The guild hall was teeming when she slipped in the back door. “Have I missed the roll call?” she whispered to Vetri, a fellow wizard and childhood friend of Elspethe’s. The dark elf female shook her head. “Good.” Meriel Q’Indyrk, the wizard guild master, stepped up in front of the throng, and all of them sat in unison. Juxtaposed with individuality was the superiority of the Ikedrian over all the other races of Orana; Ikedrians still held a strong sense of knowing one’s place in the community. This was probably a result of the training that young Ikedrians received from the time that they were old enough to stand up and walk into their chosen guild halls. The practice often included beatings and torture, and only the strongest would prevail to become full members of the guild.
Elspethe could remember vividly training at the hand of her own master, or A’chyra in D’Leesh, Meriel Q’Indyrk. She was particularly cruel and took her students for individual training with some of the most fearsome creatures in the Great Forest. Those that survived the training became the most powerful and feared wizards in all of Orana. A’chrya Q’Indryk stared out at the crowd that had fallen into an uneasy silence and then addressed them.
“I am not sure how it happened, for I was sure that all of you that look upon me now would be dead by this time. I have never seen worse candidates for the ranks of wizardry in all my time here at the feet of our cursed Father Ikara. He would destroy you himself were he here,” she shouted angrily. Those assembled bent forward and bowed, touching their foreheads to the floor, before rising back to a seated position. “Your humble gestures of respect do you no favors, but our Father has granted you life—who am I to threaten to take it. May your energies combine to bring our revered Father back from exile to rule all of Orana. Rise, as the children of the Father of Darkness, and never bow to any living being again!” With a rousing cry, they got to their feet and elbowed each other out of the way. Elspethe sighed loudly. Upon hearing the ways of the Ikedrian wizards, Taeben had been simultaneously horrified and intrigued. At every meeting, he presented her with a list of questions about her culture. He would reward her compliance with tales of high elf culture; the more she heard, the more Elspethe found herself wishing she had been born in the shining high elf citadel of Alynatalos at the other end of the Great Forest from her murky home.
She let her mind wander to her lessons with the alabaster-skinned wizard. Did Taeben’s guild master beat him? Did that guild master take Taeben to the Great Forest and leave him to fend for himself? He seemed to have darkness in him that had drawn her to him, but upon getting to know him, she found it was his light that enthralled her—light poised to be engulfed in his self-made darkness.
He had taught her so much, even though he had disappeared several seasons ago and remained gone for a long time. The last time she saw him, he had seemed different, haunted—almost a shell of himself. She had begged him to tell her what had happened and to let her help in any way she could, something utterly unheard of among her kind. But he refused to say to her even the tiniest bit about his time away from her. That refusal burned in her gut like smoldering coals on a campfire. Elspethe had vowed to him that she would set right what had gone so wrong, but Taeben had made her swear that she would forget him – but continue his work—when he was gone. And then – then nothing, lots of inky black nothing in her mind when she tried to recall anything past that meeting. He must be gone from Orana, just as he foretold he would be.
She had no idea that time would have come so soon, or she would have refused the oath outright. Vetri nudged her, and she came back to the present, right in the middle of the promise of fealty her kind swore at the end of every guild meeting. Allegiance to the cursed Father. Fidelity to the superior race, the Ikedrians. Death and destruction to all others. Elspethe balled up one of her inky fists until her fingernails dug into her skin. The pain they caused distracted her from the growing Void within her for a moment, and she was able to breathe more easily as she continued to press her talon-like nails into her flesh. The pain was good. Pain meant you were still alive. The easing of pain came only with death.
The meeting soon came to an end, and Elspethe was shuffled out the door by the crowd. She stumbled about until she was in an alleyway, pleased for the freedom to stretch and move that she hadn’t had in the throng. Sometimes she was able to see her home city for what it truly was: a hollowed-out system of caves in the damp ground, with rats and other vermin running alongside the self-important and rude members of her race. This was one of those times. She grimaced as she kicked a giant sewer rat off her boot, and then twitched her fingers in the pest’s direction. She smiled maliciously as it squealed at the tiny lightning bolt that singed its tail before it ducked into a crack in the mud bricks that reinforced the underground walls.
After a few minutes, she reached the entrance to the home that she now shared only with her brother, Kamendar. Once one of the noblest families in all of the underground citadel, House Turlach
