I.
The Drow priestess-general Shulvallriel Olonrae slips her feet into a restorative bath that’s been wunderchem’d from the neutralized remains of a gelatinous cube. Her toes wriggle freely in the alchemical muck like playful wyrmlings. She has instructed her eight lieutenants to light incense around the innards of the posh command tent, and smoke from this colludes with the wispy clouds wafting out of her lit opium pipe to create a haze of peacefulness. Outside, the fog of war. The sounds of marching sandals. Shovels undermining earthworks. Chants. A siege of an ancient mind flayer bleak academy and necrological seminary is being birthed ejectively—craaa-ack!—from a hundred or more squirting cauldrons set to conjure demonic entities who don’t want to be Here. Bubbly vessels are arrayed for explosive one night stands with the infernal, and how they glisten in the wan torch light! How they quiver and vibrate in anticipation! How they shake with every discharge! How the moaning and wailing comes! And then convulsions, eruptions, thunder. A monotone female voice is saying: “Again. Again. Again.”
II.
My college experience is colder than the chill touch of Drow witchy women, cool-headed logicians directing death at a map scrawled with known enemy positions. Speaking of Drow (vith’dos!), Dungeons and Dragons is a blanket I wear around me like a strange homeless guy when I’m away at the school I don’t like that my parents did. I take it into the dining hall with me to use as a bib while I gorge on pizza only. I drag it to the library, parting the covers occasionally to peek at books in the religious texts section. I glance through it like a spy glass when making attempts to socialize with people I can’t stand on a gestalt level. I’m 17 with half the life experience of everyone else here. D&D offers a colorful lens through which to view my unfamiliar surroundings. Beers are ale mugs. Classrooms are dungeon corridors. Black people are aren’t (!) Drow.
III.
General Olonrae heaves and roils in her ceremonial armor, summarily executing the mind flayer Elder Brain with a crossbow bolt as she crushes the trepanated foreheads of its prostrate human thralls under stiletto heels. The inside of the bleak academy is decorated with an uncountable number of rib cages and skulls, because necropolitics is (was) on the mind of the cephalopodic Head Master of Undeath. Priestess Dilynrina, quartermaster of the so-called liberating army, orders the bones be removed and ground into undercattle feed. The walls of this place are non-euclidean, but they are quickly being brought back into quantifiable boundaries as the discerning red eyes of the Drow scan them. An open air pit is the destination of the acolytes, necromancers and fleshy attachés taken prisoner during the battle. They descend into the pit under their own power, and emerge clapped in irons; “The culturally-aphid are obsessed with raising the dead,” Olonrae remarks, “We will lower the dead and raise the price of slaves.”
IV.
Ye says that slavery is a choice, and I guess I chose to go to college, but it doesn’t feel like it. I’m on an infinite three hour ride back to school after a weekend at home that was too short. It’s just me and my dad. Male bonding. Mom doesn’t come because she does her lesson plans for the week on sundays. A sunday drive means NPR is playing, since in this house (car) we love science and Steve In(n)skeep, a beady eyed little dwarf who serves spirits from behind the counter and tells you when you’ve had enough. We’re driving and jiving and simply enjoying the satisfactual scenic byway on this middle of nowhere passage. NPR is on a genocide kick, so our conversation meanders to the Holocaust vs. slavery (THE WHEEL OF FATE IS TURNING, REBEL 1: ACTION!). Apparently, some of my ancestors were Hell raisers on the plantation—Cenobites with a dark paint job?—and my dad is proud of that. The subject of Jewish resistance, or possible lack thereof, comes up. He says something like, “I can’t see how anyone can just walk into an oven.” My memory of this and other turbulent journeys is hazy, obfuscated by the haloperidol fog machine making clouds in my mind rave, but the oven, the oven!
🕸
From the moment I step back into my dorm, I’m raving about D&D to my roommate. My friends and I played a campaign while I was home, and part of it was set underground in the subterranean part of ‘Dykal’, a world my buddy Hank made, which I explain has Drow but “not the strangely feminist ones.” He’s like huh? Now I’m soulja-boy-telling this poor son of a bitch about how Drow are generally depicted as fem-dommed militarist lunatics obsessed with spiders. About how they live underground in a deeply harsh place called the Underdark. He’s smirking a bit and nodding, but it’s like talking to a brick wall. His face is a brutalist building with blocky extrusions of meaning, and I don’t have Stonecunning. He’s looking past me to some people in the common area outside. The concrete dorm I live in feels like it rose from some rocky undermountain crevice, but I’m not sure if it feels more ‘Underdark’ or just plain ‘under communism.’ My roommate is Eastern European so I guess that’s a circumstantial +1 for the latter. The dorm is located on the part of the campus that used to be a women’s school. There’s a coed bathroom on my floor where I go when I feel like brushing my teeth. Sometimes there’s a girl shitting in there. Sometimes there’s a big spider patrolling the last stall on the left. I wish one of the girls who shits there would crush it with her doc martens, not necessarily because I hate spiders, but because [the parchment is ripped here]. One day there’s some fight in the bathroom and people are shouting at each other. I don’t give a shit. I’m editing my computer science traffic light program while thinking about editing a map with NWNToolset.exe, the campaign creator for the video game Neverwinter Nights. I’m editing a paper for my mandated writing intensive course called Women and Death, occasionally tabbing to NWNToolset to scatter Drow NPCs around the viewport that shows the game world. Drow diaspora. I really wanna go home.
🕸
At some point last century, Sylvia Plath—an author I won’t have to read because I’ll drop out before her scheduled block on the syllabus—put her head into an oven. I can see that. She was dom(m)ed by the recursive tyranny of her own thoughts. The happy hardcore soundtrack of my mind rave is vibrating with “Who The Fuck is Alice?” as I leaf through a trippy steampunk D&D supplement book called The Underdark by Gaslight. Same old evil Drow, different fetish aesthetics. Boots with latches. Monocles. Priestesses whipping leather daddy driders in jaunty top hats. Every woman adores a fascist, especially when that fascist is her.
V.
The favorite bound male of Shulvallriel Olonrae is Duagloth, a lithe street acrobat who tumbled into high status through good fortune in marriage. He is physically (by chain) and mentally (via psionic link) attached to the general. Her face sits on the back of his eyelids, as unwavering as the banners with spider iconography that the Priestesses of Lolth have installed at every street corner. The worship of the deity is experiencing an electric revival, shaking the brick and mortar of a city that was once dedicated to the staid traditions of arcane science. Parishioners with all black everythings whip each other with cloaks and speak in tongues for Dark Mother, slam dancing and cavorting and gyrating their swollen abdomens. And just as Lolth puts the jig-jig-jiggles in their behinds, Shulvallriel, too, is an animating force in the meager life of her sexual conquest. In Duagloth’s dreams the two are brown recluses dancing on a nuptial web that’s half lies, half-truths, and fully silken to the touch. The debilitating nature of the recluse’s bite is central to these nighttime ruminations. Daugloth frequently lucid dreams of his humanoid self losing its penis to Mistress Shulvallriel’s necrotic poison. The prick, then the quick, agile movements of chelicerae, then darkness. Then the rousing from his hammock, cock harder than an AD&D module run by Gary Gygax in 1978. In the waking world, he is a foot fetishist overcome by the sound, sight, and smell of General Olonrae’s sandals. The scrape and the snap beckon him. He wants to be the vamp thong between her big toe and the next one, bloodthirsty for a harrowing forced march. He salivates at muster, desperate to spitshine the open toed jackboots of authoritarian evil. The general knows this, and while instructing her bonded mate in written undercommon she sometimes forces him to long-scribe the phrase “[crushing a bug is permissible]” on parchment before a lick is granted. Reading and writing stimulate Duagy, and though the Lolthites heavily censor literature, he secretly reads works penned by bards from other planes of existence that the general keeps in her domicile for novelty. He loves Franziska Kafka’s treatise on transmutation magic the most. How unfortunate, he thinks to himself (and the others in his head), that he be born as a character in some perverted nigger’s erotic fan fiction instead of being incarnated into a work more literary, one that could give him a fuller experience of bugdom more rich with isolation (and more leeway to masturbate).
VI.
Since Zoloft entered my body like the Overfiend, I have started involuntarily visualizing my mom’s face while jerking off. I’m back at home now. This isn’t daddy’s Vietnam, but these 800-odd megabytes of D&D books with quasi-sexualized covers downloaded from a DC++ hub at Hamilton College’s expense are my war brides. Call me/kami- crazy war brides! Snow falls. Tearfalls. St. Regis Falls: On the way back, we ride sporty through this place, a slow-down town where the din of racist country music will rise again in the spring. I’ll use that half-assed transition as an excuse to segue into something else racist: I have been unable to masturbate to black women since late September of 2002 without picturing them as the vantablack-skinned Drow from Dungeons and Dragons. I need the lowbrow detachment of high fantasy to get off to women of my own race, because it distances them from my mother’s lightly-browned complexion. Does that make sense? I hope not. When Johnny Rebel sang “I knew what kind of Hell that they would put that nigger through” in his hit song “The Kajun Ku Klux Klan,” he was obviously crooning before Big Pharma, the most personally significant draped boogeyman of institutional terror, coalesced into its final boss form. This is a primal torment, beyond Planescape, beyond the Nine Hells, beyond the shit in Book of Vile Darkness even. Endless screaming into the abyss.
VII.
The demonic pacts that Shulvallriel and her priestesses wrought are collapsing. Great cities of the Drow are being put to the torch as possessed magic-users work incantations and disjunctions, and dysfunction abounds. In bold defiance of the law, a sorcerer raises the bodies of three slaves who were whipped to death, and more. The overseer, a monstrosity that resembles a large brown tick with crab claws for hands, flees so quickly that his straw hat is worn by a tick-shaped dust cloud. The dungbeetle of history is toiling again, and small acts like this one quickly shitball into a greater societal turbulence that reinvigorates the lost cause of necromancy. As the major Drow houses collapse to assassination or yield to the colder, genteeler machine gun hand of undeath, Duagloth finds himself alone on the plantation of his former master. The general and her compatriots are now deceased, part of something larger: a chic and colossal flesh golem sewn together from the remains of matriarchy. As this exquisite corpse smashes its way into the government district of the city, Duagy ekes out one last jerk in the closet of his oppressor-wife. The golem raises its heel to stomp the yard just as Duagloth blows a ropey load into a court shoe, losing himself in the umbra of its darkened toe indentations.
VIII.
In the shadows of my childhood bedroom, I brood, but do little scheming; I am no Anansi. In my bed, I absorb light but do little reflecting; I am no scry mirror or palantír. In my mind—and increasingly in my physical surroundings—I lash out, and I am shameless and catty about my failure to launch; I am no Mae Borowski. I participate in society and politics only insofar as I can use them as a shit-smeared scarecrow effigy to express my frustrations, a heralding/Harolding of collapses to come. When elections are in season, I do write-ins for D&D characters like Elminster Aumar and Halaster Blackcloak. In the Obama/McCain bout, I will vote for “Drizzt Do’Urville Martin,” the best combination of ‘good drow’ and ‘bad ass nigga’ possible (they call him Boss). But before I stop giving a fuck totally—around the time I send the final suicide caravan full of my dreams into the Underdark to be torn apart by bandits (or, as a psychologist called it in her assessment, my “third attempt at college”)—I will cast my only ballot-legal vote for a United States president. I dedicate this Drizzt quote from Streams of Silver to Michael Badnarik & David Cobb: “Beware the engineers of society, I say, who would make everyone in all the world equal. Opportunity should be equal, must be equal, but achievement must remain individual.” Lolth, lmao. 🕷
— Rudy Johnson (@lynchpoet) is an idiot and co-founder of Misery Tourism who designs games and shit.