Maestro (Homecoming, #2; The Legend of Drizzt, #32)

by R.A. Salvatore

Menzoberranzan shaped me, mostly by showing me what I did not want and could not accept.

How many more of similar weal, I wonder, huddle in the shadows because they believe there is no escape? How many conform to the expectations of that cruel society because they believe that there is no other way possible for them? How many feel the bite of the snake-whips, or look upon the miserable driders, and so perform as expected?

I know not, but am I not duty-bound by those same principles and ethics that guide my every step, to at least try? And am I not, for the sake of my own reflection, duty-bound to confront these ghosts that so shaped me and to learn from that honest look in the mirror of my earliest days? How might I truly understand my life’s purpose, I wonder, if I cannot honestly confront who and what placed me upon this road I walk?

She was home. This was her family, as much as Mithral Hall had been her home and Bruenor was forever her Da. Whether she was Desai or not mattered not at all, no more than the fact that she wasn’t a dwarf—nay less, she decided, because she was human, just like this family, just like this tribe. The rest of it—skin color, hair color, homeland—was nonsense, fabricated by people who needed to pretend that they were somehow superior for such superficial reasons. None of it mattered. This was her family, and she could only love them as such.

“It is so good to be among people who understand that life is more complex than darkness and light,” Lord Parise remarked. In both her lives combined, few words had Catti-brie ever heard that brought a truer sense of comfort. Lord Parise had spoken a simple truth, and a sad one.

I HAVE HEARD POWERFUL MEN WITH IMPERIAL DESIGNS CLAIM THAT reality is what they choose it to be. That they make their own reality, and so decide the reality for those in their way, and while others are trying to decipher what is truth, they move on to the next conquest, the next creation, the next deception of malleable reality.

This is the curse of Lolth. The grand deception! She has made my reality to lighten my heart, so that she can shatter my reality, and in so doing, shatter, too, the heart of Drizzt Do’Urden.

“And I do not diminish or doubt your beliefs,” said Penelope. “For me, this is what I know, and I choose to enjoy it—in every way I can.

“You will not even say it, will you? Do you claim that you are your own god then, miserable mortal?” Drizzt steadied himself and found some solid ground then. “I claim that what is right is in my heart,” he answered. “That I do not need to be told right from wrong, and if I am weak, and when I am weak, then I know that I have chosen wrongly. And that error is my failing, and not that of any external god.”

“Because I am not a lie,”

“You do!” Jarlaxle insisted. “You envy him. Because he is content in his heart that there is something more, some better angels and greater reason, and because he so easily finds his rewards, treasures as great as anything I or even you might know, in the contentment of moral clarity and personal honor.”

“Perhaps because secretly we all want to believe what Drizzt believes,” said Jarlaxle. He waited for Yvonnel to look him in the eye. “You couldn’t break him. You cannot break him.”

His faith lies in what he deigns truth, not a specific deity, and if there is a god for him, he believes he will find that god by following what he knows to be right and true. His apathy for the existence of a named truth, a god, will not chase him from his chosen course.”