It is time to let the waters of the past flow away to distant shores. Though never to be forgotten, those friends long gone must not haunt my thoughts all the day and night. They will be there, I take comfort in knowing, ready to smile whenever my mind’s eye seeks that comforting sight, ready to shout a chant to a war god when battle draws near, ready to remind me of my folly when I cannot see that which is right before me, and ready, ever ready, to make me smile, to warm my heart.
But they will ever be there, too, I fear, to remind me of the pain, of the injustice, of the callous gods who took from me my love in just that time when I had at last found peace. I’ll not forgive them.
“Live your life in segments,” a wise elf once told me, for to be a long-lived creature who might see the dawn and dusk of centuries would be a curse indeed if the immediacy and intensity of anticipated age and inevitable death is allowed to be forgotten.
And so now, after twenty-five years, I lift my glass in toast to those who have gone before: to Deudermont, to Cadderly, to Regis, perhaps to Wulfgar (for I know not of his fate), and most of all, to Catti-brie, my love, my life—nay, the love of that one segment of my life.
By circumstance, by fate, by the gods . . .
I’ll never forgive them.
So certain and confident these words of declared freedom read, yet my hand shakes as I pen them. It has been a quarter of a century since the catastrophe of the Ghost King, the fall of Spirit Soaring, and the deat . . . the loss of Catti-brie, but that awful morning seems as if it was only this very morning, and while so many memories of my life with Catti seem so far away now, almost as if I am looking back at the life of another drow, one whose boots I inherited, that morning when the spirits of my love and Regis rode from Mithral Hall on a ghostly unicorn, rode through the stone walls and were lost to me, that morning of the deepest pain I have ever known, remains to me an open, bleeding, and burning wound.
But no more, I declare.
That memory I now place on the flowing waters, and look not behind me as it recedes.
I go forward, on the open road with friends old and new. Too long have my blades been still, too clean are my boots and cape. Too restless is Guenhwyvar. Too restless is the heart of Drizzt Do’Urden.
We are off to Gauntlgrym, Bruenor insists, though I think that unlikely. But it matters not, for in truth, he is off to close his life and I am away to seek new shores. Clean shores, free of the bonds of the past, a new segment of my life.
It is what it is to be an elf.
It is what it is to be alive, for though this exercise is most poignant and necessary in those races living long, even the short-lived humans divide their lives into segments, although they rarely recognize the transient truth as they move through one or another stage of their existence. Every person I have known tricks himself into thinking that this current way of things will continue on, year after year. It is so easy to speak of expectations, of what will be in a decade, perhaps, and to be convinced that the important aspects of one’s life will remain as they are, or will improve as desired.
“This will be my life in a year!”
“This will be my life in five years!”
“This will be my life in ten years!”
We all tell ourselves these hopes and dreams and expectations, and with conviction, for the goal is needed to facilitate the journey. But in the end of that span, be it one or five or ten or fifty years hence, it is the journey and not the goal, achieved or lost, that defines who we are. The journey is the story of our life, not the achievement or failure at its end, and so the more important declaration by far, I have come to know, is, “This is my life now.”
I am Drizzt Do’Urden, once of Mithral Hall, once the battered son of a drow matron, once the protégé of a wondrous weapons-master, once loved in marriage, once friend to a king and to other companions no less wonderful and important. Those are the rivers of my memory, flowing now to distant shores, for now I reclaim my course and my heart.
But not my purpose, I am surprised to learn, for the world has moved beyond that which I once knew to be true, for the Realms have found a new sense of darkness and dread that mocks he who would deign to set things aright.
Once I would have brought with me light to pierce that darkness. Now I bring my blades, too long unused, and I welcome that darkness.
No more, I declare! I am rid of the open wound of profound loss, so say I!
I lie.
* * *
The fights are increasing and it pleases me.
The world around me has grown darker, more dangerous . . . and it pleases me.
I have just passed a period of my life most adventurous and yet, strangely, most peaceful, where Bruenor and I have climbed through a hundred hundred tunnels and traveled as deep into the Underdark as I have been since my last return to Menzoberranzan. We found our battles of course, mostly with the oversized vermin that inhabit such places, a few skirmishes with goblins and orcs, a trio of trolls here, a clan of ogres there. Never was there any sustained battle, though, never anything to truly test my blades, and indeed, the most perilous day I have known since our departure from Mithral Hall those many years ago was when an earthquake threatened to bury us in some tunnels.
No more is that the case, I find, and it pleases me. Since the day of cataclysm, a decade ago, when the volcano roared forth and painted a line of devastation from the mountain all the way to the sea, burying Neverwinter in its devastating run, the tone of the region has changed. It is almost as if that one event had sent forth a call for conflict, a clarion call for sinister beings.
In a sense, it did just that. The loss of Neverwinter in essence severed the northland from the more civilized regions to the south, where Waterdeep has now become the vanguard against the wild regions. Traders do not regularly travel through the region, except by sea, and the lure of Neverwinter’s former treasures has pulled adventurers, often unsavory, often unprincipled, to the devastated city in great numbers.
Some are trying to rebuild now, desperate to restore the important port and the order it once imposed upon these inhospitable lands. They battle as much as they build. They carry a carpenter’s hammer in one hand, a warhammer in the other.
For enemies abound: Shadovar; strange zealots to a devil god; opportunistic highwaymen; goblinkin and giantkind and monsters alive and undead. And other things, darker things from deeper holes.
In the years since the cataclysm, the region has grown darker by far.
And it pleases me.
When I am in battle, I am free. When my blades cut low a scion of evil, only then do I feel as if there is purpose and accomplishment. Many times have I wondered if this rage within is just a reflection of a heritage I have never truly shaken. The focus of battle, the intensity of the fight, the satisfaction of victory . . . are they all merely an admission by Drizzt Do’Urden that he is, after all, drow?
And if that is the truth, then what did I actually know about my homeland and my people, and what did I merely paste onto a caricature I had created of a society whose roots lay in passions and lust I had not yet begun to understand or experience?
Was there, I wonder and I fear, some deeper wisdom to the matron mothers of Menzoberranzan, some understanding of drow joy and need that perpetuated the state of conflict and battle in the drow city?
It seems a ridiculous thought, and yet, only through battle have I endured the pain. Only through battle have I found again a sense of accomplishment, of forward movement, of bettering community.
This truth surprises me, angers me, and paradoxically, even as it offers me hope to continue, it hints at some notion that perhaps I should not, that this existence is only a futile thing, after all, a mirage, a self-delusion.
Like Bruenor’s quest. I doubt he’ll find Gauntlgrym, I doubt it exists and I doubt that he believes he’ll find it, or that he ever believed he would find it!
And yet he pores over his collection of maps and clues daily, and leaves no hole unexplored. It is his purpose; the search gives meaning to the life of Bruenor Battlehammer. Indeed, it seems the nature of the dwarf, and of the dwarves, who are always talking of things gone by and reclaiming the glory that once was.
What is the nature of the drow, then?
Even before I lost her, my love Catti-brie, and my dear halfling friend, I knew that I was no creature of calm and respite; I knew that my nature was that of the warrior. I knew that I was happiest when adventure, and battle, summoned me forth, demanding of those skills I had spent my entire life perfecting.
I relish it more now—is that because of my pain and loss, or is it merely a truer reflection of my heritage?
And if that is the case, will the cause of battle widen, will the code that guides my scimitars weaken to accommodate more moments of joy? At what point, I wonder and I fear, does my desire for battle, that which is in my heart, interfere with that which is in my conscience? Is it easier to justify drawing my blades?
That is my true fear, that this rage within me will come forth in all its madness, explosively, randomly, murderously.
My fear?
Or my hope?