Minutes after leaving the fungal garden where the baby lurker dwelled, Althos sent his allies in Infernius a surprising message.

[I'm going to go visit the dark elven city of Undermoon for a few hours. I'm mostly going to go see what our other allies are up too and maybe pay a visit to a member of their high-council. I'll be back before tomorrow.]

This caught the assorted servants Althos had acquired off guard, but none of them thought the idea was bad. They swiftly wished him well, and quickly thereafter the deity teleported to the city by accessing the memories of Qu'Ren and using them to visualize her bedchamber. While he teleported he changed his shape into the handy, dark elven disguise he had crafted at the end of the time he spent with his dark elven followers.

Six days after the climatic events that happened in the forest, the dark elves had themselves settled into a routine of sorts back in their home city. A routine Althos was now minutes from disrupting, at least for Qu'Ren, as the young god tended to do to routines.

Early in the morning the sixth day since Qu'Ren, the dark elven witch who had organized and then somewhat informally led the eventful excursion into the world above the city, met her master the witch was slothfully lounging on a cushion made of spider silk.

Her eyes gazed lazily and smugly at her own nude form, staring quite lovingly at her reflection in a mirror. The dark elf was a firm believer in many things, but the thing she believed in above all else was her own power and beauty.

She had a waify body, tall and thin, but that only enhanced her elegant appearance. Her skin was the same color as an onyx gemstone, and the sight of her nude form hinted at the pleasures her body could offer to anyone who was lucky enough to have the chance to lay with her.

The arrogant and powerful witch was so lost in her own beauty she didn't even notice when the creature who had enhanced her abilities and promised her even more power in exchange for service and worship appeared in her bedchamber. The deity was plainly visible even from where she sat while she lovingly admiring her own features, and yet it took her several seconds to actually realize that the young god was there.

He had abruptly appeared in a small section of the lightless room and stood there, waiting for her to notice him. Several moments passed, and in those moments the deity's eye wandered the large room.

So this is a dark elven bedchamber? I've seen this place before, thanks to Qu'Ren's memories, but this is the first time I'm seeing it in person. It's quite impressive really.

The bedchamber was a large, circular chamber with a deep pit in its center. Assorted furniture, often adorned with motifs of various creatures native to the world beneath the world, were located throughout the room.

Qu'Ren's bed sat right in front of one of the stone walls of the chamber and atop it sat a scattered mesh of pillowy cushions. The dark elf hadn't been attended by any of her servants yet, due to how early in the morning it was, and so her bed was a reflection of herself: a wild, erratic mess.

Not far from her bed and the woman herself sat an overlarge mirror. She used that to stare at herself, the powerful emotion in her own gaze revealing the profound depths of her self-admiration. Though in fairness to the dark elf, even Althos quietly acknowledged her beauty. He didn't feel what others often felt towards her, a sort of carnal longing, but he could respectfully and truthfully admit she was quite lovely.

At that moment, her gaze was focused on a single part of her womanly body. She examined the shape of her curves and the youthfulness of her small breasts. She rather obsessively fixated on her breasts, watching the things rise and fall in time in response to her concentration and will that she determined that the spells that kept them lively were working. Shortly after that she finally noticed the deity standing in an unoccupied section of her room.

Rather than be alarmed by the deity's abrupt appearance, she smiled coyly at him. He had again taken the form of a more muscular and masculine version of the dark elf named Drow, one of her comrades, and she found herself wondering why the deity appeared before her. She opened her mouth to speak, her soft dark lips purring out her words.

"Why hello there master." She said, slowly and sensually speaking each word, with a special emphasis on the word "master". Her deity grinned at her, as his eyes slowly took in the sum of her physical form.

"Is there any... special reason you've decided to enter my bedchamber?" She asked, her eyes lustfully admiring the muscular physique of the deity she was more than happy to serve, in more than one way.

The dark elven form he had taken was not immune to the influence of the domains the deity had influence over but only one domain affected his appearance at that moment. When he was first creating that form, the deity had chosen to allow the subdomain of hand-to-hand fighting to influence it. That granted him the appearance of a dark elf with an unhealthy passion for fist-fighting, a rare dark-elven brawler.

The deity's dark elven form was an eerie replica of the warrior named Drow, but with a few distinct differences. The first difference this form had when compared to the form of the dark elven warrior who inspired it was that this form was far more muscular. Drow himself had the sinuous muscles of conventional dark elven warriors who often tended to be lithe and skinny focusing on skill as opposed to focusing on raw strength. Althos didn't.

Althos in his dark elven disguise had the dangerous and powerful looking physique of a human berserker. He also had long, white hair, which differed from Drow's in that though Drow's was the same shade of white as the dark elven warrior, Drow's was considerably shorter. Althos' hair went to the top of his shoulders, whereas Drow's went to the top of his neck.

Qu'Ren had spent more than a few minutes imagining that powerful body on top of her own since first laying her eyes upon the powerful-looking pseudo-dark-elf days ago. But sadly for her, the deity wasn't as easily distracted as the dark elf witch was, and he waved off her advances.

She pouted at him, disappointed by the deity's uninterest in pursuing carnal delights. He chuckled, the sound soft and unbefitting his physical appearance at that moment. Then he opened his mouth to speak for the first time since quietly invading her bedchamber.

"Get ready. I'm going to be exploring the city today, and you're accompanying me." He said, commandingly. He spoke the soft, sensual language of dark-elven kind quite easily. His tongue naturally caressed the proper syllables and the words escaped his lips with the slyness of a natural speaker. It was odd for the dark elven witch in his company, but she didn't dislike it.

She nodded at him, annoyance plainly visible in her eyes, but it wasn't the only emotion evident in her gaze. There was a playfulness there too, and perhaps even a sort of excitement.

So Althos wants to see the city he wants us to quietly conquer for him? Beyond the context of our memories? That makes a certain kind of sense, but I wonder why he hasn't visited here before... Or has he?

On her own, she came to the conclusion that the deity could have visited the city without her. She thought to ask him that directly but then realized that he might not answer one way or another. Fortunately, the deity was inside of her mind, quietly reading it thanks to a spell he was experimenting with and decided to respond to her thoughts.

"This is the first time I'm exploring your city. I've been busy building a base far-away from here, with my other allies, and today was the first day I've had a real chance to come here. I also didn't feel like visiting the city as an outsider, which is why I decided you'd be my guide while I was here."

She nodded in understanding at the deity's words and felt satisfied with his explanation. Wordlessly the witch cast a spell that conjured a keen sound.

The sound, a sort of hummed note, was loud enough to escape the chamber and reach the servants who waited for her summons down in the rooms below the witch's chamber. Within seconds the pit began to emit a soft glow, and Althos heard footsteps coming from beneath them.

Qu'Ren considered explaining what was about to happen, but then she recalled that she gave the god before her a copy of her mind, including all of her memories. The deity's perfect calmness hinted that he knew what was about to happen and when the first of the servants emerged from within the pit and the deity barely acknowledged them she knew he had explored her memories and was familiar with the retinue of servants who were streaming into the chamber.

She watched him for a few moments, intent on observing his reaction to them, curious as to how the deity would react to lower class dark elves as opposed to the nobility he had encountered so far.

His cold indifference to them is... becoming. It fits with how a deity, the most powerful of creatures, ought to act. A noble amongst nobles.

To Qu'Ren, herself a noble, his apparent apathy towards dark elves of lesser social stature than herself was the right attitude. At that moment when she looked upon him, she beheld what she thought was a dark elf who understood the importance of social structures and of class systems.

Qu'Ren was misreading Althos. She was fundamentally misunderstanding him and though she didn't know that, he had absolutely no problem with how he was being misunderstood. Rather than pretend that the servants of the witch were beneath his notice, he carefully studied each of them.

The deity gleamed every detail of the entourage that magically ascended from the pit. He memorized everything from the colors of their eyes to the number of hairs on each of their heads. He was just doing it magically so as to avoid notice by any of the creatures he was studying.

The deity was using a handy oracular spell to view the servants of the witch from very close up. The spell basically gave the deity an extremely focused magnifying class.

He was silent, and still as the servants approached the witch and as he noticed them. They noticed him, but a career of beatings hand-delivered by Qu'Ren herself taught them better than to openly question their mistress over the identities of the rare few she thought worthy of allowing into her bedchamber. None of them approached him or even acknowledged him.

The servants reached their mistress and quickly began the flawless execution of a routine they had mastered centuries ago. Althos would wordlessly watch the routine for close to half an hour.

It took the duo an hour on the dot to leave the thick stone building Qu'Ren called her home and enter the actual city. Over the course of that hour, Althos watched Qu'Ren's servants dress her, accompany her to a dining chamber, and watched her eat a meal consisting of subterranean critters artfully filleted and expertly grilled to suit the exquisite dark elven palate.

Althos took his first steps out of the home of one of his newest servants and into her family's estate while feeling the cool welcome of chilly air. The air kissed his face and his unarmored chest, more so than any body part covered in warm armor. He grinned and quickly felt himself adjust to the chilly, stagnant air of the enormous cavern.

He smelled the earthy scent of solid cliff-stone waft through the air. It was pungent, inescapable and after breathing it in for a few moments the deity knew he'd never forget it. It had a rock-like musk to it, the sort of smell that someone could taste. He was glad it wasn't unpleasant but he was also grateful that his form of eating was unlike the ways that humanoids ate.

At that moment the deity decided to look directly upward. His powerful vision allowed him to peer hundreds of meters into the sky before he saw the natural ceiling of the cavern. The cliff the estate was jutting out of eventually fused with the ceiling, becoming part of the grand tapestry that covered the entire city of Undermoon and significantly more than that.

The inky ceiling shrouded the city and the estate in a layer of darkness that didn't deter the dark elves. They were more than well-adapted to darkness, their eyes not needing light to see. However, their slaves often did. So the city out in the distance was well-lit, revealed to those who needed lights by an illuminated sea of torches and magical lights. This transformed it into a bright spot, relatively speaking, in a sea of darkness.

He was now surrounded by the estate of Qu'Ren's noble family. Right behind him lurked the home that housed the family's leaders, where he had just come from. Directly before him there was a stone pathway that extended a few dozen meters, and then there was an open gate. Beyond that gate was empty air. The path stopped at the end of the open gate, leading to a sheer and sudden drop-off.

He took a few more steps forward, towards the open gate, and then turned around. He saw the building that housed Qu'Ren and three other, similarly built but smaller buildings in cliff-side openings close to and also behind it.

The smaller buildings all stood two dozen or so meters tall and almost 35 meters wide, with the building that housed Qu'Ren measuring almost twice that. He admired the dimensions of the home, recognizing that it was larger than the chapel he had made into his home base in Infernius was.

Qu'Ren noticed him admiring her home, and waited for the deity to grow bored of staring at the place of his own volition rather than tearing him away from the sight of her home. Perhaps a minute passed before the deity turned around to walk towards the exit out of the estate's exit after he committed its sight to his memory.

When he reached the edge of the open gate, he quietly walked off it and allowed himself to slowly fall using magic. He smiled as he felt wind rush up at him and he leisurely enjoyed the sensation of the world coming up to greet him as he moved through the air, towards the ground.

Shortly after he fell and began to slow his descent Qu'Ren got back to his side and then allowed her own fall to slow thanks to the powerful elven magic she artfully controlled.

The one encounter the pair would have before they reached the city came as they left the guarded neighborhood Qu'Ren lived in. It happened right before they would have made it out of the neighborhood. It was initiated by a cautious guard.

"Halt! Stranger, this is guarded territory and I've never seen you before. Who do you work for?"

The source of these inquisitive questions was a stern-looking dark elven warrior dressed in organic, chitinous armor. He was safely tucked away inside of a mobile guard post made up of thick, roughly shaped and tempered vanadium and had shouted at Althos as the young god's shirtless form passed by the outpost.

The dark elf guard pushed himself to sound intimidating, but he only just barely managed to avoid having his voice crack as he attracted Althos' attention. Althos looked at him and saw a dark-skinned lad in armor that looked a touch too big, carrying a spear that looked a tad bit too heavy.

The guard's face was smooth and untested by the cruel tests of age, suggesting that he was but a youth roped into a job Qu'Ren's memories indicated Althos should have thought would be uneventful most days. Althos felt something akin to a pang of pity as he looked into the elf's eyes, but he also felt a sliver of respect for the elf.

It's not bad to be brave enough to attract the attention of strangers who posed the risk of being nobles when you aren't noble yourself. Takes guts to do this job in this sort of cruel environment. Kind of a mistake trying to stop me though... And that's without Qu'Ren at my side.

The deity knew the young guard wasn't a noble. Even without the whisper of Qu'Ren's knowledge in the back of his mind telling him that he could tell. He knew from his interactions with the dark elves that he had met, that no noble dark elf would be so fearful while reaching him out to someone as undignified as a brawler.

In a society as hierarchal and traditional as a dark elven society, only non-nobles had to fear physical reprisals from those they disrespected. Only non-nobles would feel the indignity of a fist cracking their skull because they angered a barbarian. For anyone else the risks were of a different sort, gambles didn't come in the form of fistfights but rather they came in the form of magical duels and challenges to one's nobility.

Althos considered responding but instead of him addressing the guard, Qu'Ren, who had been right behind him did the speaking. She peeked her head into the view of the dark elven guard, resting her head on Althos' shoulder. She looked into the guard's eyes and scowled. She briefly considered expressing her displeasure at the guard's interruption of the pair as they walked to the city.

Instead, the dark elf decided to do something that would ensure no other guard interrupted Althos when he was going to and from her home. She expressed that Althos meant something to her.

"This is Althos. He is my lover. You're lucky that today we are together and I am in a good mood, but if you or any of the other guards do something like this again, bothering or obstructing him, let me assure you that I will not be merciful."

The guard almost leaped out of his skin as she spoke to him. The guard ignobly nodded at her, energetically indicating that he understood her and would obey her wishes.

She smiled at him after he indicated that he understood, and then gently kissed Althos' obsidian colored cheek, so as to demonstrate the closeness she shared with the deity in a society with a cold view towards public displays of affection. Qu'Ren was individualistic enough and strong enough to care very little what the society she was in, thought of her behavior so she paid that consideration no mind when she acted out and did things like this.

The sensation of her warm, soft lips on Althos' cheek wasn't a bad one, and with a start, the god realized that that was the first time he'd ever been kissed, something the memories he had been given by other people told him was a big deal.

When he turned to her, his eyes a bit wide, she giggled. The sound was surprisingly girlish coming from someone who even by dark elven standards was not young.

Qu'Ren was having fun at that moment. Her thoughts were flirtatious and truly were those of someone who had just started seeing someone.

Kissing him is nice. He is warm, and his flustered reactions are cute. He is fun to tease... I wonder if that was his first kiss?

In the seconds that quickly passed the dark elf realized that that probably was his first kiss given his age. She grinned at him, and winked, feeling as though she had secured a victory for herself at that moment since she had stolen a kiss from a deity. After a few moments, the deity just sighed and smiled at her.

The pair quietly continued their walk towards the proper parts of the city, away from the homes that housed the most arrogant and insufferable members of the city's nobility, many of whom would have accused Qu'Ren of being perhaps the most arrogant of them all. And who knows?

If they made that accusation they may have had a point because kissing a god without their permission was something only an exceedingly arrogant person would have done. Yet Qu'Ren did that, and she and that same god were now walking towards the city's grand marketplace.