Role

Chapter 8

. Balator, home of the eternally down-trodden and bitter. I,
too, once called it "home," though the words were spat from my
insolent mouth. I was brought up in the orphanage; a place of
young outcasts and pre-teen victims of various offenses, almost
all of which included the slaying of our parents. According to
Jaragh, who decided to tell me the tale in the hopes of
instilling some kind of horror within me about the nature of my
father's people, my mother strayed too close to a cave as she
foraged near the cottage where she lived. A drow took it upon
himself to take advantage of her foolishness and raped her. It
sounds fiendishly simple and commonplace in this harsh, chaotic
world that we are forced to dwell in, but consider the mind of
the typical male drow; their lives are dominated by the women of
the race. In many ways they grow to despise the powerful
seductresses whom they are bound to, and so when they are able to
partake of the meek, soft-bodied, common human female, they
release their hatred in a primal, furious act of lust. My mother was
brutalized until she fell unconscious, and when she awoke in the
care of her neighboring villagers more than a week later, she
felt something terrible...me.

. As the lives of the drow are very long compared to a
human's, so too are the pregnancies of drowish women. To put it
simply, the drow are more advanced and thus take longer to fully
develop. For nineteen months my mother watched as her belly grew,
wondering all the while what evil festered within, and what she
had done to deserve it. Her anguish ended as I was born, when a
nineteen-month-old curse, placed by my loving father, caused her
to bleed-out unnaturally. I suppose it was fortunate for me that
the villagers did not believe that a newborn soul could be
wicked and cursed (they didn't know much about the drow). But,
even so, they could not stand the sight of me, knowing what I
was. That is how I ended up in Balator, and how only one man,
Jaragh, now knows the story.

. They preach against the use of magic in Balator. The people
there have long been fearful of it, and rightfully so. While we
were young and impressionable (most of us) we were told of the
terrible havoc that the sorcerers of old had unleashed upon the
world. We were told that Ordasen's wrath would be upon our heads
if we ever dared to steal the power of the Gods for ourselves. I
don't know about the rest of the children, and looking back I
suppose it must have been the result of my villainous heritage,
but the more they told us how terrible it was, the more I wanted
it. Above all other magics, mortals fear those who tamper with
the dead, and to me that sounded irresistably fascinating.