R. Salvatore - Archmage

The Darkening was the achievement that afforded him that possibility. The Darkening had elevated him in the eyes of all the drow. Few in Menzoberranzan would utter the name of Tsabrak Xorlarrin without the title of archmage attached.

But now it was gone.

Would the others see this as a sign that Tsabrak had lost the favor of Lolth, Matron Mother Zeerith wondered? Would they extend that criticism to House Xorlarrin, to Q’Xorlarrin?

“I felt the power,” she heard Tsabrak muttering to himself, and she turned back to regard him. He sat in the chair, eyes downcast, shaking his head slowly.

“True power,” he said. “The goddess flowed through me in beauteous power. She would take the Weave and make of it the Web. The new age would be heralded in, and I, Tsabrak, would lead that new age.”

“You alone?” Matron Mother Zeerith asked sharply, and Tsabrak looked up at her.

“House Xorlarrin,” he quickly corrected himself. “Who better? We have the most wizards. We-you! — have ever exalted in them, in us, in me, and have given to the males of your family hope unknown among the others of Menzoberranzan. I was positioned-”

“ We were positioned!” Matron Mother Zeerith interrupted.

Tsabrak nodded. “But it is gone, Matron Mother. The skies are bright once more. And there were whispers. .”

He lowered his gaze once more and looked as if he might break down.

“What did you hear, Tsabrak?” Matron Mother Zeerith demanded. “When you walked among the folk of the Silver Marches, what did you hear?”

“Mielikki, the goddess,” he whispered. “It is said that she countered my magic, and did so through the body of the heretic Drizzt Do’Urden.” He looked up as Matron Mother Zeerith gasped.

“I have failed the Spider Queen,” Tsabrak said. “You should give me to the primordial.”

Matron Mother Zeerith dismissed that with a snort, and waved away Tsabrak’s words. “If you truly failed the Spider Queen, we would make of you a drider, fool.”

“Then do so!”

“Shut up!” she ordered. She rushed back at Tsabrak and skidded down to put her face right near his. “You did not fail. The magic failed, expired, or was defeated. We cannot know which. How draining was it for the Spider Queen to hold back the light of the sun on the World Above? Perhaps she intended the Darkening for only a certain period of time, and when our people withdrew, what was to be gained by holding strong to it?”

“It pains me to think that our beloved goddess has suffered yet another defeat. .”

“Enough of such foolishness,” Matron Mother Zeerith warned.

“And one with which I was so intimately involved,” the wizard said.

“We do not even know that it was a defeat,” Matron Mother Zeerith reminded him. “We will continue our work in bringing home our fallen and properly disposing of them. We will give due thanks to the Spider Queen with our every action. We cannot know her thoughts, and so we act with only good intentions to her, our Lady of Chaos.”

Tsabrak stared for a long time, but gradually began to nod. “Thank you,” he said. “My shock-”

“Say no more about it,” Matron Mother Zeerith interrupted. She pulled his head close against her and stroked his short, thick mop of white hair, comforting him, cooing softly in his ear, reassuring him.

But inside, Matron Mother Zeerith was anything but calm or reassured. Tsabrak’s dismay was clear, and surely a straight line from it to the now-failed Darkening gave him reason to worry.

For Matron Mother Zeerith, though, that fear was multiplied a hundredfold. She was until recently the Matron Mother of the Third House of Menzoberranzan, Lolth’s own city. She was a high priestess of Lolth, but she was not much like her peers, not the Baenres or the fanatical Melarni. Matron Mother Zeerith did not adhere to the hierarchy so common in Menzoberranzan. House Xorlarrin’s power came from the men of the House, not the women, from the wizards and not the priestesses.

It had been Matron Mother Zeerith’s hunch that this would be the new paradigm, and she thought her instincts correct when Lolth made a try for the goddess Mystra’s Weave. She thought her efforts well rewarded when Tsabrak, not Gromph Baenre, had been chosen to enact the Darkening.

In the new paradigm, would any House hold higher favor with Lady Lolth than House Xorlarrin? Would not her new city become the glorious enclave of Lolth, and so Menzoberranzan would be the satellite?

But now the Darkening was no more.

And Q’Xorlarrin was burying scores of dead.

Zeerith had suffered great losses in her entourage, in her family.

Lolth was angry, Zeerith believed. Would she focus that anger on Q’Xorlarrin, on Tsabrak, on Zeerith herself?

She continued to stroke Tsabrak’s hair for a long while, drawing as much comfort as she was giving, for what that was worth.

Matron Mother Zeerith, who understood well the wrath of the Spider Queen, feared that it wasn’t worth much.

Errtu chuckled, a wet and throaty noise that sounded as if it was soon to be accompanied by fountaining gouts of vomit.

“You are a beautiful one,” he said to the small figure standing in front of him.

Off to the side, out of the swirling, fetid mists, came a hulking, vulturelike vrock, a battered drow form writhing in one of its powerful clawed hands. On a nod from the other drow female, a doppelganger to this very captive, the vrock dropped its battered prisoner and bird-hopped away into the shadows.

That drow, prone in the muck, managed to turn her filthy head to regard the other, the one that looked exactly like her.

But looked like her for only for a moment longer, as the imposter K’yorl burst free of that restrictive drow form to become once more a creature with the lower torso and legs of a gigantic spider, and the shapely upper body and painfully beautiful face of the most exquisite drow of all.

She held up her right hand, nodding contentedly at the small digits that had already regrown to replace the ones Balor’s lightning sword had taken from her.

K’yorl whined and buried her face in the muck before the deadly brilliance of Lady Lolth.

“Your physical beauty is exceeded only by the beauty of your cunning, Goddess,” Errtu said, grinning widely.

“When Gromph weakens the barrier, Menzoberranzan will know chaos as never before,” Lolth replied.

“And you will rid yourself of the pesky demon lords, and when they have abandoned the Abyss to play in the Underdark of Toril, you will build your army,” said Errtu.

“Beware your tongue, Errtu,” Lolth warned. “Your betters lurk in the fog.”

The mighty balor grunted, but nodded.

“We had all thought you defeated, Spider Queen,” Errtu said. “When you lost the Weave, and then watched as Tiamat’s plans, too, were foiled, we wondered, truly, if perhaps you would recede.”

“In reminding me, do you gain pleasure, Errtu?” Lolth asked. “For I should remind you that were I to destroy you here in this place, your home, you would truly be obliterated, never to return.”

“But it is a great compliment that I offer,” said the balor. “For you have not receded, skulking into the shadows, and truly, great Lady of Spiders, great Goddess of Chaos, this ambition and plan are your greatest scheme of all.”

“And you stand to gain,” she reminded him. He nodded, growled wickedly, and smiled hopefully. “Did I not promise you that Balor would be removed? That you could thrive in his absence?”

“Unending ambition, great Lady of Chaos,” said Errtu, who was clearly elated by the developments. “It is how we survive the boredom of passing millennia, is it not?”

“And yet, if you climb to the highest point you will ever know, it will leave you merely at the lowest point I have ever known,” Lolth said, a most vicious reminder of their relative stations.