choosing their partners arrived, Vel’duith seized Orebith’s hand and led her to Kre’thil, leaving a breathy, fawn-eyed, beckoning illusion of herself for her mother’s preferred suitor to overconfidently trip straight through, smack into the cavern wall.
Vel’duith, Orebith, and Kre’thil secretly continued their ill-starred ménage over the next few years, until Orebith bore Kre’thil a son. Kre’thil officially presented both his commoner-mate and their boy-child to Vel’duith’s mother, naming the child “Kyonil” to honor her. The thinly-smiling matron made quite a show of accepting the unexpected new additions to her house, even saccharinely complimenting Orebith on her powerful physique and emphatically wishing her many future daughters. Behind closed doors, however, the incensed matron furiously explained her true position on the matter to Vel’duith in a stormy, hour-long lecture, each adjective and epithet driven home by a painfully placed stroke of the silk-padded adamantine rod she carried for just such correctional conversations. She raged at length about how the foolish young Voiryn scions’ aberrant, selfish folggash had made a mockery of all her long efforts and best designs to raise up ‘the two least worthy runts of her house’ to some degree of respectability. She saved the hardest, most humiliatingly aimed blows for admonishing Vel’duith’s choice of bed-partners, reminding her of House Voiryn’s precarious predicament and its urgent need for her to direct her attentions exclusively upward.
Shortly after Kre’thil had moved Orebith and their infant son into House Voiryn’s complex, Vel’duith discovered a freshly-penned assassination order sitting prominently atop her mother’s desk. Vel’duith immediately realized that it had been left exactly where she would notice it. The instant she finished reading the order, she began to creep away, intent on warning her abillen to flee, only to be surprised at the doorway by the umbral silhouette of her mother, who had been laying in wait. The well-prepared matron promptly webbed Vel’duith into place with a throaty cackle of bittersweet triumph and an exaggerated clench of her fist; a spell for which she knew her daughter had yet learned no counter. Gagged and bound fast into an off balance, mid-stride pose by the spell’s thick, sticky, throttling strands, Vel’duith watched helplessly as her mother folded the order into an envelope, sealed it, and gave it over to the waiting mandibles of her loyal spider-servant, who duly scuttled off toward the Assassins’ Quarter.
Vel’duith knew without a shred of doubt that both her abillen and their infant boy-child were already as good as dead. Her frantic conscience screamed at her to struggle, to find some way to escape, to warn them. They would do it for you! You could all run away together! But the steel-strong web tendrils were inescapable. The knowledge that she had already been found out by the very worst person possible had crushed her momentary optimism within the very eggshell of its birth. Before long, the utter, complete hopelessness imbued by decades of cynical, transactional, and ruthlessly reinforced upbringing successfully shouted down the feeble, childish voice naively cajoling her to impossible fantasies of heroism. If she did somehow escape and make it to them in time, what then would they do? Where could they even go? The only possible result she could foresee was four heads lain at her mother’s feet instead of three, mayhap within the week instead of the hour. And then, when all hope had completely fled, a final, cold whisper hissed into her ear: There would be no revenge for her abillen if she died too. So she bit back the urge to weep; she dared not cry out for help, for none would come and things would only get worse for her. She doubted neither the complete resolve nor the vicious imagination of her mother should she fail to ‘learn’ this twisted, bitter lesson. Brick by brick, she walled away her tears and her guilt in the back of her mind, thoroughly defeated and resigned to the inevitable.
For several days, Vel’duith had half stood, half dangled in the dimly lit office, a doomed fly trapped fast in a spider’s web, with naught but the whimpers of her devastated conscience, stabbing pangs of hunger, haunting hallucinations from thirst, and the jeering hisses of her darkest fears as companions. She only let her mother see the smoldering, burning hatred in her eyes when she finally came to free her. The matron dissolved the web as she strode in with a dismissive flick of her fingers, then nonchalantly tossed a tray bearing a bowl of mushroom broth and a drink onto the table nearest Vel’duith’s collapsed, splaybent, emaciated form. Nearly spilling completely over, the steaming, frothing liquids overflowed onto the tray and splattered onto the floor. The statuesque, wirily-built matron smiled appreciatively down at the much more appropriate expression she had finally scriven onto her stunted, gawky runt of a daughter’s face. “At long last! My diminutive disappointment of a second-daughter is now fully mine once again - a possession, and, assuming you have finally learnt what is best for you, soon an asset; no more foolish folggash to distract you from finally performing some useful duty to this house!” She then slowly, lingeringly strode behind her, silk-wrapped rod slapping slowly, rhythmically, inevitably into her hand, pointedly avoiding stepping in any of the fresh floor stains. Her voice exultant and menacing all at once, Kyona Voiryn delivered her thoroughly humbled second-daughter one last command before leaving: “Drada’dalharil! do NOT! fail to clean up every drop of your clumsy meal-mess, and every smelly trace of your filth. Now get up!”
With the reverberation of those words, the dull thuds of the merciless rod blows accompanying them, and her own whimpers and cries, Vel’duith’s attention snapped a century, a score, and nine years back forward to the present - straight into Gabriel Sionoma’s piercing gray eyes. The whole recollection had taken perhaps ten seconds of waking-time to careen through the memory-theater of her dark-elven mind, but the ever-perceptive Warden couldn’t help but notice the glazing over and subtle watering of her pinpoint-pupiled garnet eyes, held within their met gaze. To the drow’s surprise, the man’s steely gaze softened slightly, a bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrow arching.
“Vel’duith Voiryn, you have spoken our laws… well, in adequate enough of a manner. You are hereby apprenticed to Yaegir Sigrun Flintfeet. Prepare yourself, for you shall soon leave on your first mission. We shall await here news of your success- or, should you fail and fall, the litter bearing your corpse. Heed Yaegir Flintfeet well, lest it be the latter!”
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