Illus. by W. England
he drow are a paradox among the races of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game. They are elves, but dark and cruel. They are infamous, known far and wide by players and characters alike, yet they are mysterious and subtle beings. Because everyone knows of the drow, they assume they understand the drow. They could not be more wrong. For all their infamy, for all their prominence as the most insidious of D&D villains, the drow remain largely unknown. Those who would claim to understand them and their ways have been misled by the foolish myths and deliberate propaganda of surface elves, by incomplete tales brought back by delving adventurers, or by cultural treatises specific to a particular world or setting, but not to the drow nation as a whole. Come, now, and see for the first time who the drow are, how they truly live—and why the surface-dwellers, grown complacent in their false and incomplete knowledge, would do well to fear them once more.
A DAY IN THE LIFE
The great stone bells chime from atop the enormous temple of the Spider Queen, signaling the start of yet another rite. Drawn from her trance by the reverberating sound, Velthura Vae stretches once, luxuriating in the feel of the spidersilk sheets. Then she rises, padding barefoot to her “window”—actually a crystalline mirror, enchanted to provide her a clear view of
Yvoth-Lened’s market without allowing prying eyes to spy upon her in return. Her lip curls in disdain as she gazes upon the bustle of the darkened streets below, the echoing sounds of shopkeepers and slave traders both cheating and being cheated by their clients. It is a scene of controlled chaos, and it disgusts her even as it calls her to rule it with blooded teeth and an iron fist. They are flies, she muses, not for the first time. They are flies, when they should be spiders. She turns away, to face instead the shrine carved into the far wall. With lifelike precision—and possibly lifelike color, though she has never allowed any light within the room to make sure—a stone image of a great spider returns her gaze, its front legs extended from the wall, its face that of a beautiful drow. She kneels before the icon of Lolth, the stone floor cold and painful on her bare knees. Head bowed, she raises her hands, intertwining her fingers with the spider’s legs. “Queen of Spiders, Weaver of Webs,” she intones in a rite she has performed every morning, without fail, for more years than a human lifetime. “I offer to you all my efforts and all my triumphs of the day to come.” She does not ask for Lolth’s blessing, or the goddess’s aid; she knows better. Her chamber door opens, revealing a bevy of servants led by Ashirza, her personal maid. She has no need to summon them; they all know the time their mistress rises, and they know too the penalties for tardiness.
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