Artifact Tinker’s Tool Kits have been added to the reward vendors! http://wiki.uoroleplay.com/index.php?title=Tinkering
Do you feel alone in this surface world?Do you wonder if you are better off dead? (Or undead?)Have you ever wondered if there was more to these worlds than pleasures of the flesh?Are you haunted by unfinished business?Ask for the Medium, at a healer’s…
Terian sits at the desk looking atb the scroll not sure what to say he starts it of well then throws it away,ending up with a pile of paper at his feet,he takes a deep breath and starts again
To the Jabbress of the Velve
Its been sometime since my last report,and we are observing the subject still but things have changed somewhat,it seems
he has left the company of the female human and has wandered of on his own.but something stranger has happened when,
I entered his cabin,I saw a box containing a strange egg,now this egg has disapeared I have tried to trace this egg but onelooking
about iI have a strange feeling a dark stranger and the female in the castle have taken it.it seems they have made no moves
to tell others about this egg,not sure if its through greed or stupidity.
It seems this egg was stolen from some demon king of sorts,and he and his orcs are coming the land looking for it,the thing that
amuses me is they dispise us drow and claim we are self centered and greedy with no respect,yet these elve and humans hide this
egg in secret not telling there fellow humans and elves,they hunt dragons with no reason it is a strange land
Please mistress when these demons and orc ravage this land looking for this egg,please dont order us to protect tthese humans
they have no pride or honor
Your Loyal Servant
Terian Lepos
Brother Sargthin of The Bregn D’aerthe
He reads the letters and smiles and thinks ‘”That should keep them of my back”
“Atta nice lantern you got there.”
An elderly woman looked up from her snail-slow crawl to wherever it was she needed to be. Her eyes narrowed, looking the speaker up and down. At first glance, he was some urchin. A half-elf boy whose skin would probably still be kissed brown as dirt without a wink of sun. He didn’t look like much, and people who didn’t look like much usually didn’t take much off the table to get a little more.
“How much fer it?” he drawled.
“Take it,” the elderly woman bit out, shoving it toward him. “Just… take it and go.”
The half-elf grasped her shaking, withered hand as it tried to hoist the lantern into his. He reached to his belt, undoing his coin purse with his free hand.
“Then here.” He took the lantern, and pressed the coin purse to her hand.
It was a fair amount of mixed coins, totaling in the hundreds… as well as a can of sardines. His ‘earnings’ for the day.
It was a simple, humble lantern: the kind provisioners’ shops just kept hanging around ‘til they crumbled into rust.
*
He had grown up with his mother, though the process was slow. While she watched her friends’ full-blooded human children grow like weeds… Brevardo stumbled, crawled, gurgled and cried at a longer rate than his peers.
“Rudi,” his mother’s friends would say, usually accompanied by a hand on the hip or adjusting of spectacles, “is yer son okay? He’s still crawlin’,” or “he’s so small,” or “what a daft kid!”
Slow though it was, Brevardo grew up as fast as he could.
Granted, he was still egging the guard towers well into his twenties.
There was one question his mother was certain he’d never grow out of: who his father was.
“One a the Mages on that, uh, council,” she’d say one night. “You know the one.
“Musta been that dashin’ head paladin back in Trinsic,” she’d say another one, and then make a face. “Yeaaah… Trinsic.
“Ya know that duke of… uh, ya know. Ya know?”
Some of the men she mentioned weren’t even elven.
Her love life did not seem nearly as extensive as her tales seemed to suggest. There had been two different men of hers in his life growing up: the first, an older cattle herder who seemed nice enough to an eight year old half-elf. At least he did until it turned out he had a “real” family, which upon its discovery caused great grief for his mother. Mostly what he remembered about him was that he smelled bad and couldn’t eat solids. The second, an angry (but unmarried) man of the market who lavished his mother with the ends she struggled to meet.
She came home with a swollen, bruised cheek one summer night, trying to cover it with her hand to no avail.
“Sure, he ain’t the nicest man,” she said. “But I can make it with him.”
That was when Brevardo started stealing.
On the day before his fifteenth birthday, he noticed a high elf at the market. He had pale blond hair and eyes of amethyst, and was surrounded by magic baubles. When Brevardo looked at him, the elf stared back. Come to think of it, he’d done that before: he saw that elf every now and then at the market, usually in the spring.
That night, he would see a light hovering at his window.
It was a beautiful lantern with an unusual glow to it, wires forming stars in the shadows it tossed aside. It was the kind of bauble that could easily catch a thousand gold at the market. Whoever had crafted it was a person of great accomplishment – and a person of greater means.
Such as… a traveling elven merchant who happened to be in town.
Fifteen torturous years of wondering who his father was, whether he was alive, and if he meant anything to him. After all this time, he’d been there all along. He’d been there all along, paying him but a passing glance. It was as though he were a monster at the zoo that failed to catch his attention.
Brevardo took the floating lantern gingerly into his hands, tracing fingers over the fine, silver-woven craftmanship. He leaned out the window to see if his father was still there. Not a sign of him: he must have gotten a running start with that magic of his.
He rifled through his mother’s rickety tool shelf that morning, finding the hammer she used to try and patch up their ever-leaky roof. His feet seemed to do the thinking for him, carrying him to the inn before he realized what he’d already decided to do.
When he asked the innkeeper about a blond high elf artificer, shame flooded him. Instantly, realization had dawned on the stranger’s face. Perhaps he wasn’t the first result of a dalliance. Perhaps there were hundreds of starving kids through the ages thanks to this rich bastard!
He knocked on the elf’s door, to which a bleary voice responded:
“Who is it?”
“Your son,” he deadpanned, young voice cracking despite his calmness.
There was silence, and then the slow trudge of a man dressing. He opened the door, and Brevardo barged in past him.
On the nightstand, he placed his father’s belated present.
“Did you like the-…” his father started, surprisingly alert for having just woken. His eyes widened as Brevardo’s hammer crashed down.
“The… the present?”
His father stood there, stunned, as Brevardo smashed the lantern down to the most compact shape he could manage. He resorted to jumping on it once he’d done what he could with the hammer.
“Better luck next bastard, Pops.”
I.
The Dream
The weather of the Underdark was fairly nondescript by surfacer standards. While the humans would gawp at the sky and point to watery drips, hard splats and shuddering yellow strikes of wrath against the distance, Nalzaezar’s acclimation to weather had been… subtler.
The way dew built against rock and swelled in his nostrils when summer was on the way. The bittersweet scent of decay as fall began to render the more sensitive (as well as exported) foliage dormant. The sharp, choking cold that clawed to the bone in the winter, and the curious in-between of the spring and the summer. While the changes certainly shaped his society, surfacers revolved the entirety of their lives around these innocuous phenomenons.
Whereas the Drow bent nature over Her knee, it was nature who had the surfacers at her mercy. How quaint.
Nature had not been the only thing the ladies of the depths had brought to heel…
He still remembered the thick summer day he’d been sent off to the Academy, for it was a day that typically defined the rest of every drow’s life. It was the day that it was decided who – or more importantly, what – a woman or man was. What she or he could amount to. How long they might expect to live.
He had hoped – no, prayed! that he might find himself at Lolth’s mercy. Perhaps a life as a dutiful mage; a conduit to the city’s basic maintenance. Neither threatening to the average person’s standing, nor likely to become obsolete. Maybe an occasional stud for some merchants who preferred to travel, and would forget him with minimal ire as soon as their night was spent.
The priestess slapped him in the back with her whip, and Nalzaezar barely flinched. She stood half a head taller than him, at an average height for a woman.
“This one’s too tall,” she remarked blandly, circling to the front of him. She grabbed him by the chin, yanking it up as though she were checking a steed’s shoulders. “Bulky, too.” She studied his face impassively, the cloying incense of the temple thick in the air about her.
They would look at his test results next, he was certain. See that he had a keen mind, feel the magic that all but ached to burst forth from his body. Then he would be set; after the academy, he would be put to some mundane magical work befitting of a male with his abilities-…
“Mediocre facial features,” the evaluating priestess sighed, running her fingers through his long, fine hair. “But I guess I could use a tall daughter.”
“Martial Academy?” a priestess-in-training sneered, a hand on her hip as she watched. Nalzaezar’s eyes widened, and the corners of the evaluating priestess’ mouth quirked in a sinister smile.
“Where else?” she grinned.
The Martial Academy: where spare males went to die.
It was decided: he would never see the Mage Academy alive.
He still saw the grinning priestess’ damned bed sheets whenever he got a whiff of blood posies.
Nalzaezar ran a hand over his bare scalp and traced where eyebrows used to be. He was tucked away in the unrented suite beneath the Narrowhaven Academy, journal in his lap. The surfacers had strange castes, of which he was still amongst the lowest. But, if he kept concealed, in the dark, and did not speak too frequently, he was usually able to pass through without much hassle.
His studies had already cost him so much. The last thing he needed was to attract attention.