The Do'Urden Brothers

Chapter 18

Note: as I introduce this group of characters, I had created an OC to be paired with Entreri whom you'll meet later, but now I am feeling some feels between Entreri and Jarlaxle whom I mildly ship. So I decided to make it a poly pairing. A slow evolving one just like most of my pairings.

It felt like it had been ages since Entreri had first left Calimport on his original mission to catch the halfling, Regis. As he peered out the top floor window of the non descript inn he had found himself in, he watched as the people below mulled about. People used to fear him. People used to move out of his path as he approached. He had thrived on that fear.

But now? He had been gone so long that the younger guild members didn't even know him. And worse yet, some thought they could challenge him. He thought of the young rogue who had attempted to kill him last night and the broken body he had left in the street, laying in a pool of his own blood. He was still Artemis Entreri. At least that's what he tried to tell himself.

Calimport wasn't so different from what it was when he first left. The city was still a massive sprawling web of wards controlled by wealthy pashas who lavished in the wealth they had accumulated by plotting and scheming, while others in the city lived in extreme poverty, huddled in doorways and alleys, or living cramped in tiny crowded buildings.

But, the criminal streets of Calimport, streets that Entreri knew so well, had changed. Pashas and guilds had shifted about, some getting more prominent and wealthy, others absorbed by rivals.

And what's more, Entreri was different. Older, and changed. Menzoberranzan had affected him so profoundly that it seemed that it had left him void of anything- anything except anger. Ambition- the ambition to be the best fighter- was what drove him to seek out Drizzt Do'Urden, and through that ambition- and obsession, Entreri had been brought down.

The city of the drow had shown him that his reputation in Calimport meant nothing. The drow saw him as a colnbluth, Iblith. Lower than pond scum. And they had treated him accordingly. They had abused him and insulted him whenever they got the chance.

Artemis Entreri was no stranger to abuse. He'd endured it as a child. But he'd managed to claw his way from the lowly street rat that he had been, the scrawny, flea ridden child that had been sold by his own mother, to becoming the fearest assassin Calimport had ever known. His reputation alone protected him. He no longer feared abuse.

That is until he had gone to Menzoberranzan. In many ways, Entreri realized how his greatest rival, Drizzt, was similar to him. They both grew up in hostile environments, both endured abuse. The difference was that Drizzt had fled and Entreri had not.

The assassin was so immersed in his own thoughts that he almost didn't hear the soft thud against his locked door. Whirling, he turned to face the sound. For a moment he couldn't discern the cause. But he sensed it. He sensed a presence.

And it was more than the rodents that scurried across the floor in this less than sanitary inn that he had locked himself away in. Stealthily, he moved silently and effortlessly to the few paces it took to reach his jeweled dagger which lay at the edge of the ratty hay filled mattress.

These accommodations were hardly befitting an assassin of Entreri's caliber. If he had wanted to, he could have returned to Palace Pook and gotten his old room back and lived in the sort of luxury he had once known. But that sort of thing didn't really concern him. He'd lived the majority of his life in squalor, or on the road. The times in which he had a soft bed to sleep in were very few compared to the times he had slept on the cold hard ground, huddled around a campfire, or curled in a corner of the tiny shack in which he had grown up.