r/Drizzt

After speaking to the mods - I am re-posting my story - full disclosure as agreed with them is below. I am posting it as I feel it is a true Sword Coast story, steeped in the lore and the history with compelling characters that will immerse any reader in the setting.

The Weight is Silver charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa Duskmere becoming one of the most powerful and influential people in the Sword Coast.

Chapter One is below for easy access and I will only post an update when a new chapter is added - so far 5 Chapters are up at this subreddit:

FULL CHAPTER LISTING: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf5g3h/the_weight_of_silver_a_tale_of_the_sword_coast/

This story started off as a vignette about the people in the picture below and has morphed into epic saga charting rise of the House of Duskmere and of Lady Vessa herself becoming one of the most powerful and influential people on the Sword Coast.

For full transparency the story is AI assisted in its writing else it would be impossible to get the depth of lore and world realism without excessive study of the lore which very few people have command of. The characters and storyline are my own. Even with the AI's help It takes hours of editing and story shaping to get the story to a standard that satisfies me and hopefully a wider audience.

I am well aware that many people dismiss AI assisted content as 'slop' but I assure you that the level of depth of the lore and layered nature of the story along with the richly drawn characters and one soon forgets how it was written. I ask you to read the first chapter and decide for yourself.

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The Weight of Silver - Chapter One

A tale of the Sword Coast, in the Year of Three Streams Blooded (1492 DR)

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Lady Vessa Duskmere, Halric Stone, Branwen Asher, Corin Vale, Kael Auvrenal

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I. The Walk Down from Helmsblade

The five of them came down the cracked stone of the outer bailey at dusk, with the sun bleeding red over the Sunset Mountains and the banners of House Helmsblade snapping like impatient hounds above them. The keep at their backs was old Cormyrean stonework gone bastard — a border holding granted in the chaos that followed the Sundering, when the Dragon Throne had been too distracted by Netherese ghosts and Shadovar wraiths to mind its western marches. Now, with Suzail's eye turned outward again and the High Forest stirring with things that should not be stirring, places like Helmsblade had become useful once more.

Useful, and watched.

They had been summoned for a private council. They were leaving with something heavier than any of them had brought up the hill.

Lady Vessa Duskmere walked at the centre of them, as was her habit and her right, though she would have refused either word if pressed. She was tall — taller than three of the four men around her — and the wind off the foothills lifted her black hair where it had escaped the silver clasp at her crown. Her armour was Calishite work, or made to look it: blackened plate over the chest and ribs, etched in a script that was not quite Thorass and not quite anything a scholar of Candlekeep would name for you, the metal dark as wet slate and inlaid with copper filigree that caught the dying light. Below the cuirass, the long split skirt of dyed leather and lacquered scale fell to her boots, with thigh straps that held two narrow blades reversed against the leg — a fighting style she had brought back from her years in the East, where she had served, and bled, and learned things she did not speak about.

She was thirty-four. She had been a Harper once. She was not, any longer, anything so simple.

"Say it again," she said quietly, without turning her head. "Slowly."

Behind her left shoulder, Corin Vale obliged. He was the eldest of the company, forty if he was a day, with a face that had been handsome once and had now gone craggy in the way that suited some men better than youth had. His beard was shot through with iron, his hair tied back with a leather thong, and his armour was the heaviest of the five — full plate of Damaran make, the breastplate scored across the left pauldron from a gnoll's axe at the Battle of Berdusk Ford six summers past. The scar had not been buffed out. Corin Vale considered such things to be honest.

"The seal was Lord Helmsblade's," he said. "I watched him press it. The wax was Cormyrean red, not the Helmsblade blue. That means it was witnessed by a Crown agent, Vessa. There was a Purple Dragon in the room we did not see."

"And the contents."

"Are exactly what Branwen says they are."

At Vessa's right, walking a half-pace ahead because he could never quite force himself to walk in line, was Branwen Asher. Younger than Corin by ten years, leaner, sharper-faced, with the high cheekbones and pale hair of a man whose blood ran half-Illuskan. He wore a lighter harness — black scale over a gambeson, a single shoulder of articulated plate on his sword arm, the rest left mobile. Two blades crossed at his back: a longsword for the right hand, a parrying sword for the left. He was a duellist by training, a spy by trade, and a Harper still — the only one of them who had not yet given up the silver pin, though he carried it in a hidden seam now rather than at his collar.

"Three thousand crowns," Branwen said. "Three thousand Cormyrean crowns and a writ of safe passage, in exchange for one woman in Yartar. By the second tenday of Mirtul. Or the offer voids and the bounty quadruples and is opened to the open market."

"Mirtul," said the man behind Vessa's right shoulder. "Three tendays."

This was Halric Stone, and he was the largest of them, though not the loudest. A Damaran by birth, a sellsword by necessity, a bear of a man with a beard that had gone to rust at the edges and a voice that rumbled up out of his chest like a millwheel. His armour was older than any of theirs — fluted plate that had belonged to his father, and his father's father, with the Stone family device hammered out long ago and replaced now with nothing at all, a patch of bare scarred steel over the heart. He carried a bastard sword across his back and a war-hammer at his hip, and he had killed more men than he could count and fewer than rumour gave him credit for, which is the truth of any man who has fought for coin long enough.

"Mirtul," Halric said again, as though tasting it. "And the woman is?"

Vessa stopped walking. They stopped with her, in the unconscious way of a unit that has fought together long enough that no one needs to give the order. The keep was a dark crown above them now, the last sentries on the wall reduced to shapes against the bruised sky. The stones underfoot were broken in a pattern that looked almost deliberate from above, like the cracked face of a dropped mirror.

She drew the parchment from inside her cuirass and read it again, although she had read it three times already in the lord's solar and could have recited it from memory.

"The woman in Yartar," she said, "is named in the writ as Sira of Auvrenal. Age twenty-six. Dark-haired. Last seen in the company of a Waterdhavian merchant called Olem Voss. The Crown wants her returned alive. Helmsblade will pay the three thousand on delivery."

She let the parchment hang at her side.

"That is the public name and the public price."

"And the private?" Branwen asked, though his voice had gone flat in a way that suggested he already knew.

"Her true name," said Vessa, "is Sira Auvrenal."

Halric did not understand. Corin did, and his jaw worked.

The fifth man understood too, and that was the one who had said nothing yet, and whose silence had begun to weigh on the others like a held breath.

II. The Fifth

He stood a little apart, as he always did. Kael Auvrenal — though only one person in Faerûn living still called him that, and he had not seen her in eleven years — leaned on the low wall of cut stone at the edge of the path and looked out at the failing light over the foothills, and said nothing at all.

He was thirty-one. His hair was the colour of old wheat, longer than was fashionable in the cities, tied back with a thin braid at the temple in the manner of the Uthgardt tribesmen he had run with for two winters in his early twenties — a debt repaid, a story for another night. His armour was the lightest of the five, by his own preference: a cuirass of dwarf-make under a long charcoal tabard, vambraces of beaten steel, a sword-belt that carried both a hand-and-a-half blade and, on the left hip, a shorter, older weapon with a wire-wrapped hilt and a pommel that had been worn smooth by some other hand long before his.

He had a way of going still that the others had learned to read. Halric, who had drunk with him in nine cities, said it was the stillness of a man calculating how many people in the room he could kill before they killed him. Branwen, who had worked beside him in the dark for years and trusted him further than was wise, said it was the stillness of a man trying not to remember something.

Tonight it was both.

"Auvrenal," Halric said slowly, sounding the name out as though that would help. "I know that name."

"You should," said Corin. "You drank his sister's wedding-wine in Baldur's Gate four years ago. You don't forget weddings, Hal, you've told me so a dozen times."

"Gods." Halric's face changed. He looked at Kael, and Kael did not look back. "Gods, that's Sira? Your sister Sira?"

"My half-sister," Kael said. His voice was very level. He had a voice that could be very level when he chose. "Same father. Different mothers. She was twelve when our father died. I have not seen her since the year of her wedding, which was, as Corin says, four years ago."

"And the wedding," Branwen said carefully, "was to —"

"Olem Voss." Kael turned at last. The light caught his eyes, which were grey, and very tired. "Yes. The Waterdhavian merchant. Who is named in the writ as her companion, which is Cormyrean for abductor, but who is in fact her husband of four years, and the father of her two children, and a man I have personally drunk with on three occasions and consider a decent if slightly venal soul."

A silence.

It was Vessa who spoke, finally, and she spoke to Kael alone, although the others heard.

"Why does the Dragon Throne want your sister, Kael?"

He did not answer at once. He was looking down at the stones under his boots, at the cracked pattern of them, and one of his hands had closed unconsciously around the older sword's pommel — the one with the worn grip, the one that had been someone else's first.

"Our father," he said, "served in the household of Vangerdahast for the last six years of the old wizard's tenure. He was not a mage. He was something more useful, which was a man who could be trusted to carry letters and not read them. When the Steel Regent dismissed Vangey in '69, our father came home. He brought certain papers with him."

"Which papers?" Vessa asked.

"I don't know. I never did know. He did not tell me, because I was nineteen and stupid, and he did not tell Sira, because she was twelve. He told no one. He died of a flux in the spring of 1481 and the papers vanished. We assumed he had burned them. The household assumed he had burned them. Apparently —" his mouth twisted, "— the household was wrong."

"Apparently," said Branwen, very softly, "the Crown thinks Sira has them."

"The Crown does not," said Corin. "The Crown thinks Sira knows where they are. There is a distinction. If the Crown thought Sira had them, the writ would name them and demand them. The writ names Sira and demands Sira."

"And the writ," Vessa said, "was witnessed by a Purple Dragon agent in Lord Helmsblade's solar this afternoon."

"Yes."

"Which means," she went on, her voice flat as a struck bell, "that the request did not come from Helmsblade. Helmsblade is the purse. The hand belongs to Suzail."

III. What Each of Them Heard

There is a thing that happens when five people receive the same news and each one of them hears something different, and the air between them becomes for a moment very crowded with the unsaid.

Corin heard Suzail, and remembered.

He had not been a soldier of Cormyr, but he had fought for them, briefly, as a free company captain during the Goblin War of '79 — the small ugly war the chronicles barely mention, fought in the marshes south of Wheloon while the kingdom's attention was elsewhere. He had watched a Purple Dragon officer order the execution of forty bound prisoners because feeding them on the march was inconvenient. He had said nothing, because he had been twenty-six and hungry and the contract paid in Cormyrean gold. He had carried the silence of it for fourteen years. Now Cormyr wanted him to deliver a young woman with two children to that same kind of officer in that same kind of room, and he heard the request the way a man hears a debt being called in by a creditor he had hoped was dead.

Halric heard three thousand crowns, and felt sick.

Three thousand crowns was the precise sum his sister's husband owed to a Calishite slaver-banker in Memnon, against which his sister and her two daughters stood as collateral under a contract Halric had been working for two years to dissolve. He had ridden into Helmsblade tonight with twelve hundred to his name. He had ridden in calculating, as he had been calculating for eight months, how much longer he could keep the banker patient. Three thousand crowns would not just buy his sister's freedom; it would buy her a house in Berdusk and her daughters' apprenticeships and a future. And all he had to do was help take a Waterdhavian merchant's wife from her bed in Yartar and put her in a wagon bound for Suzail. That was all. He had done worse for less.

He looked at Kael, and felt sicker.

Branwen heard Vangerdahast's papers, and went cold all the way to the bone.

Branwen was the only one of the five who knew what those papers almost certainly were, because Branwen had been a Harper long enough and well-placed enough to have heard the rumour, twice, in two different cities, from two different sources who did not know each other and were both now dead. The rumour was that Vangerdahast, in the last months before his dismissal, had compiled a private register of the bloodlines of the Cormyrean nobility — including the irregularities. The bastards. The substitutions. The quiet infidelities of two centuries of Obarskyr queens and their cousins. The register had vanished when Vangey did. If it existed and if Suzail wanted it back, then Suzail did not want it for safekeeping. Suzail wanted it because someone in the current succession was vulnerable to it, and the current king was a child of eleven, and the regency council was already at one another's throats, and a piece of paper with the wrong name on it could pull the whole kingdom into civil war within a season.

Branwen heard all of that, in the half-second after Kael said Vangerdahast, and he understood that the Harpers needed to know. Tonight. Before any of them slept.

He also understood that telling Vessa would put her in an impossible place, because Vessa was no longer a Harper, and the silver pin in Branwen's collar seam was not a thing he had ever shown her.

Vessa heard the Crown wants her returned alive, and heard the lie under it.

She had served the Zhentarim for eighteen months in her early twenties — a fact known to no one in this company except, possibly, Kael, who knew because he had been the one to pull her out — and she knew the shape of a contract that ended in a quiet death. Returned alive meant delivered alive to a place where she will die. It did not matter what was in the papers. It mattered that Sira knew, and knowing made her a thing that could not be allowed to wander Faerûn telling her story to merchants and priests and drunken Waterdhavian husbands. The Crown was not retrieving an asset. The Crown was closing a door.

And Vessa, who had been pulled out of a Zhentish counting-house at the age of twenty-three by a young swordsman with grey eyes and a worn-pommelled blade and no good reason to bother saving her, looked at that swordsman now and understood, as she had understood from the moment she first read the writ, that there was only one answer she could give.

Kael heard his sister's name, and heard nothing else for a long time.

He had not protected her when their father died. He had been nineteen, and angry, and useless, and he had taken his father's older sword and gone north to the Uthgardt because he could not bear the house. Sira had been raised by their father's sister in Baldur's Gate. He had written, sometimes. He had sent money when he had it. He had stood at her wedding, drunk too much, and left before the dancing because the bride looked too much like their mother, who had died in childbirth, and he could not breathe in that hall.

He had told himself, for eleven years, that she was safe because she was small, because she was domestic, because she was a merchant's wife in a quiet city and not a swordsman's sister in a contested march. He had told himself that the worst gift their father had left them had been the name, and that she had escaped it by taking another man's.

He had been wrong about that, too. He was beginning to suspect he had been wrong about most things.

IV. The Council on the Stones

They did not go down into the village. They sat on the broken stones at the edge of the path, in the long blue moment between sunset and full dark, and they spoke as quietly as five armoured people can speak.

"We have until the second tenday of Mirtul," Corin said. "Three tendays. Yartar is twelve days' hard ride from here, less if the weather holds in the High Moor. If we go now —"

"We are not delivering her," Vessa said.

"I did not say we were delivering her, Vessa, I was speaking to time."

"Then speak to it more clearly. We are not delivering her. We are taking her out. Her, the husband, the children, the household if there is one. We are taking them somewhere the Crown's hand does not reach, and we are doing it before the second tenday of Mirtul, because at the second tenday the bounty quadruples and goes open and every blade between Neverwinter and the Dragonmere will be hunting her."

"Where is out?" asked Halric.

"That is the harder question."

"Waterdeep," said Branwen. "The Lords will not extradite to Cormyr on a sealed writ. Voss has standing there."

"Voss has enemies there," Corin countered. "He left two trade partners ruined when he went to Yartar. Waterdeep is a hornet's nest for him personally."

"Silverymoon, then. The High Lady —"

"Silverymoon is six tendays north and we have three."

"The Underdark," said Halric, with a perfectly straight face, and Vessa snorted in spite of herself, and the moment broke a little, and they were able to think again.

It was Kael who spoke next, and he had not spoken since Vessa had said the hand belongs to Suzail.

"There is a fourth answer," he said.

They looked at him.

"We take her out," he said. "And we take the papers with her. Wherever they are. She will know, or Voss will know, or there will be a trail in the house in Yartar that will tell us. We find them. And we read them."

"Kael," said Corin.

"We read them, Corin. Whatever is in those papers, we read them, and then we decide. If they are what Branwen's face just told me they are —" his eyes flicked to Branwen, who did not flinch, although the cost of not flinching was visible — "then they are a weapon, and a weapon in the right hands is a shield, and Sira does not survive this unless somebody holds a shield over her."

"That is treason, Kael."

"It is treason," Kael agreed, "if Cormyr is the kingdom we serve. I am not a Cormyrean. Vessa is not a Cormyrean. Halric is not a Cormyrean. Branwen is whatever Branwen is this tenday. You, Corin, are the only one of us who has ever taken Cormyrean coin in earnest, and you have been telling me for two years that you regretted it."

"There is regret," said Corin softly, "and there is open rebellion against the Forest Kingdom. They are not the same country."

"No," said Kael. "They are not. But they are on the same road, and the road is shorter than you think."

Vessa said: "I am with him."

She said it before Kael had finished speaking, almost on top of him, and there was something in her voice that none of them — not even Kael — had ever quite heard before. Not loyalty, because loyalty was a word she had used up years ago. Something older and uglier and more honest. A debt being paid forward.

Branwen was the next.

He did it with his hands rather than his voice. He reached into the seam of his collar, and worked the silver pin out, and held it between his fingers in the blue light, and then he closed his fist over it and put it into his belt-pouch and said: "I am with him too. The pin is on a holiday. We will see if it comes back."

Halric looked at the three of them, and then at Corin, and then at his own hands. He thought about his sister. He thought about three thousand crowns. He thought about the look on Sira's face four years ago when she had pressed a cup of wedding-wine into his hand and called him uncle because Kael had been too drunk to introduce him properly.

"Aye," he said, "I am with him."

Corin Vale was the last. He took the longest. He sat with his old plate creaking around him and he looked up at the keep above them, at Helmsblade's banner snapping against the bruised sky, at the Crown of Cormyr that had paid him in gold he had spent and could not give back.

"You understand," he said to Kael, and only to Kael, "that if we do this thing, we do not go back. None of us. Not to Cormyr, not to the lords of the Heartlands, not to any clean contract any of us have ever known. We become outlaws, Kael. Hunted outlaws. With a child of eleven on the Dragon Throne and a regency that needs an enemy, we become exactly the enemy they need."

"Yes," said Kael.

"And you are asking it for one woman."

"I am asking it for my sister," said Kael, "and her children, and the truth of what our father carried home and died of, and the shape of the kingdom that comes after this one. Yes. I am asking it. I will not ask twice."

Corin closed his eyes. When he opened them he was not the man he had been a moment before, and they all saw it, and none of them spoke of it.

"Then I am with you," he said. "Gods help us all. I am with you."

V. The Walk Down

They rose. They did not embrace; they were not that kind of company. They checked their straps and their blades in the unconscious way of people who have decided, without saying it, that the next time they drew steel it would be in earnest.

Vessa folded the parchment and tucked it back into her cuirass, and she did not return it to Lord Helmsblade, and she did not intend to.

Branwen ran his thumb once over the seam of his collar where the pin had been, and felt the absence of it the way a man feels the absence of a tooth — with the tongue, idly, and often.

Halric drew a long breath that smelt of mountain pine and distant rain, and thought, I will find another way for my sister. There is always another way. There has to be.

Corin set his hand on the scarred place on his pauldron where the gnoll's axe had bitten him at Berdusk Ford, and made himself a small, private promise about the kind of man he would be from this night forward.

Kael Auvrenal touched the worn pommel of the older sword at his left hip — the sword that had been his father's, that had carried letters from Vangerdahast, that had hung above a hearth in a house he had not seen in eleven years — and thought of a twelve-year-old girl with dark hair pressing her face against the doorframe and watching him leave.

The wind off the Sunset Mountains lifted and cooled. Somewhere below them, in the village of Helmsblade, the first lamps were being lit.

They walked down together towards the horses, and the road, and Yartar, and the second tenday of Mirtul, and whatever the Year of Three Streams Blooded had left to do with them.

Behind them, on the broken stones of the path, a torn corner of red Cormyrean wax lay where it had fallen from Vessa's hand. The breeze rolled it once, and then again, and then carried it over the wall and down into the dark.

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To be continued:

Chapter 1a: Selene Duskwind
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf5sd2/the_weight_of_silver_chapter_1a_addendum_in_the/

Chapter Two: Sedgewater Patrol
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf5ov5/the_patrol_on_the_sedgewater_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Three: The Conversation by the Sedgewater
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf60c1/the_conversation_by_the_sedgewater_the_weight_of/

Chapter Four: Ruin at Mournstar
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf65vt/the_ruin_at_mournstar_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Four - contd: Ruin at Mournstar
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf68yp/the_ruin_at_mournstar_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Five: Approach to Yartar
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf6k9j/the_approach_to_yartar_the_weight_of_silver/

Chapter Five: Approach to Yartar - continued
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWeightofSilver/comments/1tf6gwk/the_approach_to_yartar_the_weight_of_silver/

Hi, I just discovered Drizzt a month ago aprox. I created a character for a DnD party with friends, I feel so proud cause it's my third original character and honestly, the only one that I create with my own feelings and heart. I send it to a friend and he asked me: "Do you know who is Drizzt Do'Urden?" I answered with a no and he told me to read "The dark elf trilogy". I loved it and now im about to start the last book of "Icewind Dale".

I really love the books, I really love Drizzt but I feel bad cause my character seems like a copy, she even has an ice scimitar too from the first sesion when I didn’t read any book and have no clue! The DM told me to be a drow with two scimitars cause the other warrior of the party was the tank and we needed a DPS, so I accepted. Then I start reading the books, when I finished the first trilogy I asked the DM if he has a clue about who is Drizzt Do'Urden and he doesn’t know him. Im just in shock cause even our group is so similar to the Icewind Dale one.

I know my drow isn't Drizzt, it's my own character with her own story but the paralels are so similar and I feel like I'm playing a Drizzt copy.

This and discover him when I'm 27 years old make me feel mixed feelings. I wish I discovered this books on my adolescence cause it would have helped me a lot with my struggles in daily life cause >!trauma and autism!<.

Anyway, whats ur opinion on that? I just nedeed to vent I think, I hope it's okay. If it's not just tell me and I'll delete the post, thank you for reading.

I just finished Promise of the Witch-King and...

Why doesn't Drizzt talk to animals?

Missing the Companions

My drawing of Wulfgar

[OC] Entreri failing to obliterate Jarlaxle’s fanfic

Hasbro Cancelled the D&D Adventure Game

Neverwinter is Hilarious (spoilers)

RE-POSTED: Lady Vessa Duskmere & The Weight of Silver - A Tale of the Sword Coast

Zaknafeins racial ambiguity

Where to get books like The Legend of Drizzt and others like it?

Guen - Low Poly Ceramics

Jarlaxle turned 1!

I painted the Companions of the Hall

who would win?

my Drizzt drawings I made while being bored at work

Just finished painting my Guenhwyvar miniature that I printed!

It's okay if I'm a new Drizzt fan on my late 20?

The Legend of Drizzt Visual Dictionary is on sale on Amazon for only $17!

📫📚 Mail call - stoked 📚📫

First time reading, definitely wasn't expecting THAT.