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Ninety years, and he still feels lost when he looks upon the moon.
Elendar perches at the edge of the yawning chasm beneath the peak where the Sanctum of the Moon perches. The marble of the railing is cool beneath him. Idly, he curls his fingers against the unyielding surface, watching his legs dangle over the empty darkness below. The building at his back is luminous in the light of the full moon - he doesn’t have to look for his sensitive eyes to pick up on the glow.
This high up, the air is cold, sharp on his tongue when he breathes it in. There are still higher peaks looming around him, clad in silver from the neverending snowfalls of the north. Even in a temple built into the walls of one of the lower passes, he is further above the surface of the world than he’d ever imagined he would be. The thinness of the air attests to that. He still remembers how sick he was when he first came here, choking on every breath, head pounding as though he'd taken a club to the skull, illness gripping the pit of his stomach and sending him emptying its contents on the rocks as he staggered towards the Sanctum gates.
Of course, that illness has long since passed. His body, meant for the depths of the earth, has adjusted as well as it can to a life on its highest reaches.
If only his mind would adapt so easily.
The surface has been trial on trial, from the first day he set foot beneath the sky, but he's used to enduring for the sake of a goddess. He could never do it right when he lived below, but now, at least, he’s trying. He makes a poor surfacer, but a worse drow. He's not even drow anymore, as far as his people are concerned. They'd call him dobluth , now - that is, if they deigned to call him anything at all before giving him a slow, painful death.
What they've already done to him is more than he can begin to understand.
Decade after decade of living on the surface, and he feels fragmented, and what's worse is how much deeper the cracks ran before. At least now, he's certain he's best off on the surface and not dead in a crevasse somewhere below. Existing isn't such a dreadful burden anymore. Perhaps he's just learned how to shoulder it.
He turns his gaze outward and marvels, only somewhat sardonically, at how lucky he is.
Of all the trials he’s suffered, the surface is by far the most beautiful. Moonlight turns the snow to silver, wreathing the peaks in palest light. It's stark against the gray of the bared mountaintops, the range purpling with distance as the peaks march out to the horizon and beyond, soldiers on eternal watch. Last night's snowfall brought the blanket of white now coating the world, but the sky is clear for the moment. Storms whip up with little to no fanfare in the mountains, but seem disinclined to do so now. With the clouds cleared, he can see for miles upon miles.
Far away, the lights of Ten-Towns shine like the scattered sparks of an overturned brazier, warm amber amidst the forbidding peaks and the lonesome wilderness of Icewind Dale. He supposes they ought to look welcoming - they do, for many a traveller passing through the Sanctum. To him, the lights are just another place he cannot go. His nature forbids it.
He doesn't hold it against the townsfolk, of course - their assessment of his people is not baseless. Oftentimes, he finds himself wondering if it's too lenient. Elendar may have compassion for his fellow drow - or that's the name he's given to the tightness in his chest when he dwells on them - but he'll always be first to condemn their ways.
None of that matters to the people of Ten-Towns, or indeed, many surfacers who've crossed his path. He learned early that there is nothing he stands to gain from burdening them with his presence, nothing he can say that will earn him a place among them. Does he even want one? Will he ever? His ways are not theirs, theirs are not his - who would benefit in such a fruitless arrangement?
The Sanctum has all he needs, and he's known the current High Priesthood since they were bright-eyed youths first coming into their faith. Before them, he knew their elders, and their elders' elders - it didn't strike him how brief human lives are until he'd watched generations live them out. The initiates often ask him about their predecessors, burning with youthful curiosity, and he answers as much as he can. He gets the sense that they can tell he never knew any of them well enough to call them friends, but they never question it. That's good enough for him.
Left alone is the best he's ever dared to hope for.
He has a place here, distant as he may be from his fellow faithful. He is sheltered, clothed, and fed. He has paints and canvases, wood and whittling knives, and time enough to devote to both. He reads the histories of the lands-above, and the holy texts penned by the Moonmaiden’s followers, and does his best to make sense of both. He cares for the proud-spirited snowy owls that roost in the highest towers, each bird large enough to carry one of the faithful upon their backs, and he finds a strange fulfillment in looking after the beasts. Some nights, he roams the lands around the lakes and finds quiet inspiration for his art, knowing he has a haven in the mountain passes awaiting his return.
The life the Sanctum has given him is hardly opulent, but it's more than comfortable. Most importantly of all, it's secure . He will not be driven from the marble walls he's come to call home. Stars, he’s sure the young acolytes think his presence as eternal as that of the soaring towers. Here, amid snow and moonlight and mournful wind, he's found a quiet that has seeped into his soul.
The silence grows deeper on the coldest nights, and he welcomes it like an old friend. Elendar loathes mindless talk. He thinks before he speaks, then thinks again, and never lets his thoughts pass his lips unless they would be better than that ever-present silence. Many humans consider him guarded, as though that is an unreasonable state to keep oneself in. Logic aside, he prefers quiet either way. It’s less grating. Safer.
When he finally breaks that silence, it's to say words that are sometimes the only ones passing his lips on any given day.
“Moonmaiden,” he breathes, the title melting into fog in the icy air. "Kindler of starlight, Lady of Silver, I trust in your radiance and turn my gaze to the night. I take the moon as my guide and the stars as my companions. I offer you my efforts and triumphs in the day to come."
It's a prayer he speaks so often that the words come forth of their own volition. He gazes into the full silvery face of the moon, suspended in midnight, dappled with darkest grays and wreathed in its own radiance. It's like nothing the Underdark has to offer.
"May your stars ever emblazon the sky, and may the darkness ever shrink before the rising moon. Be my blackest hour upon me, my faith shall never waver. Be the world’s trials mine to endure, my heart shall not be swayed and my strength shall not fail you." He raises his empty palms to the sky, watching the distant points of light twinkle beyond his fingertips. “Your guidance be mine to follow, and your wisdom be mine to trust.”
One more breath, one more searching look into the stars. “Hear my words, my Lady of Silver, and know their truth.”
High in the cold gulf of the sky, the moon shines impassively down upon him, turning the marmoreal stone of the Sanctum to silver light and catching in Elendar’s loosely-bound hair until it’s limned in a still-brighter shade of white. For a moment, he lets himself be dazzled.
With difficulty, he tears his thoughts from his surroundings and directs them inwards. The quiet after prayer is a time for introspection, he’s learned.
For a terse, frustrating moment, his mind remains stubbornly blank. It’s a defense he’s trying to convince himself he no longer needs.
Once he chases away that block with a sigh and a curling of his fingers against the cold stone of the railing, his mind first strays to the one who ultimately brought him to this sanctuary above the world.
Fionn was a man Elendar hardly knew, fear and resentment and salvation all at once. The first of the faithful he’d met, a cleric who’d pulled his broken body from a crevasse deep beneath the surface and proceeded to all but imprison him. Fionn had needed a guide, Elendar had needed a savior, and he’d been so shattered that he’d settled for a captor instead. Fionn was an enigma he still cannot solve - desperate and yet hopeful, devotee of the moon and yet far from the sky, frightened and yet unfaltering.
Perhaps if he’d lived to see his beloved starlight again, Elendar would have come to understand him.
For all the fervor with which the cleric prayed to his goddess, it hadn't stopped the bulette's claws from tearing his body asunder. One glance at the carnage and Elendar had known. It's a lesson every drow learns sooner rather than later - once a pool of blood reaches a certain size, there's no return.
Running until he could run no longer was the only logical choice in such a situation, and yet over the years, his flight has begun to gnaw at his insides like a small animal seeking escape. It aches sharper than the mountain-sickness did when he first ascended to the Sanctum’s gates. The thing that eludes him is why.
He cannot answer that question. The absence of an answer has become another thing to run from. He's not yet worn himself out, but the aching within tells him it won't be long now.
With a sigh that turns to ephemeral mist, he settles onto the broad rail, flat on his back and looking upwards into cold heavens. The end of his braid sways above the abyss below, tossed by a light wind. The air carries a chill that has him clutching his mantle tighter about himself, a billowing of ivory fur that shields him from the worst of the northern night. Beneath him, the marble is sturdy, just broad enough to let him stretch out without slipping off either side. It’s a vulnerable position, on his back so close to a precipice, but here, he’s begun to understand that he has nothing to fear. There is not a place in the whole of the Underdark where that is true. Then again, so much about the Sanctum is different than the world he left behind.
In Menzoberranzan, prayer is not a choice. It is an obligation every drow understands from the time they’re old enough to speak. The dark elves are their faith, far more than surfacers could ever understand, and the Spider Queen involves herself in their lives more readily than Selûne ever would. Until the first time he watched Fionn pray, miles away from the sky, he’d never thought a deity’s devout would dare to shape their prayers around requests for anything other than trials. The Weaver would have seen such grovelling weakness punished without hesitation. Selûne seems to…welcome it?
He doesn’t know, and it’s kept anything approaching a plea from his prayers.
Displeasing the Weaver is not a distant prospect, but fear of it no longer rules his every breath. It had, once, when he'd first reached the Selûnite outpost in the Underdark, when he'd lied about the death of the man who'd saved him, when he'd let them whisk him to the surface and the Sanctum without warning them of the folly of their quest. He'd feared her retribution enough to keep his silence, even when he knew it meant their death. Now, that fear has ebbed, and in its place a feeling that cuts him inside, gnaws at his ribcage until he feels hollowed-out - not fear, but something equally wretched. Nonetheless, he still does not speak her name - if he was a failure of a drow before, what horrors would she see him suffer now? Elendar can only pray her gaze has turned from him, as his own has from her. He has a wholly different goddess to worry about pleasing - or at least, not angering. Selûne may not make her wrath known as readily as the Spider Queen does, but she withholds her favor just as easily.
It’s almost worse, this silence. Not for the first time, he wonders if he’s mad to pray as fervently as he does.
Prayer was not a choice before, but it is now, and it is one he makes for himself every single night. Were he a better drow, that conviction would have been turned towards capturing glory in the arena or chasing the favor of his Ilharess and, by proxy, their goddess. Somehow, the fear that pervades every aspect of his homeland had paralyzed him into passivity rather than galvanizing him on to a glorious death.
Not inaction, perhaps. Elendar’s former life had been guided by devoted caution and the maintenance of a delicate balance between usefulness and dedicated unremarkableness. He'd held his place, stagnating under the Ilharess’ rule, by skill and paranoia alone. He only survived the long, perilous journey into the north and the Sanctum as a consequence of that strategy - hiding and running, hiding and running, wary for danger, scrounging for scraps with which to sustain himself, never daring more. He's so used to being invisible. It's different when he's such in the eyes of the goddess.
Going unseen was a comfort before. Now, it’s simply all he knows.
He is not a scion of a noble House. If he was ever to know greatness, he would have had to claw it from an unwilling world - through blood spilt in the arena, his or another’s, or through arcane talents he has never possessed. There was no other way. He’d thought his birth granted him a place above the denizens of the Overbright, but near a century on the surface has taught him how wrong he was. There is so much he didn’t understand before his ascent, and more still that feels forever out of his grasp.
Humility is difficult to bear, but he knew it even among his people.
Elendar was raised into carpentry. Any work requiring such frequent contact with the surface was humiliating drudgery, no matter how necessary, no matter how much even the greatest Houses relied on the skill of a woodcarver - no matter how much well-hidden pride he'd taken in a job well done. Elendar had been taught to see his work as strict utility. While he did his work strictly to the expectations of his clients, something about the act of creating soothed something within him.
Woodcarving is not the only thing that fills the void he'd known since birth.
He swings his legs over the railing until his boots hit the pale masonry of the balcony floor. On a small table, polished smooth by the incessant wind, he's left a roll of parchment weighted down by a leather satchel of charcoal pens. He takes them in his hands, kneels on a smooth section of the bricks, and spreads out the blank sheet before him. The satchel atop one corner and the press of his own sure hands keep the breeze from snatching it away. The parchment lies before him, a mosaic of dormant possibilities waiting to be coaxed out by his hand.
Tonight, he has his mind set on only one.
The first rasp of charcoal on paper is always the hardest. The second is little better. It's always worst when he starts - the hesitant push of a chisel, the careful stroke of a brush. He loathes uncertainty. Sometimes, it feels impossible to even set charcoal to page.
Once he starts, he can never stop.
Elendar is a man given to careful forethought, and his art is no exception. No line or curve is unnecessary to the whole. Even when he first drew the stars, hunched in a dark corner with a slip of parchment and a length of scrap wood darkened to charcoal in the hearth, he was as precise as his memory would allow. It’s that drawing, long since turned to ash, that he seeks to recollect now.
The thing that eludes him is why.
He has better tools than parchment and charcoal. When he first began to paint, he'd been stunned by the sheer variety of colors available to him - his people only ever choose shades of darkness. Now, it's as if every pigment in the world is his to use as he wills it. At first, he couldn't bear to choose anything but black or gray. The years since have seen him build up quite the collection of paints. Now, he can paint the sky in a dozen shades of darkness and starlight.
Still, he chooses his simplest tools and not his dizzying array of color. A redone work ought to be faithful to the original's medium, after all.
One careful twitch of charcoal against paper, then another, then another. The stars begin to take form, rough and unfinished, and the imperfection has him knitting his brows, but he does not stop. He cannot. His hands know how to spill the inner recesses of his thoughts across a canvas, even if he himself does not.
He doesn't look up when he draws - he'd had no reference save his own memory back then, after all. Though that memory has grown so much keener, honed by night after night gazing upwards instead of a few stolen glances here and there, he tries his best to forget what he knows of the stars until he's left with nothing but the feeling they give him. He'd drawn his first star-bright skies from that admiration alone. He smiles at the canvas, bitterly - he'd misplaced Selûne's Tears. He repeats the mistake now, putting them on the wrong side, scattered too far from the waning crescent of the moon.
Charcoal stains the gray of his hands, black flecks like a mockery of the stars he maps out. Constellation after constellation, haphazard, come to life on the paper, connected by hair-thin lines. Some exist only in his own mind. It was impossible for him to dwell so long on his glimpse of the night sky without forming connections between the stars. A harp, a cobweb, a chisel, a dagger…
Such imaginings were never taught - they simply are.
Drow do not name the stars. In contrast, it seems that every culture which came to its maturity beneath the sky has their own patterns picked out across the night. Perhaps that urge is more widespread than either they or his own people would care to admit.
Elendar draws star after star, reaching into the depths of his memory for whatever scraps he can remember, back further than he usually cares to go. He's hardly eager to recall his days in the city of his birth, and yet it's necessary work, dwelling on the place that shaped him. Small comfort, that every material trace of that life is gone, even the pieces that were never meant to exist.
It took him two decades after he surfaced to stop putting every piece of his artwork to the torch. Longer to feel such acts as a loss and not a simple necessity.
He's not sure why he bothered with art before, when all his drawings were destined to become kindling, or why he even started, when it carried such risk. He’s even less sure why he kept going after being beaten to death’s doorstep for drawing stars in the Underdark. All he knows is that he needs it like he needs air.
He smudges the outlines of his half-remembered stars with his thumb, watches them blur. His mind goes calm.
Once, he could not draw stars without feeling the phantom pain of his mother's lash turning him into a bloodied heap on the ground - a near-death granted for his heretical fixation on the sky, for the crime of creating things his station did not demand of him. Now, he's started feeling Selûne's presence when he sits on his balcony by moonlight and occupies his hands with a paintbrush. Still, he somehow hadn't expected that odd comfort, like a cloak wrapped around his shoulders, to come creeping up as he draws some imaginary reflection of the sky.
It's strange, in a grim sort of way, to imagine she'd care for a butchered misremembering of her creations. Gods, is he finally going mad? Has he been mad for the past ninety years, ever since he imagined she'd want to hear the prayers of the Spider Queen’s wayward child?
Perhaps he's madder than even he imagined, for he starts speaking to thin air.
"I don't know if you're there," he murmurs, "but I'm here. I watch the sky every night - though I suppose you'd know that, if you're listening."
She can see every deed the moon’s light touches. He's just never found a reason she'd care for his.
"I don't know if you ever thought people like me would pay any heed to the stars, but…I think they're beautiful." A thin smile twitches at his lips as he misplaces another constellation. How can he call the sky beautiful as he draws this flawed remembering of it? Contradiction upon contradiction - but then, his whole life has been such: the dark elf who looks to the moon for guidance, the faithful whose prayers dissipate to mist in the freezing air, the artist who burns his own work.
"This makes for poor tribute, I'll admit." He sketches the threadlines connecting stars in his dreamt-up constellations and chuckles to himself, the sound souring on his tongue. "I had everything all wrong."
He could draw a better map in a windowless room by now, but that's not the point.
"I suppose it means something, that I drew the stars even then. Not that I've any idea what, beyond that I’ve always made for a poor drow." He sighs, snow-kissed air prickling in his throat. "Foolish of me. They would have killed me for this a thousand times over, or made me wish they had. I ought to have feared it more, I suppose, but…would I have stopped looking at the stars?"
Would it have mattered if he had?
"I wonder if you ever saw me, then." He wishes he sounded less bitter. There's no reason she would have thought twice about a dark elf stealing glances at the night sky like a cutpurse snatching jewels from the queen’s pockets. He shakes his head. "How little I knew."
How little he yet understands.
“I don’t know why I’m speaking to you like this,” he says, air weighing cold in his lungs. Gods, why is he talking to her beyond the words of a prayer or a hymn? It’s not something he’s ever dared to do before. No drow would. Here, alone at the roof of the world, it’s the only thing he can do.
“You deserve more than this - more than…whatever I’ve offered.”
He keeps drawing, pushing a little harder than necessary with the blunt edge of the charcoal.
“Stars, but I'm a mess. I don’t know if you’ll listen…or if you ever did. If you ever will. There’s so much I don’t know, and so much the others understand that I cannot. Perhaps it's foolish, but I trust you with all of it. The things I know and the things I never will." He laughs, a thin sound that rings hollow in the clear night. "And I'm afraid, goddess."
His pen pauses, charcoal dust settling into the parchment. In terms of tempting death, admitting fear is the equal of prodding a sleeping dragon. He half-expects to be struck down where he sits. His shoulders go steel-tense, but he is still alone with his thoughts and his art. No divine wrath…and no divine favor, either. Just more silence.
He's started to think anger might be easier to bear, but he can’t take back what he’s said.
"I'm afraid," he repeats, tasting the word on his tongue like it's his last meal. "That's it. I'm afraid . I have always been so…"
His voice dies acrid in his throat.
Afraid.
In Menzoberranzan, he’d lived every day in the grip of mortal terror, and he hadn't even known it until the day it eased. He remembers the faces from his past and wonders how much fear was hidden behind cold red eyes. Some of them may have felt none - but some were doubtless so consumed by it that they'd never dream of being anything other than sharp and angry and terrified. The Weaver guides with fear. Selûne guides with…something else entirely. Joy? Trust? Hope?
His hand is still on the parchment, the charcoal-dust stars blurring together. He cannot think.
Hope is as foreign to the Underdark as sunlight is to the sea’s depths. Elendar learned the word in the upperworld’s common tongue long before he’d even begun to understand what it means. Even after nearly a century, hope is an abstraction, distant as the stars above. Hope is a fleeting idea that slips through his fingers like water, a distracted thought, and...
Hope is speaking to a goddess without knowing if she’s listening.
His fingers tighten on the charcoal. Rare are the moments where he feels less like he’s adrift in a sea of stars, but suddenly he’s grasping at a mooring-line. Something rights itself. The moon shines a little brighter off the snow-wreathed mountains below. He wouldn’t dare believe he understands now, but…
If he’s going to hope, he might as well push it to its boundary.
"I don’t know why I’m doing this at all - speaking to you, I mean. You know I…I never ask for anything.” It’s a remnant of his upbringing, just another shadow he can’t seem to step out of. “And I'm not asking for anything, in truth.”
He's not sure when he realized that everything he truly wants is earned, not given.
"I have all I need - I have more than I ever thought I deserved. A life, a home, my art…something more than I was meant to have. I ought not press my luck, and yet…” he deliberates on his words far too much for a man speaking into the wind. “I suppose I had to speak for its own sake. Foolish, isn’t it?”
“You've faithful with more pressing needs than I, and yet here I am, saying nothing. We've several in the sanctum alone - Anyra's health has been failing ever since the frosts came early, and I fear Elwin's adventuring around the shore of the Redwaters will be his undoing, what with the frost drake we’ve spotted along the eastern banks. She tires of resting, and he’ll not listen to reason. Of course, you’d know, and yet…"
He turns his gaze out to the surface of the far-off lake called Redwaters, a polished sheet of glass beneath the moon, ringed by nightblack woodland broken from place to place by the amber lights of civilization. The wilds are unforgiving. His own forays beyond the Sanctum's walls have taught him as much. He sighs deep, slow. “They ought to be kept safe.”
The winter air sharpens in his throat. His eyes widen until the cold stings at the corners.
"...I just asked for something, didn't I?" He could laugh or cower, but he chooses to keep drawing instead. "I did. I asked. And maybe you heard. Maybe you didn’t. But I said it.”
His hands are shaking so hard the parchment rustles. He keeps drawing.
"I suppose…if I'm asking, I should like to know if you're there. That I haven't been talking to myself all this time." His eyelids flutter shut, the moonlight seeping in through the gaps until a silvery darkness is all he can see. “I need to know it wasn’t all for nothing.”
The air shifts. He opens his eyes.
Some things are beyond logic, beyond reason. They are simply known bone-deep, truth he understands as innately as he knows he must breathe. The way the starlight feels on his skin is one such clarity. It carries with it a promise he cannot name. Winter-sharp air thaws to spring, just for a moment, as though the moonbeams carry with them the warmth of the sun.
Heatless sparks the color of moonlight dance from his fingertips and land, ephemeral, atop each of his ill-remembered stars.
His gasp rings clear through the still night, his hand flying to his mouth too late to silence it. He blinks, then blinks again, but the sparks still glow, a net of diamonds strewn across the ragged parchment. Both hands fall into his lap, trembling, palms hazy with that ethereal glow. The charcoal pen rolls off across the bricks, forgotten. For a wild moment, he wonders if his mind has finally snapped with wanting - but no. The light in his hands is too real to be the product of a fractured mind. He can feel it.
Bands of moonlight coil up his arms, around and around, never more than a whisper of a presence. Somehow, it sinks right through his heavy robe, through his very skin, until something silvery and bright is twining up against his bones. It finds his heart a moment later. That glow coalesces thick over his chest and another broken gasp spills from his lips, his hands leaping to the fallen moonbeams as though he can catch them like so many wayward sparks from the hearth. They slip between his fingers, fading to nothing in an instant, but something of that light remains behind - remains within him.
It was not for nothing.
"Goddess," he breathes, voice shaking. It's all he can say. His throat closes on a thank you , on dozens of words that fall intolerably short of what he feels. He says it again, shortly - “Goddess.”
His face is wet. By the stars, why is his face wet? He scrubs roughly at his eyes with a fur-trimmed sleeve, blinking away the damp beading there. Tears are a perilous display of weakness - one he can no longer pretend he never succumbs to. The moonlight has settled into his veins. It feels like nothing he could have imagined.
For a long time, he clutches his hands to his chest and does not speak.
When he dares to gaze upon the moon through the veil of his tears, something in his heart stirs. The night is inconceivably lovelier than before. Suddenly, he’s once more gazing at the stars through the eyes of a boy who’s never known more than darkness.
His ragged sigh is nothing but mist, and when he breathes in, starlight is drawn into his lungs. His whole body goes lighter than the moonbeams turning the world silver. Something dark and edged has loosened its grip on his soul, quailing before the moonlight beneath his skin - somehow, he knows. He’s not ready to speak - and maybe he never will be again - but he doesn't need to.
His fingertips trace the path of the constellations wheeling across the parchment. How has he never seen how beautiful they are when they’re wrought by his own hand? He understands, at last, why he brought stars to the Underdark.
She was with him even then.
He may never understand why her gaze has turned to him, but now he has a chance.