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From when I'm a young kid, my mom teaches me the rules. The first rule is to be Good, and the second rule is to be smart. I learn the rules have rules of their own.
The first rule of being Good is to share, even when you're hungry. Let the little kids have the first bites, when you score a cut of meat. We survive together or we die together. There's more to being Good, a bunch of "don't"s. Don't pray to evil gods unless a drow makes you, and pick a good god to mean in your head while you say the words. Don't kill people even if a drow tries to make you. Don't snitch on your fellow slaves to the drow.
The first rule of being smart is to be boring, around big people. They already think you're just part of the furniture; let them keep thinking it. Help humans and orcs, but don't trust them; they're not Good or smart. They hear about how their great-grandfather was a warrior or a wizard, and get it into their heads that they can advance into some position other than "furniture", so they snitch, or forget to be boring. We know our great-grandfathers were slaves and our great-grandsons will be too, and all we can hope to be is Good and alive. Look and listen, especially when no one thinks you are, and don't give away the secrets you learn for free. Hide how much you can work, stay in bed longer than you need to sleep. They mean to work us half to death; if they think we're half as capable, they'll only work us a quarter to death.
When I get my first monthly, my mom tells me the rules about boys. The smartest thing a girl can do, she says, is not to sleep with a boy at all. But very few girls are that smart, and there's no shame in admitting it. So the thing to do is make sure he's Good, that he'll feed your child before he feeds himself.
I find a boy, older than me but not too much older. He's handsome, and Good, and strong enough to scare off any boy who'd think to have his way with me against my will. Any halfling boy, that is, but big people don't want us anyway. Marriage is for drow, so we're not really married, with a wedding in a church. Slaves seldom pass through the doors of churches down here, and anyway they're all Evil—except Calistria, I suppose, but He wouldn't bless a wedding. We can swear to each other on our honor not to stray, though, and gather our friends and family to say a prayer to Lady Shelyn for our love. I wouldn't say it where a tall person can hear, but I know in my heart that he's my husband.
I fall pregnant, and my owners start talking. There's a mushroom farmer on the outskirts of town, with demonic ancestry, a tiefling and a sorcerer. She's been getting rich by assassinating her neighbors and taking over their plots of land. It's invited reprisals, of course, but her sorcery has been strong enough to fight off all challengers. She's pregnant, too, and offering a good price for a wet-nurse.
I'm sold before my baby is even born. My mom and husband squeeze me tight and wipe away my tears. We promise each other we'll be Good and smart, and pray to the gods that we'll meet again in the afterlife.
My new mistress's baby is born. She's inherited her mother's physical abnormalities; based on family history, her mother takes this as a promising sign regarding inheritance of the sorcery as well, and lets the baby live. I nurse her alongside my own son. My mom said that nursing the oppressor's babies is one of the greatest indignities, but I develop a sense of affection for the baby. She's not so different from my own son, both of them so small and helpless.
My son grows older, and learns to walk and work. He's abysmal in the kitchen, and horrendous at cleaning, but a prodigy at spinning, sewing, and weaving. He cries whenever he has to kill a bug. He doesn't talk, and walks funny. The older children harass him; those his age refuse to play with him. I'm his only friend.
My owner goes on a trip to a big city—not the capital, where the Queen's palace is, but the next biggest in the country, with a sprawling temple of Baphomet. She takes some slaves, including me. We go to the temple to watch an execution. A human paladin and ranger are brought before the congregation in chains, and the dead bodies of their adventuring companions piled on the altar. They're made to watch as their companions' bodies are burned so they can't be resurrected, and then the cleric casts a spell on the paladin, who is beheaded. The ranger has his hands mutilated so he can't fire a bow, and is sent back up to the surface to tell his people not to try again.
A little drow girl next to me asks her mom what the spell was. She says it's malediction, which determines the destination of a soul. It's used in last rites for those who have sold their souls to demon lords, so they can expeditiously reach the right realm of the Abyss, and when a Queen manages to live long enough to die of old age rather than some "unfortunate 'accident'" involving poison or a vat of acid, all her slaves are killed and maledicted so they can continue to serve her in the afterlife. On the paladin, she explains, it was used to send him to the realm of Baphomet, where he will be devoured by a demon, melt painfully in its stomach acid for centuries, and eventually cease to exist entirely, so he can never again threaten little drow girls like her. The drow girl, who's barely older than my son, gives her mom a sharp, firm, decisive nod of approval, and declares in a high voice that she will be a cleric when she grows up.
I teach my son the rules of being smart and Good, and he learns diligently. He can understand, even if he can't speak. He fails to hide how hard he can work, though. A traveling merchant notices his prodigious talent with thread and cloth, and says he'd sell for a lot in the capital, perhaps even the palace itself. She makes my owner an offer she can't refuse, and my son is sold.
I don't understand how my mom managed to let me go, to speak clearly enough to wish me goodbye, to move gracefully enough to wipe my tears. My heart has been ripped out of my chest and carted off to the capital, dripping blood behind it, and there ought to be a hole in my chest oozing gore where it once was, but it remains intact. They ought to have had to push my ribs aside when they yanked it out, but they remain in place. I don't understand why I'm not dead.
Sometimes people pray to the good gods to make them clerics. Very rarely, rumor has it, their prayers are answered, and then they're usually caught and executed. It's not worth the try, except that my son doesn't just face death in the capital, he faces worse than death. If the Queen's slaves are maledicted, that means there are clerics that can cast it there too. I pray to all the good gods, and nothing happens.
A drow girl and her twin sister, who think I can't hear them, are discussing their school lessons on alignment. "Drow are all Chaotic Evil. Baphomet, Lamashtu, and Nocticula are also, so we have lots of clerics of them. Norgorber and Urgathoa are Neutral Evil, so any Evil person can be Their cleric, and Calistria is Chaotic Neutral, so any Chaotic person can be His. That's why we have some of Their clerics too."
I don't know how to make sure I'm Chaotic. Maybe it's not something you can do on purpose. But I know how to be Evil.
When the drow's daughter takes her first toddling steps towards me, I snap her neck. Her face doesn't even have time to show the outrage of betrayal; it registers only confusion. I pray first to Unholy Urgathoa; as I expected, She doesn’t answer. Then I call on Lady Norgorber—or Lord; like Calistria, They're one of those that's called a different sex by those whose families have more recently arrived from the surface—and at last my answer comes.
Goddess of assassination and secrecy. God of crime, the more recent arrivals call Him. Holy symbol is a one-eyed mask.
I cobble together a holy symbol out of scraps, and flee into the upper tunnels, the barren space between the Underdark and the surface.
This place is normally a death sentence, but I subsist on Created water, slay the monsters that pass through with my channels and Purify their corpses to eat, and a special blessing of my god blocks enough scries for the escaped slave that my owner gives up trying.
I descend into towns and pick off the weakest drow families with poison and daggers. Men and children included; if I cease to be damned, my Lord will no longer be able to reach me. I steal the most valuable possessions and bring the most valuable slaves up with me to the upper tunnels. I have everyone pray to the gods to become a cleric like me; one, an old woman who wants nothing more than revenge on the drow who killed her lover and children, is chosen by Calistria. Chaotic Good or Neutral, I would guess, from her positive channels. She becomes my second-in-command, though I keep her away from the more unsavory aspects of the work. I steal a spellbook and some magic instructional books from a wizard student, and ask if anyone can read. An orc boy, a wall of muscle covered in scars and the patchy hair of adolescence, says he can, and I assign him the books. I build my army, and prepare for the day we can storm the capital, maledict the Queen to Abaddon and choke her out as she begs for my mercy with fear and hate in her eyes, and save my son.