Ulli Perhonen
History of House Perhonen
House Perhonen was founded millennia ago by some exceptionally murderous bitch. There are a few books about her, but I never bothered to read them. It wasn't until the time of my great great grandmother, Anna Perhonen, who took advantage of the chaos caused by the separation of Aushodore from the other planes of existence to seize power in the city that is now named Perhonas, it's previous name has been obliterated from history along with the house for which it had been named.
House Perhonen is built on an unusual thing in Drow society, cooperation. Conflict within the family is forbidden, outside of a few rather large exceptions. Instead, priests of Lolth that are members of House Perhones adjudicate disputes, making use of house bylaws and the ideal of strengthening the house's power to make decisions. Intra-house conflict still occurs, but everyone knows it must be kept quiet and limited or else everyone involved suffer the wrath of the Matriarch. This system has broad support across the family because it has worked. Family unity has enabled the family to proliferate and prosper.
The Academy did not come into existence as a discreet creation, rather it slowly emerged out several systems to cultivate the strength of the House. The first recognizable antecedent were games where sons of the house would compete to become the consort of the Matriarch. The coopetition, repeated every five years, cultivated a stronger "stable" of men to serve the house. A ruling by Priestess Iralyon that Matriarch Janna had neglected the wellbeing of poor kin led to the creation of a single school where all daughters of the House would receive equal instruction and opportunity to excel and rise within the house. In the year 4566 AMW Matriarch Vanna Perhonen formally established the Academy where all sons and daughters of the house would be educated. It became a carefully engineered outlet for the family's divinely ordained need for competition. All the aunties, a nice way to refer to rabidly ambitious matrons of House Perhonen, compete with each other to see who can produce the most successful progeny.
Each Matriarch has left her mark on the institution. My mother, Matriarch Maj'Ryd Perhonen, left her mark with the aggressive use of mutagens. Following a failed war with the neighboring Drow city-state of Heilbronn, the ranks of the house had been greatly depleted. Unwilling to wait decades to replenish the losses, Maj'Ryd synthesized a mutagenic agent that cut the time between her pregnancies from ten to fifteen years to only a few years. The first few children were horribly deformed and were disposed of, but once the toxicity of the drug had been reduced the whole family joined her. As my mother continued her experiments mutagens took on a greater role in the family and the Academy. Mothers took mutagens to rebuild their bodies in the hope that improved traits would pass onto their children. Those children would also be pumped full of mutagens to increase their size, strength, durability, intelligence, magical ability, and virility. There were of course costs, mostly borne by children, but as the mutagenic program matured the quality and number of children passing through the Academy increased.
When I ran away, there were about six hundred adult members of House Perhonen and eighty children enrolled in the Academy. This number has been trending steadily upwards since my mother became Matriarch. The family has grown so large that it no longer fits within the estate in Perhonas.
Birth
My birth was traumatic. Matriarch Perhonen nearly died in childbirth despite the presence of two clerics. I had grown so large that I split her belly open. When my mother recovered enough to hold me, she cried out in horror and dropped me to the floor. She demanded that I be sacrificed to Lolth immediately. I nearly was.
Even though the clerics assured her I was not a curse visited upon her, my mother was convinced that my hybrid anatomy was nothing but shameful and vile imperfection that made me unworthy of any of the boons of my ancestry. My mother and aunts debated my sacrifice and were leaning towards it. Unusually, it was my father with a purely logical argument that spared my life. At the moment I had no sisters and therefore I was the only eligible "daughter" of the Perhonen dynasty. Despite his status, my father convinced my family to wait.
By the time my younger sister Anya was born three years later, my mother's rage had abated.
Priesthood
There I found myself, knocking on towering, gem-encrusted obsidian doors of the Lothite Cathedral of Perhonas. Matriach Perhonen had given me a letter or recommendation, so I was accepted, but anyone who doesn't feel anxious in the presence of Lothites is a fool.
Life as a neophyte could not have been more different than life at home. I was a slave to the full priests, but so were all the other girls and one boy. We served the full priests in every way imaginable and plenty we could never have imagined. There was something akin to camaraderie. We were now property of Lolth and only she was allowed to kill us, via her priests of course. It wasn't that we neophytes trusted each other, rather that we knew the threat wasn't from each other. I had it easier than most of them. I had no ambition. Satisfactory performance was all I aspired to. Some imaginative neophytes saw my "apparent" lack of ambition as a brilliant maneuver to evade unwanted attention.
Despite my lack of effort, I drew attention. The deviant and the demonic are embraced in the church. The forms of some demons match my own, both male and female. My hybrid form delighted the priests and they saw it a a gift from Lolth, that rather than being a mutant borne of excessive mutagen use, that I had been blessed with demonic blood. Ritual orgies were my first experience with uncomplicated joy. You can forget yourself amidst the surging bodies and flowing blood. Though at least some presence of mind must be maintained as the participants have a penchant for demonic transformation the powerful magics involved aren't precisely controlled.
I was a fool, and it was nearly too late when I realized what the priests had planned for me. High Priestess Thayil made me a full priest far sooner than I had anticipated, but not because I had earned it, but because she saw me as nothing but a vessel for her pet project. She expected me to excited and honored when she told me that I was to be mother to a Draegloth. I barely managed to keep my cool as she excitedly explained that my "blessed" form might permit me to give birth to a unique Draegloth with the grace and intelligence of a female and the strength of a male. She had no idea if it would work, but her curiosity was completely unrestrained by the risk to my life.
I thanked High Priestess Thayil, and walked right out of the Cathedral and into the Underdark.
Alienation
Why did I run away?
There wasn't an inciting incident, there wasn't any specific act of cruelty that scared me into it. It was alienation, an encroaching feeling that I was not part of the Perhonen family. That even as I slept under the finest silk sheets and ate rich food, that I was an outsider. The more I understood of alchemy the more certain I became that my hybrid anatomy had been caused by my mother, and that she understood this just as well as I. Yet, she never stopped treating me as the perpetrator of some terrible crime against her. For her, there was no reason to distinguish between the cause and effect of my mutation. To her, I was no daughter and no son, therefore I was nothing and that was the only thing that mattered.
A few of my siblings became my friends. Hanza was the only person who treated my like family, doting on me like a little sister. We would stay up late into the day and scheme to pull pranks on my more uptight sisters. It was a dangerous game we played, making would-be Matriarchs look like fools, but no Drow can find joy in a game that doesn't involve at least some risk of death. As I endured puberty he would soothe my anxiety by joking that I had the best of both genders, that he was actually jealous of me. For him, sex was just another service men owed to the family, no different than murder or court ritual. That I had both a cock and pussy just meant that I had more tools to deploy. I was never so sanguine, but he accepted me for what I was and for that I love him.
My sister Miezen was also accepting, though never openly affectionate. She saw my lack of ambition as an opportunity to form an uncomplicated friendship. Most of our interactions were utilitarian, I was much better at alchemy than she, and she never felt the least bit ashamed to obligate my time to improve her craft, but she did trust me. When she needed to vent her anxieties she would come to me, and I would comfort her. All Drow noble women go to sleep with the inescapable fear of not knowing whether they'll wake in the morning. Miezen's status as favored daughter only intensified that fear, a fear that she only escaped when she slept in my bed. She trusted me to stay awake while she slept to watch over her, sure beyond any doubt that I would never hurt her.
The rest of my siblings limited their interactions with me. Apart from when I was teaching, I was usually left alone. Occasionally some eager sister would try to curry my favor for aid in my alchemy course, but it was never genuine. It would be a fun dalliance, a flash of intrigue and interest followed by another year of cold. Their true emotions usually ranged between revulsion and pity. The worst lusted after me.
A few happy moments, spread months and years apart with Hanza and Miezen couldn't make for a bearable life. I realized that eventually Matriarch Perhonen would have me killed. My growing skills could become a threat. I was only one of her children that showed any chance of exceeding her own skills in mutagenic alchemy. I could forestall, even prevent my filicide by restraining my skills, but that path was an option I only briefly considered. A life of self-imposed mediocrity lacks any charm.
On my thirtieth birthday I asked Matriarch Perhonen a favor, to join in the Priesthood of Lolth. She thought about it for ten seconds then, cast me aside without a second thought.
The Academy
Matriarch Perhonen, my mother, operated something akin to a battle royal for the Perhonen Dynasty called the Academy, an uninspired name but sufficient. It is a secret system of child abuse, mutagenic augmentation, education, and indoctrination designed to strengthen the Perhonen dynasty. The philosophy, explicitly stated, was to push children through a series of brutal filters that would leave only those capable of leading the family to greater prestige, piety, and renown. All the children of the extended Perhonen Dynasty are required to endure the Academy. There were hundreds of them, at least twenty new boys and girls pushed out by hyper-ambitious, sex-demon-goddess worshiping bitches. Most didn't graduate.
My brothers were expected to serve as elite soldiers, assassins, and court attendants in the service of the family's great dynastic plan. My brothers entered into the "academy" at age three. Their education consisted of martial arts, military theory, court ritual, and once they were old enough, sex. Academics had little role. Calligraphy was considered more important that being able to think. Those that graduated could look forward to hedonistic luxury as scions and consorts of the Perhonen family. Most of them fit type, cold and calculating while being eager to please. A few stood out, little Nikki ran away. A set of twins that did everything together. Maybe some day I'll tell a story about my favorite brother Hanza, who meet his would-be assassins with debilitating puns before he slew them.
My sisters had it worse. They were expected to learn everything my brothers did, but on top of that religious doctrine and advanced skills as suited their aptitudes. Their greatest challenge was Matriarch Perhonen, who looked over their studies not with a baleful gaze, but from the shadows. Those that failed to display unwavering zeal and brilliance even in supposed private moments would become targets for even ingenious methods of killing. These incidents of filicide were part of their training, for those that survived or evaded the attacks were given another chance. If my brothers were uniformly terrified and desperate, my sisters were also arrogant and eager. Most of them fully internalized that they had a chance at becoming the leaders of an ascendant dynasty and claim unfathomable wealth and power. Those that choose not to pursue this path at least had an out; if a daughter of Perhonen choose to abdicate her royal name, she could become a sister in the Priesthood of Lolth. Only one of my sisters, Miezen, five years my junior, survived until I ran away. My father joked that she was compensation from Lolth for me. Her birth had been smooth and easy, and she had exceeded every expectation my mother placed on her. She was brilliant, beautiful, and appropriately bitchy.
Matriarch Perhonen never enrolled me in the Academy. My only expectations were to stay alive and out of the way. I lived a curiously carefree life without the lethal pressures that molded my siblings into weapons of dynastic politics. However, I was permitted to roam the Academy at will. Often I lurked in the back of lecture halls where my brothers we're learning about the fine points of poison making or my sisters studied moral history. While my bothers and sisters had to spend their every waking moment focused on survival, I could consume content at my leisure and inclination. The only subject that really held my interest was mutagenic alchemy. I came to realized that my hybrid anatomy was almost certainly caused by my mother's consumption of mutagenic concoctions. The irony wasn't lost on me.
I was twenty when I started applying myself. It was a strange thing to belatedly realize that I was a genius. My sisters struggled mightily to understand mutagenic interactions. Most of my sisters scrapped by through memorization of formulae. I taught myself the underlying chemistry. My art wasn't about cooking some recipe passed down by some long dead master, but understanding why the the ingredients in that recipe did what they did.
Matriarch Perhonen was a master of this. The only time she ever showed me any sign of approval was when I invented a more efficient and effective formula for a strengthening mutagen. My reward was to become an instructor in the Academy, teaching my siblings.
Comments