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TobyKikami
Learned Scribe
USA
113 Posts |
 Posted - 30 Jun 2006 : 01:45:39
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This is the third in a series I'm working on, concerning drow clerics who aren't the typical gender for their god (i.e. the 2E male priests of Lolth and the Masked Traitors of Vhaeraun). The other two stories so far, as well as this one, can also be found in the Forgotten Realms section of fanfiction.net under "Traditional Gender Roles." The "Lolth" story steps on the toes of an established character (as opposed to the other two, which merely violate their personal space), and I may put up the "Vhaeraun" story once I see how this pans out.
I understand it could use some more work - I'm not deluding myself about that. I would like some idea of where to start, though.
Oddly enough for a fic concerning the worshippers of a war god, this has little graphic violence if at all. Plenty of talk about it, though, not forgetting blood. Semi-spoilers for Selvetarm's status at the time of War of the Spider Queen.
Notes on canon can be found at the end. In an ideal situation they ought to be superfluous, but if they're not they should at least save some time.
Traditional Gender Roles
The Waiting Spider's Sword Arm
The Year of Wild Magic (DR 1372)
The voice of the priestess of Lolth rose abruptly as Micarlin Jhalavar got to work. “I’ll not have my House gambled on your impulsive tendencies-”
The higher-ranking priests of Selvetarm always seemed to have a ready supply of blood for the ends of their braids. Adinirahc, for instance, had just finished a new set before receiving the message and so been the only one to forego the recent opportunity. He stood with the priestess of Lolth at the far end of the bunker, where they’d conversed in nominal privacy for some time before the priestess’s shout - Filfaere, Micarlin remembered, her name was Filfaere. Filfaere stopped shouting quickly. From the sound of it she switched to hissing through her teeth.
Like most of the other junior Selvetargtlin, Micarlin made her own arrangements concerning hair. Not the blooding - though she’d done that with Lesaonar, while he was still there. Saved the trouble of seeking the slightest of slights as grounds for challenge, though some did that in any case. Still others resorted to blood of thrall or rothé; Lesaonar called that a pathetic practice and took some knocks for it. Blasphemer he might have been, but she thought him right about that much at least.
Micarlin’s particular arrangement had gone on long enough so that when she finished with her own sword and met Ilztrysn’s eyes he immediately handed his over. He’d done his part a cycle before, and done it well as usual - emulating the typical mage affectations without commensurate coin for years before he joined the Selvetargtlin was good practice. It was simple work to soak the ends, and soon they would be dry enough to serve as an impromptu weapon. The blade was functional enough, as Ilztrysn had demonstrated, but in the aftermath it could be tiresome to clean the designs adorning the hilt. She had sometimes been tempted to tell him he ought to learn to do it himself, but she hadn’t learned to make a braid without hair jutting out in every direction like a fraying rope.
Adinirahc twisted, gesturing in their direction with one hand. Micarlin caught a canny bent to the visible half of his face. Along with the others she looked to Nadal, who sat as close to the two as he dared. In his training as a spellsinger, he’d learned to notice the vagaries of sound as well as produce it, which aided his scandal collection.
Nadal, ear and eye directed toward the conversation, signed his report. Something about a message back to the temple. She wants to leave and come back with reinforcements. He says that we’re in already, let’s not waste it.
Chelanghym was one of the most reclusive of the middling Houses - Nadal picked up on this sort of thing. Filfaere Chelanghym was an exception, teaching at the temple as she did. The majority were so cloistered that were it not for the communication, likely not even Filfaere would have realized that the seclusion of her own House was abnormal as that of the Spider Queen herself - at least, not until it was definitely too late as opposed to probably.
Some might even call them paranoid, Nadal had whispered. In Eryndlyn, where any given drow had at the very least thousands of default enemies made via theological disagreement, paranoid was not a term used lightly.
Paranoid or not, the House defenses certainly did not seem lacking. Seem lacking, for they had failed regardless against the followers of Vhaeraun and Ghaunadaur whose bodies cooled several rooms back. The bunker was opened only after application of Filfaere’s insignia and two passwords. Filfaere’s mouth was closed on the subject of others, but she had revealed there were a few more around. It was stocked with ammunition, a small supply of healing potions, a cut crystal pitcher that refilled itself with water, and an equally elaborate bowl that filled with incongruously bland food on command. There were several openings to jakes and narrow tunnels. Judging from her expression when asked, even Filfaere wasn’t sure where the tunnels led.
Micarlin glanced over at Ilztrysn, who poured out the pitcher across each stained hand. He hadn’t memorized any of the spells she’d seen him use on occasion for that and for his sword. Especially now, even his cantrips tended to the martial. Natural for a Selvetargtlin, and natural in these times.
It had boiled for tendays. In the plaza around the Five Pillars, the three cities claiming the name Eryndlyn - for how could they be one in anything but name? - haggled over magical goods with almost the same ferocity as conventional combat. A number of Selvetargtlin with divine magic were set to producing wands, potions, and scrolls. The rest went about their patrols and stood sentry, ready to explode into motion when the other two cities made their move. When that happened, they whispered, they would enjoy the carnage, remembering the Time of Troubles while screaming the name of their god and consecrating their kills in his name. Selvetarm, this one is for you.
Evidently their whispers had got out. Until whatever had befallen House Chelanghym, the other Eryndlyns of masks and oozes had essayed nothing - that they knew of.
She rubbed at the setting of one of the garnets in the hilt and breathed deeply, preparing - or trying to - for this cycle’s divine communion. With every inch she cleared her mind, something came in to fill the gap.
***
She’d been posted at the city gates and so she watched Lesaonar leave. That was the first she’d heard of the matter. He walked in the middle of the group. He spoke with one of the other exiles, displaying his usual fervor; on one side of his face was a dark starburst that could have been either blood or the residue of something thrown. His fingers curled around his holy symbol, lifted the medallion on its chain away from his neck, displayed the spider on the crossed sword and mace to Selvetarm and everyone. He hadn’t looked at her, or looked back. He might not have noticed she was there.
He hadn’t told her.
Micarlin felt strange anger at this, worsened because if he had told her of his heresy she wasn’t sure at all what she would have done. It shouldn’t have changed anything if he had done that, or even if he’d asked her to accompany him outright. She knew that should be the case. The risk was too great. And why should he have done it at all? But she still didn’t know.
I hope you’re still alive, she thought as if the sheer rage of it would propel the words to Lesaonar wherever he might be. Then I can track you down eventually, and kill you for tempting me to act like the faeriebrained idiot they think I am.
To her further chagrin, she wasn’t even sure she could manage that.
She’d wandered in a rage for a tenday afterward. Everyone assumed she was indignant at their temerity. She did nothing to contradict their notion. Selvetarm didn’t seem to mind.
***
“He may still be alive,” Filfaere told them, her face strangely blank. “He” was one of the Selvetargtlin of House Chelanghym, who’d used a spell of sending to alert Adinirahc and by extension Filfaere to the situation. There had been theories as to why it had gone to Adinirahc, high priest though he was, and not someone of his own House. “Or others like him. Holding out in another of these, perhaps.”
Adinirahc nodded. “We could always use more clerics.” He didn’t need to say functioning. Filfaere’s face seemed even blanker. Two fingers pressed against her holy symbol, a disk pinned to her piwafwi below her House insignia. “Ilztrysn,” he continued, “What mage spells have you left?” Ilztrysn nonchalantly counted off on his fingers; he trusted his other means to fend off any with inopportune ideas. “Then an hour and a half. I’ll send word to the temple before we move on.” Any blanker and she would no longer have a face.
At least this one hadn’t a reputation for being excessively harsh. Else it would likely be Adinirahc who no longer had a face.
Perhaps that had changed. The stirrings Micarlin felt were not so great as they might have been; the Selvetargtlin, famed for recklessness, were careful in this. It could after all be a test for the followers of both gods or either. But there was stirring still, and who could fault them for taking advantage of the situation in true drow fashion?
While she ruminated, Adinirahc had assigned two others to watch the entrances and seated himself against a wall, sticking his legs out before him with his knees jutting up and outward. He took a moment to adjust his robe, then placed his hands together. Filfaere returned to the other end of the bunker and folded herself up in the typical manner of taking Reverie or communing - though she could hardly commune now.
An hour and a half. More than time enough to request her own spells and finish cleaning; the stains were not quite as bad as other times. She balanced Ilztrysn’s sword across her knees and shut her eyes, her tongue twitching in vague mimicry of the prayers that ran behind her eyelids and were declaimed aloud in Adinirahc’s voice, which could carry across battles with as much ease as Nadal’s spellsong. Better luck this time.
***
“It is the sword arm of Lolth.” The priestess in the middle of the street spread her arms out as if to catch the drow passing her on either side. In one hand, she brandished a spider amber, presumably her holy symbol. In these times it was little more than a pretty trinket, but the priestess did not seem to mind. “It has come to punish the heretics. Our goddess has not left us. Our goddess has not left us.”
Micarlin barely listened once she had the particulars. She’d been a child of the marketplace as much as a child of the Spider Queen. Her mother gave praises at appropriate times and backed the Eryndlyn of the western plateau when called upon, but she was a merchant first and not about to reject two-thirds of her potential coin even if it came from a drow who talked to slimes or donned a mask. Lesaonar’s family was much the same. Neither of the progeny felt anything strong enough to the contrary to disrupt this amiable state of affairs.
A quick hand signal to Lesaonar beside her and they were running through the plaza. She recognized several of the drow who fled past her, shouting to their gods. Ghaunadaur and Vhaeraun were as unresponsive as Lolth - that is, as Lolth in herself. Apparently she had dispatched her sword arm in her stead.
“Do you know its name?” she asked Lesaonar. They leaned against the wall of a deserted shop. “I didn’t catch it, if she even said.”
“I think she said Selvetarm. Tanar’ri demon in the Spider Queen’s service, was it?” He frowned. Another lot of mixed drow and thralls rushed by, one of the drow turning long enough to glare at them. “Or a tanar’ri who became a god, or a tanar’ri the Spider Queen made a god. There was disagreement on that.” He hadn’t quite the aptitude to be a wizard, but he was more clever than Micarlin though that wasn’t saying so much - clever enough so that his parents had thought magecraft a possibility for several years. He’d done quite a large amount of reading in the interim. “Or maybe just… a god.”
She smiled at the sound of clashing weapons around the corner. “Shall we try and find out?”
That was the last thing either of them said for some time. Speaking would have ruined their waking Reverie. They watched the flurry of sword and mace, watched the techniques they’d practiced and observed ascend and combine with others into an art to make mages with their own “art” weep in envy when not concerned with the immediate matter of survival, watched the crimson rivulets run around the cobblestones, and Micarlin thought that even if she would never understand the priestesses of Lolth at least she understood the strength of their feeling.
One of Lesaonar’s theories was eliminated shortly afterward. Among the others, he chose wrongly.
***
She finished and turned her head, pressing a hand to the back of her neck to prompt any stubborn muscle, to find Filfaere Chelanghym staring at her from the far corner. Micarlin blinked but kept her eyes up out of instinct. Some of the others looked on in her line of sight and at the periphery, most with knowing expressions. The expressions she recognized easily, having had her share of them directed at her from before word-weaning onward. She only wondered if their knowing was at the priestess of Lolth’s expense or - possibly and - her own. Adinirahc chanted from his own position, either still engaged in his devotions or casting the sending. He showed no notice of the scene.
Filfaere lifted her hands and signed, We will talk.
Micarlin inclined her head in return and stood, taking Ilztrysn’s sword and her cleaning paraphernalia in hand. She glimpsed Nadal signing, and judging from the addition of several more of those expressions he was informing again.
“Mistress Chel-”
Hand sign. A minute smile, almost triumphant, and a flicker of yet another knowing. Can you manage that?
She seated herself. Of course. It hadn’t come as easily to Micarlin as it seemingly had to most; no need for her to know. She lowered her hand and returned most of her attention to the sword. Filfaere, following her half-gaze, lifted an eyebrow but said - or signed - nothing.
Was this some private game? The possibility could not be discounted. Or it truly could be something she didn’t wish others to overhear. Only one way to find out. In the meantime, she continued her work.
You are not from the west plateau.
She’d not set foot in Lolth’s city until the end of the Time of Troubles. Lesaonar was with her, their eyes still filled with the witnessed wonder. At his suggestion she carried a spider, the largest they could find in the plaza. At her own suggestion, she did this after judicious use of antitoxin. It wouldn’t do to arrive at the grand temple with an armful of venom-swollen bites. The Five Pillars. Mistress.
Ah. Another of those smiles, though Filfaere’s eyes still stared narrow. You’ve not just graduated from wood in your scabbard, have you now?
I was in the city guard for six years before the Troubles, Micarlin replied, ready for a statement along the lines of her certainly not showing it. The city guard was an institution of the plaza, paying heed to theological conflict only insofar as it affected market stability - though there had been quite some infighting among the more outspoken. Lesaonar was with her as well, after the idea of mage training fell through.
Do try to demonstrate that in the future. Gellaer, was it?
Jhalavar.
The weapons merchant?
Weapons and armor. It could be she considered damage to the rest of the family. Response to an overstepping of bounds? An attempt to regain the attention of her goddess by excess chaos?
Following in their footsteps?
Not exactly, Mistress.
Not exactly?
Not exactly. I’m the only cleric at the moment.
That’s to be expected, isn’t it? This time she did not smile.
It made a difference. She’d recognized this for years now; she might not know so many facts as Nadal did, but she perceived the gist of it. And how could there not be a difference? Some of the male Selvetargtlin, like Adinirahc or Lesaonar… they could match wits with any priestess of Lolth, and with her departure they dared this - those who were still there - with increasing frequency. This was the one of the better positions they could aspire to under a spider banner. There certainly could be no male priests of Lolth - in a distant city like Ched Nasad perhaps, but not in any Eryndlyn. The prestige was good enough even to excuse setting aside arcane study, as Ilztrysn had done, in hopes of being granted clerical magic from what divinity would pay him any mind.
But what female of any intellect would settle for serving Lolth’s Champion when there was service to the Spider Queen herself to be had? That was the question they asked, and the usual answer seemed to be that none would. They could be right about that with the others. They could be right about Micarlin herself.
It would do her little good to dive deep into a maze of webs and accompanying spiders, to try and maintain herself among the truly devious and the clever. She was not clever. She knew that at least and was content where most things could be grasped with relative ease. There were occasional descents, but better than total immersion and fighting just to breathe amid the maze. They would think her more of a fool than she actually was; that was her price and she could pay it.
No one ever suggested you honor Lolth?
We honor the Spider Queen. I honor the Spider Queen. Even if it was by proxy, she did that. It was more than Lesaonar did. It was why she was still here.
Filfaere stared, stared, stared…
This was wrong.
You must know what I mean. Filfaere frowned. She did not appear to notice Micarlin’s small epiphany. Even you cannot possibly be so - why? You tell me that.
The weak and the stupid were mocked, and this induced amusement. Amusement, not the focus Filfaere brought to bear now. Determination was wasted on such a pastime. But the other priestess was going about this as though she contended with an equal.
Suppose Micarlin was her equal?
She managed to ride out the thought with only a stiffening of her neck and fingers.
Mistress, you must have realized I am not exactly proper material for a cleric of Lolth.
Proper material? The frown turned halfway into a snarl. You are drow. You are female. That is enough.
Enough for a novice, perhaps. I don’t plan on staying a novice forever.
Better to try for a reign among the males than be a fool among your own, is that so? Filfaere smiled again as she spelled this out.
Micarlin smiled back, watching the other smile freeze and go to pieces.
Is there a point to this, Mistress Chelanghym?
She guessed the point even as she moved her fingers. An equal. Yes. Whose god kept the absent Spider Queen’s Eryndlyn from going to pieces? Whose god still answered her prayers?
Filfaere fought that. She continued to stare at Micarlin. Trying to shame her and distract them from her new advantage. An incompetent commoner, Filfaere would be assuring herself now, a blood-drenched dullard, a fool among her own.
A fool who still had her spells. So what did that make Filfaere?
Lesaonar was one of those to choose wrongly. Too few chose wrongly to make it right. Whoever heard of a city full of blasphemers? Blasphemers saying they were more than the Spider Queen’s sword arm, Selvetarm himself was more. She only gathered that later on. Lesaonar hadn’t told her any of it.
More than the Spider Queen’s sword arm. A sword arm that fought on while the rest of the body slept (or cooled was the intangible whisper in all three Eryndlyns, or cooled, a corpse) in the Demonweb Pits. The more powerful of the priests, Adinirahc included, had managed to speak with Selvetarm directly. It is not for him to disclose, they said on their return, with just the correct inflection to send tongues and hands in a speculative flurry.
In other cities maybe the priestesses of Lolth would say as they liked about that and no one could argue. But the existence of the other Eryndlyns was an argument in itself.
Is there nothing else? Micarlin prompted. Her smile moved up to a grin. Mistress?
Nothing else, Filfaere managed with trembling hands. Go. She flung one hand in the appropriate direction. Micarlin went as directed, resisting the mad urge to yell out and declare victory in the name of her god. This expedition into the maze had gone not too badly at all.
She could pay the price. That didn’t mean she liked it.
Some of the others turned to smile back at her as she neared. Ilztrysn waved briefly, keeping his hand raised. “Can you get it done?” Did you…
Micarlin displayed her progress on the hilt with one hand and lifted the other in response. “I ought to.” I did.
More of those knowing looks. This time, Micarlin wore one of them. While the grin faded soon enough, she wore the knowing all through their remaining time in the bunker, and had the satisfaction of exchanging it with Adinirahc when he finally finished the sending to the temple.
Lesaonar chose wrongly then. Was he vindicated now?
I hope you’re still alive. Then I can track you down eventually and pay you back for not telling me.
Then I can show you this.
END
As of Demihuman Deities, at fifteen percent female (eight percent drow and seven percent aranea) Selvetarm's priesthood is the highest gender mix listed for the generally skewed drow pantheon.
From an article on the Wizards site concerning gods during the Time of Troubles: "Selvetarm rampaged through the drow city of Eryndlyn, located in hidden caves beneath the High Moor, attacking strongholds of the followers of Ghaunadaur and Vhaeraun. The avatar was eventually driven into the wild Underdark by an alliance of the victimized cults." Selvetarm's popularity (and by extension, Lolth's) increased in the aftermath; as of Demihuman Deities the followers of Ghaunadaur and Vhaeraun were still reluctantly allied in order to fend off their increased strength. However, a group of Selvetarm's followers ended up exiled for worshipping him "as a god in his own right" and took up residence in Undermountain, beneath Waterdeep. Their apparent fate is mentioned in the online "Return to Undermountain," Room 16 - the timing seems about right, although the drow in "Return to Undermountain" are described as scouts instead of exiles.
"Selvetargtlin," for the curious, seems to be a combination of "Selvetarm" and the drow word "sargtlin," or "warrior". It means just what you might expect.
The City of the Spider Queen web enhancement and the Underdark sourcebook give conflicting accounts of what happened in Eryndlyn during Lolth's Silence. According to the web enhancement, Lolth's faction was obliterated and the other two proceeded to have it out. According to the sourcebook, everyone pretty much sat around not daring to do anything. Neither source makes any mention of the Eryndlyn Selvetargtlin whatsoever. This story could take place either before events in the web enhancement or, more likely, after events in the sourcebook.
Thanks for reading.
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Edited by - TobyKikami on 30 Jun 2006 01:51:02
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The Waiting Spider’s Sword Arm
