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The Once and Future Champion (Baldur's Gate 3/Dragon Age)
- Thread starter cliffc999
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DIT_grue
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The player may know that name, but unfamiliar readers only learn it several paragraphs after this point.
finished
that
There are only two previously planned actions available for this to be referring back to ("read scroll" and "speak to animal"), but the sentence explicitly establishes that it (whatever it is) is occurring between them. Perhaps rephrase the beginning to something more like With a long...?
drawn
purple
S!ËGFR!ÊD
Experienced.
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Nah, see it's because she's a goddess of loss that she never lets things go. All she does is lose, so she's desperate for a win.
Chapter 25
New
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
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"I-I can't believe I just did that." Shadowheart muttered dazedly as I sheltered her in my arms. "Lady Shar's wrath will be unending- and we're trapped in her realm-"
"So we must escape, quickly!" the Nightsong called to us. "Bring her to the circle!"
"What do we do?" I said briskly as I helped Shadowheart over to the boundaries of the Nightsong's prison.
"The priestess must channel a spark of her divine power into one of the runes!" the Nightsong implored us as she knelt on the cold stone barely several feet away. "If she can cause even a momentary disruption-"
"What divine power?" Shadowheart pleaded. "I've rejected her! I'm no longer a priestess of Shar, I have nothing!"
"Try." the Nightsong begged. "It is the only hope for any of us."
Shadowheart laid both of her hands flat on the nearest rune, closed her eyes, and concentrated with all her might. Our hearts sank during a long moment of nothing, as she desperately muttered a prayer under her breath to gods or goddesses she couldn't even name-
-and then a small flicker of silver light leapt from her fingertips into the rune. The tiniest ripple formed in the air over the rune, gleaming into visibility.
"Stand back!" the Nightsong cried, as her fist crashed mightily into the invisible barrier exactly where Shadowheart had momentarily disrupted it. Eldritch lightning crackled and roared in the distant sky and the platform shook as the force of her blow struck like the maul of a titan. Again and again she struck at the barrier, and the lightning doubled and redoubled as the thunder grew deafening.
"Our Lady of Silver! Hear me!" she chanted as she struck again and again. "She who guides, the Moonmaiden Selune! Mother of the so-called 'Nightsong'-"
With her final great blow shining cracks shone into visibility and spread all over the dome of force covering the rune circle, spreading and spreading. And then with sound like all the glass in Val Royeaux shattering at once the soul cage containing the Nightsong broke and the glowing circle on the ground faded into nothingness.
"-THE NIGHTSONG IS NO MORE!" she roared in triumph as she rose to her feet, and with arms outstretched and head upraised to the sky she spread her arms and floated majestically up into the air. Her eyes blazed white with light, and the blinding glow spread out to cover her body. In the blink of an eye the haggard prisoner clad in rags was gone. A majestic figure in polished plate armor and open-faced greathelm floated looking down at us regally, every stain of her captivity wiped away as if it had never been. She reached out one hand and a blade of pure light materialized in front of her, dimming to reveal a massive two-handed greatsword that she plucked out of the air as if it were a toy. And as the culmination of this marvelous transformation, two great gleaming wings sprouted from her back, their spotless white feathers shining out in this shadowy realm like a beacon.
"I am Dame Aylin, and- beware!" she interrupted herself as a savage bolt of lighting crashed down out of the sky striking directly towards us. Aylin desperately leapt forward and wrapped her wings around both of us, and an aura of silver light deflected the bolt away. We could see the cracks and strains in her aura of protection as it barely managed to resist Shar's retribution.
"Grab hold!" she ordered us, slinging her blade on her back as she reached out and clasped us firmly around the wrist one with each hand. "We must flee!" Before either of us could react Dame Aylin's wings flapped hard and our arms felt yanked halfway out of our sockets as we launched into the air like an eruption. We both dangled helplessly from her grasp like kittens caught in the jaws of a mother cat fleeing for her life as she flew at reckless speed up, up, up, dodging or deflecting more lightning strikes as the wrath of Shar attempted to burn us all to ash before we could escape her realm. I barely had enough wits left to realize that Aylin's claim of being Selune's own daughter - of being some kind of demigoddess - must be true, or else she could never have survived even a glancing blow from such power-
"The portal!" Shadowheart said relievedly as Aylin's flight finally brought us level with the height where we'd originally entered this divine realm. "We're almost there-"
"Slow down!" I shouted desperately as I realized Aylin was going to head into the portal at her full flight speed, and there wasn't nearly enough room on the other side for her to decelerate-
We took the transition between planes rapidly enough that all of us who weren't demi-divine needed an epic act of will to avoid losing their lunches, and even though most of the momentum of her flight had thankfully been dissipated by the transition she was still left staggering and almost fell on her face with the effort of suddenly dragging herself to a halt. And both Shadowheart and I were jostled loose from her grip and rolled across the floor like sacks of grain falling off a speeding wagon.
"Ouch!" I said not very heroically. "Everyone still alive?"
"Unbelievably, yes!" Shadowheart's voice called back with brittle humor.
"What happened?" Gale asked incredulously as everyone rushed around and helped us back to our feet. "And who is she?"
"Selune's daughter, held captive by Shar for over a century." I explained hurriedly. "And we just aided in a jailbreak."
"And I'm still not evil, if anyone's asking." Shadowheart contributed with a tremulous smile. Lae'zel actually smiled back for a moment before catching herself and deliberately resuming her usual scowl.
"No, you certainly are not." Dame Aylin chimed in with rough humor. "May my mother's grace shelter you forevermore-"
The earth underneath our feet trembled, and bits of rubble began to fall from the ceiling. The tremors roared more forcefully than they ever had with Balthazar-
"And that was the sound of this entire complex being filled to the rafters with more of Shar's shadow warriors." Wyll said grimly. "She might not be able to pursue you onto the Prime directly, but she still doesn't want you to get away."
"Hah! Let them come!" Dame Aylin faced the passage back into the Gauntlet and drew her greatsword with an arrogant flourish of her shoulders.
"Can they follow us out of the temple?" I asked hurriedly.
"No." Aylin said. "The divine compact limits direct interference on the Prime, and limits it even further on ground not specifically consecrated to the deity in question. If we can reach the exit, we need not fear this plague being unleashed to scourge the land."
"Or we could just leave right now." I said, having checked that our travelstone attunements had yet to be disrupted. "Grab hold!" I deliberately echoed Aylin's words, and with a firm clasp on her forearm I brought us all safely to Last Light Inn.
"Hawke's returned!" one of the Harper guards announced as we materialized in the inn yard. "Someone fetch Jaheira, this could be it!"
"I am here." Jaheira replied, having come running off the front porch in reaction to our arrival, before stopping short in surprise at the sight of the towering Aylin. "An aasimar? Here?" Jaheira recovered herself and gave a brief formal bow of her head. "I am High Harper Jaheira of Baldur's Gate, sacred one, and I welcome you to our war camp. Have you come to aid us?"
"If you contend against Ketheric Thorm, of a certainty. My battle with him is a century and more overdue, and he must be brought to a reckoning." Aylin almost snarled.
"Oh, we most definitely are." Jaheira said, and then turned to me. "Your mission?!?" she asked urgently.
"Accomplished." I reassured her. "Ketheric Thorm's immortality is no more."
"And so now we must strike!" Aylin affirmed. "Well met, High Harper Jaheira. I am-"
"Aylin?!?" Our heads all snapped aside to see Isobel standing a few paces away, breathless from where she'd apparently ran all the way from her chambers down to here. Her jaw was agape, her hair disheveled, and her voice a desperate prayer. "You're- you're alive?!?'
"Isobel." Aylin whispered wonderingly, one hand almost reaching out as if to touch a vision. "ISOBEL!" she shrieked happily, and then the two of them rushed into an embrace. Isobel was hoisted clear off the ground in Aylin's mighty arms as if she were a small child, and the two of them both sobbed with joy as they-
"Oh." Shadowheart blushed discordantly, and then tilted her head curiously to get a better look as the priestess and the immortal kissed like lovers reunited after a century of forced separation. "So that's who she'd meant."
I looked away from then and down at the young woman standing at my side, also miraculously returned to me from the grasp of a goddess who'd tried to snatch her away. I reached out and gently cupped her chin, turning her face towards me, and she smiled in realization at what my own beaming grin meant. We leaned in and let our lips meet, celebrating our own reunion. Because the outside world could just-
"This is all very touching." Jaheira's exasperated voice brought us crashing down to earth as her hand landed on my shoulder and gently pulled us apart, "but we are not at leisure to indulge ourselves!" She turned and glared up at the still-embracing pair of Selunites like a frustrated grandmother. "With the greatest of respect, could we please get back to saving the land from evil? Just for a moment?" she huffed sarcastically.
"Sorry." Isobel said, still flushed with embarassment as her and Aylin finally brought themselves back to reality. "It's just- we-"
"I can imagine." Jaheira said agreeably. "Really. But lives are hanging in the balance even as we speak. We cannot delay."
"Back to business." I agreed with a sigh. "Dame Aylin, I'm assuming that Ketheric will have felt the soul cage being dispelled and the parasitic link between you ending?"
"Yes." she said, reluctantly turning away from Isobel. "He will know by now that he no longer has his stolen immortality, but I cannot begin to predict how he will react."
"And I'm assuming that he's also expecting you to come after him immediately and without mercy." I thought out loud to Aylin's vigorous nod. "So three likeliest options - he makes an immediate rush at Last Light to try and secure Isobel as a hostage against Aylin, he flees to the safety of his army encamped on the western road, or he stands pat at Moonrise Towers. Two of those would be very bad for us, so we've got to make our move before he makes his."
"If each one of your group takes through a squad of my men, we can use the travelstone in Reithwin to get my entire force there immediately and steal a march on him." Jaheira followed my thought. "And then it doesn't matter which one he picks - we'll either have him besieged in Moonrise or be able to ambush him as he tries to get through the town."
"Isobel needs to come with us." Shadowheart interrupted. "Even without his immortality, Ketheric is still a powerful warrior and his troops still have us outnumbered. She's the only one here who has even a chance of convincing him to surrender."
"Why is that?" Jaheira asked curiously.
"You did not know? She is Ketheric's daughter, resurrected just as he was." Aylin answered matter-of-factly.
"You cannot be serious." Jaheira said, looking incredulously at Isobel. "No, of course you're serious. That is exactly the sort of nonsense that always happens at times like this." she trailed off in a disgruntled mutter.
"I can't- I can't leave here." Isobel said. "I'm the only thing keeping the shadows from devouring all these people."
"We have all those spare moonlanterns I stole." I pointed out. "Even with the ones Jaheira's attack force will be using, we can still spare one or two for the people here. We put all the refugees in the basement with the moonlanterns and lots of regular lighting, they'll be safe enough for a couple hours. And by then it'll all be over, one way or the other."
"There is another factor." Halsin broke in, having joined our impromptu war council all gathering in the inn yard. "While you were on your mission, Jaheira and I were able to successfully recover Thaniel and reunite him with the missing part of his spirit that Shar had concealed in these shadow-cursed lands. Have you felt the Shadow Curse being weaker? That is because the land is already starting to heal. The deeper darknesses are already dissipating, so ordinary lights and torches can shield the attack force well enough. And when Ketheric Thorm finally falls the Shadow Curse will end - now he alone is the only remaining anchor holding it in place."
"I still-" Isobel sighed, her shoulders slumping. "I just can't bear to see him. Not what he's become. Call me a coward, but I can't. I already know he's lost."
"Less than an hour ago I was certain that I was lost," Shadowheart said simply. "And then the man who loved me convinced me that I was wrong." She reached into her pack and withdrew an envelope. "When we were scouting Moonrise Towers, I found this in your father's room - in his chest of keepsakes." She looked briefly aside at me with a flash of guilt. "It's a letter from your mother. He'd still kept it after all these years."
Isobel took the letter from Shadowheart's hands, reached into the already-opened envelope, and read it. Tears began falling again from her eyes as she silently perused the words - tears of grief this time, not happiness.
"Father." Isobel whispered painfully. "I- gods, I'm so sorry."
"I will be right there alongside you, Isobel." Aylin said with a reassuring hand on Isobel's shoulder. "I will not let him hurt you again, no matter what fell powers he invokes."
"All right." Isobel agreed. "I'll try."
"Right, I'll start getting my men organized and the tieflings safe in the shelter." Jaheira said. "Everyone, stand to! We're moving out!" she bellowed as she marched away and back into the encampment.
We used those several minutes to all introduce ourselves to Aylin and give her a brief outline of events to date, as well as reading Isobel in on how we'd found and freed Aylin in the first place.
"And now I'm death-marked in the eyes of all her followers by Lady Shar herself, and Hawke with me." Shadowheart finished despondently. "They likely won't have opportunity to strike us down while the crisis of the Absolute is still burgeoning, but afterwards? Two people - even six people - no matter how skilled in battle, can still only fight for so long before they're worn down, caught off guard, or just miss a stroke. We'd have to win every time, and they'd only need to win once." She smiled sadly at us. "I don't regret Hawke's choice or my own. I see now that Shar's offer was merely another road to death... and a far more horrible one." She turned grave. "But I still can't delude myself about what's going to happen."
"Speak not of what will happen, but of what you will do." Aylin insisted. "Your past is not yet lost. Your future is not yet written."
"And you will have more help than you know." Isobel encouraged her. "Please... channel your power again, as you did to help set Aylin free. I want to see it."
Shadowheart brought up her hand and concentrated, invoking a divine channeling just as clerics normally did to turn undead or several other uses. A brief silver shimmer flickered over her fingertips-
-and then Shadowheart's eyes opened in wonder as Isobel brought up her own hand, also shimmering with silver light. A silver light of exactly the same hue and chroma as the one Shadowheart had just invoked.
"You mean-?" Shadowheart gasped.
"Yes." Isobel smiled warmly, and reached out to take Shadowheart's hand in both of her own. "Be forever welcome in moonlight - Initiate."
The newest priestess of Selune stared down at her hands and then back up at her senior cleric, still trying to mentally grasp the reality of it. "But for all my life I've rejected Her! I've reviled Her, spat on Her teachings, helped torment Her followers, devoted my every breath to serving Her arch-enemy- and yet the instant I abandon Shar, She adopts me? Just like that?!?"
"Just like that." Isobel agreed. "As I promised you, Selune had never forsaken you. You merely couldn't hear Her voice while it was drowned out by all of Shar's lies... until now." She suddenly chuckled to herself. "Oh, and if we're heading into battle then I really should return this to you." She reached down and unhooked the Blood of Lathander off of her belt and handed it back to Shadowheart.
"I presume that you left your spear in your room... again." Aylin chided Isobel affectionately. "Wait here, I shall go fetch it for you." Aylin easily flew into the air to soar around the inn until she spotted the altar of Selune on Isobel's balcony, then used that for a landing point to swiftly return with Isobel's own weapon.
"Is everyone ready?" Jaheira said as she rejoined us.
"As we'll ever be." I agreed.
We left Jaheira's troops waiting along with Isobel in Reithwin Town. Since Aylin was essentially incapable of stealth in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, being a giant winged white immortal scion of the gods who glowed with a holy aura of the moon goddess against the black shadowy background, we had her flying aerial reconaissance over Moonrise Towers at an altitude just out of ballista range and being a highly visible distraction. She reported back with the disposition of troops in the courtyard, how the siege engines were manned and ready on the walls, and that Ketheric himself was watching us defiantly from an elaborate open-air chapel to Myrkul that had been set up on the roof. Ketheric's goading presence had almost induced Aylin to break ranks and fly down for a berserker solo run against the man who'd imprisoned and tortured her for decades, but the knowledge that Isobel was waiting for her return and that we'd promised the priestess a chance to parley with her father first allowed Aylin to restrain her vengeful impulses. Even then, she shamefacedly acknowledged that it had been a very close-run thing.
So the Harpers and Aylin remained in place and let Ketheric believe that we were helplessly deterred by the lethal killing chokepoint of the only bridge that we'd noted earlier on our initial approach to Moonrise as the key defensible obstacle, and remain confident that the odds would only swing further and further in his favor the longer we delayed. Meanwhile my team was approaching the hidden cove in a boat under cover of a Darkness spell, preventing lookouts from getting the slightest glimpse of us as anything but a drifting black shadow amongst all the other cursed shadows out there. This admittedly would have made it impossible for us to steer except for the fortuitous circumstance that one of Wyll's warlock powers was a magical devil's sight that allowed him to freely see through all forms of darkness be they mundane or magical. So with him on the tiller and the rest of us rowing blind, he brought us safely into the secret dock and dispelled his darkness, restoring vision to us and the small team of hand-picked Harpers accompanying us.
"All right. We'll go first and hope they fall for the True Soul gag once again, you follow along and secure the dungeon level as soon as we're in position to strike." I ordered them. "Let's go, team."
We emerged from the hidden passage onto the prison floor to be confronted by a Death Shepherd flanked by a squad of robed skeletons and accompanied by two priests of Myrkul, according to their robes. We didn't even get a chance to try our undercover routine before the nearest priestess pointed at us and said "It's them! The traitors that Balthazar reported! Attack!" Damn it, his mental link with his undead must have gone farther than we'd anticipated - far enough to reach back here-
By this point we'd fought enough battles and grown acclimated enough to the changes within us that we had all regained a good measure of our former prowess, so I was able to unleash a scything whirlwind with my greatsword that cleaved most of the skeletons to the ground in a single attack. Wyll and Lae'zel each engaged a priest, while Gale stayed in reserve and Shadowheart used the Blood of Lathander's radiant aura to blind the Death Shepherd and leave it almost entirely combat ineffective while she started to wear it down with good old-fashioned blunt force trauma. Its support crew having been readily dispatched, I turned to help her flank the biggest threat and turned it to ash with a single smite.
A fast sweep of the lower levels turned up no other patrols than the ones we'd killed, and the welcome news that no defenders were responding to us from above - apparently they hadn't heard the brief sounds of combat on the surface. Good.
Wyll used one of his remaining warlock spells to cast a spell of Invisibility and headed up to take a look at what awaited us on the upper level. He soon came back with the report that Thorm was using a simple yet thorough defense in depth. We'd already seen that the siege engines and outer bailey were fully manned, all with a clear field of fire on the main bridge in and out that would let them make mincemeat of any attackers trapped on that narrow open stonework without any cover or room to maneuver. Z'Rell waited with a squad of elite drow, an ogre, and a pack of gnolls, all ready to reap a bloody toll on any survivors who attempted to force their way through the killing chokepoint that was the main door. Several pairs of stragglers were scattered about in position to call away an alarm if any attackers attempted to go around the exterior instead of straight in from the ramp and flank the ground floor defenders through any of the side doors, such as the ones leading from the kitchen. And another squad of defenders was set up in the main audience chamber, ready to do the same thing on anyone who survived the first gauntlet.
"Multiple layers of attrition defense, making sure that anybody who actually reaches Ketheric on the roof is as worn down as possible. And it does not matter how much of Moonrise's garrison he uses up in the process, because he has a whole army of replacements waiting just down the road." Lae'zel nodded in reluctant respect. "Jaheira was right - Ketheric Thorm did earn the right to be called 'General'. I am not sure that either of us could have done as well given as little opportunity to prepare as Ketheric was given."
"And he's also tempting Aylin to split off from the rest of her support, as she's the only person who can bypass all of this and fly straight for the roof - which allows Ketheric to defeat his strongest anticipated foe in detail in addition to whittling away the rest of us to a nub before we can even get to him. You're right, he is good." I shrugged. "Which is why we're cheating as hard as we are. All right, Z'Rell is anchoring the strongest point so we go for her first. Wyll, you said you saw that she had protective magics up?"
"Yes." Wyll nodded. "Multiple mirror images to help use up the first several attacks against her to no effect, and a shield of magical cold that will both help her resist magical fire and sear the flesh of anybody who tries engaging her in close combat with frostbite."
"One of you warp back to the Reithwin travelstone and tell Jaheira that it's plan B. We'll give her five minutes to get ready before we move, but remind her not to start her half of it until after we've sent the signal." I ordered the Harpers. "The rest of you, draw out your bows and stack up in ambush positions. "
Since all of the defenders in the entrance chamber were looking at the front door, we had a clear shot at their rear flank from the door leading to the chamber that held the top of the dungeon stairs. I pulsed a magical dispel on Z'Rell to remove her protections and Gale immediately followed up with a fireball centered on her, and that left the gnolls and a couple of the less experienced soldiers killed by the fireball while everybody else was severely wounded. The rest of us followed up with a single volley of missile fire, concentrating on the remaining spelllcasters, and then we immediately fell back and shut the door again, leaving behind an entire chamber full of shocked, surprised, and severely wounded survivors.
"And now they get to come to us one or two at a time through a narrow doorway." I grinned. "And we're distracting the ones in the audience chamber, who will try to flank us through that door. " We stacked up on both entrances and used our advantage of position to start killing the Absolutists as they filtered in to us, Z'Rell ruthlessly sending through her weakest first - trying to use up our ammunition and split our attention before she risked forcing a breach. Clearly she was hoping to overwhelm our defensive advantage and then either pincer us through both doorways or else force our retreat back down to the dungeon levels.
And just as she was well and truly pinned against our improvised defensive strongpoint, the tower was rocked by the sound of explosions.
When our deep gnome acquaintances had reached Last Light Inn Jaheira had put their alchemists to work helping brew up some smokepowder and incendiary charges in anticipation of having to blast her way through Moonrise's walls in a siege situation. When I'd come up with the current plan to take advantage of Aylin's presence and Jaheira had refined it, those charges had been repurposed for aerial bombardment. So as soon as our fireball told the defenders outside that we were making our move, Aylin's role would be to use her wings and strength to toss entire barrels of smokepowder and firewine down on top of the siege engines covering the front entrance and incinerate both them and their crews. The artillery bombardment that Z'Rell had counted on to hold the bridge while she diverted her effort towards killing us would be entirely gone, and the archers on the walls would then be scattered and demoralized by an unkillable flying celestial paladin single-handedly clearing the battlements after completing her aerial bombardment.
And that meant the front entrance was wide open, and Jaheira and her Harpers would be hitting the backs of the ground-floor defenders who'd all turned to focus on dealing with us... now!
Aylin was first through the door, deliberately drawing fire away from the less immortal people behind her. Jaheira was second, leading her Harpers from the front, with Isobel safely ensconced in the middle of their rush as spellcasting support. The Harper squad securing the dungeon level closed up on us as we advanced and helped us pincer all the surviving defenders on the ground floor, who were already caught out of position and severely wounded by Gale's fireball. We finished clearing the lower floor in a single furious minute, and now we held the tower.
"Hold here." Jaheira ordered us. "Isobel, you and Dame Aylin stick with Hawke's team. Everyone heal up and refresh yourselves as best you can - we'll need you as close to full strength as possible if the parley with Ketheric doesn't go the way we hope. If he wants to wait up on the roof while we kill every other Absolute cultist in this tower, then let him. Me and my men will take care of sweeping the upper floor."
"I hate to say it, but this is almost going too easily. Where's his reserves?" I wondered out loud. "As competent as this defensive layout was, it still seems a bit thin."
"I've been wondering the same." Jaheira agreed. "Possibly he intends for us to pin ourselves down in Moonrise while he recalls his army once we're all stuck in here. I have lookout posts back in Reithwin watching for that and we'll have to retreat fast if they spot anything coming, but so far there hasn't been any movement at all."
"Wait." Gale interrupted us. "Remember what Wulbren said about there being something 'suspicious' underneath the dungeon? And the several high-value prisoners we were looking for that hadn't been removed from the dungeon level, but had never been sent there to begin with and certainly aren't anywhere else in Moonrise that we've seized? There must be a deeper section buried underneath this complex that we don't know anything about."
"Shit." Jaheira swore. "All right, I'm going to put half our men back in the dungeon level to watch out from below and clear the upper floor with the other half. The only good news is that Ketheric is on the roof - he's isolated himself from any immediate reinforcements from down below, even if they'd have had a clear shot at our backs if we'd been careless. Hopefully if we can talk him down, or take him down, we can then figure out how to breach this sublevel ourselves."
Aylin flatly vetoed the idea of Isobel being the first one to go up the rooftop stairway, because even if Ketheric would almost certainly hold his fire against her Aylin's airborne reconnaissance had revealed that he had a final squad of minions waiting with him and they might not be so reticent. I likewise argued against the idea of Aylin being first, because while she was impossible to keep down permanently without a godslaying weapon we were trying to bring Thorm to a parley and he was expecting Aylin to try to immediately gut him on sight and would react accordingly. And so that meant I was the one who had to go first, and so I marched alone out onto the open roof.
"You!" Ketheric Thorm cried hoarsely. "What have you done?! What have you done to me?!"
"You've seen Dame Aylin flying around free, so you already know." I replied, fighting to keep my disgust with this necromancer out of my voice. "What's more important is that I've brought your daughter to see you."
"Why?" Ketheric asked helplessly. "She could not accept me as I am, and I cannot return to being the man I was. It is too late. If she knew everything about what I've done, she'd know that her father died on the same day she did." He shook his head. "Only unlike her, he could not be brought back."
"You've dug yourself a damned deep pit to try and climb out of, I'm not going to lie." I agreed. "But not two hours ago I saw someone stand in the heart of Shar's realm and still turn back to the light after knowing nothing but a lifetime of darkness - literally, as her memories of any other life had been removed. But she still did it, so don't tell me it's impossible General. It's just... sometimes very difficult."
"I'll tell you a story, True Soul." Ketheric said softly. "About a man who sold himself piece by piece. He had everything. A wonderful wife, a brilliant daughter. They lived not far from here. His wife died too young. Grief tore through their home like a thief, snatching away the scent of her hair... the rustle of her skirts... but the man did not break. He could not break. His daughter needed him whole, after all. And she grew up, grew strong. Challenged him. Filled his heart with such joy, it supplanted all sorrow." Ketheric swallowed heavily, his voice strained and taunt. "And when she was killed, the man... He tried to remain whole, but it wasn't possible! Do you understand?"
"I knew a necromancer once named Quentin, who had also lost his beloved wife." I replied evenly. "And he too swore that he'd sacrifice anyone and anything to bring her back." My own voice grew thick with pain. "And one of those sacrifices was my mother. Who had been the only family I had left, after already burying my father, my brother, and my sister." I shook my head. "I do understand your grief, Ketheric Thorm. I know how hollow it makes the world feel, how desperate the lengths to which it can drive a man. I have been there."
"Then you know why I have done what I have done!" Ketheric insisted. "The pain was unbearable, all consuming. A man would do anything for reprieve in the face of such desolation. So first I sold myself to the goddess of loss, but her promises of solace remained lies no matter how obscene my devotion. But then a new god came, a god who promised something wonderful, My daughter back, her life returned. I would have to give everything, body and soul entire, but I did not hesitate for a moment. And the new god did as promised. My brilliant beautiful daughter came back. I was whole and she was alive. But she despised what her father had become, she could not bear even to look at him... yet her hatred I could endure, so long as she had another chance to live. Everything I have done, everything I have built, has been to give Isobel that chance."
"Ketheric Thorm, it is precisely because I know how horrific such grief can feel that I refused to use my own losses to justify bringing such losses to other people. Like Quentin did. Like you have." I replied ruthlessly. "It sounds so noble, to say that you're willing to sacrifice anything for a loved one. And if you're only talking about the things that are rightly yours to sacrifice, I suppose it is. But all this wasn't yours." I waved my hand around at the vista visible below us, of all the Shadow-Cursed Lands. "Their lives, their happiness, their loved ones, those were not for you to take! Not yours, not Shar's, not Myrkul's, not anyone's! Your sins never took away your grief - they just multiplied it, and spread it, only to rebound it back onto you again and again and again." I sighed again, even my anger drained away now. "And if you don't turn away from this while you still can, that will be your fate for eternity."
"Please listen to him, Father." Isobel's voice came to us, as she slowly advanced across the rooftop to stand by my side. Aylin stood protectively within arm's reach of her, visibly keeping herself silent with an effort, and the rest of my party and Jaheira followed a short distance behind. "We can't go on like this, not either of us."
"Isobel." Ketheric said wonderingly, before his expression hardened with hate at the sight of Aylin. "And the creature who stole her from me."
"No one has stolen me!" Isobel implored him. "I'm standing right here! And I want my father back!"
Thorm wavered on his feet, struck to his marrow. "You don't know what you're asking." he quavered.
Isobel reached into her robe and withdrew the letter that Shadowheart had handed her when we'd arrived at Last Light, the one she'd found while we were searching Ketheric's quarters. "But I know what Mother asked of us. And I don't know if you've looked at this recently or not, so I'll read from it again." Isobel said, and began to recite:
"My darling husband, I know my time is drawing near. I don't want to leave you. I don't want to leave our little girl. But I'm not writing to lament our lot. It's ours and no other's. Though the City of Judgment is dark, I know Our Lady's light will find me even there. I will see her shining spires and walk the silver gardens we've both dreamt of. I go to my reward - and leave quite a task to you yet, my heart. Selune's light shines bright in our little one, but she will need a guide to keep on her path. I have no doubt that she will keep you on yours. It is the same path - our Lady's path - and one day I know it will bring you both back to me. Only not too soon, I hope. I won't say goodbye. There is no loss; only temporary separation. How I love you. Forever yours, Melodia."
All of us present - even Ketheric - were teary-eyed by the time she was done. Isobel continued, her voice held rigid over heartbreak. "You were so strong for me when Mother died, when I could barely understand why she was gone. You did so much, you cared so much. Did I ask you for too much? Did I make you work so hard saving my soul that I left you unable to save your own?" she begged.
"I don't know." Ketheric replied, raising a hand as if to reach out to her before pulling it away. "I can't remember why. I can only remember the madness. The emptiness."
"Then leave it behind." Isobel begged him. "Leave it all behind, and return to the moonlight. Abandon this mad quest! Repent of your sins! Even if Myrkul withdraws his gift, even if we both die today, it'll still be all right!' She tried to smile at him through her sobs. "We'll be in the Gates of the Moon with Mother, just like she hoped we'd be. All three of us, reunited forever."
"Would your mother even allow that, Aylin?" Ketheric spoke to her for the first time. "To accept the Chosen of Myrkul, the infamous commander of Shar's Dark Justiciars, into her silver halls? To make such a monster welcome among her righteous pilgrims?'
"I would not." Aylin answered him unhesitatingly, her voice like bared steel. "I know only one way to rightly deal with your kind, and have stayed my hand so far only because your daughter has begged my forbearance." Her wings lowered slightly, as did her voice. "But I am only the sword of Selune, not the Moonmaiden herself. And my mother often does things beyond my understanding... and far more graciously than I." She nodded to Ketheric Thorm. "I will not lie to you no matter how wroth my heart. What Isobel asks of you is most unlikely, but it is not impossible."
"I wish it could be so, I do." Ketheric said plaintively. "But no divine grace was offered to me when my life was dismantled piece by piece. And when I tried to buy it back-"
"It can't be bought!" I shouted back at him. "Grace is not a commodity. It's an act of trust. An expression of faith."
"Then I have lost it." Ketheric replied simply. "As I have lost everything, even those things I tried most to save."
The tower suddenly trembled underneath our feet, an earthquake even more severe than any we'd experienced in the Gauntlet of Shar.
"What the hells was that?" Jaheira cried as we all struggled to retain our footing.
"A reminder." Ketheric said grimly, the sorrow fading from his eyes as he drew himself erect, as a sense of something terrible began to fill him. "That I was a fool to hesitate. There are forces that once unleashed cannot be turned away from. That must be mastered, or else they will consume you utterly - and then go on to consume those you love." He said with a longing look at Isobel. "Power like mine has a price... and now I must pay it." he finished calmly, as he drew his warhammer and readied his shield. "Restrain my daughter. Kill the rest."
Aylin's greatsword crashed down against his shield with terrible force, but Ketheric Thorm could not be pushed so much as an inch. Isobel froze in shock, and Jaheira hurriedly pulled her back and out of the line of fire as the rest of us leapt into action.
"Turn Undead!" Shadowheart cried, creating a bubble around us that would repel the many robed skeletons lurking around the edge of the encampment.
"Firebal-" the robed necromancer off to Ketheric's left in a vantage point began to cry, only to be shut down by Gale's "Counterspell!"
Several of the robed skeletons managed to resist Shadowheart's turning and closed in. Karlach cursed and leapt to cut them off.
"I have the wizard!" Lae'zel shouted, calling on her githyanki psionics to Misty Step across the intervening distance and appear directly behind the robed necromancer. Her blade swung down, wounding them terribly, and the enemy spellcaster was preoccupied from then on with keeping Lae'zel from gutting them.
"Concentrate fire on the mortal paladin!" Ketheric commanded, and I winced as all of the robed skeletons that weren't fighting Karlach raised their hands... which began to glow with unholy green fire. Over half a dozen eldritch bolts leapt forth, all aimed unerringly at me, and tore into my flesh with corrupted necrotic energy. Even though the damage had been substantially reduced by my unique magic resistance, I still was left staggering from the force of my wounds.
"Heat Metal!" Jaheira cried, and Ketheric's warhammer began to glow red-hot. He snarled almost like a wild beast, fighting on through the pain of his burns as if he he did not even feel them. Wyll and Jaheira and I had to concentrate on tearing down these damned spellcasting skeletons before they could unleash their combined powers into us again and again. From the corner of my eye I could see Shadowheart having little luck attempting to bring the Blood into melee range of Ketheric, and Gale was not having much luck slowing the relentless General down with the lower-level spells he had left either. So for now Aylin was left carrying most of the freight there-
A clever twist of Ketheric's hammer and a battering of his shield left Aylin off-balance, but while a mortal would have been able to recover their footing her large heavy wings left her staggering sideways and falling to the ground once she'd been tipped beyond a certain point. "I see you that haven't spent any of the intervening time working on your weaknesses, Aylin." Ketheric said contemptuously as he raised his hammer high to smash her skull-
"Resilient Sphere!" Isobel's voice cut through the din, and suddenly an impenetrable globe of force sprang into existence around Ketheric. Entirely unable to either be harmed or inflict any harm through the bubble of force, Ketheric Thorm was a helpless spectator to the rest of the battle as we easily destroyed his minions once his threat was temporarily neutralized and his subordinate necromancer wasn't present to further buff or command them. Even his attempts to summon more robed skeletons - 'necromites', I later learned they were called - were rendered futile, as he could only summon forth one at a time.
"Stop! Stop!" Isobel begged her father from where he stood watching us within his prison of force, his dully-glowing warhammer discarded at his feet. "I don't want you to hurt them! I don't want them to hurt you! I just want this to end!"
"My darling daughter." Ketheric looked at her with a genuine affection, an honest love, that felt so horribly out of place in the midst of all this death and destruction. "You truly are the best of us. I would have given you the world, if I could."
"I don't want to be given the world!" Isobel begged him.
"I know." Ketheric agreed sagely. "So the only goal I have left now is to keep the world from taking you. Because no one will take you from me." Ketheric's voice firmed. "Not Aylin, not the Harpers... and certainly not these miserable True Souls!" he roared at us with hatred. "How dare you try to deceive us! How dare you pretend to freedom and friendship that you cannot truly feel, how dare you press any claim on her or try to entreat with me when you are only hollow tools that exist to serve! Bow, you miserable slaves! BOW!"
A terrible mental force erupted like a thunderclap, in answer to Ketheric's demand. A voice spoke in our brains on the edge of audibility... a voice drowned by a familiar white-hot keening, as a familiar polygon floated in front of us glowing brilliant orange as it shielded us from the Absolute's call.
"The Astral Prism!" Ketheric gaped at it. "You've had it, all this time!" That sense of terrible power began to fill Ketheric again as the loving father was yet again swallowed by the implacable servant of death. "ENOUGH! My Lord beckons me, and I must answer!"
The gem on the front of Ketheric's breastplate suddenly glowed a brilliant unholy red, and he raised both arms in invocation as the castle began shaking again as if its very foundations would tear free of the world. All of us fell to our knees, or to the ground, as one corner of the the central tower's roof burst open like a full wineskin struck by a catapult shot. A giant glistening purple tentacle extended several stories into the sky from the hole torn in the pillar's top, and an unearthly roar shattered our hearing-
"You must be returned to your prison! And the will of my Lord must be fulfilled!" Ketheric pronounced hieratically as he waved one arm, clearly directing the motion of the tentacle even though he was trapped inside the bubble. The tentacle lashed down as if to strike at Isobel, and Aylin frantically interposed herself between it and her lover's body. I could just spot a slight grin on Ketheric's face as the tentacle suddenly shifted motion, its strike at Isobel only a feint, as it crashed down on the defenseless Aylin instead and hammered her so far into the stone roof that anybody not as immortal as her would already be pulp. With a contemptuous twitch of its tip the tentacle rolled the unconscious Aylin over to Ketheric's feet, the bubble around him having been dispelled when Isobel lost her concentration at Aylin's being struck down. The tentacle's tip glowed with energy and suddenly Ketheric and Aylin vanished, teleported away to who-knows-where, and then it writhed and retreated back down into the hole it had burst out of as if it had never been there.
"Aylin! Father!" Isobel shouted, helplessly reaching out to grasp at the empty space where her lover's body had lay. "Where did they go? Where did they go?"
"I think... down there." Jaheira said, having gone over to look down the hole now gaping in the roof. As we looked down it we could see that it ran the entire length of one of Moonrise Tower's main support pillars, having cored out the entire cylinder of stone from top to bottom. The hole ran down, down out of sight, as if it ran into the very Underdark.
"The sealed sublevel we never found." I swore. "That's where Ketheric has retreated to. That's where that... tentacle monster came from."
"Look there." Lae'zel said fearfully, pointing down into the hole at the fleshy coating and glistening slime lining the tunnel that the tentacle had bored. "You have seen such things before, as have I."
At Lae'zel's prompting I realized that I had indeed seen that before - it was just like the horrid living architecture that the illithid nautiloid had been comprised of. Whatever had burrowed that tunnel, summoned that impossible tentacle, it had been part of the mind flayers' horrid living technology-
"Ketheric's hidden lair. The location of the missing prisoners. And now a hidden mind flayer colony. We've found the source of the tadpoles." Shadowheart said.
"As well as a living creature the size of a building or more, yet which is still clearly related to the ghaik." Lae'zel followed her thought. "And there is only one such creature I can think of."
"An elder brain." I agreed, staring down into the black pit where our doom potentially awaited. "This is the lair of the Absolute."
Author's Note: I'm actually mildly down on the canon Ketheric confrontation - not because it sucks, it's actually quite good. It just could have been so much better. In the game Aylin turns into a vengeful musclehead who monomaniacally focuses on Ketheric and interrupts your attempt to turn him back to the Light Side, and Isobel doesn't even go on the Moonrise Towers assault so she never sees her father again before he dies. Hell, I don't think Aylin even finds out Isobel isn't dead until after they've finished helping kill her father. And I'm just not going to put up with that, so here we go. I could wish to have made the boss fight more cinematic, but then Isobel was a meanie-pants and insisted that she'd never let it drag out and she had access to a spell that could end it prematurely, so boom. (Otiluke's Resilient Sphere actually is a Knowledge domain spell for clerics, and one of Selune's domains is Knowledge.)
I was shocked to find out how low-level Isobel actually was in the game, because I didn't look up her stats until we reached this fight scene. You'd think that somebody who was cranking all the power she was shielding Last Light, as well as someone with such a long history of serving Selune, would be a high-level priestess... but nope. I suppose that was for balance purposes because Isobel is a possible antagonist if you let her get mind-controlled by Ketheric, but pffft on game balance, that's Larian's problem and not mine.
Ketheric's expanded dialogue re: "I'll tell you a story, True Soul" is largely canon, however - it was in Early Access, but was cut from the production version. I'm happy to share as much as of it as I could find, with minor tweaks to fit the current narrative.
Likewise I punched up the Nightsong scene a bit as well. In the game Shar just lets you walk right out of her realm - and sure, that's probably because she intends to catch up to Shadowheart later, she knows where Shadowheart is going. And Aylin just flies off without you. But that's the game, not here, because sometimes I prefer more cinema than they can fit into a brief cutscene. OTOH, I absolutely must share the original soundtrack from the Nightsong scene, because that rocked.
"So we must escape, quickly!" the Nightsong called to us. "Bring her to the circle!"
"What do we do?" I said briskly as I helped Shadowheart over to the boundaries of the Nightsong's prison.
"The priestess must channel a spark of her divine power into one of the runes!" the Nightsong implored us as she knelt on the cold stone barely several feet away. "If she can cause even a momentary disruption-"
"What divine power?" Shadowheart pleaded. "I've rejected her! I'm no longer a priestess of Shar, I have nothing!"
"Try." the Nightsong begged. "It is the only hope for any of us."
Shadowheart laid both of her hands flat on the nearest rune, closed her eyes, and concentrated with all her might. Our hearts sank during a long moment of nothing, as she desperately muttered a prayer under her breath to gods or goddesses she couldn't even name-
-and then a small flicker of silver light leapt from her fingertips into the rune. The tiniest ripple formed in the air over the rune, gleaming into visibility.
"Stand back!" the Nightsong cried, as her fist crashed mightily into the invisible barrier exactly where Shadowheart had momentarily disrupted it. Eldritch lightning crackled and roared in the distant sky and the platform shook as the force of her blow struck like the maul of a titan. Again and again she struck at the barrier, and the lightning doubled and redoubled as the thunder grew deafening.
"Our Lady of Silver! Hear me!" she chanted as she struck again and again. "She who guides, the Moonmaiden Selune! Mother of the so-called 'Nightsong'-"
With her final great blow shining cracks shone into visibility and spread all over the dome of force covering the rune circle, spreading and spreading. And then with sound like all the glass in Val Royeaux shattering at once the soul cage containing the Nightsong broke and the glowing circle on the ground faded into nothingness.
"-THE NIGHTSONG IS NO MORE!" she roared in triumph as she rose to her feet, and with arms outstretched and head upraised to the sky she spread her arms and floated majestically up into the air. Her eyes blazed white with light, and the blinding glow spread out to cover her body. In the blink of an eye the haggard prisoner clad in rags was gone. A majestic figure in polished plate armor and open-faced greathelm floated looking down at us regally, every stain of her captivity wiped away as if it had never been. She reached out one hand and a blade of pure light materialized in front of her, dimming to reveal a massive two-handed greatsword that she plucked out of the air as if it were a toy. And as the culmination of this marvelous transformation, two great gleaming wings sprouted from her back, their spotless white feathers shining out in this shadowy realm like a beacon.
"I am Dame Aylin, and- beware!" she interrupted herself as a savage bolt of lighting crashed down out of the sky striking directly towards us. Aylin desperately leapt forward and wrapped her wings around both of us, and an aura of silver light deflected the bolt away. We could see the cracks and strains in her aura of protection as it barely managed to resist Shar's retribution.
"Grab hold!" she ordered us, slinging her blade on her back as she reached out and clasped us firmly around the wrist one with each hand. "We must flee!" Before either of us could react Dame Aylin's wings flapped hard and our arms felt yanked halfway out of our sockets as we launched into the air like an eruption. We both dangled helplessly from her grasp like kittens caught in the jaws of a mother cat fleeing for her life as she flew at reckless speed up, up, up, dodging or deflecting more lightning strikes as the wrath of Shar attempted to burn us all to ash before we could escape her realm. I barely had enough wits left to realize that Aylin's claim of being Selune's own daughter - of being some kind of demigoddess - must be true, or else she could never have survived even a glancing blow from such power-
"The portal!" Shadowheart said relievedly as Aylin's flight finally brought us level with the height where we'd originally entered this divine realm. "We're almost there-"
"Slow down!" I shouted desperately as I realized Aylin was going to head into the portal at her full flight speed, and there wasn't nearly enough room on the other side for her to decelerate-
We took the transition between planes rapidly enough that all of us who weren't demi-divine needed an epic act of will to avoid losing their lunches, and even though most of the momentum of her flight had thankfully been dissipated by the transition she was still left staggering and almost fell on her face with the effort of suddenly dragging herself to a halt. And both Shadowheart and I were jostled loose from her grip and rolled across the floor like sacks of grain falling off a speeding wagon.
"Ouch!" I said not very heroically. "Everyone still alive?"
"Unbelievably, yes!" Shadowheart's voice called back with brittle humor.
"What happened?" Gale asked incredulously as everyone rushed around and helped us back to our feet. "And who is she?"
"Selune's daughter, held captive by Shar for over a century." I explained hurriedly. "And we just aided in a jailbreak."
"And I'm still not evil, if anyone's asking." Shadowheart contributed with a tremulous smile. Lae'zel actually smiled back for a moment before catching herself and deliberately resuming her usual scowl.
"No, you certainly are not." Dame Aylin chimed in with rough humor. "May my mother's grace shelter you forevermore-"
The earth underneath our feet trembled, and bits of rubble began to fall from the ceiling. The tremors roared more forcefully than they ever had with Balthazar-
"And that was the sound of this entire complex being filled to the rafters with more of Shar's shadow warriors." Wyll said grimly. "She might not be able to pursue you onto the Prime directly, but she still doesn't want you to get away."
"Hah! Let them come!" Dame Aylin faced the passage back into the Gauntlet and drew her greatsword with an arrogant flourish of her shoulders.
"Can they follow us out of the temple?" I asked hurriedly.
"No." Aylin said. "The divine compact limits direct interference on the Prime, and limits it even further on ground not specifically consecrated to the deity in question. If we can reach the exit, we need not fear this plague being unleashed to scourge the land."
"Or we could just leave right now." I said, having checked that our travelstone attunements had yet to be disrupted. "Grab hold!" I deliberately echoed Aylin's words, and with a firm clasp on her forearm I brought us all safely to Last Light Inn.
"Hawke's returned!" one of the Harper guards announced as we materialized in the inn yard. "Someone fetch Jaheira, this could be it!"
"I am here." Jaheira replied, having come running off the front porch in reaction to our arrival, before stopping short in surprise at the sight of the towering Aylin. "An aasimar? Here?" Jaheira recovered herself and gave a brief formal bow of her head. "I am High Harper Jaheira of Baldur's Gate, sacred one, and I welcome you to our war camp. Have you come to aid us?"
"If you contend against Ketheric Thorm, of a certainty. My battle with him is a century and more overdue, and he must be brought to a reckoning." Aylin almost snarled.
"Oh, we most definitely are." Jaheira said, and then turned to me. "Your mission?!?" she asked urgently.
"Accomplished." I reassured her. "Ketheric Thorm's immortality is no more."
"And so now we must strike!" Aylin affirmed. "Well met, High Harper Jaheira. I am-"
"Aylin?!?" Our heads all snapped aside to see Isobel standing a few paces away, breathless from where she'd apparently ran all the way from her chambers down to here. Her jaw was agape, her hair disheveled, and her voice a desperate prayer. "You're- you're alive?!?'
"Isobel." Aylin whispered wonderingly, one hand almost reaching out as if to touch a vision. "ISOBEL!" she shrieked happily, and then the two of them rushed into an embrace. Isobel was hoisted clear off the ground in Aylin's mighty arms as if she were a small child, and the two of them both sobbed with joy as they-
"Oh." Shadowheart blushed discordantly, and then tilted her head curiously to get a better look as the priestess and the immortal kissed like lovers reunited after a century of forced separation. "So that's who she'd meant."
I looked away from then and down at the young woman standing at my side, also miraculously returned to me from the grasp of a goddess who'd tried to snatch her away. I reached out and gently cupped her chin, turning her face towards me, and she smiled in realization at what my own beaming grin meant. We leaned in and let our lips meet, celebrating our own reunion. Because the outside world could just-
"This is all very touching." Jaheira's exasperated voice brought us crashing down to earth as her hand landed on my shoulder and gently pulled us apart, "but we are not at leisure to indulge ourselves!" She turned and glared up at the still-embracing pair of Selunites like a frustrated grandmother. "With the greatest of respect, could we please get back to saving the land from evil? Just for a moment?" she huffed sarcastically.
"Sorry." Isobel said, still flushed with embarassment as her and Aylin finally brought themselves back to reality. "It's just- we-"
"I can imagine." Jaheira said agreeably. "Really. But lives are hanging in the balance even as we speak. We cannot delay."
"Back to business." I agreed with a sigh. "Dame Aylin, I'm assuming that Ketheric will have felt the soul cage being dispelled and the parasitic link between you ending?"
"Yes." she said, reluctantly turning away from Isobel. "He will know by now that he no longer has his stolen immortality, but I cannot begin to predict how he will react."
"And I'm assuming that he's also expecting you to come after him immediately and without mercy." I thought out loud to Aylin's vigorous nod. "So three likeliest options - he makes an immediate rush at Last Light to try and secure Isobel as a hostage against Aylin, he flees to the safety of his army encamped on the western road, or he stands pat at Moonrise Towers. Two of those would be very bad for us, so we've got to make our move before he makes his."
"If each one of your group takes through a squad of my men, we can use the travelstone in Reithwin to get my entire force there immediately and steal a march on him." Jaheira followed my thought. "And then it doesn't matter which one he picks - we'll either have him besieged in Moonrise or be able to ambush him as he tries to get through the town."
"Isobel needs to come with us." Shadowheart interrupted. "Even without his immortality, Ketheric is still a powerful warrior and his troops still have us outnumbered. She's the only one here who has even a chance of convincing him to surrender."
"Why is that?" Jaheira asked curiously.
"You did not know? She is Ketheric's daughter, resurrected just as he was." Aylin answered matter-of-factly.
"You cannot be serious." Jaheira said, looking incredulously at Isobel. "No, of course you're serious. That is exactly the sort of nonsense that always happens at times like this." she trailed off in a disgruntled mutter.
"I can't- I can't leave here." Isobel said. "I'm the only thing keeping the shadows from devouring all these people."
"We have all those spare moonlanterns I stole." I pointed out. "Even with the ones Jaheira's attack force will be using, we can still spare one or two for the people here. We put all the refugees in the basement with the moonlanterns and lots of regular lighting, they'll be safe enough for a couple hours. And by then it'll all be over, one way or the other."
"There is another factor." Halsin broke in, having joined our impromptu war council all gathering in the inn yard. "While you were on your mission, Jaheira and I were able to successfully recover Thaniel and reunite him with the missing part of his spirit that Shar had concealed in these shadow-cursed lands. Have you felt the Shadow Curse being weaker? That is because the land is already starting to heal. The deeper darknesses are already dissipating, so ordinary lights and torches can shield the attack force well enough. And when Ketheric Thorm finally falls the Shadow Curse will end - now he alone is the only remaining anchor holding it in place."
"I still-" Isobel sighed, her shoulders slumping. "I just can't bear to see him. Not what he's become. Call me a coward, but I can't. I already know he's lost."
"Less than an hour ago I was certain that I was lost," Shadowheart said simply. "And then the man who loved me convinced me that I was wrong." She reached into her pack and withdrew an envelope. "When we were scouting Moonrise Towers, I found this in your father's room - in his chest of keepsakes." She looked briefly aside at me with a flash of guilt. "It's a letter from your mother. He'd still kept it after all these years."
Isobel took the letter from Shadowheart's hands, reached into the already-opened envelope, and read it. Tears began falling again from her eyes as she silently perused the words - tears of grief this time, not happiness.
"Father." Isobel whispered painfully. "I- gods, I'm so sorry."
"I will be right there alongside you, Isobel." Aylin said with a reassuring hand on Isobel's shoulder. "I will not let him hurt you again, no matter what fell powers he invokes."
"All right." Isobel agreed. "I'll try."
"Right, I'll start getting my men organized and the tieflings safe in the shelter." Jaheira said. "Everyone, stand to! We're moving out!" she bellowed as she marched away and back into the encampment.
We used those several minutes to all introduce ourselves to Aylin and give her a brief outline of events to date, as well as reading Isobel in on how we'd found and freed Aylin in the first place.
"And now I'm death-marked in the eyes of all her followers by Lady Shar herself, and Hawke with me." Shadowheart finished despondently. "They likely won't have opportunity to strike us down while the crisis of the Absolute is still burgeoning, but afterwards? Two people - even six people - no matter how skilled in battle, can still only fight for so long before they're worn down, caught off guard, or just miss a stroke. We'd have to win every time, and they'd only need to win once." She smiled sadly at us. "I don't regret Hawke's choice or my own. I see now that Shar's offer was merely another road to death... and a far more horrible one." She turned grave. "But I still can't delude myself about what's going to happen."
"Speak not of what will happen, but of what you will do." Aylin insisted. "Your past is not yet lost. Your future is not yet written."
"And you will have more help than you know." Isobel encouraged her. "Please... channel your power again, as you did to help set Aylin free. I want to see it."
Shadowheart brought up her hand and concentrated, invoking a divine channeling just as clerics normally did to turn undead or several other uses. A brief silver shimmer flickered over her fingertips-
-and then Shadowheart's eyes opened in wonder as Isobel brought up her own hand, also shimmering with silver light. A silver light of exactly the same hue and chroma as the one Shadowheart had just invoked.
"You mean-?" Shadowheart gasped.
"Yes." Isobel smiled warmly, and reached out to take Shadowheart's hand in both of her own. "Be forever welcome in moonlight - Initiate."
The newest priestess of Selune stared down at her hands and then back up at her senior cleric, still trying to mentally grasp the reality of it. "But for all my life I've rejected Her! I've reviled Her, spat on Her teachings, helped torment Her followers, devoted my every breath to serving Her arch-enemy- and yet the instant I abandon Shar, She adopts me? Just like that?!?"
"Just like that." Isobel agreed. "As I promised you, Selune had never forsaken you. You merely couldn't hear Her voice while it was drowned out by all of Shar's lies... until now." She suddenly chuckled to herself. "Oh, and if we're heading into battle then I really should return this to you." She reached down and unhooked the Blood of Lathander off of her belt and handed it back to Shadowheart.
"I presume that you left your spear in your room... again." Aylin chided Isobel affectionately. "Wait here, I shall go fetch it for you." Aylin easily flew into the air to soar around the inn until she spotted the altar of Selune on Isobel's balcony, then used that for a landing point to swiftly return with Isobel's own weapon.
"Is everyone ready?" Jaheira said as she rejoined us.
"As we'll ever be." I agreed.
We left Jaheira's troops waiting along with Isobel in Reithwin Town. Since Aylin was essentially incapable of stealth in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, being a giant winged white immortal scion of the gods who glowed with a holy aura of the moon goddess against the black shadowy background, we had her flying aerial reconaissance over Moonrise Towers at an altitude just out of ballista range and being a highly visible distraction. She reported back with the disposition of troops in the courtyard, how the siege engines were manned and ready on the walls, and that Ketheric himself was watching us defiantly from an elaborate open-air chapel to Myrkul that had been set up on the roof. Ketheric's goading presence had almost induced Aylin to break ranks and fly down for a berserker solo run against the man who'd imprisoned and tortured her for decades, but the knowledge that Isobel was waiting for her return and that we'd promised the priestess a chance to parley with her father first allowed Aylin to restrain her vengeful impulses. Even then, she shamefacedly acknowledged that it had been a very close-run thing.
So the Harpers and Aylin remained in place and let Ketheric believe that we were helplessly deterred by the lethal killing chokepoint of the only bridge that we'd noted earlier on our initial approach to Moonrise as the key defensible obstacle, and remain confident that the odds would only swing further and further in his favor the longer we delayed. Meanwhile my team was approaching the hidden cove in a boat under cover of a Darkness spell, preventing lookouts from getting the slightest glimpse of us as anything but a drifting black shadow amongst all the other cursed shadows out there. This admittedly would have made it impossible for us to steer except for the fortuitous circumstance that one of Wyll's warlock powers was a magical devil's sight that allowed him to freely see through all forms of darkness be they mundane or magical. So with him on the tiller and the rest of us rowing blind, he brought us safely into the secret dock and dispelled his darkness, restoring vision to us and the small team of hand-picked Harpers accompanying us.
"All right. We'll go first and hope they fall for the True Soul gag once again, you follow along and secure the dungeon level as soon as we're in position to strike." I ordered them. "Let's go, team."
We emerged from the hidden passage onto the prison floor to be confronted by a Death Shepherd flanked by a squad of robed skeletons and accompanied by two priests of Myrkul, according to their robes. We didn't even get a chance to try our undercover routine before the nearest priestess pointed at us and said "It's them! The traitors that Balthazar reported! Attack!" Damn it, his mental link with his undead must have gone farther than we'd anticipated - far enough to reach back here-
By this point we'd fought enough battles and grown acclimated enough to the changes within us that we had all regained a good measure of our former prowess, so I was able to unleash a scything whirlwind with my greatsword that cleaved most of the skeletons to the ground in a single attack. Wyll and Lae'zel each engaged a priest, while Gale stayed in reserve and Shadowheart used the Blood of Lathander's radiant aura to blind the Death Shepherd and leave it almost entirely combat ineffective while she started to wear it down with good old-fashioned blunt force trauma. Its support crew having been readily dispatched, I turned to help her flank the biggest threat and turned it to ash with a single smite.
A fast sweep of the lower levels turned up no other patrols than the ones we'd killed, and the welcome news that no defenders were responding to us from above - apparently they hadn't heard the brief sounds of combat on the surface. Good.
Wyll used one of his remaining warlock spells to cast a spell of Invisibility and headed up to take a look at what awaited us on the upper level. He soon came back with the report that Thorm was using a simple yet thorough defense in depth. We'd already seen that the siege engines and outer bailey were fully manned, all with a clear field of fire on the main bridge in and out that would let them make mincemeat of any attackers trapped on that narrow open stonework without any cover or room to maneuver. Z'Rell waited with a squad of elite drow, an ogre, and a pack of gnolls, all ready to reap a bloody toll on any survivors who attempted to force their way through the killing chokepoint that was the main door. Several pairs of stragglers were scattered about in position to call away an alarm if any attackers attempted to go around the exterior instead of straight in from the ramp and flank the ground floor defenders through any of the side doors, such as the ones leading from the kitchen. And another squad of defenders was set up in the main audience chamber, ready to do the same thing on anyone who survived the first gauntlet.
"Multiple layers of attrition defense, making sure that anybody who actually reaches Ketheric on the roof is as worn down as possible. And it does not matter how much of Moonrise's garrison he uses up in the process, because he has a whole army of replacements waiting just down the road." Lae'zel nodded in reluctant respect. "Jaheira was right - Ketheric Thorm did earn the right to be called 'General'. I am not sure that either of us could have done as well given as little opportunity to prepare as Ketheric was given."
"And he's also tempting Aylin to split off from the rest of her support, as she's the only person who can bypass all of this and fly straight for the roof - which allows Ketheric to defeat his strongest anticipated foe in detail in addition to whittling away the rest of us to a nub before we can even get to him. You're right, he is good." I shrugged. "Which is why we're cheating as hard as we are. All right, Z'Rell is anchoring the strongest point so we go for her first. Wyll, you said you saw that she had protective magics up?"
"Yes." Wyll nodded. "Multiple mirror images to help use up the first several attacks against her to no effect, and a shield of magical cold that will both help her resist magical fire and sear the flesh of anybody who tries engaging her in close combat with frostbite."
"One of you warp back to the Reithwin travelstone and tell Jaheira that it's plan B. We'll give her five minutes to get ready before we move, but remind her not to start her half of it until after we've sent the signal." I ordered the Harpers. "The rest of you, draw out your bows and stack up in ambush positions. "
Since all of the defenders in the entrance chamber were looking at the front door, we had a clear shot at their rear flank from the door leading to the chamber that held the top of the dungeon stairs. I pulsed a magical dispel on Z'Rell to remove her protections and Gale immediately followed up with a fireball centered on her, and that left the gnolls and a couple of the less experienced soldiers killed by the fireball while everybody else was severely wounded. The rest of us followed up with a single volley of missile fire, concentrating on the remaining spelllcasters, and then we immediately fell back and shut the door again, leaving behind an entire chamber full of shocked, surprised, and severely wounded survivors.
"And now they get to come to us one or two at a time through a narrow doorway." I grinned. "And we're distracting the ones in the audience chamber, who will try to flank us through that door. " We stacked up on both entrances and used our advantage of position to start killing the Absolutists as they filtered in to us, Z'Rell ruthlessly sending through her weakest first - trying to use up our ammunition and split our attention before she risked forcing a breach. Clearly she was hoping to overwhelm our defensive advantage and then either pincer us through both doorways or else force our retreat back down to the dungeon levels.
And just as she was well and truly pinned against our improvised defensive strongpoint, the tower was rocked by the sound of explosions.
When our deep gnome acquaintances had reached Last Light Inn Jaheira had put their alchemists to work helping brew up some smokepowder and incendiary charges in anticipation of having to blast her way through Moonrise's walls in a siege situation. When I'd come up with the current plan to take advantage of Aylin's presence and Jaheira had refined it, those charges had been repurposed for aerial bombardment. So as soon as our fireball told the defenders outside that we were making our move, Aylin's role would be to use her wings and strength to toss entire barrels of smokepowder and firewine down on top of the siege engines covering the front entrance and incinerate both them and their crews. The artillery bombardment that Z'Rell had counted on to hold the bridge while she diverted her effort towards killing us would be entirely gone, and the archers on the walls would then be scattered and demoralized by an unkillable flying celestial paladin single-handedly clearing the battlements after completing her aerial bombardment.
And that meant the front entrance was wide open, and Jaheira and her Harpers would be hitting the backs of the ground-floor defenders who'd all turned to focus on dealing with us... now!
Aylin was first through the door, deliberately drawing fire away from the less immortal people behind her. Jaheira was second, leading her Harpers from the front, with Isobel safely ensconced in the middle of their rush as spellcasting support. The Harper squad securing the dungeon level closed up on us as we advanced and helped us pincer all the surviving defenders on the ground floor, who were already caught out of position and severely wounded by Gale's fireball. We finished clearing the lower floor in a single furious minute, and now we held the tower.
"Hold here." Jaheira ordered us. "Isobel, you and Dame Aylin stick with Hawke's team. Everyone heal up and refresh yourselves as best you can - we'll need you as close to full strength as possible if the parley with Ketheric doesn't go the way we hope. If he wants to wait up on the roof while we kill every other Absolute cultist in this tower, then let him. Me and my men will take care of sweeping the upper floor."
"I hate to say it, but this is almost going too easily. Where's his reserves?" I wondered out loud. "As competent as this defensive layout was, it still seems a bit thin."
"I've been wondering the same." Jaheira agreed. "Possibly he intends for us to pin ourselves down in Moonrise while he recalls his army once we're all stuck in here. I have lookout posts back in Reithwin watching for that and we'll have to retreat fast if they spot anything coming, but so far there hasn't been any movement at all."
"Wait." Gale interrupted us. "Remember what Wulbren said about there being something 'suspicious' underneath the dungeon? And the several high-value prisoners we were looking for that hadn't been removed from the dungeon level, but had never been sent there to begin with and certainly aren't anywhere else in Moonrise that we've seized? There must be a deeper section buried underneath this complex that we don't know anything about."
"Shit." Jaheira swore. "All right, I'm going to put half our men back in the dungeon level to watch out from below and clear the upper floor with the other half. The only good news is that Ketheric is on the roof - he's isolated himself from any immediate reinforcements from down below, even if they'd have had a clear shot at our backs if we'd been careless. Hopefully if we can talk him down, or take him down, we can then figure out how to breach this sublevel ourselves."
Aylin flatly vetoed the idea of Isobel being the first one to go up the rooftop stairway, because even if Ketheric would almost certainly hold his fire against her Aylin's airborne reconnaissance had revealed that he had a final squad of minions waiting with him and they might not be so reticent. I likewise argued against the idea of Aylin being first, because while she was impossible to keep down permanently without a godslaying weapon we were trying to bring Thorm to a parley and he was expecting Aylin to try to immediately gut him on sight and would react accordingly. And so that meant I was the one who had to go first, and so I marched alone out onto the open roof.
"You!" Ketheric Thorm cried hoarsely. "What have you done?! What have you done to me?!"
"You've seen Dame Aylin flying around free, so you already know." I replied, fighting to keep my disgust with this necromancer out of my voice. "What's more important is that I've brought your daughter to see you."
"Why?" Ketheric asked helplessly. "She could not accept me as I am, and I cannot return to being the man I was. It is too late. If she knew everything about what I've done, she'd know that her father died on the same day she did." He shook his head. "Only unlike her, he could not be brought back."
"You've dug yourself a damned deep pit to try and climb out of, I'm not going to lie." I agreed. "But not two hours ago I saw someone stand in the heart of Shar's realm and still turn back to the light after knowing nothing but a lifetime of darkness - literally, as her memories of any other life had been removed. But she still did it, so don't tell me it's impossible General. It's just... sometimes very difficult."
"I'll tell you a story, True Soul." Ketheric said softly. "About a man who sold himself piece by piece. He had everything. A wonderful wife, a brilliant daughter. They lived not far from here. His wife died too young. Grief tore through their home like a thief, snatching away the scent of her hair... the rustle of her skirts... but the man did not break. He could not break. His daughter needed him whole, after all. And she grew up, grew strong. Challenged him. Filled his heart with such joy, it supplanted all sorrow." Ketheric swallowed heavily, his voice strained and taunt. "And when she was killed, the man... He tried to remain whole, but it wasn't possible! Do you understand?"
"I knew a necromancer once named Quentin, who had also lost his beloved wife." I replied evenly. "And he too swore that he'd sacrifice anyone and anything to bring her back." My own voice grew thick with pain. "And one of those sacrifices was my mother. Who had been the only family I had left, after already burying my father, my brother, and my sister." I shook my head. "I do understand your grief, Ketheric Thorm. I know how hollow it makes the world feel, how desperate the lengths to which it can drive a man. I have been there."
"Then you know why I have done what I have done!" Ketheric insisted. "The pain was unbearable, all consuming. A man would do anything for reprieve in the face of such desolation. So first I sold myself to the goddess of loss, but her promises of solace remained lies no matter how obscene my devotion. But then a new god came, a god who promised something wonderful, My daughter back, her life returned. I would have to give everything, body and soul entire, but I did not hesitate for a moment. And the new god did as promised. My brilliant beautiful daughter came back. I was whole and she was alive. But she despised what her father had become, she could not bear even to look at him... yet her hatred I could endure, so long as she had another chance to live. Everything I have done, everything I have built, has been to give Isobel that chance."
"Ketheric Thorm, it is precisely because I know how horrific such grief can feel that I refused to use my own losses to justify bringing such losses to other people. Like Quentin did. Like you have." I replied ruthlessly. "It sounds so noble, to say that you're willing to sacrifice anything for a loved one. And if you're only talking about the things that are rightly yours to sacrifice, I suppose it is. But all this wasn't yours." I waved my hand around at the vista visible below us, of all the Shadow-Cursed Lands. "Their lives, their happiness, their loved ones, those were not for you to take! Not yours, not Shar's, not Myrkul's, not anyone's! Your sins never took away your grief - they just multiplied it, and spread it, only to rebound it back onto you again and again and again." I sighed again, even my anger drained away now. "And if you don't turn away from this while you still can, that will be your fate for eternity."
"Please listen to him, Father." Isobel's voice came to us, as she slowly advanced across the rooftop to stand by my side. Aylin stood protectively within arm's reach of her, visibly keeping herself silent with an effort, and the rest of my party and Jaheira followed a short distance behind. "We can't go on like this, not either of us."
"Isobel." Ketheric said wonderingly, before his expression hardened with hate at the sight of Aylin. "And the creature who stole her from me."
"No one has stolen me!" Isobel implored him. "I'm standing right here! And I want my father back!"
Thorm wavered on his feet, struck to his marrow. "You don't know what you're asking." he quavered.
Isobel reached into her robe and withdrew the letter that Shadowheart had handed her when we'd arrived at Last Light, the one she'd found while we were searching Ketheric's quarters. "But I know what Mother asked of us. And I don't know if you've looked at this recently or not, so I'll read from it again." Isobel said, and began to recite:
"My darling husband, I know my time is drawing near. I don't want to leave you. I don't want to leave our little girl. But I'm not writing to lament our lot. It's ours and no other's. Though the City of Judgment is dark, I know Our Lady's light will find me even there. I will see her shining spires and walk the silver gardens we've both dreamt of. I go to my reward - and leave quite a task to you yet, my heart. Selune's light shines bright in our little one, but she will need a guide to keep on her path. I have no doubt that she will keep you on yours. It is the same path - our Lady's path - and one day I know it will bring you both back to me. Only not too soon, I hope. I won't say goodbye. There is no loss; only temporary separation. How I love you. Forever yours, Melodia."
All of us present - even Ketheric - were teary-eyed by the time she was done. Isobel continued, her voice held rigid over heartbreak. "You were so strong for me when Mother died, when I could barely understand why she was gone. You did so much, you cared so much. Did I ask you for too much? Did I make you work so hard saving my soul that I left you unable to save your own?" she begged.
"I don't know." Ketheric replied, raising a hand as if to reach out to her before pulling it away. "I can't remember why. I can only remember the madness. The emptiness."
"Then leave it behind." Isobel begged him. "Leave it all behind, and return to the moonlight. Abandon this mad quest! Repent of your sins! Even if Myrkul withdraws his gift, even if we both die today, it'll still be all right!' She tried to smile at him through her sobs. "We'll be in the Gates of the Moon with Mother, just like she hoped we'd be. All three of us, reunited forever."
"Would your mother even allow that, Aylin?" Ketheric spoke to her for the first time. "To accept the Chosen of Myrkul, the infamous commander of Shar's Dark Justiciars, into her silver halls? To make such a monster welcome among her righteous pilgrims?'
"I would not." Aylin answered him unhesitatingly, her voice like bared steel. "I know only one way to rightly deal with your kind, and have stayed my hand so far only because your daughter has begged my forbearance." Her wings lowered slightly, as did her voice. "But I am only the sword of Selune, not the Moonmaiden herself. And my mother often does things beyond my understanding... and far more graciously than I." She nodded to Ketheric Thorm. "I will not lie to you no matter how wroth my heart. What Isobel asks of you is most unlikely, but it is not impossible."
"I wish it could be so, I do." Ketheric said plaintively. "But no divine grace was offered to me when my life was dismantled piece by piece. And when I tried to buy it back-"
"It can't be bought!" I shouted back at him. "Grace is not a commodity. It's an act of trust. An expression of faith."
"Then I have lost it." Ketheric replied simply. "As I have lost everything, even those things I tried most to save."
The tower suddenly trembled underneath our feet, an earthquake even more severe than any we'd experienced in the Gauntlet of Shar.
"What the hells was that?" Jaheira cried as we all struggled to retain our footing.
"A reminder." Ketheric said grimly, the sorrow fading from his eyes as he drew himself erect, as a sense of something terrible began to fill him. "That I was a fool to hesitate. There are forces that once unleashed cannot be turned away from. That must be mastered, or else they will consume you utterly - and then go on to consume those you love." He said with a longing look at Isobel. "Power like mine has a price... and now I must pay it." he finished calmly, as he drew his warhammer and readied his shield. "Restrain my daughter. Kill the rest."
Aylin's greatsword crashed down against his shield with terrible force, but Ketheric Thorm could not be pushed so much as an inch. Isobel froze in shock, and Jaheira hurriedly pulled her back and out of the line of fire as the rest of us leapt into action.
"Turn Undead!" Shadowheart cried, creating a bubble around us that would repel the many robed skeletons lurking around the edge of the encampment.
"Firebal-" the robed necromancer off to Ketheric's left in a vantage point began to cry, only to be shut down by Gale's "Counterspell!"
Several of the robed skeletons managed to resist Shadowheart's turning and closed in. Karlach cursed and leapt to cut them off.
"I have the wizard!" Lae'zel shouted, calling on her githyanki psionics to Misty Step across the intervening distance and appear directly behind the robed necromancer. Her blade swung down, wounding them terribly, and the enemy spellcaster was preoccupied from then on with keeping Lae'zel from gutting them.
"Concentrate fire on the mortal paladin!" Ketheric commanded, and I winced as all of the robed skeletons that weren't fighting Karlach raised their hands... which began to glow with unholy green fire. Over half a dozen eldritch bolts leapt forth, all aimed unerringly at me, and tore into my flesh with corrupted necrotic energy. Even though the damage had been substantially reduced by my unique magic resistance, I still was left staggering from the force of my wounds.
"Heat Metal!" Jaheira cried, and Ketheric's warhammer began to glow red-hot. He snarled almost like a wild beast, fighting on through the pain of his burns as if he he did not even feel them. Wyll and Jaheira and I had to concentrate on tearing down these damned spellcasting skeletons before they could unleash their combined powers into us again and again. From the corner of my eye I could see Shadowheart having little luck attempting to bring the Blood into melee range of Ketheric, and Gale was not having much luck slowing the relentless General down with the lower-level spells he had left either. So for now Aylin was left carrying most of the freight there-
A clever twist of Ketheric's hammer and a battering of his shield left Aylin off-balance, but while a mortal would have been able to recover their footing her large heavy wings left her staggering sideways and falling to the ground once she'd been tipped beyond a certain point. "I see you that haven't spent any of the intervening time working on your weaknesses, Aylin." Ketheric said contemptuously as he raised his hammer high to smash her skull-
"Resilient Sphere!" Isobel's voice cut through the din, and suddenly an impenetrable globe of force sprang into existence around Ketheric. Entirely unable to either be harmed or inflict any harm through the bubble of force, Ketheric Thorm was a helpless spectator to the rest of the battle as we easily destroyed his minions once his threat was temporarily neutralized and his subordinate necromancer wasn't present to further buff or command them. Even his attempts to summon more robed skeletons - 'necromites', I later learned they were called - were rendered futile, as he could only summon forth one at a time.
"Stop! Stop!" Isobel begged her father from where he stood watching us within his prison of force, his dully-glowing warhammer discarded at his feet. "I don't want you to hurt them! I don't want them to hurt you! I just want this to end!"
"My darling daughter." Ketheric looked at her with a genuine affection, an honest love, that felt so horribly out of place in the midst of all this death and destruction. "You truly are the best of us. I would have given you the world, if I could."
"I don't want to be given the world!" Isobel begged him.
"I know." Ketheric agreed sagely. "So the only goal I have left now is to keep the world from taking you. Because no one will take you from me." Ketheric's voice firmed. "Not Aylin, not the Harpers... and certainly not these miserable True Souls!" he roared at us with hatred. "How dare you try to deceive us! How dare you pretend to freedom and friendship that you cannot truly feel, how dare you press any claim on her or try to entreat with me when you are only hollow tools that exist to serve! Bow, you miserable slaves! BOW!"
A terrible mental force erupted like a thunderclap, in answer to Ketheric's demand. A voice spoke in our brains on the edge of audibility... a voice drowned by a familiar white-hot keening, as a familiar polygon floated in front of us glowing brilliant orange as it shielded us from the Absolute's call.
"The Astral Prism!" Ketheric gaped at it. "You've had it, all this time!" That sense of terrible power began to fill Ketheric again as the loving father was yet again swallowed by the implacable servant of death. "ENOUGH! My Lord beckons me, and I must answer!"
The gem on the front of Ketheric's breastplate suddenly glowed a brilliant unholy red, and he raised both arms in invocation as the castle began shaking again as if its very foundations would tear free of the world. All of us fell to our knees, or to the ground, as one corner of the the central tower's roof burst open like a full wineskin struck by a catapult shot. A giant glistening purple tentacle extended several stories into the sky from the hole torn in the pillar's top, and an unearthly roar shattered our hearing-
"You must be returned to your prison! And the will of my Lord must be fulfilled!" Ketheric pronounced hieratically as he waved one arm, clearly directing the motion of the tentacle even though he was trapped inside the bubble. The tentacle lashed down as if to strike at Isobel, and Aylin frantically interposed herself between it and her lover's body. I could just spot a slight grin on Ketheric's face as the tentacle suddenly shifted motion, its strike at Isobel only a feint, as it crashed down on the defenseless Aylin instead and hammered her so far into the stone roof that anybody not as immortal as her would already be pulp. With a contemptuous twitch of its tip the tentacle rolled the unconscious Aylin over to Ketheric's feet, the bubble around him having been dispelled when Isobel lost her concentration at Aylin's being struck down. The tentacle's tip glowed with energy and suddenly Ketheric and Aylin vanished, teleported away to who-knows-where, and then it writhed and retreated back down into the hole it had burst out of as if it had never been there.
"Aylin! Father!" Isobel shouted, helplessly reaching out to grasp at the empty space where her lover's body had lay. "Where did they go? Where did they go?"
"I think... down there." Jaheira said, having gone over to look down the hole now gaping in the roof. As we looked down it we could see that it ran the entire length of one of Moonrise Tower's main support pillars, having cored out the entire cylinder of stone from top to bottom. The hole ran down, down out of sight, as if it ran into the very Underdark.
"The sealed sublevel we never found." I swore. "That's where Ketheric has retreated to. That's where that... tentacle monster came from."
"Look there." Lae'zel said fearfully, pointing down into the hole at the fleshy coating and glistening slime lining the tunnel that the tentacle had bored. "You have seen such things before, as have I."
At Lae'zel's prompting I realized that I had indeed seen that before - it was just like the horrid living architecture that the illithid nautiloid had been comprised of. Whatever had burrowed that tunnel, summoned that impossible tentacle, it had been part of the mind flayers' horrid living technology-
"Ketheric's hidden lair. The location of the missing prisoners. And now a hidden mind flayer colony. We've found the source of the tadpoles." Shadowheart said.
"As well as a living creature the size of a building or more, yet which is still clearly related to the ghaik." Lae'zel followed her thought. "And there is only one such creature I can think of."
"An elder brain." I agreed, staring down into the black pit where our doom potentially awaited. "This is the lair of the Absolute."
Author's Note: I'm actually mildly down on the canon Ketheric confrontation - not because it sucks, it's actually quite good. It just could have been so much better. In the game Aylin turns into a vengeful musclehead who monomaniacally focuses on Ketheric and interrupts your attempt to turn him back to the Light Side, and Isobel doesn't even go on the Moonrise Towers assault so she never sees her father again before he dies. Hell, I don't think Aylin even finds out Isobel isn't dead until after they've finished helping kill her father. And I'm just not going to put up with that, so here we go. I could wish to have made the boss fight more cinematic, but then Isobel was a meanie-pants and insisted that she'd never let it drag out and she had access to a spell that could end it prematurely, so boom. (Otiluke's Resilient Sphere actually is a Knowledge domain spell for clerics, and one of Selune's domains is Knowledge.)
I was shocked to find out how low-level Isobel actually was in the game, because I didn't look up her stats until we reached this fight scene. You'd think that somebody who was cranking all the power she was shielding Last Light, as well as someone with such a long history of serving Selune, would be a high-level priestess... but nope. I suppose that was for balance purposes because Isobel is a possible antagonist if you let her get mind-controlled by Ketheric, but pffft on game balance, that's Larian's problem and not mine.
Ketheric's expanded dialogue re: "I'll tell you a story, True Soul" is largely canon, however - it was in Early Access, but was cut from the production version. I'm happy to share as much as of it as I could find, with minor tweaks to fit the current narrative.
Likewise I punched up the Nightsong scene a bit as well. In the game Shar just lets you walk right out of her realm - and sure, that's probably because she intends to catch up to Shadowheart later, she knows where Shadowheart is going. And Aylin just flies off without you. But that's the game, not here, because sometimes I prefer more cinema than they can fit into a brief cutscene. OTOH, I absolutely must share the original soundtrack from the Nightsong scene, because that rocked.
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Simonbob
Really? You don't say.
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Cool chapter. Not bad music, too.
However, this is what I was listening to when I was reading it.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6zOT3IZ90U
Matrix Dragon
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Selune is currently doing the Happy Dance.
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I just realized Shar is the Lady of Loss.
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Matrix Dragon
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sicksock
Pigs can always find mud.
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DreadnaughtVV
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While stopping every now and then in order to throw rude gestures in Shar's general direction.
Prince Chrom
Experienced.
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It's a really good thing she's a goddess or she'd be having trouble breathing with how hard she's laughing.
cliffc999
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Ugh, minor tweak - Aylin is now the one who reveals that Isobel is Ketheric's daughter, not Hawke. I'd temporarily forgotten he'd promised not to tell (remember that the rest of the group figures it out on their own once they search the mausoleum), but Aylin doesn't even know that Isobel didn't want it revealed.
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TyricGaias
Getting sticky.
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This is why I can't write fics, fan or otherwise. I forget details like that all the damn time. That and I have no confidence in my skills
Matrix Dragon
Making the rounds.
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This line really shows how far gone Ketheric is, honestly.
DIT_grue
lurker
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Delete the duplicate.
engines were manned
defensible
Its
engaging
Ragnarokasgard67
Perpetually annoyed Fry-Cook
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Because fuck you, you can't have nice things
Favorite spell of all time
It would be hilarious if this worked on Thorm
Amazing writing as usual cliff, although I had a question, how does the mind wiping used on Shadowheart work? Is it just burying the memories or is it full on memory erasure?
cliffc999
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The player finds out in act 3.
cliffc999
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I can't take credit for that bit, it's scripted into the original boss fight. You do phase one with Ketheric on the roof, it ends with Elder Brain Interrupt once you deplete his health bar enough and Ketheric subduing Aylin and running off with her, and an invitation to go down to the secret sublevel.
Hawke's ability to actually recruit and manage allies did mean this fight went notably easier for him than BG3 default, though. As I mentioned previously, Isobel doesn't even come to the boss fight normally, and Aylin goes completely Leeroy Jenkins so Tav and party are basically stuck doing it themselves.
TyricGaias
Getting sticky.
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Awesome chapter as always. Sad that they weren't able to reach him…. At this point anyway. Though Aylin getting Worf'd amuses me as much as it annoys me.
Gobble'n
Bend over
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Or take their weapons. That worked pretty well for me.
Gobble'n
Bend over
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Do it Hawke! Ruin your budding romance with that dainty half-elf!
Also I'm looking forward to how he reacts to gale hitting on him.
S!ËGFR!ÊD
Experienced.
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…You're a bit late to the party, my friend.
Chapter 26
New
cliffc999
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"Curse it! We almost reached him!" Isobel fumed despairingly. "Why did he turn away?"
"He spoke of himself as the Chosen of Myrkul." Gale said grimly. "My mentor Elminster is a Chosen of Mystra, gifted with a spark of her own divine essence embedded within him. And that grants him great power, but also requires him to obey his patron's commands - even when he direly wishes otherwise. I don't understand everything about the relationship that they have but I do know that it is closer even than that of a priestess to their goddess." He sighed. "Your restored life may have been a gift to him from Myrkul, but I fear that your father's own still lies in pawn to the Lord of Bones - and that it continues only so long as he continues to further their will."
"Perhaps that's why he so desperately wishes to steal Aylin's immortality." Wyll observed. "Only eternal life can keep him out of the death god's clutches."
"Well, we damn sure can't let Ketheric stay out of ours." Jaheira vowed. "My second-in-command can take charge up here as soon as I brief them, and then I'm coming with you."
"Gale, dig through that collection of scrolls and see if you can find one for Feather Fall." I ordered him. "That's one hell of a drop."
Shadowheart healed most of my wounds and Jaheira finished briefing her men, and then Gale cast his spell and we jumped. We all fell down, down through the hole to gently land at the bottom. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all composed of a horrid glistening pink/purple flesh, the same as the architecture onboard the illithid nautiloid. Only this was moister, somehow. Softer. More alive. It was like walking through the intestines of a dead colossus, only worse. The very air seemed to be whispering to us-
"Is everybody else hearing that, or just those of us with tadpoles?" I asked.
"I hear nothing." Jaheira said briskly. "It must be the illithid hive mind. Can you make out what it is saying?"
"Just... 'prepare'." Gale replied. "The Astral Prism is blocking most of the broadcast."
"A ghaik colony." Lae'zel glared suspiciously at the walls around us, her blade out and quivering. "My teachers in the creche spoke of them, but I have never seen one before. We must all be cautious."
"We must all be scared halfway shitless, more like it." Karlach muttered.
"That as well." Lae'zel agreed immediately.
A few swings of a blade cut through the membrane blocking the only exit out of the room, and we came out into a hallway. "We'll have to explore each one of these side chambers before we move on. There might be survivors... and we can't afford to let any mind flayers get behind us and flank attack." I decided.
"I told my Harpers to come down and start searching the oubliette beneath the dungeon level, the one you did not have time to explore when last you were here." Jaheira said. "Hopefully they can find the entrance between there and this colony."
"Not least because we'd like to be able to leave here once we're done." Shadowheart agreed.
Isobel muttered a cantrip for guidance, then carefully studied the area. "Unless I've gotten turned around, I think the dungeon level is that way." She pointed at a door on the right side of the hallway. As soon as we opened it, an acrid stench assaulted our nostrils.
"Myrkul's armpit!" Isobel cursed. "It smells like a mass grave in here!"
"It is a mass grave in here." Jaheira said grimly, as we stared into a scene of butchery out of our worst nightmares. Rotting viscera and spoiled blood positively drenched the floor, and piles of bones and rotting, dismembered corpses were haphazardly strewn everywhere.
"I think we've found where all the corpses they 'disposed of' from the dungeon level ended up." I said, my gorge rising. "I wonder how many 'pilgrimages' to Moonrise ended here."
"Chop. Chop. Chop." a voice chanted dully, as a bugbear drenched in blood and gore literally from head to toe loomed at us out of the darkness. A butcher's cleaver was clenched in one hand, and the corpse of a young boy was slung over his shoulder. Ignoring us as if we weren't present, the lumbering humanoid turned and laid the corpse out on a filthy workbench, and then the cleaver began to rise and fall. "Pretty pink. Make more. Never think. Chop. Chop. Chop."
"What are you doing?" I asked the dazed bugbear.
"Chop. Chop. Help them... become...?" it slowly and awkwardly fumbled for words, as if barely conscious of our presence.
"Become what?" Wyll burst out, exasperated.
"Part of... One Mind. Four little feet. Dancing. To same song." it whispered.
"The intellect devourers." Lae'zel spat. "This thrall has been set to the task of harvesting the corpses of those judged unfit for conversion to ghaik. To salvage their brains to make ghaik tools with."
I risked a probe into the bugbear's mind, and realized to my horror that there practically was no mind. They'd hollowed him out, burned most of his consciousness away, leaving behind only a vestigial awareness and the well-worn grooves of a single, programmed routine. Crack the bones. Harvest the brains. Leave the unworthy meat to feed the hive. No desires, no thoughts, no will, all engraved away to leave behind nothing but the remnants of a soul helplessly trapped inside an automaton of flesh.
"Where is your master?" I asked him.
"Mas-ter?" the bugbear's voice cringed, showing visible emotion - fear - for the first time. "No. Not here. Gone deep!"
"Chop." I asked the bugbear, using the only name for itself that it could remember. "Do you want this to stop? Do you want an ending?"
"Yes." Chop replied softly. "Yes. Please." it begged, its eyes screaming from an impassive face.
I struck as quickly and cleanly as I could, impaling him directly through the heart. "Rest now. It's all over." I reassured him.
"Free..." he whispered wonderingly, looking back at me with gratitude, and then he died.
"Selune have mercy on this poor creature." Isobel sorrowed. "This is what the Absolute would have us all become? This is the 'new world' that Father wanted to give me?"
-The moment comes. The Absolute moves.- the telepathic voice wafted through the air.
"I think the elder brain is waking up..." Shadowheart said worriedly.
-Prepare the march. My Chosen gather below.- the Absolute spoke.
"Oh wonderful, all of them." Jaheira swore. "We had our hands full with just the one!"
-Many hearts. One soul.-
"Enough!" I swore, blocking out the voice with an act of will. "Let's move."
We found a grating that led to another section of the colony above us, in the oubliette level under the dungeon, but we couldn't find any entrance. Several of Jaheira's Harpers were already searching the oubliette, and we called out to them through the grating - Jaheira ordered them to work on finding a way to break through and come down to help reinforce and clear this level as well when they managed that, and then we got back to searching.
There was a barracks section down here containing several Myrkulite acolytes and their ghoul servants which we cleared out, and another large concentration of undead - lesser zombies, mostly, with a few winged ghouls and one Death Shepherd - in a large laboratory area. These battles didn't exhaust us, strictly speaking, but we were using up spells and healing potions that we'd rather not have. Somewhere in the deepest levels of this complex awaited not only Ketheric but almost certainly his fellow 'Chosen of the Absolute', as well as the elder brain itself, and we didn't remotely have enough power for that confrontation. Right now the best we were hoping to do was find and free the still-missing prisoners and then open up a route to the surface, preparatory to eventually bringing a small army down here.
"We've still got that big area near the barracks we didn't explore." I said. "Hopefully this is the deeper dungeon-" The bio-mechanical iris door squeezed open, and we were confronted by a large oblong chamber with multiple pods spaced all around the borders of the room. And I was very familiar with those pods - we all were. Because we'd been trapped in them onboard the nautiloid, when they'd tadpoled us.
"A conversion chamber." Lae'zel said.
A frantic search of those pods produced the results that several of them contained newborn mind flayers, the transformation on them already completed, while the others contained several Flaming Fists apparently captured during the attack on Waukeen's Rest as well as two very familiar tieflings - Zevlor and Mol. A quick probe with our tadpoles produced the startling revelation that the still-intact prisoners hadn't been tadpoled - their brains were clean. All of them, mind flayers and prisoners alike, floated in dreamlike suspension as they were sustained by the bio-machinery of the pods.
"It's like they just abandoned their job half done and then didn't follow up for the past couple of days. We must have been distracting them quite a bit." I thought out loud.
"Father's not here!" Wyll said, still frantically searching through the last few empty pods. "Where have they taken him?"
"Deeper below, presumably." Shadowheart answered. "Wyll, don't despair. He's certainly in danger, but out of all the prisoners they've taken he's the absolute last one they'd kill. If they have plans for Baldur's Gate, they need the Grand Duke alive."
"There don't seem to be any individual pod releases, or at least none that I can find." Gale said. "Just that master set of controls over there in the corner."
"Wait, why can I read these labels?" I wondered, having suddenly realized that the illithid script on the controls was comprehensible. "Damn it, what have these tadpoles been doing while we weren't paying attention?"
"Hopefully as little as possible." Gale agreed. "And yes, I can read them too. 'Release'... and 'Purge'. Well, that's plain enough."
"'Purge is obviously not an option, but if we hit Release we're going to release the mind flayers too." I groused.
"So we pre-position people behind their pods and cut their throats from ambush while they're still waking up." Jaheira snorted. "How simple can it get?"
Jaheira's plan went off without a hitch, and the survivors all struggled their way back to consciousness even as the newborn illithids lay bleeding on the floor.
"Well it's about time you got here!" Mol was predictably the first one to recover and start running her mouth.
"Nice to see you too, Mol." I snarked back.
"Likewise." she agreed, more seriously. "I was starting to think I'd made a bad decision in turning down that devil's bargain and waiting for you instead, so thank the gods you did turn up eventually. Do you know that he came to me while I was stuck in that tube and offered me a way out?"
"That would explain why you were dragged away from the attack on Last Light by one of the flying ghouls even though their leader had ordered them all to go after Isobel instead." I realized. "I'd been wondering why it had just suddenly gone off on its own, but if it was all a setup by a certain someone-"
"Yeah, I was thinking the same thing." Mol agreed. "Smooth bastard digs a hole behind my back for me to get pushed into by someone else, then drops by later to sell me a ladder - at a very high price." Her voice turned embarrassed. "And it would've worked, too, if somebody hadn't pointed out to me how I was already getting conned in that lanceboard game. Thanks. I owe you a big one."
"Just try to keep your operations at least halfway legitimate in the future, all right?" I said. "There's a lot of sharks out there in the ocean, and I think you're starting to learn that some of them have had a head start on you."
"Don't rub it in." she grinned back, before nodding. "But yeah, I'll keep it in mind."
"Gods, my head." Zevlor moaned as he struggled back to consciousness. "Hawke?" He focused on me.
"You're in an illithid colony under Moonrise Towers." I tried to reorient him. "It's been a couple of days since your convoy was hit."
"The others. Did they survive?!?" he begged.
"There were casualties, but most of them made it to shelter." Jaheira reassured him. "And we rescued the ones that the cult took prisoner a day ago. You two were the last unaccounted for."
"Thank the Triad." Zevlor said relievedly. "The Absolute- it crawled into my head, offering me-" He shook his head angrily. "It doesn't matter what it offered me, because I managed to hold out. Just barely." He dispelled the dark memory with an effort and refocused on me. "What's the plan?"
"Scouting out a way into the deepest sublevel, then clearing and holding a route through for our hoped-for reinforcements." I said. "We're almost entirely certain there's a damn Elder Brain down there, and two high-value prisoners still unaccounted for. Three." I corrected myself, remembering the infernal 'asset' that Wyll had to recover on pain of eternal damnation.
"No, two." Wyll's amused voice came to us. "Because look at who I just found in the next room."
We left Jaheira, Isobel, and Zevlor behind to start organizing the survivors and getting them back upstairs to wait for the Harper reinforcements and headed into the back room of the conversion center, where we all broke out in uncontrollable grins at the sight of the last prisoner here. One who had been isolated in a very specially-reinforced containment pod of her own.
"STOP GAWKING AND GET ME OUT OF HERE!" Mizora screeched angrily.
I stopped in shock at this unexpected sight, and then was awestruck by a full realization of just how priceless and unique this opportunity could be. A plan began to take shape in my mind-
"No wonder you had to ask Raphael to run a message for you." I smirked at the helplessly imprisoned devil. "Do I even want to know how much he overcharged you? Or how much more he was asking you for a rescue, instead of what he extorted from you for just running a message to us and leaving you hoping we'd get here in time?"
"I. Don't. Want. To. Talk. About. It." Mizora bit off each word as if it were stabbing her in the tongue.
I leaned over and whispered a few quick sentences into Karlach's ear, then turned to Wyll. "Wyll, could you do me a favor?"
"Of course. What?" He turned to me-
"Hold still!" I said quickly as I hurriedly snatched his rapier out of its sheath. In the moment of shock that produced, Karlach stepped behind him and pinned him in a chokehold from behind right on cue.
"'Should the promised soul refuse obeyance or neglect duty, the pact-holder shall cast the promised in Avernus as a lemure.'" I quoted the clause from Wyll's contract that Mizora had recently threatened him with in her message. "Except now Wyll isn't either refusing or neglecting - he's being restrained against his will, and that means you can't punish him for failing to stop what we're doing. Karlach, if Wyll tries to escape, spellcast, or do anything else, then choke him out right away with a sleeper hold."
"You got it, boss!" she said cheerfully, as the others caught on to my intention and relaxed from their own startlement. "Sorry about the rough stuff, Wyll... but you'll love the ending, I promise!"
"Do you really think this is going to-?" Mizora spat, and I cut her off with a headshake.
"Let's get one thing clear right now. There's two controls to your pod, and one of them destroys you immediately. And the fact that Wyll is not yet killed, exploded, imploded, turned into a lemure, or anything else unpleasant and irreversible - as well as the contract proviso that eternally damns him if you die - is why I haven't just hit the 'purge' button yet and turned you into mind flayer residue." I said, my voice fully as iron as Aylin's condemnation of Thorm. "So if you still find a way to get past our restraints on Wyll right now, if you think you're being clever, then the best-case scenario is we can subdue him without hurting him and you're still stuck in the pod... only negotations go even worse for you. And the worst-case scenario is that our friend dies... and then you follow him, right on the spot."
"Go ahead, kill me!" Mizora spat. "If I die outside the Hells, I'll just revive there! And while I might be much diminished-"
"You won't be diminished, you'll be consumed." I said flatly. "As near as I can decipher, the 'purge' command works by supercharging the transformation into illithid at a lethally fast speed. And illithids don't have souls, remember?" Mizora paled in realization as to just how poor her bargaining position really was. "You didn't know that, did you? About the pods, I mean. I'm certain you knew the part about soul-destruction being part of the illithid transformation... you were just hoping that I didn't."
"... I will acknowledge that you have me at a temporary disadvantage." Mizora began to wheedle. "But-"
'But 'temporary' can become 'permanent' for you as easy as the push of a button." I held up my index finger dramatically. "So what we have right now is a stand-off. We can't kill you without also sacrificing Wyll thanks to his pact's penalty clauses... but by the same token he's the only hostage against us that you have right now and your current maximum lifespan is Wyll's lifespan plus a few heartbeats, and no longer. So until the stand-off is broken, you can't go anywhere." I smiled. "But we can come and go as we wish, even if we have to knock Wyll out and drag him from this room kicking and screaming." I shrugged. "And then I'll just move your pod to somewhere else before he can come back here, and never tell him where. It's not a refusal to free you on his part if he can't find you. So, how many days, or weeks, or months do you think you can stay stuffed in there before your affairs in the Hells suffer from your prolonged absence? Before your reputation in Hell absolutely craters from having been so careless as to somehow get yourself imprisoned by mortals and mind flayers? Or just before the boredom drives you mad?" I mentally thanked Raphael - not that I'd ever actually thank him to his face - for setting an example for me with Yurgir, as I hoped what had worked for him there would work for me here.
"What do you want?!?" Mizora screeched. It seemed to be working so far, then!
"Wyll released from his pact. His soul to be his own again." I said flatly.
"All right! You let me out and I'll release him from his pact, it's a deal!" she agreed hurriedly with a bright, innocent smile.
"Oh, and when exactly would you release Wyll from his pact?" I questioned, and her face collapsed into a mask of rage the instant she realized that the copper piece had dropped. "Next month? Next year? I know, how's about a single heartbeat before his eventual mortal death? Or a single heartbeat after?"
"Well of course I'd do it expeditiously!" she insisted. "Ask Wyll! I always live up to the terms of a contract!"
"Thank you for reminding me." Wyll contributed. "I've been taken by surprise far too often by contract terms I hadn't known about or overlooked, again and again - but now that I recall, you can't actually lie to me about what is in the contract. You can only 'forget' to mention details that I don't know to ask about. Which is why I'm asking you now, what exactly does my contract specify about 'expeditiously' releasing me from it?"
"Clause Z, Section 13. If the soul-binder consents to separation, she will release the soul-bearer from all obligation within six months." Mizora admitted like pulling teeth.
"Six months?" Shadowheart rolled her eyes. "I wonder how many attempts to arm-twist him into an even newer and worse deal, or just to kill him while you still had a lien on his soul, would occupy those six months?"
"At a rough guess I'd say at least five months, 30 days, 23 hours, and fifty-nine minutes' worth." I agreed. "Fortunately, however, the wording of the clause said 'within' six months... so she could do it earlier if she chose to." I stared MIzora down. "So do it earlier. As in right now."
"Are you mad, or do you think I am?!?" Mizora said. "You want me to give up my last piece of leverage on this situation while I'm still stuck in here?"
"Yes, that is exactly what I want you to do." I drawled. "Wasn't it obvious?"
"Oh, and Wyll gets to keep his powers." Shadowheart said. "A warlock's abilities don't necessarily have to go away even after the pact ends, it's just that revoking them for breach of contract is a common clause." She shrugged. "So don't enforce the clause and tear up the pact anyway."
"And what, do you want the secret of godhood in addition to all that? Or Wyll's humanity restored? Because the one of those is as impossible for me as the other!" Mizora spat sarcastically. "Look, if you miserable bastards don't want me devoting my entire immortal life to making you as miserable as I can possibly manage, then you're opening this damn pod right now and being grateful that I'm only waiting six months!"
"You know, it occurs to me that if I just leave you here and accidentally let slip to the next illithid I see that there's a free meal waiting in this chamber, it won't actually be killing you on Wyll's behalf - and I won't actually be ordering you killed on his behalf, either." I raised the ante. "Because how much mileage have devils gotten out of 'innocent' suggestions that weren't actually orders?" I smirked at her, before my expression turned murderous. "You will end the pact right now, unconditionally and entirely, with Wyll keeping all the warlock talents you've already gifted him. Because until after all that happens, I'm not going to even consider opening that pod... and I'm pretty sure that I also get what I want regarding Wyll's pact ending if he somehow outlives you."
"Wyll-!" Mizora began, only to break off hurriedly as my finger tapped menacingly on the 'Purge' button.
"One minute to decide, then we walk right now and you can hope that you're still around tomorrow and that we're in a better mood." I said menacingly.
"And I'm supposed to trust you?!?" Mizora shrieked. "I absolutely will not give up my binding on Wyll before I'm freed! It's the only leverage I have!"
"So we're supposed to trust you without any leverage?" I retorted. "Not happening! But you're focused too much on Wyll's binding and have forgotten that there's also a binding on me. I'm a paladin, remember?"
"All right! All right! Swear on your Oath that you'll free me, and I'll do it!" Mizora desperately agreed.
"On my Oath, if you immediately and unconditionally destroy Wyll's contract and set him entirely and permanently free, while allowing him to keep his warlock abilities, then I will treat you exactly as I have just described." I proclaimed solemnly.
"Done!" she cried immediately. Inside the pod she squirmed around until she could get a hand into her pocket and it came out with the scroll that held Wyll's contract... and as she held it up where we all could see it, the contract burst into flames and crumbled into ash. Wyll suddenly gasped and went slack with relief.
"I'm free." he said, wonderingly. "I can feel it- I'm a free warlock! It's a miracle!"
"Join the club!" Karlach yelled cheerfully as she converted her choke hold on him into an enthusiastic noogie. "Hell's escapees, two for two! Go team!"
"There, he's been freed! Now do as you said you would, paladin, or be damned as an oathbreaker!" Mizora demanded.
"Mizora... think back on our conversation, and replay every exact word in your head." I grinned at her viciously. "I never said I'd free you."
Her eyes opened wide in horror as she realized that she had at long last fallen for the same snare she'd caught Wyll and all her other victims in - of getting them hoping so desperately that they thought a promise had been made when it had never actually been spoken. And then all expression left her face forever as my fist slammed down ruthlessly on the button and the purge mechanism of the pod destroyed her utterly.
"She might actually revive from that in Hell, you know." Gale observed matter-of-factly. "You were only guessing that the purge mechanism would consume her soul as well as her body."
"Yes, but the pact was ended first so Wyll's still fine." I shrugged. "And I'm pretty sure that Karlach can tell us how Zariel's court is going to react to a weakened Mizora who won't even be able to do any of her emissary duties on the Prime for however long she's bound in Hell - assuming she even shows up there at all."
Karlach was by this point already doubled over helplessly in laughter, but threw me an eager thumbs-up anyway from where she was convulsing. "It'd be like tossing a raw fish into a bunch of cats!" she chortled out in-between guffaws. "She couldn't even get her friends to come mess us up, because she can't keep doing her dealmaking for as long as she can't return to the Prime and that means she wouldn't be able to pay for any help! And there's nobody who'd ever do a favor for that bitch for free, and Zariel damn sure doesn't have much use for people who can't keep up with their jobs!" Karlach finally managed to calm herself and continued on with purest satisfaction. "No, even if she respawned in Hell she still won't be in a position to make any trouble for us until most of us were already long dead."
"I had thought you promised, or at least implied, that you would deal with her fairly." Jaheira observed coolly from the doorway.
"I treated her exactly like she'd treated Wyll and all her other victims." I said equably. "What could be fairer than that?"
"A valid point." Jaheira agreed. "Come on. We've still got a job to finish."
A laboratory of some type contained a few pieces of useful loot, a machine for manipulating brains somehow that we didn't even want to touch, and several illithid rune slates whose psychically infused text whispered to our tadpoles of the ancient history of the race...
A flash of nautiloids lining a great dark void. One mind, with one purpose, moving in concert through the darkness between planes. The Grand Design in action, before the mutant-slave's corrupted power defied the great-minds and deafened her kin to their guidance.
"Mother Gith." Lae'zel said wonderingly. "So our oldest legends are true. She had the power to shield the minds of others from ghaik control, even against the force of an elder brain."
"Doesn't that remind you of something else we've seen?" I tapped the pouch that held the Astral Prism. "But it can't be her who's imprisoned in here - you said that Gith's being lost predated even the rise of the first Vlaakith. Also, Voss would hardly have 'mistakenly' rebelled against her, would he?"
"No." Lae'zel agreed. "Even allowing for distortion of the exact details of the histories, such a narrative does not seem remotely credible."
A final, mournful entry, carrying with it a vast hollow feeling of grief. The colony in decline. The Elder starving, falling dormant to preserve its strength and lie in wait - for some salvation to come.
"That seems to be a historical record of this colony." Gale analyzed.
"So my childhood home was built on top of an old, remnant illithid hive that had been laying here dormant for... centuries, apparently. Until these 'Chosen' came along to revive the hibernating brain - and enslave it." Isobel shivered.
"Let's hope it's still weakened, then." I said. "Let's move on. We're burning moonlight."
Some further exploration finally brought us to an enormous gaping cavern, dug so deeply in the earth that you'd almost swear clouds could form at its ceilling. As we stood on a platform of illithid construction next to a floating mobile platform similar to those we'd seen in the Gauntlet of Shar, only of entirely different construction, we looked down and down and down into the depths to dimly see a small circular platform on the bottom whose center was shining with an unholy green glow. Floating with silent menace towards the roof of this great subterranean dock were several nautiloid ships, intact and empty.
"They've got an entire flotilla of nautiloids docked here!" Shadowheart gaped fearfully. "How many illithids have they made? How many True Souls have been 'initiated'?"
"Did you not notice? The brine pools in the conversion center were entirely empty of larvae." Lae'zel explained. "They have exhaustively harvested the tadpoles from this hive, well beyond usual levels. And they will certainly have a use for all that they have grown." She looked to the side at a strange bulbous formation growing out of the wall whose multiple glowing ciliae looked like a translucent jellyfish. "A restoration pod. They can fully restore not only the health but the spells and powers of those who use them, once per day, drawing energy from the psionic collective to do so. A priceless opportunity for us to ensure that we are fully fit for battle against even the strength of those who await us." She shuddered. "I would normally rather die than risk using ghaik technology... but I must acknowledge the truth. We are exhausted, and we are desperate."
"If the elder brain is down there then we don't have anything that can take it out except Gale's orb, which I'm still not keen on using." I replied. "But we can't just stay up here either - if Ketheric hops on one of those nautiloids and sails away, we'll never catch him."
"No." Isobel agreed resolutely. "Aylin's down there, and I've already vowed that it has to end today. So it will, one way or the other."
As it turned out the restoration pod refused to do anything for Jaheira or Isobel, but the tadpoles in our heads fooled it into thinking we were authorized users. Fortunately they hadn't been as exhausted from all the battles today as we were, but they were still going in slightly understrength. But all six of us were entirely back to full fighting trim, and a brief mental touch from my tadpole was all it took to set the travel platform into motion.
At the bottom a short passageway led to a giant doorway like those on the nautiloid only several times the size, that slid smoothly open with the touch of a control. Our mouths were dry and our hearts thumping like drums as we slowly crept down the corridor. A short distance ahead was the platform we had dimly glimpsed from above, now plainly visible. There was a lower ring at the same level as the passageway we were entering by, surrounded by several isolated raised platforms within easy leaping distance at various points of the compass. A higher, inner ring overlooked the outer ring, and the whole series of platforms was suspended by pillars of stone over a giant, gaping hole in the earth whose depths were invisible underneath a roiling sea of bilious green light. It looked almost like the entrance to some eldritch underworld, promising an eternal damnation for any who fell into it-
And standing on the elevated inner platform we could see three upright figures in the distance and a fourth one kneeling motionlessly on the ground. One of the three was Ketheric Thorm. The other two were a strange pale woman with long blond braided hair and dressed in horrific-looking blood-red armor, and a young nobleman garbed in elaborate black-and-gold finery.
"Gortash." Karlach growled under her breath at the sight of the last man. "That letter wasn't lying, he's up to his neck in this!" she hissed.
"Father!" Wyll cried out softly, having gotten a look at the kneeling man. As the pale woman restlessly paced and stopped blocking the view, we all saw an aging bald man with skin as dark as Wyll's, still dressed in the armor of a senior officer of the Flaming Fist.
"Hold!" I grabbed his arm and kept him from rushing forward and whispered intently. "Keep your head down until we know where that damned elder brain is, or we can be sure it's not here!"
Some trick of the acoustics in this chamber brought the arguing voices of the Chosen trio to our ears, and we all fell breathlessly silent to eavesdrop-
"-you said it was under control." Gortash said icily.
"It isn't you I answer to, Gortash." Ketheric replied with death-like calm.
"Oh, the General voice!" Gortash said mockingly. "Is this where we salute?"
"Salute, yes." the pale woman said in a voice that echoed strangely. "With cleavers through his blood-starved flesh! How it crawls with failure." she sneered. "Like flies on lick-wet carrion."
"You forget yourself, Orin." Ketheric pointed an accusing finger. "I have played my part."
"You've built an army for our masters, true enough." Gortash acknowledged. "But what of the Astral Prism?!?" he insisted. "A rogue True Soul, flaunting it under your nose this whole time. And you ran from them." His rich orator's voice lashed at Ketheric like a whip.
"Sure that they would follow, and deliver it into my hands here." Ketheric replied reasonably. "If you would cease these distractions." he finished with an angry hiss.
"The distractions have been yours, Ketheric." Gortash accused. "Perhaps we should never have dug your daughter up!"
Ketheric's face contorted in pure rage and he lunged forward, his fist raised high to smash Gortash's skull - only to suddenly stop short several feet of his target. "So you haven't lost your edge." Gortash observed smugly, not having even blinked in the face of Ketheric's attack. "But you're still not as sharp as Orin is, I wager."
Because the reason Ketheric had stopped was the point of Orin's dagger pressed directly against his throat, her having moved so swiftly that it had literally happened between eyeblinks. Orin's psychotic grin wordlessly taunted Ketheric as Gortash arrogantly continued. "The slayer against the undying one. That might be fun to see."
"His crypt-breath sings to my sinews - again, again, againagainagain!" Orin giggled with a sick ecstasy. "But no, he is needed to lead the murder-march to Baldur's Grave." she pouted childishly.
"Speaking as someone who was raised entirely among fervent devotees of the cruelest goddess in the firmament, there is something direly wrong with that woman." Shadowheart shivered.
"If the Prism is truly within your grasp, Ketheric, then might I suggest closing your fist?" Gortash asked mildly, as Ketheric and Orin both stepped away from each other and relaxed from their combative postures. "Orin and I can wait for you no longer. The plan proceeds. We're going to the city, and we expect you to follow - after you have finished up here." Gortash and Orin both walked away from Ketheric towards the far end of the platform and looked down into the pit. Gortash raised his golden gauntlet high, and Orin matched his gesture with her blood-red dagger.
"The Edict of Bane!" Gortash suddenly boomed operatically, and a great gem on his gauntlet suddenly flared the same eerie color that the stone on Ketheric's breastplate had.
"The Lash of Bhaal!" Orin cried loudly, raising her dagger even higher as a great gem on its hilt also blazed forth with light.
And then all of our hearts sank as a great tentacle suddenly lashed up and over the edge of the platform, coming into view. The ground began to quiver as something massive came up from the depths, slowly becoming visible to us as it rose majestically into the air over the pit The elder brain was a great pulsing exposed cerebrum at least the size of a house, its exposed lobes glowing red with power and with multiple great tentacles reaching forth from where the brainstem would have been on a human brain. Perched directly between its lobes, up where the front brim of a hat would have been on a human head, was a great three-pronged crown with multiple smaller gems set within it blazing forth with light of the same color as the three gems the three Chosen bore.
"That crown!" Gale gasped wondrously. "I can feel the power radiating from it! If I but had the tongue of a bard, to describe what I'm seeing..."
The elder brain quivered, lashing back and forth in suppressed frustration, as Gortash and Orin visibly strained against an invisible force. Ketheric stood by, silently watching their struggles, until with visible reluctance he finally strode across the platform to stand in formation with them.
"The Testament of Myrkul!" Ketheric's voice roared out, completing their unholy ceremony, and his own gem blazed forth to match theirs. The elder brain grew still, floating docilely in front of them.
"One of the cruelest and most powerful creatures in all existence, leashed by a trio of mortals." Lae'zel said in awe.
"But not leashed very tightly." I muttered. "Did you see how those two were struggling to keep it still until Ketheric finally pitched in? That might explain what he was talking about on the roof."
Gale wordlessly looked at me, as if asking that I were really sure about not using the orb, and I shrugged helplessly. He nodded in resignation, and we kept watching.
"There we are." Gortash said smugly, after the three Chosen finished silently commanding the elder brain. "It wouldn't do to fight in front of our guest. Behold, Duke Ravengard! The Absolute!" He dramatically waved his hand with a flourish at the floating elder brain.
The kneeling Ravengard shook his head in denial and horror, flinching away from the visage of the Absolute. Orin kneeled down behind him and contemptuously spat in his ear. "You wag your tongue-flap in vain, Ulderling! While the worm holds the whip, your feeble flesh will serve us."
"Already tadpoled." Wyll lowered his head in despair. "Damn!"
"But still alive." I encouraged him. "Just like we are."
"And now it's really time for us to be going." Gortash said with a cheerful clap of his hands. "Orin and I will empty out this place and begin the march. You may catch up with the army once you've retrieved the Astral Prism. Oh, and Ketheric, do try not to sulk." Gortash taunted him mildly. "You're supposed to be the fearsome General, come to conquer the city." Gortash turned away and strolled arrogantly to where Orin was standing guard over the subdued Grand Duke. "And I am the hero who will save it!"
Ketheric hefted a wicked-looking flail, substitute for his lost warhammer, and turned his back on his co-conspirators and angrily marched away. The Absolute reached out and gently brushed the two Chosen and Wyll's father with a tentacle, and then the elder brain vanished in a flash of teleportation - taking everyone on the platform but Ketheric with it.
It is time, faithful ones! the Absolute's voice suddenly rang clearly through all our ears. Images flickered behind the eyes of those of us who had tadpoles - the crowned elder brain triumphantly floating in the air over the army encamped west of Moonrise Towers, the thousands of dupes and thralls raising their weapons with gleeful battle-cries. March, for Baldur's Gate! We go to prepare the way! The images faded and the pressure on our minds vanished as the Absolute was gone, presumably teleporting or flying ahead of its horde of cultists. But we knew that far above our heads, that very same horde was now marching towards the city.
Ketheric stood alone on the platform, his hands behind his back in a stiff parade rest. He apparently couldn't see us where we crouched just inside the doorway, hidden by the shadows and the passageway walls before the large open platform.
"I can see Aylin, now that that horrid thing is gone." Isobel muttered. "She's in the far right corner of the room, on that raised platform. Imprisoned again."
"So Ketheric's invulnerable again until we break her out of that soul cage." I muttered. "Mind flayer up on the near right platform, with a clear field of view and field of fire all down that side. Multiple necromites on the left elevated platform, towards the back where they can be a sniper team. And Ketheric up front."
"A bit overconfident to think he can take us all on by himself... but his two co-conspirators stole away most of his troops. Are they leaving him to die, or do they truly believe he can beat us all?" Jaheira wondered.
"For as long as he's got the link with Aylin, he can beat us all." I said. "But he hasn't thought of everything. Did anyone memorize an invisibility spell?"
"I did." Jaheira said. "Not usual for druids, I admit, but I study the Circle of the Land path of druidism and we have a few extra tricks. What are you thinking?"
"Gale, got anything for flying?" I asked him.
"One potion left." he answered.
"Good." I said. "We make Isobel invisible, then give her the potion. Nobody can reach Aylin's platform on foot without going near the mind flayer, who will almost certainly psychically sense them whether they're invisible or not - but he won't be sensing behind him if he's concentrating on his front. Am I right, Lae'zel?"
"Yes." Lae'zel agreed.
"So Isobel flies around the outside wall of the room, invisibly, and reaches Aylin and sets her free as our opening move." I confirmed. "Jaheira, you know wild shape, yes?"
"All druids do, even if I have not mastered as many forms as Halsin has. That was his particular specialty." Jaheira confirmed.
"Do you have any forms that are small birds? Because if you do, then you can get right behind the mind flayer." I smiled. "And as soon as the party starts, you can shove it right over the edge and into the pit."
"Mind flayers levitate." Jaheira said flatly.
"Not while I'm dispelling them, they don't." I grinned back at her.
"Necromites have a nasty sting, but they're fragile." Gale said. "One simple Shatter spell and I can turn that whole group into powdered bone."
"If Ketheric sees only us six marching up to him, he'll likely think that's all we brought." I agreed. "So we go first and engage him in conversation - he's invincible right now, he'll almost certainly want to talk before he fights just like he did last time. And while he's looking at us you two will get into position. When Isobel frees Aylin, that's the signal for me, Jaheira, and Gale to all take our shots. And Ketheric will suddenly go from being the invincible man with allies all around to being vulnerable, alone, and surrounded."
"And maybe then he'll finally see sense." Isobel said plaintively. "But if he doesn't..." She sighed. "Then we do what we must."
"Just watch Aylin's back and keep yourself safe." I told Isobel. "Nobody expects you to actually shed the blood of your own father."
"We don't even want you to." Jaheira agreed.
"Thank you." Isobel said.
We waited until Isobel and Jaheira started to move, then boldly strode down the path towards the central platform. Ketheric saw us coming as soon as we moved out of the shadowed doorway and into the light, and calmly, expressionlessly waited for us to arrive at the section of the lower ring directly beneath his perch.
"There you are. As I predicted." Ketheric greeted us calmly. "What is it about death, I wonder, that draws one toward it like a moth to light? You could have run away. Absconded with the Prism. The one thing that could have prevented me from fulfilling my destiny. But the lure of one's destiny is irresistible, isn't it?"
"There's no destiny here, Ketheric." I answered him. Out of the corner of my eye I noted Isobel still struggling with Aylin's new soul cage, so I kept talking. "Just a man who has run away from his only remaining family. Absconded from his fatherhood to instead become obsessed with death and destruction."
Ketheric's face twisted in anger, but unlike Gortash my challenge did not move him to blind rage - perhaps because he believed that I at least was sincerely a friend of Isobel. "You of all people should understand. Unlike the lying Shar, Myrkul truly fulfilled his promise - a promise no other god could fulfill. My daughter was returned to me, and in exchange for that I swore to serve him forever. When he asked me to join Orin and Gortash to awaken the elder brain, to grow the cult of the Absolute, and then eventually to wrest control of it from them, I did not question why. I did not need to share my Lord Myrkul's enthusiasm for the goal. He has commanded it of me, and that is all I need to devote my utmost effort towards achieving it." Ketheric nodded to me sagely. "Every god or goddess I have served has received my truest devotion, at least as true as your own to your Oath. But only one of them rewarded that devotion, and it is that one I will not forsake. I have fought great wars before, in the service of others. But for my Lord Myrkul, I would condemn all of Faerun to death-" And then Ketheric suddenly gasped and spun around.
"All of Faerun, death-seeker?" Aylin spat at him challengingly, her blade out and her wings spread defensively over Isobel standing behind her. "Even her?"
Gale's Shatter spell detonated the cluster of necromites at the same time Jaheira resumed her true shape directly behind the mind flayer and viciously slashed it across its hamstrings before shoulder-checking it into the void. It was barely able to concentrate on its psionic powers and levitate itself in mid-air, saving itself from a fatal fall - until with a brush of my templar powers its levitation was disrupted and it fell like a stone into the depths of the earth. Several intellect devourers we hadn't seen tried charging the party, but Lae'zel and Karlach contemptuously beat them into paste. We spread out, flanking Ketheric on three sides in addition to Aylin and Isobel in his rear.
"Give it up, father!" Isobel begged him. "Aylin speaks truth! Even if you care nothing about the world, even if I am your sole obsession, you still cannot do this! Myrkul will only let you keep me until he no longer has need of you, and then he will take us from each other... forever!"
"Have you forgotten the Dead Three's founding legend, Ketheric?" I remembered Gale's impromptu lecture at Last Light Inn. "Are you ignorant of what Myrkul said to Bane, on the day they first ascended to divinity?" 'But I choose the dead, and by doing so I truly win, because all you are lord over, Bane, will eventually be mine. All things must die - even gods.' I quoted. "All things must die - that was Myrkul's very first proclamation! His wish is that nothing will be allowed to escape his grasp forever, that eventually the entire world must be swept clean of life!!" I nodded towards Isobel. "As you yourself just said!"
"No!" Ketheric said, his voice thick with horror. "He would not do that! I could not have- you are wrong! You must be wrong!"
"You're his Chosen!" Gale cried out. "He speaks to you! Of all the people in this room, only you and Aylin can actually talk directly to their gods and get an answer! So if you won't listen to what her deity has to say, then listen to your own! Ask Myrkul what his true endgame is! And see if he'll tell you!"
"My Lord!" Ketheric cried desperately. "Grant me the strength to smite these heretics! Share your truth with me! Expose their lies!"
For a long moment, the room stood in absolute silence. And then suddenly the earth began not just to quiver, but to throb. The ground shook with a dull heavy beat, as did the air-
"Remind me why encouraging the Chosen of the god of death to directly invoke his patron's presence was a good idea?" I facepalmed.
"Perhaps I should have tried another line of reasoning." Gale admitted embarrassedly.
"My Lord, please, no!" Ketheric cried desperately. "Not her! Not them! Not this-!"
Ketheric's words were cut off like a knife as a giant gout of green death welled up from the pit below us like a volcanic eruption of pure necrotic energy. Aylin frantically grabbed Isobel and wrapped her wings around her, and Jaheira fell prone directly in the center of the wide stone platform she was in and curled into a tight protective ball. We were doing the same, shielding ourselves from the fountain of death energy with the rocks we lay on, but the giant green pillar of energy was only in the center of the pit, and only shooting up through the inner ring. The only person in the area of effect was Ketheric, and as the eruption faded away we saw that he was not there-
-and then a horrific presence filed the air.
You dare break the faith of one who belongs to me? a great, rasping whisper filled the air without sound.
The distant thudding became louder and louder, the sound of giant funeral drums beating a dirge-
I AM THE SMILE OF THE WORM-CLEANSED SKULL. I AM THE REGRETS OF THOSE WHO REMAIN, AND THE RESTLESSNESS OF THOSE WHO ARE GONE.
One skeletal hand, over half the length of a man from fingertips to wrist and attached to the bony forearm of a giant, reached up from the pit and clasped itself around the inner ring of the central platform.
I AM THE HAUNT OF MAUSOLEUMS. THE GOD OF GRAVES AND AGE. OF DUST AND DUSK.
Another skeletal hand reached up to also clasp around the ring, and both arms pulled. A giant's skull, surmounted by a golden triangular crown, began to rise into view-
I AM MYRKUL, LORD OF BONES, AND YOU HAVE DEFEATED MY CHOSEN.
The avatar of the death god stood tall, floating suspended in the center of the pit. Its horrific visage glared down at us all from several stories in the air despite the fact that its lower body was still out of view beneath the platform and its waist floated level with the innermost ring.
BUT IT IS NO MATTER.
A scythe the size of a small tower materialized in one outthrust hand of bone.
FOR I AM DEATH, AND I AM NOT THE END. I AM A BEGINNING.
Author's Note: Don't be too hard on Gale. The Avatar of Myrkul was showing up no matter what he said - Ketheric situated the fight directly over a gate to his realm. The wily General always has a trump card in reserve.
Granted, Myrkul wasn't expecting them to actually successfully psyche out Ketheric either.
And yup, Hawke totally ended Mizora. In game you can't do that - Wyll falls right for the whole 'If you let me out, I'll end your pact!' without stopping to ask himself if Mizora is going to play silly buggers with exact contract terms. I mean, she's only done that to him fifteen dozen times before, but this time it'll be different! In-game, Wyll's starting Wisdom defaults to 10. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if it shouldn't have been 8. Or 6. Wyll's a good guy, but dear Lord does he suck at life choices.
"He spoke of himself as the Chosen of Myrkul." Gale said grimly. "My mentor Elminster is a Chosen of Mystra, gifted with a spark of her own divine essence embedded within him. And that grants him great power, but also requires him to obey his patron's commands - even when he direly wishes otherwise. I don't understand everything about the relationship that they have but I do know that it is closer even than that of a priestess to their goddess." He sighed. "Your restored life may have been a gift to him from Myrkul, but I fear that your father's own still lies in pawn to the Lord of Bones - and that it continues only so long as he continues to further their will."
"Perhaps that's why he so desperately wishes to steal Aylin's immortality." Wyll observed. "Only eternal life can keep him out of the death god's clutches."
"Well, we damn sure can't let Ketheric stay out of ours." Jaheira vowed. "My second-in-command can take charge up here as soon as I brief them, and then I'm coming with you."
"Gale, dig through that collection of scrolls and see if you can find one for Feather Fall." I ordered him. "That's one hell of a drop."
Shadowheart healed most of my wounds and Jaheira finished briefing her men, and then Gale cast his spell and we jumped. We all fell down, down through the hole to gently land at the bottom. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all composed of a horrid glistening pink/purple flesh, the same as the architecture onboard the illithid nautiloid. Only this was moister, somehow. Softer. More alive. It was like walking through the intestines of a dead colossus, only worse. The very air seemed to be whispering to us-
"Is everybody else hearing that, or just those of us with tadpoles?" I asked.
"I hear nothing." Jaheira said briskly. "It must be the illithid hive mind. Can you make out what it is saying?"
"Just... 'prepare'." Gale replied. "The Astral Prism is blocking most of the broadcast."
"A ghaik colony." Lae'zel glared suspiciously at the walls around us, her blade out and quivering. "My teachers in the creche spoke of them, but I have never seen one before. We must all be cautious."
"We must all be scared halfway shitless, more like it." Karlach muttered.
"That as well." Lae'zel agreed immediately.
A few swings of a blade cut through the membrane blocking the only exit out of the room, and we came out into a hallway. "We'll have to explore each one of these side chambers before we move on. There might be survivors... and we can't afford to let any mind flayers get behind us and flank attack." I decided.
"I told my Harpers to come down and start searching the oubliette beneath the dungeon level, the one you did not have time to explore when last you were here." Jaheira said. "Hopefully they can find the entrance between there and this colony."
"Not least because we'd like to be able to leave here once we're done." Shadowheart agreed.
Isobel muttered a cantrip for guidance, then carefully studied the area. "Unless I've gotten turned around, I think the dungeon level is that way." She pointed at a door on the right side of the hallway. As soon as we opened it, an acrid stench assaulted our nostrils.
"Myrkul's armpit!" Isobel cursed. "It smells like a mass grave in here!"
"It is a mass grave in here." Jaheira said grimly, as we stared into a scene of butchery out of our worst nightmares. Rotting viscera and spoiled blood positively drenched the floor, and piles of bones and rotting, dismembered corpses were haphazardly strewn everywhere.
"I think we've found where all the corpses they 'disposed of' from the dungeon level ended up." I said, my gorge rising. "I wonder how many 'pilgrimages' to Moonrise ended here."
"Chop. Chop. Chop." a voice chanted dully, as a bugbear drenched in blood and gore literally from head to toe loomed at us out of the darkness. A butcher's cleaver was clenched in one hand, and the corpse of a young boy was slung over his shoulder. Ignoring us as if we weren't present, the lumbering humanoid turned and laid the corpse out on a filthy workbench, and then the cleaver began to rise and fall. "Pretty pink. Make more. Never think. Chop. Chop. Chop."
"What are you doing?" I asked the dazed bugbear.
"Chop. Chop. Help them... become...?" it slowly and awkwardly fumbled for words, as if barely conscious of our presence.
"Become what?" Wyll burst out, exasperated.
"Part of... One Mind. Four little feet. Dancing. To same song." it whispered.
"The intellect devourers." Lae'zel spat. "This thrall has been set to the task of harvesting the corpses of those judged unfit for conversion to ghaik. To salvage their brains to make ghaik tools with."
I risked a probe into the bugbear's mind, and realized to my horror that there practically was no mind. They'd hollowed him out, burned most of his consciousness away, leaving behind only a vestigial awareness and the well-worn grooves of a single, programmed routine. Crack the bones. Harvest the brains. Leave the unworthy meat to feed the hive. No desires, no thoughts, no will, all engraved away to leave behind nothing but the remnants of a soul helplessly trapped inside an automaton of flesh.
"Where is your master?" I asked him.
"Mas-ter?" the bugbear's voice cringed, showing visible emotion - fear - for the first time. "No. Not here. Gone deep!"
"Chop." I asked the bugbear, using the only name for itself that it could remember. "Do you want this to stop? Do you want an ending?"
"Yes." Chop replied softly. "Yes. Please." it begged, its eyes screaming from an impassive face.
I struck as quickly and cleanly as I could, impaling him directly through the heart. "Rest now. It's all over." I reassured him.
"Free..." he whispered wonderingly, looking back at me with gratitude, and then he died.
"Selune have mercy on this poor creature." Isobel sorrowed. "This is what the Absolute would have us all become? This is the 'new world' that Father wanted to give me?"
-The moment comes. The Absolute moves.- the telepathic voice wafted through the air.
"I think the elder brain is waking up..." Shadowheart said worriedly.
-Prepare the march. My Chosen gather below.- the Absolute spoke.
"Oh wonderful, all of them." Jaheira swore. "We had our hands full with just the one!"
-Many hearts. One soul.-
"Enough!" I swore, blocking out the voice with an act of will. "Let's move."
We found a grating that led to another section of the colony above us, in the oubliette level under the dungeon, but we couldn't find any entrance. Several of Jaheira's Harpers were already searching the oubliette, and we called out to them through the grating - Jaheira ordered them to work on finding a way to break through and come down to help reinforce and clear this level as well when they managed that, and then we got back to searching.
There was a barracks section down here containing several Myrkulite acolytes and their ghoul servants which we cleared out, and another large concentration of undead - lesser zombies, mostly, with a few winged ghouls and one Death Shepherd - in a large laboratory area. These battles didn't exhaust us, strictly speaking, but we were using up spells and healing potions that we'd rather not have. Somewhere in the deepest levels of this complex awaited not only Ketheric but almost certainly his fellow 'Chosen of the Absolute', as well as the elder brain itself, and we didn't remotely have enough power for that confrontation. Right now the best we were hoping to do was find and free the still-missing prisoners and then open up a route to the surface, preparatory to eventually bringing a small army down here.
"We've still got that big area near the barracks we didn't explore." I said. "Hopefully this is the deeper dungeon-" The bio-mechanical iris door squeezed open, and we were confronted by a large oblong chamber with multiple pods spaced all around the borders of the room. And I was very familiar with those pods - we all were. Because we'd been trapped in them onboard the nautiloid, when they'd tadpoled us.
"A conversion chamber." Lae'zel said.
A frantic search of those pods produced the results that several of them contained newborn mind flayers, the transformation on them already completed, while the others contained several Flaming Fists apparently captured during the attack on Waukeen's Rest as well as two very familiar tieflings - Zevlor and Mol. A quick probe with our tadpoles produced the startling revelation that the still-intact prisoners hadn't been tadpoled - their brains were clean. All of them, mind flayers and prisoners alike, floated in dreamlike suspension as they were sustained by the bio-machinery of the pods.
"It's like they just abandoned their job half done and then didn't follow up for the past couple of days. We must have been distracting them quite a bit." I thought out loud.
"Father's not here!" Wyll said, still frantically searching through the last few empty pods. "Where have they taken him?"
"Deeper below, presumably." Shadowheart answered. "Wyll, don't despair. He's certainly in danger, but out of all the prisoners they've taken he's the absolute last one they'd kill. If they have plans for Baldur's Gate, they need the Grand Duke alive."
"There don't seem to be any individual pod releases, or at least none that I can find." Gale said. "Just that master set of controls over there in the corner."
"Wait, why can I read these labels?" I wondered, having suddenly realized that the illithid script on the controls was comprehensible. "Damn it, what have these tadpoles been doing while we weren't paying attention?"
"Hopefully as little as possible." Gale agreed. "And yes, I can read them too. 'Release'... and 'Purge'. Well, that's plain enough."
"'Purge is obviously not an option, but if we hit Release we're going to release the mind flayers too." I groused.
"So we pre-position people behind their pods and cut their throats from ambush while they're still waking up." Jaheira snorted. "How simple can it get?"
Jaheira's plan went off without a hitch, and the survivors all struggled their way back to consciousness even as the newborn illithids lay bleeding on the floor.
"Well it's about time you got here!" Mol was predictably the first one to recover and start running her mouth.
"Nice to see you too, Mol." I snarked back.
"Likewise." she agreed, more seriously. "I was starting to think I'd made a bad decision in turning down that devil's bargain and waiting for you instead, so thank the gods you did turn up eventually. Do you know that he came to me while I was stuck in that tube and offered me a way out?"
"That would explain why you were dragged away from the attack on Last Light by one of the flying ghouls even though their leader had ordered them all to go after Isobel instead." I realized. "I'd been wondering why it had just suddenly gone off on its own, but if it was all a setup by a certain someone-"
"Yeah, I was thinking the same thing." Mol agreed. "Smooth bastard digs a hole behind my back for me to get pushed into by someone else, then drops by later to sell me a ladder - at a very high price." Her voice turned embarrassed. "And it would've worked, too, if somebody hadn't pointed out to me how I was already getting conned in that lanceboard game. Thanks. I owe you a big one."
"Just try to keep your operations at least halfway legitimate in the future, all right?" I said. "There's a lot of sharks out there in the ocean, and I think you're starting to learn that some of them have had a head start on you."
"Don't rub it in." she grinned back, before nodding. "But yeah, I'll keep it in mind."
"Gods, my head." Zevlor moaned as he struggled back to consciousness. "Hawke?" He focused on me.
"You're in an illithid colony under Moonrise Towers." I tried to reorient him. "It's been a couple of days since your convoy was hit."
"The others. Did they survive?!?" he begged.
"There were casualties, but most of them made it to shelter." Jaheira reassured him. "And we rescued the ones that the cult took prisoner a day ago. You two were the last unaccounted for."
"Thank the Triad." Zevlor said relievedly. "The Absolute- it crawled into my head, offering me-" He shook his head angrily. "It doesn't matter what it offered me, because I managed to hold out. Just barely." He dispelled the dark memory with an effort and refocused on me. "What's the plan?"
"Scouting out a way into the deepest sublevel, then clearing and holding a route through for our hoped-for reinforcements." I said. "We're almost entirely certain there's a damn Elder Brain down there, and two high-value prisoners still unaccounted for. Three." I corrected myself, remembering the infernal 'asset' that Wyll had to recover on pain of eternal damnation.
"No, two." Wyll's amused voice came to us. "Because look at who I just found in the next room."
We left Jaheira, Isobel, and Zevlor behind to start organizing the survivors and getting them back upstairs to wait for the Harper reinforcements and headed into the back room of the conversion center, where we all broke out in uncontrollable grins at the sight of the last prisoner here. One who had been isolated in a very specially-reinforced containment pod of her own.
"STOP GAWKING AND GET ME OUT OF HERE!" Mizora screeched angrily.
I stopped in shock at this unexpected sight, and then was awestruck by a full realization of just how priceless and unique this opportunity could be. A plan began to take shape in my mind-
"No wonder you had to ask Raphael to run a message for you." I smirked at the helplessly imprisoned devil. "Do I even want to know how much he overcharged you? Or how much more he was asking you for a rescue, instead of what he extorted from you for just running a message to us and leaving you hoping we'd get here in time?"
"I. Don't. Want. To. Talk. About. It." Mizora bit off each word as if it were stabbing her in the tongue.
I leaned over and whispered a few quick sentences into Karlach's ear, then turned to Wyll. "Wyll, could you do me a favor?"
"Of course. What?" He turned to me-
"Hold still!" I said quickly as I hurriedly snatched his rapier out of its sheath. In the moment of shock that produced, Karlach stepped behind him and pinned him in a chokehold from behind right on cue.
"'Should the promised soul refuse obeyance or neglect duty, the pact-holder shall cast the promised in Avernus as a lemure.'" I quoted the clause from Wyll's contract that Mizora had recently threatened him with in her message. "Except now Wyll isn't either refusing or neglecting - he's being restrained against his will, and that means you can't punish him for failing to stop what we're doing. Karlach, if Wyll tries to escape, spellcast, or do anything else, then choke him out right away with a sleeper hold."
"You got it, boss!" she said cheerfully, as the others caught on to my intention and relaxed from their own startlement. "Sorry about the rough stuff, Wyll... but you'll love the ending, I promise!"
"Do you really think this is going to-?" Mizora spat, and I cut her off with a headshake.
"Let's get one thing clear right now. There's two controls to your pod, and one of them destroys you immediately. And the fact that Wyll is not yet killed, exploded, imploded, turned into a lemure, or anything else unpleasant and irreversible - as well as the contract proviso that eternally damns him if you die - is why I haven't just hit the 'purge' button yet and turned you into mind flayer residue." I said, my voice fully as iron as Aylin's condemnation of Thorm. "So if you still find a way to get past our restraints on Wyll right now, if you think you're being clever, then the best-case scenario is we can subdue him without hurting him and you're still stuck in the pod... only negotations go even worse for you. And the worst-case scenario is that our friend dies... and then you follow him, right on the spot."
"Go ahead, kill me!" Mizora spat. "If I die outside the Hells, I'll just revive there! And while I might be much diminished-"
"You won't be diminished, you'll be consumed." I said flatly. "As near as I can decipher, the 'purge' command works by supercharging the transformation into illithid at a lethally fast speed. And illithids don't have souls, remember?" Mizora paled in realization as to just how poor her bargaining position really was. "You didn't know that, did you? About the pods, I mean. I'm certain you knew the part about soul-destruction being part of the illithid transformation... you were just hoping that I didn't."
"... I will acknowledge that you have me at a temporary disadvantage." Mizora began to wheedle. "But-"
'But 'temporary' can become 'permanent' for you as easy as the push of a button." I held up my index finger dramatically. "So what we have right now is a stand-off. We can't kill you without also sacrificing Wyll thanks to his pact's penalty clauses... but by the same token he's the only hostage against us that you have right now and your current maximum lifespan is Wyll's lifespan plus a few heartbeats, and no longer. So until the stand-off is broken, you can't go anywhere." I smiled. "But we can come and go as we wish, even if we have to knock Wyll out and drag him from this room kicking and screaming." I shrugged. "And then I'll just move your pod to somewhere else before he can come back here, and never tell him where. It's not a refusal to free you on his part if he can't find you. So, how many days, or weeks, or months do you think you can stay stuffed in there before your affairs in the Hells suffer from your prolonged absence? Before your reputation in Hell absolutely craters from having been so careless as to somehow get yourself imprisoned by mortals and mind flayers? Or just before the boredom drives you mad?" I mentally thanked Raphael - not that I'd ever actually thank him to his face - for setting an example for me with Yurgir, as I hoped what had worked for him there would work for me here.
"What do you want?!?" Mizora screeched. It seemed to be working so far, then!
"Wyll released from his pact. His soul to be his own again." I said flatly.
"All right! You let me out and I'll release him from his pact, it's a deal!" she agreed hurriedly with a bright, innocent smile.
"Oh, and when exactly would you release Wyll from his pact?" I questioned, and her face collapsed into a mask of rage the instant she realized that the copper piece had dropped. "Next month? Next year? I know, how's about a single heartbeat before his eventual mortal death? Or a single heartbeat after?"
"Well of course I'd do it expeditiously!" she insisted. "Ask Wyll! I always live up to the terms of a contract!"
"Thank you for reminding me." Wyll contributed. "I've been taken by surprise far too often by contract terms I hadn't known about or overlooked, again and again - but now that I recall, you can't actually lie to me about what is in the contract. You can only 'forget' to mention details that I don't know to ask about. Which is why I'm asking you now, what exactly does my contract specify about 'expeditiously' releasing me from it?"
"Clause Z, Section 13. If the soul-binder consents to separation, she will release the soul-bearer from all obligation within six months." Mizora admitted like pulling teeth.
"Six months?" Shadowheart rolled her eyes. "I wonder how many attempts to arm-twist him into an even newer and worse deal, or just to kill him while you still had a lien on his soul, would occupy those six months?"
"At a rough guess I'd say at least five months, 30 days, 23 hours, and fifty-nine minutes' worth." I agreed. "Fortunately, however, the wording of the clause said 'within' six months... so she could do it earlier if she chose to." I stared MIzora down. "So do it earlier. As in right now."
"Are you mad, or do you think I am?!?" Mizora said. "You want me to give up my last piece of leverage on this situation while I'm still stuck in here?"
"Yes, that is exactly what I want you to do." I drawled. "Wasn't it obvious?"
"Oh, and Wyll gets to keep his powers." Shadowheart said. "A warlock's abilities don't necessarily have to go away even after the pact ends, it's just that revoking them for breach of contract is a common clause." She shrugged. "So don't enforce the clause and tear up the pact anyway."
"And what, do you want the secret of godhood in addition to all that? Or Wyll's humanity restored? Because the one of those is as impossible for me as the other!" Mizora spat sarcastically. "Look, if you miserable bastards don't want me devoting my entire immortal life to making you as miserable as I can possibly manage, then you're opening this damn pod right now and being grateful that I'm only waiting six months!"
"You know, it occurs to me that if I just leave you here and accidentally let slip to the next illithid I see that there's a free meal waiting in this chamber, it won't actually be killing you on Wyll's behalf - and I won't actually be ordering you killed on his behalf, either." I raised the ante. "Because how much mileage have devils gotten out of 'innocent' suggestions that weren't actually orders?" I smirked at her, before my expression turned murderous. "You will end the pact right now, unconditionally and entirely, with Wyll keeping all the warlock talents you've already gifted him. Because until after all that happens, I'm not going to even consider opening that pod... and I'm pretty sure that I also get what I want regarding Wyll's pact ending if he somehow outlives you."
"Wyll-!" Mizora began, only to break off hurriedly as my finger tapped menacingly on the 'Purge' button.
"One minute to decide, then we walk right now and you can hope that you're still around tomorrow and that we're in a better mood." I said menacingly.
"And I'm supposed to trust you?!?" Mizora shrieked. "I absolutely will not give up my binding on Wyll before I'm freed! It's the only leverage I have!"
"So we're supposed to trust you without any leverage?" I retorted. "Not happening! But you're focused too much on Wyll's binding and have forgotten that there's also a binding on me. I'm a paladin, remember?"
"All right! All right! Swear on your Oath that you'll free me, and I'll do it!" Mizora desperately agreed.
"On my Oath, if you immediately and unconditionally destroy Wyll's contract and set him entirely and permanently free, while allowing him to keep his warlock abilities, then I will treat you exactly as I have just described." I proclaimed solemnly.
"Done!" she cried immediately. Inside the pod she squirmed around until she could get a hand into her pocket and it came out with the scroll that held Wyll's contract... and as she held it up where we all could see it, the contract burst into flames and crumbled into ash. Wyll suddenly gasped and went slack with relief.
"I'm free." he said, wonderingly. "I can feel it- I'm a free warlock! It's a miracle!"
"Join the club!" Karlach yelled cheerfully as she converted her choke hold on him into an enthusiastic noogie. "Hell's escapees, two for two! Go team!"
"There, he's been freed! Now do as you said you would, paladin, or be damned as an oathbreaker!" Mizora demanded.
"Mizora... think back on our conversation, and replay every exact word in your head." I grinned at her viciously. "I never said I'd free you."
Her eyes opened wide in horror as she realized that she had at long last fallen for the same snare she'd caught Wyll and all her other victims in - of getting them hoping so desperately that they thought a promise had been made when it had never actually been spoken. And then all expression left her face forever as my fist slammed down ruthlessly on the button and the purge mechanism of the pod destroyed her utterly.
"She might actually revive from that in Hell, you know." Gale observed matter-of-factly. "You were only guessing that the purge mechanism would consume her soul as well as her body."
"Yes, but the pact was ended first so Wyll's still fine." I shrugged. "And I'm pretty sure that Karlach can tell us how Zariel's court is going to react to a weakened Mizora who won't even be able to do any of her emissary duties on the Prime for however long she's bound in Hell - assuming she even shows up there at all."
Karlach was by this point already doubled over helplessly in laughter, but threw me an eager thumbs-up anyway from where she was convulsing. "It'd be like tossing a raw fish into a bunch of cats!" she chortled out in-between guffaws. "She couldn't even get her friends to come mess us up, because she can't keep doing her dealmaking for as long as she can't return to the Prime and that means she wouldn't be able to pay for any help! And there's nobody who'd ever do a favor for that bitch for free, and Zariel damn sure doesn't have much use for people who can't keep up with their jobs!" Karlach finally managed to calm herself and continued on with purest satisfaction. "No, even if she respawned in Hell she still won't be in a position to make any trouble for us until most of us were already long dead."
"I had thought you promised, or at least implied, that you would deal with her fairly." Jaheira observed coolly from the doorway.
"I treated her exactly like she'd treated Wyll and all her other victims." I said equably. "What could be fairer than that?"
"A valid point." Jaheira agreed. "Come on. We've still got a job to finish."
A laboratory of some type contained a few pieces of useful loot, a machine for manipulating brains somehow that we didn't even want to touch, and several illithid rune slates whose psychically infused text whispered to our tadpoles of the ancient history of the race...
A flash of nautiloids lining a great dark void. One mind, with one purpose, moving in concert through the darkness between planes. The Grand Design in action, before the mutant-slave's corrupted power defied the great-minds and deafened her kin to their guidance.
"Mother Gith." Lae'zel said wonderingly. "So our oldest legends are true. She had the power to shield the minds of others from ghaik control, even against the force of an elder brain."
"Doesn't that remind you of something else we've seen?" I tapped the pouch that held the Astral Prism. "But it can't be her who's imprisoned in here - you said that Gith's being lost predated even the rise of the first Vlaakith. Also, Voss would hardly have 'mistakenly' rebelled against her, would he?"
"No." Lae'zel agreed. "Even allowing for distortion of the exact details of the histories, such a narrative does not seem remotely credible."
A final, mournful entry, carrying with it a vast hollow feeling of grief. The colony in decline. The Elder starving, falling dormant to preserve its strength and lie in wait - for some salvation to come.
"That seems to be a historical record of this colony." Gale analyzed.
"So my childhood home was built on top of an old, remnant illithid hive that had been laying here dormant for... centuries, apparently. Until these 'Chosen' came along to revive the hibernating brain - and enslave it." Isobel shivered.
"Let's hope it's still weakened, then." I said. "Let's move on. We're burning moonlight."
Some further exploration finally brought us to an enormous gaping cavern, dug so deeply in the earth that you'd almost swear clouds could form at its ceilling. As we stood on a platform of illithid construction next to a floating mobile platform similar to those we'd seen in the Gauntlet of Shar, only of entirely different construction, we looked down and down and down into the depths to dimly see a small circular platform on the bottom whose center was shining with an unholy green glow. Floating with silent menace towards the roof of this great subterranean dock were several nautiloid ships, intact and empty.
"They've got an entire flotilla of nautiloids docked here!" Shadowheart gaped fearfully. "How many illithids have they made? How many True Souls have been 'initiated'?"
"Did you not notice? The brine pools in the conversion center were entirely empty of larvae." Lae'zel explained. "They have exhaustively harvested the tadpoles from this hive, well beyond usual levels. And they will certainly have a use for all that they have grown." She looked to the side at a strange bulbous formation growing out of the wall whose multiple glowing ciliae looked like a translucent jellyfish. "A restoration pod. They can fully restore not only the health but the spells and powers of those who use them, once per day, drawing energy from the psionic collective to do so. A priceless opportunity for us to ensure that we are fully fit for battle against even the strength of those who await us." She shuddered. "I would normally rather die than risk using ghaik technology... but I must acknowledge the truth. We are exhausted, and we are desperate."
"If the elder brain is down there then we don't have anything that can take it out except Gale's orb, which I'm still not keen on using." I replied. "But we can't just stay up here either - if Ketheric hops on one of those nautiloids and sails away, we'll never catch him."
"No." Isobel agreed resolutely. "Aylin's down there, and I've already vowed that it has to end today. So it will, one way or the other."
As it turned out the restoration pod refused to do anything for Jaheira or Isobel, but the tadpoles in our heads fooled it into thinking we were authorized users. Fortunately they hadn't been as exhausted from all the battles today as we were, but they were still going in slightly understrength. But all six of us were entirely back to full fighting trim, and a brief mental touch from my tadpole was all it took to set the travel platform into motion.
At the bottom a short passageway led to a giant doorway like those on the nautiloid only several times the size, that slid smoothly open with the touch of a control. Our mouths were dry and our hearts thumping like drums as we slowly crept down the corridor. A short distance ahead was the platform we had dimly glimpsed from above, now plainly visible. There was a lower ring at the same level as the passageway we were entering by, surrounded by several isolated raised platforms within easy leaping distance at various points of the compass. A higher, inner ring overlooked the outer ring, and the whole series of platforms was suspended by pillars of stone over a giant, gaping hole in the earth whose depths were invisible underneath a roiling sea of bilious green light. It looked almost like the entrance to some eldritch underworld, promising an eternal damnation for any who fell into it-
And standing on the elevated inner platform we could see three upright figures in the distance and a fourth one kneeling motionlessly on the ground. One of the three was Ketheric Thorm. The other two were a strange pale woman with long blond braided hair and dressed in horrific-looking blood-red armor, and a young nobleman garbed in elaborate black-and-gold finery.
"Gortash." Karlach growled under her breath at the sight of the last man. "That letter wasn't lying, he's up to his neck in this!" she hissed.
"Father!" Wyll cried out softly, having gotten a look at the kneeling man. As the pale woman restlessly paced and stopped blocking the view, we all saw an aging bald man with skin as dark as Wyll's, still dressed in the armor of a senior officer of the Flaming Fist.
"Hold!" I grabbed his arm and kept him from rushing forward and whispered intently. "Keep your head down until we know where that damned elder brain is, or we can be sure it's not here!"
Some trick of the acoustics in this chamber brought the arguing voices of the Chosen trio to our ears, and we all fell breathlessly silent to eavesdrop-
"-you said it was under control." Gortash said icily.
"It isn't you I answer to, Gortash." Ketheric replied with death-like calm.
"Oh, the General voice!" Gortash said mockingly. "Is this where we salute?"
"Salute, yes." the pale woman said in a voice that echoed strangely. "With cleavers through his blood-starved flesh! How it crawls with failure." she sneered. "Like flies on lick-wet carrion."
"You forget yourself, Orin." Ketheric pointed an accusing finger. "I have played my part."
"You've built an army for our masters, true enough." Gortash acknowledged. "But what of the Astral Prism?!?" he insisted. "A rogue True Soul, flaunting it under your nose this whole time. And you ran from them." His rich orator's voice lashed at Ketheric like a whip.
"Sure that they would follow, and deliver it into my hands here." Ketheric replied reasonably. "If you would cease these distractions." he finished with an angry hiss.
"The distractions have been yours, Ketheric." Gortash accused. "Perhaps we should never have dug your daughter up!"
Ketheric's face contorted in pure rage and he lunged forward, his fist raised high to smash Gortash's skull - only to suddenly stop short several feet of his target. "So you haven't lost your edge." Gortash observed smugly, not having even blinked in the face of Ketheric's attack. "But you're still not as sharp as Orin is, I wager."
Because the reason Ketheric had stopped was the point of Orin's dagger pressed directly against his throat, her having moved so swiftly that it had literally happened between eyeblinks. Orin's psychotic grin wordlessly taunted Ketheric as Gortash arrogantly continued. "The slayer against the undying one. That might be fun to see."
"His crypt-breath sings to my sinews - again, again, againagainagain!" Orin giggled with a sick ecstasy. "But no, he is needed to lead the murder-march to Baldur's Grave." she pouted childishly.
"Speaking as someone who was raised entirely among fervent devotees of the cruelest goddess in the firmament, there is something direly wrong with that woman." Shadowheart shivered.
"If the Prism is truly within your grasp, Ketheric, then might I suggest closing your fist?" Gortash asked mildly, as Ketheric and Orin both stepped away from each other and relaxed from their combative postures. "Orin and I can wait for you no longer. The plan proceeds. We're going to the city, and we expect you to follow - after you have finished up here." Gortash and Orin both walked away from Ketheric towards the far end of the platform and looked down into the pit. Gortash raised his golden gauntlet high, and Orin matched his gesture with her blood-red dagger.
"The Edict of Bane!" Gortash suddenly boomed operatically, and a great gem on his gauntlet suddenly flared the same eerie color that the stone on Ketheric's breastplate had.
"The Lash of Bhaal!" Orin cried loudly, raising her dagger even higher as a great gem on its hilt also blazed forth with light.
And then all of our hearts sank as a great tentacle suddenly lashed up and over the edge of the platform, coming into view. The ground began to quiver as something massive came up from the depths, slowly becoming visible to us as it rose majestically into the air over the pit The elder brain was a great pulsing exposed cerebrum at least the size of a house, its exposed lobes glowing red with power and with multiple great tentacles reaching forth from where the brainstem would have been on a human brain. Perched directly between its lobes, up where the front brim of a hat would have been on a human head, was a great three-pronged crown with multiple smaller gems set within it blazing forth with light of the same color as the three gems the three Chosen bore.
"That crown!" Gale gasped wondrously. "I can feel the power radiating from it! If I but had the tongue of a bard, to describe what I'm seeing..."
The elder brain quivered, lashing back and forth in suppressed frustration, as Gortash and Orin visibly strained against an invisible force. Ketheric stood by, silently watching their struggles, until with visible reluctance he finally strode across the platform to stand in formation with them.
"The Testament of Myrkul!" Ketheric's voice roared out, completing their unholy ceremony, and his own gem blazed forth to match theirs. The elder brain grew still, floating docilely in front of them.
"One of the cruelest and most powerful creatures in all existence, leashed by a trio of mortals." Lae'zel said in awe.
"But not leashed very tightly." I muttered. "Did you see how those two were struggling to keep it still until Ketheric finally pitched in? That might explain what he was talking about on the roof."
Gale wordlessly looked at me, as if asking that I were really sure about not using the orb, and I shrugged helplessly. He nodded in resignation, and we kept watching.
"There we are." Gortash said smugly, after the three Chosen finished silently commanding the elder brain. "It wouldn't do to fight in front of our guest. Behold, Duke Ravengard! The Absolute!" He dramatically waved his hand with a flourish at the floating elder brain.
The kneeling Ravengard shook his head in denial and horror, flinching away from the visage of the Absolute. Orin kneeled down behind him and contemptuously spat in his ear. "You wag your tongue-flap in vain, Ulderling! While the worm holds the whip, your feeble flesh will serve us."
"Already tadpoled." Wyll lowered his head in despair. "Damn!"
"But still alive." I encouraged him. "Just like we are."
"And now it's really time for us to be going." Gortash said with a cheerful clap of his hands. "Orin and I will empty out this place and begin the march. You may catch up with the army once you've retrieved the Astral Prism. Oh, and Ketheric, do try not to sulk." Gortash taunted him mildly. "You're supposed to be the fearsome General, come to conquer the city." Gortash turned away and strolled arrogantly to where Orin was standing guard over the subdued Grand Duke. "And I am the hero who will save it!"
Ketheric hefted a wicked-looking flail, substitute for his lost warhammer, and turned his back on his co-conspirators and angrily marched away. The Absolute reached out and gently brushed the two Chosen and Wyll's father with a tentacle, and then the elder brain vanished in a flash of teleportation - taking everyone on the platform but Ketheric with it.
It is time, faithful ones! the Absolute's voice suddenly rang clearly through all our ears. Images flickered behind the eyes of those of us who had tadpoles - the crowned elder brain triumphantly floating in the air over the army encamped west of Moonrise Towers, the thousands of dupes and thralls raising their weapons with gleeful battle-cries. March, for Baldur's Gate! We go to prepare the way! The images faded and the pressure on our minds vanished as the Absolute was gone, presumably teleporting or flying ahead of its horde of cultists. But we knew that far above our heads, that very same horde was now marching towards the city.
Ketheric stood alone on the platform, his hands behind his back in a stiff parade rest. He apparently couldn't see us where we crouched just inside the doorway, hidden by the shadows and the passageway walls before the large open platform.
"I can see Aylin, now that that horrid thing is gone." Isobel muttered. "She's in the far right corner of the room, on that raised platform. Imprisoned again."
"So Ketheric's invulnerable again until we break her out of that soul cage." I muttered. "Mind flayer up on the near right platform, with a clear field of view and field of fire all down that side. Multiple necromites on the left elevated platform, towards the back where they can be a sniper team. And Ketheric up front."
"A bit overconfident to think he can take us all on by himself... but his two co-conspirators stole away most of his troops. Are they leaving him to die, or do they truly believe he can beat us all?" Jaheira wondered.
"For as long as he's got the link with Aylin, he can beat us all." I said. "But he hasn't thought of everything. Did anyone memorize an invisibility spell?"
"I did." Jaheira said. "Not usual for druids, I admit, but I study the Circle of the Land path of druidism and we have a few extra tricks. What are you thinking?"
"Gale, got anything for flying?" I asked him.
"One potion left." he answered.
"Good." I said. "We make Isobel invisible, then give her the potion. Nobody can reach Aylin's platform on foot without going near the mind flayer, who will almost certainly psychically sense them whether they're invisible or not - but he won't be sensing behind him if he's concentrating on his front. Am I right, Lae'zel?"
"Yes." Lae'zel agreed.
"So Isobel flies around the outside wall of the room, invisibly, and reaches Aylin and sets her free as our opening move." I confirmed. "Jaheira, you know wild shape, yes?"
"All druids do, even if I have not mastered as many forms as Halsin has. That was his particular specialty." Jaheira confirmed.
"Do you have any forms that are small birds? Because if you do, then you can get right behind the mind flayer." I smiled. "And as soon as the party starts, you can shove it right over the edge and into the pit."
"Mind flayers levitate." Jaheira said flatly.
"Not while I'm dispelling them, they don't." I grinned back at her.
"Necromites have a nasty sting, but they're fragile." Gale said. "One simple Shatter spell and I can turn that whole group into powdered bone."
"If Ketheric sees only us six marching up to him, he'll likely think that's all we brought." I agreed. "So we go first and engage him in conversation - he's invincible right now, he'll almost certainly want to talk before he fights just like he did last time. And while he's looking at us you two will get into position. When Isobel frees Aylin, that's the signal for me, Jaheira, and Gale to all take our shots. And Ketheric will suddenly go from being the invincible man with allies all around to being vulnerable, alone, and surrounded."
"And maybe then he'll finally see sense." Isobel said plaintively. "But if he doesn't..." She sighed. "Then we do what we must."
"Just watch Aylin's back and keep yourself safe." I told Isobel. "Nobody expects you to actually shed the blood of your own father."
"We don't even want you to." Jaheira agreed.
"Thank you." Isobel said.
We waited until Isobel and Jaheira started to move, then boldly strode down the path towards the central platform. Ketheric saw us coming as soon as we moved out of the shadowed doorway and into the light, and calmly, expressionlessly waited for us to arrive at the section of the lower ring directly beneath his perch.
"There you are. As I predicted." Ketheric greeted us calmly. "What is it about death, I wonder, that draws one toward it like a moth to light? You could have run away. Absconded with the Prism. The one thing that could have prevented me from fulfilling my destiny. But the lure of one's destiny is irresistible, isn't it?"
"There's no destiny here, Ketheric." I answered him. Out of the corner of my eye I noted Isobel still struggling with Aylin's new soul cage, so I kept talking. "Just a man who has run away from his only remaining family. Absconded from his fatherhood to instead become obsessed with death and destruction."
Ketheric's face twisted in anger, but unlike Gortash my challenge did not move him to blind rage - perhaps because he believed that I at least was sincerely a friend of Isobel. "You of all people should understand. Unlike the lying Shar, Myrkul truly fulfilled his promise - a promise no other god could fulfill. My daughter was returned to me, and in exchange for that I swore to serve him forever. When he asked me to join Orin and Gortash to awaken the elder brain, to grow the cult of the Absolute, and then eventually to wrest control of it from them, I did not question why. I did not need to share my Lord Myrkul's enthusiasm for the goal. He has commanded it of me, and that is all I need to devote my utmost effort towards achieving it." Ketheric nodded to me sagely. "Every god or goddess I have served has received my truest devotion, at least as true as your own to your Oath. But only one of them rewarded that devotion, and it is that one I will not forsake. I have fought great wars before, in the service of others. But for my Lord Myrkul, I would condemn all of Faerun to death-" And then Ketheric suddenly gasped and spun around.
"All of Faerun, death-seeker?" Aylin spat at him challengingly, her blade out and her wings spread defensively over Isobel standing behind her. "Even her?"
Gale's Shatter spell detonated the cluster of necromites at the same time Jaheira resumed her true shape directly behind the mind flayer and viciously slashed it across its hamstrings before shoulder-checking it into the void. It was barely able to concentrate on its psionic powers and levitate itself in mid-air, saving itself from a fatal fall - until with a brush of my templar powers its levitation was disrupted and it fell like a stone into the depths of the earth. Several intellect devourers we hadn't seen tried charging the party, but Lae'zel and Karlach contemptuously beat them into paste. We spread out, flanking Ketheric on three sides in addition to Aylin and Isobel in his rear.
"Give it up, father!" Isobel begged him. "Aylin speaks truth! Even if you care nothing about the world, even if I am your sole obsession, you still cannot do this! Myrkul will only let you keep me until he no longer has need of you, and then he will take us from each other... forever!"
"Have you forgotten the Dead Three's founding legend, Ketheric?" I remembered Gale's impromptu lecture at Last Light Inn. "Are you ignorant of what Myrkul said to Bane, on the day they first ascended to divinity?" 'But I choose the dead, and by doing so I truly win, because all you are lord over, Bane, will eventually be mine. All things must die - even gods.' I quoted. "All things must die - that was Myrkul's very first proclamation! His wish is that nothing will be allowed to escape his grasp forever, that eventually the entire world must be swept clean of life!!" I nodded towards Isobel. "As you yourself just said!"
"No!" Ketheric said, his voice thick with horror. "He would not do that! I could not have- you are wrong! You must be wrong!"
"You're his Chosen!" Gale cried out. "He speaks to you! Of all the people in this room, only you and Aylin can actually talk directly to their gods and get an answer! So if you won't listen to what her deity has to say, then listen to your own! Ask Myrkul what his true endgame is! And see if he'll tell you!"
"My Lord!" Ketheric cried desperately. "Grant me the strength to smite these heretics! Share your truth with me! Expose their lies!"
For a long moment, the room stood in absolute silence. And then suddenly the earth began not just to quiver, but to throb. The ground shook with a dull heavy beat, as did the air-
"Remind me why encouraging the Chosen of the god of death to directly invoke his patron's presence was a good idea?" I facepalmed.
"Perhaps I should have tried another line of reasoning." Gale admitted embarrassedly.
"My Lord, please, no!" Ketheric cried desperately. "Not her! Not them! Not this-!"
Ketheric's words were cut off like a knife as a giant gout of green death welled up from the pit below us like a volcanic eruption of pure necrotic energy. Aylin frantically grabbed Isobel and wrapped her wings around her, and Jaheira fell prone directly in the center of the wide stone platform she was in and curled into a tight protective ball. We were doing the same, shielding ourselves from the fountain of death energy with the rocks we lay on, but the giant green pillar of energy was only in the center of the pit, and only shooting up through the inner ring. The only person in the area of effect was Ketheric, and as the eruption faded away we saw that he was not there-
-and then a horrific presence filed the air.
You dare break the faith of one who belongs to me? a great, rasping whisper filled the air without sound.
The distant thudding became louder and louder, the sound of giant funeral drums beating a dirge-
I AM THE SMILE OF THE WORM-CLEANSED SKULL. I AM THE REGRETS OF THOSE WHO REMAIN, AND THE RESTLESSNESS OF THOSE WHO ARE GONE.
One skeletal hand, over half the length of a man from fingertips to wrist and attached to the bony forearm of a giant, reached up from the pit and clasped itself around the inner ring of the central platform.
I AM THE HAUNT OF MAUSOLEUMS. THE GOD OF GRAVES AND AGE. OF DUST AND DUSK.
Another skeletal hand reached up to also clasp around the ring, and both arms pulled. A giant's skull, surmounted by a golden triangular crown, began to rise into view-
I AM MYRKUL, LORD OF BONES, AND YOU HAVE DEFEATED MY CHOSEN.
The avatar of the death god stood tall, floating suspended in the center of the pit. Its horrific visage glared down at us all from several stories in the air despite the fact that its lower body was still out of view beneath the platform and its waist floated level with the innermost ring.
BUT IT IS NO MATTER.
A scythe the size of a small tower materialized in one outthrust hand of bone.
FOR I AM DEATH, AND I AM NOT THE END. I AM A BEGINNING.
Author's Note: Don't be too hard on Gale. The Avatar of Myrkul was showing up no matter what he said - Ketheric situated the fight directly over a gate to his realm. The wily General always has a trump card in reserve.
Granted, Myrkul wasn't expecting them to actually successfully psyche out Ketheric either.
And yup, Hawke totally ended Mizora. In game you can't do that - Wyll falls right for the whole 'If you let me out, I'll end your pact!' without stopping to ask himself if Mizora is going to play silly buggers with exact contract terms. I mean, she's only done that to him fifteen dozen times before, but this time it'll be different! In-game, Wyll's starting Wisdom defaults to 10. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if it shouldn't have been 8. Or 6. Wyll's a good guy, but dear Lord does he suck at life choices.
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Maybe he finds Mizora to be really hot, and his mind doesn't fire at full when near her.
He is very horny, after all.
TyricGaias
Getting sticky.
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How many of us were smart at 24?
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
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I was certainly smart enough to never sign any legal document I had not completely read, and not to do a handshake deal with anybody who'd cheated me once before (let alone a dozen-plus times before).
Fuck, I was that smart at 14. And I was not smart at 14.
TyricGaias
Getting sticky.
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Enohthree
Versed in the lewd.
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The only downside is that with Mizora pureed is that Gale can no longer cast Irresistible Dance on her in Act 3, bypassing her protections and having her break it down for Wyll's amusement when he needs a pick me up at the end of a long adventuring day.
