wiz bits

Tuk lay, eyes closed, on a quarter-dried bedroll. The blanket, like most of his belongings, had not quite fully dried from the prison escape of recent days past. Although he was exhausted, his sleep was fitful and light. For this, the damp bedroll was among the least of causes. You can try any number of contraptions and rituals — wring it with all your strength, sling it on a line, carefully drape it over a fire — but once a bedroll is wet, it never dries, not really. Such is life out of doors. A sojourner’s bedroll is always musky and damp, the same way his stomach is never quite full, the same way his eyes are always at least a little bit red. To lose any of these is to be at home. To be at home out here is to die. Doubly so in the Underdark.

Had he not rappelled ten stories of waterfall, the shabby bundle of burlap and straw, surely molding by now, would still be tinged with sweat. Even in the cool, dank environs of the world beneath, one must consider the stressors of combat and survival, the continuous strain of alertness, the weighty knowledge that from the shadows encroach horrors unseen. One of these conditions by itself would be sufficient to produce sweat on the brow of any man. Tuk bore them all with respectable stoicism, but stoicism was not all. In the early, pre-waking hours, he felt something that the others did not: peace. Though there was no sunrise on the horizon, no birdsong on the air, no comforts of the world above, Tuk felt peace. Peace, thanks in some part, to the boon of sleep. Sleep helps one to forget — forget the grudges and pains of yesterday — if only momentarily. Tuk slept, and he forgot. Nonetheless, he sweat.

His hand rested lightly on his ward, a hairy arachnid companion in its youth, larger now than it had been some tenday or so upon their meeting. The spider, Nonny, nestled tightly between Tuk’s hand and ribs. The slow drip, drip, drip of cave moisture was a familiar sound to him (or so he thought) as was the odd rustle, sniff, or snort of his slumbering topside companions, unaccustomed as they were to sleeping in the utter silence of the Underdark. No leaves rustled here. No soft whisper of wind tickled the ear or kissed the cheek. There was no owl’s nocturnal call, no dim flicker of starlight. No benevolent deity gazed down at them from above, at least none who would care to make herself known.

Tuk had received a fair amount of religious instruction as a youth, running the gamut of the more socially accepted pantheons of his metropolitan home. What were described to him as gods never failed to seem more like caricatures, heightened versions of the base, boring, mortal experience. He often wondered if they should be called gods at all. If there were indeed some higher existence, he thought, it might look a lot more interesting and strange than what he had been taught — stranger than could be taught, for that matter. Nonetheless, the good-aligned denizens of which he knew must have preferred to turn their inviolate visages elsewhere, to other places and other planes than this.

The others in the camp drooled and snored, battle-wounded, in shameful want of the subtlety needed to survive such a place. Though free from their stalactite cells, they were no less trapped, caught. Doomed as fish washed ashore, gasping for air. Splayed and vulnerable as Shuushar, strung up by an as yet unidentified assailant. Cursed, as one who robs the spider-queen herself. Infected, as one afflicted with a lycan’s bite — or worse. They were mere flies caught in a web, panic-stricken, struggling fruitlessly, each limb becoming more tightly ensnared, each twitching wing more fully arrested, bodies thrashing impotently as each helpless blunder further sealed their fate. Doomed and cursed all — all, save for perhaps the child of Cannith, the warforged. No, not the one with decidedly human proclivities. The other one. He neither slumbers nor drools. He has not succumbed to greed like the other of his mechanistic kin. His is a way of silence. In him has yet to be espied any vice. Ah, but give it time. As the old gnomic goes: Clockwork most precise is not without ticks.

Tuk thought none of this, of course. As he lay sleeping, or half-sleeping, he knew only the dripping and the snoring. Eyes closed, he was home. Where else would he be? It must be raining, dripping down the stone walls of the cell block. His thick wooden door, the only one that could be freely opened by its occupant, was doing its part to muffle the snores, sighs, ruffles, and other, less gracious noises of the halflings and women there detained — there, of course, being the Baldurian Detention Center for Wayward Women and Little People. Home. More home than anywhere on Toril, if in her bosom Yondalla yet retained any warmth. But of course she had, and with warmth to spare. Anyone could see that. Anyone could feel it. All it would take were a visit to one mealtime, and anyone with eyes would see the halflings, wrongfully detained (for the most part) though they were, conjuring all the merriment of a holiday at home, all the joyful warmth of a well-kept hearth, from a meager prison lunch .

Then, as Tuk yawned and stretched happily, it happened again, as it always did, as it had countless times before. With eyes first squinting, then half-lidded, he was greeted once more by a world completely foreign to him, a place that was not his home at all, a place he had never seen before, a place of which he had no recollection whatsoever. It happened as it always did. First, the wave of shock and surprise. Strangeness all around: strange people, strange smells, strange environs. Next, the pit of longing, the emptiness in the stomach, longing for that which was so near. It was just here. It could have stayed if he had just kept his damned eyes shut. Lost in an instant. Lost so long ago.

Finally, the dread. The sweat on the back of his neck, the realization that this day, as all other days, he would be met with the unknown once more. Each and every person, creature, and moment, would be a potential threat as yet unfulfilled. Another day in which everyone would know everything, and he would know nothing at all.

What memories he did have were few and fleeting: Glimpses of home, isolated facial features, and a Vow of Truth. I am… at first, nothing came. I am… He searched for something more, but could find nothing, until a thought presented itself from the recesses of his mind, as though it had been folded away neatly, waiting to be retrieved: I am Tuk.

…Why is my bed wet?

He was awash with senses. His mind may not have remembered, but his body did. His hands throbbed, and he was reminded of swinging his staff into… something. Someone? Had he been moved to violence? That’s unlike me. His ankles remembered the soreness of weary travel, and of perhaps kicking? Strange. His inner ear recalled in vertiginous waves the feeling of falling a long, long way. His shoulders recalled the stings of many whips. His wrists felt the warm cuffing of new scabs. Imprisonment! Real imprisonment, not like home. All surprising. All confusing. All new.

Then his hand felt… But no, it couldn’t be. His eyes drifted downward, and he recoiled, first with his hand, then jumping to his feet. A spider! Monstrous in size, unnatural and terrible, the largest spider he had ever seen. He drove his hands into his robe, seeking safety, but there he felt something warm and wet. It smelled rotten. His fingers grasped in horror. A snake? No, a tail. Fearing to be bitten, he pulled it out quickly: the half-eaten, decaying corpse of a rat.

The spider wiggled expectantly, displaying something like excitement. Almost servile. Almost… cute. He tossed the rat to the swaying creature, who nibbled it at first, then finding no sport in its quarry, devoured the rodent with unchecked malice. It scampered to Tuk’s ankle and sidled him like a cat. Charmed, he reached down, hesitantly, and pet the thing. He was surprised to find warmth, an ever so gradual softness, as though the palm of his hand were momentarily engulfed in beautiful oblivion.

Then he remembered himself. Rather, he remembered to observe his surroundings. His eyes, adjusting to the dim bioluminescence of standing toadstools and creeping molds, saw for the first time an encampment of strange bodies and faces. He eyed them suspiciously. He caught small glimpses of familiarity, a cheekbone here, an odd nose there, but he recalled not a single name.

His hands found his quarterstaff. Some rope. A torch. Ordinary, everyday objects. Tools. Implements. These he remembered. In these he would find comfort. Upon these he would rely. He sat in a meditative pose, waiting patiently for the troubles of the day to arrive as surely they would. When arrive they did, he would face them as he always had: feet light, hands ready, and thoughts renewed.