To Live and Uplift Underground 5


My male cousins were copying me.


And that left me with many mixed feelings.


Now, before I go further, I must make something clear: saying that they were all my cousins is a bit reductive, so perhaps it would be more apt to say that my cousins, my nephews, uncles my age, and perhaps even my brothers were all copying me. Because the only relations that truly matter in Drow society are vertical ones, not horizontal. I don’t say this to dismiss them; I say this to explain why a word to precisely describe all of them doesn’t quite exist. 


So, as most of my familial relations with my peer kinfolk were of the cousin variety, “cousin” will have to do to refer to all my peers of roughly my age. Because, yes, there indeed is a noticeable difference even among males between those who are older and those who are not.


But we are not talking about our many “uncles” yet.


We are talking about those who, driven by envy and spite, had taken rock to stone and began shaping murder implements out of them, Neolithic style. Which was more than half of them. I have long realized that, by standing out, I provide a contrast that the gang did not have an easy way to navigate. By producing something the gang wanted besides a warm body, I must have made my cousins feel threatened; wasn’t I proving that they were useless?


It might be that extending a little empathy is naive, especially given that we are Drow, but it hurts me little to do that now.


Back then, of course, it was somewhat concerning.


I hadn’t set out to do any of what I did because I wanted to elevate myself above my peers. I did it because I wanted to be more than a coward. It shouldn’t have mattered if someone picked up the torches that I was setting.


Sure, half were doing it because they wanted to get the things I was being given, which I can’t blame them for. And the other half doing it because I was, and wanted to show others that I was nothing “special”, didn’t really matter.


But life on the outskirts was a fight over scraps.


Now, I will admit that the problems of having to fight other would-be stone workers were a danger lurking off in the distance. But a future danger was still a danger.


Even back then, I knew that the “worst” that could happen if I failed to advance was that I rejoined a caste of, yes, more useful and slightly more valuable males. I, perhaps, could have taken some solace that I “taught” them that.


But you should understand.


No.


You HAVE to understand.


I.


Was.


Not.


Done.


Yet.


The fire in my heart still burned.


Luckily, despite not being a master stone craftsdrow back then, the gulf that lies just between someone who had an idea of how something was supposed to go and someone who doesn’t was still monstrosously vast. They still needed examples of just what could be done. Example that only I could provide.


But seeing them break flakes off rocks, each one getting that bit more clean and precise, lent to what I did a certain sense of urgency.


A sense of urgency that made me take the copper that we got very, VERY seriously.


So, after I had applied the glue that I had made to fungus wood hafts that I had carved grooves on. After I had set stone blades into their tips, about a third smaller than my first one had been. After the tendons dried and contracted stone leafs into the grooves. After the glue dried with the blades were in their place. After I had five knife-clubs that I was sure could at least survive one single fight and not be spent in a single throw….I set them aside.


I wanted the copper that Talia’s crew brought, so I would need Aunt Kan’a to get it for me. Ideally, I would have turned in my commissions right away and asked for just that. But younger Talia, the cousin who had forced me to give her oral, had “retrieved” the weapon that I had stolen from Jarna’t. A weapon that I had supposedly stolen FOR Kan’a. Asking for anything in return right away might have been taken as the opportunity to tweak her nose a bit. So, in the interest of not having my request dismissed out of hand, I opted to wait a few days to let things settle down.


Which left me time to tackle my remaining commission.


Given enough time, if I stayed doing the same thing, my male cousins would catch up to me and make what I do superfluous. Given how long-lived Drow are, that was inevitable. But so long as I knew some of the techniques behind working it, and they didn’t, that day would always be tomorrow.


They knew that stones could be knapped. That there was a certain order and scheme to it. They had seen me do it.


But did they know that stone could be cut?


Or, well, “abraded” would be more apt.


I had promised Zinta a new handle and a part of me couldn’t wait to see what their reaction was to it.


But first, I had to find a stone.


Now, unlike a stone blade, I didn’t need the rock to be brittle enough to leave jagged edges behind when struck from sharp angles. 


No, I quite simply needed the rock to be light.


The thing with earthquakes is that they moved earth around. The tunnels that collapsed and the tunnels that opened up revealed ancient traumatic events from the past, and that included volcanic activity.


I am not going to lie to your face and say that I can tell igneous rocks from sedimentary at a glance. That is, rocks made from cooled lava and rocks made from solidified “dirt”. 


I will, however, say that obsidian is not hard to tell apart.


I am sure that a normal person in a normal environment would have needed to go prospecting to find what I simply traveled a good hour to get to. But for once, being part of semi-nomadic underground elves was actually useful. 


This was a spot I had spied in one of our movements.


The particular vein that I was looking for was situated in one of the newer tunnels. The mushrooms hadn’t moved in here yet, so there were no moles or cave rats to give any sign of life. As far as I was concerned, that was good.


Because, in a wall that was half rubble, protruded what was a big block of smooth stone that, to my infrared-seeing eyes, glowed when exposed to my body heat.


I had no pickaxe with me. I had no hammer. No tools.


But hadn’t I been working with stones as of late?


The underground provided plenty of boulders, and I just needed to grab the heaviest one that I could lift over my head. Yes, so that I could bring it down at an angle, just right where the obsidian vein protruded the most.


The chunk that flew off almost went straight for my thigh, but it might have been worth it even if it had, because it only needed me to break it in half again to have a sample that I could work with.


I still took both pieces, just in case.


The next day, I woke up early again and resisted the urge to go very far from the gang’s home caves. 


Being far away from my cousin’s prying eyes would have been preferable, yes, but the dangers outside still remained. You might think that Younger Talia’s visit would have made me afraid to be so close to my home while being outside of it.


But all it made me consider was what would have happened if she had chanced upon me if I had been far away from it.


She would not have harmed me, I am sure of that, but I am also fairly sure the knife-club that I had taken from Jarna’t would not have been the only thing she “repossessed”.


Besides, the stone bowl that I had used to make my glue was going to come in clutch once again, and it would have been a bitch and a half to move the heavy fucker.


So, despite the hidden eyes looking at me, I came back to what was starting to become my work spot.


Parking my ass against a wall, I gathered a hard stone and took out one of my obsidian blocks.


I wasn’t going to knap the whole way this time…but I still benefited from having the piece I was working on being as close to its final projections as I could. The breaking angle eluded me for a while, the flakes I was breaking off being too small to make good time on it. But after getting a feel for it, one good blow broke a slab out of a half chunk.


It was less than half of that half, but it was in the form of an awkward tile that was thick enough to work for my purposes. Making a fully rounded handle might have been impossible with it, but I had decided from the beginning that the handle would be an oval.


Or as close as I could get to the shape.


But there was still a whole lot of superfluous obsidian that I had to break off. And here, again, I started knapping, trying to get as much work done through flaking before I turned to abrasion.


For my troubles, I ended up with a long column of black stone that would have actually made a rather attractive obsidian knife if I kept working at it.


It actually hurt a bit to put my flaking stone down, but pity would not get me to where I wanted.


Thus far, I had not done anything that anyone in my gang had not witnessed before. It had taken me a couple of hours and I dearly hope that I had bored them by this point.


Because if that hadn’t, what I was about to do probably did.


I took out my sole water skin and dabbed a bit of it into the stone bowl. I took a fistful of sand and dumped it into the water. I took my obsidian column and put one of the still long, blunt edges against the watery sand.


And then, quite liberally, I started dragging it up and down.


That was it.


That’s all I did.


I sanded one side of the obsidian column through the depression that stone bowl had and, every single time I did, I left a few microns of obsidian behind in the water.


This being my first time doing this, I tried to not put too much pressure on my handle lest it break, but a steady amount of pressure, after three hours, reduced one side of the column into a surprisingly flat surface.


But it was such a hard-fought surface that I considered flaking it a bit more to make it quicker.


In the end, however, it was fairly close to the shape that I needed it to be. So, sighing, I turned it around.


And abraded the other side for three more hours.


I knew that “cutting” stone this way could remove up to a centimeter of stone, per hour, but the actual experience would have been soul-killing and frustrating if I hadn’t known that it required this much time. As it was, I was sure I lost my “audience” at some point.


That is, before I brought it up and saw that it was now roughly almost an oval.


The sides that I had not “cut” still had all manner of protrusions in them, but the sanded ones were smooth to the touch. As it was, I could wrap my hand around the column and imagine that there was a knife at the end of it, despite its heft.


The water in the bowl was so dirty by then, though, that refilling it with water did not seem like it would do much. 


So I was surprised to notice that I had ALSO dug a trench into the bottom of the stone bowl when I dumped the “shavings”.


But it made sense that it, too, was being abraded at the same rate my handle was.


This was a lucky discovery, however.


Putting more sand and water into it, this new trench allowed me to abrade my obsidian column without having to guide it.


Reducing it to the two other sides to the right dimensions still took another 6 hours.


But by the time I went to sleep, I would only need to “cut” the uncomfortable edges off to make it useful.


And then, after that, would come the hard part.


Cutting into it.


Two days later, I had a fungus wood stick in my hand that I was rolling into one end of my obsidian stick as if I were trying to light it on fire.


Clumps of dirt and water formed into clay allowed me to make a “bowl” at the end of said stick where less saturated dirt and water rolled under the gyrating stick of “wood”.


This thin piece of fungus wood was actually from a broken haft that the gang was going to use as kindling. Being of no use other than that, I was not denied it when I asked for it.


Now, after many hours, I was perhaps getting the hole to the right “depth”.


The handle itself must have been 6 inches long, as it was, but I knew that I was going to reduce the ends. With that in mind, I was sure I would have, at most, 5 inches of handle. I did not know how long Zinta’s knife handle was, exactly, but I would have eaten my loincloth if it were more than that.


The thing is, what little I saw of it, revealed that it wasn’t a full tang knife.


And that meant that I had, what, 2 inches, or about 5 centimeters, worth of tang? I could make a small circular hole that deep in about 5 hours.


I had to make multiple ones, each one right next to the other, until they made a slit opening at the end of the obsidian column. And this hole was merely the second one.


I did not finish opening that day.


But I certainly finished it on the third day.


There I was, with something that I was SURE could technically be used to finish my “commission”. It was a dark stick of volcanic glass that had an aperture large enough at one end to slide a blade tang into. With the glue that I had, I did not even have to worry about figuring out how the tendons would work with this thing; the surface area between obsidian and metal was enough to let the glue work alone.


But, as I stared at it, at the thing that had taken me so many hours to do and represented the whole of a debt owed, I became…discontent.


It was ugly.


For something that should have been wondrous, it was butt ugly.


The other end of the knife was a jagged mess that should not have mattered and there were still some sides of the handle that were still unsanded because they were already flat. It wasn’t asymmetrical in a way that was handsome and just spoke of a lack of care.


A lack of love, when I had always thought that obsidian was a beautiful stone.


So, sighing, I filled my stone basin with water and sand once more.


And took one more day to polish things off.


When I sought Zinta out, what I had was a column that tapered from a blunt end to a narrow end that would accept the knife tang. Sanding the whole column at an angle had been a massive pain in the ass, but the handle already felt a hundred times better than it had yesterday.


And it looked, in my humble opinion, a thousand times better.


“The crafts-male comes,” the gilf of my mother’s gang joked, “Here to give me my handle and not an excuse to get out of your debt, I hope?”


Instead of two months, it had taken me two weeks to get this done. I don’t know if it was smart of me to make this impression, but I was excited to show off what I had made.


“You tell me,” I said with a wide smile on my face, holding the black glass handle in my hand.


“This-that’s not fungus.” That was my first time ever seeing Zinta dumbfounded, “Not wood either. Actual wood, I mean.”


“Obsidian?” She took a hold of the handle and touched it with expert hands, her gray fingers gliding through the smooth surface, ”You made this from obsidian?”


“How did you make obsidian look like this?” she said with wonder.


“Did you-did you use any magic?” she said with such earnestness that I almost laughed.


5 days of work for one simple 5-inch handle that I could wrap my hand around of. 5 days of work for such a simple thing.


But hah, this was worth it.


“Nope,” I replied in what I hoped made me mysterious, “Just a whole lot of hard work.”


“Quake mistress, I don’t know HOW you figured out how to do this, but-” Zinta stopped staring at the handle in wonder only to lick her lips in contemplation, “I wonder if it’ll fit.”


She reached into the waistband of her pants, making my eyes catch a flash of brief white pubic hair before she drew her knife out.


The knife handle was thoroughly wrapped with thin strips of leather, to the point that it looked a bit uncomfortable to grab. Indentions in the form of splits still showed throughout the handle and I wondered how I would dissemble it without breaking the thing. Just in case I had sized my obsidian handle wrong.


But Zinta merely bit into the leather of her handle and ripped it off with her teeth.


The handle fell appart after that.


This was my first time seeing actual honest to goodness wood, the real thing from the top side world. It had once formed the handle of the gang’s huntress’ knife, but it was now a bunch of shattered pieces that had only held on to their handle shape due to glued leather making it hold it.


A protest  against destroying the handle, just in case mine wasn’t the right size, died in my lips as Zinta dusted the tang of her knife.


And then slid it into the aperture of the black glass handle.


“Oh my,” she gasped as her knife’s bolster clicked on the slit at the end of the obsidian knife. Not only was the aparture, the right depth, it was also large enough to handle what turned out to be 5 centimeters of a push tang.


She swung it back and forth in her hand, making her knife click against the walls of the handle slit, but it neither fell off nor did it break.


“Um,” I said, knowing that the job wasn’t done, “I am going to need to glue them together.”


“Oh? Yes, right,” Zinta seemed to snap out of her wonder, “Right, we’d have to finish the work.”


“But, hmmm, how long until I get it back?” the old female drow happily asked.


“Just to be sure, a full day?” I gandered, “That should be enough time for the glue to cure against metal and glass.”


“Glass?” Zinta quirked her head.


“The obsidian,” I slapped my forehead. Of course, she wouldn’t know they were molecularly the same.


“Well, tomorrow is the day when I check my traps on the upper tunnels,” she mused, letting my comment go, “so if you don’t see me, give it to my daughter. You know, O’vilia.”


“Right, right,” I nodded. O’vilia was the only daughter that Zinta, despite her age, had ever borne.


There was great debate as to why that was. In the end, the best guess that anyone had was that, as someone who wasn’t actually related to my mother, Zinta didn’t want to threaten her in even the smallest of ways by trying to grow her own gang while being part of my mother’s. Though truthfully, it didn’t matter to me.


I turned the now complete obsidian-handled steel knife the next day.


I knew that O’vilia was a Drow woman of 50. Anything below a hundred was considered “young” by Drow standards, but 50 was still old enough to make O’vilia a vaunted “Aunt” to me.


And yes, she was that despite being one of the rare women in the clan who weren’t actually related to me in any way or form. In outskirt gangs, familial relations were social law as much as they were fact. O’vilia was a female above my age peers and that made her an “Aunt”, because there was no room in the gang for her to be anything else.


Well, there was the slight possibility that we were related through our fathers, but as the only children males bothered trying to “claim” were the girls, I had no idea if we were. One look at her, however, made me believe that was very unlikely.


At 5 feet and 10 inches tall, O’vilia was the tallest Drow girl in our gang.


I would learn later on that Drow tended to be short by elf standards, and that outskirt elves tended to be short by Drow standards. How O’vilia grew that tall, I had absolutely no idea, but there was no doubt in me that it probably had something to do with whoever her father was. She was relatively thin, otherwise, with a small bust, a good sized hips and a tight ass. She was almost wispy, even, but she had the natural beauty that all Drow had.


Her nose was straight and pointy, and her eyes were almost a clear brown. Her face was oval, and her lips slight. It was a lovely face, truth be told.


And it would have been lovelier still if she hadn’t been using it to glare at me.


“So,” were the first words that she’d ever said to me, “you are the reason why every single young fucking male in the clan has been badgering me and mama for our catches.”


“I’m sorry?” I blinked.


“You should be,” she pointed a finger at me, “Do you have the slightest idea how many males beggar us for the animals we catch? As if they didn’t know we catch them for the Big Girls? You know, like the crew leads?”


“They have?” I was thoroughly surprised despite the fact that, if I had thought about it some more, I really should not have been.


If my cousins were imitating what I did with the stone, why wouldn’t they imitate what I did with the rat corpses? How else were they going to secure blades to hafts?


“They have the audacity to ask for whole parts of our catches!” O’vilia yelled at me, “And all because my mother humored you!”


“Um, I-I brought this for her?” I dumbly pulled out the now-set knife.


The obsidian ate all the light that hit it, looking dark even in the low light of our caves. But in the infrared spectrum, it glowed with the heat coming out of my hand.


The metal glinted along with it, making for quite a striking thing.


O’vilia stared.


“Your mother told me to give to you if I couldn’t find her,” I explained.


She snatched it from my hands so fast that I almost didn’t see it happen, “I’ll see to it she gets it.”


She rolled the obsidian-handled in her hand for a bit, admiring the way it felt.


“It's really quite bottom-heavy for a knife,” she offhandedly noted, “But it fits just right. It’s-”


She was looking at me.


O’vilia was giving me a considering look.


In the end, she nodded, “You owe us.”


“What?’ I asked.


“You owe us for all the trouble you have brought,” she explained, “If you can make another knife like this-”


“I can’t make steel!” I simply HAD to interrupt.


I had actually played around with the idea of digging further where the obsidian vein laid to look for various ores. Hematite formed in old lava flows due to oxidation, and almost all old volcanic veins around my home were certainly old. It made for interesting fantasies but the fact was, I had no way to heat the ore enough to render any iron from them. 


No, not here in the outskirts.


“Are you an idiot?” O’vilia gave me a look, “You are only a male. Of course, you can’t make something like that. No, what I am asking for is a knife made completely out of this-”


She pointed at the handle I’d made, “-pretty black stone.”


“I heard you’ve been making stone weapons for Aunt Kan’a’s gang and here you are making something pretty for mama,” she slid her fingers through the handle again, “So just one more thing should do it.”


“B-but that was what I owed you!” I couldn’t help but say. It took a whole week of work to make this one knife handle and, despite being long-lived now, my time was still precious to me.


“No, this is for the meat and flesh that mama graciously let you have,” O’vilia waved the knife around.


“What you’ll be making me is for all the trouble your trade made for us,” she seriously said.


“Do you understand, male?”


I swallowed.


“I do.”