You can’t see webs in the Underdark. You’ll feel them, too late, tickling and teasing, and perhaps you’ll cry out in fear or disgust before you die.
But you won’t see them.
Not those of spiders, or of other creatures laying traps for wayward fools who have ventured where they do not belong.
And few do. Few belong in the Underdark, and those who live there see the darkness as an ally in their own treachery.
Here the duergar dwarves chop and gnash the stone, swinging picks with the strength of hate. Ever growling, ever cursing, any spark from metal on stone revealing grizzled faces locked in a perpetual and threatening scowl.
Here the monstrous cave fishers lay their long lines, ready to snatch an unwary visitor and drag him, flailing helplessly and pitifully, up the cliff to a waiting maw.
Here the huge umber hulks burrow, through stone, through flesh—it does not matter.
Here the giant mushrooms gather and plot catastrophe.
Here the living, sentient shadows flitter and fly, cold fingers ready to throttle anything possessed of the warmth of life.
Here the lurkers pose as floors.
Here the piercers hang among stalactites. Any who are found by either would think that the Underdark itself had risen to devour them.
In so many ways, they would not be wrong.
And then they, like so many before, would die, would be eaten by the shadow.
For this is the Underdark, where shadows huddle too closely to be called shadows, where light marks the bearer more than it marks the way before him, where every hunting ground is bordered by another hunting ground, where most are lucky to simply choose the manner of their own deaths, to stick their own swords into their own hearts before the tentacles of the displacer beast pull them from the ledge, or before the spider has finished sucking out the life juices, so slowly, in an inescapable cocoon.
Here the demons often roam, insatiably angry, masters of murder.
Here the quiet, odorless, invisible gases of distant tumult make sleep eternal, or make a flash of flint and steel into a fireball to humble the archmage of Menzoberranzan.
Here is the ominous heartbeat of distant, dripping water, a single sound dancing from stone to stone, amplified by the profound stillness.
Here are the rattles of the bones of unshriven dead, tickled to movement by the dark magic of the dark place, raised in undeath to claw and chew.
Aye, this is the Underdark, and here lies Menzoberranzan, the City of Spiders, the city of those who worship the demon goddess who calls herself the Spider Queen.
Only a fool would come here unbidden.
Only a fool would come here bidden.
For here are the drow, the dark elves, masters of magic divine and arcane, masters of weapons edged in the cruel enchantments of the Faerzress, the magical boundary that gives life to the Underdark and that connects it, so fittingly, to the lands of demons and devils.
Yes, here are the drow, and they will stop killing one another just long enough to kill you.
“What should I bring, Father?” asks the young man about to set off on an adventure into the Underdark, in a fable common throughout Faerun.
“Two coins.”
“Waterdhavian gold? Cormyr silver?”
“It does not matter,” says the father.
“How much food shall I pack?”
“It does not matter. Two coins.”
“Water, then, surely, Father. How much water shall I carry?”
“It does not matter. Two coins.”
“I will buy all I need with only two coins? What weapon is best, then? A sword? A bow?”
“Two coins. Only two coins.”
“To buy all that I need?” the confused son asks.
“No,” answers the father. “To cover your eyes when you are dead. Nothing else that you bring will stop that.”
This is the Underdark, the land of murderers.
The land of the drow.
* * *
It is interesting to me to look back upon my writings from many years ago. I often cringe at my conclusions, believing that I know better now and that I’ve come to a clearer view of whatever situation I must confront, a clearer understanding of the best likely resolution. Oh, I see the same intent, the same hoped-for conclusion in those old writings, but there are little mistakes scattered throughout, and they are now obvious to me.
“Wisdom” is a word often associated with experience—perhaps it should also be spoken of in conjunction with the word “humility,” because I now understand that if I look back upon this piece in a decade, or a century, I will likely once again find much to correct.
The other thing that strikes me about these glimpses into the past is the cyclical nature of life. Not just regarding birth and death, but in the many joys and crises that find us, year after year. There is an old drow saying:
Ava’til natha pasaison zhah ques po finnud ebries herm.
“History is a poem where all lines rhyme.”
How true! To simply view the conflicts that my friends and I have faced is to see new threats that sound very much like the old. Even the great tragedies and joys of our companionship follow predictable patterns to one who has lived them, again and again. Paradigms often seem broken, but the nature of reasoning beings will someday reinstate them.
In this one manner, perhaps Lolth is no fool, or perhaps she is the greatest fool. Chaos brings excitement to her followers—they feel alive! But in the end, they will go right back to where they were before. The rank of a house might change, a nearby foe might be vanquished, a new spell created to darken the skies. But a person traveling to Menzoberranzan today would see a place that rhymes quite closely with the city I first glimpsed from a cradle.
Is it any different with Waterdeep?
For, yes, some civilizations will be wiped away by conquerors. Some will be flattened by volcanoes. Great drought will displace entire cultures and massive ocean waves might sweep others to the silence of the seafloor. But the circle of life continues. The greed and the generosity remain. The love and the hate remain. The mercy and the vengeance remain. All of these countervailing, endlessly competing facets of humans and dwarves and elves and halflings and gnomes and every other reasoning race remain . . . and battle.
And the winner is always in jeopardy and the result is so common, either way, that there is, overall, stasis within the swirl of chaos.
When I told this to Bruenor, he replied that I was dark in more than skin, reached behind his shield, and handed me a drink.
But no, it is not a dispiriting thought, nor one that implies helplessness in the face of fate and predetermination.
Because this, too, I know: while we move in circles, we still move forward. Like my own maturation in looking at my past writing, the cultures mature. To a visitor today, Menzoberranzan would look very much as it did to me when I first peeked out from House Do’Urden, but not exactly the same.
The times grow less dark for all the races, because within the culture, too, is memory, an understanding of what works and what does not. When those lessons are forgotten, the circle winds its way backward, and when they are remembered, society moves forward, and with each cycle, with each affirmation of that which is good and that which is evil, the starting point of the next lesson is a bit closer to goodness.
It is a long roll, this circle, but it is rolling in the direction of justice and goodness, for all of us. It is not hard to look back on history and see atrocities committed on a grand scale that horrify the sensibilities of the folk of this day but were simply accepted or deemed necessary by folk in days more superstitious and unenlightened.
Bruenor wasn’t impressed by this claim. He just handed me another drink.
But it seems true to me now, undeniably so, that the life of an individual and the life of a society go in these circles of crisis and peace, and from each, we learn and we become stronger.
We become wiser.
It occurs to me that the beings we on Faerun call gods might be no more than long-living creatures who have heard the rhyme of pasaison, of yesteryear, so many times that their simple experience allows them to know the future. So ingrained is the inevitable result, perhaps, that they can now hear the echoes of the future instead of merely those of the past—they have the foresight of consequence. They have learned great powers, as a swordsman learns a new attack routine.
My own journey nearly ended during this last crisis, not merely because I might have died—that seems a very common condition—but because what I lost most of all was my grounding in reality. The ground on which I stood became shifting sand, and in that sand I nearly disappeared.
And would have, except that now I have learned to tighten the circles of my life, almost to where I have come to hope that my journey from here on out is a straighter road forward, a path to better epiphany and clearer insight.
For the greatest teaching of the monks of the Yellow Rose is the ability to forgive, wholly, your own shortcomings, to accept your physical being as a vessel to a spirit ever seeking perfection. Such true acceptance of oneself, of limitations and weaknesses and failings, allows one to proceed without becoming hindered by guilt and undue hesitance.
To hear the echoes of the past.
To anticipate the notes of the future.
To stride more boldly.
And so, scimitars high, I go, boldly and with a smile.
* * *
Age breeds wisdom because age brings experience. Thus we learn, and if we are not frozen in our ways or wedded to a manner of looking at the world that defies experiential evidence, we learn.
The rhyme of history is, in the end, the greatest teacher.
The question, however, is whether the students are sufficient. Yes, Menzoberranzan would look very different to me now, with my wealth of experience accompanying me back to that dark place, and yes, an individual may learn, should learn, must learn, through his or her journey. But that doesn’t happen to all individuals, I have seen. And is it true at all on a societal level? Or a generational level?
I would expect the elves, including the drow, to be the learned guides of this turning cycle. Having seen the birth and death of centuries, the memories of the long-living races should cry as warnings to another fool king or queen or council of lords to change course when they are walking the road to catastrophe. For we have witnessed this marionette show before, and the puppets all died, and the principals who lived did so with great regret and even horror at their own actions. A dark path is walked in tiny steps.
So the elves should be the clarion call of warning, but, sadly, it is the shorter life span of the humans that seems to most dictate the cycles of destruction, as if the passing of a generation that knew great strife or war or insurgence erases, too, the societal memory of a road’s tragic destination.
In the Monastery of the Yellow Rose, they have a great library, and in that historical repository is a timeline of devastating, world-shattering events.
The occurrences appear with alarming regularity. Every seventy to one hundred years, there comes a time of great strife. Oh, there are other events, often tragic, from time to time, but these are often anomalies, it seems, the rogue acts of foolish kings.
The events of which I speak appear more to be a maturation of devastation, a perilous journey of thousands of tiny steps that culminates when the last of those humans who remember have died away.
Then, again, darkness falls.
It is more than coincidence, I think, this backstep, this backward downslope of the rolling wheel of the centuries, and so I have come to believe that enlightenment may occur in a straight line for individuals, but only within that slowly turning wheel for the world at large.
There have been Lord Neverembers before, with different names but similar shortsightedness.
Hereafter, perhaps I shall refer to the lord protector of Neverwinter as Lord Never-remember.
His attitude toward King Bruenor raises great alarms. His clamor for supremacy knows no common sense. His selfishness leads to hoarding that is greatly detrimental, even fatal, to those he calls his subjects.
Everything is faster for the humans. Their compressed lives lead to compressed kingdoms, and to repeated wars. Perhaps it is the urgency of trying to achieve too-high pedestals too quickly, before the unbeatable death closes in. Or perhaps, because they are shorter-lived, it is simply that they have less to lose. A king who has passed his fiftieth year might lose twenty years of life if he dies in battle or the guillotine finds his neck after a failed grab for even more power, while an elven king could lose centuries, or a dwarven king might lose many decades.
As old age sets in and the joys of life are compromised, perhaps this human king must grab for something glorious to replace the excitement of his rise to power, or the distant pleasures of the flesh, or the simple absence of pain when he crawled out of bed each morning.
For all this potential tragedy and darkness, though, I must remind myself that the wheel does inevitably move forward. The world was a darker, harsher, crueler place a hundred years ago, and much more so a thousand years ago.
And this gives me hope for my own people. Is our wheel similarly turning, though at a vastly slower pace?
Is Menzoberranzan truly evolving toward a lighter and more generous existence with the passing of each drow generation?
That is my hope, but it is tempered with very real fears that the wheel turns so slowly that its momentum may not be enough, that events and unscrupulous matrons could not just stop it but push it in the other direction.
And that’s to say nothing of the vile demon goddess who holds those matrons in thrall.
Drow heroes are needed.
Fortunately, Menzoberranzan has produced a surprising number of those, usually hidden in the shadows, of which there are many.
It is my desperate hope that one of them, one I dearly loved, has returned to the world.
* * *
Where does the self end and the other, the community, begin?
It seems a simple, even self-evident, question, but I have come to believe that it is perhaps the most complicated investigation of all. And the most pressing one, if I am to find any true meaning in my life. Even more, on a wider level, this is the question that will determine the heart of a society, and possibly even its very life span—one way or the other.
If I were walking down the road and saw a person drowning in a pond, and I had a rope that would reach, of course I would throw it to the troubled fellow and pull him to safety.
But that is not a selfless act.
I might be called a hero for saving the person.
But that is not a heroic act.
No, that is merely the expected behavior of one worthy to live in a civilized society, and any who would not stop to help the drowning person in such a situation deserve to be shunned, at the very least.
If I were walking down a road and saw a person drowning in a pond, but I had no rope, I would dive in and swim out to try to pull the person to safety.
This is more selfless, and involves a small measure of danger.
Would I be a hero then?
Some would call me that, but the word would ring hollow in my ears. For I would have done only what I would have expected from my neighbor were I that drowning man.
This is what makes the community greater than the individual.
Suppose the drowning man was in a lake known to be inhabited by a killer gar. Suppose he was even then being attacked by such a creature. Suppose the lake was full of them, swarming, hungry.
At what point would my act of attempting to rescue him become heroic? At what point would my actions rightly earn the title of hero?
At what point would I not want my neighbors to jump into that gar-filled death trap to try to save me?
And there is a point, surely. There is a place where responsibility to self outweighs, must outweigh, responsibility to the community.
But where?
Likely, few have considered the above dilemma specifically, but the question posed is one that every person faces in his or her life, all the time. Where does one’s responsibility to oneself end, and a wider responsibility to the community begin?
If I am a successful hunter and fill my winter stores, is it right and just for me to let my neighbor go hungry? If feeding my neighbor would mean rationing for me, a winter of privation but not death, is it still my duty to save the unsuccessful hunter?
I am surprised by how many people I have met who would say that it is not, that their growling belly is not worth a neighbor’s life, and who justify their claim by blaming their neighbor for being less successful in the hunt.
Again, the example is extreme, but moving now toward the commonplace, toward the daily choices we all face in our lives, the choices are no less crucial. What is your responsibility beyond the self? To your partner, your children, your brothers, your parents, your cousins, your neighbors, a stranger?
These are the questions that will define you as a person, I think, more than anything else you might do.
The laws of a kingdom try to define these lines of responsibility in the daily lives of citizens. In the village of Lonelywood in Ten Towns, for example, a successful hunter is bound to share all bounty beyond one full meal a day, with any excess to be divided equally among all Lonelywood residents. But in Dougan’s Hole, another of the Ten Towns of Icewind Dale, those who cannot hunt their winter food will very possibly starve, and successful hunters can defend their bounty to the death, even if that bounty is so great that much will rot when the spring melt falls across the tundra.
No one in Dougan’s Hole tries to change these laws, or the common behavior that gives them credence. Certainly, though, there are folks in Bryn Shander, the hub of Ten Towns, who would like to see such changes, since the starving people of the Redwaters’ towns inevitably try to make it to Bryn Shander’s gates.
I prefer Lonelywood, as would my companions, for I have come to see philanthropy as ultimately self-satisfying, if not selfish!
There is in Bryn Shander an old woman who takes in the stray cats and dogs of the place. She works tirelessly feeding, grooming, hugging, and training the animals, and tries ceaselessly to find for them homes among the citizens of the town.
So dedicated is she that she eats little and sleeps less. I once asked her about it, about why she would give up that extra hour of sleep to hunt down a reported stray.
“Every hour I’m not at me work, a precious little one might die,” she told me.
The people of Bryn Shander think her quite mad, and to be honest, I questioned her grasp on reality and priority myself. Until I spoke with her, and then I found in her one of the most sane and satisfied humans I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. The warmth of her heart touched me and made me know the sincerity in her smile. This was, to her, a calling, a way that she, a feeble old woman of little means, could make the world a better place.
I have met few nobles whose smiles can rival hers in sincerity.
For I see myself somewhat akin to this old woman, and more so now after my training in the monastery. The greatest lesson in that place of profound teaching was the constant reminder of how little I truly need and the mindset to avoid the traps of acquisition.
The rich man is often owned by that which he thinks he owns.
The rich woman might elicit jealousy, and while satisfying to her, her provocation will harden the visages of those around her long before she has died.
Some people measure wealth in gold.
Others measure it in tears of those who mourn them when they have passed on.
I recognize and admit with contempt that my own preferences are not universal—not nearly—among the people I have met. Dougan’s Hole is in no need of new residents, and any houses emptied by the harsh terms of that community will soon enough be full again, mostly with people grumbling about tithing or taxation, and ready to go to war with any who would demand one copper piece from them.
“If ye canno’ catch yer food, ye’ve no right to live” is a common credo, spoken sternly about that town, and indeed, recited about all the reaches of the lake called Redwaters.
This is the ethical spectrum of reasoning beings, moving that slide between self and community.
My friend Bruenor is one of the richest kings in the region. The linked dwarven communities, from Icewind Dale to the Silver Marches to Gauntlgrym in the Crags, have come out of their wars brimming with wealth and power, and Bruenor himself already possesses a treasury that would make most Waterdhavian lords envious.
Is Bruenor bound, then, to open his gates wide to all who would come begging? How far ranges the responsibility of one who has gained so much? Farther than that of the farmer or the cobbler? If a farmer has saved a dozen silver coins and gives one to a poor man he meets at the market, should Bruenor, who has a thousand thousand times that wealth, dole out a silver to a thousand thousand needy others?
Or should he dole out even more than that, because his coins become less important to his own security and health once he has surpassed a certain point of wealth? Like dragons, the great lords of the north possess hoards of treasure beyond anything they might hope to spend in their lifetimes, or that their children could spend, or even the familial generation beyond that. Taking a silver piece from a man who has ten silvers hurts him and his family less than taking a copper piece from a family that has only ten coppers. And taking a gold piece from a woman who has ten gold means less to her family’s well-being than the tithe imposed upon the man with the ten silvers.
And the rule holds true so on up the line of wealth. The more you have, the less you need, and once all the basic needs are met, the luxuries become redundant and indeed flatten the joy of purchase.
Menzoberranzan is not unlike Dougan’s Hole. There is never enough gold and gems and jewels to satisfy the insatiable greed of the matrons. In Menzoberranzan, wealth is power, and power is all. And wealth is station, which implies more than power. For station breeds envy, and to the drow of my homeland, the envy of others is among life’s greatest joys.
This philosophy of life seems foolhardy to me.
A beggar at the gates of House Baenre will be killed or enslaved.
A beggar at the gates of Gauntlgrym will find a hot meal and a bed. This is why King Bruenor is my friend.