Into the Darkness; Nizana

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Caliber
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Into the Darkness; Nizana

Post by Caliber » Wed May 31, 2017 8:15 am

I.
Nizana Trisvaria, formerly of House Telarr,held the little parchment up and viewed it by the light of her dim candle.

Her quarters were spartan; the light was expensive. She had it anyway, preferring the dim shadows it cast it to magical light, which always shone too stark for her dark, and darkness-loving eyes. The words that the dim, stubby little wax candle illuminated shown, she thought, as coppery red as the ink she had used to write it. In the infrared spectrum, it wouldn't show, but in the light it seemed a little bloody to her.

The Archpriestess had tasked her with detailing the rituals involved with the Swords of the Temple; she had done a practical application, already, and now the only thing left upon Nizana's plate resided in her hand.

Oh, there were other things, she mused, as she spread fixture on the paper and set it aside to dry. Brizshala, the heretic, still drew breath on the surface, teasing all sorts of possibilities from Nizana's twisted and spider-webbed mind. That had been a fulfilling, and interesting victory; the right tease of one edge of that web or another, and she had shaken another spider off of it. She had told the Commander, and the commander had told the Sword, and the sword had driven the knife deep into the Elistreean's heart.

Nizana wished she had been there to wield that particular blade, but she smiled as she realized that she would have the chance again.

As the Temple's new mistress of rituals – a title that Nizana would never breathe around the Archpriestess, but something that she mused over privately and with great pleasure – she had already done great things. She had reworked the Sword ritual, putting a male to the blade in the process through duplicity, and then with her newfound authority, inducted a third priestess. And her 'older sister' wasn't even a Priestess, yet – and likely, Nizana would be the one to perform that one as well. The High Priestesses did not bother very far to train the new Acolytes. She, herself, had been the Acolyte of the First Matron, personally, and as a Priestess, she acknowledged that formidable Matron as her superior.

The only impressive Drow in the entire city, though there were a few others that had her respect, that sort of immediacy hadn't been commanded by any of the others.

Well.

She let the paper down, back onto the heavy zurkwood desk that she had inherited from this room's previous owner, and twined her slender fingers together over her bare stomach. Next to that paper sat another book – a book on Devils, given to her by a certain amorous, and clever Orog. Arakh, Master of the Sharps. The flesh of the thing made her skin crawl slightly, and the small hairs on the back of her neck near the Priestess's spider mark standing nearly on end. House Freth. The Sharps. She could practically smell the brimstone rising off of it; speaking the names of devils and demons, even writing them down, gave the paper they were writ upon a certain sort of power and allure.

Eventually, she would ward her mind against evil, read the text, and so avoid the obvious trap that had been set before her. And then she would pretend she hadn't, masking all her true thoughts behind her carefully crafted smile and docile expression.

Menzoberranzan may be the drow race's very center of intrigue, the great, testing legs of that particular arachnid casting its net far and wide, but the nearsightedness of these particular drow amazed her. It had been too easy to build her own web of informants. Now she listened to it carefully, and knew the whole workings of this little city, and every time any new opponent stepped onto the web, she could feel the tremors.

Zala would eventually return to the only bed in the room. Lacking a male, or at least a consistent one, Nizana had begun to, in a small way, look forward to the slave's return. The other female seemed a poor substitute as a bedwarmer, but Nizana looked forward to it anyway. Her shoulders had tensed. Her neck hurt. Her eyes also hurt, a little, from the strain that the light caused them. The slave wasn't the best massuse, but she was a better massuse than a spy.

Nizana had read the shame on the other drow's face, in the heat that had gathered around the bridge of the woman's nose and spread across her high-boned cheeks during the ritual inducting the Sword. It hadn't been striking to her at the time – she had been elbow deep in the man's blood, and filled with divine ecstasy at it – but now that Nizana looked back, she could tell that the slave regretted her decision, regretted not giving herself to Lolth as Nizana had offered.

Well, Nizana had given her the choice of handmaiden or Sword, and she had chosen handmaiden. She wouldn't have given the slave the choice at all, if she had truly cared; she would have just ordered her one way or another. These thoughts drew Nizana's attention to another message, more a drawing than a message, of a drowess with a hood, mask, a slender build even for a drowess, and a pair of kama.

“Oathtaker.”

Nizana tilted the paper to the edge of the flame, feeling the tenseness in her shoulders as she let the thing catch fire. She did not need it anymore, the woman was fixed in her mind already, but burning it somehow felt as though she were destroying some sort of proof.

Andunor, city of Devil-worship. Andunor, which seemed to Nizana, as barely a drow city.

Those of the faithful whose loyalty is weak must be eliminated.

That had been absent from the Archpriestess's litany, Nizana had noted, when she had been confirmed as an Acolyte at this city's Arach-Tinilith. And, what's more than that, Nizana knew that others had noted it. How many times had she warned the Archpriestess, hoping to gain more of her favor? How many times had Nizana seen, in her own city, the jaws of intrigue closing around the unwary?

Unity...?

Nizana smoothed her hair back, gathering the volumnous mess of white back into a low ponytail.

The only unity drow knew, the only unity that Lolth found acceptable, was unity through fear. Priestesses all knew a very dark, very dear secret, and kept it close to themselves - never spoken of, never voiced, but intuited in the same way that all priestesses knew it. Lolth loved drow sacrifices. Lolth loved female drow sacrifices, powerful female sacrifices, and the Priestesses who forgot that or failed to intuit it from their devotions and from the motions of their everyday lives soon found out that everyone around them knew something they didn't.

A lone Priestess did not stay lonely for very long.

Unity, of a sort.

Nizana licked her fingers and extinguished the candle, and then went to bed to await her slave.

She slept, shortly afterwards.
Last edited by Caliber on Mon Jun 12, 2017 2:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Into the Darkness; Nizana

Post by Caliber » Sun Jun 11, 2017 9:10 pm

II.
It must have been around the third hour of the cycle when Nizana Trisvaria woke to the sound of a snap from somewhere beyond the curtains of her bedroom.

She came full awake immediately, her heart pounding hard in her chest, one hand on her wicked athame dagger beneath her several pillows, and the other going to the shoulder of a slave that was not there. The drowess groped for a moment before her waking mind caught up with her racing heart. Of course, Callandra was missing and had been missing for some small while, entirely defeating the purpose of sleeping next to her most powerful, if frustratingly willful possession.

Zala was there, and the kobold, curled like a loyal dog at the end of her bed, but neither had woke with her and neither would be of help to her fending off an ambush except as confused body shields. From beyond the curtains, Nizana could see the flickering light of a dying hearth fire, and the shadows cast from its visible light dancing upon the rough-hewn walls. Untangling herself from her slaves, mostly just the other drowess, Nizana stalked, as lithe as a cat, to the edge of the curtain separating herself from the small estate great commons room, a dozen possibilities in her mind.

Were they Xal'rae assassins? Zau'myr, deciding to eliminate their eventual rival, earlier than expected? Had Arakh been planning this sort of betrayal all along? Erelyne, finally deciding to kill the upstart who would, eventually, inevitably take her place beside the Archpriestess?

Though Nizana was loathed to admit it, deep in the very back of her mind, it was this clawing fear that made her wary. One of Lolth's many blessings, it was that wariness that had kept her alive as long as she had been. As softly as she could, she muttered the abyssal orisons to light her eyes to the unseen spectrum, attuning herself with the ethereal plane enough to see those who walked in shadow and fooled the light. Knowing that whatever intruder would likely be enspelled, but expecting Erelyne most of all - may as well prepare for the greatest of her foes, and so easily overcome the lesser - she prepared several incantations; one of blinding, dazzling light, and the other of muted silence. Either might be resisted, but such was the best that could be done.

She ripped aside the curtains upon an empty room, eyes flashing hateful steel, unarmored but proud, weapon in hand.

Again came the ominous crack, followed by an equally ominous, wooden shifting noise that nearly saw Nizana smiting the fireplace to oblivion, where a log had shifted position, again, to settle as it died.

Nothing else happened.

The bestirred drowess put a hand over her rapidly pounding heart, as though that would do any damn good, and after making double, and triple sure that none were awake, or even roaming her demesne, she found a place next to that fire and stretched her bare legs out towards it, reasoning that if she were going to be kept awake at night by the demons of her own mind that they had best work for the pleasure of her company and ultimately to her benefit.

It took her a long time of watching the low, dark, and flameless fire, warming herself by its dying light, and reflecting on the various, myriad intrigues of the previous cycles, for her heart to quit drumming against the inside of her ribs, and afterwards Nizana felt cold and completely drained. She always felt so, after incidents like this, and had to patiently remind herself that she wasn't in danger, that she wasn't about to die. Neither of those might be true, however, in the broad sense; she had created enough enemies here that fearing death merited this sort of response. It did nothing for her sleep cycle, however.

How had she got so deep, so swiftly?

And so, she pulled from the nearby end table the tome that she had begun to write, flipped to near the back of it, and began.
Last edited by Caliber on Sun Jun 11, 2017 10:20 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Into the Darkness; Nizana

Post by Caliber » Sun Jun 11, 2017 9:51 pm

III.

It all started, as most stories worth recounting start, at the very beginning and at the very bottom.

First, my true name is Nizana Bel'vesetor, the daughter of Sinifein, who owned a House so low and so common that it might have been compared to the Spider's Web of Andunor. Certainly, I had best tailor my story to relatable things and places. Though I have little idea why I bother recording this, perhaps it will help ease my mind as I continue.

So let us say that I started there, a squawking female infant, which was bwael for Sinifein. She had already given three of her sons to Lolth, and never before birthed a daughter. She doted on me perhaps more than was proper, I now find, and for what it was worth my childhood underfoot was one of reasonable happiness. I have written before, elsewhere, that for a drow to escape the trials and eyes of Lolth is a fair thing for those who can manage it. I repeat this impetus, here. For sixteen or seventeen years I escaped. My earliest memory is the smell of cooking, and of playing, like a fool, in the soot, under the supervision of one of my older brothers as they went about serving females far their betters.

There were two of them, as you should be able to infer from my earlier paragraph. Lolth demands the sacrifice of the third son, and there had been many third sons. In fact, the manner of my birth eventually became a pain to me when I learned how exactly my mother had bothered to conceive my brothers and I. So there is will I will start, at the lowest possible low, the daughter of a worthless if reasonably talented entertainer who was, for the life of her, convinced, that her station was preordained to be much greater than her ability as a bawdy house mistress in the lower bazaar.

My birth, in essence, gave Sinifein the idea of becoming a common house.

In Menzoberranzan, like in Andunor, there are only perfunctory laws governing the formation of houses, but those laws are absolute. Matron Sinifein got her chance from the advent of my birth, and I was soon plucked from my warm and cozy understanding of the world into the halls of the Tenth House of Menzoberranzan, House Telarr. Jhadra Telarr, the House's Matron, was perhaps the oldest drow I have ever known, and she achieved the age through pure timidity matched with a sort of base guile which ensured that her daughters, of which she had several though only one worth mentioning – I shall mention her later – never quite bothered to challenge her position. She loved the company of my older brothers, each one of them a great deal, and quite expensively, as one of our family's primary patrons. Sinifein worked upon her for years to get the old, senile hag to apprentice me to one of her dumb daughters. For all of my New Matron's beguiling and carousing, I do not think that she thought enough of me to bother hating me – I was just a tool for her to get what she wanted, which seemed to be Sinifein's continued silence about her predilections.

So Sinifein got what she wanted, when House Telarr's soldiers, under House Bel'vesetor's banner, cleared out the fifteenth House's squat near the western wall, and afterwards, rather than destroying that little, petty stalagmite, the Council ruled the deceit well done enough to credit the place to the usurper.

Everything got forgotten. My brothers became noble, to an extent, and I became the first daughter of the Fifteenth House of Menzoberranzan. For me, this meant a great deal of study beneath Telarr's only Priestess, Cazna. But it was the last time I had ever actually seen my mother. Her death came as swiftly as her rise, though that is a later part of this story.

Cazna, though I've hated her dearly for many years and rejoiced (chastely and privately) at her death for many years after that hatred blossomed to joy at victory – another story I will eventually recount – was a vicious female. She was wiry like any spider I have ever seen, with a base cunning that did her mother proud, and as she was the heir apparent should her Mother eventually die, she was also quite elderly for a drow elf. However, she lacked her mother's crippling habits, and satisfied herself with occasional tours as a lesser teacher in the Arach-Tinilith. I am sure that she had tried to speed her rise to Ilharess in many ways. Poison, or assassination, or any other number of ways – and here, I mark her a coward. Not because she didn't try, I think, but because she gave up. Cazna was, I think, capable of ursurping her mother, but she had some of her blood's timidity in her, I think, and had settled for First Daughter of the Tenth House sometime in her fifth or sixth century. She and her mother, together, traversed that particular political web just well enough to deter lower houses, but not quite well enough to become greater.

Cazna is the first person to have ever put a whip to me, a true whip, and I learned to fear hers better than any High Priestess's snake-headed monstrosity later in my life. I remember the length of it, hewn and sewn from aged rothe-hide, better than I remember the woman's face. And I remember the crack – Snap! A sound like surface thunder, to a young female! - being my primary motivation to read, and write, and study the stories and teachings of our Spider Queen. Indeed, beneath that whip, I barely stopped, and hardly dared to sleep.

So from the front of my beginning as an Acolyte, to my appointment now, as a High Priestess, I have always carried that lesson very well; fear is the basis of all power. In every relationship I have ever seen, it has been fear that has placed the stronger over the weaker. Fear of death, fear of loss, fear of starvation – and for me, at this point in my life, fear of that cursed whip waking me up every morning for my studies.

To this day, I cannot sleep without another beside me, whether it is a slave or a lover, or I wake in panic. I have killed Cazna and taken great pleasure in her demise, but her ghost haunts me, to this day, in every minor sound in the night.

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Re: Into the Darkness; Nizana

Post by Caliber » Tue Jun 13, 2017 9:24 am

IV.
I wrote of Cazna last time, and I see no reason not to continue.

As I said, she was a spidery woman, grown old in Jhadra's service, and she was my first true teacher, though I was at the time a poor, if terrified, learner. My talents, I fear, have always drifted more towards my mother's propensities than actual scholarly pursuits. It has always been difficult for me to pay the strictest attention to my studies, and I was a difficult child. Looking back upon myself, as I am sure many High Priestesses must, I think that I was a fool and wonder how I survived the tests of Lolth.

But I did survive being Cazna's pupil. As I wrote before, she sometimes did duties, lesser duties, in the Arach-tinilith, which meant that in reality I was barely more than her secretary and janitor. It may surprise the males to learn that, during this period of my tenancy, I was barely more than a male myself though I was the First Daughter of a Noble House. I was allowed to look up, however, enough to see the subservient males, and also to catch the eyes of my fellow novices, on occasion. But I always looked up, further, and that set me apart from them. I think it is the reason I have become such a wonderful stonemason; my tutors were the great sculptors of Menzoberranzan. The work there, in the Arach-Tinilith, and in the halls of House Telarr – though they were modest and humble indeed compared to the Temple's treasures of masonry – has always inspired my own hand when chisel or brush finds it.

I copied manuscripts. At first I copied manuscripts because I had to copy manuscripts. But then, because I think I had an artist's mind even then, I copied manuscripts for the depictions within them. A girl can become very skilled with art when failure means the lash, and as Cazna had already scarred my back a dozen times before I was even allowed to set foot into the Arach-Tinilith, I became very skilled, very quickly. The other novices always thought this a chore. For me, it was a sort of escape.

One day in particular I was copying over the temple's canon, when next to me at the reliquary, one of my fellow novices spilled her ink. It ruined a full page of the canon, and all of us watched as she was beaten near to death and humiliated by Cazna and her imp companion. I've had plenty of 'intimate' encounters before that, and many after, but this was the first time I had seen such a thing done upon someone unwilling. Upon a female, like me. We were aghast, all of us. Even as novices, we received a certain amount of respect and freedom, and nobody would have ever dared to even suggest humiliating one of us, like that novice was humiliated. We had, until this moment, been under the general protection of the Yath, so that none would have dared lay a hand on us at all. This humiliation of hers lasted until my candle had nearly burned out down to the copying board and every moment was horrible.

Afterwards, Cazna actually taught – a rarity – and the thing she impressed upon us at that time, the twelve or so of us who had borne witness to the issue, was the following, as best as I can remember it;

“Lolth is fickle, Lolth is cruel. Her laws are absolute, and not to be questioned. All drow who profane those laws, even accidentally, should be subjected to her whim.

"Priestesses are the hands of Lolth on Faerun. And if you should err, it is my hand, my word, that will see you punished for it. Remember, children, that your authority comes from Lolth. The truth is that you are weak without her, stupid without her, and worthless without her. Anyone could do what I have done today, to your little girlfriend, here. But they will not, because they fear Lolth. They will fear what you represent. But remember that you can always be taken like this, at her whim, and keep it secret to yourselves as best you can, because if any discover your weakness you will not survive to become Her servants.

"Work hard to please her, and me, for I am her voice, for you, and I've your keeping. One day if you are lucky you will find yourself in my place, and you will teach this same lesson. And if you are unlucky...”

That is the first time I encountered the idea of the Yath as a whole, united. I think that every one of us in that room, at that time, was terrified that something similar could happen to us. It is also the only time I ever really saw Cazna express an ounce of compassion, because I could hear one of us in the back crying softly and trying to choke the tears back, and Cazna did not whip her. I think she felt, at that point, that we had been punished enough.

It is difficult to describe the gut-wrenching horror that you feel when you are so terrified of failure that it becomes impossible. I am a perfectionist for this reason. I know that now, as I write, or as I carve or paint, that I do so for myself. But I also do so, for Lolth. And, for Lolth, my work must be perfect, every time.

For this reason, also, there is a head outside the Yath in Andunor. Callandra, my slave, has used some sort of preservative on it and piked it for me, outside of the stairs. I told her that it should remain there for at least three cycles, but it has now been there for several tendays without rotting. The name of the head that adorns it is Thu'Ulstra Grelles, a former weaponsmaster from some fallen house. This 'servant of the Temple' knew the secret carried dear to all Priestesses – that we are weak, in our infancy, and easily taken advantage of. And she did not fear Lolth, as she should have, but thought herself above me, and fancied herself better informed on Lolth's will than I or any other.

Matron Malixtra is the second person to remind me of the importance of Cazna's lesson, and she did so in a similar manner, with this Sword. Namely, she heard me out, and helped me kill her. All Priestesses must support all other Priestesses, against those not of the Yath. It is law, but it is also self preservation. Had all of us, at that moment, stood up, perhaps we could have prevented the humiliation of one of our number. Perhaps Cazna wanted to put that in the back of my mind, of our minds, by the display. A single imp, and all of us paralized like rothe by fear. That, beyond anything else, that shared fear and horror, made us sisters from that point onwards. We never again quarreled with each other, as well, though that had been common up to that 'lesson' - at least, not publicly.

It is difficult to collect my thoughts on this issue. I have covered the acid scarring from my extended torture by hiring one of the Sharps' kobolds, to put onto my back, over the scars, a beautiful motive of my own devising. There is nothing to be done about the scar on my face, for I have tried to restore it several times and failed, so I have simply taken it as my own and begun to use the Amethyst Tunnel Spider image of Matron Eleon, with a white mark over its abdomen, as my artist's spidermark. I think that the nature of the torture I endured, having been struck, and healed, and struck, repeatedly, until I had despaired of ever escaping it, has scarred me for life.

I look in the mirror in my current abode, even now, in this dim and purple lighting from this lamp, and I see a strange thing. I am my mother's daughter. Not Matron Eleon's, certainly, but my own. I remember her face vaguely. But I am something different, as well. Sometimes I find it strange to regard myself in the sense of that longevity. I have started seeing Matron Eleon's traits in her sons and daughters, however, and so when I see my face in the mirror and remember my own mother's, my blood mother's, I feel the hair on my neck rise and cannot help but worry. Perhaps this scar will mark me out from her. Perhaps it won't.

Certainly, Sinifein's fate was far worse than any humiliation I have endured so far in Andunor.

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