Chapter Text
At 13 years old, I was 8.
The various Elf subspecies did not really physically mature any slower than humans did, but with a long enough life what was considered “mature” differed from species to species. Culture to culture. The Drow treated their young differently than human beings but then, the maturity with which they treated children was a strange, harsh thing.
A girl taller than me, the same age as me, set her hands on her hips and glared down at me.
“What do you think you are doing?” she asked me.
“H-he was the one that stole sandals, see?” a little dusk-skinned boy said as he pointed at me.
He also had one of said sandals on his feet.
“Shut up, Rozz,” the girl clicked her tongue, and the boy recoiled as if struck.
The girl pushed her arm towards me and let the matching sandal of my cousin’s footwear dangle from her hand, “And you, answer the question.”
“What do you think you are doing?”
“I-I didn’t steal them,” I said, despite the fact that the girl in front of me was only about 2 inches taller than me. Really, in another time, in another life, being dressed down by such a girl would have been comical.
Her eyes were large, and her skin, much like our cousin’s, much like mine, was dark with slightly exotic brown tones to it. Her lips were shaping up to be full pillows in the future and her straight eagle-nose made her look adorable rather than threatening.
The way she was dressed, with strips of cloth arranged by layers and only sometimes connected to each other by thread, was only a step removed from being rags. Her hair was a puffy mess and the day’s dirt matted it.
Her little hands were slight and slim, her limbs still narrow.
This would have been funny. Should have been funny.
But I was much like our cousin was.
I was a little boy of dusky skin with gray hair.
In Drow society, differences in strength, absent all other concerns, tended to be difficult to surmount.
But social differences? They were absolute.
Our tall cousin was a girl and we, we were boys.
Rozz shied away from the girl’s displeasure because he had been beaten around all the other times he hadn’t.
And I was nervous because I had observed it happen all too often.
I knew it was a bad idea, but it was impossible to remain unfettered in this underground hellhole that I found myself in. One of my male cousins found themselves hardly keeping up with the gang as we moved to different tunnels and I, I saw the means to rectify it.
To their credit, our clan would not have actually abandoned my cousin if he couldn’t keep up.
But they would have made him wish he had if he didn’t.
“That’s not what I asked,” the girl cut me off, “What do you think you are doing?”
“...giving Rozz sandals?” I lamely replied.
“Why didn’t you keep them?” she scowled, “If you were going to steal them, why give them to Rozz of all people?”
“He’s useless!” the girl gestured at our cousin. Rozz’s shoulders didn’t even slouch; it wasn’t exactly rare to hear that, not in Drow society. Not while being male.
But because he didn’t, I cringed for him.
And the question remained.
“Because I could?” was the only response I realistically had. I was the best at avoiding problems out of all the boys.
Consequently, I was probably the worst at dealing with them once I couldn’t.
But then, hadn’t it always been that way?
“Hah,” our cousin blinked and then snapped her fingers, as if that somehow made sense, “Couldn’t let the sandals go, but didn’t want to get in trouble, did you?”
Rozz gasped and looked at me as if I had set him up.
As if I were responsible for his trouble.
“I-I made them,” I tried one last time.
“That’s fine-hmm, you know, I don’t think I remember your name,” the girl rubbed her chin.
“Arione,” I said, hope, as rare as it was, radiating briefly in my chest.
“Ah, Aunt Arie’t must have shat you out,” the girl mused, “But, you don’t have to lie, you know? I think that was impressive. I don’t even recall ever seeing those sandals before!”
But as always, things were just twisted down here.
“Say, how about you show me how you did it?”
At 18 years old, I was 13.
“Get your garbage, I am going to need you to come along,” Jarna’t told me, now much older and at her full physical height.
The years did her good, and she had grown to 5 feet and 7 inches. She was no longer pubescent, and her physical development made her very attractive. Her breasts filled out her binds, her hips flared to the sides, but her small and tight ass still retained some of her nubile charm.
That she was pretty wasn’t a surprise; good enough eating and plenty of exercise made for a healthy look, and healthy was attractive. But elves being beautiful had never been the problem.
It was appreciating all of it past the ugly acts that came with it.
“What are we going to do?” I asked even as I did what she asked of me. I didn’t even have to think about it, I just obeyed.
Jarna’t was a female, and that would have normally been enough to justify doing what she said.
But power dynamics were as circumstantial as they were traditional, and in regards to this girl? I did whatever she told me to do. Because when I did, I did not have to do what other girls our age told me to do.
There was safety in that. A certain freedom, too.
But there were no illusions here about what this was. The only thing was that Jarna’t wasn’t harsh with her patronage.
“Mother Talia says it's time,” my cousin shot me a smirk that was half elation and half excitement. The sort that would have warmed many an old heart in another life…if they hadn’t possessed any context.
“Oh,” I said lamely as I gathered all the things that I could claim as mine. And only then, because Jarna’t could say they were, “Who are you fighting?”
“I don’t know,” Jarna’t shrugged, “But I hope we get blooded.”
“It’s bad enough we need to stay with all the worms,” she casually gestured at our male cousins. There was no malice in her voice, just a statement of fact. My fellow guys still looked away. Not out of shame, of course. They did so because we all knew our place, “But I am sick of being treated like a child.’
Me? I might as well have been like my fellow male family members, except that my star was already hitched to a girl.
They envied me for that.
But it did mean that I had to go with her, “So what do you want me to do? I don’t know how much help I’ll be.”
“Oh, I know you are a male,” she waved off me off, “But I am going to need every single bit of help I can get.
“You hear that?” she asked me with a winning smile, slyly looking at the ugly looks our cousins were starting to show me.
“You're useful! That’s why I like you!”
At 25, I was finally an adult.
Not because I had reached an arbitrary age that any Drow authority figure judged to be “adulthood” but because it was at this age where I became properly “blooded”.
I participated in a raid.
I handed out the clubs and the things that my cousin used to, finally, properly kill someone.
It had almost become something of a joke. 7 years, and no kills.
Jarna’t had wounded many, and been wounded in turn, in the quick skirmishes that happened in the tunnels of the underground. When the gangs had to move, they needed to scout not only the destination but the way there. Because we weren’t the only gang around.
Because we weren’t the only ones trying to find victims.
These clashes weren’t guaranteed to create corpses, but 7 years of them was a long time to not have much to show for it.
Even if 7 years of surviving them was reward enough in my mind.
A smaller gang did not set up a proper scouting screen one day. The cave where they hid away was thus poorly prepared when we came.
We came just before the “night”, when the tunnels would freeze. It was a bad habit to let your guard down while the tunnels were still accessible, but Drow developed bad habits as often as human beings did.
They were just punished for it more often and harshly.
That “evening”, we were “correction” incarnate.
The leaders of the small gang were shocked by our sudden assault, but a long life underground gave them enough learnt instinct to react.
Yes, many strangers managed to come together with all the weapons that they could muster to face ours as we rampaged into their home. But make no mistake:
This was a rout.
Jarna’t gleefully knocked a woman twice our age as we invaded, chancing upon a particularly confused one. A defenceless one.
One hit over the head knocked her to the ground.
Another dazed her.
Another stopped her from covering her head with her arms.
Another split it open.
That was that, then.
We were blooded.
But the fight wasn’t over.
The elite warriors of the gang managed to flee their home with the lives of most of their leaders and what wealth they could safely carry.
But that was fine.
They left the rest behind.
By the time WE were done, my cousin had taken two more lives and I…I had been there to hand her fresh clubs to fight with when her old ones broke.
I had been there to warn her when our victims were fighting back.
I had been there to pick up her trophies and her loot as she won them.
I had been her extra arms.
I had helped her spill blood.
As the tunnels froze hours later, as we were temporarily “stuck” in our victim’s old home, there was still the clean-up.
And I, I was still there every step of the way.
What was Jarna’t’s fourth victim, the number of corpses she’d generated apparently being the most impressive contribution to the raid, the older women in charge of the raid freely noted, was a girl who was trapped with a net.
Trapped with something I had also handed Jarna’t.
But rope looping her limbs together even as she trashed?
This was…this was something I did myself.
Jarna’t asked and I obeyed.
I tied this girl.
The fight had settled down by this point, and most who weren’t dying might have been considered for service in our gang. Goods and produce were being counted, and looting was being declared. Things were settling down, but we, Jarna’t and I, were somehow the only ones still active.
The last ones to still participating in the fight of the raid.
“I did it!” Jarna’t, hands and face covered in blood not her own, yelled at our leaders, “Four kills! Yes, bloodless no longer, see what I’ve done?”
“It’s a good show, girl,” Talia, the leader of the raid, said with motherly pride, “But she’s still alive, see? Don’t count your fourth until you’ve actually killed her.”
The girl we had captured, bound and beaten, was tired by this point.
In a single moment, we had come into her life and taken down her world.
And in another, we would do the same to her life.
The smell of blood, the smell of fear, the smell of death.
The heat radiating from the shed blood, and the wails of the beaten.
I wanted to run away from the cave, but I could not.
Not when my “family” cheered.
Not when their mood was so electric.
I was breathing hard. I was sweating profusely.
No matter my morals, no matter my ethics, I had still participated in this and was part of them. I could feel it too.
In the drumming of my heart and the heat in my veins.
I could feel the same elation, a taste of the same excitement, that existed among them.
It was so tiring to always be horrified by everything…
I, too, waited with abated breath when my cousin stood over the girl with a bloody club in hand, and a wide, toothy smile on her face.
I waited for the club to fall, for the horrific crunch and splatter.
I waited for the sickening feeling in my stomach.
Or, rather, hoped for it.
And yet, the blow never came.
“No,” Jarna’t said and a rosy complexion that had little to do with the blood shed had come into her face, “I have a better idea.”
Mercy? In here and now? Was that an actual thing?
A strange hope blossomed in my heart that I would have something to justify the things I’d done. The fact that I didn’t have much choice in things had done much to assuage my conscience, but this raid pushed that excuse to breaking.
I...I was at a breaking point, I realized.
I felt almost as though I wasn’t myself anymore.
“Here, take this,” Jarna’t told me as she… took her clothes off and threw them to me, trusting that I wouldn’t let them get dirty on the ground.
It was the first time I’d ever seen her fully nude, yet it didn’t matter at that moment.
Only all my aunts and older cousins did. They who watched with amusement in their eyes, as best friend took hold of what rags the girl we had captured had.
And began to rip them off.
“What is-” I began to ask, but stopped when my cousin took a hold of the girl’s leg.
And lifted it into her stomach.
“Urgh,” the captive girl blinked her eyes as my cousin spread her leg wide as she lowered herself into her.
As Jarna’t made pussy meet pussy.
“A show it is!” someone said as, before the captured girl could truly understand what was happening to her, Jarna’t started rubbing them together.
“A fight and a show!” a blood-covered aunt whooped as she stopped looting to see my cousin lose her virginity to a conquest.
Both their pussies were featurless save for their slits. Yet labia kissed labia as my cousin, my best friend, female female juices into her victim with their pussies.
The smell of arousal struck me. This close, I could practically taste the rape.
And I did not know what to do about it.
“Fuck that bitch!” a girl our age called, one of the tentative friends my cousin had made.
“Show her who’s her mommy!” another cheered and only made Jarna’t hump her victim that much more.
I tried to rationalize things.
I tried to put things into their place.
I tried to set myself aside of this grim reality, but I couldn’t. Not this time.
This time I was undeniably THERE.
Jerna’t humped against the captured girl until she wasn’t the only one moaning.
Until the girl was also grunting.
The girl even looked relieved, as if getting to live another day was worth THIS!
Breaths hard and getting fast, both girls were close to coming.
Aunt Talia didn’t say anything more, but she was watching.
And her smile was approving.
‘For the, hmm, gang!” Jarna’t moaned as she rose to a pitch and then shuddered as she orgasmed with the girl.
I had no doubt her poor victim would have done the same thing if the tables were turned; she had been a combatant in the raid, but the catatonic way she looked up, as if she couldn’t believe what was happening to her, was one I don’t think I could easily forget.
Nor square away.
I knew I would not be able to do the same to the euphoria on my cousin’s face. Nor the loud cheers and hot-blooded baying from the rest of the gang.
In that moment, I could not run from myself.
—-------------------------------------------------------
You.
Let me tell you a tale.
Once upon a time, there was this boy who grew up in this rather disadvantaged home. It wasn’t poor as we would understand it, but both parents worked and barely made ends meet. Maybe it was the alcohol that they each hid away from the other, and maybe it was a lack of forethought. The point is that times were always hard and so they fought.
The boy didn’t really enjoy being in this sort of environment and so sought ways to stay away from home. Maybe he’d stay at school as long as he could. Maybe he’d visit his friends as often as he could. It didn’t matter what it was, but he tried many things until he found a true source of escapism. And, as it turned out, it was chemistry.
His school called it a club, but the boy called it salvation. He threw himself into it because the alternative was going home.
Eventually, he would make good enough impressions and good enough grades that he sought a career in metallurgy. Not quite the jump from his past studies, but it was the only program that would take someone poor like him in his town and he NEEDED to not be around his family. As it turned out, he was quite good at that too and so, eventually, got a high degree in it and joined the workforce as a trained professional.
Things were looking good for him and, being free of his family, he was high on life. He met the love of his life and ended up repeating the same sad story as his parents.
Maybe it was that, given his upbringing, he was attracted to the kind of partner that wasn’t good for him, but to his private shame, his wife would eventually come to be an abusive one. It was a problem compounded by the generation of kids and so, eventually, in his adult years, he returned to a spot he had long left behind in his childhood.
One where he didn’t want to be around his family.
He threw himself into his career with the gusto the desperate had and sought to rarely be home. It was a relief valve that he was familiar with but, unlike his younger years, it only made things worse. His children, who he often didn’t see, didn’t really know him or, for that matter, respect him. How could they when all he did was be at work?
But the more problems he had, and boy did they collect, the more and more he sought an escape.
Metallurgy isn’t hard work, not really. If you know the subject, and have the years of experience, a man can figuratively swim with metal like a fish swam in the sea. But the man who had once been a boy stopped coming up for air at one point. And escape or not, the body needs more things than just work. It needs time to let go of stress, time to think and time to simply not be doing anything.
The man who had once been a boy denied himself all these things until, one day, he simply dropped.
Death from overworking, they pronounced his death when, really, all he’d ever been doing was running away.
And for his sins, death wasn’t the end of his troubles.
For his cowardice, he was then reborn as a Drow elf.
My old life started to fade away long ago, to the point I forgot the faces of my personal demons. Of the families I had continuously ran away from. But time dulled all feelings and brought new perspectives to past events.
The raid on the small gang had been a few weeks ago.
And today? Today I needed stone.
Living underground was quite the thing. Though, after 25 years of doing it, it had lost its luster and was, quite simply, a “normal” thing to me. To whatever degree anything that happened in this underground hellhole could be normal. Despite the Drow living underground they were still Elves. Blooded or not, 25 years was still considered very young. I would have said “teenager”, even, if that meant anything down here.
Though, perhaps, I would have gotten somewhere if I said “someone who had the poor habit of wondering where they shouldn’t.”
Because that’s what I was doing.
Furthermore, as a man? I was being outright stupid.
The thing is that there is no such thing as Dark Vision. Some creatures could “see” simply by perceiving sound, but even the most adapted to the dark who used their eyes needed something to make contact with their retinas. Be it very faint light or, in the case of Drow, my case, heat to see into the infrared.
The problem was that the tunnels underground got very cold, and so it was that a lot of the time, the only light source anyone had was their own body heat. Anyone traveling through the myriad ways in the underground had to provide their own torch, one way or another.
I wasn’t going too far from the home tunnels of my gang, but I was far enough that my breath would have come out as a mist if I hadn’t wrapped up my face. Not that I had wrapped up my face because I was cold, but out of paranoia: There were many things that could drop the temperature in the tunnels below freezing, and one of them absolutely loved CO2.
Despite that the Drow didn’t know what carbon dioxide was, there was a reason why everyone didn’t just keel over whenever some overworlder brought a lit fire underground. That was because various types of underground creatures and mushrooms, of which there were literal groves of, were voracious devourers of the carbon in the air. And sometimes, of those that produced it.
It was an easy safety measure to take, but I was pretty sure that it said something when deliciously pure and clean air was a source of danger.
So what I was doing was dangerous and stupid. Why do it then?
And the answer was that I needed to make something useless.
It was cliche to say it, but Drow society was like an iceberg. The most visible parts of it were the most awe-inspiring and terror-inducing parts, but they were just that: The most visible parts.
We had a huge city in a huge underground cavern that still managed not to collapse on itself. We had a caste of priestesses that worshiped a blatantly demonic god. There was magic being spent like tap water in great and vain displays, and it was all to the beat of cutthroat nobility who made the whole wheel move. That is what anyone who visited the City of my people saw. But, you know, to be anyone in the city, noble or slave, was to be in some way privileged.
Any member of my family, my gang because “clans” were something only “proper” Drow families had, would have traded their left breasts to be a beggar in the city.
Unfortunately, we were but Drow living on the outskirts.
That meant we had no fixed location to call home, just an endless expanse of tunnels and temporary caverns. Both of which we had to constantly move in and out of just to keep living. That meant the routes themselves were our home and, more often than not, we had to share them with many other gangs.
You probably have not been poor in the way that a truly poor Drow is poor. You can’t be. Even a slave holds value, but an outskirt Elf? They are an annoyance at best. And a ready victim at worst. Because, yes, killing other Drows is a culture-wide pastime.
Yet I couldn’t quite call myself truly unfortunate. Because my family, my gang, was on the rise. As much as Drow on the outskirts could be said to be.
So why was I making something useless?
Because my family was worse than either of my past ones had been in my first life.
The thing about Drow is that they had the fertility of human beings. So, by Elf standards, we were practically explosive breeders. I grew up with many cousins and perhaps even half-siblings. Yet even that was a bit imprecise because all Elves lived for a long time. I grew up with people to whom I was an uncle, a great uncle or a great-great uncle as my mother was the leader of the gang. Which meant she’d been around for a while.
I was indeed breastfed, but only because babies that weren’t died. And I, despite being male, was another asset. And a growing gang needed many assets. To my playmates, this was natural, but to me this had been strange at first. And then it had been disturbing.
Having a past life behind me didn’t allow me to behave like a normal babe, and then a growing kid. I was taciturn and quieter than a growing boy should have been. I was less curious and less willing to form bonds with others. I would have been a red flag for any sane household. But what you or I would call sanity was scarce among Drow. This was a norm male Drow needed to grow into. Because everyone taught them from day one what their true worth was.
The way girls and boys were treated? It was not equal and no one ever made any bones about it. Girls were bigger and stronger than males. Women were more sensitive to magic and matured more quickly. A single woman could, with time, produce her own gang while a male could only, only, ever join another’s.
That meant that my male cousins, the little boys I grew up with, couldn’t help but be spineless manlets who were more likely than not to pull me down, because I was the only one they could do that to.
And then, there were my female cousins.
“You saw that? She wouldn’t even look me in the eye,” the voice of Jarna’t reached me as I walked around, freezing me for a single second.
Since the raid, I’d interacted with her of course.
I couldn’t do otherwise. But what happened in the raid had stayed with me and I…
I hid now.
It was almost never lethal to meet another member of your family alone out in the tunnels, but I was deeply disturbed by her at that moment. And Jarna’t, believe it or not, continued to be my best friend.
My only friend.
You have to understand that I am not trying to put on airs by declaring a close relationship with a female. For whatever reason, she was the one that chose to associate with me.
Males were otherwise considered use-impaired.
You see, sometimes, if they didn’t have anything better to do, males were thrown into the heat of things and more often than not ended up injured or dying. But when males were being useful, it was because they were supporting the women by collecting things, carrying things, and being the ones to organize the homes.
But a young male who hadn’t proved himself useful might as well just be standing in the way of a swung stick, or a slobbering monster.
I had walked with aunt Talia’s forces in the last raid, but it wasn’t on the front line. It had been, technically, behind Jarna’t. I carried her things. Her weapons, our meager property, clothing and her loot. I was useful to her and was thus useful in general.
Despite the blood, despite the screams, I stood behind her back as we drove another gang out of their home. The girl whom I had grown up with, the girl who had promised that she wouldn’t leave me behind, that she could trust me, stood victorious as we decided what to do with our prisoners.
Because, yes, killing other Drow was a cultural pastime.
But rape was the cultural fetish. One apparently shared by noble and pauper alike.
My cousin wouldn’t do anything to me if she found me here.
I knew that.
But I couldn’t face her here, all alone, where no one else could see where we were.
Where I would be like the captive girl.
It was…it was running, I suppose. Though there was a difference.
No matter how much I wanted to, I really couldn’t run away from my new family. I either was my rapist best friend’s helper, or my use would be speculative. And I did not want to be a fresh body in the skirmish line.
So far, I had only done the things I had no choice in doing.
But that was no longer enough.
I had to-
I had to do something.
BE something.
I could not run away anymore.