"You know what I hate?" Nedelyne panted, trying to ignore the exertion that was threatening to claim her muscles. All around them the stone was quiet, figures of their fellow students paralyzed on the ground from enchantments. This was one of their tests, of a competitive nature.

They'd worked out an excellent system, beginning as a team and ruthlessly cutting their way through their opponents. But after being separated from Alystin, now it was just the two of them.

"What?" Sabal asked, nimbly twisting just out of reach of the cleric's blade and bringing her own sword down on the offending hand with a sharp crack.

"Ah! Elg'caress!" Nede snarled, barely managing to keep hold with her now paralyzed hand. It hurt like a bastard, too. She fumbled with her blade for a moment and then caught it in her other hand. The cleric adjusted her stance so she lead with her off side and hurled herself forward to inside Sabal's guard. Nedelyne dropped her point and swept her hand up with a twist of her wrist. Her blade shoved the wilder's out of the way and the hilt struck hard in the cheekbone beneath one baleful amber eye.

Sabal dropped her blade and grabbed her friend's wrist with one hand, sweeping Nede's legs out from under her. They were a tangle on the floor now, snarling and each struggling for advantage. Nedelyne was larger and stronger, but she had to admit that Sabal made excellent use of the leverage she got. The cleric drew the dagger that was her constant companion, keeping it flat against her leg so the wilder couldn't use it against her and grabbed an arm, pinning Sabal neatly.

It worked somewhat less well than Nede'd envisioned, particularly when Sabal pulled a leg free and slammed her heel into the cleric's chest. She felt her heart skip a beat, and not in a good way. It was a good thing they got along well, or else the noble knew that would have hit her in the face.

"You were...saying?" Sabal breathed, getting to her feet. One of her shoulders was aching furiously from her friend's attempt to pin. Nedelyne had almost dislocated it.

"I hate that you let me win," the cleric snarled, finding her second wind. Nedelyne launched herself up and then into a tackle, her shoulder hitting the wilder squarely in the solar plexus. Sabal folded neatly over the priestess's shoulder, the breath leaving her in a sudden whoosh.

Sabal hit a jutting stalagmite with an explosive crack of breaking ribs. When the blunted blade punched into her torso, her whole body stiffened and went unresponsive. Breathing was a struggle, particularly when every inhale felt like she was being knifed by several very angry, very large trolls.

The novice priestess was barely on her feet, but managed a grin. "At least you make me work for it."

On the bright side, Sabal didn't have to wait long for a rescue. In only a moment or two, the enchantments were suddenly lifted. She stayed very still all the same, trying not to think about the pain. "I try," she said very softly, so as not to make her chest move too much. After a moment of steeling herself, she grit her teeth and levered herself up with a growl of pain. "I will need healing for that little rock trick."

Nedelyne gave her a cheeky bow. "My pleasure," she said with a grin. "Shall I carry you to Faeryl?"

"Not if you want to live," Sabal ground out. She bared her teeth at Nede in what was either a grimace or a parody of the cocky smile. "Get walking, you little elg'caress."

"Might I say that your charm and eloquence are yet to be surpassed?" Nedelyne said, milking this for all it was worth. She enjoyed the wilder's company, but that didn't mean she was above tormenting Sabal on occasion.

"Do you speak well with your face through the back of your head?" Sabal asked, flexing her fingers before curling them into a fist. She had one eyebrow raised slightly in an expression that boded a definite willingness to do her friend harm.

"Point taken," the cleric said with a respectably small amount of smugness. They walked together to where one of the more experienced priestesses was sitting and working healing spells, sporting no small number of bruises herself. People tended to be gentle when taking her out of the fight, of course, for fear she would just leave them in various states of injury. "Faeryl, would you care to handle Sabal's ribs?"

The healer gave them a long-suffering sigh and rolled her eyes slightly. "If I must," she said, weaving a small spell near Sabal's side. She muttered incantations, brow knitted in disapproval. After a moment, there was a series of sharp cracks that almost brought Sabal to her knees, the ribs snapping themselves back into place. Nede grabbed her companion's arm, steadying Sabal as she blacked out and then came straight back to wakefulness.

"Vith!"

"Very eloquent indeed," Nede said, patting her shoulder. "How do you feel now?"

Sabal smoothed out her hair with one shaky hand and cleared her throat thickly. "Better. My thanks, Faeryl," she said, looking around the open field. With the competition at its end, the Underdark terrain had vanished as if it were a dream, leaving everyone just a little bit disoriented and feeling remarkably exposed.

"Let's find Aly. I imagine she gave a good accounting of herself even after that rockfall. If Ilivarra still has her face, she should count herself lucky," Nede said.

Alystin had pulled herself up and was feeling gingerly at her back, where the blow had hit. She scowled up at her friends when they sauntered over. "I could have used you," the female mage said accusingly.

"I'm sure you could have, as we clearly have the powers to prevent cataclysmic stalactite collapses," the cleric said sarcastically, offering her hand. Alystin growled at her smirking friend and got up on her own, leaning on her staff. Nedelyne just shrugged. "So, did you get Ilivarra?"

That brought a smile to the mage's face. "Nailed her right in the chest with an ice spell. I'd love to see her walk that one off."

Nede felt the adrenaline fading and a powerful twinge of pain hit her in the sternum, where Sabal's foot had connected. "I'm familiar with the feeling, I think. Goddess, Sabal, did you have to hit so hard?"

The amber-eyed drowess shrugged slightly. "Sorry, Nede. Next time I'll aim for someplace softer, like the head."

"At least no one can strike a match on my face," the cleric said before pulling Alystin a long after them. "Come on, we placed well. Let's celebrate!"

"This is code for her ditching us for a male after a few drinks, isn't it?" Aly muttered to the wilder.

Sabal shrugged with a faint smile. "This time, just try not to win at cards so much. We want to be able to go back to somewhere."

It felt like only minutes later when the mage spoke again in the smoky confines of the Widow's Den. "I can't believe I agreed to this," Alystin growled under the noise of drinking and general misbehavior by the students. They were granted more privileges than the average male studying at Melee-Magthere was, but she would have been completely happy shut away in Sorcere's walls. The taverns were full of noise and fights and dirt, not to mention people stumbling into her or shouting right by her sensitive ears.

It was times like this where she envied Sabal's ability to completely shut out everything she didn't want to hear and focus on the cards. The wilder's hands were still very certain and nimble, her drink sitting near her elbow completely untouched. "Time out isn't going to do you any harm," she said, sliding some tokens forward. "I see Nede was distracted on her way back."

"Mhm. I'll play her hand," Aly said, leaning over and sliding that set of cards to her. She measured them judiciously. "Three orbben and two cressen."

Sabal gave a low whistle. "Nice hand."

The mage glanced over at where Nedelyne was beginning to pry herself away from a handsome male and smiled wickedly. "Oh, certainly. But I think she'd fold." She slid the cards in, losing a fair portion of her coins to Sabal's hand.

"Where'd all my money go?" the cleric asked when she sat back down at the table, looking back over her shoulder at the male still.

"Mm. You were betting with a bad hand," Sabal said, her expression unreadable as she shuffled the cards again.

"Xsa ol! I thought I knew better than that. Anyway, what was I talking about earlier? Oh, right. Aly, it's not healthy to spend all that time shut up alone with books. A tumble now and again would make you so much more relaxed," Nedelyne said, leaning forward with a look on her face that suggested serious intent.

Alystin made a face. "No offense, Nede, but you're the last person whose advice I'll take. Quality over quantity."

"Well, you'll never get the former without a bit of the latter. Right, Sabal?"

The wilder looked up, bafflement scrawled plainly across her flawed features. "And your long association with me has led you believe that I'm an expert on this how?"

"You don't have to know anything. Just agree. Aly hangs off what you say," Nedelyne said with a wave of her hand.

"I do not!" Aly shot back, bristling slightly at the implication. "I am a noble!"

"Right, so if you could do it, you would." Nedelyne was well-versed in how to probe people in just the right way that they would do what she wanted. "But I suppose I can sympathize if you're not up to the challenge."

The noble's knuckles tightened slightly and she let out a hiss of breath, eyes narrowing dangerously. Sabal was about ready to calm things down with a few words, but then the mage stood up. "Fine." The word came out as a snarl flung at them before the mage stalked off.

"Tactful, Nede," Sabal muttered, watching Alystin go. She had to admit, she wasn't pleased with either the intervention or the result. Something told her this was something that wouldn't end well somehow.

"She'll thank me when she's feeling better. Besides, it's been at least months. No wonder she's such a pain," the cleric said. "Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind."

Sabal didn't answer, shuffling the cards up again and straightening the deck with a few sharp taps before pulling her drink in front of her. Nedelyne would be at the table for maybe a handful more minutes and then she'd be on her own. Alystin might come back and settle down, but it was unlikely. Even though the sting of anger was quick to fade in their healer's mind, she was not about to have her pride wounded by stepping away from a challenge.

"I think I'm going to head back," the wilder said finally, ignoring every protest. She figured had earned some rest.


Aly hated this.

Her arms curled around her knees, clean clothes sticking to her damp body. The second bath felt like it had done nothing beyond sear her flesh with heat and steam. Instead, that feeling of dirt, of sickness in her stomach was still there. The anger made her hands tremble where they knotted and pressed into the flesh of her thighs. Why did he have to be interested? Why couldn't I have just kept walking?

It hadn't been intentional. She'd seen the male approaching but had been trapped by the need to somehow beat Nedelyne long enough for the siren call of a body's desires long ignored to overtake her. The words he had said really weren't important, the same little song and dance always used when a male was interested and wanted to offer his company to a female. And despite everything she shouted at herself in the confines of the mind, it was a temptation she'd been unable to resist.

You enjoy it, the phantom voices in her mind whispered. The power, the control. The ability to inflict harm.

She wanted to deny it so badly, but the part of her that stood back and watched as she built her own ecstasy on the suffering of another wouldn't let her memory offer that absolution. Every begging plea, every gasp of pain had only egged that black demon curled around her heart on, driving it to sink its spurring claws even deeper.

How it began was blurry thanks to that song of need and desire that seared through her whole body. But she could remember too clearly the whimpers and cries, the taste of copper and salt sweat, the feel of skin tearing beneath her fingernails... Some part of her knew it was wrong even as she'd left her damage, marks proving that she'd taken what she wanted. That for a little while, she'd been the one meting punishment instead of receiving it. He deserved it, of course. Every drow did. In her shoes, anyone would have done the same.

Just like Sinjss. Just like Chardalyn. Just like the Matron.

She wished she would be gentle, but the anger always came. And then when it faded, she just left without a word and scrubbed herself here in the baths. She hated the way it made her just like them. She remembered being too young to understand and hearing begging and pleading for mercy through the door. She remembered perching on the edge of a bed and watching the Patron—her father, though she'd never dared say it aloud—try to tend to his own wounds with hollowness in his face.

Those were the nightmares she had: of waking up and realizing that she had become no different than Chardalyn; of hating until everything she was burned away; of turning from the little girl who suffered at those hands to the sneering monster that inflicted it.

How different was she really?

"Aly."

The noble didn't look up at the sound of her name, inner turmoil as clear in her face as it was across the surface of her mind. Sabal sighed and knelt down on the stone next to her mage, armored hands turning the familiar gray eyes to look into her own. These were emotions she had seen before: guilt, anger, pain, remorse, regret, and shame. But here they seemed doubly worse, haunting the visage of her mage.

Anger focused on those amber eyes in a surge. It was a desperate attack, a last ditch attempt to shield wounded pride and fear and vulnerability behind bitterness and cruelty. Sabal felt it and paid no heed to the whirlwind of poison words directed at her. Instead, she cut it off with her own quiet, firm voice.

"Let me help?"

Say no. Say no. Say no. She'll see. She'll see and she'll go away. Or she'll tell the truth. She'll say that we're the same. And it will hurt. But Alystin knew to take the help when it was offered. If anyone could make this feel better, just for a while, it would be her friend. So she found herself nodding.

Sabal was experienced at doing things subtly, though it had not been the focus of her training. Sometimes one needed to sift through memories so gently that the subject didn't realize anything was happening. She framed Aly's face in her hands as an anchor so the mage wouldn't panic before gently reaching out to fix this.

This was not going to be something she could ever magically rework. The memories were churning, some more vivid than they should have been, like Aly was trapped experiencing them over and over. Some slid together in kaleidoscopes of pain and anger. The blame and the feeling of helplessness was everywhere. Sabal pushed carefully, reigning in the emotions and silencing the voices of phantoms from the past. She smoothed along the ragged edges of self-inflicted wounds and eased them away. Where she felt fear, she did her best to project calm reassurance. This was far from over, but for the moment the mage had her reprieve.

When Sabal pulled back into her own mind and let her eyes focus in the physical world, her mage was sleeping against an armored shoulder.

The wilder sighed slightly but had no intention of waking Alystin up. Sleep was a good way to heal such things, particularly since this one would be deep and dreamless. But with these repairs so fragile, she couldn't just return the mage to her room either. Besides, that was not a moment of vulnerability she wanted exposed to the world.

So she sat with her back against the stone wall in the small alcove off the baths, listening to the sounds of soft breathing. Alystin pulled closer to the amber-eyed drowess, her fingers clutching at the belt holding one pauldron to the shoulder serving as her pillow.

"What am I going to do with you?" Sabal murmured softly. It was awkward to just look down at the mage curled up into her, but she didn't know how to be reassuring or soothing. The wilder made a quick search of her memories for a few vague ideas of what to do. She lifted a hand tentatively and touched Aly's damp white hair. Affectionate behavior had never been her strong suit, not with the armor Xullae had taught her to always construct around her emotions.

For the first time, Sabal realized what a gift she had in her own upbringing. Certainly, her mentor had never coddled. Xullae's temper was something to be feared and she had no qualms about venting it upon her student. Lessons were punctuated by blood and brutality. But there was no sadism to it either. That was what made the difference between drow, though other races painted them all with the same brush. Violence, murder, those were necessary parts of life. Not every drow, however, reveled in them.

She rested her head back against the cool stone and tried to make herself comfortable. They would no doubt be here awhile.


orbben - spiders
cressen - webs
Xsa ol! -
Damn it!