You’ve heard stories about the drow. The evil, dark-skinned, matriarchal elves living under the ground. You were meant to hear those stories. The drow are masters of psychology. They studied the surface world before they made contact with it. And they orchestrated the very stories that portray them so harshly.
The First Lie: The Drow Are Matriarchal
The drow saw that those who ruled the surface were mostly men, and that in the rare instance when someone who wasn’t a man gained power, many of those ruling men were at their most irrational, driven by a mix of suspicious sexism and eroticized fascination. This was the state in which these rulers were least prudent and most vulnerable. So the drow planted the idea that theirs was a matriarchal society; not just a regent empress or other temporary form of non-male rule, but a continuous matriarchal line where men were subservient.
The truth: Drow do not typically express a particular gender. Reproductively, they are crepuscular hermaphrodites; female in darkness, but male when exposed to moonlight. Their primary reason to interact with the surface at all is to find liminal-luminal locations where they can procreate.
The Second Lie: They Are Dark-Skinned
The drow sought more weaknesses among the surface men, and they found the second in their reliance on sight. Touched by the sun in varying degrees, the surface men used skin tone as a shorthand for distinguishing between nearby kin and far-flung strangers. It was very different from the brutal but egalitarian darkness that the drow knew from the underground, where sight was not privileged as first among the senses. The drow saw another exploitable weakness, and planted the lie that (despite their deprivation from the sun) they were darker than the darkest-skinned human, the sort of total darkness that surface-dwellers feared above all.
The truth: The drow are translucent. When still and unclothed, they are very difficult to see at all, even in moderate illumination, although light will cause their silhouette to quiver in a manner similar to the way shadows seem to move at the edge of the candlelight in a child’s bedroom. A clothed drow is either a pool of inky blankness or a blinding flash of silvery strands (their clothes are reversible). They are fully visible and conventionally opaque in moonlight, in some forms of magical light, and during coronal mass ejections and other rare, disruptive stellar events.
The Third Lie: They Are Elves
The final weakness that the drow identified in the surface men was their love-hate relationship with elves. The elves were everything the men wished they could be. Longer-lived, more beautiful, more skilled with magic. The mightiest human leader would be dust within the natural lifespan of the lowliest elf, and humans were both awed and enraged by this fact.
The truth: No elf, good or evil, would ever live underground. The surface is fundamental to what makes elves elves. The drow are best understood as fey, as they once lived in the shadowy glades of the unseelie court. Insofar as elves also have fey blood, they’re related to the drow; but no moreso than they’re related to satyrs or pixies.
Three Truths About the Drow
The drow spread these lies to ensure that their potential foes on the surface would not understand them well enough to defeat them, if they were to come into conflict. But the drow did not completely fabricate the stories that spread on the surface. The best lies mix in enough truth to fool even those who investigate.
The drow do live underground, although not exclusively. Only by living under the earth and severing themselves from the seasons can the drow resist the instinctive pull to return to the fey realm, which eventually calls even the most willful and mischievous of its children back from seasonal dalliances on the material plane.
The drow do love spiders, although not as a form of demon worship. Spiders were one of the few familiar things the drow knew from the fey realm and recognized when they arrived in the underground world, and they serve as mounts, livestock, and guardians for the drow.
Like other members of the unseelie court, the drow are morally inscrutable to most humans, which can be difficult to distinguish from evil. Their society has been shaped by the low-resource, high-competition environment of the underground. They can be cruel (they would say pragmatic), extreme (they would say uncompromising), and quick to judgment (they would say decisive) in their dealings with other peoples. But the few surface-dwellers who have untangled the lies from the truth in the webs the drow spin have dealt with them and lived to… well, probably not "lived to tell the tale," because the drow would not appreciate that. But they have lived.
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