>>5378992>>5378984>>5378958>>5378924>>5378870>>5379048You had a vision, once, and a revelation. The Master of the Insightful Eye, Dark God of Knowledge, brought it to you. It is not enough for you to be powerful, to be feared and placated. You desire to be respected. To be LOVED. You chassed this goal, it brought you to a peculiar end—one antithetical, in many ways, to the Serpent Priest’s orthodoxy. You recruited outcasts, thieves, low-born Reptilians, even Degenerates… Degenerates like your mother.
You met outcast elves not with condemnation or extermination, but with negotiation and religious proselytization. When you encountered a race of bug-folk created to supplant you, you did not immolate their princess—you befriended her first, and eventually impregnated her. When bugbears invaded your warrens, you fought them… But only to a draw, and then you recruited them as mercenaries. Even the dwarves, who you promised merciless conquest, did not receive the whole of your fury; they are slaves, but you blooded several of them as overseers of the rest—the so-called ‘Bloody Dwarves’, or ‘Duergar’.
So it is that you focus your efforts upon internal stability. This effort takes forms tender and brutal, in equal measures.
A rigid structure of hierarchy is established and enforced. Reptilians sit at the top, with those of the Master Race above kobolds. Drow are co-equal, within their sphere, and with the understanding that their parcels of Bloodrise were gifted (CONDITIONALLY) by you and your people; you retain dominion over their trade, especially of the area and valuable orichalcum. Dwarves and other, non-Drow mammals are beneath them, with the Duergar overseeing these lowly folk. Those who deviate from or defy this order are punished harshly, sometimes lethally; torture occurs frequently, torture-to-the-death is rarer but not unheard of.
However, you forbid your forces from consuming the dwarves as livestock, and you ensure all your people are given a share of the sparse rations, so they will not starve. You recognize the mammalian instinct towards close familial ties, and afford the children of the dwarves special educational privileges, alongside the ever-more-abundant kobold-spawn. It takes the form of sermons—propagandistic lessons, reinforcing the ‘salvation’ granted by the Dark Gods from the utter ruin you might have otherwise visited upon them. There are no Drow children in attendance—nor have you ever met one—but their adults are frequent attendees of such lessons; you gladly offer them more in-depth clarifications appropriate to their age and understanding afterwards.
