Chapter Text
I'm five, and my father is teaching me my letters. We have no ink or paper, so he rubs them in the dust. He goes through the drow alphabet first and then the Taldane letters from up above. I practice every chance I get when the lady of the house isn't looking, rubbing them in the dust and scratching them in rocks, sneaking glances at every page of drow writing I can get my eyes on. It's my secret joy, shared only with my father, and sometimes he and I will smile and wink at each other about it.
I'm six, and I'm old enough to work in the kitchen with the halflings. The others on duty with me one day are young, but older than me, nearly men. I ask them why my dad doesn't sleep with the rest of us in the slave quarters.
"He's the lady's bedwarmer," one of them explains.
"That's dumb," I reply.
I share a bed with my half-siblings; we sleep cuddled up together in a pile. It's perfectly warm. Why would rich people want a room all to themselves if it's just going to be cold and lonely and they'll need a whole slave to fix it?
"Little people like us work in the kitchens and full-grown orcs like your mom get sent down to the mines," another halfling says, "but the only use for a human down here is—" and he makes a gesture I don't understand, and they all laugh.
I'm seven, and I've just used magic for the first time. I've recently finished cleaning up a disgusting mess, and I'm filthy, and I Prestidigitate the grime off myself. My mom slaps me, hard, leaving a mark on my face. Tears come to my eyes, not at the pain, but out of a sense of betrayal; my mom doesn't hit us. Seeing my face doesn't soften her glare or her tone.
"Never let me catch you doing that again."
Later, when she's calmed down, she explains in a whisper. My father and I are something called "sorcerers". It means magic is in our blood—in our case, the magic of Heaven. But my father keeps it a secret, and so should I. Drow get nervous about other kinds of people casting spells. Fatally nervous.
I'm eight, and I'm my eldest brother's shadow. I realize I'm not a full orc, that I won't grow up big and strong enough to work in the mines.
(My mother had kids with three men, and I was the only one with my father. The lady had said if they slept together again, she'd kill them both. My father explained that it's a good thing, it means she's attached enough to be jealous. He can get better treatment; he can get me better treatment.)
He defends me when other kids pick on me. He's everything I want to be. I follow him around, do whatever he's doing, pray to the gods to make me like him.
I'm nine, and I wake up crying every night from nightmares. My mom hugs me and wipes away my tears and asks me what's wrong. I tell her I'm afraid of dying, that I know I'm too weak and stupid to make it long enough to become a man. She tells me death isn't something to be afraid of.
"We're the lucky ones," she says. "They get to have nice lives here, and we're slaves, but when they die they all go to the Abyss, where most of them are slaves forever, or devoured for good. All we have to do is not be Evil, endure for a few decades, and then we get to go somewhere nice, somewhere we can have all the things they denied us."
And she tells me stories about the afterlives she learned from my father and the halflings, passed down from someone's great-grandfather who's a cleric or read in an old book somewhere. I could go to Heaven or Axis where I'd get to read every book in the world, or Nirvana or the Maelstrom where I could learn to change my form and try out being every kind of creature. No one ever starves in the afterlives, except the Evil ones.
I'm ten, and I ask my father about the surface. He says he grew up in a place called Oppara, a great city, and he'd been every bit as much a noble among humans as the lady is among drow. Court politics hadn't gone his way, and to escape execution he had fled into the sewers, and then further down, beyond the reach of the guards.
"If it weren't for me getting to have you," he says, "it wouldn't have been worth it. It'd have been better to let them drag me off and face the Judge right then."
I'm eleven, and my brother is dead. He'd been in an accident in the mine and lost his arm, and the lady of the house calculated he wouldn't be able to work enough with his disability to be an asset to the household. She'd killed him quick and clean. We'd all been agreed as a family that if one of us dies the rest can eat them, it would be an honor to nourish one of our own, but we don't get the chance. The drow keep him all for themselves.
The lady of the house is having an argument about the decision with her husband, a man I rarely see.
"—presents for your round-eared boy toy," he's saying, "but you can't afford to repair one that brings profit into the household?"
His voice is soft, almost whispering. He cringes as the words "round-eared boy toy" slip out of his mouth, half pained and half disbelieving; he stutters through the rest of his sentence.
"First of all, his arm was severed entirely, there's only one cleric in the country who can fix that. Second—" she punches him hard in the chest, knocking the wind out of him. He falls to his knees, sliently crying. She ruffles his hair and strides out of the room.
"What're you looking at?" he asks me in a very different voice from the one he uses around the drow women, and shoots a Ray of Frost right over my head, leaving ice crystals in my hair.
(He's almost as much a slave as us, bought and sold, but he isn't afraid of being killed for having magic in his blood.)
That night, my surviving siblings and I reassure one another that he's in a better place now. I wonder which one. I wonder if I'll get the same.
I'm twelve, and my father is dead too. He was growing older, and rather than watch his youth and beauty fade, the lady had him killed. She'd called in a favor from a cleric friend, had him Maledicted to the Abyss. Specifically, she had him sent to the realm of Lamashtu, where she is assured a place on account of her sold soul. It's something she does for her favorite slaves, so she'll have them even in the afterlife.
I'm thirteen, and my father is gone. The lady scries him once in a while, and one day concludes that he isn't there, that he's been eaten. She'd given herself the best chance she could to see him again, but it didn't work out. That's how it goes, sometimes.
The next time I hear one of the halflings spouting that line about how we're the luckiest ones, the line I taught them after learning it from my mother, I trip her. I see a bruise on her where she fell, later, and I don't say sorry.
I'm fourteen, and hair is starting to grow on my face. I wake up sometimes with a sticky spot around my groin, and Prestidigitate it away, security risks be damned. My ears and teeth are those of an orc, but my build is that of a human, and that's showing no sign of changing. The lady starts looking at me. I don't want her to. If they don't care about you, the worst they can do is kill you.
She touches me, the way she did my father and does her husband. Fingers through the hair, a squeeze of the butt, an arm around the waist. I shudder. It makes her do it more.
One time, she puts her hand under my chin, tips my normally downward-pointed head up so I'm facing her directly.
"You have your father's eyes."
I'm fifteen. Not quite old enough to be a man, in any human land I've heard of from my father's stories. The lady calls me to her bed.
(There's a poison mushroom I could get my hands on; the lady used it to assassinate a rival, once. It'd be slow and painful, though. I'd shit and puke myself to death. I've always been more afraid of the pain right in front of me than what's waiting further down the line.
It's probably a good thing, anyway. They say Pharasma damns those who kill themselves, and one's chances are worse with Abaddon on the table than only the Abyss.)
I hold out hope that I'll be unable to perform, that I'll let her down and pass back out of her notice. That in a few more years, when it's undeniable that I'll never be big and strong enough for the mines, they'll dispose of me quick and clean, like my brother.
No such luck. She reaches her hand between my legs and my traitorous flesh stiffens. It seems to be of the opinion that pumping blood is pumping blood, regardless of whether it's driven by lust, fear, or rage. She pushes me very gently down on the bed and rides me. She brushes my hair out of my eyes so she can look in them, touches my chest so she can feel my heartbeat. When I'm done, she has me clean myself off her.
Usually it's like that. Sometimes she cuddles me afterwards; sometimes her husband. Once in a while she'll lay down on the bed herself and tell me to fuck her. It's an advantage for that, she says, that I hate her. It means I don't treat her like she's made of glass, the way her husband does. Eventually she starts calling in me and her husband at once. We kiss while she's watching and glare daggers at each other when she has her head turned.
I'm sixteen and I'm her favorite. One night we're lying together and she starts venting to me about how a year ago she'd threatened to kill her third daughter, a wizard school student, if she couldn't hit first circle in a year, and now the time is up but she doesn't wanna. She asks if she should give her another year. When I actually answer, she draws in breath sharply and her eyes widen, as if she just noticed me laying there. She does give her the extra year, though.
(Her third daughter had been nice to me. She'd whispered where I could hear it, once, that she wishes it didn't have to be like this, that drow and orcs and halflings could all be clean and have enough to eat and learn to be wizards.)
I get to eat meat—real meat, not just bugs, and almost as often as the drow do—and she Prestidigitates me clean regularly enough that it's not noticeable if I do it to myself sometimes too. She promises to spare my mom even when she's too old to work, and lets me borrow her books to teach my siblings their letters. The people who bullied me as a kid glare at me in jealousy.
I can barely remember what it felt like to fall asleep in my own bed, in a pile of my siblings. I can barely remember what it felt like for my stomach to not be doing somersaults, struggling to keep down the fine food I've been so generously offered, for my heart to not be hammering against my ribs trying to break free, for there to not be an invisible hand squeezing my throat.