>>5442707>>5442817>>5443101>>5443163You tip back the the glass of clear alcohol and gulp. The taste of this vile toxicant makes you retch. Why humans imbibe in this rubbish is a mystery that you feel you will simply never solve. The effect it has on the mind, however, leads you to speculate that it may be enjoyed for its strength rather than its flavor. Ideas that would never manifest if you were sober knock against the interior of your skull, roiling in the cauldron of vivid imagination.
Two centuries already? And you are not getting any younger. Some fifteen decades ago, you believed that your entire life was ahead of you. One day, you would grow up to be a priestess, rise up the ranks, and spend the next six hundred years of your life visiting wickedness on any foolish enough to cross your path while living in comfort and luxury, until one of your many powerful daughters murdered you and assumed your position. How ironic, that clawing your way to the top of the body pile has earned you nothing but the chance to live and fight another day. Today, you have no authority, no wealth, no daughters.
Motherhood is sacred. From a young age, all females are taught that it is their obligation to spawn as many offspring as their bodies will allow. Not for any fondness of children, obviously; the grim reality is that Lolthite society is so vicious that your race would drive itself to extinction without a steady supply of fresh blood entering the population pool at all times. Since your people are as meat and drink for the Weaver of Chaos, even the most dull, feeble, or slow woman should aspire to someday give birth to please her.
This inexorable truth has gone unchallenged for the whole of your existence. Always, there are those who choese to forego the ordeal in its entirety - but those are the deviants, like your sister Phaere. Even if your child would be born and raised a surface-dweller, the specter of the old ways doggedly hounds your thoughts. Brought up into this culture, you still feel as though a core facet of your identity as an individual is somehow missing or deficient.
The Jezyrene of ten, a hundred years ago knew that she needed daughters. What does the Jezyrene of the here and now say?
>There is magic that can breath new life into the dead and even halt the flow of time. A cure for my... unique womanly condition must exist.>That old human, he took in that girl as his own flesh and blood when there is no connection between them. That is the same as having a daughter, is it not?>For too long, I have suffered under the yoke of tradition. I am more than the number of deplorable beasts that I can spit out of my crotch. I can leave some other legacy behind! 