decade, perhaps, and to be convinced that the important aspects of one’s life will remain as they are, or will improve as desired.
“This will be my life in a year!”
“This will be my life in five years!”
“This will be my life in ten years!”
We all tell ourselves these hopes and dreams and expectations, and with conviction, for the goal is needed to facilitate the journey. But in the end of that span, be it one or five or ten or fifty years hence, it is the journey and not the goal, achieved or lost, that defines who we are. The journey is the story of our life, not the achievement or failure at its end, and so the more important declaration by far, I have come to know, is, “This is my life now.”
I am Drizzt Do’Urden, once of Mithral Hall, once the battered son of a drow matron mother, once the protégé of a wondrous weapons master, once loved in marriage, once friend to a king and to other companions no less wonderful and important. Those are the rivers of my memory, flowing now to distant shores, for I reclaim my course and my heart.
But not my purpose, I am surprised to learn, for the world has moved beyond that which I once knew to be true, for this realm has found a new sense of darkness and dread that mocks he who would deign to set things aright.
Once I would have brought with me light to pierce that darkness. Now I bring my blades, too long unused, and I welcome that darkness.
No more! I am rid of the open wound of profound loss!
I lie.
—Drizzt Do’Urden
THE DAMNED
The Year of Knowledge Unearthed (1451 DR)
IT WAS A CLEVER DEVICE SHE HAD FASHIONED, A THIMBLELIKE, CONICAL PIECE of smooth cedar with a point like a spear and an opening that allowed her to fit it onto her finger. She slipped it on and gently rotated a knot in the wood, and the mundane became magical as the finger spear diminished and took the form of a beautiful sapphire ring.
The glittering adornment fit the majestic image of Dahlia Sin’felle. Her tall, lithe elf form was topped by a head shaved clean but for a single thin clutch of raven black and cardinal red locks, woven to run down the right side of her shapely head and nestle in the hollow of her deceptively delicate neck. Her long fingers, wrapped with more than that one jeweled ring, were tipped with perfect nails, painted white and set with tiny diamonds. Her icy blue eyes could freeze a man’s heart or melt it with a simple look. Dahlia appeared the artist’s epitome of Thayan aristocracy, a lady great even among the greatest, a young woman who could enter a room and turn all heads in lust, in awe, or in murderous jealousy.
She wore seven diamonds in her left ear, one for each of the lovers she had murdered, and two more small, sparkling studs in her right ear for the lovers she had yet to kill. Like some of the men of the day, but few if any other Thayan women, Dahlia had tattooed her head with the blue dye of the woad plant. Dots blue and purple decorated the right side of her nearly hairless skull and face, a delicate and mesmerizing pattern enchanted by the master artist to impart various shapes to the viewer. As the woman gracefully turned her head to the left, one might see a gazelle in stride among the reeds of blue. When she snapped back angrily to the right, perhaps a great cat would rear up to strike. When her blue eyes flashed with lust, her target, be it man or woman, might fall helplessly into the dizzying patterns of Dahlia’s woad, entrapped and mesmerized, perhaps never to emerge.
She wore a crimson gown, sleeveless and backless, and cut low in the front, the soft round curves of her breasts contrasting starkly with the sharp seam of rich fabric. The gown reached nearly to the floor, but was slit very high up the right side, drawing the eyes of lusting onlookers, man and woman alike, from her glittering red-painted toenails, past the delicate straps of her ruby sandals, and up the porcelain skin of her shapely leg, nearly to her hip. From there, one’s eyes could not help but be drawn to the base of the V, and up to the shining tip of the singular black and red braid,