Ash Finds Drow Behind a Door

The roaming eye took Ash away from the rest of the maze problem and dropped him into another one. Displaced into a remote cell block, Ash found himself speaking through a door to someone who recognized My Alchemical Romance and Nick Kremp. That recognition mattered. It meant whoever was behind the door was not only another frightened prisoner. She had history near the party's orbit. The injured prisoner opened the door and revealed herself as Drow. She was a thieves-guild-linked hexelf who had been hiding from a flameskull after killing one and barricading herself away from another. Her name carried its own old bruise. Drow was not her real name; it was the hexname she had adopted after being misidentified so often that the insult had hardened into an identity she could use. That made the meeting uncomfortable in the right way. Drow returned as a trapped maze survivor, but she also reflected Ash's own messy history with using "drow" as a careless or misapplied label. The maze did not only separate people physically. It isolated them with reminders of who they had been before they got lost.