Datasets:
mickume
/
dnd_drow

Dataset card Data Studio Files
xet
 Community
text
stringlengths
0
41.4k
Sabatons scraping on rock, he staggers away from the edge in the guttering torchlight. At his back echoes the clash of steel on steel, interspersed by Shadowheart’s invocations of her dark goddess and the resultant flashes of Weave as she and Astarion fall back across the bridge.
One of the goblins raises a crooked staff, crackling with magic. Three missiles of force spring forth - again aimed at Elendar, though his armor absorbs much of the blow. He can all but feel the bruising already blossoming underneath. 
With a word and an arcane gesture, Gale answers the goblin in kind.
The wave of thunder upsets several unlit candelabrum in a clatter of iron, sends the air tugging at Elendar’s tabard - and sends the mage swaying off balance, stave ripped from clawed hands. Even Minthara shudders from the force of it.
She snaps back to her balance and charges at Gale.
Minthara is relentless, mace a blur of faerie fire in her hands, the darkness rippling around her. The part of Elendar that is drow wants to fall to his knees before her might.
The part of him that is
sees him standing tall between her and Gale.
He’s lost enough to his own people.
Sourceless moonlight catches in his holy symbol, a blinding white flashing before Minthara’s eyes. Her strike swings wide. Elendar blinks against the sudden watering of his eyes and brings his morningstar down on the goblin mage’s head.
The body slumps to the floor. 
Minthara sidesteps it, violet light trailing behind her mace, lip curling back. Her downswing breaks against a shimmering disc of light Gale calls into being between them, an eruption of faerie fire curling across the surface. Elendar starts towards her. 
From across the crevice, a clash of steel cuts through the dust-thick air. Astarion’s voice, strained with urgency, follows it. "Get him off of me, damn you!" 
He spares him a glance - the vampire is backed against a shelf by one of the war-chiefs, scrambling to maintain enough distance to strike with his rapier. Shadowheart has the other locked in combat scant paces away, blade on shield, mace on chainmail. She’s too far to help him.
"Gale, guard me!" Elendar dares not check if he’s responded - time is too short, the goblin’s advance too close for the rapier’s needle-point length. He wheels to face his newest foe, Selûne’s symbol aloft in his hand.
"Moonmaiden, take my foe’s sight!" The holy symbol blazes with brightest silver. "Let him gaze no more on the beauty of Toril!" 
The goblin war-chief chokes on a cry as his eyes blaze with moonlight. Elendar grits his teeth against the lance of pain the spell sends echoing through his own skull. The unseeing goblin stumbles towards Astarion, frothing at the lips, flailing at thin air with a jagged blade. 
Elendar turns back to the foe at hand, but the sounds of daggers meeting flesh, chased by the heavy
of an armored body collapsing to rock, greet his ears nonetheless. He can’t be certain, but the crunch of bone and the cut-off shriek suggest that Shadowheart’s foe has shared the same fate.
His relief is quelled by the sight of a violet-limned mace, a blur in the gloom, crashing into Gale’s ribs.
The blow sends the wizard crashing back against the wall. His cry cuts off into dreadful silence. He falls still.
"Gale!" The shout tears itself from his throat before he can think better of it. He pivots on his heel to face her. Something hot and feral twists through his veins, burning hotter than the moon-fire of his magic.
Fury guides his next strike, as true as any goddess’ guidance ever could.
The morningstar meets her squarely in the ribcage - a spot Elendar knows intimately well, for how easily it’s damaged. A wet, bloodstained cry spills from his lips. Her eyes fly wide.
The next arc of the morningstar ends at her jaw.
It’s a brutal death, bloody, wrought with the sickening
of steel on bone. There’s a scant heartbeat of silence - that of the grave, fatal and ruinous - followed by the cacophony of an armored body meeting the ground. Nightwarden Minthara sprawls, twisted and broken, upon ancient stones slick with blood. In that moment, she is a hundred drow he’d once known, and simultaneous...
Before he can think, the morningstar descends again.
His first drawing of the stars, taken and shredded, his own blood soaking the scraps of parchment. His body, beaten by his mother's whip until the light nearly faded from his eyes.
The C'rintri who'd forced him to kneel, his body obeying even as his mind screamed. The look in her eyes - complete superiority, domination that cannot be rivaled, rendering him no one and nothing. 
The way his brother had watched him - a young warrior, flush with success in the arena, lethal as a bulette lurking in the shadows, ambitious as all drow are called to be. A second son, watching the first for the nearest chance to wet his blades with their shared blood.
Raw fury writhes within him, tears a scream from his throat. His blood runs fever-hot. Dimly, he feels the ache of his wounds, the dull throb of overexertion as he raises his weapon high and lets its bulk carry it down on her skill once more. The scent of blood is iron on his tongue, tangy and sharp and
His blood runs hot as fire, but the tears cutting through the gore streaking his face are hotter still.
"Elendar!" It’s Shadowheart’s voice which cuts through the blood-haze over his mind, somewhere between disgusted and shocked. "Enough!"
He cannot stop the arc he's set his weapon on, but the sound of splitting bone at the end heralds a deep, deafening silence. 
Elendar stands over her, crimson dripping from the spiked head of his morningstar as his hand goes slack on the handle. At his feet lies the first drow he’s spoken to in ninety long years. They are traitors both - Elendar bearing Selûne’s mark across his face, Minthara branded with the Absolute’s dread sigil.
As the fervent wrath ebbs, fear slips into the space left behind - perhaps they were more alike than he'd thought.
At the Sanctum, he'd thought bloodlust far behind him. Now, his body feels scorched by it, left numb and shaking in the aftermath of that wildfire fury. For an
to slay a daughter of House Baenre is an unforgivable sin - and an act of wild, blade-sharp ambition. To see such an act of power carried through...
It is the surest path to the Spider Queen's favor.
Crime or exaltation, the death of a Baenre can only draw the Weaver's gaze to the hand that wrought it.
The morningstar rings on stone when it drops from his hand.
Minthara Baenre is unrecognizable.
The presence of her former goddess murmurs in the shadows.
And then a familiar voice comes, strained but no less welcome as it shatters the pall over his mind. "As fun as your little bloodbath was to watch, I rather suspect you'd hate to see our wizard go the same route."
He startles at Astarion's words. Before he can make sense of it himself, his body is moving.
The wizard of Waterdeep is pale, slumped against the wall, clutching at his side. Shock has left his body rigid, his eyes wide and jaw set in a grimace. Something in Elendar’s chest lurches at the sight of him.
"Secure the room. See that no reinforcements arrive." The order comes in a steely tone that
be his. "I’ll tend to him."
Shadowheart’s eyes narrow. "Are you certain I shouldn’t do the honors? You hardly seem to have healing on your mind."
"I said," he hisses, nerves wearing to a thread, "to secure the room,
For a moment, she stares him down, jaw tense and eyes like iron. At her side, Astarion’s lip twitches. "Come now. Show's over."
The moment she turns away, following Astarion towards the open doorway that leaves them all too vulnerable to the rest of the goblin horde, Elendar drops to his knees at Gale’s side.
"Can you speak?" Something frantic is fluttering in his pulse, setting his head spinning. "I'm so sorry - stars, I don't know what came over me, I ought to have helped sooner--"
A weak groan slips from chapped lips. Gale’s head lolls back against the cracked stones. For once, that silver tongue has nothing to say.
"Let me look at you," he says in a rush, hands flying to the ties of his robe. They come undone easily between his blood-slick fingers. Somehow, Elendar has never noticed the little stars embroidered along the front. 
It’s always been easiest for him to treat injuries of such severity if he can see them, assess the damage wrought with the eyes of a healer. Still, opening the robe feels like treading ground he was never meant to see.
Gale’s torso lies bared beneath the flickering candlelight. Bruises mottle his skin, red blooming beneath the surface, purpling at the edges. Contusions, struck through with cuts where the skin split from the sheer force of the blow. Blood smears his skin, sticking to his robes. His chest rises and falls, too rapid, th...
The thought of losing him is a terror deeper than the shadow of the Weaver's gaze.
"Alright," he murmurs, with a calm he does not feel. "You’re alright. Look at me."
From beneath flickering eyelids, Gale obeys. His lips part around a strangled gasp. "Elen--"
"I can heal this," he soothes. "Just lie still."
Elendar knows the sort of injuries he bears. Bruising, both visible and hidden within his body. Cracked bones, crushed blood vessels, blood-wet lacerations.
The goddess lends him her healing magic, but it is worth nothing without a skilled hand directing it.
Elendar presses his holy symbol to Gale's abdomen, the silver stars bright against his skin. The metal is almost frosty in Elendar's hand. It stands in stark contrast to Gale’s heated skin.
"Selûne, grant this man your grace, that he may rise to fight another day." Elendar’s voice is steady, though the wheel of stars shakes in his hands. "By your light, let his wounds be mended."
A whisper of starlight in the darkness, a silver-blue glow spreading from the symbol clutched in Elendar’s palm, and his goddess makes herself known in the knitting of wounds and the easing of pain.
His own palm burns before the sacred light, but he holds it steady nonetheless.
Something in his stomach wrenches, uneasy, as he watches silver blossom across Gale’s injuries.
He’s used to the sight of blood. His own, crimson on dusky skin. That of his enemies, staining his morningstar, spattered on the ground. That of his patients, soaking his hands as he winds bandages or presses cloth against the flow of scarlet from a fresh wound. Something about the sight of Gale’s has his throat closin...
The injuries are hardly insurmountable before the star-glow of Elendar’s magic. Before his eyes, they begin to knit together at the seams, the cuts grown over by the pink of new skin. The blood-spray is still there. 
Elendar looks away.
When he looks back, the swelling has eased, the redness melting away. Elendar can feel the way his magic works out of sight, mending bones and flesh alike. Slowly but surely, Gale’s breathing steadies.
"Are you alright?" Elendar dares to meet his eyes. To his abject relief, they’re open and clear.
"I will be." He swallows hard, lets out a shaking sigh. "That was...timely."
Their gazes linger together. His eyes are dark, hearth-warm after the ice of Minthara's gaze. His hand comes to rest atop Elendar's - goddess, his skin is warmer still against his blood-slick fingers.
"I can channel the goddess’ power still, if you need it." The well of divinity vested within his body has not quite run dry for the day. 
Gale lifts his head, moves each limb in turn. He grits his teeth, flinches here and there, but otherwise...
"I ought to be fit to press on." He offers him a smile, but something about it is pained. Taut at the edges, like a rope worn to threads.
Elendar looks closer.
He is still pale, weariness stamped dark beneath his eyes, a tremor to the set of his shoulders. His breath comes shallower than it ought to. At his sides, his hands are tremulous.
Something is wrong.
"You still look unwell." Elendar splays his fingers across his abdomen, feeling the warmth of his skin, the softness of him beneath the metal of the holy symbol. "Is it enchantment? My people are fond of such spellcraft."
"Nothing of the sort." Gale’s tone carries a dread familiarity, as though speaking the name of an old enemy. His fingers caress Elendar's, once, before his hand drops back to his side. "And as much as I’ve come to enjoy you fussing over me, it’s nothing your spells can whisk away."
Elendar frowns even as realization dawns. "Is it the orb?"
"Seek me out when we return to camp," Gale murmurs. "I’ve further need of your aid."
Their gazes meet. A certain silence passes between them, the sort that says more than words. He’s suddenly aware of the hints of gray streaking Gale’s hair, the tentative hope in his eyes, the faint scent of parchment that clings to everything he owns. He swallows, wets his lips. "I hope you know you’ll always have it....
As if on cue, Astarion’s light footfalls herald his return from between the marble bookshelves, a sway to his hips as he stalks from the gloom. Elendar nods to Gale once, lips pressed tight together, before turning to face their companion.
"I trust we’re not down a wizard?" Astarion leans against the bookshelf, as though he hasn’t a care in the world, and examines the points of his nails. "Because I can’t tell you how much I’d hate to be picking through a horde of vile little goblins without someone who can toss fireballs about."
"I’m perfectly fine, thank you," Gale huffs. "I see you have your priorities in order."
Astarion’s blood-red eyes trace through the shadows, settling pointedly on the place where Elendar’s hand presses to Gale’s sternum. "So does he."
Elendar yanks his hand back as though Gale’s skin is scalding, all but sending his holy symbol clattering across the stones. His cheeks burn with something hotter than battle-rush. Something between embarrassment, relief, and wretched disgust at himself has him babbling. "Yes, and now that he’s healed, we’ve much more ...
, mind, but healing in general--"
"You’re quite the killer, too, it would seem." Astarion clicks his tongue at the ruined corpse on the temple floor. "What
Selûne teach her clerics? Or does this delightful bit of nastiness come from...somewhere else, perhaps?" He casts a pointed look at the body of Elendar’s fellow drow.
For all Astarion has tried his nerves since they met, now is the first moment when Elendar has found himself silently begging Selûne for patience.
"That’s enough, Astarion," Gale cautions, hands busy securing the ties of his robe once more. "And what have you done with Shadowheart?"
"I left her on guard," he says with a roll of his shoulders. "In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a room positively begging to be looted."
On shaking legs, Elendar rises from Gale’s side, returning his holy symbol to its place at his belt. He offers him a hand, tries not to feel that rush of warmth from skin on skin when he takes it. The touch lingers just a second too long. 
He’s coming to find he can’t help the things he feels when the wizard of Waterdeep concerns himself.