The Rat Queen of Vermin's Snye

Being a chronicle drawn from the confessions of Ayamia the Unfortunate, and from the cold accounts of the Scholars' Institute for Change, set down that the truth and the sorrow of her may not be wholly lost to the dark beneath the streets.

There are griefs that break a soul cleanly, as a blade parts bone, and there are griefs that break it slowly, as water wears away stone until the shape of the thing is gone and only the ruin remains. Ayamia, whom later years would name the Rat Queen, suffered the second kind. Hers is not a tale of monsters, though she is counted among them by those who wander the Snye with torch and steel. It is a tale of a mother, and of the price a mother's heart will pay rather than accept a truth too heavy to bear.

Of Her House and Her Fortune

In the years before the Age of Cataclysms fell upon Norrath, Ayamia was no dweller in filth and shadow. She was the wife of Lord Selien, a man of station and repute, and she kept a house of comfort and quiet grace. Her days were given to the gentle arts that ladies of her rank prized: the weaving of fine lace so delicate it seemed spun from frost, and the painting of miniatures, small and jewel-bright, in which she took no small pride. The Museum of Fine Arts once counted her lacework worthy of display, and the memory of that honor she carried with her long after all else was stripped away.

Tunare had blessed her, or so she believed, above all women. Seven sons she bore to Lord Selien, seven strong boys in the flower of their youth. She had wished, in her fond and playful way, to name them all with a single letter, that the household might ring with a chorus of like names. Her lord husband forbade it, thinking it a foolishness. Yet when the birth of her youngest laid her low with a sickness that near carried her from the world, his heart softened, and he relented. So the eldest was named Varion, who wore his father's face as a coin wears its stamp, and the youngest was Voland, and between them came five more, and among these was Asrey.

Of the Sister and the Long Illness

The sickness that came upon Ayamia at Voland's birth did not pass in a season. Near a full turning of the year she lay abed, her strength poured out of her, her mind adrift upon fevered waters. In this time her sons wanted a mother's hand, and it was her own sister who came and gave it, raising the seven boys with patience while Ayamia hung between waking and the long dark.

Here the chronicle turns cruel, and I set it down plainly, for a lorekeeper who softens the truth serves no one. When at last Ayamia rose from her bed and her strength returned to her, she did not thank her sister. She accused her. Whether the seed of madness was already planted, or whether the fever had watered it, none can say. But Ayamia named her own sister a traitor, and by whatever influence her house yet held, she saw her sister arrested and put to death upon that charge. Only then did she take up again the raising of her sons, as though no shadow had passed over the hearth at all.

I do not offer this as excuse for what she became. I offer it because the mind that could do such a thing, and then forget it, was already a mind learning to unmake what it could not bear. That art she would one day perfect.

Of the Shattering and the Sons Who Did Not Return

Then came the Shattering, that catastrophe which no chronicler of Norrath may set down without a stilling of the pen. The world was rent. Antonica was broken, the seas rose and swallowed the coasts, and travelers beyond counting were lost upon the churning waters. Whole families were unmade in a single night, and the roads and shipping lanes that had bound the world together were drowned or torn asunder.

Upon some errand, the purpose of which no record preserves, Ayamia sent her seven sons abroad. Varion, Voland, Asrey, and the four others took ship together, and the sea took all seven. They did not come home. They would never come home.

Consider the weight of it. Seven sons, the whole of a mother's harvest, gone in a single stroke of the world's calamity. And more: it was she who had sent them. Whatever the errand, it was her word that put them upon the water, and so in her own heart the great disaster of the age and her own private ruin became one and the same wound. The magnitude of Norrath's loss and the guilt of her own hand pressed together upon a mind already cracked, and something within her gave way entirely. She did not weep and heal, as sorrowing mothers do. She simply refused. She would not know that they were dead.

Of the Descent Beneath the Streets

Whether the family of Lord Selien shunned her in his absence, or whether her ruin made her intolerable to those who once shared her table, Ayamia was cast out from the world above. She has written that a wretched landlord turned her and her children into the streets, and that she chose, being resourceful, to go below, where the elements could not reach and a cozy corner might be made a home. This much of her account is true in its bones, though the children she gathered about her were not the children she named.

Down into the drains and the dark she went, into the tunnels that the world calls the Vermin's Snye. There the crews who tend the sewers keep their stores of fuel for the wall sconces, and she learned to borrow a little of their flame to warm herself. She found a side passage, little used, patrolled at its mouth by the roving thugs and cutthroats who claim such places. They did not trouble her. A broken old woman muttering to vermin in the deep dark is a thing even hardened men leave alone.

And in that dark, she gathered the rats.

Of Her Children in the Deep

She called them her sons. She called them by name.

Ayamia moved through the Snye tending the creatures of the drains as a mother tends her boys. When they wandered too far into the tunnels, she grieved their absence and rejoiced at their return. She spoke to them of the world above, and she remembered, with a clarity that ought to break the heart of any who reads her words, the true small details of her lost children's lives.

She remembered that Asrey, her third son, had a voice like clear water over stone. She remembered that even as a boy he was called to sing before the great house of Bayle, and that Lady Larinna Bayle herself, moved by his song, gave into his hands an engraved flute as a token of her favor. That flute went down with Asrey beneath the waves. Yet Ayamia in her dark kingdom would tell how her boy loved to stand where the ceilings rose highest and sing, that he might hear his own voice come back to him out of the stone.

Here is the strange mercy and the strange horror of her madness together. She held fast to every gentle truth of her sons: Varion's face so like his father's, Asrey's gift, the flute, the illness at Voland's birth, the names she chose with such care. All of it she kept, bright and whole. Only one thing she had cast away, the single fact she could not carry: that they were dead, and that she had sent them to it. Around that one absence her whole ruined mind arranged itself, and called the arrangement peace.

She spoke, too, of paintings she had made of her sons, portraits she treasured. No such portraits were ever found, and whether they existed or were only the last flickering of an artist's habit turned inward, none can say. Perhaps she painted them in the dark upon the stone. Perhaps she only saw them there.

Of the Cruelty That Named Her Queen

The world above did not leave her wholly in peace. There came a day when vandals broke into the Museum of Fine Arts and stole away the last of her displayed lacework, the final relic of the lady she had been. This alone might have been borne. But the thieves were not content with theft. They carried the bits of stolen lace down into the Snye, and they bound them to the rats she called her children, and they set the creatures alight.

Ayamia, seeing her children burn, rose up in a fury of grief to defend them. It is from this, this pitiable and terrible scene of a broken mother flailing to save flaming vermin she believed were her sons, that the world coined her name in mockery. The Rat Queen of Vermin's Snye. So she is known to this day by those who pass through her dark demesne, and few who speak the name pause to remember that beneath the title lies a woman who once wove frost into lace and bore seven sons and lost every one.

The Lorekeeper's Word

The Scholars' Institute for Change examined her writings and set down their analysis coldly, as scholars do, marking each place where her account parted from the record. They noted her denial, her fictions, her blotting out of the deaths. In this they were correct, and their labor preserved the truth for us who come after. Yet I would add to their cold ledger this warning, which is the whole reason I have set the tale down anew.

Do not mistake the Rat Queen for a mere horror of the deep, a thing to be put to the sword and forgotten. She is a warning written in a mother's grief. The mind will not always break where the blow falls. Sometimes it bends around the wound and hides it, and builds a whole false world in which the wound was never dealt. Ayamia chose her seven rats over the truth of seven graves, because the graves would have killed her outright and the rats let her go on loving. Who among us, standing where she stood, upon the drowned edge of the world with all our children gone by our own sending, can swear we would have chosen better?

Let the wanderer who descends into Vermin's Snye and meets her there remember it. And let the Society remember, as we remember all such tales, that endurance is not always a virtue. Sometimes it is only the shape grief takes when it cannot end.