Theories & Obligations of Jhaelryna, House Desptyl

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The outcast daughter of House Desptyl sat in the middle of the bed, newly appointed to her, which by then was drowned in books and papers. Throughout the room, stacked and scattered, lay more evidence of the early, chaotic stages of organization. Having completed the initial survey, she had begun to prepare the first notes for a finding aid, but presently she held a length of copper wire in her hands.

"Poltical situation untenable. Physical communications could compromise. Magical practice unusual. Not yet ascertained if unsanctioned. One arcanist, also divine. Analogous but unafilliated." Jhaelryna turned the copper wire over as she paused to count the words. At last she added, "Making new friends."

The copper wire remained inert, as Jhaelryna expected it would. Still beyond her limitations, the fifth circle spell failed to manifest so much as a ripple in the Weave. She found herself questioning the merit of her prospectus. The connection to her own unfinished thesis had been tenuous, but none had questioned that. Such thoughts were unproductive. She'd argued the case, and she'd been awarded the travel fund with the letter of introduction. She was there at Moonreach now. She had work to do.

"--One Globe, in brass...." She wrote at the top of a new page before describing its essential features. Stockley had implied that Farian hadn't been introduced to the previous astrologer, much less to remnants of his work. On first seeing the room, Jhael had formulated the plan in less time than a human heartbeat. "The globe stays," she'd said, cutting off Stockley's offer to empty the space. She would present Farian with the inventory and her observations. That should buy some confidence, and it might even help her understand his unusual system of arcane notation.

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In this particular notebook, which Jhaelryna now held, the early entries are marked by neat lines and harmonic figures to mark the discovery of creative new theorems. Jhaelryna struggled now to comprehend these old visions and the intuition behind them. The most recent pages were filled with simple proofs and calculations in an increasingly erratic hand. They resembled nothing more than a student's workbook---full of repetition and exercises on postulates that another, more skilled mind had long ago devised. She found it difficult to stomach---as if the churning of the more recent handwriting was enough to make one seasick. The notebook was undeniable evidence of her descent since she was first targeted by the fallen theurge, Elias Houl.

The curse---and the damned possession---were robbing her of more than time or reputation. Plainly, she was losing her mind and more quickly than she ever feared. Often she found that facts, memories, formulas---that she should know, should be expected to know---were simply absent. She could think or talk around them as if skirting a physical hole in her thoughts, but she was powerless to explain. She would find herself searching through reference materials and introductory texts that she'd long ago memorized. The names for basic lattices and algebraic rings. Axioms of group theory. Topics that, a few months ago, she could have taught without preparation.

Her descent was becoming an obsession. She tried to mark her time, catalogue and account for her hours. She tried for a while to document her struggling memory, hoping the specifics might prove a pattern. But it was hopeless. She struggled to focus through the simplest trance routines. She hardly recognized herself in the mirror, and sometimes, in the hallways of Moonreach Keep... sometimes she heard it behind her.

In those moments, when a draft silenced the candlelight and the stone became a familiar, colorless gray, the memory was so vivid that she thought she was below ground in the cavern of the Middledark where she'd fallen to her knees before a group of surfacers, what she'd later learn was a Phoenix expedition. In those moments, she could smell the foul creature's unmistakable musk---fermented mushrooms, the rotting teeth of a slave, the sputtering, oozing corpse of a bottom rung necromancy novice. One moment she'd be in Moonreach, but in the next she'd hear the chitinous legs crossing from wall to wall. It spoke not a word, neither in memory nor haunting. Her wild sprints and trembling must have tantalized her pursuer. She was being hunted, she knew, and she was powerless to fight back. In these moments of walking reverie, she remembered her rescue, but the danger felt so real, so pungent, that she feared she'd be captured, that she'd always always been captured, that she'd but dreamed of her escape.

A day earlier, she'd been in the temple. Mid-service, she'd risen from the depths of an epiphany so powerful that she feared the entire congregation had felt it. But only the statue of the Spider Queen was watching her. Staring back at those unblinking red gems, Jhaelryna knew she had to flee. She'd tried to make the Matron proud. She'd risen to the top of her class, but she didn't find the cruelty of politics easy. She wasn't a natural liar. Her fate seemed sealed: sh would achieve nothing until the hour came when she was tasked by her superiors, by the all-powerful priestesses, to do what for her was impossible. She had to leave Draadaoloth before that hour.

Past or present, Jhaelryna never feared that the silent hunter would kill her. She feared Lloth had sent it specifically, that the demon goddess would strip her of her gifts, drive her mad, and shape her into another drider outcast. She imagined the experience wasn't dissimilar from Houl's curse. She'd now seen her body act without her will. Seen the signs that her mind was no longer her own. She feared the moment when her friends who would look on her with revulsion---a stranger, an outcast, a monster.

She'd experienced Houl's possession as watching a drow mage descend from the aether and wrest control of her body. She remembered how the goblins once reacted to her visage. Had they known this mage? But who was she to them in life? How was she connected to Moonreach, and what had happened to her?

Was she ever real?

Jhael turned back to her notes on the ritual to purify the moonstone. At some point, she'd attempted to improve it, to simplify its complicated demands, but that Jhael had misunderstood, had made foolish, embarrassing mistakes. They'd barely succeeded the first time, and Jhael was no longer confident that she could still rise to the challenge. She tossed the notebook to the ground. The dangers of Moonreach hadn't been anything like she'd expected, and it was still unfolding every day, every choice, every move they made. The L.O. misunderstood the risks, and in their most frustrated, stubborn moment, they'd caused a woman's likely death. Certainly the death of who'd she been. Jhael could hardly recall what she'd hoped to accomplish coming here, before the war came, and even if she could read her old theories, she wasn't sure she'd believe them any longer. Her body was being used for evil, and she was no longer confident that the evil wasn't her.

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With the word monster. still echoing in her mind, the half-drow paused between the shelves to contemplate why this incidence felt different in some as-yet unarticulated way. Intuition is the mind recognizing an answer before reason can write the question. It was a poorly formed aphorism, incapable of verification---and yet it had so often been true. Jhaelryna had utterly failed to convince her cohort of the inevitability of her dismissal. But what had changed, what was the source of this new discomfort?

The miscommunication could originate with the lack of comparison to Laura Cade and her biography, she theorized. The theurge was truly a generalist: her eyes, mind, and heart all vessels eager to receive life's endless wonders. She'd reasoned with a kuo toa--a gibbering, maddened species incapable of subservience let alone trade. But why wouldn't Laura Cade expect so? The best schools, as she often repeated. Paid for by a brother who is simultaneously absent yet ever-present. No one had been paid to share Jhael's company since she'd arrived on the surface. Her own arcane education, initially, had been a defeat, a sorrow, for the Matron who'd salvaged her son's mistake in the hope of securing House Desptyl another priestess of the spider queen. Now Cade's form of optimism crawled across Jhaelryna's skin like the march of small insects, like hope, like desperation. It surprised her, and she hadn't be able to receive surprises as anything other than peril in a long time. Kindness. The word had been her oath for a century, but Cade owned it more than she did. Their time together was surely dwindling, and despite their miscommunications, Jhael's intuition already staked this severance as a tremendous loss.

With Stockley whispering in Farian's ear, with his all-important work interrupted by unnecessary politics, the dis-invitation was imminent. Ashla Mihr Anahel seemed to understand that much, that the commonfolk would play the system to their favor. "Their bitterness is reflecting of misfortune that's nothing to do with you," she'd said before attempting her failed intervention. They'd shared a moment on the rooftops together early on. Jhael thought she recognized a kindred spirit, another who knew the sanctity of obligation and honesty. Despite Ashla's recognition by the Lunar Knights, Jhael suspected they shared something more - that perhaps Ashla also remained an outsider among peers.

Jhael recalled the first time she'd seen the common-folk of Norwick huddled in the slave pit and awaiting auction. So pale and crowded that her initial impression was of a congealed mass of jelly, the alien bodies had terrified the young Jhael, who until that moment knew only that the Matron had forbidden humans and Seldarine in their house. Then she recognized the terror in the eyes of their children. She'd asked her uncle---no, her father---whether any of them were storytellers. She'd heard strange tales of their open sky and its blinding ball of fire, the fields of gold that sprung from soft soil. That curiosity would be whipped from her when they returned home. She hadn't yet uncovered the secret about her mother, her actual mother, and the reason for the Matron's stricture.

Jhaelryna had learned early not to share stories of the Underdark with surfacers. They may not whip her, but they withdrew in ways which hurt far worse. Yet Jhael believed, on the scarcest of evidence, that Ashla could listen without judgment or indeed could sympathize and offer more than an aphorism or blind hope. That day may be unattainable now.

Monster. Aenhever had been the first to notice the looks, to comment on them as if he thought she hadn't seen the same many times before. But then, he was newly a monster himself. Perhaps she was another rat-thing to him, another cautionary tale. Aenhever was far more likely to hurt these commoners than she, and yet he only expressed gratitude toward Moonreach, Cleimants and all. Jhael realized then that she was unaware of what the Selunites were teaching him, if they were teaching him. Had she not even asked? Had she not even been curious about his ordeal in chains? On her original admittance to Spellweaver Keep, Jhaelryna had became subject to rules upon rules. How to eat with a thank you, how to make requests of her lessers with please, how lessers was never an absolute. Then came the advanced lessons - anticipating a need, leading without dictating, disproving a malicious rumor through action alone. Genzir's rules and affirmations were etched into her being now, rehearsed when she tranced as frequently as Gerrault's Elements. Such wisdom seemed to come easily to Aenhever, with his quiet asides to everyone in their cohort. Jhael had fancied herself observant and by necessity an adept judge of character. Yet Aenhever could speak five words of wisdom worth fifty sentences of her own.

Lokelani, Florian, and Nergui all contained depths hidden to her, and Jhaelryna couldn't begin to estimate what the loss of their friendship would cost. And therein was written the question that intuition had answered: she'd never in her years left behind so many whom she could call friend. It wasn't hope or desperation either, they'd proven as much when they'd rescued her. Jhaelryna cried, foolishly, for the many unknowns. When a sniffle seemed to echo across the stone library, she straightened her spine, wiped her cheeks, and returned to work lest she be caught. It was another of Genzir's lessons, and not Farian's directive, that had set her upon this task. Always leave a library in better shape than you found it. The outpouring of books into the hallways wasn't a thing she could tolerate. She could at least finish this reshelving project before the inevitable.

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From Jhaelryna's notebook:

The Adventurer : A theoretical model developed from interviews

Danger, close calls, rescues. Deny life debts even if advantageous.
Nicknames--highlight specialities. NOT appearance. Possible exception for unusual hair color.
Growth in power. Strive for reciprocal benefits, not domination.
Gossip. Frame as concern. No spying or alliances.
Personal goals must become group goals, however tangential.
Stark political beliefs. For "the good of all" & "the common man."
Confessions of history. Disagreement & forgiveness.
Sacrifice or willingness for same. Obligation to resist or avert by others even when elegant or practical solution.

Must test limitations of original data - only arcanists. Question: how skewed the results, re power? Evident that one can swing sword better or worse, but is there equivalence?

Moonreach Experiment
Day One

Attempted to account for human factor, re brevity. Uncertain what affect this could have either way.

Day Two

Feedback: "You don't have to prove yourself" - what could this mean? Reference to origin and anticipation of Step 7? Unclear if too late for follow-up question.
Step 5 begun with some. Appear to be proceeding at different rates. Many remain insular. Helmet and hood. My example has not helped. Have yet to draw out. Others equally unwilling to speculate.

Day Three

Hinted others discussed me previous night. Recognition of successful rescue in crypt.
Suggests could have missed progress in eagerness to study new findings, re mission. Is one drink inadequate for socialization?
Resistance to nicknames? Repetition must be key.