>>5418213Then again, perhaps you should not be SO swift to judge, seeing as how you now travel to greet a sultanate of women—MAMMAL women. This, among your won people, would be seek as an illogical and plainly awful arrangement, and your visit to them might well be seen as indignity. Yet together with Olu, Karz, and Ivno, plus Jazkarmel’s two guards (their names are apparently Jhamrius and Sengar), this is where you now go; you leave the Novice to attend to her experiments, and the Junior Novice to keep her company and serve as a guard.
When you arrive at House Yvonlace, you are… Underwhelmed., admittedly. They have the usual luminous crystals ensconced in their walls or suspended atop fungal growths cultivated to lamplike scepters, and they have draped silks about, some dyed with patterns of reddish-brown iconography of some intricacy. You have seen surface-elf art, though, and this is—sadly—pale imitation from their darker, deeper cousins. Even when a pageant of beautiful, black-skinned and pointy-eared young mammals comes to meet you in a strange, symmetrically-choreographed tiptoeing dance, you cannot help but feel they are a mockery of the elven finery you have read of, heard tell of…
Until they pull out their blades, hidden from within their flowing fabric, and begin what you are told by one of Jazkarmels men is called ‘The Dance of Silk and Steel’.
“A good elf-maid, like a good elf-man, must be ready to kill and die,” Sengar tells you.
“But with greater grace, unflinching face,” says Jhamrius.
Indeed, the cold-but-beautiful expressions of the Drow who perform this dance is striking. These women are no soft creatures, but warriors; even in your own race’s harsh conditions, a female of high birth like the Novice can afford to be out-of-shape physically, with her soft body and thick rump; she gets by on charisma, intellect, and magical ability. Here, no elf in these impoverish under-lands dares lose his (or her) athleticism, even among their upper echelons.
But the time that the Queen-for-the-Season arrived, led by a gem-bespeckled Jazkarmel and the e other young and berobed noblewomen, you are unsurprised to find ‘Myrymma’ looks no older than her daughters and nieces, and moves with the precision and strength of an athlete beneath her relative royal finer—a tall and towering trifle of folded-and-stacked silk and string-like lace, dangling star-like gems to frame a beautiful and noble visage, and icy-silver eyes. No elf like these dancers, you sense, would long tolerate any bloated or lethargic queen.
