Forsaken by Shadows Season 1 Recap

Part 1: Where the Stars Vanish—Summary

(From Mazira’s perspective)

~*~*~

My name is Mazira, but for a long time I went by Kitty. I was only eight years old when dark elves, known as drow, raided the camp of traveling minstrels my family lived with and slaughtered everyone I knew and loved.

By some whim and fancy, the leader of these raiders, Toloruel Tear, decided to spare my life. Not out of kindness, but out of a darker desire to tease out my misery for as long as possible. I became a slave to him and his tyrannical family, one of the leading noble houses of Menzoberranzan, the underground city of the drow.

If you are not familiar with drow, I pray you never become so. They are a race of elves wholly devoted to the evil deity Lolth, goddess of spiders and chaos. She thrives of blood and treachery, encouraging her followers to war against each other. Her favor goes to the most dastardly of Matron Mothers, the vicious women who lead their houses to glory or ruin.

But there is one thing all drow can unite together on. They hate the elves of the surface, of which three-quarters of my blood hails.

For three years I lived in constant fear and dread of what each day would bring. The hours were long and filled with hard work and torture, as I was considered less than an animal to my captors. They worshipped through my despair, they offered my blood and tears as their sacrifice to the Spider Queen.

Then, one day, things change. I met a boy, in the most unlikely of circumstances. I was cleaning in the chapel of Lolth when I heard the sound of someone crying. Curiosity led me to investigated and to my horror, I discovered Rismyn Tear, the younger brother of Toloruel, hiding in an alcove.

He was only eleven, the same age as me, but he was the son of Matron Xatel, queen of House Tear. Yet he had been whipped and beaten, and had come to the alcove to hide his tears. And I, a faerie elf, had just discovered him.

But I had pity on him, the son who was treated as a slave. So I offered to use the balm of healing I carried on his wounds to ease his suffering.

Unfortunately, he thought I had stolen the balm. He didn’t believe Toloruel had given it to me for convenience sake, so I could get on with my work without having to be slowed by my pains. He took the balm from in a fit of rage, and I was so scared I ran away.

A few days later, Toloruel found me limping and demanded to know why I had not used my balm. I lied to him, and told him I lost it. Rismyn happened to be there at the time, and realized that he had, in fact, taken from me what was actually given.

Later, when Toloruel was away, Rismyn snuck in to see me. He was a drow, and I was afraid, but oddly enough, he didn’t act like any drow I had ever met. True, he grew angry and raised his voice, but he never hit me like the others. He only came to apologize.

To apologize.

I didn’t know what to think. He asked me why I lied and didn’t tell Toloruel he had taken the balm from me. I was forced to confess that I felt pity, and when that made him angry I was sure he would stike me then. I asked for mercy. Poor Rismyn had never heard the word Mercy before, so I had to explain it. Which led to more words I needed to define, such as kindness.  Eventually he left me, but not before he healed the spider bites that were causing my limp.

What I didn’t know then was that my words had made him curious. Rismyn couldn’t stop thinking about me, or the words mercy and kindness, and how good he had felt when he healed my wounds. He tried to practice kindness for his elder sister, Mindra, by cleaning up her office that she had trashed in a rage.

Unfortunately, Mindra regarded his act of foresight as rebellion, signs that a lowly male child in a female-run society was taking initiative when he ought to have been taking orders. When Rismyn confessed to trying kindness, she saw weakness in him.

She beat him fiercely and left him to his misery. He ran off again, back to the alcove where we met, and little did I know, he believed I had enchanted him. He thought the only reason he couldn’t cease to think of me and my “infectious” kindness was because I had cast a spell on him, and his only hope of breaking free was to kill me.

If I had known that, I might not have done what I did next. I found Rismyn in the alcove again, and was possessed by uncharacteristic boldness. I offered him comfort, though he lashed out at me with his words. I took the balm and healed his wounds, and though I could have died for it, I sang to him, like my mama used to sing when I was scared or hurt. To make matters worse, I even gave him a hug.

That was the start of many years of secret friendship. Rismyn was possessed by my song, and came to me every chance he got to hear more music. I began to teach him more things. Love, kindness, family. I had my work cut out for me, and he mostly scoffed at every story of the surface I told him. But he’d become like a friend to me. More than that, he grew to be someone I deeply loved, though I wouldn’t realize that until much later.

As the years went on, his hostility softened towards me, and he treated me as an equal. I began to forget that he was a drow. I even intervened to save him from Toloruel, the night of his sixteenth birthday when he got caught sneaking in to see me.

He had come to tell me his position had been elevated, that the slavery that marked his early life had come to an end, and he was finally being recognized as a real son of the family. He even got what he’d always wanted, a chance to train with the weapon’s master of House Tear and serve the family as a warrior.

But I wasn’t conscious when he arrived. Toloruel was furious that his little brother was now his competition for favor. He took his fury out on me, and little did Rismyn know, Toloruel was coming back to drench me in a healing potion when he found Rismyn kneeling over my broken body.

Rismyn only escaped certain doom because I reminded Toloruel his mother had work for him. I took a beating for it, but then Toloruel left me and Rismyn, and we found ourselves somewhere safer in the house to meet. A broom closet that hadn’t been used in decades. It became our sanctuary. Despite my pain, I was proud of myself for protecting my only friend. My only regret that night was that Rismyn had seen my scar, the image of a spider that had been dripped onto my back with acid.

But my regrets would eventually catch up to me. Just four years later, Rismyn called me from my work and led me into an empty ritual room. I thought it was strange, since he never interacted with me during the day where people might see and wonder. But he had to talk to me; he had been ordered to Melee-Magthere, the Academy that trained Menzoberranzan’s elite warriors.

That was when I found out that Rismyn had believe–all this time–that I had him enchanted. He really, honestly believed he liked me because I bewitched him. It was the only way he knew to reconcile the teachings of his family about how evil and wicked faeries were with how he felt towards me.

Feelings that he made shockingly clear when he advanced upon me, believing I must reciprocate if I went through the trouble of bewitching him in the first place.

Thankfully, nothing irrevocable happened. Though he put his hands on me in ways I did not invite, his words betrayed him. He whispered that he loved me.

Despite my shock and fear, those words incited a black rage within me. I shoved him away and informed him it wasn’t possible that he loved me, because drow aren’t capable of love. But I humiliated him, and in his hurt and rejection he struck me with the back of his hand, then fled in horror at what he’d done.

I didn’t see Rismyn again for five years. After he left I broke down into sobs. Toloruel found me and wanted to know what Rismyn had done. But I refused to tell him anything. I had realized that I loved a drow, and that drow turned out to be no different from every other monster I served. In my sorrow I had given up. I told Toloruel to kill me, because I would never give him the satisfaction of my screams again.

When I woke next, I was trapped in the broom closet Rimsyn and I had claimed as our own. Toloruel visited me many times, endeavoring to garner any response but apathy from me. He thrived off my fear and agony, but I no longer feared anything. After several days, however, he found the one thing that could break through my new shell of apathy.

He told me he was going to kill me. But as he raised his blade to strike, he told me also he would be acquiring a new slave from the surface to replace me. I couldn’t stand the thought of another little girl going through what I went through, so to my shame I begged his forgiveness. I promised to play my part properly, and things went back to the way it was.

Those years without Rismyn were the darkest of my life. I’m sure I never would have survived the full ten years that he was supposed to be away at Melee-Magthere.

But in his fifth year of schooling, one of the other students in his class convinced the instructors that they should invite Toloruel to present his “pet faerie” to the class. Toloruel was more than happy to show me off, to boast of his victories in surface raiding.

While visiting the Academy, Toloruel had another errand to attend to, and he left me in the care of the class. The teachers instructed their students to make their own observations about me and…well...things got out of hand. The student who had come up with the idea to have me there got too close, and though I planned to just ignore whatever happened, Rismyn could not stand by.

He challenged the student, called Dreder, and a sort of game began where I was the bait. I was shoved round and round, while Rismyn tried to reach me, his way barred by the other students.

The game ended abruptly when I found myself impaled by a sword. Another student, who had it in for Rismyn, thought it might be funny to take away the faerie he so obviously cared about.

Rismyn killed the drow who wounded me, and then found himself in a precarious situation. I was dying in his arms, he was now a murderer. It was a sort of wake up call to him, and he realized he didn’t want to live the life of the drow anymore. So he took my body and fled.

He wouldn’t have made it, if not for a surprising turn of events. Torafein, one of his instructors, actually helped Rismyn to escape. He pointed to a secret way out of the cavern, and Rismyn got me to safety.

Before I lost full consciousness, I confessed my real name, Mazira, to Rismyn.

I should be dead. I lost so much blood, the wound was lethal  Even though Rismyn waited and waited for me to die, I never did. Instead, strange things happened. A crack appeared in the wall, dripping fresh water. There were magic berries growing inside, berries with a small amount of healing properties. It sustained us both for several days. When the berries stopped appearing, Rismyn was forced to return to Menzoberranzan for supplies.

He chose to seek the aid of a mercenary band called Bregan D’Aerthe. There he met Kalos and Pearl, acting leaders of the organization. They agreed to aid him if he would do a job for them first, an assassination. Unbeknownst to him, Dreder, the student he crippled during his escape from Melee-Magthere by slicing off his hand, had already joined the mercenaries.

To Rismyn, this job was nothing. He went on the mission and killed the priestess as instructed, only to realize after how terrible it was to kill for coin. When the mercenaries tried to recruit him permanently, he refused, took his supplies, and returned to me.

For the first time in over a tenday, I awoke. I had no idea where I was or what was happening, and I didn’t know how to treat Rismyn after so long apart. I remembered nothing of almost dying. When Rismyn told me his plan to set me free and take me to the surface, all I could think about was that little girl Toloruel would replace me with. I absolutely panicked, and begged Rismyn to take me back.

He refused, and after some back and forth, he convinced me a deity had intervened in my life. While he’d been living off magic berries, I’d been dreaming of conjuring those berries. Rismyn convinced me this meant a god had saved us, and I had to go along with destiny.

So…I believed him. But I made him promise me we would kill Toloruel before we left the Underdark. He agreed, and also promised to never hurt me again.

I don’t know if I believe that second promise. But for now, we travel together through the Underdark, doing our best to survive.

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