“We are not in stasis,” Drizzt countered. “Are you so quick to surrender?”
That statement had Effron narrowing his gaze in anger. “You know nothing of me,” he said in a low and threatening tone. “Were I quick to surrender, I would have done so as soon as I knew who I was—and what I was! Do you know what it is to be an outcast, Drizzt Do’Urden? Do you know what it is to not belong, anywhere?”
Drizzt broke out in laughter and Effron couldn’t begin to sort out what the drow had found so funny. The tiefling watched as Drizzt crawled over to sit right in front of him.
“We seem to have time,” Drizzt said. “Likely quite a bit of time, unless your mother and the rest can find us.”
Effron studied the drow carefully, not sure what to make of him.
“Perhaps it is time we came to understand each other, for your mother’s sake,” Drizzt explained. “Let me tell you what I know of not belonging in my own home, or, as I thought for so many years, even in my own skin.”
Drizzt told him a story then, one that began two centuries before in an Underdark city called Menzoberranzan. At first Effron scoffed at the seemingly meager attempt to create a bond—what did he need with this drow, anyway?—but soon, the young tiefling found himself scoffing less and listening more.
He marveled at the drow’s descriptions of this decadent place, Menzoberranzan, and descriptions of his family in House Do’Urden, which seemed to Effron not so unlike life at Draygo Quick’s castle. Drizzt told of the drow schools of study—martial, divine, and arcane—and the inevitable accompanying indoctrination they entailed. Effron found himself so drawn into the winding ways of Menzoberranzan, his imagination walking those shadowy streets, that it took him a long while to realize that Drizzt had stopped talking.
He looked up at the drow, staring into those lavender eyes, reflecting back at him in the dim bluish light of the glowing bars.
Drizzt told him another story, one of a surface raid where his companions had slaughtered an elf clan. He described saving a young elf child by smearing her with her own dead mother’s blood.
Clearly affected by the memory, Drizzt’s voice grew very low, so he was obviously startled, straightening quickly, when Effron angrily interjected, “Would that you had been there before Dahlia threw me from the cliff!”
An uncomfortable silence followed.
“You have not made peace with her,” Drizzt said. “I had thought—”
“More so than my comment and tone would indicate,” Effron replied, and he meant it. He lowered his gaze and shook his head and admitted, “It is hard.”
“She’s a difficult person sometimes, I know,” said Drizzt.
“She loves you.”
Effron noted Drizzt’s wince, and came to think that perhaps the feeling wasn’t mutual—which explained a lot regarding Drizzt’s acceptance of Dahlia’s dalliance with Artemis Entreri, after all.
“I was much like you when I left Menzoberranzan,” Drizzt said, quickly regaining Effron’s attention. “It took me many years to learn to trust, and some time after that to recognize the beauty and love such trust can bring.”
He launched back into his story then, completing the tale of Menzoberranzan and completing, too, the tale of his own father and Zaknafein’s ultimate victory over the miserable priestesses of Lolth. He detailed his journey through the Underdark, the road that led him, at last, to the surface world.
By that time, growling stomachs interrupted the tales, and the two went to their stocks. But Effron bade Drizzt to continue his tale through the meal, and all the way until they lay down once more for sleep—where Drizzt left Effron’s imagination on the side of a cold mountain known as Kelvin’s Cairn, with a promise to tell him of the greatest friends anyone could ever hope to know.
And they had plenty of time for Drizzt to finish his stories, as the days drifted past and no one, not Draygo Quick or his minions, nor Dahlia and the others, came to see them.
Then it was a tenday, and Effron, too, had shared his own tales of growing up in the shadow of Herzgo Alegni, and under the harsh tutelage of Lord Draygo Quick.
And they ran out of food and water, and still they sat, in their own waste, and both came to wonder if Draygo had just sent them to this place to be forgotten and to die in the near darkness and the monotonous hum.
“Our friends were likely victorious, but they haven’t found us yet,” Effron posited at one point, his voice barely a whisper, for he had no strength for anything louder. “Lord Draygo would not just leave me here to die.”
Drizzt, lying on his back, wore his skepticism on his face.
“You were too important to him,” Effron explained, echoing what he had told Drizzt on Minnow Skipper’s return journey to Luskan. “He wouldn’t …”
Those were the last words Effron spoke to Drizzt in that cell, or at least, the last Drizzt heard.
When Drizzt awakened, he found himself in a different place, in a more typical dungeon cell with a dirt floor and stone walls. He was sitting against the wall, opposite the bars of the cell door, his arms chained up above his head, the other end of the chain spiked into the wall far above him.
It took Drizzt a while to sort out the changes in his situation, but one of the first things he came to recognize was not an encouraging thought: given his predicament and the change of venue, his friends had certainly not won out.
It was darker in here than in the other cell, the only light coming from the distant flicker of a torch set in a sconce on a wall many twists and turns from Drizzt’s location. Before him on the floor, Drizzt noted a plate of food, that sight reminding him of how desperately hungry he was.
A pair of rats poked around the plate, which Drizzt could not begin to reach with his chained hands. Instinctively, a feral movement even, Drizzt kicked out at the rodents, chasing them away—and looking at his own legs and feet made him aware that he was naked now. His thoughts could hardly register the implications of that, or of anything, though, as he hooked his feet and toes and dragged the plate in closer.
Still he could not reach it with his hands or his face, for he could not lower his hands below his shoulders. He tugged futilely against the chains for a few moments, but then, driven almost mad by his hunger, he merely scooped the meal with his dirty foot and used his great agility to bring it to his mouth.
He managed to force the dry and foul-tasting stuff down his parched throat, barely, but after a single swallow, he had tasted more than enough, and so he just slumped back and thought of the world beyond the grave.
He forced himself to fill his mind with notions of Catti-brie …
“It is humbling, is it not?” came a voice, from very far away it seemed.