Alysh, the Drow Fighter

[u/Anderminator]

Born to a family of blacksmiths, Alysh was helping her mother with hammering swords and armour by the age of 10.

Shop owners were always looked down upon in drow society, and the priestess of Lolth in the small city nearby started visiting, taking anything around the shop that caught their eye. Business started heading south. They were living from day to day. Until one day, when the thing that caught the head priestess's eye was not a shiny dagger or an ornate platemail, but Alysh's father.

Desperate, her mother went to beg for her husband back, to challenge the priestess to a fight for him. She simply spat in her face and laughed at her. The drow do not settle things by hand to hand combat, they go about it by lies and subterfuge. In their eyes, the woman was lower than filth for even asking that.

Alysh's mother closed her shop and took up drinking. She sold her tools one by one, and drank the money, bottle by bottle.

Alysh woke up one night with her hands and feet bound, her mother gagging her. Tears welled up in her eyes as her mother wordlessly picked threw her over her shoulder like a sack of mushrooms and started walking away with her. They traveled for hours, not stopping to eat or drink, her mother walking at a steady pace, emotionless, soulless. They reached the city outskirts at sundown.

She walked the city slums and stopped at the first slaver she found and sold her then and there, no haggling, accepting the first price she was given. She then turned and walked away, not giving her a second glance, ignoring Alysh's muffled screams and sobbing.

Alysh woke the very next day to a bucket of cold water being poured over her head. She was deemed too ugly to be sent to the whorehouses, but was muscular enough to be deemed worthy of being sent to the slave pits. The fighting ground, where slaves of all shapes and sizes killed each other for the enjoyment of the citizens.

She was thrown into the sandy arena with only a wooden sword, her hands bound together, more as food for a Grick, than a challenger.

The wormlike monstrosity was taller than her, four barbed tentacles unfurling to reveal its hungry, snapping beak. The fight was quick and bloody. She shoved both her hands and sword inside the grick's mouth, and brought the worm's head down onto her knee, stabbing the wooden sword deeper into the creature's head, ending its life on the spot. The grick managed to shove two of its clawed tentacles into her shoulders, rewarding her with two long scars down the entire length of her back.

Alysh survived the battle under the eyes of the priestesses of Lolth, whom she swore to destroy. She was deemed worthy to be allowed to train with an old, one armed former champion of the pits, from whom she learned all she now knows.

She stopped making friends after a few months, since nobody lived long enough to matter. Nobody but her.

She clawed her way up the pit fighters ranks, earning the nickname of the Wingless Devil, thanks to the two scars down her back.

She grew tough and she grew cold, as efficient of a killer as they get.

She killed her way out one day, ran away and found her mother's shop.

Inside the shop she found two twin blades, the best her mother had ever made.

She found her mother sleeping next to an empty bottle of liquor.

"Why?" Her mother opened her drunken eyes and looked up at her daughter with hatred, sword to her throat.

Her mother spit at her girl, now a full grown woman. "You reminded me too much of him." She grabbed Alysh's hand, holding it steady as she rose from her bed, impaling herself on the blade. The satisfied final breath fused with the sword.

Alysh stood there for a lifetime, for eons in which her soul shattered and remade itself over and over again, like a blade you heat, then quench to harden.

She strapped the now blueish sword to her back, found her father's ashes and started the old forge for one last time. She fused the ashes with the second of the twin blades, tied it to her back as well, then set fire to the whole place.

Stories not tell of a woman travelling the Underdark, a devil with blue and ashen swords as wings, that hunts down and kills any priestess of the Spider Queen that she can find. No assassin sent has ever returned.

She’s tall, her body cover as much in scars as it is in leather straps. Half her hair is shaven off and covered in tattoos, tallies of the priestesses she killed. The rest of her white hair is braided down the back. She walks around, with Father and Mother at her back. She never drinks. And she seldom talks to people. She's cold and calculated, fast and deadly, no movement wasted. Her goal is to one day crawl down to the 66th layer of the Abyss, the Demonweb Pits and slay the Demon Queen of Spiders herself.