Prologue

SOLAUFEIN

It had been a little under five years since Solaufein had left the company of Aphra of Candlekeep, Child of Bhaal, Scourge of the Sword Coast and one-time Lady of the Iron Chair. Survival had been his only initial goal in leaving his homeland, and it was hard to picture what life might be like outside of survival when he was fairly certain he was going to die every day. He was genuinely surprised that he had managed to live as long as he had. 

He knew the goddess in his heart and heeded the warning she'd given to him in a dream that spoke of a stranger coming, but he had determined upon leaving Ust'Natha that if the Handmaidens did not find him, then he would surely die in battle alongside the first woman to ever treat him as something other than a pet or a worm to grind under her boot. For battle was all he knew. It was the only thing he'd ever truly excelled at. Death was his only real skill. And she'd understood that, as no one else ever had - though unlike him, Aphra (Veldrin as he'd known her) had ever worried at the hundreds of souls she gave to death at her hands. The weight of her conscience drove her from Faerûn; his conscience had been suffocated to death by Lloth's whips long ago. He had breathed death all around him; it was how he'd flourished, how he'd lived with himself for so long. He didn't mourn his enemies since they were the reasons he was alive. The quick death he'd given to everyone that met his blade was a mercy compared to the pain of living. Such is life, in the Underdark.

When Solaufein did not die in Aphra's company and survived long enough for her to leave him behind, he felt lost. He thought he had known the woman's spirit, so close to his own, but where she had gone he knew he could not follow. He watched her change dramatically over their few (but highly eventful) years, as if she had finally succumbed under the burden of her fate. He understood, when others had not, that she had not really expected to survive it either. Both of them, in their own small ways, were in love with the idea of death. She'd had nowhere to go, had made too many enemies by trying to do too many things right. She was wanted on the Sword Coast as much as she was vaunted in Amn; for her strength, she was beloved by the weak and reviled by the strong, and so found no peace outside of her friends anywhere. The great library fortress she'd been raised in and always called home had forever exiled her for the crime of fulfilling their greatest monk's prophecy. Her back had bowed beneath the weight of the world's injustices. 

She'd seemed lost to him, just as he had been by Phaere, the first person he'd ever loved. It was not the same as in the past; there was no hurt between them, no whips of torment or pain for he or Aphra. Rather, it was the most peculiar ache that began from the moment he'd last seen her smile in Saradush before she disappeared - an aching that did not eat at him but remained settled in his chest in a place that only Aphra would ever reside. What he wanted out of life changed because of her; he didn't want an honorable death at her side for himself. He wanted Aphra and himself to be free to live honorably instead. To give something back, for what they'd taken. Eilistraee taught that death could never be payment for sin. They had to live with their burdens and carry on however they could.

In hindsight, it was not surprising that Aphra left; he allowed himself an amount of hope that the absence would do her heart well. Each of her and her siblings had been troubled immeasurably by their lot in life. It had taken them long to all reconcile, but since Sarevok had already died once for his crimes, Aphra declared that it made no sense to punish him further - and indeed, the man was instrumental in their greatest, and bitterest victory. As for Imoen, Solaufein understood upon meeting Aphra's sister that they were nearly inseparable - and he also understood why, for Imoen had the rare ability to make anyone smile or laugh no matter the circumstance. That part of the girl had never died and caused her to become the glue that held their troupe together. When Imoen left to pursue her own interests then, it was only a matter of time before her sister followed suit, with nothing to tie her down. Of all her companions, only Solaufein and Jaheira were unsurprised at her sudden flight after the war ended. He allowed himself to hope that they might all meet again one day in happier times.

So Solaufein drifted as wood at sea and wandered blindly into the wilderness, the only place on the surface he could find any solace. The deeper in, the trees would block out the sun and it wouldn't be as glaring on his sensitive eyes. He knew that if he could not die in Aphra's service, then he would have to follow Eilistraee's moon to whatever fate awaited him. He had no ambition of his own but to follow the path that his feet would lead and lived by his wits as best he could.

This nonchalant and indifferent attitude is precisely what landed him in the middle of a blizzard and nearly freezing to death outside of Nathan Hurst's farm. In some ways, the surface proved more dangerous than the Underdark - something he hadn't realized until then, having never seen snow in Amn. He'd spent two of his Lady's moon's in the cheerful duergar's care; once the dwarf had learned that Solaufein was no ordinary dark elf, he'd been quick to treat his wounds and his family swift to welcome him. It had bothered Solaufein at first for reasons he didn't quite understand, but made sense when Nathan pointed it out; dark elven society did not foster kindness and viewed it as a weakness.

Once he had recovered and learned of his whereabouts, he found himself being directed by the farmer to a lonely dwarf named Drogan. Drogan of Hilltop was at the end of his personal adventures and settled down in the small village at the top of its namesake's hill to start a school for adventurers that were in precisely Solaufein's predicament - those who wished to learn but had no means. Those who wished to travel but had no direction. Those who wished to make a difference but lacked ambition.

In all his centuries of darkness, Solaufein thought he had never encountered kindness until Aphra. His retrospect and time with Drogan had taught him that 'kind' was not an accurate word to describe the Bhaalspawn. Drogan was kind in that he offered food, words, and wisdom freely. Aphra had offered some solace in her kindred spirit, but she had nothing of herself to truly give. The world, or perhaps Irenicus, had taken what kindness she had to spare and returned only pain. That was a lesson she'd taken all the way to Saradush and beyond still. Through Drogan, Solaufein learned what real kindness was. And he finally understood that kindness could never be found at the edge of a blade - only mercy could be found there. Through Drogan, Solaufein learned who he himself was.

In the Adventurer's Academy, he honed his Common. He learned of his goddess in the first formal setting; he learned that there were other worshipers of her that danced and sang and drank under the moon and celebrated her beauty with their own. There were kin out there, he learned, like him - and he learned that it was his ambition to meet them. He knew now how but felt just as he felt Eilistraee in his heart that one day his path would take him there, where he might finally find himself amongst his people truly free. He absorbed everything Drogan had to offer like a sponge and helped the other students when others inevitably came to the strange school to learn the same things as him. 

He learned what vengeance was from the sly Dorna when she engaged him in a prank war. In exchange, he taught her to curse in Ilythiiri. He learned how to harden himself to discrimination from Xanos, the fiery half-orc who had seemed to have spent his entire life suffering from something outside of his control and had gained a lot of skill at throwing it back at the world. In exchange, he'd taught Xanos how to laugh at himself. He had learned infinitely more from the scholarly dwarf, however - how to smile, how to cook, how to walk the thin line between prejudice and proper judgment . . . He found, most importantly, a purpose beyond the path beneath his feet. He learned to read the world as he'd read the Underdark, and no longer feared the light or the vast open sky it dwelt in.

Or he thought he had. Then he met a strange, fearful, and gifted kobold named Deekin with a broken statuette and everything had changed. 

In the span of but four scant months, he'd been beaten, almost beaten, stabbed in the foot, nearly gutted by undead, nearly gutted by Bedine in the desert, plundered ruins, been paralyzed, and turned to stone, and finally had died. More had happened to him in those four months than had happened to him in the first three centuries of his life in Ust'Natha. He and the half-orc Xanos had been tasked with retrieving artifacts that had been in Drogan's safekeeping by order of the Harpers. The end result was a flying Netherese city named Undrentide ruled by a mad medusa named Heurodis, who had tried to kill him repeatedly after he'd survived her petrifying gaze thanks to Deekin. 

 In the end, the kobold proved himself the real hero of his own tale by killing the medusa while all Solaufein really did was help Xanos aim his hands so the sorcerer could destroy the mythal that kept Undrentide afloat above the Anauroch. He'd died there with Xanos feeling a little like Deekin's escort long before the city hit the ground, and fully expected that to be his strange end. He remembered being at peace with it, and a little sad that Deekin and Xanos wouldn't survive it either. 

Solaufein had always hoped to die in an interesting way, if he couldn't die in a meaningful one - something to get a last laugh at, at the very least, was all he could ask for out of fate. He'd hate to think that he led so boring a life that he might live only to die in his sleep. Dying as a flying city crashes with you in it had never been in any of the scenarios he'd predicted of his own death. Gored by a giant boar that rampaged through a city perhaps or tied to a gnomish ballista and shot at a target in a spelljammer battle or dismembered by an angry hamadryad for stumbling on her nude or losing an arm-wrestling match to a hook horror - any of these would have been preferable to dying as he had in Undrentide, bleeding out slowly and crushed to death by stone. He had been aware of his own state for some time, living but unliving under the broken rocks and dying slowly. He had heard the rats and was a little grateful that they'd waited to eat his eyeballs until he was most certainly dead. Deekin hadn't been that lucky.

Undrentide, unfortunately, was the beginning of Solaufein's adventures. The only real upside to that series of events that had led to Drogan's, Solaufein's, Deekin's, and Xanos' deaths was that Deekin managed to author a best-selling book out of it by dramatizing the whole affair. How exactly the three of them survived certain death was a story Solaufein told to no one and made Deekin promise to leave out of the book. The mystery had bothered readers for some time; the truth of it had certainly bothered Solaufein. It disturbed him to look at his own body and see no scars where he had earned them or feel the pain of old injuries he'd learned from. He moved as he always had, but his body felt like it belonged to a stranger he used to know. He did not know himself after that and felt like he had not known himself since.

The artifact responsible for their miraculous survival tumbled in between his fingers as he eyed it contemplatively, leaning against the deck railing of a schooner bound for Waterdeep. Ordinarily, having access to a pocket dimension was of great value. The Reaper, the entity in charge of the realm who had resurrected him and his fellows after the city fell, unsettled him even on good days. No matter how he'd tried to rid himself of the peculiar piece, it always returned to his pack. He'd given up on trying to throw it away and kept it at his side, tucked into his boot. 

He'd tried looking up seers, diviners . . . He'd even tried to gain entry to Candlekeep to look at their library using Aphra's name, but it had not availed him. If being a dark elf was not reason enough for refusal, the mention of the Bhaalspawn's name was. It seemed as though being labeled a 'hero' only helped him when it really hindered him. Eyes glassed over when anyone other than Xanos or Deekin, who were already aware of it, tried to examine it. None of Drogan's books in Hilltop had helped, and he'd yet to find a wizard that would give him the time of day, let alone find one he trusted enough to examine his inter-dimensional pocket-key. The Reaper, who controlled the portals and appeared to answer to Solaufein, was frustratingly vague on the nature of the nexus and its access.

Waterdeep was his last resort. A city of a million was one large enough that he was certain he could lose himself in it. Blackstaff would not even notice. The small fortune he had to his name would be enough to grant him entry into Oghma's temple and pay for a competent augury on the small artifact. He'd been at peace with his death in the Netherese city, knowing that at least it had been for a purpose. His life after, on the other hand . . .

And so Solaufein played with the gem-encrusted piece in his hands while he slipped into reverie in his small cabin aboard the merchant ship The Leeward Star. His thoughts, feelings, and memories all swirled in and out of consciousness as his mind struggled to create a dream. Thoughts of his old life and friends all fell away as he succumbed to a deep rest, lulled by the slapping of the sea's waves against the outer hull.

In his cot, his mind found itself being pulled down. Down, into the ground, into the deep dark of the earth below, past the whispers of worms and graves, into a place he could call home. His eyes struggled for purchase as he found himself standing in a very strange dream. A voice spoke to him in Ilythiiri and he struggled to listen as his mind flooded with memories he'd pushed aside so that he might live.

"Proceed with the ritual, male." It was undoubtedly a dhaerow female. "My sources say this one poses a threat to my plans, and my sources are infallible." The confidence of the voice alone was unmistakable. The voice was unfamiliar, but hearing his own tongue spoken after so long caused him to feel a sharp and sudden pang of homesickness. He knew it wasn't exactly healthy; one should not desire to return to a place that had only brought them despair, but he could not help it. 

As he found himself remembering things he'd struggled to forget in his scant few years on the surface, a picture began to form in front of him. While he did not miss Ust'Natha, or the pain his home had brought him, he missed the warmth. The walkways. The elegant, spidery crawl of architecture that spread around the cavern, building into it, and supporting it. The glow of mushroom forests, the laughter of people that looked and thought and spoke like him, all of it rushed back to him as the scene in front of him unfolded. 

A host of dark elves stood before him in a circle bowing in supplication before an intricately carved circle. The room was full of carvings he knew to be native to the temple of Lloth; which one, he could not say because they all looked the same to him. He couldn't suppress a sneer as he took in the carving of the goddess that stood central to the chamber across an open pit on the far side of the temple's room - a great spider topped with the body of a lovingly carved obsidian female.

"What is this!?" The female voice seethed. He turned his attention toward a beautiful female in front of him. Lovely though she was, the contemptuous sneer on her face detracted from her beauty. Her met her gaze unflinchingly - her eyes were the red of arterial blood, her lips pale around clenched teeth as white as the knuckled grip she had on her whip. Her armor sparse, more decorative than functional and hid a surprising amount of curves for an elven woman. Her posture radiated a churning fury beneath this artful surface. Solaufein noted that the normal snakes were not on this Handmaiden's whip - rather it glowed with a magical energy. He could not tell if she was truly a priestess or not, but since she stood in the chamber of the Spider Queen and acted arrogant and commanding, he assumed so. Her sneer was practiced, but the rage was real. "A dhaerow male?! Is this a joke?" She cried out, staring at Solaufein. He dared not look away but assumed she must refer to him - for he was at the center of the circle, and no other.

Her anger seemed to put the petitioners on edge, but none dared raise their head. A nearby male in wizardly robes of red and black in the dark elven fashion spoke up in a reedy voice. "Great Valsharess, we have performed the ritual to your—" The dhaerow female's whip cracked out of her hand and wound around the neck of a nearby male. Solaufein did not flinch as the male was dragged forth with a cry of pain, and his neck snapped under the effort. It seemed to him to be a very characteristic thing for a female to do.

"You will speak when spoken to!" The one who was called 'Valsharess' lectured.

It seemed a useless point for her to make, to Solaufein, who watched the dream go about him dispassionately. A part of him missed his homeland, but he did not miss this - the senseless death, the domineering, the needless and pointless grandstanding. He doubted that she was a priestess in that moment, for one could not go about called oneself 'Valsharess' without incurring some wrath from the Spider Queen. Such a title was holy and reserved only for her.

"This . . . Worm will pose no threat to me," the female stated with assurance. She addressed her audience, but had her suspicious eyes narrowed on Solaufein. What her expression was, was something that Solaufein had trouble identifying. She carried herself with the usual arrogance of a Handmaiden, but there was a strange desperation in her eyes that he'd never seen in a female dark elf before. "No threat at all," she insisted. "For you will die before you ever face me. The people of Waterdeep will die screaming, and you - male - will do nothing to stop my ascension. Now, worms! Summon my Red Sisters!" 

He thought about saying something to her. He could say something about Lloth being jealous or make a pun on the 'worm' comment, but instead a rather juvenile insult he'd taught to Imoen many years ago when she had asked popped into his mind that made his lips curl involuntarily: "Dosst ilhar uriu vith xuil rothe, dosst ky'ostal zhahus beldraus a naut'kyn dothkarn." It was only a dream, after all, and he was better at killing than he was at wordplay. She seemed pretty outraged by the remark if the scream indicated anything.

He returned to a deep reverie after the strange dream. His mind fed him foreign images and voices that floated past his awareness. Few found purchase in his waking thoughts when the sailor up top from the crow's nest alerted everyone to the presence of land. He remembered the vision with the not-so-Handmaiden who called herself Valsharess, the image of another dhaerow female with eyes the color of skies that changed to a bright and glowing amber, the sight of a white wasteland plagued by blizzards, and a sword as black as night, and a voice he'd never heard but had always known had woken him by stilling all the sounds and images and whispering his name. Though he'd awoken to the sound with a start, hearing it as a whisper in his ear, there was nothing around him, and all was calm.

Solaufein continued thinking the whole thing was just a strange dream until he was denied entrance into Waterdeep. The city, it appeared, was under the siege of creatures that attacked from the shadows - beholders, duergar, spiders, and all manner of strange demons were appearing in the streets. Undermountain, the great dungeon of the mad wizard Halaster that lay beneath Mount Waterdeep - and the city's most famous tourist attraction - had been compromised. Dark elves had also been spotted, and poisonings had gone up a thousand percent. People had fled their homes. Guards had fled their posts. The Lords of Waterdeep had issued a call to adventurers from afar, seeking aid to discover the root of the attacks and purpose behind them. The Temple of Oghma was closed and abandoned, its library inaccessible while the city was under siege from the shadows of the Underdark.

He wondered at his luck; a dark elf, coming to try to rescue a city from invading dark elves. He'd had to flash the title of Deekin's book at the guards before they stopped pointing swords at him, and instead led him to a place called the Yawning Portal, where a defense force of adventurers was being mounted. Volunteers to send into the impossible maze of a dungeon to find the mad wizard held by even madder foes. It seemed an impossible quest, the kind that would lead to certain death and uncertain fate. Solaufein was good at achieving the impossible and figured maybe if he saved the city someone would finally consent to look at the Reaper's Relic and tell him what in the Hells it actually was. 

Maybe. If he was lucky. 

Drow-to-Common Dictionary: 

Dosst ilhar uriu vith . . . Your mom has sex with goats and your armor looks about as useful as the spidery offspring of the costumes in Lady Gaga's Paparazzi video and Madonna's 1990 pointy boob tour

Dhaerow . . . The actual word for dark elves in their own language