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

[Sun Dog]

Already building most of the party. I used Astarion as such a meatshield in the early days of my own playthrough, but Lae'zel and Karlach are better for it.

 

[cliffc999]

The Emerald Grove was a clever mixture of simple architecture and natural defenses. The porticullis we entered through was actually a reinforced wooden gatehouse, died gray to simulate rock and then carefully overgrown with vines. You had to approach quite closely to the rock face it was set into to realize that it actually was an entrance. These druids certainly liked their privacy.

Behind the porticullis was a narrow cut between rock formations that led into a small series of caves adjoining a peaceful glade, with a large idol representing the god of nature that was worshipped here mounted in the center. As we looked down into the glade from a high path adjoining it I spotted barely-visible wisps of arcane energies gathering and flowing around the idol, pulsing in time with the chanting of a small circle of druids who were all surrounding it in some elaborate ritual.

The caves were crowded with dozens of tieflings, living in improvised shelters and hasty tents or just sleeping on the ground. A communal kitchen had been set up in one cavern, but it was clearly of recent construction and used only those implements which could be carried on pack animals. Between the sheer rawness of the set-up and the mixture of quiet despair and suppressed panic that suffused every low-faced conversation, marked every person's face as they fell warily silent at our approach and watched us walk past, I didn't need Zamsyn's mention of his folk being refugees to tell exactly what was going on here. I'd seen exactly the same gathering of lost souls piled up outside the gates of Kirkwall, as all the folks who had tried fleeing the Blight in Ferelden to seek safety in the Free Marches had found out that the Free Marches didn't want any part of them. And if we hadn't been able to prove that we were members of an old Kirkwall family trying to return home, with a still-living relative in the city to vouch for us - and if I hadn't indentured myself for a year to raise enough money to pay a hefty amount of bribes - we'd have been stuck out there with them for a lot longer than a few days.

So I took several moments out as we passed to stop and ask needless directions from one person, to dip out a bit of food at the tieflings' soup kitchen, and to trade for a new dagger at their smith's. I even happened across a tiefling boy trying and failing to pick the pocket of one of Aradin's mercenaries as they were finishing up their packing, and needed a quick bit of diplomatic intervention to save our would-be thief from a thrashing. I still wasn't certain that the sob story he pitched us of the man's favorite locket reminding the boy of the one his dead mother had worn was true or not, but it certainly convinced the locket's owner enough to let it go.

What I was actually doing, of course, was taking advantage of these conversational opportunities to spread some rumors - or more precisely, some counter-rumors - throughout the crowd. My own refugee experience had left me keenly aware of how a desperate crowded of stranded folk could go from despair to panic in the blink of an eye under the wrong circumstances, and the knowledge that some type of battle against the goblins had just been fought outside the gate was visibly spreading through the compound at the speed of gossip even as I watched. However, apparently no one had made any systematic attempt to inform the refugees of what had actually happened, so I took that task upon myself. As one of the primary participants in that battle it was of course natural that people would ask me what had happened, and I left them reassured that it had merely been a goblin scouting party that had made it close to the gates but which had been successfully cut off and destroyed before a single one of them could report back. And so we proceeded onward, leaving behind a crowd significantly less likely to start a riot than they might have been a few minutes ago.

"That was nobly done," Wyll complimented me as we reached the passage junction that led down to the central courtyard. "You have a definite air of command, Hawke. Were you a man of rank back home?"

"Several ranks, actually." I chuckled softly. "Army sergeant, sellsword captain, expedition leader, landed lord - it's been a varied career."

"Then there must be quite a tale indeed behind how you ended up on that nautiloid." he grinned at me.

"How did you know about the nautiloid?" I looked at him suspiciously. Because I certainly hadn't mentioned that to him in the brief time we'd been acquainted-

Wyll's expression became grave as he turned to look me in the eye... and a sudden mental shivering resonated in my brain, as it echoed the mental signal from his own. He too bore a mind flayer's parasite.

"You as well?" Gale said incredulously. "Were those illithids working double shifts?"

"How I ended up sharing the same fate as you good folk is a long tale, some parts of which I'm not at liberty to tell." Wyll assured us. "I made it to the grove only a little over a day ahead of you. Their leader, Halsin, had recently left with the expedition whose survivors you fought alongside at the gate- I'd been doing my best to aid these refugees until he returned."

"And now-" I began, only for us all to be distracted by a sudden shout nearby.

"You!" Lae'zel had left our group to go loom menaciningly over a scared young tiefling man who was at present was trying to burrow through a cave wall with his shoulderblades to get away from her. "I saw how you tried to flee as soon as you spotted me! You have fought one of my kind before, haven't you? Are you this 'Zorru' of whom I've heard? Are you?!?"

"Please don't hurt me!" he begged her. "I haven't done anything!"

"Lae'zel." I cut off her words firmly. "Are you trying to get us thrown out of here?"

"I am trying to save our lives." she spat back at me. "Have your brains turned to mud and oozed out your ears? Have you forgotten how dire our need is already? We must locate the nearest githyanki creche, and this witless fool refuses to cooperate!"

"Would you give any cooperation to someone trying to threaten it out of you so crudely?" I belabored. "Or would your pride as a warrior forbid it?" I tried to turn her own militaristic logic back on her.

"But- he is clearly no warrior!" she protested.

"And you are clearly no diplomat." I cut her off, and then gently shouldered her aside. I ignored her hiss of fury as I turned to our unlucky wallflower and gave him my best charming smile. "Well met. I'm Hawke, and you are-?"

"Zorru." he quavered. "Why- why is she here?"

"We're lost, and she's trying to find her way back to her kin." I explained reasonably. "And you apparently saw others like her recently. Now, I apologize for her horrible manners-"

"I certainly do not!" Lae'zel tried to interrupt, and I rounded on her as firmly as I could.

"Lae'zel!" I barked. "Not two hours ago you gave your word to act as one of the party and already I'm getting a mutiny!"

"Mutiny is only conducted against superior officers! Who says you are mine?!?" Lae'zel argued.

"The rest of the party." Shadowheart's interruption chilled the air. "Gale and I have both acknowledged him as our leader. And that means you're outvoted." she finished cattily.

"I- this is- fine!" Lae'zel sputtered uselessly. "Just get the location from this witless teeth-ling already!"

"It's pronounced 'tiefling'," I corrected her amusedly, before turning back to Zorru.

"Are her people all like that?" he asked me nervously, edging around to my opposite side from Lae'zel. "So harsh and cruel?"

"I'm trying not to make any hasty judgments." I non-answered. "Now, would you please tell me what happened the last time you met one of her people, in your own words?"

"We were up scouting near where the Risen Road enters the mountain pass." he quavered. "There were two of us, me and Yul, and we'd almost made it to the bridge a little ways past the roadside inn, Waukeen's Rest I think it was called. I don't know exactly what happened." his voice fell as his eyes stopped focusing on us, as he began revisiting the horrible moment in his head. "They saw us before we saw them. First I knew they were there, one of them had come out of nowhere and jammed his blade straight through Yul's belly, front to back. I saw him go down, I saw several more of them step out from where they'd been hiding- and then I took off running."

Lae'zel opened her mouth, then shut it as I threw her a meaningful look. "Did you have your weapons out? Could they have thought they were under attack?" I probed.

"We were holding our bows as we marched, but didn't have any arrows nocked." he explained. "And they didn't challenge us or anything, just leapt out and had at us."

"That... is not usual behavior for one of our patrols." Lae'zel said confusedly. "Something must have gone wrong."

"You- you're not going up that way yourself, are you?" Zorru asked us worriedly.

"Not immediately," I looked at the rest of the group. "We've got to see the healer here first, at the very least."

"Maybe it'll go better for you than it did for us, if you've got one of their own along to speak for you. I don't know. But- look, that's all I know. Can I go now?" Zorru pleaded.

"Thank you." I said, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder. "And listen... I've been the one who survived a patrol gone wrong as well. Several times, even. Being alive when your friends are dead always feels like it's your fault, but it still feels that way even when it's not. You said it yourself - you didn't abandon your partner. He was already dead and you fell back only because you were hopelessly outnumbered."

"I ran like a coward." Zorru moaned. "Sometimes it feels like I'll always be the one running."

"Not unless that's who you choose to be." I reassured him. "Talk to Zevlor if you don't believe me, or one of the other experienced men. They'll say the same thing."

"I will." he breathed out heavily, squaring his shoulders a bit. "I- thank you. I didn't want to talk about it, or even think about it- but thank you."

"Any time." I nodded to him, and we left Zorru to his thoughts as we continued onward.

"Do the people of this Fay-run always coddle their weak so?" Lae'zel asked me as we marched onwards. "In my creche, one whose nerve failed so badly when under fire would have been relegated to thrall duties forevermore. A failure of courage in a single man can potentially doom an entire company!"

"Which is exactly why good soldiers need to help foster the courage of their fellows whenever they can." I pointed out the gap in her reasoning.

"Hrm." she wordlessly acknowledged, and said no more.

As we drew near to the entrance to the courtyard we saw several druids standing there on guard, and blocking the entryway. Several angry tieflings were confronting them, the woman in the lead almost hysterical with rage while her husband tried to hold her back.

"Let my daughter go right now!" she was screaming at the guard in the center.

"She's a thief, hellspawn!" they sneered contemptuously. "And you will wait for Kagha's judgment! Now get back!"

"Arrgh! Let me through you magreshem, or I swear I'll rip your damned throat out!" the enraged mother shouted, and with a primal roar the druid standing on the left shapeshifted into a bear. My hair stood on end at this display - back home in Thedas it was rumored that the Chasind barbarians had mage-shamans who could shapeshift into animals, but I'd certainly never seen one before. And although the bear-druid seemed to maintain the full reasoning powers of the man it had been, given its intelligent behavior, the sight still understandably intimidated the small group of angry tieflings into breaking and running back up the stone steps and away from the courtyard.

"You!" her husband called out to Wyll as they ran into us coming down. "Can you help us, please? They've got our daughter in there, and they're talking all sorts of madness!"

"What happened?" Wyll said, rushing over to the couple. We followed after him.

"It's our fault." the woman moaned. "The druids said they were going to toss us out of here as soon as they finished their ritual, and I ranted out loud about how I wish their damned idol would fall into the sea and get lost so they couldn't ever finish. Only our little Arabella got it into her head that she should actually try doing that, and-" She shook her head. "But she got caught, and with Halsin gone that damned Kagha is the one running everything, and now she's got my little girl locked up in there doing demons know what to her!"

"Look, they won't let any of us refugees in, but you're not refugees." her husband continued. "And you were already heading down there. Can you please talk to these druids? Get them to not do anything rash, at least?"

"We should-" Shadowheart cut herself off mid-sentence. "Do you really think we should get involved?" she asked me reasonably. "What with how tense the situation here already is, and our own life-threatening dangers that only seem to multiply every time we turn around?"

"I'm certainly not going to start any new fights over this, you're right that we've already got more than enough to worry about." I reassured her. "But if there's a child in danger, I can't not at least try to put a word in."

"Certainly not." Gale agreed, and Wyll vigorously nodded alongside him. "Let's just hope those guards are as sympathetic to the 'not a refugee' line of reasoning as our good couple here hopes they are."

"You! Step back!" the chief guard glared at us as we drew close. "No one is allowed past!"

"We need to consult Healer Nettie on a matter of urgency." I asked them reasonably. "May we be allowed in for that much, at least?"

"No! We've had enough of you outsiders-" Another druid ran up at that moment and interrupted her. "Jeorna, a moment. Kagha has sent word - she wishes to speak to this one."

"Very well, you and your party may pass." Jeorna said reluctantly. "But be on your best behavior! We'll be watching!"

"Is this normal behavior for druids?" I asked Wyll as we headed towards the stone door and the passage to the druids' subterranean quarters.

"No." Wyll said. "The worship rites of Silvanus the Oak-Father are about maintaining the balance of nature, not the paths of good or justice, but the vast majority of druids choose largely to focus on nature's more nurturing aspects. This isn't typical of my experience with them at all."

As we entered the antechamber of the druids' quarters, a large wolf - one of the several normally-wild animals that we'd seen wandering around, as even the druids who didn't shapeshift seemed to keep bonded animal companions the same way rangers did back in Ferelden - took a casual sniff at us, from its position by the door where it had been standing like a sentry, and I turned around in shock as Shadowheart fell back with a cry. The woman who'd managed to keep a steely composure even in the midst of a desperate battle against mind flayers while we rode a crashing airship through the Nine Hells had fallen into a terrified, shuddering crouch, her face gray with panic and her eyes wide and staring at nothing. "Goddess protect me-" she moaned incoherently.

I immediately stepped between her and the wolf and gave it a wordless stare of Would you please go somewhere else?, and it took the hint and padded silently away as I knelt down alongside her. I'd seen more than enough people in battle-shock to know better than to touch a panicking person, so I simply made myself a comforting presence close by but not too close. "Shadowheart?" I said firmly, but in a low tone of voice, trying to give her something to orient on. "Are you all right?"

"I. Hate. Wolves!" she moaned, visibly fighting for self-control with deep breaths, in and out. "And I don't care what you say, my fear is hardly irrational when you see the fangs on those things!" she half-babbled as she rose shakily to her feet, and I along with her.

"How long have you felt this way?" I asked her.

"As far back as I can remember." she admitted. "Since I was a small child. I-" she stopped and looked challengingly up at me. "Look, I'm all right. You don't have to coddle me!"

"Shadowheart, you didn't mock me when I mistook those goblins for darkspawn the other day." I tried to cheer her up. "So why do you think I'm going to mock you now? We've all got the one thing that brings up the worst memories for us."

"How did you know-?" she blurted out, before shaking her head ruefully and recovering. "You're a very insightful man, Hawke. I'm going to have to watch myself." she quirked the corner of her lip. "But thank you- for caring." she trailed off warmly. "I can usually do better than that. It was just the surprise, my suddenly walking right into one of them when I'd thought I was in a safe place. If we get attacked by any wolves out on the road I can face them down, I've done it before. Just... I'd prefer not to do it alone, if possible."

"Don't worry. You won't have to." I reassured her, and we continued on.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" a terrified child's voice was begging as we rounded the corner, and we arrived to see a young tiefling girl of about ten crying and trying not to curl up into the fetal position while she was surrounded by several angry druids. The apparent leader, who I presumed was this 'Kagha', was a tall red-heared elven woman in apparent middle age, with her narrow face drawn up in an arrogant, self-righteous rage worthy of Templar Knight-Captain Meredith at her worst.

I had to restrain myself from lunging forward as Kagha's animal companion, a giant serpent of some kind at least a dozen feet long and at least as thick as my leg, reared up and bared fangs the size of daggers in Arabella's face.

"This is madness, Kagha!" one of the other druids importuned the red-headed elven woman. "She's just a-"

"A what, Rath?" she rounded on him with an angry peroration. "A thief? A poison? A threat? I will imprison this devil, and I will cast out every stranger."

"Thief? Poison?" I challenged Kagha, stepping up to them both. "What's this girl's actual crime?"

"Girl?" Kagha sneered, turning to face me. "You mean parasite. She eats our food, drinks our water. Then then steals our most holy idol in thanks! Rath, lock her up." she turned to him imperiously. "She remains here until the rite is complete!" Kagha then leaned over Arabella menacingly, forcing her back against the low stone table in fear. "And keep still, devil." she murmured menacingly. "Teela is restless." The snake half-circled Arabella with another twitch of its coils and hissed, causing her to yelp in fear.

"I thought druids revered the balance of nature." I rushed to try and reason with Kagha before she did something that would start a fight. "What is balanced about so harshly punishing the folly of the young?"

"Don't presume to teach me about the ways of nature, you meddling sellsword!" Kagha sneered. "We cannot be expected to nurture a threat at our bosom! An example must be made!"

As I watched her eyes flicker aside to note the reactions of Rath and the others to her posturing, I began to realize what was going on here. I'd already heard that the leader of these druids was the now-missing Halsin, and that Kagha had only stepped up to take temporary charge in his absence. An ambitious underling, unsure of her position and believing that she needed to make the strongest possible first impression-

"You've already more than demonstrated your authority." I reasoned with her. "Now it's time to reassure those under your authority that you are as wise as you are resolute... and not everyone will see the wisdom of imprisoning a child." I lowered my voice to the least challenging yet still not vacillating tones I could manage. "Declare her guilt, then pardon the girl into the custody of her family. Everyone will know what the Grove will not tolerate, and I very much doubt that anyone will attempt such a thing a second time."

"Yes!" Arabella begged. "Please, I'm so sorry! I'll never touch anything without permission ever again, I promise!"

Kagha's eyes and mine met in a wordless contest of wills, and after another flickering glance from side to side, she blinked first. "Very well! Rath, take this brat back to her people and make certain that they all understand there will be no mercy next time. Go!"

"Yes, Kagha!" Rath acknowledged her hurriedly, and then rushed to get Arabella and himself out of the room before anyone changed their mind. I heard Shadowheart painfully draw a breath, and when I turned around to see if that damned wolf had come back I noticed that there was no wolf, but she was wincing in pain and gripping her hand as if it were painfully cramping. I could only look for a moment though, because I still had an angry elf in front of me-

"Druid Kagha, my name is Hawke." I introduced myself after letting the tension ease for a moment. "Your guard Jeorna said that you wanted to see me?"

"I did." she bit off frustratedly. "Not that I wanted you to- but what's done is done. They tell me that you led the defense of the gate against the most recent goblin attack, and that you were instrumental in saving the Grove from discovery."

"No, I think we still need to talk about what was almost done!" Wyll interjected passionately. "What sort of monster threatens a child so viciously?"

"Yes, you would say so, wouldn't you?" Kagha mocked him. "I know your kind. You see only villains and victims. But when a viper bares her fangs to defend her brood? You would call her monster, but I call her mother." She imperiously dismissed his concerns. "But we have reclaimed the Idol of Silvanus and the Rite of Thorns has resumed! When it completes, the grove will be sealed and safe! Free from harm, and free from outsiders."

"And this requires ejecting all the refugees?" Wyll importuned her. "There's a goblin army gathering out there, and it blocks the road between here and Baldur's Gate! And they're mostly civilians, and even their fighting-men are largely militia at best! If you force them to go, they'll perish out there!"

"And my people will perish in here if they stay!" Kagha replied. "Which is why I wanted to speak to this man in the first place!" She turned to me. "You clearly have great skill at both fighting and commanding. I want you to take charge of these tieflings, because their current leadership isn't doing anything except whining and pleading to stay here. If you can get them organized and then find a way to get them past the obstacles on the road then we can both get what we want. Otherwise, they must leave as the ritual completes, ready or not, because when the Rite of Thorns is complete then the earth will rise up and the Great Vine will flourish - and the wrath of Silvanus will scourge all from the Grove who do not belong here! The sanctuary of the Oakfather will be only for his true faithful, and no one else!"

"Exactly how long will this ritual take?" I asked her wearily. Because at the rate this conversation was going I had less chance of convincing Kagha to give safe refuge to outsiders than I would have had of convincing Meredith to free all the mages in the Kirkwall Gallows, so barring a miracle-

"Not long. Several days at most - exactly how long depends on what that damned brat's interruption has done to the sacred cleansings or not. So you'd better not waste any time." Kagha declared.

"I can't even begin to promise anything until after I've spoken to Zevlor." I told her. "But I'll definitely keep your time limit in mind."

"See that you do. Now get moving!" she dismissed us, and then left to go back outside and supervise the ritualists.

"So much for your vaunted diplomacy." Lae'zel said darkly.

"He saved Arabella from an extreme punishment at the hands of a sadistic fanatic, that's still a victory." Shadowheart defended me.

"There is something wrong with that woman." I agreed. "Stealing a sacred idol from a group of priests is hardly a blameless action, but there's such a thing as a proper degree of punishment for the circumstances."

"Quite so." Gale nodded. "That girl wasn't innocent, but that's hardly the same thing as being guilty."

"This 'Healer Nettie' we were here to see? Perhaps we should do that sometime today?" Lae'zel reminded us archly, and with a nod of acknowledgement we set off. 'Nettie' turned out to be a young dwarven woman in an adjacent workroom, who had just finished casting a healing spell on a wounded bird when we found her.

"Can I help you?" she said, turning to us as the exhausted bird peacefully rested behind her on a stone table.

"Do you know anything about ceremorphosis?" I asked.

"You've got a parasite in you?" Nettie drew back worriedly. "A mind flayer parasite?"

"Yes." I nodded. "We were told that only a powerful healer can hope to safely extract one."

"Follow me." Nettie said, heading across her workroom towards a blank wall, which turned out to be some type of magically sealed secret panel that she opened with a brief use of a magical golden circlet worn on her head. Inside was a stone bench covered with alchemists' paraphernalia, handwritten notes, and several opened tomes, while shelves around the walls of the room held more books and carved stone tablets. Another workbench nearby held the corpse of some type of strangely-colored elf, with skin so dark blue they were almost black, whose condition and the surgical instruments surrounding it showed that it had been undergoing an autopsy. So, both a library and a research laboratory-

"Sit here." she patted a low stone bench adjacent to the table, as she rummaged for something on the workbench. "Right..." She found what she was looking for - a small, neatly pruned branch with several thorns sticking out of it - and brought it over to me. "Let's have a look at you," she said, gently pulling my head down so she could stare me in the eyes. "What are your symptoms?"

I described what symptoms I'd had so far - which were barely any - and she nodded in acknowledgement. "What's that branch for?" I continued asking. "Because it's not for treatment - if curing one of these tadpoles was as simple as some type of herbal preparation, then people wouldn't be so afraid of them."

"It's from a rare type of thornbush that's deadly poison." she acknowledged matter-of-factly. "Because if you start to transform into a mind flayer on me here, then I'm going to need to stick you in the arm pretty fast."

"... fair enough." I acknowledged.

"And this is very puzzling." Nettie mused. "You said that it's been in your head almost two days by this point, yes? But that means you should already be having a screaming headache by now. Aches in the joints, fever- Oakfather, your very skin should start peeling in just a day or two more!"

"Your knowledge is accurate." Lae'zel complimented her. "That is the same progression of symptoms we all studied as crechelings. It's why I have been so impatient with the dilatory progress of certain traveling companions. And it is certainly anomalous that our transformations are not proceeding on the usual schedule."

"Which is still a worrying mystery, even though it's saving our lives right now. Do you know what's happening?" I asked our healer.

"Barely a clue." Nettie shrugged ruefully. "You're not the first one we've seen with one of those tadpoles in your head - that drow over there had one too." She nodded towards the autopsied corpse. "He attacked Master Halsin out in the woods several days ago, and they brought him back here to try and figure out what was going on. From everything Master Halsin was able to gather more and more infected people are just coming into this region, and we've no idea where from! Where did you say you picked up this tadpole?"

"I was abducted - we all were - by a mind flayer nautiloid. The same one that crashed nearby. We were all infected while we were on it." I explained.

"Then that just raises more questions." Nettie swore. "Because these other sightings I've been talking about? They're from before that nautiloid ever coming here. And the way your tadpoles have somehow been altered - Master Halsin examined the one we pried out of that dead drow's head, and he said that some kind of powerful magic had been used on it to inhibit the normal transformation. That's why he left with that expedition to that ruined temple nearby, the one the goblins are all forting up in. All of the sightings we've had of strangers are around there, so he thought he could find the answer there."

"So to sum up - we don't have to worry about transforming into mind flayers on the usual schedule, because some powerful force is holding our tadpoles in remission." Gale said. "But we have no idea what it is or why it's doing it... or when it might decide to switch off and let us all sprout purple tentacles after all."

"Exactly." Nettie agreed. "You've got some extra time, hopefully substantially more than you'd normally have, but nobody can say exactly when it'll finally run out. And I can't get your tadpoles out of your heads for you, at least not while you're still alive. I might have just barely been able to do for a normal infection, but contending with whatever strange magic's all mixed up with yours? Master Halsin might have that kind of power, but I certainly don't."

"And so of course he was the one lost in the goblin lair." Shadowheart said ruefully.

"Do you think it's possible he's still alive?" I asked Nettie reluctantly.

"I've no idea." she said. "I'd like to think I could feel it if he were dead, but it's not something I can check. We've tried sending animals and birds in there to scout the way for us, but they keep dyin'." Nettie's eyes widened. "But you could get in there, maybe."

"What, just walk into an army of goblins?" Shadowheart asked sarcastically. "You certainly have a flattering idea about our prowess, but no."

"I don't mean you taking them all head-on." Nettie said. "But has it occurred to you that your tadpoles' little trick of sharing thoughts occasionally is certainly how those infected folk are all recognizing each other? And I'm sure the infected folk are also working with the goblins - that one certainly was!" she quirked a thumb at the dead dark elf. "You could just walk in there, and they'd just accept you for one of their own!"

"That is a very clever idea... but it's also a tremendous amount of 'what ifs' and blind guesses, and it's certain death for all of us if you guessed wrong about any part of it." I said reasonably.

"But it is an option," Wyll said hopefully. "Powerful magic is mixed up with our tadpoles. A powerful something is assembling a substantial force nearby, with people like us working with forces that would normally never cooperate with humans and elves so well. I think Nettie's right, it's all connected."

"And I think Hawke's also right, the only way for us to find out for sure involves our total massacre if it turns out we're wrong." Gale said.

"Wait." Shadowheart narrowed her eyes consideringly at the dead elf. "There is one thing we could try..." She turned to look at me. "I know you're not always comfortable with strange magic, but could you stretch your practical nature to tolerate summoning the voices of the dead?"

"You can cast that spell?" Nettie asked Shadowheart, visibly impressed. "I've heard of it, but never seen it done before."

"Not quite." Shadowheart admitted. "But do you remember one of the items we found in those ruins? That odd little amulet from the chest in the same room as the big sarcophagus with that- rather odd skeleton?" she temporized.

"And that lets you speak to dead people?" I sputtered.

"It took me a while to match its description to something I'd read about but yes, I'm almost certain this is the Amulet of Lost Voices." Shadowheart said, pulling the item in question out of her pack. "And if so, then dead men actually will tell tales."

"Let me get this straight. There's magic - relatively commonplace magic, at that - that can breach the barrier between the worlds of life and death?" I asked incredulously.

"Oh no." Nettie waved away my concerns. "If you want the sort of magic that can do that you're talking priestly magic barely a step south of a full divine intervention. But what your friend's talking about is just... stimulating the residual memories, as it were. Briefly animating just an echo of the spirit that used to be in the body, divining what traces of information were left behind in the corpse when the spirit itself has long since moved on."

"That almost makes sense." I said. "And if it's not actually tormenting the souls of the damned or anything, then I suppose it isn't too much odder than the average run of magic. All right, give it a try."

Shadowheart nodded and then pulled the amulet's chain on and over her head, then grasped it firmly with both hands and concentrated on the corpse. My hair stood on end as the dead dark elf's eyes snapped open and glowed an eldritch green, and the corpse then floated up off the table several feet in the air.

"I can only ask a few questions before the magic runs out, so we'll need to pick them carefully." Shadowheart said.

I prompted her with the most important question, and she echoed me. "Where did they put the tadpole in your head?"

Silence. "He... doesn't understand the question?" Shadowheart asked confusedly. "How can he not know that he has a tadpole in his head?"

"Where and how did you first become able to hear other people like you in your mind?" we tried.

"Moonrise... Towers..." the corpse whispered eeriely. "Initiation..."

"Why did you attack the druids?" Nettie suggested, and Shadowheart repeated.

"Minthara's... orders..."

"Who is Minthara?"

"Drow... My matriarch..."

"Where can we find her?"

"Ruined temple... with the goblins..."

"Who does Minthara serve?"

"The Absolute..."

"That's it." Shadowheart exhaled wearily as the green glow faded and the corpse thumped down back to the table. "We're not getting anything more out of him."

"Moonrise Towers." I thought aloud. "Is that a place anyone here has ever heard of?"

"It's an old castle several days' travel away from here, west up the Risen Road and on the other side of the mountain pass." Nettie said. "But the lands around it are cursed - nothing growing, nothing alive, lots of undead and worse. Nobody's lived there for decades at least."

"How could anyone garrison a substantial force in such a place?" Lae'zel wondered out loud. "How would they themselves not be struck down by this curse? What would they use for food and water?"

"And who or what is 'The Absolute'?" Gale wondered out loud. "Because that is a remarkably grandiose title for someone to give themselves."

"Anybody who could call themselves something like that with a straight face has got to be an out-and-out megalomaniac." Wyll agreed. "This is starting to sound like something a lot larger than just a handful of unlucky people who got abducted onboard a mind flayer ship."

"I think the most important thing is that 'initiation' our dead friend mentioned." I thought out loud. "He didn't even know how he was changed, he just knew that he'd been 'initiated' into something and given powers of the mind thereby. Which means Nettie's theory is probably right - the mental connection these tadpoles provide is how they're identifying each other as being 'initiated'."

"Oh no." Shadowheart moaned, already familiar enough with my thought processes to see where this was heading.

"Which means we're going to have to risk going into that damned temple after all." I agreed with her ruefully.

---

Author's Note: Oh my God there are so many people to talk with in the Emerald Grove! I'm amazed I was able to get as far as I did in this chapter. If I hadn't ruthlessly skipped past some possible interactions we'd have barely made it to the door! As is, triaging through So. Many. Possible. Sidequests. is still going to be a series of tough decisions, especially since some things get kinda fucked if you don't do enough sidequests.

And this is where we really start to go off-script now that we're not stuck with game logic but can start freelancing. Hawke is an advanced Persuasion build Dragon Age character and thus insightful enough to pull off dialogue checks that in the regular BG3 game you need Detect Thoughts to be able to make, and minor NPCs actually get more dialogue, and we can have more than three party members along simultaneously.

I also get to rewrite dialogue. For example, in-game Shadowheart just straight-up says 'Arabella made the mistake of getting caught, we shouldn't risk getting involved', when she obviously didn't say that so bluntly here... but of course my Shadowheart is getting more than familiar enough with Hawke's thought processes to know how not to completely alienate her audience, and unlike the videogame I have infinite flexibility in how my NPCs react to different contexts.

Oh, and the Amulet of Lost Voices is found in-game in the chest in the same room as Withers, and it lets you have free Speak With Dead spells for the entire game even all the way back at level 1.

 

[wellis]

Honestly one issue I had with the way BG3 handled that tiefling kid stealing the relic is that it had the parents kind of just ignore/shrug at it.

Like, Kagha was being an evil bitch there but at the same time, the kid stealing stuff basically gave her a good excuse.

 

[BigBad]

Kids do stupid shit. That's not a good excuse for threatening a kid with murder. For attempted theft.

And the parents don't ignore it. They do scold her for it. And they understand that her actions could have had severely tragic consequences. But what are they gonna do, ground her? She's been punished already.

 

[Mizu]

Do the people of this Fay-run always coddle their weak so?" Lae'zel asked me as we marched onwards

Click to shrink...

Oh right, Laezel isn't native to Faerun either. Easy to forget Hawke isn't the only person in that position.

Why do things turn poorly if you don't do enough side quests? I did them all so dunno what that path results in.

 

[BigBad]

The side quests usually involve taking care of dangers that might otherwise kill or save some NPCs.

If you kill the Strange Ox in the Grove, it isn't alive to save Dammon's life and he dies on the road, which in turn means Karlach doesn't get the second repair to her heart and still can't touch anyone. Or if you don't convince Rolan to stay and help the group, he isn't there to save some of the tiefling kids.

 

[Matrix Dragon]

I quite like how you're not just repeating game dialogue exactly with the NPCs. While it can be useful at times, too many fall into that trap and go too far with it. Instead, so far their interactions have felt more like conversations, not just a series of charisma rolls.

 

[Yacov]

"Let me get this straight. There's magic - relatively commonplace magic, at that - that can breach the barrier between the worlds of life and death?" I asked incredulously.

"Oh no." Nettle waved away my concerns. "If you want the sort of magic that can do that you're talking priestly magic barely a step south of a full divine intervention. But what your friend's talking about is just... stimulating the residual memories, as it were. Briefly animating just an echo of the spirit that used to be in the body, divining what traces of information were left behind in the corpse when the spirit itself has long since moved on."

"That almost makes sense." I said. "And if it's not actually tormenting the souls of the damned or anything, then I suppose it isn't too much odder than the average run of magic. All right, give it a try."

Click to shrink...

It is easy to forget that Hawke probably has opinions about Necromancy, even more than the average person. You could even say he has a motherlode of baggage over it.

Hawke's mother really got the worst death out of the Hawke family, and it really didn't feel like she deserved it. A Necromancer going for the standard sob story about bringing back a dead loved one might make Hawke want to cleave them in half even more.

 

[BigBad]

The quest with Leandra was some of the darkest shit in the franchise. Topped maybe by the broodmother in DAO.

 

[cliffc999]

Oh right, Laezel isn't native to Faerun either. Easy to forget Hawke isn't the only person in that position.

Click to shrink...

And even more amusingly, Lae'zel is not yet aware that Hawke isn't a Faerunian native. She wasn't there for that conversation.

 

[Faralis]

Author's Note: Oh my God there are so many people to talk with in the Emerald Grove! I'm amazed I was able to get as far as I did in this chapter. If I hadn't ruthlessly skipped past some possible interactions we'd have barely made it to the door! As is, triaging through So. Many. Possible. Sidequests. is still going to be a series of tough decisions, especially since some things get kinda fucked if you don't do enough sidequests.

Click to shrink...

That's a big problem with novelization of a RPG game that has thousands and thousands of lines. The novel of the first Baldur's Gate was terrible, because between having to choose only a few of the story lines, and the fact that the protagonist was a Baalspawn, the protagonist kinda looked like a mentally "compromised" serial killer.

 

[Sun Dog]

Yeah, like there's a couple Tiefling kids who get straight up murdered if you don't make a beeline to save them right after getting let in.

Or you can play through the Emerald Grove section multiple times without once discovering/exposing Kagha as a pawn of the Shadow Druids.

Oh, and the Amulet of Lost Voices is found in-game in the chest in the same room as Withers, and it lets you have free Speak With Dead spells for the entire game even all the way back at level 1.

Click to shrink...

I have fond memories, though a lot of the early corpses have little to say.

 

[crissthethief]

Honestly one issue I had with the way BG3 handled that tiefling kid stealing the relic is that it had the parents kind of just ignore/shrug at it.

Like, Kagha was being an evil bitch there but at the same time, the kid stealing stuff basically gave her a good excuse.

Click to shrink...

At worst a prepubescent child could be expected to given a slap on the wrist.
If they were a teenager maybe some jail time.
But kagha probably had ulterior motives considering the kids talent with shadowmagic.

 

[cliffc999]

Despite our newfound resolution, we did not set out immediately. For one thing, we still had to figure out what exactly we'd do in the goblin lair after we infiltrated it. But more importantly, right now we needed to drill.

If there's one thing I'd learned in all my years of adventuring it was that while developing individual prowess was how a person prepared themselves for adventuring, improving their teamwork was how small adventuring parties prepared themselves to defeat larger groups of monsters. And unlike soldiers or city guardsmen, adventurers were almost always outnumbered - there was simply no way around that when you were marching through hostile territory without available reinforcements. And while we'd instinctively been falling into a fairly effective rhythm so far, I wasn't going to depend just on instinct alone. The battle at the gate alone proved my point; if Gale hadn't happened to have just the right spell prepared, we'd have been facing a line of archers in the open without shields. Even my stunt of baiting the wolf-riders into charging too far ahead from their support and then leaving them vulnerable to our missile troops in the rear line wouldn't have worked if they hadn't been quick enough on the uptake to know which targets to concentrate on first, and I hadn't had an opportunity to explain the tactic to them ahead of time. So while I'd still not hesitated to take the gamble - after all, it's not as if we were overburdened with other options at that point - we could just as easily have lost that battle as won it.

For all that Lae'zel really didn't seem to understand how effective morale-building and team bonding worked - at least for humans and demi-humans, presumably her attitude was not considered especially disruptive among her own people - she was still entirely correct that a single failure of self-discipline or communication at a critical moment could potentially doom an entire team. So when I quietly approached her and asked for advice on what training drills would be best to use for our group in the limited time we had available, she eagerly contributed some suggestions. Of course I was already thoroughly versed in weapons skills and military tactics, but I wasn't familiar with all the potentials of the combat magics that they used here. And while I had no doubt that Gale would be willing to lecture me on the topic for hours if I asked, and I must just take him up on that offer later, he had no military experience and so wouldn't know what to focus on as the most immediately useful topics. Lae'zel's people, however, were much like the qunari in that they were a highly regimented society where every able-bodied member underwent lifelong military training - but unlike the qunari, they fully embraced magic as being as useful a weapon as swords and had spent a lot of time studying how best to integrate it into even squad-level combat. Lae'zel seemed to have absolutely no experience at teaching, though, and very little patience for it, so things went much more smoothly when I took what she was showing me and then adapted it for the rest.

Our intended training exercises immediately went live fire, though, when the deserted beach we'd hoped to use for our maneuvers turned out to be infested by ugly bird-women monsters with a hypnotic voice that Gale explained were 'harpies'. At least we'd arrived in time to save one of the tiefling children from being trapped by them, and they went down fairly quickly to our barrage of cantrips and missile fire. We then spent the next several hours learning more about each other's individual capabilities and working through some basic exercises to get familiar with each other's rhythm, as well as rehearse some simple tactical options such as 'response to ambush', 'skirmish line', 'cover the retreat', and so forth. Shadowheart was visibly uncomfortable with how readily Lae'zel fell into a self-appointed role as the effective squad sergeant to my officer, but had enough self-discipline to keep any catty comments to herself. After I noticed this I made sure to consult Shadowheart afterwards on a few useful points of lore related to her own specialty; reassuring her that I valued both of their opinions seem to calm her down a bit. Wyll turned out to be legitimately formidable in close combat and with a useful number of arcane warrior tricks of his own but had apparently spent his career mostly fighting as a lone wolf, so I had to treat him almost like a novice when it came to learning how to keep even a loose formation and instinctively stay clear from your teammates' lanes of fire.

The child we'd saved had invited us to come talk to his 'friends', and so we did that after we'd finished our training. I was surprised when his 'friends' turned out to be a budding junior thieves' guild comprised of urchins and orphans who'd fled along with the other refugees. Their leader Mol was a tough girl who was almost woman-high, an eyepatch-wearing charismatic rogue who reminded me of a teenaged tiefling version of Isabella, knives and all. She certainly didn't bring Isabella's experience to the job, however - I had to patiently explain to her that keeping up with the usual cons and lifts of a thieves' guild was a bad idea when you didn't have an exit strategy, because until and unless the refugee caravan made it to Baldur's Gate their only two choices were to either stick with the rest or commit suicide by trying to take her little children's crusade through that many days of rough country alone. I could at least partly sympathize with Mol's position - she'd ended up leader of these dispossessed children, only some of whom had actually been her old street gang back in Elturel and the rest orphans and stragglers and the lost who'd attached themselves to her on the way, and so she had to maintain a facade of confidence to keep the whole pack of scared children from falling apart in mob hysteria. And you couldn't be a leader if you didn't have a goal to be visibly leading your people towards, and 'keep up with our usual thieving operations and try to build a stake for setting up in Baldur's Gate' was the only one Mol had been able to think of.

I did my best to patiently work with her on brainstorming a couple of things her group could do to help the refugees, not prey on them, because if they kept pushing the limits the way they had been then eventually they'd have ended up all pitched out of the encampment on their backsides, children or not. I definitely wished that I could just tell them to stop stealing for a living, and I certainly would have if I had the slightest belief Mol would ever listen, but having had Isabella as a friend had taught me that no matter what new opportunities life offered them some people would simply never haul down the pirate flag more than temporarily.

"Look, if we're going to shut down alternate business for a while then we're going to need something to make up for it." Mol replied after I'd finished my explanation. "So I've got a proposition for you."

"And that would be?" I said as non-commitally as I could.

"Take me with you." she shocked me. "As part of your adventuring party. Just for the duration, mind, not permanent, but the share I'd earn there would more than help set my people up."

Lae'zel proved that she'd at least begun to learn how not to step on a moment when she confined her scorn at the very idea of a teenaged street urchin accompanying us into the goblins' lair to an epic eyeroll and no verbal comments. Honestly, I couldn't help but agree with her there. "Having taken down the occasional goblin or not-" I tried to reason with Mol.

"It was a hobgoblin Mol killed by herself, not just any old goblin!" one of her followers indignantly chimed in.

"-you're still not exactly the sort of veteran sellsword that gets hired for jobs like this." I continued.

"Yeah, but you need me." Mol shot back. "I can see you've got swords a plenty, and a wizard and a cleric, but where's your stealth? Where's your tools? Haven't got anyone for scouting and lockpicking, have you?"

"They've got me." Shadowheart broke in, to my considerable surprise. "What, did you think you were the only one who ever grew up rough? I was already a fair hand with a set of picks or a trap kit back when I was younger than you."

"Then how's about you show me your tools, hmm?" Mol smirked up at us, and Shadowheart glared back indignantly. "Haven't actually kept your hand in in ages and ages, have you, not ever since you started going to religious school?"

"I'll make you a counter-offer." I broke in. "Sell Shadowheart your best set of picks-"

"Second-best, like hell I'm giving up my personal set." Mol interrupted.

"-and give her as much of a refresher course as you can manage this afternoon, and I'll pay you in good coin." And after a reasonably vigorous haggling session the deal was done, and Shadowheart stayed behind to help re-educate her fingers in some old skills while the rest of us continued with preparations elsewhere.

By this time it was getting to be afternoon, so after a hasty lunch we all split up to cover more ground. Shadowheart was off getting a refresher course in 'adventuring skills' from Mol, Wyll had gone off to see if any of the druids would be willing to quietly contribute some aid or information to us behind Kagha's back, and Gale and Lae'zel had been sent to go replenish our supplies in the refugee camp's traveling marketplace. That left me to go consult with Zevlor and get brought up to date on what he he knew about the strategic situation we faced.

The first thing Zevlor did was finally show me where the hell we were, because he had a set of excellent maps for the region. My surmise that we'd landed almost halfway on the Chionthar River halfway between Baldur's Gate and Elturel was correct; we were closer to the Gate than to Elturel, but by only a little over a day's march. We were on the north bank of the Chionthar, several miles off of the Risen Road that had been constructed as the main trade route between the two cities. Over a century ago there had originally been a settlement in this region, a large village called 'Moonhaven', but its surviving population had abandoned it and left things to fall into ruin after the village had been repeatedly raided by marauders from whatever dark forces had cursed the land around Moonrise Towers some decades ago. Now the only signs of civilization in the reason were the Waukeen's Rest inn and the tollhouse adjoining the Risen Road where it went through the nearby mountain pass, and the Emerald Grove community of druids.

As it turned out the tiefling refugees were all from Elturel, which had expelled all tieflings from the city after some recent tragedy there they referrred to only as 'the Descent' that had apparently been caused by a massive outbreak of infernal magic of some kind. Fiends and humans could apparently have offspring together - and didn't that thought just put my hair on end again - and the resulting half-breeds were called 'cambions'. As it turned out, the devil-men I'd seen onboard the nautiloid had been cambions. Tieflings were much more closer to human stock but still had superficial cambion-like features due to distant cambion ancestry or ancestors who had been exposed to other infernal magics; apparently this was considered sufficient cause by their once-fellow Elturans to suspect all tieflings of being in active collusion with infernal forces and forcing them all to flee just ahead of a potential pogrom.

And that sounded foolish even to me, a near-total stranger to Faerun and a refugee myself from a world where the slightest trace of demonic taint so often led to catastrophe. My half a days' experience with the tiefling encampment was still enough to tell me that they were as human as anyone else under their skin; overhearing them all talking about their fears, their hopes, their concerns, even simple gossip was all as entirely familiar and homelike as any crowd of people at a market day in Kirkwall would have been. The Elturans' concern might have been entirely justified about true cambions - just the glimpse of them that I'd had personally on the nautiloid had been enough to let me sense the aura of demonic malevolence they seemed to go around actively wreathed in - but Zevlor and his people just felt like people.

At any rate, the main crisis facing the refugees was that reaching Baldur's Gate from here of a necessity funnelled directly through a terrain chokepoint - the nearby mountain pass - and the goblin encampment was too close to the route between the grove and the pass. The goblins had not yet amassed a large enough force to completely cut off the terrain - small parties could still hope to make it to the pass, particularly if they went off-road - but a large and slow-moving column of civilian refugees, many of them not even with mounts or wagons, couldn't possibly hope to get through quickly or quietly enough to avoid discovery. And once the goblins knew that such a large juicy target was available to be caught out in the open, the refugees would be dead meat.

"And from what our scouts have been able to find out, the longer this drags out the more goblins show up to join them." Zevlor sighed as we both stared down at his map table. "They've already gone well beyond what a single goblin tribe, even a large one, can amass. Someone or something is assembling an entire horde. And when they get large enough-"

"They've already almost found the Grove once." I agreed. "The larger their forces get, the more patrols they can push out more extensively. Discovery is only a matter of time." I rubbed my chin. "Your own scouts have probably had to step down operations with the losses you've been recently taking, but the druids have magic that lets them speak to animals. And even shapeshift into animals themselves. Have they shared any of the results of their reconaissance with you?"

"Ever since Kagha took charge, they've stopped forest patrols almost entirely." Zevlor groused. "She's concentrating all of the druids in the Grove to help defend the walls and speed up the preparations for this damned protective ritual she's obsessed with."

"That's certainly short-sighted of her." I nodded to him. "Even if she has absolute faith in her protective ritual, she still can't afford for the goblins to find and assault the Grove before she finishes it. She should at least have people out to interdict and ambush any goblin scouts who get too close."

"And yet she's not, and so witness your own battle yesteday." Zevlor nodded. "I don't have enough fighters to even hope to assault the goblin fortress directly, and the druids won't help. Your idea of infiltrating their fortress disguised as 'initiates' is the only chance we've got."

"And we're still trying to figure out what we could possibly do in there, assuming we got in there." I said.

"Assassination." Zevlor immediately suggested. "A horde of multiple tribes only stays together if there's a powerful or charismatic leader compelling them to stay together. Without them to rally around they'll scatter back into their own tribes and stay there; goblins' infighting with each other is often as savage as their raiding of other races."

"That dead drow mentioned a drow matriarch called Minthara." I nodded. "So that's one target at least."

"There'll likely be at least one other, their chief shaman or priest." Zevlor nodded. "Possibly more. But yes, without any strong dominant figure to rally and organize them the goblins would all scatter back to their own territories soon enough, and then the way would be clear for us. If only Kagha would see reason!"

"We've still got several days." I reassured him. "Hopefully we'll have figured out a way to pull it off by then."

"Hopefully." Zevlor agreed. "I can't send any of my people with you; I need them all to interdict as many goblin scouting parties as possible to help keep the Grove safe, especially if the druids are no longer helping with that. Do you think you'll be able to pull it off in time?"

"I'll want to test our 'initiate' theory at least once before I try it on the main goblin fastness." I thought out loud. "That will be our first task."

"Well, if there's anything we can do to assist you with it, please don't hesitate to ask." Zevlor offered.

We all met up for dinner and to compare notes. Wyll brought the disturbing news that several goblins had been caught and killed in the druids' underground escape tunnel, their secret back way out of the enclave. Apparently they'd followed a careless druid back from a herb-gathering expedition. Fortunately, there'd only been a couple of them, and a hasty interrogation with the Amulet of Lost Voices produced the welcome news that the goblin patrol that had followed the Grove's hapless gatherer back hadn't thought to send one of their own as a messenger before all trying to confirm for themselves whether or not the tunnel really did lead into the Grove.

"Still, the second near-miss has put the druids into a state of panic." Wyll said disappointedly. "Even the ones who might have originally been willing to provide us a little support behind Kagha's back are now wondering if she was right after all. 'Letting the outsiders come in here is the only reason the Grove is in danger, send them out to die and seal up the Grove and that's the only way!'" he sarcastically mocked.

"But the main reason the goblins are getting so close to finding the Grove in the first place is because this Kagha pulled in all the druidic patrols who were previously making sure no goblin could get within several miles of this place and live!" Lae'zel could see the military logic as readily as I could.

"Even more than you know." Shadowheart agreed. "This is largely forest country here. In this sort of terrain and with a safe haven to sortie from, a sufficient force of druids and all their nature magic could hold off anything short of a conquering army." Her eyes widened. "Isn't it convenient that the person whose decisions largely contributed to the threat becoming so immediate in the first place is having the fear that immediate threat inspires now solidifying her grasp on power here?"

"Oh come on." I facepalmed.

"You've a very suspicious mind, Shadowheart." Gale opined. "The idea that Kagha is working with the goblins is absurd!"

"She's not saying Kagha is working with the goblins, she's saying that Kagha is trying to take advantage of an already existing crisis to make her own separate power play - at the worst possible time, in the stupidest possible way." I explained. "Remind me to tell you about a man called Teryn Loghain sometime, and how he had a similar idea back home and almost doomed the entire kingdom of Ferelden in the process of trying."

"But what can we do about it? How do we even know this suspicion is true?" Wyll asked.

"Well, I did just spend an afternoon re-learning some old burglary skills of a misspent youth." Shadowheart smiled. "So I could use an opportunity to test those skills before I risked them in the heart of a goblin dungeon or such. I wonder, what might an irregular search of Kagha's quarters turn up?"

"Your neck on a chopping block, given how wary of intruders and outsiders these druids have become." Lae'zel said darkly. "And ours along with yours."

"It's a risk, but so's everything else in our lives right now." I said. "And there's no point in us doing an extremely risky mission to end this goblin threat to the Grove and the refugees if some other treason ruins the Grove behind our backs while we're doing it. Shadowheart, do you really think you can get in there without being caught?"

She smiled confidently and whispered a few indecipherable words, and suddenly her form blurred out in a flare of magic... and reformed into the image of a tall, red-haired elven woman with a harsh, narrow face. A close and searching examination still turned up some marginal differences between her and Kagha, but it would certainly fool anyone who wasn't either extremely close or else already actively searching for imposters.

"Unfortunately it doesn't do anything to change my voice," Shadowheart said with Kagha's face, "so I won't be able to talk to anyone. Still, if we can just make sure that she's elsewhere at the time then any druid who happens to see me walking into her quarters will simply think Kagha went back to fetch something of hers... and given what a cheerful personality he has, I can't imagine anyone here rushing to make any conversation with her that she doesn't invite herself. And once I'm inside her rooms, we'll see what I can find."

"Disguise Self?" Gale said wonderingly. "That's not a clerical spell. How do you know it?"

"It's in my goddess' domain." Shadowheart explained simply as she reverted to her normal appearance. "So, when do you think we should do this?"

"As soon as possible." I said. "The later the hour gets, the more likely it is that Kagha will retire to her own quarters and stay there."

Despite the tension produced by the thought of us trying this and failing - and thus getting expelled from the grove at best, if not mobbed by enraged druids - the operation, such as it was, went off without a hitch. We already had been given access to the central courtyard and the druids' quarters underground earlier today, and nobody had revoked it yet. Kagha soon enough emerged from her quarters after finishing her own dinner and went out to spend some time supervising the evening shift of the ongoing ritualists as they continued on with their 'several days' of ceremonial cleansing and preparations. As soon as the coast was clear Shadowheart stepped inside as if she were going to consult something in the library, with the intention of doing a quick shift of her face and then stealthily raiding Kagha's room as soon as she had a moment alone. The rest of us remained in the courtyard, ready to delay Kagha with whatever diversion we could think of if she made to go back inside.

After a very tense few minutes, Shadowheart emerged into the courtyard from the underground section wearing her own face again and we all relaxed. As soon as we found a quiet cave off in the back of the refugees' section, she brought us up to date.

"She's definitely conspiring with someone." Shadowheart said, reaching into her pouch to bring out a ragged sheet of paper. "I found that in a lockbox in her quarters."

The ragged sheet of paper had a few words drawn on it a very rough hand, almost as if someone had slashed the paper with an ink-stained claw rather than a pen. Oddly that seemed to be a stylistic choice, not a necessity, as the little sketch map next to the message had been drawn more conventionally and in a very steady hand.

Kagha.

Swamp-docks. Tree. Meet me. Alone.

Olodan.

"None of the druids who live here is named Olodan." Wyll said. "So whoever she's conspiring with, it's someone outside the Grove."

"I'm presuming the map is why you risked taking this note instead of just memorizing the contents and leaving it there." I asked Shadowheart.

"Exactly. We'll need it to find whatever meeting site this 'Olodan' referred to." she nodded back.

"If I remember Zevlor's area map correctly, these swamps are to the south of the goblin fortress, at the end of a little tributary river that runs from the swamp to the Chionthar proper." I thought out loud. "And we wanted to find an isolated goblin patrol anyway, to test our 'initiate' theory on before we risked the main fortress. We could combine two errands at once by heading that way."

"A bit closer to the fortress than we wanted to go on a first acquaintance, but either we'll get that far without meeting a patrol first or we won't - and then we'll know either way, of course." Shadowheart agreed. "I assume we're staying in the Grove tonight?"

"I'm tempted to try stealing a march, but if we're not risking immediate death by ceremorphosis any longer then we can afford to take a little rest when we need it - and out of all of us, only Shadowheart has elven nightvision anyway." I decided. "We set out at next daylight."

"One last night before we set out to test our fortune." Wyll said dramatically. "I'll stand the first round!"

Nobody wanted to be hung over for the mission so we adjourned the drinking session after only a couple of tankards, and then each scattered to finish up personal business or just find a small recreation or two before it was time for bed. I began to head back towards the beach where we'd trained this morning, hoping to just spend some quiet time sitting in the moonlight and thinking, when Wyll caught up to me from where we'd all gotten up from the table.

"Hawke. If you please, I need a word." he began diffidently.

"Something wrong?" I asked him, mildly surprised at this lapse from his usual cheerful confidence.

"Do you remember how I told you that how I ended up on the nautiloid was quite the long tale, some parts of which I wasn't at liberty to tell?" he opened.

"Go on." I encouraged him.

"I wasn't abducted by the nautiloid." he surprised me. "I'd already been in Avernus before the nautiloid arrived there, pursuing a specific target. An Advocatus Diaboli, a champion of the Blood War - a savage, remorseless slaughterer of innocent souls, the devil Karlach."

I mentally noted down the unfamiliar terms as things to ask Shadowheart or Gale about later and nodded for him to keep going. "Hunting in the Nine Hells. Dangerous work."

"There was a time I tussed with hill giants without breaking a sweat." he boasted proudly. "This tadpole has significantly reduced my powers as much as it has yours or Shadowheart's. But yes, my patron had warned me of the danger this Karlach presented and tasked me with bringing her to justice. I almost had her cornered when the nautiloid you were on entered Avernus... and she escaped me by fleeing onto it."

"So you pursued her onto the ship-" I followed along.

"And there we were both overwhelmed and infected by the mind flayers." Wyll continued. "Karlach escaped me in the crash, and is out there threatening the good folks of the Sword Coast even now. Her powers are almost certainly as reduced as mine are by our infections, but even that small mercy won't prevent her from leaving a river of innocent blood across the land. I must find her and stop her before she kills any more!"

"If you want to split from us to pursue your own task-" I offered.

"No." Wyll said. "I'm only guessing that she's as reduced as I am. Who knows the details of how ceremorphosis affects devils, as opposed to men? I'm asking for your help."

"I'm certainly no fan of demons or devils preying on the innocent." I passionately agreed with him. "But Kagha's ritual will place all these innocent folk in deadly danger if we haven't won at least some type of victory against the goblins before then. I can't turn away from the strict time limit they face now to search for a trail already gone cold. I have to prioritize."

"I suppose you do." Wyll agreed disappointedly. "And I gave my word I would come with you, and I won't go back on my word. But if we do see any sign of Karlach's trail out there, then please tell me we can at least spare an attempt at following it?"

"Of course, if it's possible to." I agreed with him.

"Thank you." he gusted with relief.

"You mentioned a 'patron'. Who are they?" I asked him.

"A powerful figure... and one with a very keen interest in their own privacy." Wyll temporized. "I've sworn an oath to say no more."

We said our good-nights and I continued on with my walk to the secluded beach... only to find out that someone else had had the same idea.

"Hawke." Shadowheart smiled briefly. "Can't get enough of me?" she continued cheekily from where she'd been sitting on the beach meditating.

"I just wanted to sit and look at the moonlight for a while." I said, settling down on the sand a companionable distance away from her. "But I'm certainly not objecting to the company."

"I'm not exactly a fan of moonlight." Shadowheart chuckled softly. "But I do enjoy a nice, quiet night, so moonlight or not I'm finding a bit of it here."

"And just taking a moment to breathe." I agreed, stretching my shoulders out as I rolled my arms back and forth trying to unkink my back. "Gods, it's been a rough couple of days, hasn't it? And with at least several more to come."

"To say the least." she nodded, and we peacefully felt the silence for a short while.

"You mentioned several more days to come." Shadowheart slowly continued. "And it's true that we've still got a ways to go on our quest, and that's assuming we're not given any more surprises at the next step. But what if this were our last night together?" she mused idly, looking up at the sky. "What would you say?"

"That I'd be sorry to see you go." I replied automatically. "We haven't known each other long, but you've been a good friend."

"Thank you." she said quickly, turning her head briefly. "And... I'd temporarily forgotten that you were a castaway even before the nautiloid crashed. Of course you're not certain of where you'd go next, after our quest was done." she mildly criticized herself.

"And you?" I asked her. "Where will you go after we're done?"

"Baldur's Gate." she replied. "There's someone there waiting for me, and I have... responsibilities."

"Earlier today you mentioned growing up an urchin like Mol, without a family." I thought out loud. So if she hadn't had a family, then who was she speaking of like family- and then an alarming possibility suddenly came to my mind. "You're not married, are you?" I blurted out.

Her snorting laughter answered that question even before her words did. "No! Goddess, what a ridiculous thought!" she fought through her chuckles. "And yes, I'm an orphan, but even orphans are still sometimes raised by someone. In my case, that was the temple."

"That's right, you're a priestess." I acknowledged. "Of which god or goddess?" I asked curiously.

"The goddess of privacy, among other things." she put me off gently. "It's- I'm not allowed to discuss much of the details with outsiders."

"All right." I accepted that - for the moment.

"I'm sure you'll land on your feet." Shadowheart reassured me. "Look at all that you've accomplished just recently! You're a natural adventurer, and Faerun is a land where adventurers have been making their fortunes for centuries."

"You could come with me." I offered. "After all, a good adventurer needs a party, and every good party needs a cleric."

"Thank you." she smiled regretfully at me. "But no. I was on a mission for my temple when I was abducted, a very important one." she explained. "And as soon as I can get myself cured of this damn tadpole, I'll need to be getting back to it."

"To bring them that artifact?" I asked her intelligently, turning to look her square in the face.

"What artifact?" she drew back defensively.

"The little one shaped like a polygon with silver runes, that I saw on the nautiloid." I said as diplomatically as possible. "The one so important to you that you grabbed at it even before you moved to secure your lost weapon, while surrounded by deadly danger in the depths of the Nine Hells."

"Damn your insighfulness!" she swore viciously, rising to her feet and taking a step away from me. I rose to match her, quickly, but kept my hands open and my body language nonthreatening. "Why couldn't you have just not seen anything?!?"

"I'm not going to take it from you!" I rushed to reassure her. "I don't even know what it is! I was just asking!"

"I wish I knew what it was." she blurted, her hand relaxing back from where it had almost been grabbing for her mace. "There was a whole group of us sent after it. I was the juniormost. And- the only survivor." she trailed off sadly.

"You already heard what I said to Zorru about that topic." I reassured her gently. "I'm certainly not going to question your courage, not after you've proven it so many times."

"No amount of courage justifies failing my goddess." Shadowheart replied flatly.

"You haven't failed her yet." I comforted her. "Now come on, sit down and relax."

"Sorry." she said. "I just- I'm not used to- ah!" she cried out in pain, and urgently clutching at her one hand with the other.

"Are you all right?" I asked her urgently. "I've noticed you cradling that hand several times before. If you hurt it in the crash, why didn't you ask Nettie to take care of it this morning?"

"It's not that." Shadowheart said, her voice heavy with pain. "It's- an old wound. Just- something I have to live with." She slowly relaxed as the spasm of pain passed.

"Does it hurt very much?" I asked her gently.

"Quite a bit, actually." she retorted with rueful sarcasm. "But I'll be all right. This just- happens, from time to time."

"I can't imagine what, but if there's anything I can do to help you with that, you know you only need to ask." I offered.

"I know." she smiled briefly at me, and we sat back down and let another quiet minute grow.

"So... the githyanki?" I took a shot in the dark as gently as I could. "Is that who your team 'recovered' the artifact from?"

"Why am I even surprised at this point?" she moaned softly, crading her chin in her palms. "Are you an oracle, Hawke, or do you just read minds?"

"No, I just happened to notice that my very practical-minded friend didn't hesitate to accept help in a crisis from every passing stranger who offered any - except from our one stranded githyanki, who she argued against trusting at every opportunity and did her best to drive away from the group several times." I thought out loud.

"You are positively insufferable at times, do you know that?" she chided me.

"I won't tell Lae'zel if you won't." I offered her. "And if she could recognize it by sight, she'd certainly have reacted to it on the nautiloid. I just wanted to make sure the topic was raised ahead of time, because the last time I invited a woman with a bit of a rogueish background into my adventuring party and it turned out that she was carrying a stolen relic from an isolationist, arrogant warrior race with her, it started a war." And then I segued into a brief explanation of the whole mess involving the qunari relic, the Arishok and his invasion force, and how Isabella hadn't told me for years that she'd known the entire time why the qunari were so obsessed with staying in Kirkwall. "So if there's anything you can tell me about your mission to 'recover' it in the first place, I'd appreciate it if you did that sometime before we ended up in the middle of a githyanki invasion or suchlike."

"I very much doubt we're going to get one of those." Shadowheart reassured me. "But there's honestly not much more I can tell you - as I said, I was the juniormost member of the team. I barely got any mission briefing at all - I don't even know who stole it or what githyanki fortress it was kept in. I was just part of a team intended to pick up a 'githyanki artifact' at a rendezvous and help carry it back to the temple at Baldur's Gate. And then an illithid nautiloid showed up and they tore through us, and the last man standing tossed the artfact to me and told me to run-" She sighed. "And then I woke up in a pod and you helped me out. I was terrified the artifact had been lost, until I saw it with the rest of my gear right there next to me."

"Which doesn't make any sense." I thought out loud. "If the illithids were after the artifact too, then how did they not recognize it when they found it on you? But the idea that they just showed up by coincidence is absurdly unlikely."

"Even more unlikely when you consider that the githyanki eventually showed up chasing the nautiloid as well." Shadowheart agreed. "I'm just glad that they seem to have lost the trail ever since we jumped between planes to get away from them."

"Have they?" I asked her. "Remember, there was at least one githyanki patrol sighted in the nearby mountains recently, and you heard Lae'zel say that their behavior was unusually aggressive even for githyanki."

"Oh joys." Shadowheart moaned. "Yes, let's definitely not let any of them know about our little passenger."

"One catastrophe at a time." I agreed, and we settled down to watching the water quietly flow past us and burble. "Well, so much for relaxing on the beach."

"If it helps, I'm a little relaxed." Shadowheart replied impishly, before her face fell into much more serious lines. "Because this morning... even with the party all together, I was still alone with all of this. And now I'm not. And that helps, it really does." she assured me.

"Even when I'd lost everything else, I still had the people I cared for." I nodded, staring up through the stars and into the trackless beyond. "So when I was cast into the Silver Void and I thought I'd lost all of them as well..." I looked her full in the face. "I was very glad to find that I hadn't."

"Exactly how many of those ales did you have?" Shadowheart deflected with a return to her usual cheerful sarcasm.

"Enough that one more wouldn't hurt." I followed her lead. "Care to join me?" I questioned.

"I might like to... sometime." Shadowheart answered the question I hadn't asked. "But we've got a very busy day tomorrow."

"That we do." I accepted, as I rose to my feet. "Good night, Shadowheart."

"Good night, Hawke." she smiled up at me from where she sat on the sands, and I left her in the moonlight.

---

Author's Note: Ugh, thinking of meaningful chapter names is turning out to be such a pain. Heck with it, I'll just change 'em to plain numbers.

I only found out just now that the healer in the grove is called 'Nettie'. The whole time I'd played the game I'd thought she was 'Nettle', even with subtitles turned on. I've gone back to earlier chapters and corrected it.

I also belatedly realized that if I'm not recruiting Astarion then I really should have gone with Rogue Hawke. Fortunately, while Shadowheart has the Acolyte background in the main game she had the Urchin background in Early Access... which gave her Stealth and Sleight of Hand proficiencies, and thus making her a useful backup locks-and-traps person if you didn't have Astarion in rotation. So, I just rolled with that. Because yeah, if you don't have at least one party member who can pick locks, you miss a lot.

Disguise Self does not let you impersonate specific people in-game, but that's a limitation of the game engine. You can use it for that purpose in D&D. Shadowheart has access to Disguise Self as a Ritual spell through her Trickery domain.

I came this close to actually making Mol a party member, as I had a nice opportunity here to depart from the canon rails, but decided against. If I'm already tempted to prune the list of permanent party members down just so I have a manageable number of characters to write, then the last thing I need is to start throwing new hirelings into the batch. Also, she doesn't have a tadpole.

Shar's portfolio includes secrets, so amusingly she actually is the goddess of privacy - from a certain point of view.

And the exact backstory of how the hell Shadowheart ended up with the artifact really isn't gone into in game beyond a few spoilers I hope the Internet was not lying to me about, so I rode the USS Make Shit Up for the rest.

 

[TheChairIsAgainstTheWall]

Because yeah, if you don't have at least one party member who can pick locks, you miss a lot.

Click to shrink...

I forget where in Act 1, but there's an armor set that gives you Advantage on all Dex skill checks. Astarion+it+Sleight of hand Expertise+Guidance from Shadowheart (yet another reason to never leave Best Girl at camp), and locks basically cease to exist. I'm getting regular 30s, it's disgusting.

 

[cliffc999]

The Graceful Cloth, which you can buy from Lady Esther on the mountain pass trail near Rosymorn Monastery.

 

[Yacov]

For one thing, we still had to figure out what exactly we'd do in the goblin lair after we infiltrated it. But more importantly, right now we needed to drill.

If there's one thing I'd learned in all my years of adventuring it was that while developing individual prowess was how a person prepared themselves for adventuring, improving their teamwork was how small adventuring parties prepared themselves to defeat larger groups of monsters. And unlike soldiers or city guardsmen, adventurers were almost always outnumbered - there was simply no way around that when you were marching through hostile territory without available reinforcements.

Click to shrink...

Hawke is a good soldier, a decent military squad leader and knows a thing or two about drilling. Just don't ask him what happened to the armies he served in, especially the first one.

Wyll turned out to be legitimately formidable in close combat and with a useful number of arcane warrior tricks of his own but had apparently spent his career mostly fighting as a lone wolf, so I had to treat him almost like a novice when it came to learning how to keep even a loose formation and instinctively stay clear from your teammates' lanes of fire.

Click to shrink...

The problem with being a lone wolf who don't need no allies is that when there are friends around you tend to run into friendly fire. It's less your allies' fault when you are the one running into the cone or circle of death. Don't believe me, play Left for Dead with the AI or do an MMO raid.

"Your own scouts have probably had to step down operations with the losses you've been recently taking, but the druids have magic that lets them speak to animals. And even shapeshift into animals themselves. Have they shared any of the results of their reconaissance with you?"

"Ever since Kagha took charge, they've stopped forest patrols almost entirely." Zevlor groused. "She's concentrating all of the druids in the Grove to help defend the walls and speed up the preparations for this damned protective ritual she's obsessed with."

"That's certainly short-sighted of her." I nodded to him. "Even if she has absolute faith in her protective ritual, she still can't afford for the goblins to find and assault the Grove before she finishes it. She should at least have people out to interdict and ambush any goblin scouts who get too close."

Click to shrink...

Oh joy the leader of the place you want to defend has the strategic acumen of a squirrel as well as the ability to transform into one. Hawke is used to that.

"You mentioned a 'patron'. Who are they?" I asked him.

"A powerful figure... and one with a very keen interest in their own privacy." Wyll temporized. "I've sworn an oath to say no more."

Click to shrink...

Red flag. Surely this won't endanger the party in any meaningful way.

"That's right, you're a priestess." I acknowledged. "Of which god or goddess?" I asked curiously.

"The goddess of privacy, among other things." she put me off gently. "It's- I'm not allowed to discuss much of the details with outsiders."

Click to shrink...

Man the party sure likes Red Flags tonight. At least Hawke can be forgiven for this one since he isn't really used to the gods being around so wouldn't know hiding your deity is usually a bad sign.

"So... the githyanki?" I took a shot in the dark as gently as I could. "Is that who your team 'recovered' the artifact from?"

"Why am I even surprised at this point?" she moaned softly, crading her chin in her palms. "Are you an oracle, Hawke, or do you just read minds?"

"No, I just happened to notice that my very practical-minded friend didn't hesitate to accept help in a crisis from every passing stranger who offered any - except from our one stranded githyanki, who she argued against trusting at every opportunity and did her best to drive away from the group several times." I thought out loud.

Click to shrink...

Well at least Hawke is potentially starting to deal with this Red Flag in a calm, if slow manner.

 

[Mizu]

What would be a problem of Mol tagging along in story, I wonder? Guess the plot has you infiltrate several times via tadpole, so she'd be unable to help out there ...

 

[cliffc999]

Man the party sure likes Red Flags tonight. At least Hawke can be forgiven for this one since he isn't really used to the gods being around so wouldn't know hiding your deity is usually a bad sign.

Click to shrink...

Regarding Hawke not being alarmed at Shadowheart's excessive secretiveness about her deity, the several things I'm thinking are thus:

* As mentioned, Hawke is feeling extremely lonely and adrift, and Shadowheart is the first sympathetic face he saw, and has so far been very charming, supportive, and helpful. He's not going to be a completely helpless simp, but she'd have to put significant effort into alienating him before she actually could.

* There's also that this is a Hawke who romanced Merrill and so he's already proven willing to put up with quite a lot of high-risk dark magic behavior from a woman if she's otherwise beautiful, sympathetic, and kind. Because while I did already write into his backstory that his relationship with Merrill ultimately failed when he full rival'ed her while trying to stop her from finishing the eluvian, it had still lasted all the way into a good chunk of Act Three... IOW, for at least seven years. Granted that their breakup was almost two years ago in Hawke's personal timeline, that just makes him even more ready to start dating again. Plus, if you reread the prologue. you'll note that Hawke initially mistook Shadowheart for Merrill before he got a closer look; I'm writing them as quite alike in looks, and this is obviously going to put him at Disadvantage when rolling those Wisdom saves versus Shadowheart.

* Lastly, Hawke is from Thedas and was raised as a Chantry worshipper. Which is not only a religion that very much discourages laypeople from confronting clergy about points of religious doctrine at all, but is also a religion that only has female priests. His natural reflex is to give Shadowheart the same deference on religious topics that he would a Chantry Sister back home, because he already knows she's an ordained cleric (and for that matter, recently saw a druidic priestess and a knowledgeable wizard both acknowledge her as such). Especially given that he's already seen Shadowheart successfully cast clerical magic, and his reaction to being in a world where the gods actually do empower worshippers was wonder, not fear.

So while he has begun to note Shadowheart's red flags, she's going to be getting notably more benefit of the doubt from him than anyone else in the party would.

What would be a problem of Mol tagging along in story, I wonder?

Click to shrink...

Cast bloat, plus I'd have to work a lot to flesh out her personality seeing as how unlike the origin characters I don't have a fully-developed outline to work from, and that's a lot of work to do ultimately to just solve the relatively minor problem of 'the party needs somebody who can make a good lockpicking check'.

 

[Prince Chrom]

especially the first one.

Click to shrink...

To be fair, that army dying wasn't his fault, it was the fault of a traitor.

Red flag. Surely this won't endanger the party in any meaningful way.

Click to shrink...

Hawke is almost certainly being subtle enough to not bring it up yet, but he will have noticed.

 

[Cosmic Dream]

Are the harpy encounter and Kagha's note things that you can find in the game?

So many little things that you can just miss ... would that I could afford to spend as many hundred hours on it as I did with BG2 back in the day.

 

[cliffc999]

Are the harpy encounter and Kagha's note things that you can find in the game?

Click to shrink...

Yes. Saving the kid from the harpies on the beach is one of the ways you can get an introduction to Mol and her junior thieves' guild.

Likewise the note, but it's in a locked chest in an alcove behind a bookshelf off a druid common room - they don't seem to have separate bedrooms in the game. I ignored that as an engine limitation and went 'They've lived here for decades and had high-level druid magic, and a bunch of caves to work with, of course they have room.'

So many little things that you can just miss ...

Click to shrink...

I'm still finding shit I didn't know about, yes. Hell, right now I'm redoing Act One several different ways to try and figure out what would make the best narrative combo for my story.

 

[DIT_grue]

Spoiler: Suggestions

"Hopefully." Zevlor agreed. "I can't send of my people with you; I need them all to interdict as many goblin scouting parties as possible to help keep the Grove save, especially if the druids are no longer helping with that. Do you think you'll be able to pull it off in time?"

Click to shrink...

send any of
safe

"Well, if there's anything we can to assist you with it, please don't hesitate to ask." Zevlor offered.

Click to shrink...

can do to

We all met up for dinner and to compare notes. Wyll brought the disturbing news that several goblins had been caught and killed in the druids' underground escape tunnel, their secret back way out of the enclave. Apparently they'd followed a careless druid back from a herb-gathering expedition. Fortunately, there'd only been a couple of them, and a hasty interrogation with the Amulet of Lost Voices produced the welcoming news that the goblin patrol that had followed the Grove's hapless gatherer back hadn't thought to send one of their own as a messenger before all trying to confirm for themselves whether or not the tunnel really did leaev into the Grove.

Click to shrink...

welcome
lead

 

[cliffc999]

We set out early the next day through the druids' secret tunnel out of the Grove. Not only was the tunnel exit closer to our destination than the main exit was, but we lowered the risk of our being spotted entering or leaving the Grove as much as possible.

The concealed passage exit let us out a short ways east of the ruins of Moonhaven, in the low ravine that held the creek we'd noted yesterday on the map. Moonhaven was of course built on the intersection of several of the larger dirt roads in the region, so I'd readily spotted that it would be a natural terrain chokepoint for the goblins to put a forward outpost to help coordinate their search parties from. We thus resolved to avoid it for now while we looked to test our luck with a goblin patrol somewhere else further out in the woods, where they'd have no reinforcements easily available if our trick didn't work.

Which is why we were surprised when the first 'patrol' we ran into wasn't of goblins but humans. We'd only traveled maybe half a mile down the trail when we came across a young man and woman, both of them kneeling over the body of a older man and frantically trying to staunch the bleeding from his wounds. "No, put pressure there!" the young man was saying to his companion desperately.

"Edowin? Edowin, hang on!" she tried to rally her fallen companion. "You can't die, you're-"

"Look out!" the young man cried in alarm as he spotted us rushing forward. The woman was unarmored and dressed like a farmer but the young man was wearing a chain shirt, and they were armed with a mace and a sword respectively. The older man on the ground was dressed in finery, and a broken spear handle with a missing point lay next to him, presumably a casualty of the same battle that had wounded him so.

"Not another step!" the woman continued as they both drew their weapons and fell into a guard stance - him with at least some professional training, and her as if she'd only started learning how to swing that mace last week. I was about to say something reassuring when a glowing magical brand suddenly erupted into view on her cheekbone as soon as my eyes fell upon her face, and I felt something deep within me shiver in response.

"Wait!" the wounded man gasped weakly, as he rolled his head over to look at us with an effort and I was still momentarily dumbstruck with shock. "He... He is-"

And then my shock deepned at the outright writhing in my mind the instant our eyes met, as the tadpole in my mind shivered and forged a mental connection with him. I saw/heard/felt the man's thoughts - he knew he was mortally wounded, and he was afraid for- for his siblings? My heart wrenched as I looked down at what was clearly the older brother of these two, his last thoughts being both a frantic terror and a desperate hope-

Brynna. Andrick. Protect them. he begged me mentally.

"Edowin, lie still!" Brynna ordered him. "You'll-"

"He... is a True Soul." Edowin whispered, doing his best to smile at his siblings as his lungs filled with blood. "You-" His voice trailed off as his eyes shut for the final time.

"Edowin? Ed! Please!" Andrick begged.

"He's with the Absolute now." Brynna reassured her surviving brother with a serene calm I honestly found more than a bit eerie, given that her oldest brother had just died at her feet.

"Brynna. Andrick." I greeted them both by name, and they stood bolt upright and faced me like recruits snapping to attention.

Wonderful. I mused. On the one hand, our theory that the enemy used the tadpoles for identification apparently just had confirmation fall right out of the sky and into our laps. On the other hand, I'm facing a pair of armed religious fanatics who are probably going to start swinging as soon as I say the wrong thing and expose myself as an imposter. and while I'm certain I could kill them both easily- I nodded inwardly to myself, acknowledging the truth that I simply didn't want to. While these two certainly weren't Carver and Bethany, and were servants of our enemy besides, I didn't have the heart to disregard a dying man's innocent wish under these circumstances.

"How much did Edowin teach you of the Absolute?" I finally risked a bluff.

"He didn't have time for much more than the basic catechism, True Soul." Andrick answered briskly. "The Absolute is the new goddess, who will rise up to sweep away the corrupt old order and remake the world."

"Her True Souls, like you, are her chosen ones - you speak with Her voice." Brynna continued, her voice low with awe. "You have the power to enforce Her will on others, like Edowin had. And when the Absolute's crusade has succeeded, her True Souls will rule the world with peace and order."

... if I had a silver piece for every time I'd heard that same script from a group of cultists, I could pay off Varric's bar tab! I inwardly facepalmed.

"Good, then he at least covered the most important parts." I non-answered.

"We were reporting to Edowin, but without him I'm not sure-" Brynna said. "I suppose we're assigned to your squad now. What are your orders, True Soul?"

"What were the original orders for Edowin's squad?" Lae'zel broke in.

"They pulled in every team they could from neighboring regions, for a higher priority here." Andrick explained. "We were searching for fugitives - survivors from the nautiloid ship that crashed near here several days ago. The Absolute wants them brought to Her - at any cost."

"We don't have any description of the survivors," Brynna continued - which I'd already figured out, seeing as how neither of them had begun to recognize us - "but they had to have been wounded in the crash, so we've been searching for blood trails, people with mysterious injuries. That was the only clue we had to go on."

"Where were you originally assigned before your team was sent here?" I asked.

"Moonrise Towers. We'd been lay followers of the Absolute in Baldur's Gate- Edowin had only been initiated several months ago." Andrick explained.

"Then return to Baldur's Gate and wait to be contacted." I decided. "If the crash survivors haven't received medical attention by now then they're dead, and the only place they could have received any is that armed encampment the goblins have been scouting for. Neither of you look to have much military experience, so you wouldn't be very useful for either that kind of reconaissance or the assault phase. The Absolute isn't wasteful; you'll serve better in an urban role."

"One moment." Shadowheart asked. "Edowin's wounds - what inflicted them? Were you attacked?"

"A damned owlbear did it." Andrick swore viciously. "Of all the useless things- we'd just gone in to check the cave nearby as a possible hiding place for those survivors, and it turns out we walked right into its bloody lair!"

"My condolences." I assured them both. "Now clear the area; this operation is entering a new phase."

"Of course sir!" Andrick nodded. "We'll depart at once."

"You should have just killed them." Lae'zel confronted me as soon as they were out of earshot. "They were armed, they were enemies- they have seen our faces! What reason did you have to hold back?"

I opened my mouth, then closed it. "Sentimentality." I admitted. "I was once the oldest of three siblings, desperately trying to keep them all alive. I wasn't going to be the reason Edowin failed to do that... like I did."

Lae'zel glared at me briefly before nodding matter-of-factly. "Then at least you are not lying to me." she replied evenly. "And I already did not expect groundlings like yourself to have fully the same steel as true gith warriors. This particular act of mercy is unlikely to threaten our mission; that is adequate for now."

"Did anyone else see something odd glowing on that woman's cheek, or was it just me?" Wyll queried, and after a hasty comparision of notes we all agreed that we'd seen something, and our tadpoles had instinctively responded to it.

"It wasn't the same sort of resonance that we've felt from other people with tadpoles, but it was certainly something." Gale analyzed. "This cult of the 'Absolute' is apparently putting a magical mark on at least some of its lay worshippers, the ones not 'worthy' to be 'True Souls', so that they can still be identified."

"Also perhaps to make them more subservient." I thought out loud. "Brynna was the branded one, her brother Andrick was not, and her emotional reactions seemed... different from his."

"What sort of madman would be using mind flayer technology to try and build themselves a network of fanatic worshippers hidden amongst human society?" Shadowheart questioned. "Because while the most obvious thought would be 'mind flayers', they've never tried anything like this before that I know of."

"Nor I." Lae'zel conceded. "The ghaik are too proud to build the illusion of a god to deceive their slaves into following. To do so would require first admitting that they are too weak to simply force the obedience that they desire. But for anyone other than a ghaik to delve so deeply into their secrets is insanity. Such attempts inevitably result in nothing but the ghaik eventually infecting and possessing those who try!"

"The more layers we peel, the more rotten the onion smells." I complained. "Well, we've had a successful result in our first test, but I still don't think that means we should go charging directly into the depths of the goblin fortress just yet. That conversation could have gone very differently if they'd been the slightest bit more suspicious."

"The village?" Shadowheart suggested. "If the Absolute has recently called in human reinforcements from neighboring areas of operation, then not everyone will be familiar with everyone's faces. Our tadpoles should be enough identification for all of us."

"And the goblins can't be attacking all strange people on sight without at least having their sentries challenge and identify them first, or else Edowin and his siblings wouldn't have been able to pass by Moonhaven on their way here." I agreed. "So we'll try checking out the village next. But before we do that... Shadowheart, how often can you use that amulet?" I asked her.

Our attempt to do a post-mortem interrogation of Edowin was momentarily interrupted when the tadpole in his head turned to be still alive even after he died, and it reached out to my tadpole and tried to mentally compel me into extracting it from his head and saving its life. I focused my will and allowed the damned thing to believe it was going to be saved, right up until the point it crawled back out of his dead eye socket and I crushed it in my fist. I dimly heard a dying squeal in my mind as it perished, along with an overtone of... disapproval?

Questioning Edowin's corpse with the Amulet of Lost Voices turned up the knowledge that he had also been infected at Moonrise Towers, just like the dead drow back at the Grove. He gave us no details about the Absolute when we asked save that she was an 'almighty goddess' of 'irresistible power'. However, we also turned up very disturbing piece of information that while the Absolute desperately wanted any survivors from the nautiloid crash, that was for purposes of interrogation. The search effort's true target was a weapon that the nautiloid ship had been carrying, and that the Absolute assumed had been spirited away by a survivor from the crash because it had already failed to be found in the wreckage. What weapon we had no idea; the existence of 'the weapon' had been revealed only in the answer to the last question we'd asked, and the magic had run out before we could follow up.

Shadowheart and I wordlessly exchanged a look behind Lae'zel's back at that particular revelation, because we didn't need tadpole telepathy to know the conclusion we'd both immediately leapt to; that 'the weapon' was almost certainly a little polygonal artifact currently hidden in Shadowheart's belt pouch.

Our thoughts hung heavier on us than our packs as we headed back up the trail to rejoin the main road that led to a small stone bridge high over the creek-filled ravine and into Moonhaven. Even from a distance we could see that while most of the buildings were still mostly standing the wood was rotten, overgrown with mildew, and with sagging walls and collapsing rooftops all over town. This place had clearly been abandoned for at least several decades. However, it wasn't abandoned now, as the silouhettes of a pair of goblin sentries posted on the highest rooftops were just visible to us even from our position several hundred yards outside the village walls.

"No smoke means no campfires." I mused as we all carefully studied the village. "Which means they haven't settled in because it's midday and an actual encampment would have at least one fire going for the cookpot. But by the same token they've got lookouts posted, so they're not just passing through."

"Keeping watch while the remainder of their unit searches the village?" Lae'zel thought out loud. "Although what in those ruins could still be worth sending search parties after is beyond me."

"You're giving them too much credit, because you're both too used to dealing with large, well-disciplined forces." Wyll contributed. "Even with mysterious cult masters and mind-affecting tadpoles in the picture goblins will still be goblins. And the only thing goblins like even more than killing is looting, so that's likely a raider band that's stopped for some easy gleanings - not a task force."

"Then let's try the open approach." I said, and we drew up in our march formation and, making no effort to conceal ourselves, headed across the bridge.

"Dead tieflings. Dead goblins." Shadowheart noted the several bodies strewn nearby as we crossed the bridge. The bodies were no longer stiff but had only barely begun to smell; they were maybe a day old. One of Zevlor's patrols had taken casualties here. As we drew nearer to the village's main gates just on the other side of the bridge, I saw that Wyll's estimate of the goblins' relative lack of discipline had been accurate. Their lookouts were doing a desultory job, and didn't begin to spot us until we had almost reached the already-open gates.

"Over there! Surround 'em like!" a female goblin bellowed orders as she climbed up on the rooftop to our right to join her lookout there.

"Identify yourselves!" I interrupted her with an authoritative bark.

"Wot?" their leader goggled incredulously as the several goblins each to our left and right laughed from their rooftop perches. "You is stealin' my lines, berk!"

"You dare speak so insolently to a True Soul, goblin?" I glared at her... and with those words I felt something go click in my brain as my tadpole awakened. I saw a brand identical to Brynna's brand flare to light on the goblin leader's cheek - except that this time my intuition told me that I wasn't seeing it with my eyes, but with my mind. I felt a power awaken in me, and surge... a glimmer of a sense of something larger, something vsst, as my mind and my voice filled with an eldritch Authority.

"I told you to identify yourself." I commanded, and I felt the goblin's will crumble in the face of my own. I heard several of my companions drawing a shocked breath behind me, but I kept my gaze focused on the goblin leader's...

My stomach spasmed in a brief moment of nausea. I broke out in a cold sweat. I had the momentary impression that my mind was a small fish swimming in a great ocean, and suddenly the wake of a leviathan swimming past had sucked me into its current-

"Booyahg Haysa, commandin' this squad, sir!" she snapped to attention, and every goblin within view lowered their weapons.

"Report." I ordered her, shaking off my momentary distraction.

"Uh- nothin special's goin' on? Sir?" she added confusedly.

"How long have you been in this village?" I probed.

"Since- this mornin', sir! We wuz- we wuz searchin' for clues to what the Absolute wanted us to find, yeah!" she visibly strained for an answer. It appeared that Wyll had been right on the money with this theory that the goblins here had been slacking off from their assigned task for a looting break.

"Any results?" I asked calmly.

"Not- not yet. But I'm sure we'll-" she frantically tried to explain.

"Get back to work." I growled as if entirely uninterested in the affairs of goblins, and all of the goblins except for the posted lookouts immediately scattered all over the village, trying to look as busy as possible.

"There was more than just commanding mannerisms making that goblin obey you." Shadowheart asked worriedly, pitching her voice low to keep any goblins from overhearing. "What was that?"

"Apparently Brynna's statement that True Souls could 'speak with the authority of the Absolute' was more than just cult rhetoric." I replied. "When I concentrated hard on trying to convince her I was a True Soul, my tadpole responded."

"Psionic influence." Lae'zel said worriedly. "A power of the ghaik. But-" she peered warily at me, one hand on her sword. "You show not the slightest change in feature! Not even the color of your eyes has shifted! Such powers do not develop in one infected until after the physical aspects of the change are almost complete!"

"Nettie said that some powerful magic had been used to alter our tadpoles, to inhibit the normal transformation." Gale thought out loud. "Any force with the power to do that could in theory also force certain parts of the ceremorphosis to occur while stopping others."

"You mean our minds are being altered even while our bodies remain unchanged?" Shadowheart gasped in horror.

"The goblins are starting to get curious." Wyll warned us.

"North gate." I picked at random. "Let them think we just stopped for a moment to discuss which was the best way to proceed, and now we're moving on."

There was another stone bridge on the north road out of Moonhaven, crossing a branch of the same ravine and creek that we'd crossed coming in from the east. At the far end of the bridge the road stopped, blocked off by a rock face, and a T-intersection gave us a choice of routes both north and south. South led us back towards the Grove, so we took that. The dirt road split again, and a horrific odor came to our nostrils as we came to the latest intersection. Rounding the curve gave us a clear sight as to why.

"Gnolls." Shadowheart said, looking at the several large, hulking corpses of hyena-headed humanoids strewn all over the path, looking as if they'd been hacked at by an enraged ogre with a greataxe. "Very thoroughly dead ones."

"How can the corpses be that rotten when the blood hasn't even dried yet?" I said, because while thickened and with the flies already thronging to feed off of it, the copious amounts of blood the gutted and dismembered gnolls had left soaking into the landscape was still fluid.

"They smell that bad even when they're alive." Wyll pointed out, before he went taut like a hunting dog spotting a scent. "Wait a minute." he leaned over one of the corpses. "This one's been burnt as well as hacked. The fur is singed all over! Could it be...?" He reached down and started to carefully examine the ground away from the immediate battle site, before pointing at what was clearly the blood trail of a wounded person - a person who bled an entirely different color of blood from the gnolls.

"Do you smell that?" he said, as he bent over to more carefully examine the blood spots. "Devil blood! The stench of Avernus! Karlach was here! We have to find her!" he begged.

I very briefly explained what Wyll had told me the night before about his own quest to the others, and since we were already here and our main reconaissance had already gone so well this morning in such little time, we readily agreed that we could now turn to the hunt.

Karlach had apparently been hurt substantially in their battle because I'd very seldom seen anyone leave that much of a blood trail for that kind of distance and still be walking at the end. On the other hand, they were clearly a damn tough opponent because they not only had gone all that way, but judging by the footprints had been still setting a fairly good pace even at the end. Still, with the wounds they bore they'd need to stop to rest sometime, while we were all fresh, and they only had a several hours' lead on us. And they either had no skill at woodcraft or no desire to conceal their blood trail, so following it was merely a matter of keeping to the path. So after a mile or two more, we eventually caught up to her where she was sitting by the side of the creek with her back propped against a tree, some bloodied rags wrapped around her ribs as an improvised bandage.

"One horn. The stench of Avernus. Advocatus Diaboli!" Wyll challenged her with a horrible intent, drawing his rapier as he completely violated any chance of stealth by stepping out to openly challenge here.

"I'll be gods-damned." she complained in an incongrously female voice as she rose to her feet with a grunt of pain. Seeing her standing for the first time put a prickle of alarm down my back... although robustly and abundantly female in shape Karlach was also a mass of muscle standing at least six inches taller than I did, and I was the tallest member of our party. I'd seen qunari with a less muscular build, if not by much. Her skin was as red as many of Zevlor's tieflings, and she had a large corkscrew horn coming out the left side of her head, with a broken-off stub on her right showing where a matching one had been. The many scars criss-crossing her arms and legs and torso, as well as the giant patches of gnarled and horny skin where she had clearly been burnt in the past and only partially healed, told a tale of someone who had been fighting in literally hellish battles for years.

"The Blade of Frontiers. Thought I'd shaken you for good. That'll teach me to underestimate you." she greeted Wyll, before looking up briefly to take in all of us as we came up behind Wyll. "And you're clearly not underestimating me either, not with all the help you brought this time! I'd be flattered - if you weren't so hellbent on gutting me."

"You won't escape justice this time, monster!" Wyll snarled at her. "Any last words?"

"Here's two - Back! Off!" she howled in a voice that mixed rage and agony, and her skin began to erupt in hellish flame. "If you lot want my head, then you're trading in at least three of your own to get it! Just- just go away!"

"Wait." I put one hand on Wyll's arm as he was about to lunge forward. "No matter what your patron said, this doesn't add up! Since when do remorseless engines of hellish slaughter ask for time-outs?"

"It's a trick!" he shook me off angrily. "She's a devil, a champion of the Arch-Devil Zariel's army! Countless innocents will die if we let her deceive us!"

"I can explain, please!" Karlach pleaded. "It's a whole situation, but-"

"You served Zariel." Wyll practically snarled. "That's enough to condemn you!"

"I didn't have a bloody choice!" Karlach shouted back. "They took me, they collared me, it was fight or die! What would you have done?" she screamed desperately, and then winced in agony at the strain she'd just put on her wounded ribs.

Wyll took advantage of her momentary lapse to begin to lunge forward, and I grabbed him by the wrist and bore down with my full strength. "No."

"Are you mad?!?" he rounded on me angrily as he pulled free. "You would side with a denizen of the Hells?"

"Is this 'sentimentality' again, Hawke?" Lae'zel questioned me coldly, as she moved to stand alongside Wyll. Shadowheart stayed with me, Gale looked undecided- oh, this entire situation was rapidly going south. Was this truly just a ploy by Karlach, to get the party fighting each other? Some demons back in Thedas had that kind of insidiousness, that subtlety-

I suddenly remembered what Wyll had said about both of them having been infected on that nautiloid and decided to try an experiment. When we'd found her in that cage, Lae'zel had used our tadpoles' connection with each other to send me her thoughts without words. So if we possibly-

I turned away from Wyll to make eye contact with Karlach, and concentrated not on trying to dominate her, to exercise that eldritch Authority, but simply to connect. To understand. And her tadpole suddenly awoke and shivered in resonance with mine, and images flickered before our eyes- flashes of Karlach fighting on the front line in the Blood War, a shocktrooper thrown again and again at demons and bringing them down with blades and fire and fury- then more images, of Karlach with her axe raised slicing through devils and cambions - a glimpse of the passing nautiloid in the distance - a frantic run for freedom-

"Lies! It has to be!" Wyll said frantically, as he reeled away from the mental images that all our tadpoles had been bombarded with.

"Don't be an idiot!" I growled at him. "You saw the truth, you felt her emotions - she was trapped with no way out, and the instant she first saw a possible one, she leapt at it! She was a victim of this Blood War - not a champion of it."

"You're asking me to trust a devil!" he begged, his face gone pale with shock? Terror? "You don't know what you're doing!"

"I'm a tiefling, not a bloody devil!" Karlach shouted back. "I was born in Baldur's Gate, for Tyr's sake! These flames? That's shit they did to me, with their experiments! I never wanted it! I never wanted any of this! I just want to go home!"

"Wyll. Stand. Down." I ordered with a voice of stone.

"You're supposed to know about monsters, right?" Karlach begged softly. "Better than anyone? Look at me. Listen to me. Can't you see I'm not what you think I am?"

"I- I- damn it!" he howled, and sheathed his rapier. "You... you really are no devil, are you? I've been deceived."

Karlach went limp with relief, lowering her axe to the ground. "Oh thank the gods. I really didn't want this to end badly for either of us."

"Shadowheart, can you help her with those wounds?" I asked, and she moved alongside Karlach.

"Careful!" Karlach warned. "Only touch the armor - you lay your hand on my bare skin and you'll get a nasty burn." Shadowheart shifted her hand as directed, and used the contact to deliver one of her lesser healing spells. "Ohhhh, that's nice." Karlach moaned with relief, and then craned both arms above her head in a great relaxing stretch. "Thanks a bunch, that one was really too close to the lung for me to go runnin' around on it like that."

"You still shouldn't put any great strain on it for a while, but that spell will have cleaned and closed the wound." Shadowheart replied.

"As long as you've taken care of the immediate, I can walk the rest off. I'm tough like that." Karlach said agreeably.

"Wyll?" I asked him, as he seemed like a man in shock.

"Your friend said 'patron' earlier." Karlach stepped over to Wyll, looking at him compassionately. "Warlock, are you?"

"Yes." Wyll admitted. "And my patron is the one who commanded me to slay you."

"And now you're not going to - bloody hells, you are in a bind." Karlach said. "Damn, I'm really sorry to hear that. Doubly sorry because I still can't just lie down and die for you."

Shadowheart rapidly leaned over to whisper in my ear a very brief explanation of what a 'warlock' was. My heart sank as I realized that my 'arcane warrior' companion had apparently been foolish enough to gain his talents by pacting with a fiend of some type. Because it was always something with people, wasn't it?

"I wouldn't ask you to." Wyll said slowly. "But you are right - I am going to pay a significant price for my disobedience. I just hope it will be one that I can bear."

"And why would your patron even want me dead? -oh shit, it isn't Zariel is it?" Karlach flinched back.

"My pact forbids me from naming them." Wyll said. "But no, it's not her."

"Wait, if you were sent into Avernus after me then your patron already wanted me taken out even before I got a bounty put on me by escapin'." Karlach realized. "And using a hero from Faerun to do the job instead of just getting someone already in the Hells to shank me in the back - oh bugger me with a flaming pike, it's not fucking Mizora is it?"

Wyll opened his mouth, then closed it, then mimed the classic gesture of zippering one's lips shut with his two fingers. "I... can't say that it's not Mizora." he finally managed.

"Fuck!" Karlach swore. "I swear, I've taken sweeter-smelling shits than that bitch! And at least I could bury those after!"

Wyll laughed faintly, helplessly. "You've a unique way with words."

"I've a unique way with a lot of things." she shot back proudly. "So," she said, turning to me. "That mental connection thing - that was from that little bit the tentacle bastards stuck in our heads, yeah?"

"Mind flayer parasites." I replied, and then gave a brief explanation of ceremorphosis and our tadpoles' having had the transformation put in remission - for the moment.

"Fuck." she swore. "Ten years I'm stuck in that damned pit, and I finally get out - and I'm barely back in Faerun again before this shit drops on my head!" She turned to me. "I'm not one to mince words, so here it is. You're out looking for a cure for this damned thing, as well as these plotting buggers who are behind it, and I definitely want a piece of both those things. But I can't sign on with your group until I've dealt with another problem. Because Wyll here might have stopped trying to kill me, but Zariel's got her own squad of hunters on my arse. I was tryin' to get away from them when I ran into those gnolls on the path. But even though they banged me up pretty good, I did the same to them. Last I knew they were forted up a little ways away from here, in the old tollhouse on the Risen Road. You help me hit them in their camp and wipe them, my blade is yours for the duration." A brief glance of mine around the group revealed no objections, and so we welcomed Karlach aboard.

"We penetrated a deception, avoided a needless fight, and are now pre-emptively removing a possible threat while simultaneously recruiting a powerful ally." Lae'zel quietly spoke to me after we'd been hiking back up the path towards the tollhouse for a while. "I had thought you addled with sentimentality again, but clearly not." She angrily waved her hand. "Again and again you make soft, senseless decisions, and again and again they somehow work out to our benefit! I do not understand you, Hawke."

"It's much easier to transition from talking to fighting than to try the reverse." I thought over my possible answers for a while before giving that one.

"Diplomacy. Tchk." she grumbled, and silently fell back into marching order.

In less than an hour, we arrived at the old tollhouse adjoining the Risen Road. The several Zariel warlocks who'd been posing as 'paladins of Tyr' - or their survivors, rather, as Karlach had already killed a couple of them in their first encounter - first tried lying, then bargaining, and then finally angrily cast aside their roles when we made it abundantly plain that we weren't falling for the act and were sticking with Karlach.

"Fine!" their leader swore, as he and his surviving compatriots readied their weapons. "I'm sick of playing the coward anyway! Karlach, you're going home in pieces if you must! But first, we'll teach your friends what a mistake it was to try and ally themselves with trash like you!"

"Avernus was never my home!" Karlach shrieked furiously, as her flames erupted from her skin more brightly than I'd ever seen them. "It was my PRISON! But I'm FREE now! AND I'M NEVER GOING BACK!" she finished with a roar that shook the walls. The servitors of Zariel flinched away in terror as Karlach erupted in a blind rage worthy of any berserker I'd ever seen, and all we needed to do was watch her flanks and help keep her reckless charge from exposing her to a sneak attack while she straight-up hacked the infernal bounty hunters to pieces. And then we had to rapidly excuse ourselves from the tollhouse for several minutes as Karlach proceeded to vent her fury on the furniture, doors, walls, and basically everything else she saw that wasn't us. By the time she was done, we needed a hasty Create Water spell to help keep the old tollhouse from burning down.

"Fuck them. Fuck Zariel. I won't go back. I'm never going back." Karlach gasped out heavily from where she lay on her knees, panting with exhaustion. "Ten years. Ten fucking years of nothing but-" She went limp. "Can you imagine what it's like to actually live in Hell? Never seeing so much as dirt?" she reached down and drew up a handful of earth in her palm as she spoke. "Or grass? Or trees? Or wind? Just endless black rocks and red lava and brimstone everything?" She slowly rose to her feet. "When I made my break for it, I could've died. Should've died, as crazy as the odds against me were. But I just didn't care. So much as the slightest chance of seeing the Prime Material again was worth dying for. And then actually making it, and landing this close to home besides?" She shook her head. "The idea of having to give up my freedom after just barely starting to taste it, to go right back into that hell - hell yeah, I lost it." She looked ruefully up at us. "Sorry about that." she apologized as she slowly rose to her feet. "I'm really not that bad, usually, even if I get a bit wild in a scrap sometimes."

"I can't even begin to start to imagine." I admitted honestly.

"You'd better hope that you never can." she agreed grimly. "So what now, boss?"

"We move far enough away from the tollhouse that we don't have to smell the bodies stink and make a camp." I said. "We all face the same dilemma with our tadpoles, but some of us only know some of the picture. We need to share everything." I noticed Shadowheart's face twist up with worry, and I caught her eye and concentrated on sending her a brief mental message. Almost everything. I clarified. Because while I'd have gladly told the rest of the group about the relic if I could, Lae'zel's presence meant I didn't dare to. Not without touching off some devastating party infighting like what we'd only narrowly avoided today.

As it turned out, fording the creek near where we'd originally met Karlach put us on a narrow side path that let us bypass the Moonhaven road junction entirely and get back on the route towards the Grove. Not that we intended to go all the way back there tonight, but the closer we could camp to there and the less deep in goblin territory we did so, the better. We eventually found a likely spot and settled in for the night.

"God damn this is good!" Karlach said gleefully as she tore through a double-sized portion of our travel rations. "I mean, actual bread? Do you know what it's like to almost forget how bread tastes?" she gushed.

"That's hardtack, Karlach. You're supposed to chew it." Wyll said amusedly as she bit through the hardened biscuit like it was fairy cake.

"M' chewin'!" she mumbled indistinctly through her overstuffed cheeks.

We spent the rest of the evening getting everyone on the same page about almost everything - including the outline of my past for those who didn't already know it, so that they'd know I'd occasionally need prompting about Faerun-specific knowledge to help inform my tactical choices - as well as brainstorming our next move. With the successes we'd had both with the two young cultists and the goblins in Moonhaven, we were fairly confident that with a little more practice and experimenting we'd have a sufficient grasp on our abilities as 'True Souls' to risk trying to infiltrate the goblin's fortress.

And then the companionable night suddenly turned chill and cold, as a sudden wind from nowhere extinguished our fire.

"Shit!" Karlach said, leaping to her feet and drawing her axe. The rest of us were barely half a step behind her-

"Oh no." Wyll said, as I noticed that he was the only one of us who hadn't drawn his weapon. "She's coming."

We all leapt back as a sudden pool of inky darkness materialized out of nowhere on the ground, ringed by infernal flames, and then a humanoid silouhette rose up out of it and the darkness and flames faded away to reveal a woman - no, a fiend - with a very disturbing resemblance to a Desire demon from Thedas. Her skin was dark blue, not purple, but she had the same seductive figure, the same coquettish mannerisms, and the same leathery batwings.

"Mizora." Karlach spat. "I knew it!"

"Wyll." Mizora said huskily, waving away Karlach's scorn with one negligent flick of her hand. "You've been naughty." she continued in a husky voice, before it turned into an icy storm full of daggers. "And you know what happens when you've been naughty."

"Are you even allowed to walk this freely on Faerun?" I challenged this new devil.

"Oh, I'm allowed." she smiled wickedly at me. "If I've been given a proper invitation. But I'm a very popular woman, and I never lack for invitations." she smirked. "Call me Mizora. I'm Wyll's patron, the fount of his power. But my little pet's been unruly recently-" and she turned back towards Wyll and an invisible pulled him down to his knees, gasping for breath, with a single idle wave of her arm. "And I'm here to give his leash a yank."

"You're either very powerful or about to be very outnumbered." I told her menacingly. "Let him go!"

"What I am, darling, is very prepared." Mizora smirked. "Wyll? Tell your friend what happens to you if you kill me, or if anyone acting on your behalf does."

"The contract... immediate penalty clause." Wyll gasped out. "And I'm damned... to Hell... for eternity."

"You see?" she said proudly. "Any of that oh-so-uncivilized violence, and you'll inevitably lose the very thing that you're trying to save."

"She's not lying." Karlach said. "Any devil's contract is a bad idea to sign, but Mizora's infamous for how twisted hers can get."

"Thank you for reminding me, Karlach. Zariel asked me to give you her regards." Mizora said insincerely, before rounding on Wyll in a sudden fury. "We had a deal, Wyll! But Karlach's still breathing!"

"You told me... devils only!" Wyll angrily fought for breath. "She's a tiefling... not a monster!"

Mizora materialized a scroll in her hands, which she made a show of consulting. "Clause G, Section Nine. Targets shall be limited to the infernal, the demonic, the heartless, and the soulless." Mizora smirked at him as she put the scroll away. "Karlach meets the criteria by way of having a prosthetic heart. So, are you going to live up to your obligations? Or does this need to get messy?"

"You're not laying one finger on either of them." I said evenly.

"Don't worry about Karlach, that particular ship has long since sailed the Styx." Mizora said. "But as for Wyll-" Before any of us could react she raised a hand and unleashed a mystic flare of some type with a single flick of her wrist, and Wyll fell to his hands and knees screaming in agony.

As we all watched, helpless to intervene, Wyll writhed and changed as his flesh was burned with infernal fire, lashed with lightning, and underwent seven other torments as well - nine ordeals, one for each of the Nine Hells. At the end of it Wyll lay weakly on the ground, barely conscious... and with his humanity almost entirely gone, his skin now red, his eyes now yellow, his head now surmounted by two large curling horns as prominent as any of Zevlor's tieflings.

"There you go! Since you sympathize so much with tieflings now then the punishment should fit the crime, hmmm?" Mizora said with false reassurance, before her voice turned bitter with venom. "For a promise broken, a price is paid. And so it always will be. So get used to the new form, pet, because there's no going back. Some magic even I can't undo. And now we'll see how the Frontiers fare when they can no longer recognize their precious Blade." she spat. "Oh, and Wyll?" she smirked down at him again. "Don't forget - our pact still stands. Ta-ta!" she cooed, and with a flash of fire she was gone.

"Are you all right?" Karlach asked Wyll urgently, rushing to kneel over him.

"I'll survive." he said weakly. "I always survive. She'd never kill me just for something like this - that would ruin her fun."

"Shit!" Karlach swore separately. "We just met, and here you've gone and ruined your whole life just to save mine. How the bloody hells do you even begin to pay someone back for that?" she looked up entreatingly at all of us.

"You won't need to." Wyll assured her softly.

Now that the tension of the moment was over, I honestly felt a little ashamed. The instant I'd heard that Wyll had gained his powers by pacting with a fiend I'd been ready to place him in the same mental category as any maleficar or abomination back in Thedas. And then barely a couple hours later I saw what he'd been willing to risk - to suffer - to defy his patron as soon as she'd tried ordering him to do something he felt morally inexcusable. I still felt like he'd done an incredibly foolish thing to sign himself into such an unfair situation, but- I was going to need to learn more before I judged so harshly.

Wyll was as exhausted in mind and body as if he'd been beaten with clubs for several hours, so we didn't weary him with questions or comments. Those could come later, right now he just needed some medical attention and to be put to bed. Our camp broke up into ones and twos, each of us trying to process the latest shocking revelations, and after stopping to make sure Karlach was settled in - we'd scrounged most of the gear and bedroll she'd needed from the supplies of the Zariel cultists after we'd killed them - I went for a last walk around the perimeter before turning in.

And as I came to the quiet edge of the creek my hair stood on end yet again as a certain voice reached my ears out of the darkness, and I realized that in a day already jam-packed with too many surprises the gods had still seen fit to send me at least once more.

"We meet again, as predicted." the ancient lich-thing we'd freed from that tomb in the old chapel greeted me, the impossibly tall and lean silhouette barely distinguishable from any other tree in the darkness. "Now hearken, because I would have words with thee."

---

Author's Note: You actually do run into the Absolute cultists practically on top of the rear exit from the Grove. They really want you to get that encounter early.

Since the game engine compresses distances for gameplay purposes, I re-expand them for story purposes whenever convenient. Otherwise our hapless heroes would be tripping over every new encounter every time they turned a corner. They can only render so much world map, after all.

And so Karlach gets her party membership, because I just didn't have the heart to leave her out of it. Still going to need to wing it a bit on how she fits into the dynamics but hey, this whole story is an exercise in winging it a bit. The BG3 game gives me lots of background to work with and a nice storyline to follow, but I'm the one still going to need to do a lot of improv to keep it from just being a boring game rehash. Those familiar with the game have already seen where I'm starting to step outside the scripted encounters and their scripted outcomes.

Also, good God, replaying the game enough times to catch all the details is time-consuming even with cheat mods to just blow through encounters.

 

[fireball900]

Also, good God, replaying the game enough times to catch all the details is time-consuming even with cheat mods to just blow through encounters.

Click to shrink...

Just wait til you have to do it with the later acts.

 

[cliffc999]

I am dropping lots of save files, yes.

 

[TyricGaias]

I am dropping lots of save files, yes.

Click to shrink...

Your sacrifice is appreciated

 

[BigBad]

Edowin was a dwarf, no? The other two were human. I don't think they were literally siblings.

 

[Mizu]

I feel like warlock contracts are a terrible idea in general based off how Wyll got screwed over. Poor bugger.

I can't fully remember, but was there a way to return him to regular human appearance in the game?

 

[BigBad]

No. Wyll's transformation is permanent, barring a wish spell or divine intervention or something. Even Mizora can't undo it.