After a brief hiccup, Renato's life among the drow gradually settled into a routine.
He stepped out of the bathroom and put on Mountain's Embrace again, his deep dragon leather boots treading the stone steps.
Having washed away the dust from his training, Renato headed downstairs, intending to visit the Nightwind Family's library.
He spent the morning, when the Time Pillar shone brightly, on combat training.
Very few of the stones fired by those magic devices could hit Renato now. It was not that his dodging speed had improved significantly. Rather, he had changed his approach to the flying stones and begun trying to cut them down with his longsword.
The results were good. A few still slipped through occasionally, but compared with his initial passive dodging, he was now taking far more initiative.
The Weapon Master had recently been investigating the inexplicable disappearances of several drow raiding parties outside Samoriel City, so he was often away from the family compound.
From Aknath's scattered remarks, Renato learned that ordinary desertions or annihilations would leave at least some traces in the wilderness, allowing Shadowblade and the inquisitors to follow the clues.
But the recent disappearances were extremely strange. Over the past six months, more than ten drow raiding parties had vanished in the wilderness without leaving any trace that could be followed.
After divination spells also proved ineffective for unknown reasons, the Spider Mages strongly suspected that too many demon summonings had been performed within Samoriel City, creating unstable rifts in the surrounding space that connected to the Abyss and "sucked" the raiding parties into other planes.
Yet when the High Priests capable of receiving oracles sought help from Lolth in the Abyss, they found that she, usually so eager to "answer questions," offered no response on the matter.
The goddess's