The Biased Judge (Excerpt)

By Rory Hatchel

***

You open your eyes and rise to stretch and walk around. Off in the distance you see a white wolf. At first, you think it’s watching you. You step forward, then backwards, but the wolf doesn’t move. You start to walk towards it, taking out your knobkerrie. The wolf is still as you approach. On closer inspection, the wolf’s eyes glow slightly: one eye amber and the other blue.

As you step closer, the wolf slowly turns and walks deeper into the mountains. You follow, unsure of what is happening, but you’re not afraid. There is a stillness in you as the sun rises over the mountain tops and warms you. The wolf wanders through scattered trees. You go for miles, and the trees thicken into a forest at the foot of the mountains. It becomes harder and harder to keep up. Finally you lose the wolf and find yourself standing in the middle of a dead orchard.

A branch cracks behind you. You turn around, knobkerrie in your hands, raised to strike, and see a young Drow woman with her hands in the air, body covered in furs and a bow strapped to her back.

“Hey, woah, calm down,” she says. Her voice makes her appear even younger. She looks to be a teenage girl if she were human with long grey dreadlocks tied in a tail behind her head and pale pink eyes.

You lower your strike but tighten your grip on your knobkerrie.

“I’m harmless,” she says. She looks down and sees the bow strapped to her back and quiver at her waist. She takes them off and throws them on the ground. “See?” she asks, then sees the two knives strapped to her belt. She takes them off and throws them to the ground.

“Totally harmless,” she says.

You lower your weapon and ask her who she is and what she wants. She says her name is Lenweta, though you can call her Len. She’s gone north from the Petrified Wood, seeking to avoid the war. She’s a political refugee from the Drow. Her mother was an advocate for peace with the Empire. She was assassinated, but Len’s father helped her escape as the assassins came to kill the rest of Len’s family. Len’s father was killed by Dwarvish snipers near Zwergzegarek. She’s spent the last year wandering the Dragon Spine Mountains, looking for any town that will take her. She’s found no love from the Dwarves to the west nor the Humans to the east. As such, she’s lived in the mountains, fending for herself.

You ask what she wants, and she claims to have no reason for being here. A white wolf took her into the forest, closer to civilization than she’s comfortable with. She lost sight of the wolf when you appeared.

You explain to her your vision of the wolf, and she proposes that perhaps you were destined to meet. She asks what brought you into the mountains. You hesitate but decide that it can’t hurt for a single Drow to know you are on a vision quest. You explain that you are looking for the Temple of the Broken Heart. She claims to know where it is and says she can take you there.

You hesitate, asking her how far it is. She says that it’s about four days north, depending on the weather. The hardest part will be the climb up the mountain face, but she claims she can show you and help you.

You ask her what she would have to gain from taking a companion, and her shoulders slump. “Honestly?” she says. “It’d just be nice to have someone to talk to again. I can’t go home because my family members are seen as traitors, and I can’t leave the mountains because I’m a Drow. Wherever I go people want to kill me, except for here.”

Despite many terrible experiences with Drow in the past, you reflect on your time with Jeb and the Drow at the Akademie. You know not all Drow are terrible, and your time with Sol reminds you that most of your understanding of the Drow is propaganda from the Empire. With that in mind, you take this as a sign from the Daughter, thank your goddess, and extend your hand to Len.

She takes it and shakes. Without missing a beat, she turns and faces the mountain range. “We better get going. The weather looks clear for now, and we’ll want to take advantage of that.”

Without another word, Len turns and heads deeper into the mountains. You follow her, doing your best to keep up. Despite her age, she’s spent plenty of time in these mountains and it shows. As you start to ascend, each step for you is dreadful. You have the full weight of your weapons and armor on you, but Len has barely anything to carry. And she’s strong. More than once she is able to scramble up a cliff face, drop you a rope, and grant you a shortcut through the endless switchbacks of the mountains.

You do your best to get Len to talk, but she doesn’t have much to say. She gives short answers when you ask her how she’s survived for so long here and what kind of life she’s lived. But she isn’t silent. She asks you endless questions, eager to hear about the war and how it started. She doesn’t believe that Drow had anything to do with the bombing of Lichtstadt. In fact, she doesn’t think High Elves had anything to do with it either. She suspects that war hawks in the Empire did it to stir up animosity. Certain members of the Empire make their living from war, and the Drow and Empire were approaching a lazy peace. It makes perfect sense in her mind that some of the crueler humans would kill their own to promote bloodshed for financial gain.

You ask her about the potential for peace between the Drow and the Empire. She’s evasive, but you’re able to get from her that her family and a few other families were advocating for peace. They thought the war couldn’t be won, and to keep it up would be the death of their people. Once the killings of these dissenters began, any talk of peace ceased. However, Len still believes that the people would prefer peace, even if the nobles and elderly are against it. Fewer and fewer Drow are growing up with the hope to be great soldiers or martyrs.

After a day of travel, you set camp while she hunts for a meal. She comes back with two rabbits and begins cleaning them. She walks you through how to set up a shelter that will last through the cold. She insists that the cold is their true enemy here, something she’s repeated throughout the day. When you press why she’s so worried about it, she takes off a glove and shows you a hand with three fingers.

“Frostbite,” she says as she puts the glove back on. “Had to learn how to fire a bow all over again.” You nod and fall into an awkward silence while she cooks and you build a wall against the wind, pulling your cloak tight around you. It keeps you warmer than you’d expect, and the silver scales of it let your mind wander to Araya.

When the meal is prepared, you say a prayer to the Daughter in thanks, and she joins you, reciting the words along with you. As you eat, you carefully ask her about her faith.

“My family has always followed the Daughter,” she says. “And it cost us our lives.”

***