Going to meet Rakkec

Teysa wandered through corridors as beautiful as they were unfamiliar. The latter was far more surprising than the former. She’d emerged from her cocoon with, it seemed, an instinctive knowledge of the warren’s layout. Had the layout impressed itself on her brain? Was an unerring sense of direction just one of the gifts her drider form had given her? Impossible to tell, but she moved unerringly through the dim maze of tunnels and caverns, her feet guiding her to whatever destination she had in mind.

Except here, apparently. These tunnels were newer, with rough edges and thickets of speleothems. Crystalline helictites and glittering calcite deposits flowered in the corners, and sheets of flowstone gave the impression that she was walking down the throat of some great stony beast. Even the unworked stone walls shone with color: gemstone deposits like pockets of light, ice-like cave pearls and bubbles of glassy quartz, and glowing veins that pulsed with a slow, tectonic heartbeat of their own. These last were so impressive that they momentarily captivated Teysa’s attention. Their glow ebbed and flowed as though it was alive. Her earlier impression of a monstrous throat faded. This was more like a gigantic pair of lungs, capillaries flexing and throbbing as they carried air throughout the buried body of some colossal sleeper.

And it was all strange. She felt almost like an intruder here. The rest of the warren, crude as it was, was clearly a made thing, a home excavated out of the barren rock of the Underneath. It had been shaped and worked over generations and the stone remembered its place. It welcomed people, on two legs or eight, and yielded to them, forming itself into shapes that they might find pleasing or useful. It was tame stone.

Not here. This place was still wild, unbridled and unbroken. The stone here was sharp-edged and wary. It had not yet yielded up its secrets, and it clutched jealously at its treasures. Teysa blinked, and saw the flowstone for what it was. These caves had been cut by the drider stoneshapers, had been pried open from their natural borders, and they were fighting back. They were rallying at the speed of stone, fighting a **** doomed rearguard to preserve their wildness.

Teysa continued onward, but cautiously, ducking her head away from every errant stalactite. How could anyone live down here? Anyone who made their home in such a wild place was either ignorant of the stone’s malice…

…or they had made their peace with it, and accepted that their home could never really belong to them.

The drow was easy enough to find. He wasn’t making any attempt to hide, and the sound of his work echoed up through the twisty passages. Teysa could hear the rhythmic clink of metal on stone, the sound of rocks crumbling apart, the heavy thunk, thunk of shifting stone. Beneath it, she could hear something else: a rough male voice, singing barely above a murmur.

Bend your back

To endless toil

Stone goes crack

Shift the spoil!

Work the seam

Pull the ore

In your dreams,

Work some more!

He paused as she drew closer.

“Jez’ria, is that you?” he called. His voice startled her, and it took her a moment to realize why: it was the only man’s voice she’d heard in weeks. It was low and rough, with a rasping edge that made him sound like he was perpetually on the verge of a cough.

“No, it’s me,” Teysa said. She emerged from behind a stone pillar and there he was. He stood next to the wall, leaning on a mining pick that rested head-down against the ground. He was stripped to the waist, his upper body sheened with sweat. His skin was dark grey and mottled, not at all the smooth granite of Mish’li or Lil’esh, and his hair was plastered against his scalp. It was white, like any drow, but so flecked with dirt and dust that it seemed almost black. He wore a rough leather jerkin, though the tunic and trousers beneath were both simple homespun silk. It amused Teysa to see him dressed so. His face was rough and dirty, his manner simple, but the clothes he was wearing would have been worth a pile of gold on the surface.

By the looks of it, he’d been hard at work. He’d carved a divot into the wall, three feet wide by four tall, and broken rocks piled up around his ankles. A pair of metal buckets stood against the wall behind him, both half-full.

“Oh!” he said, starting backwards. “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure. I’m Rakkec.” He extended a hand to shake, looked down at it, and rubbed it half-heartedly against his trousers. This did little except smear the dirt around.

Rakkec, that was it. Teysa hesitated. At first she’d thought he might be testing her or putting her on, but replaying her recent memories, she realized he hadn’t actually seen her face to face. Not since the battle, anyways. And I looked a bit different then.

“I’m Teysa,” she said, shaking his hand. His palm was worn and callused, but warm, warmer than any drider. He nodded and then his eyes widened. He took a half-step back and looked up at her with the shock of recognition on his face.

“Oh!” he said. “You’re her!” He blushed, as much as any drow could, and looked away. “I’m… listen, I never got to tell you how sorry I am. About, you know, everything.”

Teysa reflexively opened her mouth to say that’s alright, or something of the sort, and shut it again. It wasn’t alright, was it? And if her current state wasn’t exactly his fault, she couldn’t quite bring herself to call him blameless. He’d come to the warren with an invading army, hadn’t he?

Had he?

She supposed that was one of the things she’d come down here to find out.

Something else was bothering her. “You said 'her,'” she pointed out. “You speak as if you know me.”

“Yes, well, Aliara told me about you,” Rakkec said. He chuckled nervously and twisted the toe-point of his boot against the stone. “All good things, I promise. She likes you a lot.”

The mention of Aliara’s name brought up a swell of emotion in Teysa, but again, something stopped her lips before it could spill out. He doesn’t know, she thought. He thinks she’s still here.

“And Jez’ria?” she asked. “Why did you think I was her?”

“She comes down here, sometimes,” the drow said. “She helps me dig. Or I suppose I help her. Black bones, but she’s strong! She was the one who set me up down here.” He slapped himself in the forehead, as though suddenly remembering something. “Where are my courtesies? Please, come in.”

He gestured in the manner of one inviting a stranger into their home, waving a hand towards a stone archway. To Teysa, it looked as rocky and unwrought as any other arch, but she followed him inside. She had to duck her head to fit under the lintel. When she straightened up again, her breath caught in her throat. The cave beyond the arch was a snug little hollow, its domed roof studded with crystals like glittering stars. They had not been placed there, she could tell at a glance: they were embedded in the rock where they had formed, exposed by careful hands but not extracted. They glimmered against the dark basalt of the ceiling, forming unknown constellations before her eyes.

The room was lit by more of the throbbing, glowing veins. The ebb and pulse of their light gave the impression that the room was expanding and contracting slowly, as though they stood inside a gigantic rocky heart.

Compared to the natural beauty of the cave, Rakkec’s meager possessions seemed like afterthoughts. A hammock slouched against one wall. It sagged, one of its mooring lines already coming untethered. One look told Teysa that it had been spun amateurishly, at least compared to her own. She considered saying something and decided against it. Jez’ria probably made it herself.

A few tools leaned against the far wall: a hammer, a shovel, and others that Teysa couldn’t readily identify. At their feet were more metal buckets, each piled high with ordinary-looking rocks. Two changes of clothing lay, neatly folded, on a flat stone table in one corner. Like in Teysa’s apartment, there was a small spring-fed bathing pool, though from the look of Rakkec he did not make overfrequent use of this amenity.

“Please, make yourself comfortable,” he said, sitting down on a stumpy of stalagmite. “I’d offer you food, but I don’t know what you eat, and also I don’t have anything down here.” He gave her a helpless shrug and sipped at his waterskin, then offered that instead. “Water?”

“No, thank you.” Teysa relaxed a bit. There was a certain way to stand, a way to lock out her knees and let her chitinous exoskeleton take the weight, that was almost as relaxing as sitting in a chair. She was still figuring out the finer details of life on eight legs.

“So what brings you down here?” Rakkec asked. “Aliara send you?”

“No,” Teysa replied. She hesitated. “She’s… not here right now.”

Rakkec’s face fell. “Oh,” he said, but he didn’t sound surprised. “Oh, I knew she was planning something… she went to the City, didn’t she?” He shook his head. “May the Mother Below preserve her.”

Him too? Am I the only person she didn’t tell? Teysa’s heart lurched, but she thought that she was able to keep the emotion off her face. There was no surge of anger, the way there had been with Lil’esh the day before. Teysa just felt hollow. Aliara’s absence had torn a wound in her soul, and she was still figuring out just how deep and wide the wound was.

“I didn’t come down here to talk about Aliara,” she said. “She can take care of herself.”

Rakkec nodded. “Sure she can. Toughest woman I ever met.” He paused. “Present company excepted, o’course…”

The silence hung in the air between them for a moment until he coughed to break it. “So. What did you come down here to talk about?”