Dul-Sansiska the Shield Maiden

Dul-Sansiska, the namesake for the now famous household, was once an impoverished drow girl by the name of Sal-Missus living as a vagrant in the Obscura Mountains, traversing from small hamlet to small hamlet as a beggar and selling herself to pay for a meal or a bed to sleep in. The exact dates are unconfirmed, but she was known to be born sometime in the seven hundred year period between the collapse of the Empire of Dusk, and the founding of Everglow. Most historical data presents her as being born feasibly at or around 350BE, but it is unfounded due to her being born in such a remote locale as the frigid valleys of the Eastern Obscuran Range. According to her own accounts, around the age of seven she had already lost her vagabonds for parents and had to go out and survive for herself and live with many a stranger as and when she could. sometimes it was being pulled in to a tribe of the nomads, sometimes it was whoring to some bandits, trekking to the foothills to beg for scraps from the peasantry of the countryside. by the time she was fifteen she'd migrated to the Obscuran Foothills and begun a whole new cycle of people who didn't know her face by then.

*"Tribulations of the faithful bring out the greatest strengths, like the force of the cresting wave, they show their belief with the greatest convictions"~Book of Aegis, Verse 15*

She described herself as always being tired, and sniping at the idea that the Drow are quite like the Hrow in that they never get bothered by the cold, of course they fucking do. She remembered always shivering herself awake after a few short hours, and trekking on do do what needed to be done. Always hungry too, whenever she foraged it was meager, whenever she begged it was scraps, whenever she'd be bedded it was only parcels of morsels and a warm fire while the deed was done for the night, then shoved off in the morning. Constantly feeling half dead, frozen over, and like she'd collapse. But there was a vigor and a resolve in her that she wanted to see the world, she would not be bested, and she'd counter it with the one thing that her worthless parents had left her with, some scraps of liturgy from the Church of the Servants Faith. Of course they never let her inside their halls, by the time she made it there she was already so soiled and debauched that she was deemed as vile as the Void. But those were just mortal men and women, not the Goddess and so she trekked forwards.

*"Fear not the Demon, for it is mere sand against the all mighty torrent of Aradia's love, our creator, and the one who arms us"~Book of Aegis, Verse 29*

Sal-Missus eventually trekked far into the still unbearably cold reaches of the Central Obscuran Range, the perpetual ice storm nearly did her in before she found a widespread network of deep fissures throughout the valleys leading to the highest mountain of the ranges, Mount Har-Seena. she managed to scale downwards and the heat of Terros beneath her feet was a relished feeling as the ice storms blew overhead and clashed with the rising deep heat of the earth. While nothing grew down here, it was warm and it was welcome. The fissures seemed to expand for many dozens of miles leading to Mount Har-Seena, which she would later learn was the epicenter of the Spreading. They also held things that had been blown down here some time ago, were half gone and half remaining, satchels and weapons, and the bodies of those long gone.

Dul-Sansiska admitted she committed to robbing from the bodies and the satchels of the long dead despite the reverence the Drow were meant to maintain for the dead ancestors. but she was hungry, a child, and desperate for relief. She pilfered old half gone boots, tore the clothes from the bodies, and she ate the preserved rations that had sat idle for perhaps centuries by her understanding, gross and stale and utterly sickening, but filling to the point that she could actually feel a satisfying weigh in her stomach for the first time in her life.

*"Be in kindness to the imperiled, the whore, the vagrant, and the orphan, for they are her chosen and most devoted, those who know the pain of the body, but the strength of the soul"~Book of Aegis, Verse 38*

It was during this time of pilfering and exploration that she would come upon something that would change her life forever, the frozen body of a man, kept in suspension as to the last moment of his life, covered in a permafrost so absolute the heat of the earth only served to refine the appearance like pure sheer glass to look inside. It was the body of a soldier, she had to have figured, and his body had been pierced by something before he had fallen into this deep crevasse. She couldn't rob him, and she didn't really want to either, but she also figured that something this special shouldn't languish alone and forgotten. So she summoned up the strength and the will to move him from his deep seated place of rest, and in doing so she cause the ground to give way underneath the both of them and they fell downwards into deep caverns below the earth. Far, much too far, do a little girl of sixteen to scale even without the ice chunk weighing her down, the whole thing was impassable, and while she was uninjured, she was also trapped now for good.

Divine punishments for a thief of the dead she remarked later, that was what was going through her head then, but it was moot, she took to exploring the cavern and found that is had once been inhabited, apparently the old stories of the Drow once coming from caves wasn't fully bullshit. They probably hadn't come from, but had instead made homes within them at a later time, though it was abandoned now, there were weird underground farms, old bookshelves filled with leatherbound tomes, ponds of some odd sparkling water, fixtures and beds and really it seemed like a small hamlet shoved inside the bottom of a mountain. She could live, it was always an ambient temperature that felt comfortable, she found clothes she could fit to herself, the water was fresh and tasty, and the weird plants that grew by the crystal light that illuminated the place were bland and terrible, but they filled her stomach and kept her nourished. She gained weight, drank water, and tried to read the books, but they all looked like a soup of words, this wasn't like contemporary elvish at all, it was all written in that religious language, the Golden Tongue-but in a drow dialect.

*"Cherished by her are the downtrodden, who come to believe her message, and rush like the tides to the defense of the helpless, they are her truest believers"~Book of Aegis, Verse 52*

It took her years of rereading the liturgy scraps she had an trying to find the right book in that language, when she finally found the Book of Aegis she managed to find the verses, and from there decode how to read in the Golden Tongue. Once she taught herself how, she took her time, and read all of the Books of the Servants Faith, there were ten in total, and there were loads of compendiums and supporting books written down here too. apparently this was once a type of isolationist convent that fled the wrath of the Empire. They had communications with other similar convents through special communication tunnels, and overall it seemed like they shared in knowledge, magic, religious texts, and ways to farm and survive. She'd been fortunate enough to collapse into one of the largest of these settlements, and could sustain herself, most were little more than subterranean hovels that barely subsisted anyone beyond a few people and had supposedly been purged one after another by Empress Nadia's Inquisitors.

She would read on that these were high elven and dark elven hybrids taught to hunt mages from birth and root out insurrectionists, they were supposedly what cleared out most of these cave dwellers, and this settlement left before they could be found, hoping that they'd one day return to their home but they never did. That set he young woman on edge, who knew what else these places held? She dared not to venture out the main parts of the cavern and had spent a decade simply within such a small space, nurturing her body and feeding her mind. With these revelations Sal-Missus drank more and more of the clear waters and pondered on what she should do, she'd read all the books, continued to survive under the bland tasting fungus and root vegetables she grew, and sleep in a warm place with dry clothes without having a heaving heavyset human trader on top of her groping and smashing his flabby pelvis into her like a wild dog. It was fine, but it could be more, she could be more, this place had saved her life and now she wanted to be free of it. However, the way she came in wasn't an option, the frozen man wasn't getting any less cold and stiff and coated in ice, and she didn't want to venture further into darkness to stumble upon potential booby traps or worse.

One of those would have to change.

*"Be not afraid of the gift she gives you, it will shape you much as the river shapes the earth, water is the source of all life, let it be what moves you, and go with her everlasting grace"~Book of Aegis, Verse Seventy-Five.*

It took her the better part of a week to get that body into a pool of the water, she finally had the strength to do things, she'd gotten healthy and fit over the years, and as it kerplunked in, a chain reaction began. Suddenly everything was foaming and boiling and roiling, causing Sal to stagger back and slump into a wall as what emerged from the waters was a wounded and weak man with hair as white as the stars in the sky, and eyes as silver as the brightest rings of the Church. He had a puncture wound in his stomach that was sizzling and weeping bluish-red blood and he was coughing and hacking like he had the Guffer's Plague. But here he was, another person, the first person she'd seen in over ten years. her only way out of here, was with his help.

"Who, are you?" Sal had finally managed to stammer out something, she hadn't had to speak in so long it hurt to talk.

"I'm Al-Zehin, Senior Inquisitor of the Imperial Army" he coughed up more and more before falling back in the pool of water, unconscious. Dul-Sansiska would remark later that she had pissed all over herself in terror that he was going to wring her neck when he said he was an Inquisitor, laughing as if the moment was sheer hilarity, though by that time it was a fond and distant memory of the first exchange she'd ever had with her future husband.