The Once and Future Champion (Baldur's Gate 3/Dragon Age)

[Yacov]

Personally I'd have magic paranoia. Because it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

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Wizards and Sorcerers I can see Hawke being cool with, if a bit off put by how cavalier they are with their magic. Warlocks on the other hand, might be stretching things for even a tolerant Thedean like Hawke. Especially given Hawke's personal history with a certain blonde haired pactmaker.

Also striking a pact for magical power with something as Desire Demon-looking as Mizora would probably set off all sorts of alarm bells in Hawke's head, as it would any sane person from Thedas. Making deals like that would get you hanged in pretty much any country in Thedas since it usually results in Very Bad Things.

Hawke knows from his experience with Anders that even the most well intentioned deal on the part of the mortal can have disastrous results. At the very least Wyll probably isn't getting sympathy from Hawke if Wyll breaks the pact and gets transformed.

 

[rkbinder]

Hawke does not have magic paranoia, Hawke is merely trying to get used to the idea of a universe where mages are at the same basically nonexistent risk from being possessed by demons as that random dwarf fighter over there.

Click to shrink...

I find it deeply ironic that the 'mage' that Hawk is going to interacts in this world of safe magic is the only wizard that has a magical nuke in his chest. That was created when a mage tried to replace the magic goddess.

Heck it even sounds like the whole legend of the golden city in the fade.

 

[cliffc999]

I frantically battered the darkspawn to the ground, desperately scything forward through them with a flashing charge and greatsword sweep that focused my internal energy in just the right way to cleave the foe even slightly outside the actual arc of the blade with the sheer pressure of the blow. When we'd gone up the pathway from the wreckage of the nautiloid the absolute last thing I'd expected to find in this new world of Toril was a trio of genlocks, but although my heart had frozen solid at first sight of them the reflexes that had carried me through a thousand battles drove me forward in a frantic rush to destroy them before Shadowheart could walk unawares into the danger.

"Keep back!" I yelled desperately at her. "Don't let their blood touch you, it's tainted!"

"Hawke?" she asked me, her voice thick with puzzlement. "Are you all right?"

The blurriness left my vision and I drew a series of deep panting breaths, leaning on my sword tip as I braced it on the chest of one of the fallen-

"Darkspawn. If you catch the Taint, you turn into one of them. Like the parasites in our heads, only from their blood-" I tried to explain.

"Hawke." she remonstrated gently with me. "These were goblins."

I flinched with shame as a second, more searching look at the little monsters I'd killed revealed that while they did look quite a bit like genlocks at first glance, there were multiple distinct differences. Their eyes were normally colored, their teeth were more human-shaped than the needle fangs of darkspawn, their faces narrow and skulls less rounded, their dark red blood smelled just like human blood and not anything like the Tainted ichor of darkspawn-

"Sorry." I apologized. "On Thedas-" I shook my head. "The darkspawn are perhaps the most terrible scourge we ever knew. Endless in number, untiring, implacably hateful of all other life... and worse yet, intelligent and organized underneath their Archdemons. And I already mentioned the Taint." I reminded myself that I was on another world, quite likely in another universe entirely, far beyond the furthest reach of the Fade, the Black City, or the Blight-

"And they look like these?" she said understandingly.

"The commonest type of darkspawn do, yes." I nodded. "And these 'goblins' are-?"

"A common type of humanoid. Hateful, and relatively intelligent and organized, but with nothing demonic or tainted about them. They're simply little tribal savages, raiders on isolated settlements and naught more." Shadowheart explained. "I wouldn't want to be caught unawares by them, and certainly not taken prisoner by them, but any veteran warrior can readily defeat most goblins even at several-to-one odds." She chuckled a bit. "As you just proved."

I shook off the last vestiges of my combat flashback and resisted the temptation to take the conversational out she'd just given me. "My apologies for-" I paused and reached for words. "The last darkspawn Blight on Thedas destroyed my hometown and forced our family to flee as refugees.. and-" I drew to a halt. "We lost both my younger siblings."

"Dear Lady of Loss." Shadowheart winced in sympathy.

"My brother Carver died during the retreat from Lothering. My sister Bethany died of the darkspawn taint when we had another encounter with them almost a year later. Mother and I-" I shrugged the painful memories away. "And that's not germane right now." I finished firmly.

"These goblins looked to be stragglers from a larger band, seeing as how they'd stopped to loot the wreckage here." Shadowheart obligingly turned away to practical matters. "Let's see what they found."

As it turned out the dead goblins had a near-complete set of camping supplies on them - and clean supplies and of apparent human manufacture at that, not goblin-stuff. Apparently the nautiloid had been carrying stores of such things for the use of the mind flayers' human slaves. We distributed the most useful bits into our packs, and Shadowheart picked up a small round shield for herself to compliment her mace, and we continued onwards in silence.

And just a little ways further on the sight of a man's disembodied arm sticking out of some type of spark-shooting purple magical vortex barely raised an eyebrow from our two increasingly jaded selves, seeing as how we'd already been having far too eventful a morning and were still bottoming out from the adrenaline surge of our recent combat.

"A hand? Anyone?" a man's voice called out urgently from within the... magical hole was the best description I could find for it, somehow unaccountably stuck in a nearby rock face and emitting from some sparking purple runes.

"Is this the sort of magic that's safe to touch, or am I going to get zapped?" I asked Shadowheart, and she knelt to peer more closely at it for a bit and then shrugged at me.

"I'm fairly certain it's safe," the trapped man tried to reassure me. "But I'm wedged in here a bit tight, and really could use a bit of leverage to help wiggle out please?"

"Hang on." I sighed wearily and reached forward to grab the flailing hand and pull. Fortunately, it only took a bit of muscle and some good leverage to get him moving, and soon enough a tall, handsome brown-haired man in slightly dusty purple robes and clutching a staff in his other hand flopped forward out of the hole and landed heavily on his knees. As soon as he was free the magical vortex faded and left behind an elaborate, yet entirely quiescent, circle of faintly-glowing runes etched into the rock.

"Hello!" the man said cheerfully as he heaved himself to his feet. "I'm Gale, of Waterdeep. Apologies, I'm usually better at this."

"At magic?" I queried the obvious wizard, after both Shadowheart and I introduced ourselves.

"That too." he smiled disarmingly. "In my defense, though, I don't usually try to spellcast while falling to my death hundreds of feet through the air. It was intended to be a simple Feather Fall spell to cushion my landing, but it interacted badly with that runic circle over there." he nodded at the rock face.

I nodded understandingly, because Gale did have a entirely valid point that a magical fumble was entirely forgivable given the desperate conditions he was working under. "Then you were on the nautiloid as well?" Shadowheart chimed in.

"Wonderful, that saves me many an awkward explanation." Gale nodded. "And if you were there, then I assume that you too were on the receiving end of a rather unwelcome insertion in the ocular region?"

"Couldn't have phrased it more repellently myself." I replied amusedly.

"And the insertee we speak of? The parasite? Are you aware that after a period of excruciating gestation it will turn us into mind flayers? It's a process known as 'ceremorphosis' and let me assure you, it is to be avoided!" he finished passionately.

"We're already searching for a healer for ours. There's at least some type of settlement nearby, but we don't know exactly where." Shadowheart informed him.

"But we do have an intended destination, I hope?" Gale probed earnestly.

"A little ways down that path is some type of old or abandoned structure, we glimpsed it from the beach." I nodded down the dirt path we'd already been taking. "We're hoping to pick up the trail from there."

"Then lead on!" Gale said cheerfully. I noted inwardly he was being a bit forward with his assumptions, but then again the logic of survival was just as clear for him and us as it had been for Shadowheart and myself. We were all condemned to a horrible death if we didn't get our parasites removed in time, and so for the duration we all needed each other.

"What was that, anyway?" I nodded towards the glowing runic circle. Not that I was particularly interested in strange magics, at least not when I was already this busy, but if it was possibly dangerous-

"Oh, that? It's just a travelstone." Gale assured us. "You find them in some parts of northern Faerun. Most scholars think they date back to the ancient Netherese Empire, although there is a competing theory that they're a lost elven magic-"

"The practical part?" I grinned at him, recognizing a true scholar's fascination with a lecture topic when I saw one and knowing that this bid fair to go on all day if he wasn't interrupted.

"After a person has attuned themselves to the travelstone, they can teleport back to it at any time provided the attunement is still in effect and they aren't more than a significant yet still distinctly finite distance away." Gale shocked me.

"Wait, just like that?" I marveled. "Teleportation is such a common thing here? Then how is that anyone still builds roads or uses ships?"

"Hah, no." Gale grinned at me. "As I mentioned, the secret of their manufacture has been lost for centuries. Also most of them don't work anymore, and even those that do still work seem to be active only on some unknowable astrological schedule." He looked back briefly at the nearby travelstone. "This one's fully operational though. Never thought I'd get to see one in operation, particularly not from the inside. Apparently they're not always fond of gravity-based magic cast too closely to them."

"If it's working then shouldn't we attune ourselves to it?" Shadowheart asked. "It would be a useful method for recovering our position if we got lost in this wilderness, if nothing else."

"If you think it's safe." I agreed with her, and after a brief period of experimentation led by Gale we managed to finish this 'attunement' process - largely just a matter of touching the rune and concentrating on it in a certain way - and proceeded onwards.

As we proceeded through a low stand of trees towards the small clifftop where we'd seen the structure, we saw that it appeared to be some type of ruined chapel. The top floor had almost entirely collapsed and worn away, leaving only a couple of freestanding walls and empty pillars. However, the much more recent construction of a hastily-erected timber pole-and-boom being used as some type of improvised crane to hoist up a large broken segment of stone pillar, along with several crates and bags scattered about, bespoke of a recent expedition to this site... and one that was likely still here.

"Hello the encampment!" I politely called out as we drew within easy earshot. "Three travelers to approach!"

"Boss! We got company!" a rough-sounding voice sounded faintly in reply, and by the time we finished coming up to the camp site we were met by a motley array of three individuals, in rough common dress and holding bared steel - or a wizard's staff, in the case of the one woman with them. The bowman was a human and the wizardess an elf, although their leader was of a race unfamiliar to me - as short as a dwarf but only half as stout, with a narrow face and pointed ears vaguely like an elf's.

"Bugger off! This lot's ours!" the apparent leader snarled at us.

"Easy, friend." I said, my empty palms out and my sword still slung on my back. "We're not out to rob you."

"Now if only the opposite were true." Shadowheart muttered darkly from behind my back.

"A fine tale, my friend." the leader mocked us. "Don't like the odds now that you've seen them, have you?"

Seeing as how the odds were even I did my best not to roll my eyes at his overconfidence. "If you could tell us where the nearest settlement is, we'll just head there and leave you to your labors." I tried to reason with him.

"Sure you would, and then come right back after dark and try it with daggers in our sleep!" he sneered. "I know your kind all too well!"

I looked around more carefully and thought a bit. "I only see a couple of you, and erecting that crane and doing all this digging looks to have been a larger a project than that. And none of you were laboring as we drew near. Your lookouts for a larger band, aren't you?"

"Got it in one, friend." the leader sneered. "One shout from me and all the lads will pile out and run you through!"

"But you're not shouting yet." I noted. "So you're clearly not bandits, you're an honest expedition with a purpose." All right, that last one was definitely just wishful thinking seeing as how this scruffy lot were as obviously bandit-like as any men I'd ever seen, but I was trying to be diplomatic here. "And we have no desire to interfere with that and compromise your safety, we're just a bit lost after our ship crashed and trying to find some shelter."

"Lost little travelers," the leader mused as several of his men tried to hide involuntary grins, and I sighed inwardly. A far less experienced person than any of our party could already see where this was going, and I simply was not in the mood for it. "Travelers who might be willing to pay a bit for a safe escort, then?"

"Well, if this is a negotiation, then of course I'll be willing to make you a very generous offer." I smiled as disarmingly as I could as I slowly and non-threateningly idled forward and to the right, as if I were just nervously pacing while trying to marshal my thoughts. "Because we're all peaceful and reasonable men here-"

And as I drew near enough to where I'd been carefully edging towards quickly as I could I pulled my greatsword off my back, strained the full power of my shoulders and hips into a sideways cut, and chopped my flaming sword directly through the vertical beam of wood holding up the improvised crane with a single powerful stroke. The crane, boom and all, came crashing down and the suspended pillar smashed directly through the flagstone courtyard and into some type of dark and empty catacomb below.

"-and we certainly wouldn't want any unpleasantness." I grinned wickedly at them, my blade confidently held before me in both hands while off to the side Shadowheart had her own mace and shield out, holding a blocking position in front of Gale as he dramatically lit the tip of his wizard's staff with flame. Not that I'd had a chance to actually discuss this strategy with them, but they were both clearly experienced enough to pick up on an obvious cue.

"N-no." the little man stammered. "No sir, we certainly wouldn't want that. Let's get the hell out of here!" he cried out, as he backpedaled furiously away.

"But what about the rest-" one of his men protested as they fell back with him.

"Leave 'em! We've got to look after ourselves!" the leader shot back, and as soon as they'd opened up a sufficient distance between us they all showed us their backs and took off running for the tall timber.

Shadowheart whistled softly, staring at the fallen ruins of the improvised crane as she stepped towards me. "Goddess, you're strong. I've never seen anything like that from anyone smaller than an ogre."

"It's just about putting the total power of every muscle in your body focused into a single linear strike all simultaneously." I explained. "Not much use as a technique against anything substantially smaller or faster than a tree, given the wind-up it requires, but it works just fine on things like ogres." Not that whatever they called 'ogres' here were at all likely to be the same thing as the larger darkspawn I'd fought back home, but I'd already made that mistake once today.

"That one chap mentioned 'the rest'." Gale pointed out. "I wonder how many are still down in there?" he nodded towards a set of steps leading down to what had apparently been a cellar door back when this chapel or whatever-it-was had still been standing, but which was now the outer door of the lower levels of this place.

"Do we even need to go down there?" Shadowheart asked.

"It's getting late in the afternoon." I looked up briefly at the lowering sun. "I've got no idea how far it is from here, and this is the best shelter we've found yet. Also, we don't want this lot coming out behind us and possibly hitting us wherever else we camp."

"No we don't." she wearily agreed. "Still, it's been a long day already."

"Which is why we're going to try talking first." I walked down the steps and thumped my first hard on the door. "Hello in there!"

"That you, Gimblebock?" a scared young man's voice came muffled through the door. "What's going on out there? What was that noise?"

"If your friend 'Gimblebock' was a short little man with pointed ears, then I'm afraid he's taken off down the road and left you here." I amiably called back. "Now we need to talk."

"I-I'm not allowed to speak to strangers!" he stammered out. "Be off, or-"

"Call your boss." I calmly interrupted him. "I'll wait right here."

"Who are you and what do you want?" a gruff man's voice called out a short bit later.

"We had a bit of a disagreement with the men you left to guard the entrance, but they're all right." I said disarmingly. "They just decided it would be better if they moved off down the road a bit. Now-"

"You're only getting in here over our dead bodies!" the bandit leader called back belligerently.

"Friend, you're either here because this is a nice place to lair, or it's got good loot." I reasoned with him. "Except if strangers have found it - which obviously they have - then it's no longer a nice place to lair, now is it? As for the loot, you can keep whatever you've found so far."

"Except that that's sweet bugger-all!" he shouted back. "This whole damn trip's been a bust, and now we've got a strange crew muscling in on us? Shove your sweet talk up your arse, this patch is ours!"

"Would you like to trade stories about who's had the worse day?" I snarked back at him. "And if you had a back door out of there, you'd already be using it. You're trapped down there, friend. So does this have to get unpleasant, or would you like to make an arrangement that means nobody has to get hurt or to go away empty-handed?"

"Pull the other one, it's got bells on." he sneered.

"We've already discussed how this isn't useful to you as a hiding place any longer, and you just mentioned that you haven't had any good looting here. So here's my deal. I'll put you on to a better looting opportunity nearby and let you all go peacefully to enjoy it for yourselves - even to link back up with Gimblebock and the ones who deserted with him, if you still want them - and in return, you give me and my band these ruins."

"Why would you even want it?" he asked me suspiciously. "What's your angle?"

"Do you even care, so long as you're not missing out personally?" I shot back. "And look, I'll even give you a bit up front in earnest. Did you hear that crash last night?"

"We heard something." the 'boss' said musingly. "Felt like a god-damned earthquake, too."

"Are you familiar with what a 'nautiloid' is? The flying ships the mind flayers use?" I continued.

"Heard of them a bit." the bandit leader agreed. "Wait, you're not saying-"

"That was one of them crashing." I confirmed. "All sorts of strange things from beyond the stars, just lying there in the rubble for the taking. We've already had our pickings there, as much as we could readily lift, but there was still quite a bit left. Sounds like that gleaning that would be a better score for you than these disappointing ruins, doesn't it?"

"... it sounds good, but I'm still not seeing what you get out of this." he replied quietly.

"We've already marched a damn long way today and had at least one battle, and while we're still fresh enough to fight some more we don't really want to march or fight much further. And the sun's getting low. So the emptier these ruins are, the better it is for us - all we need is the shelter for tonight."

A brief pause and some low mutterings through the door made my hopes rise, as the bandit gang in there were seriously considering my offer. "All right, it's a deal. We clear out of here and leave what's left for you, you give us the directions to this crash site. Now how do we manage this so that neither side gets rooked?"

"I'll move most of my people away from the entrance back into the woods, you won't even see them." I promised, and I could hear Shadowheart giggling behind me as she caught on. "It'll just be me and two of my men to guide the way. That's enough I can still take you - you personally - with me if you try anything, but nowhere near enough for us to try anything."

"... we'll take it." the bandit leader reluctantly agreed. "All right, you get most of your people back and have three only waiting at the top of the stairs. We'll be out in a few minutes."

Good to their word, the remainder of the bandit gang started coming out single file as soon as they saw their way was clear, and I amiably pointed them back down the path we'd come up and gave them directions to the crash site. Whatever intentions they might have possibly had of double-dealing were visibly put by the wayside when they got a good look at the wreckage I'd left of their crane, and soon enough they were down the road without further incident.

"Cleverly done." Shadowheart complimented me as they finished moving out of earshot. "And a good thing for us. We might still have won at those odds, but after all the fighting we've already done today-" she sighed with weariness.

"You've a real gift for negotiations, particularly of the more mercenary variety." Gale agreed. "I wonder, what exactly did my new friend do for a living before he came here?"

"I'd been a nobleman, actually." I surprised him. "Although one of the people who worked for me had been a pirate captain for years before she moved ashore and gave it up. Mostly gave it up." I admitted. "If you fight alongside someone for long enough, you learn at least a bit of their language."

"Handy skill." Shadowheart nodded.

"And you're right that these ruins look like the best place around to fort up for the night, particularly given that I feel like my feet are about to fall off." Gale added. "Let's make sure those bandits didn't miss anything down there when they were clearing it out and then bar the door from the inside."

We each lit torches from the supplies the bandits had left behind and did a quick search of the ruins. A weathered plaque on the wall contained an archaic inscription that Shadowheart could just barely translate as a prayer to a god named "Jergal, the Scribe of the Names of the Dead", who apparently was not a god in common worship any longer. These ruins had apparently the basement layer of an old and now-forgotten temple to this god, with commonplace things like a kitchen, storerooms, and one chamber that had apparently been the temple library. I was bemused to find that I could read the books written in common tongue just as readily as I could understand the local language, and I shoved several of the local histories and commentaries into my pack to help me get acclimated to my new home.

"Here." Shadowheart said, looking at one of several candelabras mounted into the wall. "Look at the scratches on the wall next to this. This turns." She reached up and pulled it, and the grating of stone told us of a secret door opening nearby.

"There's a sub-level beneath this one." I looked down at the hidden stairway that had been revealed. "That must be where that locked door we saw at the bottom of the cliff, the one by the beach, was leading into. It'd be about the right depth."

"A mystery to explore tomorrow." Gale said. "Because I'm about ready to drop."

After making sure the door to the outside was barred and the secret door was wedged shut from our side so we didn't get any unpleasant middle-of-the-night surprises - and also after barring the door to the one storeroom that now had a roof open to the sky, because that was where the wreckage of crane had fallen though the courtyard into - we got a fire going, cooked ourselves a hearty meal, and settled down to rest. Shadowheart used one of her spells to fill an empty barrel full of water, and after using it for cooking and drinking we rolled it into an adjacent room so we'd each have privacy for a hasty bath, or at least a scrubdown.

"Are you sure this is wise?" Shadowheart asked me, as we both sat at a table in the former refectory of this temple waiting for Gale to finish. "Every single hour brings us that much closer to a horrible death."

"I agree, but after a near-death experience last night and multiple battles then and today, and no proper rest in between-" I shook my head. "Trying to explore and fight while exhausted is another good way to find a horrible death. We need at least some proper food and rest before trying to go further."

"You're not wrong." she conceded. "But we can't spend too much time delaying either. We need to move on at first light."

"I'm also hoping to find a map in these ruins." I explained to her. "Even if it's as out of date as the rest of these ruins, if it marks the position of this temple in relation to any of the cities you already know then we can find out whether we're closer to Baldur's Gate or Elturel right now. Because time is pressing, and we can't spend any of it walking in the wrong direction."

"I hadn't thought of that." she admitted. "How far in advance were you planning this?"

"Only when I saw that there was a library down here." I answered. "Sadly, there weren't any maps in there when I searched it. But now I'm thinking that it'd be worth at least an hour or two of our time to explore the sub-level tomorrow."

"It's possible that there's more documents down there, but not likely." Shadowheart said. "What makes you so sure?"

"Those bandits funded an entire expedition and came a long way to explore this place specifically." I said. "Men like that don't fund expeditions like that unless they really believe there's a very profitable treasure to be excavated. If they hadn't already been frustrated from having searched these ruins for Maker only knows how long and finding nothing, I'd never have been able to talk them out of here." I thought out loud. "Which means they didn't find the secret stairway, which is likely where whatever they were looking for was hidden. And while we've all talked about finding a powerful healer to help cure us they're probably not going to do it for free, so-"

"We need to at least make a quick attempt at exploring down there and hopefully find enough of a treasure that we've got something to pay them with." Shadowheart realized. "I really didn't think that far ahead." She quirked a grin at me. "With a strategic mind like that, you must have been a very powerful nobleman." she flattered me.

"I wish." I burst out sourly "Everyone's always said I was a natural leader, but I never seem to lead anyone to anywhere but-" I waved one hand helplessly at the empty air. "Nine Hells, just look at us now!"

"You already mentioned your siblings." Shadowheart said with a commiserating sigh. "I'm guessing that it didn't go well after that?"

"No." I spat bitterly. Not any of it. Maker, I ended up stick in the Fade - the Silver Sea, you called it - at least partly because I didn't give a damn any longer whether I lived or died. And one of the party had to sacrifice themselves anyway to hold off the demon long enough for the rest to escape, so I figured why not me? The rest of them still had jobs to do, people who needed them, but I-" I broke off.

"This sounds very much like a tale you don't want to tell, but need to." Gale said softly, having come up behind us as we were talking. "No pressure, friend, none at all... but if you want to unburden yourself, we're here."

And with that, it all quietly burst out of me. Growing up as the eldest child of three, with our parents a runaway noblewoman of Kirkwall and the fugitive and apostate mage she'd unaccountably fell in love with. Our simple upbringing as villagers in the town of Lothering in Ferelden, and Father's passing from an illness. My having to be the man of the family until the Fifth Blight came and the darkspawn horde destroyed Lothering and almost everyone we'd grown up with, and our family's desperate flight into the wilderness pursued by darkspawn. Carver's death as he fought to keep Mother from being crushed by an ogre, and our not even having had the time to bury him before having to flee further. The miracle that rescued us and let us live to seek passage by ship to Kirkwall, the city of Mother's birth, only to find that the noble Amell family she'd been born into had lost all their wealth and station and been reduced to one destitute and dissolute uncle, her brother Gamlen. Myself and Bethany fighting and clawing at every opportunity we could find in Kirkwall's streets and lower districts, meeting Varric, our desperately hiring on to Bartrand's expedition into the Deep Roads, and Bethany's helpless death down there from the darkspawn taint those tunnels were filled with-

The sheer emptiness that was living in Kirkwall, as the more wealth and fame I acquired and the higher I rebuilt our family fortunes the emptier and bleaker our house became. Mother's death at the hands of that serial-killing necromancer, the qunari menace that had ultimately been brought down on Kirkwall by Isabela's theft of their sacred relic, Aveline's own success at becoming captain of the guard but the necessary distance that drew between her and my more "gray" activities, Anders' descent from kindly healer into mass murdering lunatic as the spirit that had possessed him drove him further and further into madness - the intolerance and paranoia of the Templars, the poisoning of the body and soul that was the red lyrium menace, Merrill's growing obsession with restoring the ancient eluvian artifact and the demon that tempted her every step of the way, our estrangement when I did my best to save her from that doom by smashing the eluvian, the war between the mages and the templars breaking loose that had us fighting as friends for the last time but no longer lovers- Orlesian plots, qunari intrigues - and that damnable moment where my blind foolishness had doomed Ferelden, when the ancient magister-turned-elder-darkspawn Corypheus tricked us into freeing him from his ancient captivity and then left me blind to the catastrophe I'd unleashed when he'd somehow returned from death after Varric and I had slain him and dropped an entire dungeon on him-

I came to the end of the sad, pathetic tale as I recounted how I'd been determined to help the Inquisitor defeat the menace that I'd unwittingly loosed on Thedas in the first place, and how in the end I could do nothing but try and die to give them a chance to run.

"And that's the tale of Garrett Hawke." I breathed out tonelessly, having gone numb from the sheer emptiness of letting it all out at once. "The illustrious Champion of Kirkwall, who could defeat any opponent and yet still lose every war. So perhaps you might want to choose another leader for this party, now that you've heard my track record."

"If I hadn't already been told that the gods had abandoned your world, then I'd have known it from how unfair your tale was." Gale said forthrightly to me. "From all that you've said you only did what any good man would be expected to do, and did it better than almost anyone. And I'm certainly no leader, no tactician, even if I am no small scholar. Someone's got to keep us on track, and I'll trust you to do that and do it well."

"I-" Shadowheart stared almost numbly at me, visibly overwhelmed with what she'd heard. "I- am really not good with comforting words." she breathed out. "That's not a thing I've ever done much. But I know - I've seen some of the things that prolonged cruelty can do to others." she visibly struggled to express herself. "How if you drown a person in pain for long enough, and pervasively enough, they can start to believe that they... deserve nothing better." She trailed off with a sharp breath and a wince. "But that's not always true, Hawke. And I can't even begin to make myself believe that it should be true for you." she finished firmly.

"Thank you." I said quietly. "That- that means a lot. I'll try my best to live up to your confidence in me." I promised them weakly.

"And with that, I think it's time we all turned in." Shadowheart deliberately eased the moment. "You go wash up and get your rest. I'll take first watch."

---

Author's Note: There's a fast-travel system in the BG3 game, but there obviously isn't one in tabletop D&D. So I could either ignore it, or I could BS up an explanation for why it was there. I hope that 'Netherese travelstones' suffices as an explanation.

And yes, my Hawke has had an absolutely shit life. Then again, even the most optimistic Hawkes still get an absolutely shit life. But hey, at least he's starting to make new friends!

 

[heralding_bubble]

Best girl Merrill, clearly this Hawke did, could, and can do nothing wrong.

But yeah, poor Hawke. Just, DAII is painful for them even at the best of runs.

 

[Frankfawn43]

Gale and Shadowheart now know exactly who is an easy sell to die gloriously in a heroic suicide sacrifice guy. Thankfully, they aren't the kind of guys you really don't what that information going to.

 

[cliffc999]

Writing the priestess of Shar struggling to find a way to be comforting to someone who'd lost everything when not only is that not something she's ever trained for but suffering and despair are literally sacraments in her religion was the most fun part of that sequence for me.

 

[ZodiacDivine]

Writing the priestess of Shar struggling to find a way to be comforting to someone who'd lost everything when not only is that not something she's ever trained for but suffering and despair are literally sacraments in her religion was the most fun part of that sequence for me.

Click to shrink...

Hopefully the cognitive dissonance of even wanting to do that despite her beliefs and training can fast-track her own deprogramming a bit.

 

[cliffc999]

Hopefully the cognitive dissonance of even wanting to do that despite her beliefs and training can fast-track her own deprogramming a bit.

Click to shrink...

Shadowheart is one of my most fave characters in BG3 precisely because she is the worst Sharran ever. Shar's cult has spent so many years programming her head with their doctrine, and she faithfully repeats it whenever prompted, but despite literal decades of mindscaping every time you knock her off-script her natural instinct is to be a kindhearted, empathetic marshmallow. If she'd been left to grow up normally she'd have been a Disney Princess, and on the sweeter end of that scale besides.

And it really doesn't help her case here that Hawke is the original Charisma 20 dude and this is a Diplomatic Hawke besides. *g*

 

[Yacov]

our desperately hiring on to Bartrand's expedition into the Deep Roads, and Bethany's helpless death down there from the darkspawn taint those tunnels were filled with-

Click to shrink...

Oh yeah Hawke is not going to be happy when the party's adventure takes them to the Underdark. Then again everyone in Thedas has good reason to have bathophobia. Most efforts to go deep below ground on Thedas not led by a main character end in horrible death. The main character ones have survivors at least.

The Underdark is relatively habitable and verdant compared to the Deep Roads. Pretty much everything under the ground past surface mining on Thedas is a desolate and hostile wasteland.

You got the one or two Thaigs full of hidebound traditionalist dwarves who are mostly following old patterns and waiting to die. Then you have a few outposts full of death seeking dwarves in the Legion of the Dead.

Outside of those two small spots of relatively civilized people, it is mostly hostile subterranean wildlife, teeming swarms of Darkspawn, and whatever horrors cross the thin parts of the Veil that far down.

 

[Golgotha]

Your writing is -good-
I am eagerly waiting for the next chapter. You have excellent world building, which is so necessary when combining two stories with such dense worlds.

 

[cliffc999]

Bah, I patched my BG3 install and now my mod configuration entirely doesn't work. This will slow down my game research until I reconstruct everything.

Which will take a bit of time given how many mods I was using. Ah well. Hopefully youtube and memory will let me fill in at least some blanks.

 

[Prince Chrom]

Something that I just thought of is that when Hawke gets his Specializations back that's going to be really interesting.

 

[cliffc999]

Even though we rose early with the dawn, the hours of sleep did us all a world of good. The remnants of the temple refectory even gave us a hearth in which we could cook ourselves a hot breakfast, and much refreshed we set back out.

The temple crypts at the bottom of the secret stairway were fairly small, and had been deserted for so long that there wasn't even any mold or dampness - the still air carried only the scents of dryness and dust. The large wooden doors leading to the deepest crypt were locked, but we found the key in a nearby sarcophagus guarded only by a few elementary traps. Also in the sarcophagus was a spear made out of a strange metal, one that Gale said was clearly magical. As I already had a magical greatsword I offered it to Shadowheart, but she decided to stick with her more familiar mace-and-shield combination.

Still, though, this clearly wasn't a large enough treasure that anyone would fund even a minor expedition to come all this way and fetch it, so after unlocking the vault doors we preceded into the depths of the catacombs.

"Odd." Shadowheart said, examining one of the robed corpses littering the floor. Whoever had died in here had done it so long ago that the only thing left of their bodies were withered scraps of desiccated skin clinging to bony skeletons. "They're dressed like scribes, but they're all armed. What were they writing that was so controversial that they were prepared to die defending it?"

"More to the point, what made their enemies willing to bury them alive with it?" I thought out loud.

"You can tell that just by looking at skeletons?" Gale questioned me.

"There's no broken or even chipped bones on any of them, and their robes might be rotting away but don't show any tears or slashes." I pointed out. "So they clearly didn't die of battle-wounds." I paced over towards the large opening in the far wall that led into a small cave system nearby. "Look, running water." I pointed at the creek burbling happily away across the cave floor. "So they didn't even die of thirst, but of hunger. And starvation takes weeks to kill, not days."

"There's a ladder over here." Shadowheart said, looking up at the ceiling of the cave where a small shaft leading upwards through the cave's roof had a set of rungs sticking a short ways down out of it. "And this lever here, it must lower the ladder. These men were down here long enough to starve to death when they had an escape route right here!"

"That doesn't make any sense." I said. "The attackers might have settled for just locking that door from the outside and leaving the people trapped in here to die rather than coming in after them, if they didn't have enough men to like their odds of going head-to-head with desperate men fighting like cornered rats in a basement. But if they had enough troops to put in a full siege of this place for the weeks it took for these last few defenders to die, then they had more than enough to just come in and do it the quick way."

"I think you might be a bit narrowly focused on only the mundanely possible explanations, Sir Hawke." Gale rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Because now that you've pointed it out, these corpses do present a distinct anomaly in their presence here. One that can't be readily explained by any conventional tactical choices."

"Ugh." Shadowheart rubbed the bridge of her nose frustratedly. "How did I not see it right away? Armed corpses left mysteriously laying around in a place they have no business laying around in means only one thing. Necromancy."

We all drew together in a defensive formation as we warily eyed the dead bodies. "So you're saying it's a trap. As soon as we touch whatever the owners of this crypt don't want touched, those corpses get back up and try to kill us."

"Very likely." Gale agreed with a sigh. "And they're almost certainly also set to go off if we start trying to destroy the bodies while they're down."

"I don't suppose you could just fill the room with magical flame or something?" I asked him, knowing that a suitably powerful wizard back home could have done just that.

"Ah, if only you'd caught me on a better day." Gale said embarassedly. "Unfortunately, ever since our illithid friends so incosiderately jammed one of their larvae into my cerebral cortex my magic's been a bit off. I can still cast the simpler spells in my repertoire, but it's going to take me a while to get back any advanced usage."

"I've noticed the same with my magic." Shadowheart agreed ruefully.

"Hrm." I mused out loud after I'd taken myself through a brief weapons drill. "I thought my timing being a bit off yesterday was just because I was exhausted, but you're right. The knowledge is all there, even most of my reflexes, but it's not coming together like it normally does. As if I'd been out of practice for months, not just days."

"Our nervous systems aren't entirely the same as they were last week." Gale analyzed. "And it only takes a very subtle shift in the activity patterns of the brain to require a significant adjustment to get back to the peak of performance."

"Well in the meanwhile, we've still got this immediate problem to solve." I rubbed my chin thoughtfully. "If you can't throw a big fireball, can you still do a little one?"

"Easily." Gale said, curling his fingers one by one over his open palm and materializing a small ball of flame within it. "I can do a cantrip this simple all day. But I'm not exactly going to take out a charging pack of undead warriors with it."

"You won't need to." I reassured him. "Not when there's an entire barrel of lamp oil still upstairs with the rest of the supplies that bandit expedition abandoned here."

And so we destroyed almost three times our number in undead warriors while barely needing to swing a sword. I simply chopped the head off of one of them while it was laying there inert, then waited until all the rest had finished rising up in response to my attack and let them follow me back out of the room and up the staircase to the upper level. And as soon as we had them all packed in tightly on the narrow staircase, Gale simply flicked his flame-bolt cantrip down the stairs and ignited the barrel of oil we'd carefully prepositioned at the chokepoint, and that took care of that. Some conjured water from one of Shadowheart's own minor spells took care of the fire hazard afterwards, and we had the entire crypt free to explore at our leisure.

"I wonder if this was the treasure those men were after?" Shadowheart said, looking at the eldritch tome we'd found locked and sealed in a room adjacent to the skeleton-trapped crypt. Nothing we'd tried had even begun to open it until she'd used her clerical powers to channel some divine magic through the lock, at which point the tome was revealed to be a high sacred artifact of Jergal. According to Shadowheart, recording the names and dates of death of the departed was a sacrament for Jergal's clergy, however commonplace or obscure the dead might have been - and the many volumes of such names we'd found in the library upstairs certainly bore that impression out. But this tome was a Book of Dead Gods - a tome in which the passing of lost divinities from Faerun's ancient past to the recent present had all had the dates and circumstances of their fading written out in a single spidery hand, by what must have been one of Jergal's highest priests or most sacred scribes.

"I can think of scholars in Waterdeep who'd pay a chest of gold for a rare find like that." Gale agreed. "Unfortunately, we're a long way from Waterdeep. So unless whatever powerful healer we hope to find likes to collect rare books-"

"There's still one more chamber to explore." I said. "Not that I've found the door to it yet, but if you look carefully at those corner walls over there you'll spot that there's some space unaccounted for behind them."

"Secret door hopefully means great treasure beyond!" Gale agreed enthusiastically, and after a brief search we found the hidden switch that opened up a small hidden chamber. Most of the chamber was filled by one giant and elaborate sarcophagus, larger even than the one we'd found the magic spear in, and a small chest in the corner with some magical potions and scrolls that we readily added to the treasure pile.

"Here lies the Guardian of Tombs. Through knowledge comes atonement." Shadowheart translated the plaque on the sarcophagus. "A 'Guardian of Tombs'? I'm not familiar with any lore pertaining to that. Gale?"

"Afraid not." he shrugged. "So, who wants to do the honors?"

I narrowed my eyes and looked at them both. "As if we don't already know who the two of you are going to make do all the heavy lifting." I grumbled at them affectionately, and then reached out to firmly grasp the lid of the sarcophagus and-

And the instant my hands touched the lid, magical green flames lit up in low braziers spaced all around the sarcophagus despite the complete absence of fuel or igniter. We all sprang back in alarm as the lid unaccountably kept moving, smoothly sliding back away from us with the slow, inexorable pace of an advancing glacier. A tall, thin figure covered in the dried gray flesh of a long-dead corpse yet wearing entirely pristine robes showing not the slightest trace of wear or rot levitated up out of the open sarcophagus, staring majestically down at us as it floated just below the ceiling.

As it floated forward and down we all backed up almost to the far wall - not that it was very far away - and hurriedly drew our weapons and set ourselves into a guard position. It made no hostile reaction and raised no weapon, despite having a long staff - of incongruously plain wood, no elaborate arcane tool - slung across its back.

My nerves were screaming at me, and only the epic embarassment I'd felt at my flashback yesterday kept me from falling into another one - except that this time it would have been nothing as harmless as mistaking goblins for genlocks. No, now my mind irresistibly kept drawing the comparision between current events and what in hindsight had been one of the very worst days of life - the day that Varric and I had inadvertently freed the ancient horror Corypheus from his imprisonment.

Like Corypheus, this lich-thing was impossibly tall, towering at least a full foot above me - and I was not a short man. Like him, it was nothing but dead, dried flesh stretched impossibly thinly over a walking skeleton. Like him, its eyes were filled with a terrible age and an inhumanly penetrating gaze-

But the closer I looked, the more I spotted the differing details. Corypheus had been an ancient darkspawn, and like all their kind brought the darkspawn taint with him wherever he walked - an offensive, corrupting musk that you could almost smell in your mind, even when it wasn't in your nostrils. This thing floated through the room as if were entirely ethereal, not even there - there was no aura, no psychic force, just a quiet smell like old dry paper. Corypheus' flesh had been twisted and corrupt, an ugly meld of the color of dried blood and rotten meat - this ancient undead's flesh was dead and dried but also smooth and symmetrical, with its gray flesh elaborately filigreed with beautiful patterns of gold inlay, even up to and covering its skull. If I hadn't seen it levitate and walk, I'd almost have thought it an elaborate work of art, a collaborate project between a master sculptor and a goldsmith-

"So he has spoken, and so thou standest before me." the ancient intoned in what was almost a chant, the cadence of its words as steady as the ticking of a clock and its tones so measured, so formal, as to bring a measure of calm to the room via sheer lack of passion alone. Which was yet another contrast from Corypheus, whose words always carried an undertone of snarling hatred even when he was pontificating most calmly. "Yet your name has been recorded for only a single day. What a curious way to awaken."

"Who's 'he'?" I grasped at the only part of that last statement that seemed to make sense.

"An arbiter of certain matters." the ancient being replied with glacial patience. "But that is not important now. I have a question for thee, Garrett Hawke. What is the worth of a single mortal's life?"

What? I blinked confusedly, hurriedly looking to both of my companions to see if they had any idea what was going on here. Because honestly, what the hell sort of question was that? It definitely said something that the part where it somehow magically knew my name was actually the least confusing part of the last several sentences.

Unfortunately, neither Shadowheart nor Gale seemed to have any more clue about what was going on here than I did. Furthermore, the intensity of the being's gaze being directed towards me made it rather plain that he was only asking one of us, so as we reluctantly lowered our weapons my thoughts raced to try and scramble for an answer-

I rapidly discarded the idea of asking this thing for clarification, or of just refusing to answer its question. It didn't seem malevolent at first glance, but it didn't seem very benevolent either, and I was almost entirely certain it was powerful enough we did not want to fight it. But I had the distinct sense that giving some obvious platitude of an answer, such as 'All life is infinitely precious' or some such, would be rejected as merely an obvious platitude. Saying that would also be rank hypocrisy on my part, because I was a warrior by profession with all that implied. Giving the opposite answer, that no life really meant anything in the face of an immense and uncaring universe, would be an even worse idea for obvious reasons. Life and its worth was far too complicated to sum up in a single sentence or phrase, or even a book, and every single mortal was living a different life under different circumstances-

"That is a question each single mortal can only answer about their own life, and only when at its end." I answered it confidently.

"Oh, if only the others had thought as such." it mused enigmatically. "Very well." it continued gently. "I am satisfied. We have met, and I know thy face. We will see each other again at the proper time and place. Fare well." it concluded dispassionately, and then turned and left the room without a single backward glance.

The silence echoed behind it for over a dozen heartbeats before I sputtered "All right, WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!?"

---

By the time we shook off our confusion and left the tomb, the ancient whatever-the-hell-it-was was long gone. Part of me couldn't help but angst over the idea that I might well have yet again let loose another primordial undead horror to go ravage the world, but my logical mind kept reminding me that this couldn't possibly be the same sort of situation as Corypheus. That monster had been sealed in the bottommost depths of an entire dwarf-built trap dungeon whose sole purpose had been to confine him for eternity, and it had taken us days worth of effort to elaborately unravel all the traps and protections - and an even more elaborate scheme on the part of Corypheus' servants to manipulate me and Varric into doing it. While this thing had simply been lying in what was a completely unguarded root cellar by comparision, with no locks or seals on its tomb at all - Gale couldn't even find any traces of residual warding magic that had ever been on that sarcophagus. By all appearances that lich-thing had simply chosen to lay down in a tomb and wait for centuries to get up and trade its strange riddle with the first person to actually touch the lid, restrained by nothing more than the honor system.

"Through Knowledge comes Atonement." Hmmm. Perhaps it was being punished? Ordered to wait - possibly by those mysterious 'others' it had mentioned disagreeing with? - until someone discovered it and showed any intent to set it free? But if it wasn't magically bound to that task then it was obedient enough to comply with such strictures without being forced to, which meant it was hopefully under enough discipline to not be an indiscriminate scourge.

It had better be, at any rate. Because I already had more than enough desperate and dangerous questing to be getting on with, just to get these damned parasites out of our heads before they turned us all into brain-eating monsters from beyond the stars. So if the world turned out to need saving from that ancient lich-thing as well then the world was just going to have to rely on somebody else for the immediate future. And whatever 'proper time and place' that thing and I were supposedly going to see each other again was hopefully a very long way off.

Unfortunately, while we'd done a fair job of finding treasure in these ruins we still hadn't found anything that would tell us where we were. So after we were done exploring we warped ourselves back to the travelstone where we'd originally met Gale and took the other turn, the one that we'd bypassed on our way to the ruins. Because even if we hadn't found a map the logic that originally compelled us to visit those ruins was still valid. If people had built a temple there then pilgrims and worshippers had to have a way to reach there, and while the nearest settlement had almost certainly not existed that far back the main road between Elturel and Baldur's Gate still had and so at least one of the paths leading away from the temple would eventually reach there. And if settlers had built a village nearby in the interim, they'd be much more likely to build it near an already-existing path than not-

"Voices up ahead." I quietly warned the rest of the party, as the distant sounds of two people conversing came to us from around a corner. We came around the path and between a pair of low rocks to see a pair of red-skinned, horned humanoids - they looked vaguely like the devil-men I'd seen on the nautiloid, only slim and of humanlike build instead of the hulking menaces there and with far less malevolent features and no aura of infernal power - dressed in leather armor and armed with hunting bows staring up at a man-trap that had been rigged over the pathway, a snare that had caught a familiar someone by her ankle and left her hanging helplessly upside down over six feet above the ground.

"Zorru was right," the male humanoid was saying to his female companion. "Face like a toad and twice as ugly."

Get me down from here! an angry mental voice sounded in my head, as the parasite in my skull twitched slightly in resonance with her own. Because the person caught in the trap was the same female githyanki warrior who'd briefly aided Shadowheart and I on the nautiloid, then taken off on her own as soon as we'd hit the ground.

Say "please". I thought back amusedly along the same mental 'circuit' she'd somehow opened between us.

NEVER! she 'screamed' indignantly.

"That thing's dangerous. Leave it here for the goblins to kill- hey, who are you?!?" the hunter's companion said, as they both turned to notice our arrival.

"Well met." I smiled at them disarmingly, as the three of us kept our hands clear of our weapons. "Catching anything?" I nodded up at the trapped githyanki.

"We found her caught in this trap." the male hunter answered. "And she's the same type of whatever-it-is as a band of them that recently attacked our friend Zorru and killed most of his patrol."

"They're called githyanki." Shadowheart offered, staring coldly up at the trapped one. "And I'm not surprised that they murdered your friends. They're too often like that." her lip curled scornfully.

Don't you dare! the githyanki mentally screamed at us. Remember what grows in your skulls! Remember that I alone know where you can find the cure!

"Is your village nearby?" I asked them. "And do you have a healer there?"

"We're refugees, friend." the male hunter corrected me. "But we're currently camping at a druid's grove just a little ways from here. The lead druid is supposed to be quite the powerful healer indeed."

"Sounds ideal!" Gale said relievedly. "Could we trouble you for an escort to your camp?"

"Well-" the female hunter trailed off, looking up at the trapped githyanki.

I shook my head. "Leaving her here for the weather to finish off is even worse than cutting her throat in cold blood, and if you were the type of people to do that then you would have done it already without stopping to debate." I sighed. "And I'm not going to do that either. So I suppose we'd better just cut her down."

"But Zorru-" the male hunter said.

I shook my head slightly at Shadowheart's wordless glare of This is a bad idea! and continued onwards. "I don't know much about her people, but are they really so much of a monolith that every single one of them is an accomplice to every crime of every other one? Men don't work that way. Elves don't. And I very much doubt your folk do either." I temporized right over the fact that I didn't properly know what the name of their race was.

"No." their leader agreed. "But how do we know she wasn't one of the individual ones that attacked our friends?"

"Because she was with us yesterday." I explained. "We were all prisoners on that nautiloid ship you might have seen crashing the other night. We got separated yesterday while exploring around." I glared up at the trapped githyanki. "But all's well that ends well, right?"

A wordless snarl of frustration was the only reply.

"Do you have many traps like this around your encampment?" Gale asked brightly in an obvious distraction.

"They're not our traps, but the goblins'." the female hunter said. "Little bastards have been scouting around for days trying to find our encampment. You're lucky you didn't run into one of their patrols."

"Actually we did." Shadowheart replied, before turning to me. "Are we really going to be bailing our rash... companion... out of the consequences of her own actions again?" she remonstrated.

The grating of githyanki teeth was clearly audible to us all even at this distance.

"If she can act with a little more discipline from now on." I stared grimly up at my captive audience. "Because rushing off on your own after we got separated was a very bad idea. You were lost in the wilderness with no idea of where you were and probably not that much experience in the Faerunian environment, and you left behind potential native guides and extra swords to proceed alone through hostile country. Without even any supplies, let alone reinforcements. Does that all begin to sound as foolish as it actually was now that I've listed it out loud?"

"Yes." she hissed through gritted teeth. "I-" she exhaled heavily. "Perhaps not all of my recent choices were... tactically optimum." she conceded like pulling teeth. "Would you cut me down now?"

I am still NOT saying it! she followed up mentally.

"Thank you." I said politely, and went to go find the other end of the rope trap keeping her up and help lower her to the ground.

"You dare set yourself up as my leader?" the githyanki fumed to me as soon as her feet touched the dirt. "You might as well suggest a wyvern bow to worms! Amongst my people authority is earned only by proven deeds!"

Maker, it's like I'm back talking to the Arishok. I grumbled in the privacy of my own thoughts. Because the uncompromising militarism and arrogance of githyanki manners was very much reminding me of the qunari at this moment.

"Then why do you offer me only words and not deeds?" I shot back, more than familiar with the rhythm of qunari negotiations by now. "I've saved your life twice already, once on the nautiloid and once right here. The very least you can do in return is help save ours from these parasites."

"You... are not entirely inaccurate." she conceded reluctantly. "Very well, we have an accord. I will fight alongside you as one of your warband for as long as we both still need each other, and lead you to my people so we may there be cured. After that much is done then we go our separate ways."

"Done." I agreed. "Come on, our new acquaintances are taking us to their settlement. There's supposed to be a druid there, a healer."

"As well as this 'Zorru', who can tell us where he encountered others of my people and thus give us a lead towards the nearest githyanki creche." she mused out loud. "Yes, this is a valid course of action."

"I'm glad you approve." Shadowheart said icily. "Just remember - you gave your word to act as one of the party from now on. Don't you dare break it."

"You dare insult my honor?" she rounded on Shadowheart angrily. "A warrior of the Gith? I should-"

"Ladies." I spoke over both of them firmly. "We're all in the same boat now, so let's not rush to toss each other overboard." I looked at Shadowheart first, because she had been going a bit out of her way to pick a fight-

"All right." Shadowheart lowered her eyes. "Allies for now." I turned my 'angry older brother' glare towards our githyanki friend before she could say anything to break the mood.

"It is as she says." the githyanki muttered. "I am Lae'zel, of Creche K'liir. Know that you have made a valuable ally this day."

After we all finished introducting ourselves - the two hunters were named Damays and Nymessa, of a people called the 'tieflings' - we fell in behind them as they led us back towards the druid's grove. I wordlessly handed Lae'zel a canteen, because she had to be thirsty as anything after hanging there for who knew how many hours, and she grabbed it and drained it without a single word of acknowledgement before handing it back. I began to wonder at how young she might be by her people's standards, because what I'd been told was a warrior race engaged in a generations-long struggle wouldn't seem to have this much room for impractical pride unless she personally had little field experience so far-

"Shouting up ahead." Damays said worriedly. "We're almost at the grove, but something's wrong-"

"Double time!" I called, and we all broke into a run. We passed another travelstone and came out into a small clearing before a stone cliff-wall about fifteen feet high and topped by a crude wooden battlement. Several more tieflings stood on top of it, looking down at a small party of human warriors shouting up at them from the ground. All of them were shaken and sweating, as if they'd just run a desperate race, and their unbandaged wounds and the goblin arrow still sticking out of one of their shields told me what they'd been running from.

"Open the gate!" the leader of the human party screamed.

"Nobody gets in!" one tiefling called down from the battlement. "Zevlor's orders!"

"That pack of goblins will be on us any second!" the man screamed back.

"But I can't risk-" the one tiefling replied.

"THEN LOWER A DAMNED ROPE!" I shouted at him as we ran up to join the other adventuring party. "We've got two of your scouts trapped out here with us, so get us in that way if you can't risk opening the gate!"

"Fetch a rope! Quickly!" someone called from up above us, as we all fell into a battle line with the others.

"Quick thinking there, friend!" the leader of the adventurers called out to me. "I'm Aradin. We get out of this alive, I'm buying you a drink!"

"Pale ale's my favorite." I said back to him cheerfully, as the yelping of some unfamiliar type of beast started sounding from the path entrance across the clearing. A pair of goblins riding two misshapen monster-wolves burst into the clearing, followed by a squad of goblin infantry running behind them.

"Dammit, not enough time!" I swore. "KEEP YOUR HEADS DOWN UP THERE, THEY'VE GOT ARCHERS!" I shouted as the goblins grinned evilly at us where we stood trapped with our backs to the wall. They lazily settled themselves into a battle line of their own and began to slowly advance across the clearing towards us, holding their fire until they got into easy bow range-

"Gale, have you got anything that blinds or flashes?" I called to him quickly. "Cast it before they turn us into archery targets against this backstop!"

"Fog Cloud!" he called out in immediate reply, and the rear line of goblins were obscured just before they had a chance to start firing at us. A few arrows still flew blindly out of the mist, but hit no one. Shadowheart took the opportunity to cast a quick spell of her own, a blessing of some kind, and we felt extra strength and steadiness of hand flow into us.

"They're off-balance! CHAAAARGE!" I called out, and took off towards the wolf-riding vanguard at a dead run. Gale hung back with the female bowman of the adventurers and the two tiefling hunters, who began to support us with cantrips and arrow fire as the rest of us hit the goblins' main force head-on.

I sprinted out ahead, making myself the vanguard and the most obvious target, and then did a powered leap directly over the heads of the two wolf-riders as they focused on me and left them skidding helplessly through our front lines to come to a halt barely fifteen feet in front of our bowmen. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed Gale casting a spell that bathed wolves and their riders in a cone of flame from his outstretched hands and left them stumbling backwards and screaming in painly, only to be helplessly shot down by the archers. The fog cloud dissipated as soon as Gale turned his concentration to his next spell, but it had done its job of delaying and confusing the remaining goblins just long enough for us to close the gap, and we hit them in a flying wedge.

"H'taka!" Lae'zel screamed a joyous battlecry as she gathered some type of magical energy around her and did a twenty-foot flying leap of her own to get ahead of me and engage the apparent goblin leader where he stood in the midst of his archers. I left her to the job of gutting him while I covered her vulnerable flank with a quick slash, sending another goblin reeling away, and then the rest of us caught up and piled on as the remaining infantry had to drop their now-useless bows and hurriedly grab for their clubs or axes. Shadowheart cast a spell of her own that struck the goblin's own spellcaster with a brilliant energy bolt, ruining whatever spell they were attempting in mid-cast, and then followed up with a relentless series of blows with her mace. I spun into a wide sweeping whirlwind cut, bringing another pair of goblins down, and then turned to face the furious charge of one of the wolf-things as it broke away from our archers and made a lunge at what it had hoped would be our undefended backs.

I switched to the Bulwark stance, which used properly focused internal energy and balance to make a defending warrior nigh-impossible to knock down or push against their will, and set myself to receive the enemy's charge. The wolf-thing yelped in surprise as it unaccountably failed to shift my feet so much as an inch despite being three times my mass and hitting me in a full charge, and the battering it took as it ran full-on into the flat of my blocking greatsword broke off several of its fangs and dislocated its jaw. I took advantage of its shock to split its skull from scalp to jawbone, noted that the two wolf-riders and the other wolf-thing were already dead and our rear line had taken no apparent casualties, and then returned my attention to the main battle.

"For the Gate! For the Gate!" Aradin's voice came to me with a heartfelt battle cry, a necessity in a confusing melee like this to avoid being accidentally spitted by one of your allies, and I witnessed him and his partner flanking and trapping a pair of goblins up against one of the nearby boulders with a smoothness befitting long-practiced teamwork as Lae'Zel and Shadowheart, their animosity put aside at least for the moment, did the same with almost equal smoothness against the goblins' other flank. I did a hasty head count, matching still-standing and fallen goblins against the number of them that I'd carefully made sure to note before we began our counterattack-

"Two of them got away!" I cried out. "We've got to get after them before they bring the whole damn tribe back here!" I broke into a frantic run, heading as desperately as I could for the distant figures I now glimpsed at the very other end of the clearing as it frantically ran for the same path they'd taken to reach here-

"Damnable roaches!" a stranger's voice called out, and an eldritch blast flew down to strike one of the fleeing goblins directly between its shoulder blades with a bolt of green fire and send it crashing to the ground. With a dramatic leap a dark-skinned man dressed in an elaborate red-and-black doublet and brandishing a rapier leapt almost ten feet down from the high rock he'd fired his mage-bolt from to land impossibly lightly on his feet menacing the other goblin, which had fearfully turned to face him rather than also get shot in the back. Our new ally had apparently raced along the top of rock wall on our right flank all the way down from the battlement by the gate to cut the corner on the fleeing goblins to intercept them-

"Provoke the Blade-" he proclaimed dramatically as he batted the goblin's clumsy swing aside with a flourish and a parry, only to immediate cut over into a swift riposte. "-and suffer its sting!" he finished, as his rapier drove directly in under the last goblin's breastbone and out through its spine.

"Neatly done." I complimented him as I drew to a halt nearby. "And that's the last of them, thank goodness."

"You did good work yourself." the arcane warrior nodded back to me. "If you hadn't so swiftly organized a counter-attack, the Grove would have been in the gravest danger." He finished wiping his blade clean and sheathed it, and then extended his hand to shake. "Wyll, the Blade of Frontiers."

"Hawke." I introduced myself, and we shook hands. "You live here?" I asked as we strode back towards the other.

"Just visiting, same as yourself." he replied cheerfully. "Although given all the dark and dangerous things that have been menacing these good people lately, they need all the help that they can get."

"Is that the last of them?" a new tiefling, older and dressed in full warrior's armor, called down to us from the top of the battlement.

"Looks to be, Zevlor!" Nymessa the hunter called up to him.

"Thank the Gods, that was too close." this Zevlor replied. "Open the gate! We've got to get them all inside before more goblins come!" A section of the rock wall began to slowly inch upwards as the tieflings on the battlement began hauling on a pair of windlasses - apparently these 'druids' had hid the gate to their hideaway by disguising it as part of the rock formation.

"Tempus' blade, we came through that barely by the skin of our teeth." Aradin greeted me as we drew up alongside and filed through the open gateway. "If you hadn't come along, we'd have all been in for it. You've more than earned that ale."

"What were you thinking, leading the goblins here?" Zevlor said challengingly as he hurriedly came down a nearby path to meet us just inside the gateway. "And where is Halsin? What the hell happened?"

"Ease off!" Aradin said belligerently as the two of them faced off. "Fat lot of help you and all your useless tieflings were, sitting up there just watching us almost get shot full of holes-"

"We just finished one battle, and you want to start another one?" I interrupted them firmly. "Stop letting the blood race and just breathe."

"Sorry," Zevlor said, taking a step back and exhaling heavily. "But the leader of these druids left with Aradin's expedition here and now they're coming back without him, and with a pack of goblins on their heels to boot?"

"We didn't ask him to come!" Aradin burst with frustration. "He invited himself along, damn well demanded it of us! And he wasn't the only one we lost! There was a small army of gobbos in there, not just the little band we'd been told to expect! When they hit us it was all any man could do to get himself out, and those that fell behind-" He trailed off. "There was only three of us standin' at the end, and dozens of them. What the hell were we supposed to do except run? Drop dead just for your convenience?"

"Damn." Zevlor swore. "No, not that-" he shook his head. "But without Halsin to speak for us, I'm afraid the druids won't let any of us stay here. This is all such a mess!"

"You got that much right, at least." Aradin agreed. "Look, me and my lot? We're pulling out. There's barely any of us left, and some of us are wounded besides. And our whole quest's a lost cause now, with that army of gobbos sitting right on top of the prize. So to hell with this whole mess, we're getting back to Baldur's Gate before those goblins finish cutting this place off." He turned to me, and reached into his pouch to toss me a coin. "Sorry I can't stand you that ale I owe you in person, but as soon as I can see to my people's wounds a bit we've got to get right back on the road. You and your team are welcome to come with us if you want - you're all damn good in a fight, we could use you."

"We've got a quest of our own, and we can't leave it." I explained to him. "Good fortune to you on the road."

"You too, mate." Aradin nodded at us, and he and his two remaining companions turned and left.

"I'm Zevlor," he introduced himself to our party after Aradin and his team had headed off. "I'm the leader of these refugees. Welcome to the Emerald Grove... at least for now."

"Do the druids have any healer other than this Halsin?" I asked him. "We're definitely in need of one."

"His apprentice, Nettie, should be able to see to you." Zevlor assured us. "Her workroom is in the Grove's underground chambers, you can find the entrance to them in the center courtyard across from their big sacred idol. I'd take you there, but I've got to go get a working party organized to clean up those bodies and at least try to hide some of the trail they left here so when the rest of their tribe comes looking for them, we can at least buy some time before they find us."

"It's all right, I'll show them the way." Wyll contributed obligingly, and as Zevlor went to go take charge of his people I turned and led our group deeper into the Grove.

---

Author's Note: Well, I got my BG3 configuration running again, but I lost all my saved games and am having to redo it from scratch. Oh well, that's what super easy god mode mods are for.

The further in we more I find myself diverting at least slightly from 'video game' logic. For example, you find Lae'zel in some elaborate suspended cage, not a trap that goblins would believably be using in the field. That's presumably so that things were easier to animate, but I don't have to worry about animation budget or physics modeling so I get to do what I want. Likewise, the tiefling hunters just tell you where the Grove is but don't lead you back there, because videogame logic has to account for 'Players who do the encounter and then go run in the opposite direction to do half a dozen sidequests or pick berries or whatnot before actually going to the next main quest location'. Likewise, there's no way in the crypt to recognize in advance that 'these bodies are totally lurking undead', although you could in theory set up your barrelmancy in advance anyways.

The 'losing power' effect of the tadpoles is BG3 canon - it's the explanation for why every party member in the game starts at level 1 and has to levelup from scratch, despite some of them having backstories as veteran adventurers. Gale in particular is explicitly an archmage in his character history, and one talented enough to have drawn the personal attention of Mystra besides, and yet he's level 1 same as the rest of you at the start of the game. So the game covered it with 'the tadpole infection basically dropped negative levels on everyone and they had to slowly work them off over the course of the game', and the same is happening here.

As for Astarion - spoiler alert, the party is not recruiting him. The story logic is that they simply went the other way from where you initially meet him, and he's not going to be hanging around for days until they possibly go back there. The Doylist reason is because every time I play BG3, Astarion gets the fucking stake. It's not even that I hate his character - every Youtube I see of the guy is entertaining as hell, and I know all about his tragic backstory. It's that I can't not roleplay my MC, and none of my Tavs could ever possibly have any reaction to 'You wake up at night in camp and see the guy leaning over you with his fangs out' and possibly have any other reaction than "He gets the fucking stake". Even my Durge isn't going to hold back. (Especially my Durge isn't going to hold back.) So rather than deal with that whole thing, Astarion simply gets to go off on his own just like if the party never recruited him in game.

 

[Frankfawn43]

So rather than deal with that whole thing, Astarion simply gets to go off on his own just like if the party never recruited him in game.

Click to shrink...

Fair enough. I really like Astarion but this keeps him from getting staked and gives more screen space for focusing on the other party members. Nothing onerous with how great every BG3 character is.

 

[Golgotha]

It's waaay too easy for the cast to bloat out in size anyway.
Thanks for another great chapter.

 

[Cosmic Dream]

Fun times .

I really should finish BG3 one of these days.

 

[Yacov]

"Odd." Shadowheart said, examining one of the robed corpses littering the floor. Whoever had died in here had done it so long ago that the only thing left of their bodies were withered scraps of desiccated skin clinging to bony skeletons. "They're dressed like scribes, but they're all armed. What were they writing that was so controversial that they were prepared to die defending it?"

Click to shrink...

Shadowheart has obviously never been in the forbidden section of a fantasy library. There is always at least one man eating gribbly hiding in those books.

By the time we shook off our confusion and left the tomb, the ancient whatever-the-hell-it-was was long gone. Part of me couldn't help but angst over the idea that I might well have yet again let loose another primordial undead horror to go ravage the world, but my logical mind kept reminding me that this couldn't possibly be the same sort of situation as Corypheus.

Click to shrink...

In most fantasy situations Hawke would be correct. Fortunately Withers is a fairly chill dude. Not that Hawke knows that.

Maker, it's like I'm back talking to the Arishok. I grumbled in the privacy of my own thoughts. Because the uncompromising militarism and arrogance of githyanki manners was uncomfortably reminding me of the qunari very much right now.

Click to shrink...

Githyanki and Quanri are fairly similar in temperament and culture role in their respective worlds. I would see they would get along, but we known these two groups would tear into each other after 30 seconds in each other's presence.

Don't worry Hawke, it is not like anyone in party has stolen an ancient artifact from this powerful and bizarre culture this time around. Right?

"Open the gate!" the leader of the human party screamed.

"Nobody gets in!" one tiefling called down from the battlement. "Zevlor's orders!"

"That pack of goblins will be on us any second!" the man screamed back.

"But I can't risk-" the one tiefling replied.

"THEN LOWER A DAMNED ROPE!" I shouted at him as we ran up to join the other adventuring party. "We've got two of your scouts trapped out here with us, so get us in that way if you can't risk opening the gate!"

Click to shrink...

Hawke continues to have the magical ability to apply logic in a crisis situation that Persuasion Build Protagonists in early Dragon Age games have.

I switched to the Bulwark stance, which used properly focused internal energy and balance to make a defending warrior nigh-impossible to knock down or push against their will, and set myself to receive the enemy's charge. The wolf-thing yelped in surprise as it unaccountably failed to shift my feet so much as an inch despite being three times my mass and hitting me in a full charge, and the battering it took as it ran full-on into the flat of my blocking greatsword broke off several of its fangs and disloacted its jaw.

Click to shrink...

Ah yes, Bulwark. The Warrior's ability to take on the sturdiness and unmovability of a table leg at midnight. Watch an Ogre stub their toe against you and fall over in pain and misery.

I did a hasty head count, matching still-standing and fallen goblins against the number of them that I'd carefully made sure to note before we began our counterattack-

"Two of them got away!" I cried out. "We've got to get after them before they bring the whole damn tribe back here!" I broke into a frantic run,

Click to shrink...

A reminder that Hawke probably has the most campaigning veterancy out of the current group. Other characters may have been more powerful or lived longer, but Hawke probably has probably spent the most time "on the march" and "in the field" in an immediate and consistent manner prior to his abduction.

The (not from previous games) member of the party with the most honed campaign instincts and habits is probably Karlach with her time spent in the Blood War.

 

[cliffc999]

A reminder that Hawke probably has the most campaigning veterancy out of the current group. Other characters may have been more powerful or lived longer, but Hawke probably has probably spent the most time "on the march" and "in the field" in an immediate and consistent manner prior to his abduction.

Click to shrink...

Oh yes.

Temporary tadpole-induced nerf or not this is still the legendary Champion of Kirkwall, a man who has fought more desperate battles for more years than anybody except the other Dragon Age game protagonists, a man who has seen action from the nastiest kind of urban civil war to the depths of the Deep Roads, from squad-sized engagements to clashes of small armies, a man who's had to do intrigue, politics, and investigations as well as desperate battles, and the man who alongside Carver survived Ostagar where the vast majority of the Ferelden army didn't... and that at the start of his career.

Hawke may not have been allowed to have the in-story successes or the immortal fame of either the Hero of Ferelden or the Inquisitor, but he definitely has earned his place alongside both of them as a professional equal. In fact, you find out in 'Inquisition' that Hawke had been Divine Justinia's first preferred candidate to head the Inquisition - that's why Seeker Cassandra had originally been sent to Kirkwall to find him, back when Divine Justinia had still been alive and planning the 'call the Inquisition' contingency to try and stop the mage/templar civil war with. Varric only thought she'd been sent there to find and execute Hawke.

Default Tav is a young hero at the start of his journey. Default Durge was a highly experienced Bhaalspawn, but all of his expertise was for murder and cult intrigue, not for field command, and that before he got a case of total amnesia at the start of BG3. Hawke is a man in his early thirties, still physically in his prime and with a solid decade and change of experience. (Dragon Age 2 spans eight years from prologue to Act Three, and there's two years between the end of DA2 and the start of Inquisition.)

One of my goals for writing this story is to explore the difference it really makes when the lead character of BG3 is a man who is a highly experienced military commander and a natural leader. I hope I pull it off.

 

[l---erddad---l]

It's that I can't not roleplay my MC, and none of my Tavs could ever possibly have any reaction to 'You wake up at night in camp and see the guy leaning over you with his fangs out' and possibly have any other reaction than "He gets the fucking stake". Even my Durge isn't going to hold back. (Especially my Durge isn't going to hold back.) So rather than deal with that whole thing, Astarion simply gets to go off on his own just like if the party never recruited him in game.

Click to shrink...

I mean, you can also have them encounter Astarion later in a way that subverts it, if you want. For example, have them meet him at Auntie Ethel's and end up needing to team up, leading to the reveal of him being a vampire spawn by the monster hunter outside. Hell, you could recruit him in Act 3 by having him have been taken 'alive' by the monster hunter back to his clan.

 

[Yacov]

Temporary tadpole-induced nerf or not this is still the legendary Champion of Kirkwall, a man who has fought more desperate battles for more years than anybody except the other Dragon Age game protagonists, a man who has seen action from the nastiest kind of urban civil war to the depths of the Deep Roads, from squad-sized engagements to clashes of small armies, a man who's had to do intrigue, politics, and investigations as well as desperate battles, and the man who alongside Carver survived Ostagar where the vast majority of the Ferelden army didn't... and that at the start of his career.

Click to shrink...

The best part about it is that there is zero indication in Hawke's background or upbringing outside of that Flemeth ex Machina in the beginning that suggests he should be anything other than a statistic. Non-magical Hawke really doesn't have anything inherently going for him. Just a regular dude with a fairly interesting backstory from some village in Ferelden.

He is not from some bloodline of heroes, no product of Grey Warden taint alchemy, nor a project of Tevinter magics, no drawing power from the Fade, not hosting a spirit inside his body, no special mark from the Veil, doesn't have anything all that special in the way of training.

In the world of Thedas, sometimes there are just those warriors like Hawke and Ser "Maker's Punishment for not choosing the Persuade Option" Cauthrien. Regular looking people who can suddenly take on an entire party with the above advantages and make them reconsider their life choices.

 

[wellis]

What companions do you plan on recruiting for the story? Beyond Gale, Shadowheart, Wyll, & Lae'zel?

 

[cliffc999]

What companions do you plan on recruiting for the story?

Click to shrink...

Confirmed: Shadowheart, Gale, Lae'zel, Wyll
Still Undecided: Karlach, Jaheira, Minsc
Not Using: Astarion, Minthara, Halsin(*)

(*) He might or might not be a temporary party member, but he won't be joining permanently.

Reasons for not using vary between just not fitting in the intended storyline and my needing to keep the # of main cast members down to a manageable amount.

 

[wellis]

Yeah admittedly for Minthara, you would need to be evil and I can't see Hawke being like that.

 

[Yacov]

Out of the potentials I can see Hawke getting along with Karlach the best. He would probably empathize both with Karlach being dropped into Hell and the circumstances that led her there. Karlach would also be helped by having someone who "gets it".

In favor of Karlach getting involved, Hawke already has Wyll, so that probably already puts the party on the course of meeting her. As for whether she survives the encounter, Hawke is a Dragon Age protagonist. They tend to exhaust the dialogue tree as much as they can before any engagement and this Hawke seems perceptive enough to smell a rat.

 

[TheChairIsAgainstTheWall]

I'm almost glad Astarion isn't featured. He's got a great backstory and killer voice work, but his thirsty fans make me hate him on principle. I feel you on the roleplay aspect there. I can justify my PC not staking him, but I have the same problem with Minthara. There's just no reason for my PC to knock her out but not kill her.

Strongly recommend you pick up Karlach. Wyll's backstory is predicated on finding her (I believe he ditches you if you don't at least encounter her), and she is just so bleeping nice. Basically Shadowheart but muscles and swearing instead of waif and sarcasm.

 

[BigBad]

What's this, a new cliffc999 story? Watched. Dragon Age? BG3? Double watched. Really enjoying this so far. And yeah, Hawke is just hella experienced. He was in the Ferelden Army until Ostagar, which he survived, then I assume his first year in Kirkwall was spent as a rising star in the Red Iron mercenary company as this Hawke seems more likely to have gone with relatively honest work than Athenril's smuggling operation. And probably the Berserker specialisation?

Anyway, looking forward to more.

 

[Domino]

I mean, you can also have them encounter Astarion later in a way that subverts it, if you want. For example, have them meet him at Auntie Ethel's and end up needing to team up, leading to the reveal of him being a vampire spawn by the monster hunter outside. Hell, you could recruit him in Act 3 by having him have been taken 'alive' by the monster hunter back to his clan.

Click to shrink...

Presumably once it's obvious that the party missed their chance at picking Astarion up, the (spoiler) that is arresting the mind flayer transformation will cut it's losses and stop shielding him from the elder brain's perception and it will complete his transformation and just be Generic Mind Flayer #37 if the party ever encounters him later

 

[Elwyn]

Presumably once it's obvious that the party missed their chance at picking Astarion up, the (spoiler) that is arresting the mind flayer transformation will cut it's losses and stop shielding him from the elder brain's perception and it will complete his transformation and just be Generic Mind Flayer #37 if the party ever encounters him later

Click to shrink...

Someone went around testing the various scenarios for what happens to the companions if you ignore them, and if I'm remembering right Astarion's was that he ends up flayed in his sire's lair. Just hanging there as a rather desfirgured corpse for the encounter.

 

[BigBad]

Aye. Astarion gets got by Cazador without the party to protect him.

 

[TyricGaias]

Hearing Astarion not showing up sucks a bit but honestly? I respect, understand your choices and am looking forward to how you move forward.