Vairah's origins

[Vairah]

This isn't a story of where Vairah came from or anything, it's got nothing to do with her current incarnation. The truth of the matter is, I've had her character somewhere in my brain for almost two years... But this is the oldest thing I could hunt up featuring her as something like she is now. I'd planned to do some kind of OMGHILARIOUS! fantasy parody thing... but this is the only part I managed and really, it isn't too original. Read at your own peril.

Random note: All previous designs for Vairah (and her predecessor, Veredin) had a monocle. An enchanted monocle of magical doom. This is referenced here. I don't think the Heirot version Vairah has one, though. It seemed a little too... "quirky." Also, she was full-blooded drow at the time and not just half, with a significantly higher evil to just-irrationally-angry ratio.

----

"Evil for evil's sake does not believable motivation make." - COMMON AUTHORIAL WISDOM
"Good for goodness's sake is stupid." - VAIRAH D'FREYN

She'd expected to be kept in a dark cell underground, thick with the reek of mold. That was standard overlord procedure, evil or no, and anyway darkness was Vairah's natural element. She'd always been most at home underground. So it was with no small measure of dismay that she found herself in a well-illuminated room with a high, narrow window and not a trace of rot to be found anywhere. It was circular, denying her even the solace of a shadowed corner. She had chanced a look out the window and would never do so again. Even now, the thought of the earth spinning away so far beneath her brought on a wave of lightheaded queasiness, blood throbbing in her skull behind her eyes.

She was not afraid of heights, she told herself firmly.

"Miss d'Freyn?" someone said from the other side of the locked wooden door, in the precise accents of one who wished to give the impression that he was far more fluent in the drow tongue than he actually was. "Milord wishes to speak with you."

"Tell milord to resume fornicating with sheep," Vairah replied affably. "I'm not interested."

There was a whispered exchange in the local human dialect in the hall.

"I must apologize, miss d'Freyn. I gave up bestiality years ago. You're my most pressing concern at the moment." That was unmistakably the voice of her captor, the half-elven Lord Illyrian.

"Very well. How may I serve milord? Shall I fake tears and plead for my freedom? For you, I might even swallow my pride enough to make it convincing."

"You make an interesting offer." A key turned in the lock. "However, I really do just want to talk." Illyrian entered, closing the door behind him. He was blond, blue-eyed, and rather tall - the usual devastatingly attractive type, of course, though he was slightly shorter than Vairah. Many non-elves were.

"I can fake an epiphany just as easily," Vairah said boredly. "Your superior virtue has showed me the light and all that rot. I solemnly swear to do no harm for as long as I live." She raised one fine, white eyebrow. "Save us both a lot of time."

Illyrian frowned. "You're not going to make this easy, are you?"

"Your thugs broke my bloody monocle. I want a new one," she said, shoving the cracked red lens into his face. She paused, leaning towards him until he began leaning back. "I meant that literally, you know. Bloody? The color comes from powdered virgin's blood."

The half-elf lord looked rather green. "You must be joking."

She straightened, allowing him to do so as well. "Yes." Then she sighed. "The human language is so ill-equipped for irony. Shall we converse in your mother's tongue?"

"I don't speak it," Illyrian said stiffly.

"Oh, come now. You're a half-elf, not a half-human."

"My mother died shortly after I was born."

Vairah made a grand, sweeping gesture. "And your anguish compelled you to seek revenge and commit unspeakable acts of evil. Wait, no, that's me. Only without the anguish part, and the revenge, and -" she paused, looking thoughtful. "My mother's still alive and well somewhere, the crazy old whore. See, we've an abundance of common ground right there. Lovely basis for an intellectual discourse."

"Why do you commit said... unspeakable acts of evil, Vairah?"

"My dear, dear boy. I'm drow. I thought that was self-explanatory. Didn't you pay attention to your lessons?"

"There's no reasoning behind it?"

Vairah snorted. "Of course not! There's no such thing as individual motivation. We all act solely on the biological imperative to commit senseless violence. With all that evil, there's no room for personality."

"You're being sarcastic, aren't you?"

"Whatever gave you that idea?" Vairah made herself lean casually on the windowsill. She was not afraid of heights. She was not going to topple backwards to an unfathomable death. "But let's talk about you, Illyrian. Why aren't you evil? Why are you such a relentlessly sporting fellow?"

"Because it's the right thing to do."

"So you're good simply for the sake of being good?" Vairah shook her head sadly. "You poor thing. What a hollow and meaningless life you must lead."

"It isn't hollow or meaningless. I find it very fulfilling," Illyrian said in a voice strained with neutrality.

"Fulfilling?" Vairah feigned shock. "Then might I assume that when you hired on a widow with two small children and no work skills to serve as a maid, though you already have five and she's making a terrible job of it... Well. Does the knowledge that you've done the right thing perhaps fill you with a warm glow, you sparkling pinnacle of decency?"

Illyrian bristled. "You say it like that's something contemptible."

"So, you help people because you like to. Am I right?"

"Yes," he said cautiously, though hating himself for the caution. It was nothing to be ashamed of.

Vairah grinned, reading all from his face. She loved it when they knew she was trapping them. "Then that makes you a hedonist," she said, her calm expression belied by her tone of malicious glee.

"No it doesn't."

"Why? Just because in serving yourself also benefits someone else? That's so unfair. All you fine, upstanding peopple get to run around doing whatever you want without incrimination just because the fulfillment of your desires adheres to some arbitrary moral code, and those of us whose desires align with baser instincts..." She shrugged. "You oppose oppression, don't you?"

"I do believe that everyone has the right to live under the same laws with the same protection guaranteed by those laws."

"But what if the laws are a form of oppression, hm? Will you change them if they seem to be purposefully holding a group down? Or is that only for the oppressed minorities that you like? Suspended between two worlds as you are, I should think you'd be a sight less xenophobic."

"A common moral philosophy or lack thereof does not make a group of miscreants into a viable social segment! I do not discriminate against drow. But discrimination against evil - and it is discrimination, I'll call it that freely. What does discrimination mean but to differentiate and to make wise decisions? - That is merely justice."

"So you're saying that if you met a drow, you would not hold their heritage against them as long as they were able to rise above it and act completely contrary to all inborn predispositions."

"You implied that you weren't all inherently evil."

"True, I was being sarcastic when I said that we were. But it wasn't much of an exaggeration."

"I will not believe that. Not all fair elves are just, so not all dark elves are evil. Why did you kill those villagers?"

Vairah grinned. "Misuse of the reflexive pronoun, mostly."

Illyrian's eyes bulged slightly. He was not so pretty now that he was all flustered. "You killed fifty people over a grammatical nitpick?"

"Come now! Surely they should speak their own mother tongue as well as I can, as a foreigner not even of the same race! Do you know what the mayor said? 'Upright, god-fearing humans such as myself won't stand for your presence in our village, you heretic drow bitch.'" She clicked her tongue disapprovingly. "What kind of construction is 'such as myself?'"

Illyrian was silent a long time, a pained sort of understanding dawning in his eyes. "They assume that you're a being of pure evil, so you feel justified in stooping to their expectations... is that it? Because they reject you?"

Vairah chuckled softly. "No. It was just the grammar."

"You're lying."

"You assume that I'm lying because of what I am."

"If I hated what you were, I'd assume you weren't lying."

"Bah! That makes no sense at all. Dark elves lie about everything. You should know that by now. Thus by claiming to be motivated by wrath at some minuscule slight, I must have indicated that my reasoning ran deeper - but that doesn't make me much of a drow at all, does it?"

"You're making my head hurt."

"Swell!" She glanced out the window and down at the ground. "Now we're even."

----

This is where the version I have on paper ends. I assume I intended to continue. Then again, maybe I didn't - I was always terrible at picking ending spots for stories. Still am. xP

Er... comments in this thread, I suppose? Little threat of this thing continuing.