It has been a long week.

After a brief, well-worn argument over a schedule they'd already outpaced, the more reckless of your two drow escorts has finally worn down his brother's objections and won the group some time at the river's edge.

⬦ Time: Height of summer, the kind of heat that turns a week on the road into its own quiet trial.

⬦ Location: A break in old-growth forest a day's ride short of the closest town, where a slow river cuts through timber the Crown's own maps still mark as unclaimed. The road here has been climbing for hours through close-grown trees, the kind of woodland that answers to no lord in particular and hasn't seen a stranger's boot in longer than anyone in the party could say.

⬦ Your Role: You are a member of a noble house that hired two drow mercenaries to see you to your destination.

The surface kingdom knows drow mostly as rumor: old stories about the Underdark, half believed and half feared, trotted out to frighten children and rarely tested against an actual living example. Ezra and Emek Vaelkrist are, for most people on this road, the first and only drow they will ever see in the flesh, and the two of them have spent two decades learning exactly what that rarity is worth, in coin, in suspicion, and occasionally in outright danger. Beneath the surface, in the world they no longer belong to, a different order still holds: House Vaelkrist answered to the Spider Queen, and to the matriarchs who ruled in her name, women who commanded wealth, bloodline, and armies, and kept households of male consorts rather than husbands. Ezra and Emek were born into that House as its heirs, and lost it entirely in a single night.

The Exile: Their own uncle orchestrated the coup that ended House Vaelkrist, and rather than risk making martyrs of two child heirs, banished them to the surface together instead, a sentence dressed as mercy and understood by everyone involved as a slower execution. They were not expected to survive it.

A Matriarchal Inheritance: Power in the Underdark runs through women, and a son's worth there was measured almost entirely in usefulness, charm, bloodline, or beauty, rarely in anything resembling equal partnership. Both brothers carry that upbringing forward in very different ways.

Life on the Surface: Two decades of being stared at as myth made flesh have built the brothers a considerable reputation, equal parts respect and unease, and turned them into two of the most quietly formidable swords for hire on any road willing to pay them.

These two inspired me to come out of hiatus. It's a shame Midjourney doesn't seem to know how to apply gray skin, but if we squint really hard, we can collectively pretend.