Chapter Text
The chosen of Bhaal. The woman from Moonrise. The changeling who reeks of murder.
A familiar sensation courses through you, of confined, sizzling magic desperate to erupt, searing your veins and skin. You long to unleash it upon her, but you know the agony it will bring and the blight it will spread across your body. Her split-lipped smile is manic, dancing, and her milky white eyes radiate glee.
“The Lord of Murder knows you, little seedling. Come to claim our stones? Come to play with our pet? Come to kill the wriggling little brain worm?”
Her sudden appearance before you is jarring. Is nowhere safe? You are unarmored, weaponless, and without magic. She could drive her dagger through your skull if she wished, yet she simply stands there, smiling.
“You know nothing of me, shape-changer.”
She leans toward you, taking a long, indulgent inhale, then giggles like a schoolchild. “I know the reek of decay.” Her gaze drifts to your arm, and she reaches out to touch you. You snap away from her corpse-like fingers.
“How exquisite you smell, hero. All that rot! Its scent is all the sicklier, burning through all that virtue. Like fire through a forest, how you stink of corruption.” Her giggle slips into mania. “No wonder the Lord of Murder is thirsty, thirsty, thirsty for your blood. How I will drink it, how I will swill it around the goblet of your skull and indulge in your rotted, putrid taste.”
She draws a curved, scarlet blade and jams it point-down into the card on the table, piercing the image of the dead man. “Bhaal rejoices in murder. It calls to him, to us. What a murder it was! How glorious! All the burning and the screaming and the melted flesh of the little, sweet younglings…”
“STOP!” you shout, and through the sizzling pain of repressed magic, a lash of thorns erupts from your hand, attempting to wrap around her ceaselessly taunting grin. It misses, and she sneers.
“And how you fled. You ran and ran and ran as the wizards welcomed into your home twisted their flame magic and turned your father into charred pulp.”
You feel the effect immediately, the creeping blackness coiling its way across your skin—a cold feeling pressing against your ribcage, making you clench your teeth. Still, the magic rattles and growls within you like a predator, desperate to silence her. The scent of blood clots in your nose, the stench so putrid you could choke on it. In the distance, outside of the heavy, cloying air of the tent, you hear your friends calling for you. Searching for you.
“Tav!” Gale’s voice is bright, a sharp beam of light through the fog, “Love?” You feel the biting stings of pain begin to lessen, and your rage-muddled mind clear. Orin notices.
“Love?!” she hisses. “Oh, how pathetic, how poetic, how weak!” She sneers. “A wizard? When it was their precious purple weave magic that scorched and choked the life from your own home, your own family?”
You can’t speak, trying too hard to focus on keeping your magic contained, leaning into the pain constricting you so as not to lose control. She leans in, and you can smell blood on her breath.
“What would your poor, slaughtered father think?”
“Tavariel!” Gale’s voice is louder, closer. You can’t let him come in here; who knows what this psychopath will do. She is obviously deranged, unpredictable, with a thirst for blood and no care for how it is quenched. The heat and panic turn to sweat on your skin.
“Gortash won’t like you sniffing around for our stones, sweetling. You should find him. Kill him. Make him feel the tickle of your blade between his ribs. Bring his stone to me, my blood-soaked sapling, and I shall spare the lives of your friends. Hurry, hurry, hurry, and when you find the Lordling, tell him Orin is watching.” She leaves in a burst of red sparks, and slowly the scent of decay starts to dissipate into the atmosphere, and the inside of the tent spins back into focus once more.
In a rush to leave, to suck in fresh air like cool water into the sticky heat of treacly carrion-scent which lingers in your nose and throat, you stumble and knock over the table where all the face-down cards rest. They flutter like dead moths to the ground, some twisting to show you their faces as they land. Every card is the same. Painted with the same picture, the same vision, the same horror.
The burning forest, the dead man, the murderous changeling, the point of her knife and…
JUDGEMENT
JUDGEMENT
JUDGEMENTJUDGEMENTJUDGEMENT
Over and over again, until the blood-red words are so indented into you, they burn crimson even behind the safety of eyes shut tight. You stagger out of the tent, breathing through your mouth, and immediately the bile swilling in your stomach and throat is brought up.
“Tav?!” Gale is by your side, moving your hair away from your sticky face and neck as you hurl your guts up into the grass, trying to expel the swallowed scent of incense and rot. The bile burns acidic in your throat, and your head pounds with the heaviness of it all. “Breathe, love,” he says, rubbing gentle circles on your back before handing you some water. You swill it around your mouth and spit it out before taking a long, cooling gulp of air.
“What happened, soldier?” asks Karlach, concern dancing in her kind, golden eyes. You lift your head to face them and their faces shift from concern to horror. You already know the reason why.
Gale gently leads you to a nearby face-painter’s tent, where mirrors of all sizes reflect your worst fear. The dark tendrils of the curse have further grown, twisted, and blossomed. They now reach your face, resembling fingers from a palm pressed against your neck, their tips almost digging into the sockets of your eyes. What would happen when they reached there? Would you be blinded? Would your sight become another cost to be paid? Sharp pinpricks of anger speckle the inside of your head, clouding your mind and making you impatient. You try to push the feeling down.
“Orin,” you say to the group, “Bhaal’s chosen. She’s following us. She’s a shapeshifter. She wants us to kill Gortash.”
“Well, that makes things easy,” smirks Karlach. “First Gortash, then her. Right?”
Before you can answer, she turns back to the others. All together again in their secluded corner of the circus, they chatter and gesture all at the same time about what comes next, how to handle Orin, and what needs to be done to end Gortash. Your unusually short temper is still frothing, and you find a bucket of cold water nearby to splash your face with.
Something feels wrong. The cool air has cleared your lungs but not your head.
“What did she say, exactly?” Gale asks next to you, his gentle, concerned hands fussing at your clammy forehead and your sweat-knotted hair. “She’s shaken you, my love. And that’s no easy thing to do.” You don’t want to tell him. You don’t want to bring all that trauma back time and time again. He wouldn’t understand anyway, you think with a bitterness that surprises you.
“Psychotic babble mostly,” you say, not looking at him and pulling away from his touch. The usually comforting feel of him feels foreign right now, unpleasant and overwhelming. All you want to feel is the cool air and clean water. You can sense his stillness, and you are sure that if you looked at him he would be wearing that frown that creases his brow. But you don’t look at him, and no more is said.
You continue your journey around Rivington in thoughtful silence, letting the others take up the burden of frantic planning. Gale slips his hand into yours, the way he always does, but the sensation still feels wrong, unwanted. You feel a bite of temper at his touch but let his fingers slide between your clammy ones, hoping he will soon let go.
“The fuck is this shit?” Karlach suddenly asks, stopping to rip a flyer stuck to a fence. She clutches it in her hands, her eyes scanning it as flames begin to flicker and dance across her skin, curling the paper as it burns in her grip. “Gortash is having a fucking coronation?!”
“What?!” Wyll appears next to her, panic clear on his face as his gaze follows hers across the paper. “He’s becoming Archduke?! This can’t be right, my father would never let someone like Gortash…”
Karlach doesn’t stop to listen. She drops the smouldering, taunting paper and storms off, letting Wyll continue his tirade to the others. You weigh up whether to follow or let her cool down. You decide she’s better off with company and follow her to an abandoned barn, fearing if she continues to flame, the beams will smoulder and catch, and the whole place will come down on top of her.
“Karlach.”
Her engine may have been upgraded, but now she is so swathed in flame it is impossible to get close to her. The vents screwed into her mottled, scarred skin hiss out hot steam.
“Archduke? Are you fucking kidding me?” Her breathing is unsteady, and her knuckles are bone-white from clenching so tightly. Your poor friend, who has worn her pain across her skin, still burns. Even now.
“I will be dead any fucking day now. I will burn out because of the fucking contraption HE put inside me, and he is becoming an archduke?! What kind of fucking joke is this?”
“Karlach, there’s still hope… if we can find a way to—”
“Fuck off!” She’s never spoken to you so harshly before. “How can I keep getting my fucking heart broken? How can I keep feeling this deeply when I’m nothing but scars and fire and fucking machinery?” Her voice cracks, raw with pain and anger. “I was poor, then I was an orphan, and then I was a lackey, and then…” She grits her teeth as though she doesn’t want to speak her horrible truth once more. “And then he gets to become an archduke.” The flames flicker and soften along with her eyes. “I have more of a heart than he does. And still, he gets to live his happy little life.”
“Not for much longer,” you say determinedly, placing a hand on her shoulder. She is still too hot to comfortably touch, but you keep your hand there anyway, knowing how much she needs it.
“When we met, I thought I was saved.” Karlach laughs lightly. “I thought it was too much of a coincidence.”
You look at her, puzzled.
“It’s mad, right? Everyone has their own struggles, and everyone has their own reason for getting to Baldur’s Gate. We are all different, and yet so similar. What were the chances of meeting someone else with a ticking timebomb in their chest, other loners fucked over by people they trusted? I thought we could outrun the inevitable, together.” She shakes her head, trying to jostle her thoughts into a neat little line.
“That nautiloid was hurtling through the sky, across planes, chased down by warriors on dragons. It could have crashed anywhere, and yet… it landed right next to the tomb of the scribe of the dead? The only one who can bring us back time and time and time again, like it’s nothing? The more I saw it, the more we were all brought back from death, the more I thought… fuck it… This has happened for a reason. I’m here for a reason, and not even death can fucking have me.” She pauses, her voice trembling with a mixture of defiance and despair. “And then I see Gortash, the man who looked after me and then cut out my heart like it was a piece of meat, and I think... how fucking cruel. Maybe I am just a machine. Built to keep raging and hacking my way forward until my purpose is done. And then, I'll die.”
The silence after she’s done hits like a guillotine. You have no reprieve to offer her because, of course, she is right. It’s cruel. And it’s difficult to imagine her story ending in any other way than tragedy, no matter how much you would give for that not to be the case.
“Karlach… I…”
“Don’t worry, soldier. I’m not expecting you to save me, yeah? I just needed to let it out.”
Her rage has subsided into sadness, and she ruffles your hair with loving affection as she leaves you in the scorched air of her grief.
You stay there for a while, until the burnt red rays of sunset slipping through the cracked roof turn to silvered moonlight, and then you head back to camp, hoping that no more is asked of you for a little while.
★
Alone, in front of the campfire, Karlach’s words swirl and refuse to settle. What if she’s right? You hadn’t really thought about it in great detail before, but Withers had been there, waiting, right from the beginning. Surely… that was too much of a coincidence? Life moves in patterns and cycles that aren’t always clear but persist in both the meaningful moments and the ones that seem insignificant: in dancing dust motes and in clear pools of water where the light plays, in the obvious, practiced, orchestrated symphonies of the seasons, and in the simple, tinkling melodies between the crashing of tides and the falling of leaves.
True coincidence is rarer than acts of fate, you think.
You try to make sense of it, to try and slot pieces together like puzzle parts - but the heart of you which once beat in tandem with nature is now misaligned. You thought that once you lifted the curse and banished the shadows, your reunion with nature would be all-healing. That the vines of Silvanus’ grace would once again wrap around you and spring gentle life back to your fraught, wintry heart. But you still feel abandoned, lost. The sun warms your skin but not your mind. The wind cools the air but not your temper, and the once companionable birdsong sounds alien. You spent so long under the curse of the shadowy heartlands, it became easy to think it was just as much your own. You were so wrapped within its story, that you tricked yourself into thinking that once it was lifted for the town, it would be lifted for you too.
It wasn’t.
You were raised to believe that easing the burdens of others would lighten the weight of your own. But heaviness persists. Darkness comes from more than just shadow, and curses are not always easy to see. Or break. You think of the others, of the long list in your journal of places you’ve been, things left to do, people to help.
What about you? Who was making a list of your struggles? The thought is bitter, and your hand instinctively goes to your throat, clutching for the precious heirloom which is no longer there. You glance around at the beauty of the world, the green and growing life which now seems to mock you. The irony of it all is not lost on you. You are a healer in need of healing, a liberator still in chains.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
Gale sits next to you, but his usual warmth doesn’t quite reach. There is a twisted feeling in you which you can’t name, but it sits there pulsing and squeezing. Normally, his presence is a balm, and his smile is sweet sunshine through clouds. But not now. The clouds won’t shift; they only darken.
“Nothing worth that much, I’m afraid,” you say. Your voice sounds disconnected and distant. The words don’t feel as though they come from your mouth.
“I’ve been thinking more about the crown…”
You are sick of the crown, of the brain, of the Dead Three and their chosen. How could this crown be worth anything if used for such malevolent control? If it was infused with the same corrupt magic that is currently balled and hungry within his own chest, how could he want anything to do with it? Had he not learned? You glance down at your arm, the same colour as his orb marking, and you are sliced by a resentfulness you had not let slip across you before.
"The plan is simple: we get to Sorcerous Sundries and focus solely on getting the information we need about the crown. There must be something there that we need…"
He trails off into one of his tangents, talking more to himself than to you. He loves the sound of his own voice so much that you wonder if you're just a doll or a plaything arranged for him to vocalise to. You are so, so tired. You love him, but Orin’s words meld with those of the Guardian, and you're too exhausted, too weighed down to distinguish between their voices and your own.
"What about Karlach?" you say, trying to remain calm.
Gale looks confused, his eyes flickering as if searching for something he’s missed.
It's not something he’s missed. It's something he has cast aside.
"Karlach," you say, voice hotter now. "You promised to help find a scroll or a tome at Sorcerous Sundries. Some spell or enchantment to cool her engine. You promised her."
"Ah, right, yes... of course... I just…"
"Forgot. Right. Your mind is so large and brilliant that it can only focus on the crown at this moment, right? Screw the rest of us."
You might as well have slapped him.
"Tav, finding out about the crown will help all of us."
"Will it? Or is it just another powerful relic for an ambitious wizard to burn everything to the ground for?"
A beat. Crackling silence. His realisation settles, and the pain sets in.
"You’re comparing me to the people who destroyed your home?" He stands, furious, hurting. "You think I am so selfish that I am doing this purely for myself? How many times have we risked our lives for each other? How many confessions of love must I make for you to realise I worship you?"
"Is that the same thing you said to Mystra?"
You feel something crack between you. Gale looks beaten, and you feel nothing.
"If that is what you truly think of me, then perhaps it is best we leave our conversation here. Before you say anything else you may regret."
"Yes. Perhaps you’re right," you say. "Tomorrow we will head for Gortash’s coronation. You should stay here. Read a book, or spend your time focusing on the crown you are so desperate to wear. I’ll take Karlach; she deserves some support."
The darkness in your chest thrums and blooms, and you feel a pulsing in your skull which beats like laughter.
He leaves, and you are alone yet again.
★
Curled and alone in your tent, you let the tears spill. You don’t truly think that way about Gale, but you're hurt, and anger is the easiest companion to cling to. Your magic is tainted with corruption, your animal instincts repressed, and all this human, twisted anger and sadness has no place to go but outward. Perhaps the two of you just needed space, or perhaps… it was not meant to be.
Perhaps your love had forged itself in the fires of adrenaline, and maybe a love like that was not meant to last. How could it? Each day brought fresh danger and new things to focus on, leaving no time to settle gradually into each other's flaws and insecurities.
You hadn’t had the luxury of spending mornings tangled in bedsheets, watching the beams of a new sun rise and filter through the cracks of closed curtains. There had been no real time to learn about the small, insignificant parts of yourselves that built you into the people you are. All you had was intensity and desperation, clinging to each other so fiercely that there was no room for the soft, little flecks of love.
You wanted to laugh more than you ached, to have hours of little importance where minutes could be ignored and not counted. You longed to drink tea neglected into coldness, and to place lazy, unthinking kisses on skin unblemished by constant battle. You yearned for someone to take care of you in the small ways that feel so significant they might as well be made of gold.
There was no gold here, only iron and steel. And you couldn’t remember what it was like to feel soft or light.
The fire crackles as the camp rests, and you are so wrought with exhaustion and despair that you do not hear the snapping of twigs at the edge of your little sanctuary.
The scent of rot and death does not rouse you from your sleep.