Far beneath the surface, beneath where the dwarves dared to venture, lay an utterly alien land. A land where the sun never shined and was instead eternally dark, only lit by the torches of those who dwelled there. Fungi replaced plants and dotted the mycelium floor. Millions of tunnels connected millions of caverns large enough to house entire cities. This was no land for the weak. Especially considering who lived there.
Unlike the high elves native to the surface, this environment housed a different kind of elf. A subrace molded into cruel beings who delighted in the suffering of others. The millennia they spent underground changed their appearance as well. Their skin became a light purple as their hair bleached white. They became the dark elves, or the drunei in their own language.
The most infamous activity the drunei participated in was slavery. While in no ways unique to them, the massive scale and brutality of them was unmatched. They would send slave raids to the surface to capture humans, elves, and dwarves. Once captured, they’d be taken underground to perform backbreaking labor, often killing all of them within a year. There were very few “Exceptionals,” which were slaves considered too important to kill.
Eldran was an Exceptional. He didn’t have time to dwell on it though. At the moment, a whip crack echoed through the tunnel, jolting him back to work. He swung his pickaxe into the ceiling, feeling the debris hitting his bare chest. If there was a reason he was an Exceptional, it was probably because he wasn’t a normal human.
Since before he could remember, his lower half was that of a spider abdomen and its eight legs. Its glossy black color contrasted against his light gray skin and white hair. His crimson red eyes could scare anyone who dared to challenge him. But most importantly, his odd body gave him several advantages over his peers. He could walk on walls and the ceiling of anywhere he was in, provided the surface wasn’t made unclimbable. He could spin webs to help him with his tasks. It could be said that he could do whatever a spider could.
After an hour of mining into the ore vein, he heard a loud whistle echo through the tunnel. He turned to face the source. Perhaps another reason he was kept around was because he resembled his masters. A drider, a drunei with the lower half of a spider, woman lowered her whistle. “Listen well, whelps!” she shouted. Her voice wasn’t powerful, but no one dared to ignore her. “We’re expecting guests today and they’re interested in seeing one of you! Don’t get your hopes up, worms!”
The drider woman, whose name Eldran forgot due to her being one of the less relevant masters, walked onto the wall. As she walked across the tunnel, no one dared to whisper a word, only watching her as she then went onto the ceiling. She stopped in front of Eldran and announced, “Eldran Blackthorn, you have been summoned! I trust that you aren’t stupid enough to attempt escape!” He nodded, making her face the crowd of emaciated human and dwarven slaves below. “The rest of you go back to work! Just because the most useful of you will be occupied doesn’t mean the quota will decrease!” With those words said, she stayed on the ceiling as the slaves started working harder.
Eldran smiled a bit as he walked towards his masters’ manor. One of the perks of being an Exceptional was that he was trusted enough to not do anything stupid. He had less supervision and could even get comfortable rations. It was still gruel, but at least it was sufficient enough that he was now muscular from all the work instead of emaciated.
He traversed the long and dark tunnel interspersed by strip mines that he dug. This was his life ever since he was five. Each strip mine had water dripping into puddles created a decade ago, their echoes are still memorized even now. By the pattern, he could infer that it was midnight on the surface. While he never saw the surface or upper levels, drunei clocks were set to follow it so they’d be awake at night.
The tunnel ended to reveal a large cavern containing the estate of his masters. While most slaves had to take the long way down on the stairs, Eldran had the fortune of having spider legs. He walked over to the web strand he made and reinforced throughout his life. He attached his legs to it and slid down. While some humans attempted to use his path, it never ended well for them. For him, however, it was fast enough that he reached the bottom in no time at all.
There was an eerie beauty to drunei caverns. Rather than the disgusting hole one would imagine, the drunei would decorate them to make them more homely. Gray grass lined the ground as leafless trees lined the paths. The walls were smoothed and painted a deep purple color. On the ceiling was a smooth and painted replica of a starry sky at night with a full moon right above the manor. Illusion spells made the bridge across the cavern, staircases, and web strand invisible, allowing the place to not be filled with eyesores.
The path to the manor started where the staircases ended, but his strand brought him down in a plaza made by his masters. It was large with stone bricks going around the fountain in the middle. More stone bricks lined the paths ahead and behind him with a large hedge forcing anyone here to go on one of the paths. In the middle of the plaza was a fountain with a fifty-foot-tall statue on top. It depicted a male drider killing a demon four times his height with a spear. It was a terrifying reminder that the drunei were one of the lesser evils down here.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Eldran walked on the path ahead towards the manor, noticing several drider children playing tag with each other. He smiled, taking solace in the fact that the drunei were innocent as children. It was just their cruel society that made them the monsters they were.
Eldran reached the front doors of the massive mansion and prepared to knock, only for the doors to open up. In front of him was a female drider twice his height wearing an elegant elven dress and a small silver crown. She looked down at him and said, “Follow me, Eldran.” He nodded and followed her into the mansion.
The interior had polished purple stone tiles with black marble columns lining the halls. The ceiling was high enough that even the tall drider wouldn’t hit her head on it on the second floor. Several elven slaves ran throughout the mansion, cleaning any blemish they could find. A dark truth of this land was that surface elves were captured and bred underground, far exceeding the birth rate on the surface. It gave them a large supply of domestic slaves without exhausting the surface of supplies.
Eldran followed the large drider down a set of stairs to the first level below cavern level. It also contained an elegant hallway, this time brighter than the one above. Bioluminescent vines lined the walls. They stopped by a large set of double doors.
The large drider looked at Eldran and said, “What we say beyond those doors will be kept a secret. Understood?”
“Yes, Mistress Morrigan,” he replied as she opened the doors. He scurried in as she closed the doors behind them. When she snapped her fingers, the room lit up to reveal that they were in some kind of private meeting room. She walked over to a large, bejeweled cushion on the ground. She sat down on it. Seeing this, Eldran sat down on a similarly large but unadorned cushion.
Morrigan tapped her hands together as she asked, “You aren’t that familiar with drunei society, are you?”
He looked up at her and replied sheepishly, “All I’m supposed to know is that you are my mistress and I must follow your every command.”
She smirked. “True, but I need you to know something else. Despite rumors to the contrary, us driders are a favored subrace of the drunei. We are favored by the Goddess of Spiders, Dylenthia. However, we are but one of the noble families. While I am working on usurping the throne of our queendom, there’s one concern. Despite what we told you, we are not immortal. I’m nearly four hundred years old. At that point, I could die of old age at any moment.”
“I’m sorry, mistress. If it’s any solace, I’m willing to sacrifice my own life to extend yours,” Eldran lied as he put on a show to make it look legitimate.
Morrigan giggled as she smiled down at him. Despite not often showing it, Eldran knew that she secretly liked him. “I’m thankful for the enthusiasm, but that could only work as a temporary measure. No, I need to become immortal.”
“Excuse me, mistress, but didn’t you tell me that immortality is a myth,” he hesitantly replied as he braced for a beating. However, he was spared the punishment since his fear sufficed.
Morrigan shot a web towards a book on a shelf, pulling it to the ground before opening it up. She quickly flipped through with one of her spider legs before reaching a page. While covered in dust and webs, Eldran could see that it showed a lake of black liquid somewhere near the Gates of Hell. It was a level far beneath even the Underdark where they were. While he could read the drunei text, he didn’t want to be punished for learning how to read.
Morrigan pointed at the lake with one of her spider legs and explained, “That is the Undying Lake. It is said that by drinking the liquid of the lake, you become undying. If anything, that sounds like immortality.” She then looked at Eldran and said, “I need you to get some of the liquid in a vial and give it back to me. As a reward, I’m willing to bend the rules and allow you to marry one of my daughters. You’ll probably be a second or third husband, but it’s definitely better than being a slave.”
“And you trust me enough to not drink out of it?” Eldran asked as he knew the weight of the task he was given. While he secretly despised the drunei, being an accepted part of their society sounded like a great deal.
Morrigan chuckled and replied, “I didn’t say it was off-limits, did I? By Dylenthia, I’d even encourage it! If you survive this trial, you’d be an equal to Daruzz himself!” Daruzz was the founder of her royal house and was the drider who the statue in the plaza depicted.
After a short period of silence, Morrigan continued, “Now then, I’m not going to lie. This is a dangerous task. So dangerous, in fact, that I’m not sending any of my sons, daughters, or kin to help you. You’ll have to do this alone. However, I will give you some supplies to help you.” She walked into a backroom.
After a couple of minutes, she returned with several items in her hands. She laid them down between the cushions before retaking her seat. She pointed to the spear and explained, “While I’m not able to give you the Lance of Daruzz, I can give you my old spear. I used it to kill a demon in my youth, so I expect it to be useful to you.” She then pointed at the pouch and explained, “While it looks like a simple coin pouch, it’s enchanted with the Spell of Infinite Holding. It has enough space to hold anything you need, even if the less than stellar enchantment will often lead to the wrong item being summoned. It currently holds six throwing knives, several rolls of bandages, antivenom, and enough water and food to last a week. You will have to hunt and gather water to sustain yourself.”
Eldran looked at it and asked, “Is that all?”
Morrigan frowned and explained, “Unfortunately, I can’t give you much more without looking suspicious. If I had to explain that I sent you on this quest, my descendants may be too eager to go on this journey themselves.”
He nodded. “Understood. Just lead me to the entrance.”
She spread out her arms and muttered something in Old Elven, which Eldran didn’t understand. As she did, he felt himself becoming lighter as a smoke cloud started to envelop him. She looked at him and said, “You’re going to be teleported to an abandoned temple far below this layer. From there, I expect you to find the lake on your own. Remember, my immortality depends on you.”
Eldran wanted to comment, but he was whisked away before he could.