Role

Chapter 4

Viera spent six years at The School. Daran's contract was crafty, it made
the rewards contingent on her good performance. And the bar was set high.
After a decade of slog, more years of mind-numbing, back-breaking work
awaited the fire giant girl.

The children of the elite of the Empire often ended up in this school.
Viera made some friends, mostly amongst fire giants and the occasional
duergar or human. She found the dark-elves conniving and untrustworthy.
Here it was she discovered the importance of social connections. It was
through a good word whispered in the right ear, or someone who knew the
right person, that you could get ahead of others in school. The usage of
privileged training facilities, reagents, equipment, material. These were
not fairly distributed. So Viera made friends. Her wit, charm, and good
looks gave her some valuable inroads amongst some fire giant elites, and
she even agreed to consort with a boyfriend from a good family, to further
increase her social connections.

Whenever she was not building her network, she was working. Each year there
were tests, as brutal as The Finals. And each year she excelled, and by the
third year her parents were freed from the mines and reassigned to the iron
mills. Iron making was a popular job for fire giants, their heritage making
the blazing hot furnace merely a slight irritation. By her fourth year her
parents were granted the status of freemen, slaves no longer. By her sixth
year they were given foreman privileges. Mahar and Nerah were grateful and
showered praise on their prodigious daughter, but she had grown distant
from them. They were too weak, and she, the child, had to help them. She
knew she owed them for her early education, but she felt resentment that
they needed their child to rescue them. Weakness is anathema to fire giants.