Chapter Text
Balehrys
The paladin sighed as he sat on his stool by the tent.
It was a busy day. From across the camp, he could hear Lae’zel’s sharp and commanding voice as she inspected the Orphic Hammer in her hands. She was thrilled—predictably so. It was a key to her people’s salvation.
By the fire, their companions had settled into the evening’s rhythm—soft conversations, the occasional burst of quiet laughter, but nothing exuberant. Their victory over Raphael had been hard-won, and while the tension had eased slightly, the weight of what lay ahead kept everyone subdued.
Balehrys, however, found his attention drifting elsewhere.
Shadowheart sat by the fire, her silver hair shimmering in the flickering light, her soft voice carrying faintly as she spoke with Minthara. He noticed the drow’s occasional suspicious glance at her as if still assessing the cleric. It sparked a faint flicker of irritation in him, but it was fleeting. He was too tired to care about whatever suspicions Minthara harbored.
He was simply glad that Shadowheart was here. Safe. Whole.
A twinge of disappointment lingered in his chest. Normally, Shadowheart would be at his side after a fight, helping him patch himself up with gentle hands and comforting touches. Tonight, though, she hadn’t come to him. Not yet, at least. He wouldn’t demand it of her, even when he misses her greatly. She had her own burdens to bear after all.
They hadn’t had a moment alone together since their return. The camp’s attention had fallen squarely on him, dragging him into long, tiresome discussions about their next steps. He’d made his decision clear enough: they would follow through with Gortash’s alliance, at least for now. Bitter though it was, it was the path that led them forward.
And forward meant one thing: his old home.
The Temple of Bhaal.
Balehrys was hardly keen at the thought, knowing what he would expect there. His eyes drifted to his beloved, knowing how little time he had left with her.
The corners of his mouth tugged upward in a soft smile as she rose from her place by the fire.
“There you are.” Shadowheart smiled
“Here I am,” Balehrys replied with a soft smile.
He didn’t wait. Without hesitation, he reached for her, pulling her into his arms. He hadn’t realized how much he’d needed this—to hold her, to feel her against him after a day of being apart.
But as she settled into his embrace, something felt…wrong.
His brow furrowed slightly as he leaned into her. Shadowheart was always warm to touch…yet she felt cold in his arms. Unnaturally so. Is she cold? Is she well?
He leaned closer, expecting the familiar scent of lime and flowers that always clung to her skin and hair—the soft fragrance of her soaps—small, treasured comforts she never missed.
It wasn’t there.
Balehrys stiffened slightly, his brow creasing as his instincts stirred uneasily. Before he could speak, Shadowheart’s voice came softly, muffled against his chest.
“I had a thought,” she began, pulling back just enough to look at him.
He frowned slightly, searching her face. “About?”
“This curse in my hand… I’m wondering how I could possibly remove it.” Her eyes fell on the floor.
Balehrys sighed. He had been expecting this. The pain had been worsening—Shar’s punishment was a slow torture his angel had endured with more grace than anyone should. Still, he had wondered when she might finally speak of undoing it... but not this soon.
“My heart,” he said gently, taking her cursed hand in his, “Has it become so unbearable now?”
“It is,” she admitted, her voice nearly breaking. “I want it gone… but I find myself… thinking...”
He waited as she lifted her eyes to meet his. Something was there—an odd, disquieting flash in her evergreen gaze.
“If I were to cut it off,” she said slowly, unnervingly calm, “sever my limbs, piece by piece… would the pain stop?”
Balehrys paused. Shadowheart pulled away from his embrace; her expression—her eyes—was wrong. Cold. Detached.
“What did you just say?” He asked, as her ramblings slowly grew frantic, even capturing the attention of their other companions by the fire.
But Balehrys was focused on the cleric before him.
“If I removed it, would it be better?” she continued, pulling her hand from his grasp. “It’s like rotting flesh… waiting to be cut out. If I carved it out myself, peeled off layer by layer—”
“Stop,” Balehrys interrupted sharply. “What in the Hells are you saying?”
“Do you not agree?” she pressed, tilting her head strangely and unnaturally. “You know how sickness works. You cut it out before it spreads. Would you… help me cut it out? Flay it just as you did the others?”
What?
A sick chill settled deep in his bones. These weren’t her words. They couldn’t be. His Shadowheart—his angel—would never say this.
Unless….
A cold dread took hold in his heart as a sudden realization took hold. That—that’s not possible. No fucking way.
No. No.
Whatever denial was left in Balehrys was ripped away almost immediately as he watched his cleric’s neck snap, her limbs bending in an unnatural angle as ash-white dust crawled in her skin.
And her pale hands reached over her face, snapping her neck back into place.
Balehrys was no longer seeing Shadowheart's warm green eyes. But the pale eyes of Orin.
“I missed you, my blood kin,” Orin giggled,
A deadly silence descended upon the camp. His companions stood frozen, their gazes shifting from Orin to him, but Balehrys could only hear the blood rushing in his ears.
Questions rang repeatedly in his head like a madman.
Where is she? Where is Shadowheart? Where is my angel?
Balehrys’s eyes grew cold as he stared down at this… abomination before him. HIs fucking sister.
“What… did you do… with Shadowheart?” Balehrys began,
Orin raised her hands in surrender, a cruel smile still etched on her face.
That face . How he longed to tear it apart, to rip every inch of flesh from her skull.
“Nothing! No, not a thing!” she sing-songed, eyes gleaming with glee, “Still gasping and gagging on the foul airs of the Bhaal temple.”
Balehrys’s fists clenched at his sides, his nails biting so deeply into his palms that blood seeped between his fingers.
“Oh! And don’t fret, dear brother,” Orin added, “I haven’t sliced up your pretty little plaything—not yet!”
“Do not test me,” he growled, “Where. Is. She?”
She giggled. She fucking giggled.
“It would be so easy for you to find her… if your mangled brain meat remembered our home,” Orin mocked, “Father’s favorite lost and wandering…Have you forgotten your way home, big brother?”
Balehrys forced himself to steady, his breaths heavy and measured even as his dark urges screamed in unison. They both longed to gut her, to silence her, to end her now .
“Should I send your lover screaming? Crying? Ohhh,” Orin cooed, clasping her hands together, “Shall I send you a trail of her little pieces? A finger here, a hand there, maybe an ear? To guide you home, sweet brother?”
The thought of Shadowheart—his Shadowheart —being mutilated at Orin’s hands made Balehrys’s vision turn red. But Orin’s mirth shifted, and her eyes grew cold.
“Oh, I know what you and the fetid tyrant are up to,” Orin sneered. Her form shifted suddenly, twisting into the spitting image of Enver Gortash. Her voice changed, too, perfectly imitating the tyrant’s tone.
“You heard Gortash’s whispers—I see how your skull swarms with his promises. He whinges and wails about the Crown of Karsus, wanting to command without me.”
Balehrys glared at the shapechanger before him as she continued in Enver's voice, “Oh, how I long to slit his poxy smile from ear to ear. But I can’t touch him. He had bound my blade when we first conspired.”
Orin went on and on, telling him how Gortash had forced her to stay her hand and made her promise not to kill—her voice carried the tone of a petulant child, complaining to an older sibling about a perceived injustice. The air around Balehrys seemed to grow colder as his dark urges stirred, urging him to silence her.
The assassin soon reverted to her true form, “Gortash betrays us, brother! He sets a leash to our slaughter, uses us to drive the herd to his tin men’s oppression.”
“There is one thing tyrants fear most,” Orin continued, stepping closer, “ Losing control. ” Her lips curled into a grin. “You must kill him. Smear him across his rock-rotten halls! Pluck the Netherstone from his cold, broken carcass.”
Her words echoed in the silence, and her deal was laid bare—another bargain, another chain wrapped in blood and deceit.
Orin wanted him to kill Gortash. Gortash wanted him to kill Orin.
“And then we duel, sweet slaughter kin! The winner claims the stones – Bhaal’s true Chosen. The loser rots in his altar.” Orin grins, “Agree—And I will bring my assassins to heel. Oh, they long to spray the crimson from your veins.”
Then she paused, eyes growing colder.
“Refuse me…” she continued, “…and you’ll learn what happens to those who defy Bhaal’s doctrine.”
She leaned in, locking her eyes on his. “So will your dearest lover. ”
Shadowheart. The reason she had been taken. A pawn. A hostage to bend him to Orin’s will.
This was Orin’s intention all along—a bloody duel between kin, a spectacle for the Lord of Murder himself.
The choice before Balehrys was clear, but it was no less abhorrent for its simplicity.
Accept—and he would have to kill Gortash, his old friend whose life he had chosen to spare, deciding that his death wouldn’t belong to him. Yet to refuse…
Refuse, and Shadowheart's life would be forfeit. The only light left in his cursed, bloodstained life.
The thought of her broken, bleeding upon Bhaal’s altar seared into his mind. A guttural rage overtook him, his teeth clenching so hard his jaw ached. How dare she? How dare Orin use Shadowheart like this? How dare she think she could manipulate him?
But beneath his fury, another sick realization settled in his chest. Orin was right. She had him. She had cornered him, and she knew it.
“I will make you wish you were never born.” Balehrys cursed her, “You think yourself triumphant, that you’ve claimed everything you ever desired… Savor it. Before I rip everything you love and everything you believe in away from you.”
He stepped forward, “And when you die, sister, you will know this: you never amounted to anything. A lump of meat, born only to be sacrificed.”
Orin’s smile wavered slightly, refusing to let him see her faltering. “I await it, big brother. But first—first, you must make gutspill of the tyrant. Only then can you see your blade against mine.”
She gave him what he would need—the information to bring Gortash low. Details of the Steel Watch, the Foundry, and the tyrant’s operations. And … of his most important prisoners.
“Once those tin men of his are gone, you can gore the tyrant again and again and again and again.” Orin giggled madly at the thought. But then, her voice shifted abruptly, deadly calm.
“But listen , Bone-Killer. Listen closely ,” she began, “I will not touch a single hair on your little lamb. But enter our temple without Gortash’s blood in your hands, and you will find nothing left of your pretty thing but a bloodied heap upon our father’s altar… We wouldn’t want that, won’t we?”
Orin let out another sick laugh, the sound clawing at his sanity.
“I imagine your hands itch to sink your blade into flesh. I can feel your bloodlust from here—it sings in your veins.” Orin continued, “A Black Altar is being prepared by Gortash’s Banite acolytes in Wyrm’s Crossing. Follow those bearing the Black Hand’s sigil; you may find their Tyrant Lord's hidden chapel. Tonight, they will make a sacrifice in the dark.”
Her lips curled into a final, sinister smile. “Sate your hunger for blood, dear brother… Who knows who you might slaughter instead?”
And with that, Orin faded into an ashen cloud of dust, her form disintegrating before his eyes.
Silence fell.
His hands hung limp at his sides, blood dripping from his palms where his nails had dug deep. His chest heaved as he struggled to breathe, to think—his love.
She’s not here.
She’s not safe.
She was taken because of him .
Somewhere behind him, someone called his name. He didn’t know who. He didn’t care.
All of his companions' words were muffled, meaningless noise in the chaos consuming him.
A hand fell on his shoulder—Gale’s, he thought, though the world was tilting so violently he couldn’t be sure.
It took every bit of his restraint to shove down the need to chop off the hand placed on him.
“Balehrys, you need to calm down—” Gale began, his tone cautious, as though speaking to a wild beast.
Calm down?
The words struck like a hammer blow, setting his blood aflame. Calm down? How could he? How dare they ask him to, when she —his angel—was suffering gods-knew-where?
Jaheira walked to him, her own hands falling on his shoulders. “Listen to me, child. You need to breathe. You need to keep it together.” Jaheira urged him carefully. Balehrys could hear the desperation in her voice.
Balehrys couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream, couldn’t lash out the way he wanted to. He tore away from Jaheira and Gale’s grasp, his shoulders trembling as he stumbled away from the firelight.
His companion’s voices followed him, angry, concerned, urging him to stop, to focus, to do anything but what his body screamed for him to do.
But the words were just noise. Grating against the jagged edges of his fraying sanity. Why couldn’t they shut up? He needed silence. Blessed silence.
He didn’t know where he was going—he just needed to move. Before the rage inside him devoured what little remained of his sanity.
His boots carried him to their tent. He didn’t remember walking there and didn’t even realize where he was until the familiar scent of lime and flowers hit him. Shadowheart’s scent. It was faint now, fading as though she had only just left.
She was supposed to be here. Sitting or lying in their bedroll, teasing him for how late he was. She should have been waiting for him, smiling, her voice warm as she called him. But she wasn’t.
Instead, the tent was dark. Cold. The soft, glowing Dancing Lights she always conjured to brighten their space were gone, leaving shadows to claim the corners. The air felt hollow, as if all life had been drained from it.
Balehrys staggered inside, dropping to his knees beside their bedroll. His trembling hands clutched at the blankets, the bedding, anything that still carried traces of her. He squeezed his eyes shut, desperate to block out the world, but the images in his mind wouldn’t leave him.
Shadowheart, bound and helpless.
Shadowheart, bleeding on Bhaal’s altar.
Shadowheart, staring with empty, lifeless eyes.
The voices followed, relentless whispers clawing at the edges of his mind.
“You let this happen. She’s gone because of you.”
“Had you embraced your gifts, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“You should’ve killed Orin the first time you saw her.”
Balehrys’s hands shot to his head, fingers digging into his scalp, nails biting into his skin like he could tear the voices out by force. Blood beaded beneath his fingers; the pain was distant, meaningless. But the voices only grew louder, feeding off his grief and rage.
“Slaughter them. Spill their blood. Make them suffer. Tear them apart like they tore her from you. Kill Orin. Kill Gortash. Kill them all.”
He didn’t know how long he knelt there, trembling in the dark. Minutes? Hours? Time meant nothing. The fury inside him burned too hot, too raw, threatening to swallow him whole.
But then the voices shifted. Coalesced. A single memory— Orin’s words —cut through the noise.
The Banite ritual. Wyrm’s Crossing. The Black Altar.
Balehrys’s breathing slowed, steadying into something cold. Controlled.
His gaze slid across the tent, landing on the weapons resting in the corner. His greatsword was there—a paladin’s weapon, but it wasn’t what he wanted. Not tonight.
Instead, his eyes fell on a pair of short swords beside it. Smaller. Faster. Bloodier .
“Take them. You want them. You need them. Your oaths of old would demand vengeance… wouldn’t they?”
His hands moved before he could think, fingers curling around the hilts.
The camp was quiet now. The last light of the fire had snuffed out, leaving only the faint glow of the stars overhead. He cast one last glance at the sleeping camp, his jaw tightening. He knew what they would say. He knew they would try to stop him.
They wouldn’t stop him. They couldn’t.
Balehrys turned and slipped silently into the night, the blades in his hands, his dark urges guiding his steps. He didn’t know where this path would lead him, but he didn’t care.
He will hunt tonight.
Gortash
The tyrant glanced down at the Netherstone gleaming in his gauntlet, its eerie light casting warped shadows across the room. His eyes shifted to the parchment on his desk—Balehrys’s letter.
Gortash allowed himself the faintest smirk.
A day had passed since he’d received the paladin’s carefully worded missive—a partial agreement, cautious but promising nonetheless. One forged to keep the Absolute in check.
He had no doubts Balehrys would see reason.
Especially now, after their recent encounter.
Balehrys was… different. Softer, even.
Gortash almost laughed at the absurdity—the Chosen of Bhaal, softened by the touch of a Selûnite cleric.
How poetic. How ridiculous.
And yet, it was a welcome development. Balehrys’s focus had shifted, pulled away from his father’s blood-soaked doctrine, dulled by something as fragile as love. Gortash could exploit that weakness and bend it to his will should he need to. The cleric’s presence was a gift—a leash, one Balehrys had willingly slipped around his neck without even realizing it.
None of Balehrys’s past lovers—red-haired fools ensnared by the monster’s charm—had survived more than a single night. Yet this cleric…
Gortash almost marveled at the thought. The Selunite had tamed the mad beast.
Most amusing. Perhaps Gortash ought to thank her.
Satisfied, Gortash pushed away from his desk, the smirk still lingering as he turned toward the door. The Banite acolytes awaited him at the Black Altar, and their preparations were likely complete. He intended to oversee the ritual himself, all for the Lord Bane.
But before he could step through the door, a Banite acolyte—dressed as a Flaming Fist soldier stumbled into the room, his face pale.
“My Lord, forgive me,” the soldier stammered, bowing low. “We have alarming news.”
Gortash’s brow furrowed. “Speak.”
“There has been… an incident, my Lord. The ritual—the acolytes—all of them are dead. Including the sacrifice.”
The tyrant’s jaw clenched.
Orin.
Of course.
The tyrant’s jaw clenched as his gauntleted fingers curled into a fist. “I assume this is like the other killings in the city?” he asked.
The soldier hesitated. “My Lord… it is not. It is different. Not like the murders in the streets. This is… monstrous .”
Gortash’s expression darkened, his fury flaring. That wretched spawn of Bhaal had grown bolder— insolent . Defiling Bane’s sacred ritual, his ritual , with her insatiable bloodlust. She dared to make a mockery of the Lord of Tyranny?
He would see her flayed alive for this insult.
“Take me there. Now,” he commanded
The tyrant’s boots echoed through the darkened stone streets of Wyrm’s Crossing, the air growing colder and heavier with every step. The Banite soldiers escorting him hesitated at the door to the hidden chapel of Bane. Gortash scowled, shoving the man aside and pushing open the door himself.
The stench hit him first—a cloying, metallic scent of blood and withering flesh that clawed at the back of his throat. Gortash’s breath caught as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the chamber, and the sight before him made his stomach lurch.
The chapel was a slaughterhouse.
Blood coated every surface, seeping into the cracks of the stone floor, dripping from the jagged edges of the altar, pooling around the broken bodies that lay scattered like discarded dolls. The walls were smeared with red handprints, streaks of gore in chaotic, spiraling patterns.
Gortash stepped inside, his boots squelching in the crimson tide. His gaze swept the carnage, trying to make sense of it, but the scene was beyond comprehension. The bodies—if they could even be called that—were mutilated to the point of near obliteration.
One corpse caught his eye. Its head was severed, the jagged stump of its neck gaping open like a grotesque maw. But where the head should have been…
There was nothing.
No sign of the head anywhere. He turned slowly, his eyes scanning the room. More bodies, more severed necks. Some were beheaded cleanly, but others… Others were far worse.
One acolyte’s head was smashed into an unrecognizable pulp, fragments of skull and brain matter spread out on the floor beside it. Another’s face had been stripped away entirely, leaving nothing but a glistening, raw mass of muscle and sinew. Tongues were violently ripped from mouths, teeth scattered like broken pearls across the floor.
Gortash stopped at one particularly gruesome display: a Banite priest, impaled on a ceremonial pike. Their head was severed entirely, the ragged flesh around their neck stretched grotesquely where the pike jutted out through their gaping neck. Blood poured from the wound in thick, sluggish streams, pooling beneath them. Their head, too, was missing.
No heads. No voices. No answers.
This wasn’t Orin’s work.
He knew her methods, her flair for theatrics, the twisted artistry in every kill. Orin left a message, a story carved in blood and bone. But this… This wasn’t a performance. There was no elegance, no deliberate arrangement.
This was angry. Violent. Rabid.
The same kind of violence that had once ignited terror in the hearts of Baldurians, long before the Absolute’s rise.
He’d seen it before. His mind drifted to a conversation from long ago, one that now made his blood run cold.
“ Indulge me a little, Balehrys. Hiding a murder isn’t easy, not when there are those who can speak to corpses. What if they could name their killer? Describe them? Wouldn’t that make it simple for someone to find you?”
Balehrys had looked at him then, his expression devoid of remorse, his voice calm, almost bored.
“Cut off their heads or remove their tongues. Destroy their bodies completely. What words could they say when there is no means to speak?”
Had Gortash been anyone else, it would have worked. But Gortash knew this killer.
The Dread Knight of Bhaal.
The Lord of Murder’s very own headsman.
The tyrant’s fists clenched at his sides as the truth sank in. He didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence was undeniable.
This was Balehrys’s work.
He had been here.
And now Gortash has two mad Bhaalspawns after his head.
“Tell them,” Gortash growled, his voice low and sharp enough to cut through the heavy silence. “Tell the city that tonight, benevolent Flaming Fists were butchered by the Absolute.”
The lie rolled easily off his tongue. A lie to cover the truth. A lie to keep the city afraid —to keep them under his thumb.
The Banite acolyte beside him hesitated, uncertainty flickering across his pale face. “My Lord?”
“I want the Steel Watch doubled across the city,” Gortash snapped, his tone brooking no argument. “Every street. Every corner. If a single whisper of rebellion arises, snuff it out before it takes root.”
“Put a bounty on their heads,” Gortash continued, turning toward the door. “I want Baen’rahel and his companions delivered to me—dead or alive.”
The soldier bowed quickly, “It will be done, my Lord.”
But even as Gortash gave the orders, his mind lingered on the deeper question. Why? Balehrys wouldn’t do this without reason. He knew the paladin too well for that. Something—or someone—had provoked this.
His lip curled into a snarl as realization struck. He already knew who had been foolish enough to light this fire.
That damned fool.
“What did you do, Orin?”
Balehrys
The oathbreaker silently wandered in the streets of the Lower City. The familiar scent of it filled his senses. He was covered in blood. From his head, up to his own clothes. He bathed in it. He satisfied this urge deep in his heart. And didn’t hurt for once.
It had felt good. Too good. Too fucking good to let go. To surrender. To be the rabid beast he had always been beneath the thin veneer of control.
Balehrys found a darkened alley, its shadows deep and untouched by the dim light of the city’s lanterns. There, among the muck and stone, he sank down, knees hitting the muddied floor. The cold night air bit at his skin, numbing him to the growing ache in his body. He didn’t care.
The memories swam back to him like hungry leeches: the earliest days of his life. Sitting alone in filth and blood, shivering in the freezing dark, an ache clawing in his chest so deep it felt like a void had been carved into him.
It was no different now.
Only now, the abyss whispered with a voice that was all too familiar. The Urges slithered through his thoughts, seductive and sweet, promising comfort. Relief.
You were magnificent.
You are your Father’s son.
It felt good, didn’t it? Don’t deny it.
And gods help him, it had.
Vengeance felt too fucking good.
Every Banite acolyte in that room had been Orin to him. Every strike of his blade, every spray of blood, had been her face, her voice, her laughter. It felt good to see her die a thousand times over. He saw her die in his mind’s eye again and again, and each time, he had reveled in it.
Deep in his soul, he felt it—that sickening feeling.
Father is pleased. Pleased that he had culled Bane's servants. That he had desecrated his most sacred ritual. Balehrys could almost hear Bhaal laughing in his ears.
The thought sickened him, choking him with shame. Balehrys curled forward, his bloodied hands dragging through his hair as though to rip the whispers from his mind.
This was who he was— what he was. Capable of such barbarity. Such mindless, senseless slaughter.
And the worst part? It wasn’t mindless at all.
Balehrys had dared to believe he was better than this. He had thought he was better. Shadowheart had believed him better. She thought him a man worth loving. Worth saving. She had saved him from the brink so many times.
And yet here he was. Drenched in blood. Reduced to the monster Orin and Gortash knew him to be.
He had failed her.
She’s still in the dark, he thought, his fists clenching until his nails bit into his palms. Somewhere deep in the hell I belong.
The shame was a living thing inside him, writhing and growing as it choked the air from his lungs.
Hope—it always burns you in the end.
How fucking true that was.
Then, a sound. A weighty thud of footsteps reverberated through the narrow alley. Balehrys stilled, his bloodshot eyes lifting from the stone.
A figure emerged from the darkness, clad in blackened, weathered armor etched with intricate patterns of tarnished gold. The greatsword slung across the figure’s back shifted slightly with every step. The knight’s helmet was crowned with sharp, menacing horns, concealing all but the burning amber orbs gliding through its visor.
They fixed on Balehrys, unblinking.
Balehrys knew this knight well. It had been that knight—the one he had seen the last time he had embraced his fall from grace—the very same who had found him covered in blood when he had broken his Oaths.
And the very same who had given Balehrys the power he now holds.
The Custodian of the Fallen.
The Oathbreaker Knight.
The knight stopped before him, the greatsword shifting slightly as it settled into a natural stance. And then, in a voice as deep as the abyss, the knight spoke:
“I have been watching you for a while now, Oathbreaker. And now, we meet once more.”