The Drow—so-called ‘dark elves’, the jet-black underground outcast of their race—call this place, their capital city, ‘Wevenore’. According to Jazkarmel, one of the many nobleborn elf-maids to bear the title of ‘Princess’ in this realm, it is also called ‘The Oasis of Crystal and Silk’. In spite of her evident pride in her race, in their survival of the harsh and impoverished isolation of the underdark, Jazkarmel warned you to lower your expectation of this place, even as she guided you here to meet with her people’s highest authorities.

Now, you see why.

This place IS a relative oasis, it must be said. You recognize, intellectually, that it is a wonder: a city built around the shores of deeply-buried lake, expansive in its sprawl and home to more elves than you have ever personally laid eyes on. So, too, do you bear witness to the namesake crystals and silk. The crystals, mostly quartz but also several more precious varieties, blaze with the dim light of magecraft, scattered like beacons through the dark, JUST bright enough to lend colour to the natives’ monochromatic darkvision in the public plazas and to the distantly-glimpsed courtyards of what you take to be powerful households. The silk—threads of corded, treated spider-thread—connect these places-of-power, and you see eight-legged messengers carrying messages and packages in bundles from one home to another in scurrying silence.

“It is as the worms of Glowie’s race,” the Novice Fleshweaver—one f your companions on this pilgrimage—notes.

You nod, but you recognize the limitations at the same time as you recognize the sophistication.