To Live and Uplift Underground 17 (Arc End)


Responsibility.


When forced to choose between two bad choices, are you responsible? I’ve been pondering this question since before I died and was born again. You could make the case that this was precisely the sort of choice I’ve always faced. When my first set of parents made life at home unlivable, when my wife and then kids made the later stages of that life into a redo, or almost every single day that I’ve been a Drow. Always, at every turn, a smorgasbord of bad choices and undesirable consequences.


It’s easy to think that’s no choice at all, isn’t it? When everything is going bad, it's the easiest way to protect your sanity. So I wouldn’t be too judgmental about it, you know? Whether good or bad, you still gotta live after you’ve made your bed.


But you can as easily crush the things that you like about yourself by doing that. So we face the facts and, whichever way is the kindest to us, try to measure what is it that we actually chose.


Because if you at least managed to make the best out of all bad choices, taking responsibility for it at least feels mollifying. Somewhat good. Ego protected, fully sane.


If.


That was a big if.


Because IF that wasn’t true. If you really didn’t make the best out of all bad choices, it was hard to say that, at that point, being delusional was a way to protect your sanity. Because no matter what you did, the pathway to change would ALWAYS be there. That acknowledgement always remained just out of sight, in the periphery of your vision, waiting to bleed you the second your self-lies weren’t enough.


I had so much time to get good at that, though…


Ah, but I was done running.


Don’t get me wrong, I was still going through my honeymoon with my newfound love of being a victim. Not having a choice excited me like nothing else. Being dominated was such a violent high that, if I didn’t have my dreams and ambitions to ground me, I don’t know what would have become of me in those few months after I became blooded.


I wasn’t protecting my ego; I was simply living in the heaven that I never knew I wanted.


But, as I reached out to one of my cousins, as both begged me for help. As I made a decision on the time that it would be meaningful. As I reached for Jarn’a, Younger Talia reached out for me, her actions full of desperation and fragility. I knew that I would not have much luck this time.


I grabbed Jarn’at’s hand and pulled her hard enough that we were both able to clear that part of the tunnel as the gravel from on top came crumbling in.


Talia made it some part of the way.


But not enough to clear the tons of rock and dirt coming down on top of her.


I turned my head just as me and Jarn’at jumped out of the way.


It let me see Talia one last time before she disappeared.


It let me look her in the eyes and see the fear in them.


The terror.


The hurt.


“Why didn’t you pick me?” is something I distinctly reall her saying, somehow.  But, of course, that would be impossible.


There wasn’t enough time for her to have said that.


One second she was there.


The next, she wasn’t.


“Talia!” I yelled as more and more of the ceiling crumbled.


“Arione, come on!” It was now Jarn’at’s turn to pull me up and drag me away, “We don’t know how much of the ceiling is going to fall. We have to get away, NOW!”


The grip of my best friend felt like iron as she dragged me away from, if we are going to be completely objective here, one of the girls who had taken advantage of me in this life.


But, unlike Aunt Kan’a, or my wife in my first life, Talia cared.


Talia actually cared.


I have absolutely no illusions about what sort of girl she was, or of the nature of her “love”. I knew she cared about me as a possession rather than a person, but I was all the same a possession she treasured. With time, under lesser pressure and lesser stakes, maybe she would have gone beyond that.


I don’t know.


I didn’t know.


I suppose I will never find out.


“No other part of the ceiling has cracked,” Jarn’at after a while of pulling me said. She was very strenuously studying the walls and ceiling, “And I don’t hear nor feel anything else. How about you, Arione?”


“Huh?” I remember snapping out of my torpor, “The earthquakes? Are they done? Good….good.”


“We were near the main route that the gang was going to take,” Jarn’at frowned at me but continued, “So we shouldn’t have gone off course too badly.”


“I am assuming, of course, that a cave in bad enough to make the gang reroute completely didn’t happen,” Jarn’at’s long ears stirred with annoyance, “But I find it doubtful they won’t at least try to recover Aunt Kan’a’s parties. The losses would be too crippling…otherwise…Arione?”


“Sorry,” I apologized like I should, “I know that this is all important. I know that it’s our life on the line.”


“I know I am being a fucking burden,” I hissed as I looked down at my hands.


“I just-I just-”


Jarn’at put her hands over mine.


“Younger Talia is dead,” she put words to what I was dealing with.


“I know,” I replied, trying and failing to put it behind me like I was always able to.


But it was so hard to do it just then.


“I didn’t like my niece,” Jarn’at said and, for a second, I was thrown for a loop; was this her way of reassuring me?


Or, rather, why wasn’t she ordering me to woman up and do what I needed to do? The social order of the Drow was so ingrained that I would have. On this occasion, it would have been a kindness.


“She was an annoying twit who thought that everything that was mine should be hers. I will not lie and say that I feel particularly bad about her being dead,” she said.


“But-” the grasp of her hands was warm and it made me aware that it was getting cold, “You do, don’t you?”


“You liked her.”


“I don’t-” I bit my lip, “I don’t know. Not really.”


I’ve had a whole case of experiences in my first life to refer to, but absolutely nothing tracked to Younger Talia. Then again, few things in my past life tracked to this Drow one.


“I’ve had friends die,” she tenderly told me.


That brought me to a stop, “...yeah, I recall.”


And I did; the skirmish line was a source of constant Darwinian pressure. Girls and boys were always dying. There was no escaping that.


“The girls-” she said, and it was with the furtive tone of someone getting ready to reveal a secret, “We keep it out of sight, because weakness is unsightly, but we know of a way to say goodbye to those who die.”


My eyes widen slightly, and I looked at my cousin with something that I didn’t think myself capable of feeling at that moment: surprise.


“Shall I show you?” she asked me with outmost seriousness.


After 25 years within the gang, this was how I found that the Drow actually mourned.


“Y-yes,” I could only reply.


“Look at the earth,” Jarn’at ordered me, her hands still engulfing mine, “Think of the unlucky depar-”


Jarn’at bit her tongue and amended herself, “-think of Talia, in the last moment when she was whole and strong. Think of her when she last was with us in a state that wouldn’t bring her shame.”


I thought about it, and could recall how she was about an hour ago before the earthquake began.


Sure. Foold hardy. 


Vexed.


Excited.


“I have her,” I whispered.


“Now, close your eyes,” she bid me.


I did.


“Release your hands,” she said as she let go of mine.


I did.


“Now, let her go. Let her descend to Matreal’s embrace,” she said and, here, I met the only trouble that I had.


After all, I didn’t believe in what I assumed was just a primitive goddess. Even in my thoughts, even acting it outloud, seemed like too far for something that mattered so much.


But what did I have to lose?


“Talia, cousin,” I breathed out.


“You can now go to Matreal’s embrace.”


“You can now go to Matreal’s embrace, you daring cunt,” Jarn’at repeated after me, managing to make the insult sound like an endearment.


For me…it was enough.


“Feeling better?” Jarn’at asked.


‘I suppose?” I shook my head. I no longer felt like my mind was weightless, at least.


“That’s good,” my cousin sighed with relief.


“Because we are going to have to go back where she died.”


“What?” I barked as my eyes shot open.


“Nightfall, Arione,” Jarn’at said, and all the tenderness that had been just there vanished, “Nightfall is coming, and we are without even a single tent.”


“We need to go back to Talia, and see what we can scrounge up from her body. Elsewise, we are dead.”


—---------------------




I didn’t know what is it that we expected to find as we made our way back.


Both Jarn’at and Talia had been in the middle of setting their tents when I turned up upon them, and both had left them where they were when the earthquake happened.


Then again, not going back to see what we could get from her was the same as just lying down and dying.


The temperature quickly dropped as we made our way back and I wondered if we would even have time to dig out her corpse. But what was the alternative?


Try and see if we could find a groove of mushrooms whose roots had been shaken loose by the earthquake? It really was no choice at all. Additionally, with our luck, I am not sure we wouldn’t have come upon some Blind Mushrooms instead and thoroughly screwed ourselves over.


But, as we made our way to the collapsed tunnel that was now my cousin’s grave, it seemed to me like we were screwed anyway.


“She had to have some kindling with her,” Jarn’at grunted as the cold started to mist our breath.


She hugged me close to her for heat ,and I had no reason to deny her, “If nothing else, there are her clothes, whatever food she has or even-”


She gave me a careful look from the periphery of her eyes, “-her corpse.”


I didn’t react to that.  After all, burning her, in my mind, wasn’t any worse than leaving her buried under the accident that killed her.


“It’s going to be hard, damned hard,” Jarn’at said, “But it should be possible to survive a night if we make a big enough fire.”


“And if we can keep it burning long enough,” she grunted.


The notion of a warm fire started to sound better and better as we walked.


The cold almost blinded us as we went, but our two bodies emitted enough heat to see right in front of us.


We were chittering by the time we got to Talia.


Our bodies felt numb.


And yet, we got there with so much work ahead of us.


I honestly don’t know what would have happened that night if it had been a “normal” night.


If and when Talia and Jarn’at fought, would they have managed to kill one another, or would they have perhaps just wounded one of themselves enough that they couldn’t contest my possession?


Maybe I could have come up with an arrangement that made everyone happy? Or at least share. Aunt Talia would have seen it as me pitting both of my cousins against each other to claw back some autonomy, I realized. It could have worked if I had just the words, just the timing, just the wit to make it happen.


But then, none of those things happen.


The fact was, that this wasn’t a “normal” night.


And I mean that in more sense then one.


By the time we got to the pile of rubble that was Talia’s grave, we saw that her arm was hanging out of the pile in a way that I knew was impossible.


Younger Talia, after all, was not close enough to have made it this far.


And yet, there her arm was.


But more than that.


MORE than that.


Was what it was holding.


“Is that?” Jarn’at choked with a tone of voice that was new to me. It took me a while to recognize it, but in the end, I knew what it was.


Fear.


“It-it is,” I gestured at it in bewilderment.


Because, in the rigid arm of my cousin’s corpse, was the copper axe that I had made for her, clenched in a fist.


It was facing us.


And it was bleeding.


“How-” Jarn’at began to ask.


“-I don’t know,” I replied.


Blood dripped from the blade of the axe.


It stained the floor, drop by drop.


But the maddening thing.


The thing that made my spine shiver?


There were other drops of blood next to the dots directly underneath the axe.


Drops that made a line.


Drops of blood that lead somewhere.


Even being as we were, two Drow shivering against each other, knocking at the door of death, it was impossible to ignore this. I don’t know that anyone could have.


I find myself following the dots and, for once, it was me who was pulling Jarn’at along.


“What is this?” she asked with fear and confusion, the normally unflappable girl that I knew was now shaken as much as I’d ever seen her.


“I don’t know,” I replied again but, no, that was a lie this time.


I had an inkling now.


An idea that had sprouted in my head.


As we walked to a tunnel that we had somehow MISSED when we were running away from the collapsing ceilings, it felt as though some of my thoughts weren’t mine.


An idea.


A word.


Something was beginning to sprout in my mind.


“This-this has to be it,” I said as I led us to the end of the tunnel.


“A deadend?” Jarn’at asked.


And, to be fair to her, that is what it looked like.


“No,” I shook my head and that helped soothe the thing that was burning a notion in my mind, “It’s-It’s-”


I put my hand against the wall.


And I put my meager weight against it.


With nary a groan, the wall collapsed.


All of a sudden, Jarn’at and I were awashed in a world of heat and light.


“It’s here,” I moaned as I clenched at my head, the notion now so bright that it was painful to bear.


“Wha-what is this?” Jarn’at whispered as her eyes got used to both of the kinds of luminosity that Drow could see


‘Aaaaugh,” I screamed as the answer was on the tip of my lips.


It could not be contained.


It needed to be known.


Divine favor needed to be revealed.


Acknowledgement


“Acknowledgement!” I screamed as the pain finally left through my mouth and left my body, leaving me sagging in place.


“Acknowledgment,” I repeated again as Jarn’at stared at me with wide eyes.


“For the sacrifice made.”


We were both standing over a pit that went down for miles and miles and miles.


A pit that was huge but was lit so far above that I couldn’t see the end, and close enough to the bottom that I could see lava bubbling.


This was a heat vent. One directly connected to a lava flow.


Something I hadn’t thought existed in our earthquake-prone mountains; if we had this, surely we would have had an eruption long ago?


But the evidence before me could not be denied.


Nightfall came, and we were warmed with the blood of Matreal.


My cousin died, and in return I was given the one thing a craftsdrow of my ilk needed the most of all.


Fire.