Author's Note: This is where I'm going to post any Dungeons and Dragons/Forgotten Realms one-shots. None of them are related to each other. This first one is about Vierna since I'm inexplicably obsessed with her, but other chapters will be about other characters or OCs. The Brimstone Angels series is my favorite Forgotten Realms series, so a lot of these will probably end up being about those books.

Vierna's hatred of Zaknafein was impossible to satisfy.

It was bitterly ironic, to so deeply hate someone who was already dead. No hope of vengeance could arise from that hatred, it was to burn endlessly. Even the memory of his death was unsatisfying. The sacrifice had been merciful; far quicker than he'd have gotten in the battle that might have happened had the natural consequences of his foolishness been given time to play out. He hadn't even screamed.

Drizzt had screamed, when he'd been told of Zaknafein's fate. But she'd raised him from infancy, and his screams grated on her, made her feel like she was obligated to end them. It was not a pleasurable sound, when Drizzt screamed.

He'd been looking for Zaknafein when they told him, the stupid boy. Even if the circumstances had been different, if he hadn't brought on the wrath of Lolth with his cowardice, he was a fool for being so open about his... alliance with Zaknafein. Did he really think no one would figure out they were plotting something? Drizzt had even been brazen enough to ignore direct questions from Matron Malice, so preoccupied he had been with his ally. He couldn't have made it more obvious.

At best, it was weakness. And weakness was an exposed carthoid on the body of their house. At worst, it was a direct threat. Had the males been planning all along to abandon their house in its time of need, perhaps, even, to openly rebel?

She didn't know. It didn't matter. They were both gone now, Zaknafein to Lolth and Drizzt to the unknown. What they had been planning did not matter.

And yet she wondered, and she hated them for leaving her wondering. Each possibility could have counted as a separate crime against House Do'Urden, deserving of a separate unattainable revenge.

Sometimes she tried to call the sacrifice back to memory, to glimpse the few seconds of anguish Zaknafein surely must have felt as the knife twisted into his heart. But she could never retrieve that moment from the dark crevice her mind must have stored it in. She could only remember what came before. The calm. His smug voice. Like he thought he'd won something.

But more often when she thought of Zaknafein's last days, what came to mind was what she'd seen when scrying the evening before; his last sparring match with Drizzt. Flashing of the swords, blurs of heat, the rage –Drizzt's rage had been enough to make her proud, but then Drizzt had made his blasphemous confession and both males had dropped their weapons.

They should have ended the scrying after Drizzt confessed. They'd needed to see nothing else. But Vierna had watched on, seen the males running to each other with swords dangling at their sides, crying, embracing. They'd held each other like rothé. Cattle. Those animals coddled their young and embraced them. Spiders did not. Not even male spiders.

Male spiders were killed before the children they sired were even born. If only the same had been done to Zaknafein.

But Zaknafein had lived to influence Vierna even beyond the foul blood he'd tainted her with (and she knew he was her sire; it was obvious, but that didn't mean she was foolish enough to acknowledge it.) He'd trained her, too. Not as extensively as he'd trained Drizzt, of course. She was a female, meant for the clergy, not as fodder for patrols. Maybe that was why Zaknafein, despite trying to claim her as a daughter, never looked at her the way he looked at Drizzt. Why every smile he'd cast her way had flattened itself into an appropriate scowl almost before she could detect it. Still, he'd trained her, and he'd tainted her with those fleeting smiles.

She'd craved his smiles once.

The first had been early on, an agility exercise; Vierna had been lightly armored but unarmed, and Zaknafein wielding blunt imitations of his favored weapons. Her goal was to dodge, and she'd already had the wind knocked out of her once. The blunts neared her sternum, she ducked, and the blow meant for her armored torso came down across her face.

She'd awoken, only minutes later, with a gashed head, fewer teeth than she was used to, and warm sticky blood in her eyes. Someone squeezed her shoulder, and even had she been able to see Zaknafein at that moment it probably wouldn't have occurred to her that the battle was over. She twisted Zaknafein's arm as she sprung to her feet, and though he easily restrained her, when she blinked her eyes clear it was a smile they opened to. It was so unlike anything she'd ever seen. When she rubbed her eyes it was gone, Zak's manner restored to its usual gruffness.

But he would smile again, always when she surprised him. When he pounced on her suddenly to catch her off-guard, only for her to parry at the last second, without even thinking about it. When she mastered her step to the point that she almost caught him off guard. With fear of punishment being the only extrinsic motivation she'd known, a smile had seemed a momentous reward.

She'd bisected pillows she imagined as members of enemy houses. She made the common soldiers spar with her; she boasted of all the surface elves she would kill in the name of Lolth.

Punishment had been the better motivator, in the end. It was guaranteed. Reward was not. The harder she tried to impress him, the colder Zaknafein's gaze grew. By the time she returned home from school, she was just another cleric to him. If he could get away with it, he would have gladly killed her in cold blood.

She was not angry about that. She was angry that there had ever been warmth.

More than anything, the warmth had fed the weakness that grew in her like a parasite–Vierna's inexplicable inclination towards mercy, the instinct to soften up around those smaller than her.

As a child she'd been a sniveling little thing, flinching at violence, balking at blood. Even stories of war had made her shudder. She'd learned to hide it, but Matron Malice and her sister Briza had not forgotten. They still searched for it in her.

Drizzt had been a test, she suspected. Matron Malice had asked her to raise him because she wanted to know if she could harden herself enough to teach a male-child his place. Had she failed, the consequences to both herself and Drizzt would have been dire. But she'd been determined not to fail.

She'd hated holding the boy. But his crying had been insufferable, and he'd cried when she didn't hold him, so she'd always had to carry him around for hours, feeling his warmth against her, his softness, his breath. She knew how it made her look to be coddling a baby. But what was she to do? When he was older she could threaten and beat him for crying, but a baby could not be reasoned with in such a way. Even a swat on the ear just set him off crying more. So she had to coddle him, and avoid being seen coddling him, and fight off the urge to hold him even closer and press her mouth to his forehead, between those pretty purple eyes.

Zaknafein had undone the work she'd put into raising Drizzt. All those years spent putting the boy in his place, only for him to be snatched from her control and placed into his. Of course the stubborn child would forget what she'd taught him under the stewardship of that rebellious male.

She was glad, at least, that all of Drizzt's failures were blamed on Zaknafein and not her. The first time Drizzt had talked back to Matron Malice she'd been terrified of the consequences she would face. She'd told him to stay in his place, but of course, he hadn't listened and it would be her fault for not making the point clearly enough. Luckily, that incident had blown over, and his further transgressions were so clearly a mirror of Zaknafein's that no one thought of her influence on the boy. But it had been a terrifying few weeks, when she'd first relinquished control of the boy-child, knowing she'd still face the consequences for his actions.

Not even the academy had been able to undo Zaknafein's influence on Drizzt. She thought of his graduation ceremony. She'd been watching him from the mezzanine. He had a reputation, even among her peers, as the strongest of the males. She'd been glad that he, like Vierna, had overcome his weakness enough to become a real warrior. And then she watched as he, in full view of all Vierna's peers, turned and ran out of the ceremony. Because he "cared nothing for" the cleric who'd claimed him.

She'd tried to help him, tried to buy him another chance to come back inside. They wouldn't have thought much of it if he'd only agreed he preferred privacy and had been startled. What else did he expect? He was a male, he had no right to refuse a cleric; why hadn't he learned that yet?

And she hated the way he looked at her when she explained that to him, like it was her fault. She hated the disgust in his eyes, the disgust aimed at her, when he asked her if she had ever had "such an experience." His disgust should have been his own problem, not hers. It was his fault for being surprised about such a thing. She was a priestess. Her graduation ceremony had been years before.

And yet, his foolish comment had stung. Because she, in her graduation ceremony, her first time, would have preferred privacy. She had not enjoyed the screams of her "honored" classmate as the demon took her, her nakedness in the presence of the peers she'd long
known not to trust, the male–she didn't even know his name–grasping at her hungrily as though she was there for his benefit and not the other way around; she hated the sickening smell of the aphrodisiacal magic. It clouded her mind to the point of near-immobility; it made her feel not like the mighty female spider or even the disposable male spider, but like one of many helpless flies caught in the spider's web.

But she'd stayed. She'd stayed, and she pretended to like it long enough to convince herself she did, because she knew how to survive in this world.

That was what she hated most. Vierna had a weakness, a weakness she shared with her sire and brother. But Vierna overcame it, and they hadn't. She'd flinched the first time she witnessed a slaying, but Briza had whipped her and she'd resolved to keep a straight face next time. Her knife-holding hand had trembled the first time she'd cut into drow flesh, but Matron Malice had rebuked her, and she'd resolved to keep her hand steady next time. She learned, and they didn't, and they had the gall to judge her for it, to think she was the weak one.

Impudent males, blinded to their own stupidity. She hated them.

And she hated that Zaknafein had seen the weakness in her eyes as she bound him to the altar. He'd seen that nostalgia (which she hated) and that sympathy (which she hated) and she'd been thinking of Drizzt that day, and their happiness the day before, and the disgusting embrace. The strange, uneasy longing intermingled with that disgust. "Don't cry for me, daughter," he'd said.

"Take your lies to your grave," she'd hissed back; how dare he make this harder for her, even now, as powerless as he could ever be? How dare he endanger her further by drawing further attention to her flaw?

"Deny it all you want," he said, serenely. She'd never seen a death so serene. No screaming, no rage, not even resignation – peace.

His soul knew no peace with Lolth, she knew. And Drizzt's inevitable death in the Underdark would surely be long and merciless. She knew it, and she reminded herself of it; her father and brother, those most hated enemies, were suffering endlessly for their weakness. Surely by now, in their torture, they had realized why she was smart and they were foolish. And that thought should have satisfied her.

But it didn't.