Yalu d'Lotha Drokk

[Lotha Drokk]

Yalu d'Lotha Drokk (Life of Little Fist/Lotha Drokk)


Home Beneath The Bustle (RhyDin)

Lotha woke in the stone-walled “cave”. It was her home, beneath one of the busiest streets at the heart of the enormous and ever-expanding city of RhyDin in the world by that same name.

The cave, as she sometimes called it, had been dug out by someone years and years before she had been born in RhyDin. It was large enough for a fully grown anyone to walk around it and live in. It had a main living space for where she slept, ate, read, and played with her pet spider. She had never measured it, but had she it would have been roughly ten by twelve feet at the floor and around eight feet tall with a doorway that was about six feet tall and three feet wide. The walls were pure rock and stone that had been chipped from a smaller pocket to make the larger one.

Where the bed was located in the room was a carved platform. She had a large rough cloth one of the women in town had sewn two panels of the cloth on three sides. One of the ends was purpose left open so she could dig out old straw and push in new. The straw mattress was very comfortable to the little Drowess. She turned from her back to her side. Bleary, waking violet eyes blinked a few times in the near darkness. The dark was never a problem for her but she didn’t see as perfectly in the dark as other Drow. Those purple eyes of her marked her bloodline somewhere recent or ages past of being impure.

Stones in a chipped out stone divot that could have been a bathing bowl were glowing enough for even a Human to easily make their way around in the dark; as if there were a dozen or more candles by the amount of light the special stones cast. At the farthest end of the chisel-formed shelf that had those stones was a wooden box with several wooden divisions in it.

Lottha smiled to see her lovely, special and intelligent spider, Jess (meaning Fang) crowing out of one of the box’s niches and snatching a large, dead praying mantis from a plate of bugs she had left him. Fang was no ordinary spider. He was a pet born in RhyDin and was not like his lower lifeform arachnids.

“Morning, Fang!” The Drow child, appearing around ten in Human years, half growled it out but she smiled at the spider. Lotha pushed her long, white hair out of her face. Locks were file and unbrushed. Pointed ears twitch, just once briefly to listen to the distance sounds of the cobbled road at least a hundred feet above her head. She could barely hear the horse hooves, cart wheels, and engines of machines she never wanted anything to do with.

There was no timepiece or magical thing to wake her. Lotha Drokk (Little Fist) woke when she felt like it. Usually, it was around the same time every night. Perhaps she heard the distant sounds in her sleep or her body just knew when it was evening, approaching night. Her eyes did not care for the harsh light of day. She could tolerate it but it made her eyes hurt a bit.

The covers were shoved aside and she abandoned the bed without making it. “We need food you and me, string, and more straw today.” That time she was cheery. That day they had shopping to do. She fluffed her long, white hair. It was a mess so it really did nothing to help the disheveled layers.

A boyish tunic with a hood was pulled over her head to layer against the smaller shirt she wore. Then pulled on some britches. Both of the garments were a bit too large for her, but her boots fit just right!

Taptap! She made a sound against the glass pendant and Fang crawled into it. She closed it with a lid that let air inside. Then Lotha put the chain of her head to wear chain and pendant as a necklace. A string was tied about her waist before she headed for the doorway of the “cave” that was her home. Grunting all the while, she moved a heavy wooden plank from the opening, then stepped out only to pull the plank back into place.

“Come, Fang. Time for shopping!” Said as she and the spider headed through one of the thousands of tunnels running beneath the great city of her birthplace, RhyDin