Sanctuary - Anonymous - Baldur's Gate (Video Games) [Archive of Our Own] (2024)

Chapter 1: Daylight

Chapter Text

After they saved Minthara from Moonrise, she came back to their camp. Hasdrubal shows her to their spare tent and then retreats to the campfire to give her space. Her awareness of the other woman is razor-sharp, scraping her nerves into a bruise-sore alertness. Minthara had been a general of the Absolute. She had ordered the slaughter of the Emerald Grove. She was willing and eager to murder innocents—for what? how would that have aided her cause? what use is mindless slaughter? it wasn’t strategic, it wasn’t smart—and then she was in the dungeons at Moonrise, having torturers scrape her mind clean. Hasdrubal had seen a wasteland when she entered her consciousness, almost every neuron broken down to unthinking matter through the brand of the Absolute. At the center of the waste of her mind, Minthara stood, clinging to whatever shred of her self she could, clinging with her nails and teeth, until every part of her was bloodied. Her eyes were red and weeping.

Hasdrubal looked at those final embers of a mind and saw a blade—fine Damascus steel, or lightning forged adamantine. A sword no corrosion could ever touch, no matter how long it has been buried. She reached out. Minthara reached back. As they marched her from Moonrise, her face was blank, stripped of any trace of the agony she endured in her mind. Here, back at camp, her face is still blank, haughty, cruel. Even her eyes are shuttered and cold, a perfect mask. Gale passes around the plates of stew he had conjured from the potatoes and sausage they scavenged. While the rest of them eat, she stays back, staring into the distance.

“She’s a warrior,” Lae’zel declares, spearing a potato cube on a fork and popping it into her mouth. She’d complained about the indulgences of Faerûn at first—food didn’t need seasoning, bedrolls didn’t have to be soft, forks were incomprehensible—but her eyes now widen at the sight of honey buns. Salty nuts, sour shaved ice, sickly-sweet spun sugar, she loves them all. She waits until Gale refills her bowl before she continues speaking. “She will be a valuable asset for the fight ahead.”

“Are we forgetting that she ordered the goblins to be massacred?” Shadowheart asks. She picks at her food. The further they go into Reithwin, the more painful the wound on her hand becomes. “She was a general of the Absolute. She’s also a drow.”

“Precisely what I’m saying, darling,” Astarion pipes up. “I don’t trust her as far as I can throw her.”

He’s perched on a stone, goblet in hand. It’s the nicest one they scavenged from the monastery, long emptied of his meal, but he says that he likes to hold it, for the gestures, for the dramatics. And because the rest of them still had plates in their laps, but he would never say that out loud. At the end of the day, they all cut their palms and drip a little blood into the goblet. It’s become something of a ritual between all of them—as far as blood sacrifices go, mostly harmless, Shadowheart had said. He still looks at the cup half-fearfully whenever they set it in front of him, as though he’s waiting for someone to snatch it away on a whim. It doesn’t stop him from draining it in one gulp.

“She was brainwashed,” Wyll points out. “Commanded against her will by the Absolute. Can we blame her for that?”

Blame—a blunt, brutal, useless weapon. Hasdrubal’s met more people than she could count who substituted it for justice. “What I saw in her mind—it was awful,” she says out loud. She glances back at the tent. “No one should have to go through that. Her hands aren’t clean, but I’m not going to condemn her, either.”

“Hear, hear,” Karlach says, raising her firewhiskey. “Hells, none of us would be here if our hands were clean. We’d all be squid meat.”

Astarion sighs. “Fine. But don’t blame me if your throats are slit in the middle of the night. I won’t be there to help.”

Hasdrubal takes the final bowl of stew over to Minthara’s tent. The woman looks up at the sound of her footsteps. Her lips curl in a mean little smile.

“You are lucky we are not in Menzoberranzan,” she says. “If you had set this slop in front of me then, I would have pried your teeth from your skull. Clearly you are not using them to any sensible discretion.”

“You haven’t tried it yet,” Hasdrubal says levelly.

Minthara blinks. Hasdrubal doesn’t think she was expecting a reply. A lot of the drow she’s met do the same thing—it’s no secret, how surface dwellers treat the denizens of the Underdark. Sometimes it’s more convenient to play to expectations. People leave you alone when you threaten to take their teeth, but only if the threat is believable. But Minthara is not so lucky, because Hasdrubal has no intention of leaving her alone. She shouldn’t have to think she is alone in this world after being freed. Hasdrubal holds the bowl towards Minthara. After a moment, Minthara accepts it.

“Can I sit?” Hasdrubal asks, gesturing at the spot of ground next to her.

“It is your camp. I can hardly stop you.”

“It’s our camp now. And this is your tent.”

Minthara looks at her for another long moment before nodding. She turns to her stew, eating it in slow, mechanical bites. Hasdrubal settles down, crossing her legs. “What would you have eaten in Menzoberranzan?” she asks.

“You truly want to know?” At Hasdrubal’s nod, she sighs, looking into the middle distance. “Marsember ice wine, so sweet it flows like honey. Rothé ribs on the bone. All the best House Baenre had to offer.”

Beneath the arrogance, there is something else. Hasdrubal toys with the fraying cuff of her tunic, letting Minthara eat in quiet.

“I miss it,” Minthara says suddenly. A muscle in the corner of her jaw twitches after the admission. It’s like she surprised herself by saying it out loud. “My recollection of my past has always been unclouded, up to the day Orin took me, but did not have enough faculty of myself to miss any of it. But now—”

She trails off, unwilling or unable to finish her sentence. Hasdrubal imagines not being able to feel the absence of her city—her home—her family. Having memories of her past, but not knowing enough of her own consciousness to think back about sunning on the banks of the Chionthar or eating spiced saffron brittle from Tymora’s night markets until she felt sick from it. Being so distanced from herself that she no longer knows how to miss things. It makes her skin crawl.

Minthara finishes her food and hands the empty bowl back to Hasdrubal. “Tell the wizard his cooking is adequate,” she says. “Perhaps there is a reason to keep him after all.”

-----

The next morning, Hasdrubal invites Minthara to head out with them. It’s a little too soon for comfort, but the break in her cool expression, the tiniest flash of pleasure, is worth it. They stop by Last Light for healing supplies before scouting the estate around Moonrise, trying to find another way into the prison. A pair of Ketheric’s scouts catch sight of them and rush over, crossbows nocked. Hasdrubal reaches out through her tadpole and slams down on the Absolute’s brand, setting it ablaze in their minds. They snap to attention.

“What’s she doing out here, True Soul?” one of them asks Hasdrubal. They pivot from her to point their crossbow at Minthara. “Z’rell sent her to be reprocessed.”

Hasdrubal does not step in front of Minthara. She does not draw the Blood and smite the guard across the skull, either; that would rather ruin the pretension that they are Absolutists. They can’t afford a fight right now; there are too many people in the towers, and Ketheric is still immortal. So Hasdrubal sweeps it all aside and smiles, praying that she’s showing the correct amount of teeth for pleasantry.

“You don’t have anything to worry about. Z’rell said I could keep her as a servant. There’s nothing left of her mind, so she’s perfectly biddable now.”

It’s the least violent option they have. It’s the safest option they have. Her voice comes out pleasant too. She does not look back to Minthara, because no one who fancies themselves a master would look back to gauge their servants’ reactions. And it’s enough for the guards, because they give Minthara another look—less suspicious, more pitying—before walking away. Hasdrubal stays still as stone as their footsteps fade into the distance.

She is then slammed into a wall.

Minthara’s hand presses down on her chest with enough force that she can feel it through her armor. Her other hand is white-knuckled around her sword. Wyll is gathering arcana in his hands, and Karlach has her axe out, but Minthara does not spare them a second of attention. Her eyes are trained on Hasdrubal.

“I understand why the fabrication was necessary,” Minthara says, her voice perfectly level. “I am even impressed that you have the capacity for it. But speak about me like that again, and I will cut out your tongue.”

Hasdrubal doesn’t think it’s an empty threat, but she can also see the creases in Minthara’s face, the agitation breaking through. Minthara is afraid. Ashamed. Her hand is shaking where it pins Hasdrubal down, and there is a maelstrom of fear and shame in her eyes—and why would she be anything but? Not even a day ago, she was still in the dungeons. She was moments away from becoming a slave to the Absolute. She has already lived under its goad.

“Alright,” Hasdrubal says. “I won’t, then.”

The other paladin rears back, like Hasdrubal had struck her. “You—what?”

“I won’t do it again,” Hasdrubal says again, with as much reassurance as she can muster. “I swear on it. I can tell them to look the other way just as easily with a mace.”

Minthara’s face changes from shock into a more familiar, comfortable expression: contempt. “We need to keep our cover here. If you cannot masquerade effectively as a True Soul, then you should be back at the inn, rubbing shoulders with the Fists and any other dullards the Harpers decided to save.”

“The Absolutists worship power.” Hasdrubal taps on the handle of the Blood, where it’s slung over her back. “They think might makes right. There’s no more effective mask than that.”

Minthara leans in close. Her eyes rust-red, like brick baking beneath the city sun, and frantic. From this close, Hasdrubal can smell her: living sweat, campfire smoke, sharp and sweet against the undead reek of Reithwin. She is a small woman, only as tall as Hasdrubal, but her hold is unyielding. She carries herself like a king. She has to. “That should not be a mask,” Minthara tells her lowly. “That is the truth of things. You would do well to learn that.”

“I think there is much more to the truth than that,” Hasdrubal says steadily.

Minthara laughs. The sound buries itself in the pit of Hasdrubal’s gut and hooks in deep. She releases her from the wall and steps away. Hasdrubal nods at Wyll and Karlach, who begrudgingly stand down.

“Paladins,” Minthara says. It’s pitying and mocking all in one.

Undead Harpers try to ambush them as they head for the toll bridge. Hasdrubal calls down sunlight and swings, and then keeps swinging until they’re down. She feels bone crack under the impact of the Blood, weakened by the maggots burrowing tracks through the marrow. Rotting gore spatters on her face before the light burns it away. She can taste it on her tongue—the spark that makes nerves alight, lightning moments before the thunder. It echoes through her hands; she flings it out. The thunder roars.

All the while, the back of her neck prickles with someone else’s regard.

Chapter 2: Protection from Good and Evil

Chapter Text

Ethel wasn’t the first. She wasn’t even creative, which was a little disappointing for a hag. After a point, Hasdrubal had started counting the times she’s heard it in a day as a number of shots to order—paladins, lonely on their high horses. Goody two-shoes, killjoys, drier than the plains of Anauroch and only a quarter of the fun. Joyless prudes. Most of the time, she doesn’t mind; so long as people let her help them, they can think whatever they want of her. She doesn’t ask for gold, much less a reputation. A majority of the women she’s bedded since leaving the academy had assumed, without asking her, that it was her first time. That was more of a problem, but also a less important one.

It becomes a shorthand, after a while. She’s a paladin. She’s from Baldur’s Gate; she went to the academy of Tyr in the Lower City, trained as the hand of the Evenhanded, the Blind One, the God of Justice. She took an oath of devotion. People hear that and know precisely what to think of her. They think she does good. They sometimes even tell her so.

Those are the days she can’t sleep at night.

It’s what Karlach said: they all have blood on their hands. They do what they have to, for the world and for each other. Hasdrubal’s tried justifying it to herself before. That’s what other people say—that the end justifies the means. Or that some beings carry darkness in their marrow, an ontological evil that marks them for slaughter. But when she walked around the goblin camp, she saw the bright-eyed children chasing chickens around and dancing to the flute music that always filled the air. There isn’t any evil here, not any more than in any other town, or any high hall in the Gate.

She tried, is the thing. She told everyone to deal damage as non-lethally as they could, closed the grand oak doors in stages so no one from the outside would be called in as support. But arrows and spells are faster and safer for them, maybe because of the instantaneous kill. And there was a little girl in the worg pits who was running for the guards, and Hasdrubal—it wasn’t an impulse. She has no illusions about that. She saw the girl open her mouth and shot her through the eye for it. Her oath grew stronger, with every one of them she killed. It’s protecting the innocent. It’s keeping the world safe. It’s how the story goes, which is a force greater than any mortal law.

In Reithwin, as they’re milling about on their rest, she comes across a shrine to Maglubiyet. Hasdrubal sets down a handful of gold and feels like the worst sort of oathbreaker.

Wyll finds her there, staring down at the shrine. It’s a musty wooden box, with a small plate to slot incense. No one has used it in years. “I traveled in a caravan with a priest of Maglubiyet once,” he says. “He drank all of us under the table and could still recite Calimshan poetry in the morning.”

Hasdrubal smiles at him, grateful that he was the one to speak. “Must have been a fun caravan.”

“It was.” Wyll sets down a bottle of Chultian red from his pack, pouring some on the ground as a libation. “He was an old goblin, so we’d carry him on our shoulders when he got tired during the day. Last I heard, he was headed to the Mountains of Silver to look for the font of life. I hope he’s alright.”

His face is creased beyond his years. The Blade of Frontiers—someone else who’s killed goblins. There are so many ballads about him that she can’t keep them straight. Paladins love them. They’re all supposed to slay monsters, stop the darkness, spread civilization. What the Hells does that even mean?

She’s a paladin, which means that she’s a force of good in this world, which means that she’s good, and when does a lie stop being a lie? Is it when other people believe it? Is it when she sometimes does, too?

“What’s your story, soldier?” Karlach is the one to ask as they hike over the vine blight infested wastes in their search for Thaniel’s other half. “I feel like you’re helping us through all of our personal issues, but we barely know anything about you.”

Hasdrubal makes a face. “Oh, you know. Paladins, open books. You’re going through a lot more sh*t; I’m just here because of the tadpole.”

Karlach guffaws. “Bullsh*t.”

“I have to agree with Karlach,” Wyll says from her other side. “That’s the sort of answer you give when you have something to hide.”

“So you’re from the Gate, and you went to the academy of Tyr,” Karlach continues. “The thing is, I’m also from the Gate, and we would’ve grown up around the same time, after you take the time f*ckery in the Hells into account. There were lots of people in Gortash’s guards who started out in the academy, so I would’ve heard about a tiefling paladin who could bench press me. You couldn’t have kept me away.”

Hasdrubal feels herself start to blush, despite the grim surroundings. She and Karlach had danced around each other in the early days, before she started sleeping with Lae’zel and Karlach found herself looking for a bigger bedroll to share with Wyll and Astarion. Hasdrubal would also be dead in the grave before she was unaffected by a compliment from a beautiful woman. “Very kind of you to say, Karlach.”

No one says anything in response. They’re all waiting for her, even Minthara, who doesn’t have the mercy to interrupt with a comment about wasting time when they should be hunting Ketheric.

“I dropped out of the academy,” she says. “I’m not actually a paladin of Tyr.”

She silently thanks the whole Dawn Pantheon when the blights leap out from the shadows and end the conversation there. The battle passes in a whirl of thorn and shadow. The light she calls onto the Blood is enough to pierce through the clouds of Moonrise, shattering the blights from within. This place grew once, she thinks. It’ll grow again. She can see it in her mind’s eye: Reithwin, dripping with blooms. Surging new and tender, fresh and green.

-----

Karlach is telling the story to everyone in camp who would listen. Unfortunately, they’re all listening. Astarion and Gale find it simply hilarious. Shadowheart says it’s the best thing she’s heard in a tennight. Even Wyll—good natured, kind Wyll, likely the only person she would have grabbed an ale with if they met outside of life and death circ*mstances—is laughing along. The only person who’s not giggling is Lae’zel, who is asking why anyone ever thought Hasdrubal would be tithed to a deity as small minded as Faerûn’s Tyr, who surely did not have a fraction of the wisdom of Mother Gith.

Hasdrubal takes refuge with Minthara. She’d sent word to Blurg that she met someone who was missing the Underdark, and Blurg left a basket of mushrooms and chasm creepers in the doorway of the abandoned temple. Inside was a note, assuring her that they would be safe to keep as decoration. It’s not much: they are sickly little copies of the grand, glowing fauna in the Underdark, but they would have to do. All of them have trinkets from home. Even after Lae’zel rejected Vlaakith, she still raised her gith standard when they made camp the following day—even more proudly than before, if anything, with a haughtiness touched by defiance. Minthara only has the spare tent Hasdrubal brought along. Hasdrubal tries to fluff one of the bluecap clusters up before squaring her shoulders and marching over to where Minthara is sitting.

“I got you something,” she says, wincing inside at the inadequacy of it.

Minthara looks up from her meditation. Her eyes flick from the basket of mushrooms to Hasdrubal’s expression. Too many things war on her face—fear, shame, gratitude. Shame again at the gratitude. Hasdrubal wonders if she knows it was all there in the open, all for her to read.

“I know it’s nothing compared to the comforts of Menzoberranzan, but I’ll try to find some Marsember ice wine.” Hasdrubal pauses, then adds, “And we’ll be killing more cultists tomorrow, which will have to stand in for picking off your siblings right now.”

Minthara is startled into laughing. “There isn’t any Marsember stock for miles,” she says. “I should know. I’ve looked.”

She takes the basket. Looks down at the withered mushrooms and chasm creepers. One of them is an orange puffball, small as an ember and glowing just as weakly. She picks it up and cradles it in her palm, as though it was more precious than all the jewels in a wyrm’s hoard.

“I will repot them,” Minthara says. “They need more room to grow.”

Despite the fact that her father’s an apothecary, Hasdrubal has the blackest thumb in the Gate. She sits down in what she’s come to think of as her spot in front of Minthara’s tent and watches.

“The paladins of Tyr are short-sighted thugs,” Minthara murmurs. She gently unroots the mushrooms from the dense soil Blurg had packed into the basket, setting them up in some of the bowls they collected in the town. Her fingers are long and slender, her skin thin enough that the illumination from the bluecaps brings her veins into stark relief. “I had my suspicions that you did not number among them. But that still leaves me with a question.”

Hasdrubal hands her another bowl when she gestures for it. “Ask it.”

“I thought truth-telling was among the commandments of your oath. Did you lie about that as well?”

“I never lied,” Hasdrubal says. “I went to the academy of Tyr in Baldur’s Gate. I’m a paladin serving under an oath of devotion. Both of those things are true.”

“But they are deceptive nonetheless.” Minthara co*cks her head. “And you lied at Moonrise, just as you’ve been lying to all of us. You did not answer my question about your oath.”

They try to drill the tenets into your head the moment you walk in through the doors. Don’t lie or cheat; let your word be your promise. That didn’t stop newly minted paladins from protecting liars and cheaters. Never fear to act, though caution is wise. You have to be damn sure in your own righteousness to always act first. Be responsible for your actions and their consequences, protect those entrusted to your care, and obey those who have just authority over you. What is it that makes a crown just? Treat others with fairness, and let your honorable deeds be an example to them. Do as much good as possible while causing the least amount of harm. Good is killing monsters. Good is spreading the light.

Aid others, protect the weak, and punish those who threaten them. Show mercy to your foes, but temper it with wisdom. She thinks about goblin children chasing chickens.

“There are a lot of things forbidden by my oath that I don’t care about,” Hasdrubal says at last. “And a lot of things the oathsworn still do that I think should be forbidden. So I don’t think about it that often.”

“That’s likely for the best. Your kind aren’t known for their strategic thought.”

Your kind can mean all sorts of things, coming from Minthara. Surface dwellers, Baldurians, tieflings. She’d be most insulted by the latter; most disappointed by the first. There’s something about the way she says it that gives Hasdrubal pause, though. It’s not as cruel as it could be.

“Minthara,” Hasdrubal says slowly, “you’re a paladin, too.”

“So I am.” Her words are heavy with a bone-deep bitterness. “Orin captured me for a reason. And now my oath to Lolth is no more, but my sword still smites under her aegis. Like the twitching of a carcass on the butcher’s block.”

Hasdrubal hesitates. “Can I ask—”

“No.” Minthara’s voice leaves no room for argument. “I’m afraid not.”

Chapter 3: Zone of Truth

Chapter Text

The thing she hates the most about her oath—

There are a lot of things she hates about her oath. But the thing she hates the most about her oath is how she can still recite it. She left the academy with two spells and that blasted oath. It’s been more than a decade since she walked out, and she still thinks about it when she has a moment to herself, which is all the more bewildering for how petty of a concern it is—no uncaring gods, no cruel patrons, no sad*stic sires, only five commandments that thousands across Faerûn swear each year, before they’ve hit their second decade. The pettiness doesn’t stop it from running through her head now as they’re sitting around the campfire. Everyone else is dividing up the gold and alchemical components they looted from Gerringothe and Thisobald Thorm.

Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Do as much good as possible while causing the least amount of harm.

Gerringothe was a ghost bound to a metal corpse, animated only by a ceaseless hunger for gold. Thisobald was a construct who won nothing but lies from his creator, belittled and mocked for being a parody of a son. She led them both to their demise through words alone, and she’d lied through her teeth the whole time. Is it a reduction of harm, because they hadn’t used violence? Is it even more violent, because she’d made them turn the knife inwards? Does it matter in the end? The two of them were dead. That means the two of them are at peace, but they didn’t do it as a mercy for the wandering souls. The gleefulness with which every piece of gold is now being counted is evidence enough for that.

Lae’zel sets down a pile of gold pieces in front of Hasdrubal. She tucks it into her pouch. Gods know she wants the gold; she’s going to buy all the healing potions she can, and then maybe a nicer shirt. Minthara passes her two flasks of alchemist’s fire and a lightning arrow. This is the first time she’s ever joined the group outside of combat.

“You should have seen her,” Karlach is telling Shadowheart. “She drank that thing under the table without breaking a sweat and told the tallest tales I’d ever heard! Something about an infernal bargain and a seductive devil of the Hells?”

Shadowheart cracks a smile. Those are getting rarer these days. Damn this place. “My, Hasdrubal. You should have been a bard.”

“That wasn’t a lie,” Hasdrubal says, rousing herself from her thoughts. “I am technically pacted to a devil.”

Wyll had sensed it on her when they first met, so he hides his smile as the others gasp in unison. Astarion even clutches at his heart with his hand, like he’s a soprano soloist on the opera stage. She’s surrounded by would-be thespians. If they weren’t living out of tents, she’d invest in fainting couches.

“I knew you had too many slots for a paladin,” Gale says triumphantly.

“Is that what you’re doing when you’re supposed to be holding your Haste on me?” Lae’zel asks, eyes narrowed. “Counting other people’s spells?”

“Concentration is complicated!” Gale protests.

Hasdrubal prods at the fire with a poker. Someone settles on the log next to her. “So,” Minthara says. A few nights ago, she traded the leather corset she wore to bed for a soft blue tunic that drowns her slight frame. It makes Hasdrubal’s whole chest feel warmer than even the flames she’s tending. Minthara’s voice is a soft burr, low and touchable. “A seductive devil of the Hells, Hasdrubal? Who knew your tastes ran so—exotic.”

Hasdrubal leans into her. “I have infernal blood,” she says, tapping her horns. “Kind of the opposite of exotic for me. I can see a tail and a forked tongue in the mirror any day.”

That pulls a full-bodied laugh from Minthara, which doubles when Hasdrubal flicks her tongue out over her lips and winks. “Nothing to rebut the seductiveness, though?” Minthara asks.

Hasdrubal falls into a doze with Minthara hand resting on her shoulder. Her thumb has slipped under the neckline of Hasdrubal’s shirt; she’s pressing little circles into the skin there, unknown to anyone else. The smoke drifting through the night air makes everything hazed at the edges, a dream of an evening. Hasdrubal sets aside good and evil for the moment.

There is an infernal presence in the back of her head. It takes up more room than it should, as through trying to fill a void of a greater absence, but it is quiet. It usually is. Together, they wait for the dawn.

-----

Daylight is an impossibility in Reithwin town. They arm themselves with torches and lanterns and descend into the mausoleum, where the Gauntlet of Shar is waiting. They help Shadowheart through the trials. With each that they pass, she gets more tense. By the time they find the Spear of Night, her every motion is wound tight as a bowstring, and Hasdrubal thinks of the finality with which arrows embed themselves into flesh, with which spun glass breaks when it is thrown from three stories high. The arrow loves the bow; the glass loves the ground. It is only inevitable.

“Shadowheart—” Hasdrubal starts. They stand before the portal to Shadowfell, Balthazar’s corpse behind them. That battle drained her, and they don’t have any more supplies to rest outside of camp. A pulsing headache is building between her temples. Something isn’t right. She can feel it on the nape of her neck, in her teeth. Something isn’t right at all.

“No.” Shadowheart doesn’t let her say anything more. “I have to do this.”

The Blood hums against Hasdrubal’s back, steadier than her own heartbeat. It grounds her. She takes a deep breath and nods. “I know. We’re coming with you.”

They step into the portal to find the Nightsong—a woman who’s been trapped in Shar’s domain for centuries. forced to die over and over again as the goddess’ final trial for her justiciars. When Shadowheart throws her spear over the side, Hasdrubal feels faint from relief. Dame Aylin unfurls her wings and flies out of the wheeling stars of Shadowfell, crowned with the burn of moonlight. The four of them watch for a moment in awe.

Hasdrubal hears the thump of a body falling. She looks down and sees Shadowheart collapsed on the gray stone, cradling her hand to her chest. A bruise-purple necrotic taint creeps up her arm, eating away at her skin. Hasdrubal can see the pinkish glint of bone deep within the wound on her palm. The flesh around it is corroded black.

“We have to go,” she says tightly. Her eyes are wide open and trained on nothing. “Gods. I can’t believe I did that. We have to go.”

Hasdrubal and Minthara haul Shadowheart to her feet, supporting her on either side. They stumble through the portal, which spits them out in the foundations of the ruined Gauntlet. Astarion helps ease Shadowheart back against a fallen column. He shoves a healing potion into her hand, and then after she drains the first one, another.

“It’s not working,” she says. “It needs to be divine healing, and it can’t be mine—”

“I don’t care,” Astarion says. “Take them anyways, darling.”

Hasdrubal falls to her knees. She unstraps one of her gauntlets and places her hand over Shadowheart’s, casting half of her healing reservoir into the festering wound. The force of it makes her ears pop. Soundlessly, the shadows in the Gauntlet flow, pooling more closely around them. Above their heads, the torch in the wall gutters, and then fizzles out. Shar doesn’t like her divine healing, either.

“That stopped the spread,” Shadowheart says. She squeezes her eyes shut. “We need to get out of here. Get up to the surface. She—I don’t know what she—”

“You’re not moving for fifteen minutes,” Astarion snaps. “At least. You’re going to brain yourself on a ladder, and then where would we be?”

Shadowheart hesitates. “I still have a couple charges left,” Hasdrubal says, stepping in. “I’ll heal you more before we head up again. And Minthara—”

She wheels around. Minthara isn’t with them. She’s standing at the far end of the room, arms crossed, watching the hallway.

Shadowheart’s frantic voice pulls her back. “I can’t believe I did that,” she mumbles. “Oh, gods, I can’t believe I did that. No one survives Shar’s wrath. No one defies her. No one lives with that. And now I’ve gone and done it. And you—” tears bead at the corners of her eyes when she looks up. “I’ve dragged you all down with me—”

“Damn Shar,” Hasdrubal says sharply. “I’m here for you, Shadowheart.”

At that, the tears spill over. Shadowheart falls into her, and Hasdrubal holds her tight.

Another torch sputters and dies down the hallway. Deep within the maze, something moans. It could be stone. It could be flesh. “I hate this place,” Astarion announces. He notches his crossbow so vehemently Hasdrubal is afraid the trigger might break. “If I see another one of those Justiciar rats, it’s getting a bolt to the eye.”

He climbs up to the top of a pile of rubble and takes up a stance there, blending into the shadows near the ceiling. Shadowheart closes her eyes, muttering something about her headache. That moaning noise rumbles through the floors, louder this time. Hasdrubal looks around aimlessly, helpless. A glint of silver catches her eye—Minthara is beckoning her over. She goes.

“That was a stupid choice,” Minthara says.

She at least has the courtesy to speak softly. Hasdrubal steps in close, lowering her voice to a whisper. “She’s going to be free from Shar, one way or another. It’ll be rough, but—”

“She still has time to renounce her rejection. With enough entreaty, Shar might still take her back.”

Hasdrubal stills. She stares at Minthara. The other paladin’s face is more earnest than she has ever seen it. “You cannot be a cleric without a god, Hasdrubal. And you cannot defy the gods without retribution—that is what makes them gods. First Vlaakith, now Shar. Soon half our party will be god-forsaken, and we are fighting against Ketheric Thorm and the avatars of the Absolute.” Minthara shakes her head, lips pressed thin. “We cannot afford this kind of hesitation now. I do not care if these goddesses hurt their feelings. We do not have time for childish rebellion. You need to tell Shadowheart to ask for Shar’s mercy at once. She—and we—will suffer a hundred times over if we do not win.”

“I won’t do that,” Hasdrubal says. It’s an instinctive reply, borne from the same wellspring of her healing. The same seat of belief. “She’s my friend. She’s also her own person, and she made this choice. And I damn well don’t want her to suffer because her god is mistreating her.”

At that, Minthara’s eyes blaze. “They are not suffering.” She spits the word out contemptuously. “A hand wound. A white lie. Some missing memories. In the Underdark, that would be a mercy none could dare to hope for. We need strength, Hasdrubal. Godly strength. You’ve had plenty of time to indulge your insipid fantasies of rescuing children and saving the weak from their appointed fate. You cannot afford to be so spineless in the battles to come.”

No one talks with such reckless, desperate certainty unless they’re afraid, unless they’ve already seen all their worst fears come to pass. Minthara’s been through this too, Hasdrubal thinks. She must have, but they’ve never talked about it. All they know is that Minthara entered the Absolute’s dominion as a paladin of Lolth, and when she left, her oath was broken. Hasdrubal hesitates a moment before reaching out a hand in supplication. “Minthara. We have strength on our side. Ketheric’s no longer immortal, we have the Nightsong on our side, we have resources—you’re not falling back into Ketheric’s grasp, or Orin’s. I swear it.”

With all the fury of a caged animal, Minthara’s eyes dart around—to Shadowheart, to Astarion. There is nothing but hate on her face. Hasdrubal realizes a second too late what she did.

Minthara’s fingers close around her wrist in a vice grip, twisting her arm almost to the point of pain. “Little hero.” Her voice is as sweet as fruit gone to rot. “Do you think I need your protection? Do you think I need saving, from a sentimental fool like you? If you had been born in the high houses of Menzoberranzan, the matrons would have laid you on the altar before you could lift your hand to a shield. They would have seen the weakness in your eyes and marked you for sacrifice. And I would have gladly brought the blade down.”

Hasdrubal’s first instinct is to pull her hand from Minthara’s grasp. She doesn’t. “I am not a woman of the Underdark, Minthara,” she says, as levelly as she can. The pressure in her ears is growing again, to the point of pain. “But even if I were, it is still not a weakness to help others, nor is it strength to let them suffer.”

“Hasdrubal—” It’s Shadowheart who speaks. Shadowheart, who is lying on the broken stone of the Gauntlet that was meant to break her, cheeks still wet, hands trembling. Betrayed by the f*cking god she devoted her life to, and still trying to push down that pain. “It’s okay. This was my choice, and even I can tell—it’s maybe the worst thing I could have done for us. She’s right, you don’t have to—”

“Like Hell she is,” Hasdrubal snarls. “Letting people suffer isn’t a sign of strength. If anything, it’s cowardice.”

Minthara smiles. It is not a gentle expression. “Are you calling me a coward?”

Hasdrubal considers her for a long moment. “Does this have to do with your oath to Lolth?” she finally asks.

Regret hits her the moment the words leave her lips. There’s a moment of ringing silence, and then Minthara says, “Perhaps it would be best if I stayed at camp for a time.”

It would be stupid to reach out to her. It would be cruel. Why does Hasdrubal feel like she still has to try? She starts, “Minthara—”

Minthara turns away. “No. I do not want to hear another word from you.”

She walks off. Hasdrubal takes one deep breath, and then another, listening for the clack of her boots on the ladder leading up to the surface. Gods almighty. She shoves it down. Whatever it is, she shoves it down. She goes back to Shadowheart and presses her hands to her temples, healing her with what strength she has left. They too prepare to ascend.

Chapter 4: Holy Weapon

Chapter Text

The air in camp is strained that night.

Lae’zel has taken it upon herself to help Shadowheart through her denouncement of her god. It is not an easy path to walk, she’d said when Shadowheart told the rest of them what had happened. But it is the only true path. And we will help you bear the weight of that truth.

She has always been one quick to action—Lae’zel does not hesitate, does not stray, acts decisively, with a bright singularity of intent. All that singularity is now trained on Shadowheart, who is hesitantly moving through the steps of a spear exercise under Lae’zel’s guidance. She’d pried herself off of her bedroll right before dinner and declared that if she didn’t do something, this very instant, she was going to start ripping her hands to the bone. Her form with the spear is not clumsy, but it is unpracticed.

“Mother Superior didn’t teach these stances,” Shadowheart mutters, struggling to hold her balance.

“No,” Lae’zel says. “They belong to the legacy of a mother far superior: Mother Gith.”

Shadowheart can’t keep herself from smiling at that. Lae’zel turns away, but not before a Hasdrubal catches a glimpse of her face—happiness, the kind that bursts from your teeth and fills your eyes, nearly eclipsed by utter terror. Creche K’liir was not a home that brooked rebellion. Hasdrubal can’t imagine the bravery it takes to be stranded on a different plane, hunted by the followers of the god who branded you a traitor, and still be able to find the joy in defiance.

Lae’zel is bent now on pulling Shadowheart into that joy through sheer willpower. It even seems to be working. The growing ease of the spear in her hands, coupled with Lae’zel’s uncomfortable but inescapably earnest praise, settles Shadowheart back into her own skin. Her hands are shaking less now.

“Gods,” Karlach says. She’s leaning her head against Wyll’s knee, ripping a heel of bread into shreds from her agitation. “Shar’s a bastard. I hope she rots.”

Chapter 5: Remove Curse

Chapter Text

With Ketheric’s death, dawn comes over Reithwin. The air tastes different—fresh, earthy, electric, like the moments before a rainstorm. They all want to sleep for a tenday. Before she heads to her bedroll, Hasdrubal heads towards Minthara’s tent with an armful of armor. She’s about to drop it next to the basket of mushrooms and leave as quietly as she can when Minthara’s voice comes from within the tent.

“I could hear you coming from across the camp. You’re louder than a squadron of Gondian automata.”

Hasdrubal winces. “Not the first time I’ve heard that.”

She clears her throat, fiddles with the hem of her tunic. “I brought you some armor,” she says at last. “You don’t have to wear it or anything, but—it would suit you in combat.”

Minthara’s head pokes through her tent entrance. Her mouth is already open in a dismissal when she sees the armor Hasdrubal’s carrying. Her eyes widen. “Is that—”

“Taken off his bones.”

Minthara clambers to her feet and takes the armor. She picks each piece up, one by one. Runs her fingers over each curve of the metal ribs on the breastplate, traces out the stylized tibia sculpted from iron on the greaves. Rubs her thumb over the skulls on the pauldrons. She wipes off smears of necrotic dust to reveal shining metal beneath, takes in each intricacy with greed. It’s evidence of Ketheric’s demise. It’s proof—incontrovertible evidence of how utterly his power has been broken.

It takes a long time for Minthara to tear her eyes away from the breastplate. “Tell me how it went,” she says.

Ketheric’s armor buzzes with enchantments; the metal is forged to refashion itself, softening like wax to fit to its wearer’s form. Hasdrubal turns to leave as Minthara starts preparing to don the armor, but Minthara’s voice stops her.

“Stay,” she says. Her words lower until they are a whisper, only meant for one to hear. It softens the command to a request, an entreaty. “Tell me how it went.”

There are people who describe desire as simple: mindless sensation, easily fulfilled. Hasdrubal has known for a long time what she likes in bed; she likes being under a woman, being used for her pleasure; or above her, drawing out her own. She prefers the latter but is still glad to lose herself to the former. She eventually needs a threshold of sensation, inflicted or received, that some of her lovers could not meet, but that did not prevent many a sweet night with her tongue between their thighs. That is all simple.

But desire is not simply that. Desire spirals out in dizzying webs, into fractals and fractals again. Minthara makes her stomach go tight despite her ambitions, her cruelty, her single-mindedness—perhaps even because of them. She’s been watching Minthara fight, and Minthara has been watching her as well. Hasdrubal wants to see her bloodied and triumphant on a battlefield, wielding shadow and flame. She wants to see her kneel in the blood which paid for her victory as she would at an altar, as once she knelt to Lolth. She wants to know what she would look like when witnessing a revelation.

She wants to see her happy. She wants to help her.

Hasdrubal swallows past the dryness in her throat and nods. She ducks inside the tent. The inside is spartan: a bedroll, some pillows, a spider lyre. She sits down on one of the pillows. Minthara pulls her tunic over her head, folding the garment neatly. She is beautiful. She is beautiful in a way that invites metaphor—a flame, a blade forged to perfect balance. A frost-rimed bloom. She is wiry; lean muscle flexes across her shoulders and beneath the softer fat of her stomach. Her breasts are small, bound loosely with black linen. Scars wind across her skin: deep gouges across her abdomen; the pebbling of an old burn on her right hip; a neat, deep star under her collarbone. When she turns to set her tunic aside, Hasdrubal can see a matching wound on her shoulder blade. There aren’t many clerics who can heal a wound like that. A tattooed lattice stretches from her neck down to the middle of her spine. It outlines each of her vertebrae in gossamer webs; the knobs are framed like jewels, skin-flushed purple against black lace.

She tugs on a gambeson, tying it tight with practiced ease. Hasdrubal watches avidly as Minthara straps on Ketheric’s armor. Her fingers are fine and agile against the brutal metal, pulling the buckles tight. The breastplate melds to her body, then the pauldrons, then vambraces. Something bubbles beneath Hasdrubal’s ribs, on the verge of boiling over and scalding her. A blazing hunger with teeth, yearning to close its jaws around the tender skin peeking above Minthara’s gorget.

Minthara’s words are filled with laughter, low and touchable. “You have not said much,” she says.

Hasdrubal’s face goes hot, but she does not look away. She tells Minthara about everything: Dame Aylin, the mind flayer colony, the Elder Brain. Ketheric’s identity as an avatar of Myrkul; his being forsaken by his god. Hasdrubal gets to the Dead Three and the crown which enables their control over their countless legions. It would let them bring cities—kingdoms—the whole of the Sword Coast to their knees. Minthara’s gaze sharpens. Hasdrubal knew it would, but she still meets it squarely.

Minthara reaches out, cradling Hasdrubal’s cheek in a cool gauntleted hand. “Before you decide on our course of action, you would do well to listen to me first,” she murmurs. Her tone brooks no argument; it is the voice of someone well-practiced in command. “Someone has to fill that seat of power, Hasdrubal, and we are the best choice. Something like the Crown of Karsus—it cannot truly be destroyed, only disassembled. You have already seen what tyrants like Gortash, Orin, and Ketheric will do with a power like that. The only way we can keep that from happening again is to take the crown for ourselves.”

“Or we can make it so that seat no longer exists for any mortal to fill,” Hasdrubal says. “Power like that should not exist, no matter who is sitting on the throne.”

Hasdrubal gazes up at her. She tracks the disappointment as it crosses Minthara’s expression, shuttering her eyes. Her hand is pulled back. Hasdrubal thinks she is about to turn away, but Minthara hesitates instead.

“You won’t change me,” Minthara says. Her words come out stilted, uncertain. They are a fraction too loud.

“I know.” Hasdrubal says it with all the gravity of a promise. “I hope that you will change your own mind, but—you know how I like to hope.”

She weighs her words and finally says, “You won’t change me either.”

Neither of them speak for a long moment. Minthara’s face crumples. “If you had been born in the high houses of Menzoberranzan,” she says, a distant echo of what she had said in Gauntlet, “you would have been killed. For your kindness, for your heart. For your impossible, terrible hope. I know the surface world is not the Underdark, but I have also come to learn that the two are not so different as some would want it to be. I am afraid of very little, but there are times when I look at you, and all I feel is fear. When your heart costs you your life, the rest of us will have to live with it. I don’t—”

She trails off. “What cruelty you would inflict on that day, little hero,” she says at last. “What fine, artful cruelty.”

At that, Hasdrubal has to look away. “I’m sorry. Hells—” once she starts, she can’t stop. “I’m sorry about what I said to you, Minthara. Your oath is your own. And you are no coward.”

“I do not want your apologies. If anything, I should be commending you.” Minthara reaches out, grazing two fingers along Hasdrubal’s jaw and down her neck, right to where her pulse thrums the strongest. “In an instant, you had found the most vital place to slip the knife. Most would need more training.”

Minthara spends a moment looking down at Hasdrubal. Her eyes are a perfect, vital red. Hasdrubal wonders what she sees. “Permit me another question,” Minthara says.

When Hasdrubal nods, she asks, “Why did you not try to speak with me following our return from the Shadowfell? I heard you come up often, but you never came in.”

Hasdrubal catches Minthara’s hand with hers. Minthara lets her lace their fingers together, and Hasdrubal feels alight with it.

“You asked,” she says.

Minthara’s eyes widen. “So I did,” she says. “I spat on everything you stand for, called you spineless and weak. You questioned my strength and integrity, and now question my ambitions. But you did not show your face to me—because I asked.”

So softly that Hasdrubal thinks she isn’t meant to hear it, Minthara mutters, “Simple as that.”

Hasdrubal nods. “Simple as that.”

Minthara squeezes her hand once before stepping away, and Hasdrubal lets her go. “I sometimes wish I could call you spineless and have it be true. Yours is a bravery that cannot be distinguished from recklessness. Yours, and that of your whole merry band.”

Her voice goes brittle and bitter. “Shadowheart and Shar. Lae’zel and Vlaakith. They suffered in breaking their allegiances. They suffer now. I do not mean to deny that. But I still do not understand how—” she cuts herself off, wrenching herself away so Hasdrubal cannot see her face. “A nun without her memories. A child raised to be a soldier. I do not understand how they could even conceive of such defiance. I spent centuries in Lolth’s service. I was her bravest and her most faithful; I killed for her without regret. Without question. Family, lovers, allies—all fell on her altar, as was right. She cast me from her power the moment my mind fell to Orin, and the first thing I thought when my mind became my own once more was—Lady of Shadows, Weaver of Destiny—”

Her voice breaks. “Let me show my devotion to you.”

Minthara’s breath hisses through her teeth. “The words of her prayer are now foul in my mouth. Yet I still remember them. There are days when I desire nothing more than to carry her faith once more.”

Her hands come up, unstrapping her armor piece by piece. Hasdrubal climbs to her feet and goes to the camp chest. She brings back a carafe of Chultian red and two cups. The wine is deep as blood in the dark, and they drink it together, heads bowed so close that there is little more than breath between them.

Chapter 6: Bless

Chapter Text

When they get to the Elfsong, they all have their priorities. It’s Yenna’s first time in the city proper, so Hasdrubal gives her ten gold, directions to a sweet vendor a couple blocks into the temple district, and a reminder to be back by sundown. They won’t be seeing her until then, so Gale summons a familiar, a tabby cat, to bound after her. He claims the desk as his own and keeps one eye on the familiar’s sight while organizing his components. Shadowheart lies down, seeking whatever rest she can from Shar’s pain, and Lae’zel stands over her, sharpening her knives with deadly focus on the door. There’s music downstairs, and ale besides, so Karlach and Wyll pull each other hand-in hand out the door, making Astarion promise to come dance with them once he’s done with his bath. Hasdrubal debates following them, just so she can have the experience of sitting in a corner chewing on some subpar roast and letting the chatter of happy people flow over her.

There’s also a pit in the middle of their shared common room, lined with fur rugs. Hasdrubal assumes it’s for conversations, shared meals, and the occasional orgy. She rolls the rugs out of the way so they wouldn’t get caught on armor and then waves Lae’zel over.

“A wise decision,” Lae’zel says. She looks down at Shadowheart for a moment, with all the intensity and affection of pressing a kiss to a brow, and then slides her knives back into their sheathes in her boots. “We should not grow complacent from all these amenities.”

“Perish the thought,” Hasdrubal says with a grin, fishing a couple potions from her bag. “To third blood?”

“Make it the fourth this time. There are surely potion shops in this city.”

Sparring with Lae’zel is a pleasure all unto itself. They’d started when they were at the Emerald Grove; Lae’zel was so used to the rhythm of daily practice that she felt it acutely when it was gone, and Hasdrubal liked to see the smile that she got when she had a blade in her hands. She likes to spar as well, likes the snap and burn of it, likes the deep-seated ache of satisfaction that spreads through her muscles afterwards. The more comfortable they got with each other, the less polite their sparring became. It’s now the opposite of a dance: vicious, rhythmless, dirty. Lae’zel disarms Hasdrubal within minutes, so she goes in for the knives and nails to wrestle her greatsword out of her hands. Fourth blood is enough to bring one of them nearly down to unconsciousness, and they scrabble hand-to-hand in that pit until they’re both bruised.

“Hells and all the f*cking gods—” Hasdrubal grunts, wrenching Lae’zel’s hands away from her face. She tries to slam her to the floor, using her arm as leverage. Lae’zel twists in her grip, unfathomably nimble, and yanks her back, one arm around her throat, the other going for her boot. Hasdrubal tries to buck her off, but it’s too late.

The knife slices across her throat, opening up a thin line of crimson. “f*ck. Fourth,” Hasdrubal wheezes.

Immediately, Lae’zel lets go and eases her to the ground. Hasdrubal lies there, staring up at the ceiling until its spinning slows. A potion is nudged into her hand. She drinks it and sits up with a groan. The healing barely took the edge off; she can still feel her split lip bleeding. “That was a good fight.”

“You were adequate,” Lae’zel says. There is a mischievous gleam in her eyes as she says that now. She tosses Hasdrubal another potion.

Before she can drink it, Minthara’s voice comes from behind her. “I believe it is my turn.”

Hasdrubal feels herself brighten. Lae’zel also seems pleased. “I have been wondering when you would join us. I have not fought many who trained in the Underdark, so I look forward to testing my mettle against yours.”

Minthara sounds much closer when she says, “I would be happy to defeat you another day,” she says, ignoring Lae’zel’s scoff, “but now, I am rather hoping to face Hasdrubal.”

Hasdrubal can’t agree fast enough. She goes to uncap the potion, but it’s plucked out of her hand before she can react. She blinks at her empty hand, then looks up to see the bottle being dangled from Minthara’s fingers. From her seat on the floor, she has to crane her neck far back to meet Minthara’s gaze. Between the hit Lae’zel landed on her temple and the blazing intensity in Minthara’s eyes, she feels more than a little dizzy.

And Minthara is comfortable now—confidence brimming in the co*ck of her hip, a pleased smirk curling over her lips. She looks happy. “That,” Hasdrubal says, licking her bloody lip so she can watch Minthara track the motion, “seems a little unfair.”

Minthara’s fingers soothe over the tender spots at the back of Hasdrubal’s skull, butterfly-light. They toy with the rough-fuzzed sides of her undercut, then lace into her braid and pull tight. “I am a scion of House Baenre,” she says. It is a smaller but no less potent joy to be able to see how the cold pride is an act, thin as an ice rime over a lake warming under the heat of the sun. “We do not play fair.”

“How disappointing,” Lae’zel sniffs, frowning to the room at large. “If either of you truly wishes to hone your martial prowess, you may alert me afterwards.”

She retreats back into the nook where Shadowheart is resting. Minthara doesn’t so much help Hasdrubal up as haul her to her feet, with enough force to send her staggering, even with her armor. Her head spins, a giddy sort of lightheadedness. “We should use the spare room,” she says. “Before anyone else tries to take it.”

Minthara arches her brow. “We are sparring, Hasdrubal. Restrain yourself.”

Hasdrubal giggles. “Before anyone else tries to spar in it, then.”

The room is barely larger than a closet, with just enough room for a bed and a chest inside. Minthara locks the door behind the two of them. The blue of her sleeping tunic is slipping to one side, revealing the smooth round of her shoulder. She smirks and pushes at Hasdrubal’s chestplate with her fingertips. Hasdrubal doesn’t budge. She closes her hands around Minthara’s hips instead, letting the tips of her gauntleted fingers dimple to fabric there.

“We’re sparring, Minthara,” she says.

At Minthara’s huff, she gives in her strongest urge and bends down, laying an open-mouthed kiss on Minthara’s bare shoulder. When she pulls away, a smear of red is left behind. She turns her head to Minthara’s ear and whispers, “I’ll even take off my armor to make it easier,” and then she licks the blood away.

One of Minthara’s hands cradles the back of Hasdrubal’s head, pressing her against her body. The other nimbly flicks at the buckles holding Hasdrubal’s armor in place, slipping over her back and under her arms. Hasdrubal helps her pull the metal off her body, letting it land on the ground with muffled clanks. The real song and dance of the paladin, Hasdrubal thinks, hiding a smile by biting softly into the meat of Minthara’s shoulder. Minthara strokes the nape of her neck before stepping away.

They meet each other’s eyes. Hasdrubal does not have any desire to come out victorious right now, but she’d be doing both of them a shame if she doesn’t try. She drops her weight and drives her elbow into Minthara’s stomach.

Her first blow lands. Her follow-up does not. Minthara moves with the grace of a dancer, shifting so Hasdrubal’s attack brushes along her side instead of ramming into her body. Her own momentum pulls her off balance. Minthara pushes between her shoulder blades, and she goes down easily, bending over the bed. The top of Hasdrubal’s body lands on the mattress. Minthara’s hand does not release its hold; it presses down harder, with five pinpricks piercing like metal nails through her tunic. Hasdrubal struggles against the pressure, not to break it, but to feel it strengthen. She hopes there’ll be bruises.

“I will never tire of seeing heroes laid low,” Minthara says.

Her voice makes Hasdrubal’s skin prickle; it’s like being bound in velvet, like the pull of the sharpest knife. She drags her hands under Hasdrubal’s shirt, squeezing the tense muscles of her back and the softer give around her hips. Her fingers dig in, scratching through the sweat that’s beading at the small of her back. The pit of Hasdrubal’s stomach tightens, pooling warmth between her legs. The happy flicking of her tail hits Minthara’s thigh, and Minthara tugs on the spade teasingly.

“Unruly,” she murmurs. “Someone should teach you manners.”

“I,” Hasdrubal says, as primly as she can when her smallclothes are getting damp, “am very polite.”

Minthara laughs with her full chest. It’s a gorgeous sound, but it stops abruptly, and Hasdrubal glances over her shoulder to see Minthara’s brow furrowed, as though she is surprised the sound even came out of her mouth. Her gaze then fixes on Hasdrubal with a fury renewed, and she takes hold of one of her horns, tilting her head with her iron grip so she can kiss her. The angle makes Hasdrubal’s neck twinge; her split lip starts bleeding with renewed vigor as Minthara tugs at it with her teeth. She licks her lips when she pulls back.

“You are ridiculous,” Minthara says. Her eyes are soft and wide; wondering, which is just short of disbelieving. “You ridiculous—”

She yanks Hasdrubal’s pants off, and her briefs with them, and then hauls Hasdrubal a handspan back so she can’t rub herself against the linens. Her fingers slot between Hasdrubal’s legs. Without any pretense, she plays with the wetness gathered on her folds, brushing feather-light over her cl*t with a calloused fingertip. Hasdrubal gasps, toes curling. Minthara touches her with the same deft, easy skill she showed with her armor. It’s fast, harsh. Perfect. The sensation flashes electric, ratcheting up the pressure in her gut. Hasdrubal whole body jerks as Minthara switches her hold, rubbing tight, unforgiving circles around her cl*t. Her other hand clamps down on Hasdrubal’s shoulder, keeping her from squirming. She doesn’t slow down.

Under Minthara’s command, pleasure builds and breaks, rushing over her so quickly that she can’t do anything but gasp into the sheets. Her climax pulls a short, broken grunt out of her, then a hiccuping noise as Minthara pushes two fingers into her up to the knuckle and spreads them as wide as she can. She laughs softly when Hasdrubal clenches around her. It’s the same sharp sensation of digging nails into a wound; it verges on too much. She’s so wet that she can hear it when Minthara’s fingers thrust in. Pain bursts as Minthara sets her teeth on the slope between Hasdrubal’s shoulder and neck and bites down hard. Her incisors are sharp enough to draw blood. The pressure between her legs coils tighter, reaching a razor-sharp singularity.

Minthara’s hand stills. She keeps the pressure of her bite as Hasdrubal whines, hips jerking fruitlessly. Her pulse seems to pool in the throbbing of her shoulder after Minthara releases her teeth.

“No, no,” Minthara chides. She wipes her fingers on Hasdrubal’s hip and nudges her to turn over. “It’s my turn now.”

Hasdrubal clambers onto her back, eager and hungry in spite of—because of—the buzzing between her legs. She watches as Minthara strips her tunic off with a soldier’s efficiency, then her pants. There is a thick raised scar on the inside of her thigh. The wiry white hair covering her mound glints wetly. Hasdrubal’s mouth goes dry.

“Come here,” Hasdrubal whispers, reaching out. “Let me—”

Minthara wastes no time. She straddles Hasdrubal’s face and grinds down on her waiting tongue. Hasdrubal moans at the taste, licking over the length of her in broad strokes. Minthara feels hot and flush with blood against her mouth, smearing wetness from Hasdrubal’s nose to her chin. Her noises—hums edging into whines when Hasdrubal seals her mouth over her cl*t and sucks, something that might be a whimper when Hasdrubal takes the edge of her folds between her teeth and bites down gently—hook deep into Hasdrubal’s stomach. The longer Hasdrubal laps at her, the more frantic the motion of her hips becomes, as though all her careful control has slipped, leaving a honeyed desperation behind.

Minthara’s fingers tighten on her horns. Hasdrubal works her tongue in deeper. Her jaw aches in the best way; her sight is eclipsed by the tender skin between Minthara’s thighs, and she is all Hasdrubal can taste and smell, sharp and musky. When Minthara comes, her whole body goes taut with it, and then she slumps, bracing herself on the pillows. She’s dripping over Hasdrubal’s jaw, down her neck.

After a moment, she eases herself up, letting Hasdrubal pant damply into the air. Hasdrubal licks her lips and grins.

“Easy,” Minthara says fondly, wiping some of her own slick off Hasdrubal’s chin with her thumb. “Shameless.” She slips it between Hasdrubal’s lips, watching with appreciation as Hasdrubal sucks.

“You like it,” Hasdrubals says once her mouth is freed.

“Gods help me.”

Minthara gets off the bed and searches through her clothes. She comes back with a potion in hand. The bottle fizzes when it’s uncorked, filling the room with a bitter herbal scent. She brushes her thumb against the corner of Hasdrubal’s jaw. Hasdrubal opens her mouth, letting the potion be poured between her teeth.

The arcana races through Hasdrubal, knitting her capillaries back together. “Thank you,” she murmurs.

Minthara touches her thumb to Hasdrubal’s healed lip. Her face is open and strange. She presses a kiss there. It feels like a benediction, or a prayer.

Chapter 7: Crusader’s Mantle

Chapter Text

The next morning, silence greets Hasdrubal when she steps out into the main room. Gleeful, vicious silence. She debates burning a dimension door scroll to shunt herself out the window, but they might need that spell later. Gale would just counterspell her anyways.

The wizard in question is stirring sugar into his redberry tisane, an angelic expression on his face. “Good morning, sunshine.”

She is a paladin. Not one blessed by the Triad, or even a particularly holy one, but a paladin nonetheless. She has faced down aberrations, devils, undead, and divine avatars. She defeated Ketheric Thorm. These are the best friends she’s ever had. They’re even happy for her. It doesn’t matter that they’ve definitely had a running bet about her hooking up with Minthara since their first scouting mission to Moonrise, or that they are inordinately invested both in her romantic prospects and in embarrassing her. It certainly doesn’t matter that Minthara beat her to the strategically advantageous position. She is sitting where they’d sparred yesterday, clearly in the middle of conversation with Shadowheart and Astarion, a plate of food balanced on her lap.

“If you don’t say it is a good morning, I will be offended,” Minthara says, a gleam in her eye.

Hasdrubal crosses her arms, staring at all of them. “She was up four hours ago,” she says, pointing at Minthara. “I don’t know why you waited for me to begin the interrogation.”

“I believe that strategy is called throwing someone else in front of the horse-and-carriage.” Minthara spears a delicate bite of egg on her fork and brings it to her mouth. “A bold maneuver.”

No one says anything for a moment, and then Astarion groans dramatically. “You two are revolting.”

Everyone laughs at that, including Hasdrubal. They all pick up their conversations again, and Hasdrubal goes to the tray next to the dumbwaiter. The food at the Elfsong isn’t high-quality by any means, but it’s plentiful, and they don’t have to scavenge for it from rotting barrels or corpses, so it might as well be a hero’s feast straight from the hands of Selûne. She fills her plate with fruit, bread, and corned beef hash, and takes some of the redberry tisane Gale was drinking. That’ll wake her up.

Minthara glances up at her when she sits down at her side and begins to eat. Her smile is small—all the more precious for how small it is, hidden behind her forkful of hash so no one can see except Hasdrubal.

“It’s about time,” Shadowheart says, waving between the two of them with her cup. She seems better today, stronger, less pained. A roof over her head and a real bed might’ve also had something to do with it. “I was about to find a closet to trap the two of you. Preferably one with a mimic in it, because I wanted you to still have fun.”

“My plan was to lock you in a room and tell you that neither of you can leave until you come to a consensus on the nature of justice in the Heracl*tean universe.” Astarion sighs. “But you beat me to it. By beating the sh*t out of each other, as I heard!”

He sounds far too chipper. “Who won the bet?” Hasdrubal asks.

Astarion blinks innocently. “What bet?”

Over the course of breakfast, nearly everyone swings by. Gale gives them a scroll of silence; he makes himself scarce at Minthara’s glare but winks at Hasdrubal before he retreats to his desk. Karlach gives them both a congratulatory clap on the back, with such pure-hearted glee that Hasdrubal gets up to hug her back. Even this early in the morning, her engine is already warming. Wyll tells her that the others might laugh, but she of all people deserves happiness. Lae’zel settles next to Shadowheart at some point, picking the crisped bits of potato from her plate and leaving Shadowheart the soft pieces. Only after the final bite of potato has been polished off between them does she begin to speak.

“I know that we are no longer lovers,” Lae’zel says, “and that you do not like to speak in terms of claim or ownership. So I will respect you, as one warrior does to another.”

She pauses, holding her chin up high. “But if she hurts you, I will cut her fingers from her hands, one at a time.”

“Not her head?” Shadowheart asks with a faux gasp. “Do you care for Hasdrubal so little?”

“No,” Lae’zel says proudly. “I am showing that I have learned from her.”

They’re going to hurt each other, Hasdrubal thinks. Not just the lighter hurt for pleasure, which Lae’zel also knows well, but deeply, because they’re such different people—similar enough to pretend at understanding, and to have that widen the rift between them. And because they are simply people, petty and selfish, liars and cheaters, who only have this world and their own two hands. To do what they can, to do what they must. Hasdrubal doesn’t know whether she would be so compelled by Minthara if there wasn’t the potential for hurt. The fact that Minthara knows precisely where her lungs are, and how to sink the knife in deep, makes the helpless judder of her hips into her mouth all the sweeter.

“An admirable goal.” Minthara smiles and toasts Lae’zel with her cup. “I will be disappointed if you do not keep to your word.”

Hasdrubal takes a deep breath. “I quite like her fingers,” she says mildly. “Please don’t.”

-----

Hasdrubal moans as Minthara pushes her pinky into her. Her hand sinks in up to the flat of her palm; Hasdrubal imagines she can feel the calluses she gained through a life of martial combat, scraping along her tender inner muscles. The fit is tight enough to be uncomfortable; a hot sweat breaks out over her skin, and Minthara licks it off her neck, humming in satisfaction at the taste. Hasdrubal is in her lap. One strong arm is clamped around her thighs, squeezing them together and folding her in half. She is crushed against Minthara’s body, unable to do anything but rock up into Minthara’s unforgiving fingers. She needs—more. More stimulation, more pain, more motion. A high, frustrated noise is building in the back of her throat. It’s exactly what she wants.

“Your friends aren’t here,” Minthara says. Her teeth close around the tip of Hasdrubal’s ears and tug. “Do not try to keep your pretty sounds from me.”

Everyone’s split up for the day: Shadowheart, Lae’zel, and Gale do reconnaissance at the harbor, while Karlach and Astarion follow up on their connections within the Guild to arrange a meeting between Jaheira and Nine-Fingers Keene. Wyll is with them as well, trying to winnow out any hint about where Gortash might be keeping his political prisoners. Hasdrubal had tried to accompany one of the groups, but they’d shooed her off. There aren’t any big fights on the docket for today, nothing that needs two paladins with greatswords and negative stealth. And what else are two paladins to do with an empty suite all to themselves?

“Not that I think that would stop you.” Minthara’s voice is speculative, superior. It makes Hasdrubal feel like a butterfly pinned beneath glass. “I could take you before all of them. Or on an altar to—your god. And you would let me, wouldn’t you?”

Hasdrubal snaps her teeth at the corner of Minthara’s jaw. It’s just barely out of reach. “If they all agreed, sure.”

Minthara laughs. It is not commensurate with the air of mastery she maintains, more like the kind of thing they might share at breakfast, or after Hasdrubal’s cleaned a potions seller out. Her hand stops its pistoning for a moment; Minthara’s own laugh seems to unsettle her, more often than not.

She recoups herself quickly, starting to finger Hasdrubal again with vicious speed. “No word on your god?”

“I mean, you could try.” Hasdrubal smiles muzzily. “I wouldn’t mind that.”

Minthara works at Hasdrubal, bringing her to the edge of climax over and over again, until her every nerve feels like it’s being held to a fire and her c*nt hurts. She’s babbling by the end of it, happily so, thrashing in Minthara’s hold. Everything’s sweat-slippery, sweltering hot. Minthara lets go, pushing Hasdrubal off of her lap. Her legs fall to the sheets woodenly, numb after what feels like hours of being restrained. Minthara pulls them apart by the ankles. She watches Hasdrubal’s entrance twitch. Her mouth works. A loud moan pulls itself from Hasdrubal’s gut as Minthara spits on her, right where she is sore and open.

They share a bath afterwards, lazing in the cool water. Hasdrubal rubs sweet oil onto her horns, feeling Minthara’s eyes on her the whole time. It is a warm but comfortable regard—the simmer of desire, tempered by the knowledge that it will be easily fulfilled. They settle themselves at the table in the main room. Minthara works on the group’s potions; she’d had alchemy training in the temple of Lolth, and it seems to bring her a kernel of joy now, to take the hyena ears and bluecaps they gather and distill them into something useful. Hasdrubal pores over the notes to the Steel Foundry they found in a watchtower. They’ll need to take down the Watch sooner rather than later. Companionable silence settles between them. Hasdrubal winds her tail around Minthara’s calf. Minthara’s eyes remain fixed on her distillation set, but a smile tugs at her cheeks.

The party gone to scout the harbor comes back first, talking about a bard, a group of cultists, and forgetful beggars near the estate of someone named Lady Jannath. The others return a little later, with news of Keene’s uneasy alliance with the Harpers and greasy paper bags of crisp spiced chicken and rice for dinner.

“We found Mol!” Karlach exclaims. She tosses Hasdrubal a pouch with seven gold, a dagger, and a smokebomb inside. There’s a note as well, in a crabbed child’s writing, saying that shiny bastards aren’t allowed in the Guild but Mol would make an exception for her. “She told us to give you this. Says you’re even now.”

It takes a moment for Hasdrubal to recognize the pouch: it’s the one Mol had stolen from her in the Emerald Grove, which she let the tiefling keep after they found her hideout. That’d been just shy of two months ago. It feels like years.

“Her fingers are sticky as ever,” Wyll says with a chuckle. “I think I’m a spellscroll or two lighter.”

Karlach kisses him on the cheek. “I’ll shake her down the next time we swing by. She might get away though—slippery little bastard.”

Dinner’s calling. Minthara clears her distillation set from the table, arguing with Gale about the most efficient way to chill the condensation bulb. The blood goblet goes around; Hasdrubal fills it to the halfway mark this time, since she spent the whole day at the inn. Minthara stares at it for a moment, lips thinned, before flicking out her switchblade and adding a couple drops of her blood to the cup.

Hasdrubal glares at Astarion. He glares back but quickly relents. “Thank you,” he says with a flourish of his hand towards Minthara. “For your contribution.”

It’s sweet as spun sugar, fake as paper snow. Minthara smirks. “Tell me how you enjoy it, spawn.”

Hasdrubal practically tears into the food. She’s hungry from the day, and she loved this chicken when she lived in the city. The seller’s wagon stopped in front of the academy when classes let out, and she’d buy a couple pieces of it wrapped in a banana leaf cone and eat it on her way to her guard posting, no plate needed. Karlach and Wyll clearly knew how good the seller was too, because they brought back enough of it for everyone to gorge themselves. Even Minthara looks faintly impressed when she bites into a piece. Conversation falls into a lull as everyone eats, but their group can’t ever stay silent for long. Astarion is reclining on the pillows and makes a show out of drinking tonight, swirling the red liquid around like it’s an actual rare vintage.

“Have you ever tasted blood?” he asks Minthara. He leans in close, lips just touching the rim of the goblet. “I assume you’ve partaken, given—your previous allegiances.”

Minthara raises an eyebrow, refusing to lean away. “Not at the temple of Lolth, or among the Absolutists, if that is what you are insinuating. I had little desire to associate myself with the rabble among them. But there are those who came into my bed who had a predilection for being bitten, and I was pleased to oblige. In the heat of passion, one can nearly taste the shift in the blood, the iron transmuting to something sweeter.”

With a gasp, Astarion rears back, looking for all the world like a patriar clutching her pearls. “Paladins. I’ve known more than my fair share to realize—you’re all freaks in the end.”

He says it as a joke, but he says everything as a joke. The prey he’d lured for Cazador came from Wyrm’s Crossing and the Lower City, she remembers. Students from the academy of Tyr are stationed there as practice since the majority of them become manips and Flaming Fists anyways. During their shifts, they kept the poor and sick of Rivington from going into the city proper and arrested citizens for crimes as petty as tripping in the crossing line. When those shifts ended, they pulled themselves into taverns and flophouses, eager for company that would flatter them for a job well done. All of them thought that they were doing the right thing—for the city, for their future employers, for themselves.

“I knew—pretty awful people back in school,” Hasdrubal says slowly. “Students join the academy for all sorts of reasons. Some want wealth, some acclaim and adoration. Some want to climb the ranks of the Fists and be liked by all their friends. And some are just certain that they were doing good in the world. That only they knew what good is.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. Not for being a freak, that part’s fine. But genuinely, because you’ve—had to meet the range of us.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Astarion scoffs. “You lot were the easiest prey by far, darling.”

The noises of dinner float through the room: chopsticks clanking on plates, ale being poured. Astarion settles more comfortably, slouching against his chosen cushion. “A viper pit of future Fists and vainglorious egotists,” he says, face softening. “Goodness, was there any room for you?”

“I left the school before swearing any oath to the Triad. Well, technically, I was kicked out when they found out I was pacted to a devil, but—” Hasdrubal grimaces. “It was a mutual decision at that point.”

The look on Wyll’s face is solemn. He hesitates before asking, “Can you tell us about the devil you’re pacted to?”

“Yeah. Thank the gods, I was luckier than I had any right to be.”

Hasdrubal sets her plate aside. She remembers being seventeen and a sh*thead, eating greasy takeout on the way back to her dorm, feeling a wisp of guilt for wasting her parents’ money but infinitely more certain that finding herself, whatever the hells that meant, was more important than measly gold.

“There’s a cult to Asmodeus in the Lower City,” she says. “A couple minutes from here, actually. They have a relic that’s supposed to come from the very hand of the god, so they’re pretty popular among tieflings. I didn’t want to swear to the Triad. Didn’t know what I believed in anymore. I was the age where you do stupid sh*t, too. My family’s descended from the Ninth. The infernal brand in our blood is all but gone, it’s been thousands of years, but I’m still his child. I thought I’d give Asmodeus a try.”

Astarion bursts out laughing. She can hear Shadowheart’s giggle. Minthara’s low laugh. Even Wyll brings his hand up to hide a smile when Karlach says, “Bloody Hells, even I could have told you that you weren’t going to last.”

“I assume you lasted, what, an hour in his service until you had to be a little mean to an old woman crossing the street?” Astarion asks. “Or refuse to give alms to an orphan child?”

Hasdrubal rolls her eyes, fighting the urge to point out that Asmodeus’ oath doesn’t preclude alms-giving or helping strangers. There isn’t a paladin oath that does that—good and evil lie in action, not in the oath.

“I went to the temple,” she continues. “They had a mace on the altar there. When I knelt down, someone spoke to me. It was an infernal presence named Xartaza, a general of the Hells under Asmodeus. Way back during the Sundering, Asmodeus used her to empower the mace of his champion. The mace got lost, and somewhere over the millennia, it ended up on the Material Plane.”

Karlach’s face scrunches as she thinks. “I’ve never heard of her,” she says. “Not once, and the legacy of every fiendish general who’s ever lived gets brought up to rally the troops in the Blood War.”

“I haven’t heard of her, either,” Wyll says.

“I hadn’t, before then.” Hasdrubal shrugs. “People here and there know about the mace, but no one I’ve met knows her name. If she didn’t let me cast eldritch blasts, I’d be half-convinced it was a sleep deprivation dream. She told me she’s been waiting in the mace for centuries. All I did was agree to try and get her out, at some point, in both our lives. We were both—lonely, I think. And a little desperate.”

Hasdrubal’s voice goes low and distant, a prayer remembered from childhood. “She was trapped. I wanted to help her.”

Minthara laughs under her breath. “To save her?”

There are too many things laden in those words: pity, ruefulness, something else bright and ineffable. Hasdrubal remembers the tapestries of the temple, infernal orange and gold covering run-down walls. She remembers the incense filling her nostrils, and the feeling of a glow seating itself deep in her chest, between her ribs, where her heart beats. “Aye,” Hasdrubal says. “To save her.”

Chapter 8: Divine Smite

Chapter Text

Wyll calls the day right as they’re about to descend into the sewers. They’re all tapped of spells and dripping with residue from dead cultists and saguahin; Wyll is particularly worse for wear, having taken the brunt of a fireball aimed at him and Karlach. Her rage burned through her on the spot, and she’d knocked the enemy caster off a cliff. They didn’t have enough healing between Hasdrubal and Shadowheart to heal Wyll back up. Wisps of orange flame lick around the engine ports on Karlach’s shoulders and chest even now, hours after the combat.

“I’m fire resistant, Wyll,” she snaps as they climb back up to the city level. “I’m a fire resistant f*cking barbarian, and you’re made of wet f*cking paper. You should have let me take that godsdamn spell.”

“You were about to bleed out,” Wyll says. He’s holding himself upright and rigid even though he’s had to strip off his armor to keep it from abrading his burn wounds. “I couldn’t just let you take it.”

The flame gutters up around her neck, up into her eyes. “You don’t get to tell me what I can and can’t do. Bleeding out or not, Let me take the f*cking spell.”

“I know,” Wyll says. He holds up his hands gingerly. “I know, Karlach. But I still think—”

He squares his shoulders, barely masking his wince. “You shouldn’t have to.”

Karlach looks at him for a long moment, then swings around to Shadowheart. “Do you have any healing left?”

“If I did, I would’ve healed him up already.” Shadowheart pauses. “Why?”

“I want to hug the daylights out of him, but I think this—” she points at her shoulder and neck, “—take him the rest of the way down.”

Hasdrubal jerks her head towards the Elfsong. “We have some supremes left inside, we can all heal up.”

They troop up the stairs. Astarion is pretending to lounge on a couch when they enter the suite. He runs for the camp chest the moment he lays eyes on Wyll, asking what the hells the point of a cleric or a paladin even was if the two of them couldn’t even keep a single warlock on his feet. Hasdrubal waits for Wyll and Karlach to be given their potions before pulling out one for herself. She passes another one to Shadowheart. Gale is at his spellbook, poring over the tomes they took from Sorcerous Sundries. Minthara is reading.

“Where’s Lae’zel?” she asks.

“Up on the roof,” Minthara says. “She said something about looking at the sky.”

Hasdrubal and Shadowheart share a grin at that. Lae’zel of Creche K’liir has no need for blue skies, cottonball clouds, and a butter-yellow sun, just as she has no need for honey cakes and toasted nuts, just as she has no need for conversation. Whenever they set up camp, Lae’zel would erect her tent as close as she could to a lookout point, just so she could watch the sunset or sunrise every day. If at leisure, she drops everything to watch flocks of birds fly by. When she isn’t traveling in the party or sharpening her sword, she’s usually sitting in a sunbeam, face tilted up in perfect contentment, one step away from lying down and sunning herself like a gecko.

The door to the balcony closes with a thump. Lae’zel comes back down the stairs, dressed in her full armor. Her expression is sour.

Hasdrubal steps forward. “Is everything alright?” she asks.

Lae’zel’s eyes land on her, coin-like and glassy. “Of course I am not okay. Orin could be upon us at any moment.”

“That is true,” Shadowheart admits with a wince. “We got ambushed by cultists twice.”

Lae’zel tilts her head. “Then perhaps we should leave. They are clearly powerful.”

No that kind of incompetence would have been unfathomable among my people. No no gith would have endured such a failure, but I am learning to temper my expectations. Not even questions about how the mission went. Lae’zel loves missions, objectives, lists, details. She loves details above all. Whenever Shadowheart returns from combat, she would listen to Shadowheart’s dry, clinical play-by-play of the battle for the better part of an hour.

Lae’zel would not admit to fear. Unless she was indeed very, very afraid. “We have the power to meet them,” Hasdrubal tells her. “We’re safe, Lae’zel.”

Lae’zel’s eyes narrow. “Paladins,” she says mockingly. “Very well. You will die at Orin’s hands, then.”

A wrenching scream of metal on metal, and Minthara is between Hasdrubal and Lae’zel, her greatsword drawn in her hands. “You could never restrain your ego, could you?” she asks in a strangely calm voice. Her aim is steady, unflinching. Her eyes are the opposite. “You have to gloat over us. See us suffer, bask in our pain, even when your fun brings your ruin. You need to learn restraint.”

Hasdrubal starts, “Minthara, what—”

Minthara shoves her blade against Lae’zel’s throat, drawing a line of thick, slow-running red. Her voice comes out in a snarl. “Show yourself.”

Shadowheart gasps. She summons a guiding bolt to her palms, aiming it at Lae’zel. “Where is she?” she bites out.

A beatific happiness overtakes Lae’zel’s face, and then her head snaps, swiveling too far on her neck. Lae’zel’s freckles and sharp teeth melt away, leaving behind the pallid gray skin and pus-seeping armor of Orin the Red.

“What gave it away?” she coos.

“She’s stalling,” Hasdrubal realizes. Without another word, she dives for the window and casts Feather Fall in midair, landing in the alley beneath the Elfsong in a shower of glass, with her mace raised. Four Death’s Heads materialize, pulled from invisibility from the impact of the razor-sharp fragments raining on their heads and opening pinpoint wounds. Two of them are carrying an unconscious Lae’zel. Shadowheart flies down from the window close on Hasdrubal’s heels, the ice-blue residue of an arcane recovery potion sparking across her teeth and her spirit guardians already hovering around her. They look different than they did when they first met, Hasdrubal realizes. Once all faceless figures in justiciar armor, they now differ from each other: a winged woman with a sword, a tall tiefling, a compact figure that might be a githyanki.

“She’s gone!” Wyll calls from the room. The fluorescent shadow of an eldritch blast streaks from above, embedding into the shoulder of one of the cultists with an infernal wail.

Karlach and Minthara jump down. The cultists drop Lae’zel and try to rally, but they’re not quick enough. Shadowheart hovers over Lae’zel’s prone body, hands and mouth spilling radiant light, while Minthara, Karlach, and Hasdrubal charge at the cultists. They’ve fought together for long enough that they fall into a rhythm now; Hasdrubal ducks under Karlach’s huge, rapid swings to land her own blows, staying close to the enemy so none of them can escape Lathander’s light. They need to be staggered before they can activate their wards. Orin’s appearance had shaken Minthara. The way she fights now is the antithesis of her usual practiced control; she hacks with her blade like a wild thing, as though she is cutting flesh with claws instead of tempered steel. One cultist tries to stab her with their dagger, and she slams them into the wall with a thunderous smite. The roar is so loud that it shakes pieces of mortar away from the bricks.

It takes a minute, maybe a minute and a half. Minthara slices clean through the last cultist, from one side of their stomach to the other, letting the guts slip through their skin. When they fall, they disintegrate bones and all into a puddle of red flesh—Bhaal’s final blessing. Minthara’s hand shakes as she wipes her blade clean.

“We need healing,” Shadowheart says. Her voice is small, hesitant, as if unsure if she is even allowed to say those words. She looks down at Lae’zel, and her face cracks open. Her eyes go to the broken window as she screams this time, “We need healing!”

Minthara shakes herself and sheathes her blade. She goes to kneel next to Lae’zel. The tremor in her hands stills as she settles them over Lae’zel’s shoulders. Gold light flashes between them, and when it fades, Lae’zel’s eyes blink open. They focus on Shadowheart first and go round and soft. There is no way Orin could have captured the warmth brimming in that amber.

Then she lunges for Shadowheart’s throat with her bare hands. Shadowheart yelp is cut off abruptly.

“Prove to me you are not that abomination,” Lae’zel hisses, clamping one hand over her mouth and pressing down on her trachea with the other. “If you laid a hand on her, you sniveling worm—if you laid a hand on any of them—I do not care who your sire is, the gods of this plane mean nothing to me, I will cleave you limb from limb—”

Hasdrubal slumps in relief at the sound of her voice, her real voice. Lae’zel’s words peter away as Shadowheart reaches out. Not to peel her hand off her throat, but to brush against her temples. The tadpoles in all their minds reverberate with the echo of that touch. Lae’zel stares at Shadowheart for a moment longer and then collapses, burying her face in Shadowheart’s neck. Shadowheart’s arms come up around her and hold her tight.

-----

Telekinesis and mending make short work of the window. The rest is not so easy.

By the evening, the perimeter of their suite is crisscrossed with wards, glyphs, and abjurative barriers. Shadowheart and Gale have both been drinking potions of angelic slumber so they can double up on the spells; Gale even tethers them all to an arcane battery he extracted from Lorroakan’s staff, making it so they had to be refreshed once every tenday, rather than once every day.

“Can these be countered?” Hasdrubal asks, watching the final ward get embedded into the threshold.

“Any spell can be countered,” Gale replies. He looks exhausted. “It’s only a matter of whether they will be countered before they are triggered. There is no way to—”

“Manual traps,” Karlach announces, with the quick expertise of someone who’s drawn up many a security detail before. She’s been standing with her arms crossed in the middle of the room, watching the ward-laying intently. “Beneath all the doors and windows. If they expect arcane traps, they won’t prepare for manual ones, and vice versa.”

Gale blinks at her for a moment before nodding. Astarion comes up to Karlach with a coil of wire and all the firesticks they stole from Arfur’s mansion, and the two of them start to install them in the rafters. Hasdrubal goes down to the management to tell them not to enter the room for the foreseeable future. The halfling manning the desk takes one look at her—armor, hickeys, absolutely drenched in old blood and sweat—and asks if she’ll want the deluxe cleaning package at the end of the tenday. When she says no, they remind her that she will be paying for the furniture repairs and rug washing out of pocket, and at this rate, she’ll have to fork over the whole weight of the Baldurian mint, and maybe they should just go up to check to see what the current damage is—

Hasdrubal puts down double the cost of the deluxe cleaning and asks to have the deluxe cleaning in two tendays’ time. The halfling accepts immediately.

Dinner that night is a subdued affair. Lae’zel is already asleep, and Shadowheart sits at the side of her bed, glaring daggers at anyone who chews too loudly. Hasdrubal has enough arcane reservoirs left to cast sanctuary on one person—Lae’zel for tonight, who stirs groggily but does not waken at the touch—and protection from good and evil from another, Wyll. She liked those spells when she was in school. She liked the equanimity. She has enough magic stored for one more spell, so she calls down radiance on a knife and goes into the cramped private room that is now unofficially shared between her and Minthara.

Minthara is sitting on their bed, with her hair already down. Hasdrubal cuts herself, showing the other woman her wound. Minthara nods in approval and takes the knife from her. Her palm splits open easily under the knife, but her blood does not spark like a fiend’s or shapeshifter’s would.

She sets the knife aside and looks at Hasdrubal. “Come here,” she says.

Hasdrubal goes. They lie down in bed and curl into each other, like ferns wilting in the sun. Minthara ends up rolling on top of her, slipping her hands beneath Hasdrubal’s shirt and scratching aimlessly, as though wanting to make sure she is who she seems beneath her skin.

“I haven’t seen Orin since—since I was sent to take the grove,” she says. She presses her face into Hasdrubal’s neck; her words buzz against her skin when she speaks next. “I had nearly forgotten what she could do to my mind, just the sight of her. How could I be so foolish, to forget that fear?”

Minthara shivers when Hasdrubal smooths a hand down her spine. “How could I be so hopeful?” she asks. Hasdrubal cannot tell who she is talking to. “How could I hope to ever forget her hold on me?”

“She has a hold no longer,” Hasdrubal says.

Minthara laughs. It’s a little frantic. “You say that so easily.” She lifts her head, staring down at Hasdrubal. “You say everything so easily, even impossible things.”

In the dim light, her red eyes are deep as heart’s blood, glinting brightly. The expression on her face makes Hasdrubal feel as pinned as she did under her hands, but it is a different sort of exposure. It is what she felt at seventeen, swearing her pact to save a devil—that same conviction that teetered on the edge of fear.

“Make another miracle,” Minthara says, lowering her eyes, performance and plea all in one. “Make me forget.”

Hasdrubal looks at her, long and hard. She’s lucid still, likely the most lucid out of all of them after the day, but afraid. Her usual proud bearing is gone, leaving her almost inconceivably small. Her collarbones are stark against her skin; her wrists are thin, with the delicacy of a cicada’s wings. Hasdrubal wants to take them between her hands. She wants to hold her.

“Alright,” she says softly.

She leans up and presses a kiss to Minthara’s cheek before lying down flat on her back. Her hands come to rest at Minthara’s waist, drawing her waistband down so she can thumb at her hipbones. Minthara slowly pulls herself upright. She straddles Hasdrubal’s chest, pressing her heels against her ribcage. Her hand is splayed on Hasdrubal’s chest, right where her heart beats. As though she expects to be able to sense any lies through her pulse alone. A flicker of exasperation crosses Minthara’s face, making whatever mask she had been trying to don crumble away.

“What do you want, Hasdrubal?” she asks abruptly.

“In—life?” Hasdrubal asks. She sits up, shifting Minthara to her lap. “Right now?”

“Yes, right now,” Minthara says. Her voice regains its waspish cast. She strokes the sides of Hasdrubal’s head, rubbing against the texture. “In bed. In pleasure.”

Desire is not a simple thing, but the answer to that question is the simplest thing in the world. “I want you to feel good.”

A muscle twitches at the corner of Minthara’s eye. There’s something affectionate now, even in that—it seems to settle her. “Are you looking for compliments on your performance? I know you are prideful, but I was hoping you weren’t one for such small-minded vanity.”

“You shouldn’t expect better from a paladin,” Hasdrubal says, snorting. She nuzzles against Minthara’s shoulder, but Minthara’s hands go to her horns, steering her head so she can’t look away. “I want you to feel good,” Hasdrubal repeats. It’s saccharine, cliché, but it is the unadulterated truth, down to the core of her. “And I feel good when I’m with you.”

“Hells save me from heroes and fools,” Minthara mutters. She settles back, cross-legged on the bed. “I know that is what you want. Everyone in camp knows that’s what you want. Anyone who has had a single conversation with you could have told me that. Is it too much for you if I ask for hidden depths?”

Hasdrubal laughs softly, turning onto her side. She reaches for Minthara’s thigh, letting her hand stroke gently when Minthara shifts closer, allows the touch, reaches for it, even. Her calluses catch on the worn fabric. She doesn’t have to wait for long for Minthara to start speaking again.

“That first day back at Moonrise. When you called me your slave to command.”

“You said you’d cut my tongue out if I did it again, I remember.” Hasdrubal frowns. “I am sorry for that, Minthara, I should have thought more about how it would feel to you—”

“Do not be sorry,” Minthara says sharply.

Before Hasdrubal can pull away, Minthara laces their fingers together, pressing Hasdrubal’s hand against her thigh, right where the scar bites deep into her muscle. “Even then, I knew you would not try to command me in some farce of ownership. And now—”

Minthara has to look away as she confesses, “I trust you.”

That word sounds like a taboo, whispered between them. Minthara continues, “Centuries in Menzoberranzan have honed my appetites, in pleasure and otherwise. I trust very few with my bared back. I would trust even fewer to see me willingly bound and begging, not for what they would do in the throes of passion, but for the delusions they would seize upon afterwards. I learned that lesson the hard way. And when I left the Underdark—there was no harsher reinforcement of that than Orin.”

Minthara takes a deep breath. She straightens her spine, as though she is hefting a blade. “You are not Orin,” she says.

“Thank the gods for that,” Hasdrubal says.

“Orin would not know how to comprehend you.” Minthara taps her fingers on her chest, right where her pulse thrums. “When I first met you, I thought you were a naif, tilting at windmills. Even when you struck me down, I thought that. And there are still days when I am unconvinced of anything otherwise, but I am no longer foolhardy so as to believe that you are blind to power.

She leans down close. “I see it in your eyes, Hasdrubal. You watch me in battle. You watch me when I bleed.”

“I watch everyone in battle,” Hasdrubal says. “For the same reason that I buy out every potions seller within walking distance before setting out for the day.”

Minthara doesn’t take the bait. “There is no reason to lie, Hasdrubal. I know you would be happy to spend the rest of your nights on your knees before me. I would not question your devotion.”

She suddenly bares her teeth, sending heat up Hasdrubal’s neck. “But do you have any idea how infuriating that is? Seeing you bloodied, wreathed in a god’s flame, with all that hunger in your eyes, and being denied it all because you never ceased to play the hero. Oh, it made me rage at first. It’s one thing to crave a woman’s hand on my throat, another when it’s a surface dweller, a bleeding heart. Someone who bares her neck without a second thought. It made me furious, how often I found myself ruminating on what it would be like if you found the nerve to be cruel to me.”

Hasdrubal licks her lips. “I want to,” she admits. It feels good to say it out loud. “Gods, Minthara, I want to. But only if that is what you want too.”

“Have you not been listening to me, little hero?” Minthara asks. There is something helpless—helplessly fond—in her voice, in her smile. “I have touched the consciousness of the Absolute. It is a candle in the monsoon rains before your will.”

She lies back down again, curling up on her side. They face each other, a hand’s breadth between them. “I would want to bow to it. But perhaps not—”

She cuts herself off. Hasdrubal reaches out, brushing two fingers to her cheek. “Not tonight,” she says.

“Aye,” Minthara says. It’s another confession. “Not tonight.”

Hasdrubal falls asleep like that, with Minthara’s red gaze on her. The glyph scrawled on their window glimmers like mother-of-pearl, spinning moonlight into a shield that cradles them both.

Chapter 9: Shield of Faith

Chapter Text

It is not Orin who trips their wards the next night, but Astarion’s fellow spawn. They wake up to the blaring of the alarm spell, with three pale shadows limned ghostly outside their doors. Two sets of firesticks have gone off, blinding the trio with cascading red and gold sparks, like the breath of a devil blooming around their necks. The pop-fizz is a sound Hasdrubal associates with festivals—wandering through garlanded booths with her friends and family, wheedling her mother for a copper so she can buy a sparkler. In their dingy suite, staring down at starving vampire spawn through a cramped doorway, the noise turns sinister.

“Brother,” one of them says. He’s a tall man, face creased with desperation. “Master needs you to come home.”

Cazador Szarr is the master in question. A blue-blood, a patriar, a monster—no, not a monster, but a man of small-minded, gauche appetites, so utterly cruel and senseless that they’ve looped back around and become banal. They’re going to rip him apart, joint from joint.

“You have to come,” another of the spawn says pleadingly. “If you don’t—he’ll keep sending us, Astarion, he needs you—”

Astarion raises his crossbow and shoots. The next morning, they set out for Szarr Palace.

It wasn’t a question that Karlach and Wyll would be the ones to round out their party. The trek up to the estate is silent. Szarr Palace has loomed over the Lower City for as long as Hasdrubal has been alive, probably since before her parents’ parents arrived in the city. Its shadow fell across the park where she spent summers practicing with a wooden sword, her and all the rest of the happy bounding children of the Gate with dreams of being an adventurer. Cazador Szarr’s name comes up in the papers as a mysterious philanthropist whose galas were the most exclusive in the city. As they approach, Wyll looks up at the behemoth building with revulsion. He’s a Ravengard. Before his exile, he’d probably been to some of those galas, seen the chandeliers and the velvet drapes and the beautiful, hungry dancers with their bloody eyes. He might have even sat down to dinner with Szarr himself.

After the truth about Cazador came out, it was guilt that first colored Wyll’s interactions with Astarion, his meticulous care. There is infinitely more between them now, Hasdrubal knows it, but she doesn’t think that guilt has ever fully faded. Not even as Astarion started to dream about taking Cazador’s place in the ritual—maybe especially then. After their meeting with Ketheric’s bloodworker in Moonrise, Astarion had apologized for trying to seduce her even after she told him to stop. When all you have is a hammer, he’d said, everything starts to look like a nail. Two hundred years of being told power is the only answer, and then being stripped of that only recourse. Two centuries of unceasing abuse masquerading as a noble family.

All that happened under the Flaming Fists’ noses—in Wyll’s lifetime, under the aegis of Ulder Ravengard, and under the eye of his son, who only wanted his city to be a home for others.

The house is just as gauche as Cazador’s ambitions. They reach the dungeons, find Sebastian, find the Gur children, find seven thousand others screaming for blood. Cazador had set wards all over his estate so their shrieks would not disturb the rest of the grounds. Astarion looks lost as his eyes roam over their cells. Hasdrubal reaches out. When he nods, she casts. All the spawn behind bars rear back from the illumination.

Cazador rips her Sanctuary aside, like a child tearing through wrapping paper on their nameday. The solution to that, at least, is easy. The Blood sings, suffusing the air with golden light.

At the end of it, Astarion hauls his sire out of his coffin. He looks back at them. At Hasdrubal—at Karlach, at Wyll. Karlach, still blazing with the flames of her rage, meets his eyes. She nods once, and takes a step back.

“Astarion,” Wyll whispers. “Please.”

He bows his head.

The sound of the dagger stabbing into Cazador’s chest is shockingly loud, a wet schlick, schlick, schlick of metal being plunged over and over into flesh that still resists. Blood spreads across the cold stone, a thick congealing pool of it. Astarion is screaming. He falls to his knees, sobbing, and Karlach and Wyll rush to meet him.

That night, Hasdrubal narrates the events at Szarr Palace to the rest of their group while the other three take their own time and rent a room elsewhere in the city. She tells everyone about the fight, about Gandrel and Ulma. About the seven thousand being freed and led into the Underdark, so they can start a new life. Minthara looks at her thoughtfully.

“I am learning more about your morals,” she says afterwards.

She says it without rancor, without judgment—at least without any more judgment than she regards anything else. “Do the most good; cause the least harm. But you know as well as I that seven thousand starving vampiric spawn would decimate a city the size of Baldur’s Gate. They are feral beasts, knowing nothing save hunger. And yet you let them go, condemning ten times as many lives in a realm that is not even yours, because you thought they were innocent.”

“They are not feral beasts,” Hasdrubal says. “They’re starving people. They need food and time—they need the chance to live.”

“That is not a fact,” Minthara says. “It is an ideal. A belief. An unfounded one, at that. Many would say that is not your decision to make. You are very willing to stake the lives of others on your beliefs.”

A hundred rebuffs spring to Hasdrubal’s tongue—that Astarion had been in that state as well, but he had grown beyond it; that there are other ways for vampiric beings to feed that are not city denizens, that giving people a chance is always worth it, no matter the price. But that argument proves Minthara’s point. Only the righteous brush aside the price with such unthinking ease.

Minthara takes her silence as affirmation. “And if he had completed the ascension—if he had sacrificed those seven thousand suffering souls—would you have stood by him afterwards?” she continues. “Save the innocent. Protect the weak. What of your ideals then, Hasdrubal?”

Hasdrubal closes her eyes. “I would,” she says at last. “Unless he used that power for ill, I would still stand by him.” Because she knows why he craved such power. Because he is her friend.

“Even when he becomes the evil you wish to eradicate from the world?”

“I don’t think he would have become evil.”

“You do not think of anything as evil.” Minthara sounds as kind as Hasdrubal has ever heard her. “I am glad for that, for it meant you saw me as a strange emblem of good—good in the making—and I know that is the only reason you drew so close to me.”

“No,” Hasdrubal says sharply. “That is not the only reason.”

She takes a deep breath. “I thought you beautiful and witty and a master of your blade. That was enough for me to come close. And I don’t believe in evil,” she says. “Which means that I don’t believe in good, either. And in a world without good and evil—”

The words start coming, fast and achingly earnest even to her own ears. “The only thing that matters is how we treat each other. Everyone deserves a chance to live. To forge connections—to make amends—to live as they will, without fear or starvation or a tyrant’s hand. I am a liar, Minthara. Of course I am. I am a liar and a hypocrite, and I have caused harm. I don’t know if what we did today was right or just, and I will probably never know. But I will continue to try to treat people well, because that is the only thing I can do. All we can do is try.”

Minthara is staring at her. “I know,” Hasdrubal says with a shaky laugh. “I know that is nothing but belief. And belief cannot be anything except a selfish thing. But it is no more empty than any other faith.”

“Our world—is not one that deserves such faith, Hasdrubal,” Minthara says. There is a look in her eyes Hasdrubal has never seen before. It is the sort of disbelief that should accompany an impossibility, a revelation, but there is no one here except for the two of them. “You will hurt other people through your convictions.”

Hasdrubal can’t do anything but nod. “I know,” she says. Damn her. She’s always known in the pit of her gut that she’s no less righteous than the rest of them.

Minthara hesitates, then adds, “You will hurt yourself.”

“I know,” Hasdrubal repeats. Her voice is barely audible, low and tired. She still has to say it.

“So long as you do,” Minthara says, just as softly.

-----

“Tell me about your god.”

Shadowheart has spent the hours since returning from the House of Grief sitting by the fire. She is holding an emblem of Selûne in her fingers as though she is seconds away from throwing it out the window, crushing it to her chest and weeping. She’d wept when they left. Wept for everything lost—for the people she once knew, the girl she once saw in the mirror—for Shar, and all she had meant to her.

For her parents. Beyond all others, for her parents, who are now in Selûne’s embrace. That was the price she paid for her freedom from Shar. The back of her hand is healed now, smooth and pale, as though the wound had never been there.

Everyone is milling around the suite with studied, careful casualness, sipping at wine, brewing potions, arguing about the mechanics of counterspell. Even Lae’zel participates in the show, honing the edges of the party’s weapons with a glare that is sharp enough that it should cut steel. Hasdrubal looks up from the romance novel she’d been pretending to read. It’s the first thing Shadowheart has said since they came back.

“My god?” Hasdrubal repeats.

“Yes. Your god. You’re a paladin. You know where all the temples are around here; you clearly have strong opinions about our faiths. I’ve heard you air them often enough.” Her voice comes out flat and clinical. She sounds like she did back when they first met—a disciple of secrets, piecing together a shadowed truth. “But I don’t believe I ever even caught your god’s name. I can’t believe I’ve never asked before now.”

“Erathis,” Hasdrubal says after a moment. “The Law Bearer. She’s the god of civilization.”

Shadowheart tilts her head. “I’ve never heard of her.”

Hasdrubal waves her hand. “She’s part of the Dawn Pantheon. They fell out of fashion a couple decades ago; I knew someone who brought me into the faith.”

“Do you believe she has the power to do good?” The words are clipped. Hasdrubal imagines that interrogating others about their faith had become instinct for her at some point, like armor. Instinct is easy. It shapes the body, lets it move when the mind cannot.

Hasdrubal hesitates, then says, “I believe so, yes.”

Shadowheart’s face does something small and strange. “Is she good to you?” she asks.

Hasdrubal does not have to think about that. “Yes,” she says, with all her heart.

“Oh.” Shadowheart blinks. “Good.”

The tears spill over her eyes. Shadowheart presses the emblem to her lips and sobs silently, shoulders shaking. Hasdrubal throws her book aside and goes to dampen clean linens on the washbasin. Lae’zel sits down next to Shadowheart and holds out her hands. Shadowheart takes them in hers. Salt water drips from Shadowheart’s chin onto their entwined fingers, onto the emblem clasped between them. Hasdrubal hands Shadowheart a damp handkerchief, and she begins to wipe off her face.

“She will be good to you,” Hasdrubal says, kneeling down next to her. “Gods, Shadowheart. Faith does not have to be pain. It should never be pain.”

Shadowheart only shakes her head and cries harder. She cries like it hurts, like that hurt will never end.

For all of them, the mood is somber that night. “So Shadowheart is finally free from Shar,” Minthara says when they are both in bed. “Selûne will guide her on a path free from the pain and sorrows of her youth, as a good god should. She will treat her well.” The words sound utterly foreign in her mouth. Her voice then takes on a more familiar biting edge. “It will be as you told her, Hasdrubal. Except you would not know the first thing about a faith such as that, because Erathis is dead.”

Hasdrubal goes still. Minthara turns around to face her. “Her name is marked among the lists of dead gods in Menzoberranzan. There is no temple to her in any city,” she says. She pauses. “You yourself do not even swear by her.”

“Followers of Tyr don’t swear by Tyr, either,” Hasdrubal says. “It’s considered a profanation.”

“As we have long ago established, you are no Tyrran. Unless you were lying about that as well—but I do not think you are.” Minthara searches her face. “Is it truly Asmodeus? Or are you sworn to your patron?”

“No.” Hasdrubal shakes her head. “I—gods, Minthara. The truth is—”

She breaks off. She doesn’t think she’s ever said this out loud before, because to do so would be as good as saying that everything about her is a lie, even the parts of her she believed in. “I don’t know.”

Minthara’s brow furrows. “How can you not know your own god?”

“I don’t.” Hasdrubal shakes her head. “I don’t know where the power comes from. I have guesses, but they’re just guesses. I—I don’t know.”

Her parents still believe she is tithed to Tyr. In the years since she turned her back on the Triad, she’s never told them the truth. She has never told her adventuring parties, her friends, her employers. It’s a paradox: a paladin without a god, divine power being channeled without a divinity. Most people she knows would put that down as a devil pact and call it a day—but infernal gods are still gods. It isn’t a devil pact; it’s a void. An absence where there should be no absence; a fundamental dislocation of something deep within her.

“Gods, Hasdrubal.” Minthara says. “How the hells do you still fight?”

Hasdrubal shakes her head again. All she can say is, “I don’t know.”

Chapter 10: Command

Chapter Text

Beneath the harbor, there is a prison called the Iron Throne. Whole families are there, to ensure the good behavior of the Gondians in the Foundry. Omeluum is there, captured when Society research brought it too close to Gortash’s secrets. It tells them that Duke Ravengard is there as well. The prison is a sprawling, heaving beast of bronze and glass. With his ultimatum, Gortash sends it into its death throes. They have half a minute to rescue all the prisoners and bring them back to the submersible. Hasdrubal feels utterly vindicated for hoarding Potions of Speed for months.

Minthara had praised Gortash when she first heard about him. The only thing keeping her from wanting to side with him was the fact of his alliance with Orin. When Hasdrubal and Lae’zel told everyone about what happened in the Throne, she looks—disappointed. Nearly crestfallen. Imprisoning children and the Grand Duke of Baldur’s Gate in a metal maze patrolled by sahuagin, and not even having the sense to make it implode the moment the submersible landed. It’s melodramatic, useless. What kind of tyrant tolerates such inefficiency? What kind of tyrant can be defeated by hedge potions?

Hasdrubal is going to give Popper all the treats she can fit in her pack. She’s going to give that little gremlin Gortash’s head, if Karlach doesn’t want it. He’ll love it.

Duke Ravengard does not know what to make of his son. He offers instead a story of a great wyrm that will awaken at the time of the Gate’s greatest need. Wyll believes him at once. He continues to believe until the corpse of Ansur rises against them, and maybe a little after then. The battle is brutal. When it ends, they huddle together in a shadowed corner of the Wyrmway. Wyll hugs her close and gives her Balduran’s Giantslayer before letting Astarion shepherd him over to a bench. He fared well in the battle, but there is still a clear hurt on his face. If Hasdrubal had to guess, it isn’t his wounds that hurt the most—a potion is enough to take care of those—but rather the rotting bones of the great wyrm in the middle of the chamber, never to live again. It hurts when stories are only that: stories.

Hasdrubal hefts the blade. The solidity of it in her palms pulls at a hot ache in her chest. She’d grown up on stories of Balduran and Ansur too.

“Should I make a comment about overcompensation?” Minthara asks from behind her.

Hasdrubal turns. The look on Minthara’s face is unspeakably open. She sets the sword aside and holds out her hand. Minthara takes it, letting herself be pulled close.

“A dragon and an ilithid walk into a tavern,” Minthara sneers. It would be derisive, except for how it is too distant. “Even a bard would know better than to use that as fodder for a song.”

“They loved each other,” Hasdrubal says. “I never knew. And now—he’s gone.”

“Love?” Minthara barks out a laugh. “One is a mind flayer. The other is a shambling pile of bones. That is no love—that is a haunting. An obsession that lasted through centuries, through transformation. Beyond death. Beyond any hope of atonement or growth. There is no more potent necromantic brand.”

Minthara’s eyes are fixed on the mound of bone that used to be Ansur when she says, “If that is the love of the surface—perhaps the Underdark has something to learn from you after all.”

Hasdrubal gazes at Minthara. There are few she would trust with her bared back, she’d said, and even fewer she would trust to touch her with care. It seems almost a waste for Hasdrubal to occupy a spot among the ranks of those few. Minthara’s high drow. More than halfway through her lifespan, but she has centuries of life left. Hasdrubal won’t fill out a hundred years, and that is if she lives a safe life. If she does not lift her blade. If they survive into the next tenday. “You won’t let me haunt you, right?”

It takes Minthara a moment to realize what Hasdrubal is asking. When she does, she laughs again. The sound is not happy. She is not the sort of woman used to being faced with inevitability. “How presumptive of you, Hasdrubal,” Minthara says lowly. She lays one hand on Hasdrubal’s cheek. Her thumb strokes a gentle curve along the base of Hasdrubal’s horn. “Telling me how I can and cannot love. That is not yours to dictate. I would build an altar for you from the bones of matrons of Menzoberranzan. Have the finest artisans of House Baenre carve pews from sussur wood. Offer you the richest meat and wine and blood every new moon.”

Hasdrubal turns her head and presses a kiss to Minthara’s palm. “My soul wouldn’t return,” she says. “I’d be gone to Avernus, paying my debts, or dissolved into the waters of the Great Sea.”

“You did not need anything to make a faith out of this rotting, fickle world. I certainly will not need your ghost to make a faith out of you.”

Hasdrubal kisses her cheek next. She doesn’t know how anyone could think of Minthara as cold. Her cheek is tacky with sweat, soft and yielding. Metal clinks on metal as she brings her hands up to Hasdrubal’s shoulders, the tips of her gauntlets colliding with the material of the pauldrons.

“Then I would ask—that you have more faith. Faith enough to let me go.”

Minthara makes a sound like she’d been punched. “How dare you ask for any more of my faith. When you already—”

She breaks off, teeth bared in a snarl, and then she kisses Hasdrubal hard. Hasdrubal kisses back, nipping at her lips until they part. She flicks the tip of her tongue against the sharp points of Minthara’s teeth until it feels tender and they both taste fresh metal. Minthara pulls Hasdrubal flush against her and then walks them both back until her back hits rock. The hewn walls of the Wyrmway form a nook here, secluding them from the rest of the room. Hasdrubal feels a hand rooting around in her pack. After a moment, Minthara pulls out Hasdrubal’s scroll of stone summoning and waves it under her nose.

“Don’t give me that look,” she says. “You never use the damn things, anyways.”

With a giggle, Hasdrubal assents and takes the scroll. It crumbles into ash when she reads the incantation. A wall of stone grows behind them up to the ceiling, ensconcing them in a bubble of unbroken darkness; the air between them suddenly feels heavier, buzzing with potential. In the hueless gradations of her darkvision, Minthara is luminous, shimmering like abalone shell. There is a thrill in doing this in a legend's lair, with two of their party members a scarce ten meters away and oblivious; it verges on profane. Hasdrubal shoves her knee between Minthara’s thighs and settles against her, breathing in deep. Sweat and metal have a distinct smell. The combination is lodged deep in Hasdrubal’s consciousness, alchemical and searing, like the burn of raw magic. The smell will be stronger after this, arousal trapped between the armor and their skin.

“You’re not even getting my armor off?” Minthara asks. Her hands move to the buckles keeping her breastplate strapped. “A failure of initiative.”

Hasdrubal catches her wrists in one hand, pinning them between their chests. She twists her other hand and activates the ring she’d bought from one of the Gondians they’d freed from the Foundry. Blue sparks arc around her fingers, catching on the flush in Minthara’s cheeks, the shine of spit at the corner of her mouth. “I’m very good at getting around armor.”

Minthara’s eyes are fixed the sparks. She licks her lips, an unthinking motion. “At least your school taught you that much.”

She nods. Hasdrubal kisses her again, a light, chaste peck. She scrapes the tips of her gauntleted fingers against the steel tassets covering Minthara’s hips, smiling at the soft clinks—metal is the best conduit for arcana, after all—then casts lightning through them. Minthara gasps and jerks, grinding her hips into Hasdrubal’s leg. It’s useless; there are layers of leather and steel and padded gambeson between them. Hasdrubal does it again, watching avidly as Minthara’s body twitches, without control or grace. A high noise catches in the back of Minthara’s throat. It sounds like a whimper.

She casts the cantrip with her other hand, through Minthara’s gauntlets, making her wrists dance in Hasdrubal’s grasp, into her breastplate. Blue sparks leap across the metal, forcing a moan out of Minthara, full-throated. She thrashes against Hasdrubal’s hold. “More,” she pants. “Give it to me—more—”

Hasdrubal tightens her grip. It makes a heady heat spread through her, to hear Minthara pleading, to have her struggle without any intent to escape. The heat centers in the pit of her stomach, between her legs. Minthara is one of the most skilled warriors she knows. She is a consummate strategist, with a paladin’s strength and pride, and a certainty in her own will that eclipses even a god’s. She bows to no one—except her. What a privilege it is, to see her begging. To have her submission, to be entrusted with it, as a pact and a promise. Everything feels more immediate, like Hasdrubal’s nerves have been fanned with forge-bellows, straining desperately beneath her skin for more of the woman beneath her. Her teeth ache. She wants to set them into something and pull, like at meat. She’s hungrier than she’s ever been in her life.

“I’d expect better manners from a matron of House Baenre,” she says. She licks Minthara’s cheek, one broad stroke. The sharp salt of her skin coats her tongue.

“You should expect to be shot instead—”

Minthara’s words turn into a hiccuping wet click on the back of her throat as Hasdrubal fingers the thin band at the tip of her ear and teasingly flicks a residual spark through the silver. Her whole ear twitches.

“Hasdrubal,” Minthara says insistently. “Hasdrubal—”

It’s a chant. The invocation that starts a prayer. Hasdrubal keeps playing with her earring, sending tiny charges into the metal whenever her fingers collect enough residual static. Minthara’s hips are working endlessly now, in random, fruitless motions. Hasdrubal presses the tip of her thumb into Minthara’s jaw, indenting the skin here, and Minthara lets her head loll under the pressure until she rests her cheek against the stone wall. It stretches her neck into a taut line. Hasdrubal ghosts a single finger across the tight curve. She imagines pressing down and seeing her lips fall open. The finest warrior of House Baenre, and all of her life would be cradled between Hasdrubal's thumb and fingers, pleasure driving out what air was left in her lungs as she gasped helplessly. How lovely it would be.

“Manners,” Hasdrubal reminds her.

Minthara inhales. Her mouth works, and then—

“Please,” she bites out.

Hasdrubal smiles. “That’s a start.”

“Please,” Minthara says, more fervently.

Hasdrubal lets a low current of lightning pool in her palm and spills it across Minthara’s breastplate. She holds her fingers over the right side of her chest, drawing the current to her nipple. Minthara makes a noise that might have been a cry, were it not caught behind her teeth.

With a snap of her fingers, Hasdrubal does it again, focusing the current on her other breast. She has to catch Minthara as her legs spasm. From her own experience, she knows that the lightning takes over everything after a while. It surmounts the neurons governing the limbs, making muscles contract with something beyond instinct.

“Let me come.” The words sound like they are dragged from Minthara’s gut. “Hasdrubal—please, Hasdrubal, let me come, make me come—”

Hasdrubal shifts her grip back to Minthara’s hips and casts the cantrip through both her hands. Minthara comes with an unmuffled cry. She twitches as though there is a knife twisting in her spine. Hasdrubal keeps her hands steady, maintaining the current until Minthara’s overwhelmed whimpers start tipping into sounds of pain. Her hands lift from the metal. The lightning fizzles into nothingness.

Without Hasdrubal’s hold to support her, Minthara slides down the wall, landing on her knees with a heavy clank. She is panting through her open mouth, eyes hazy, trained on Hasdrubal’s face but unseeing. Hasdrubal pulls her gauntlets off, letting the sharp metal fall to the side.

“I’m going to give you a potion now,” she murmurs.

It takes a moment, but Minthara nods jerkily.

The brush of skin on skin is as electric as the lightning. Minthara feels feverish beneath her palm, her pulse hammering rabbit-quick. Hasdrubal steadies Minthara’s head in her hand, holding her jaw open, and pours the potion between her bared teeth. Some of it catches on her canines, spots of red against ivory-white. After she swallows, Hasdrubal leans down and licks into her mouth, chasing the bitter herbal aftertaste.

“Torturer.” Minthara’s voice is a low, ruined rasp, as though she had been screaming for hours. “Take your tassets off. Let me—let me—”

Hasdrubal shakes her head. “You don’t have to—“

“Now, Hasdrubal,” Minthara barks.

Hasdrubal can only laugh and obey. She unstraps the armor over her hips. Minthara’s hands go to the lower ties on her gambeson, but they’re too clumsy to undo them. Hasdrubal yanks them open as well, and then Minthara shoves her face between her legs and licks at Hasdrubal through her pants. Hasdrubal’s arousal has been building for long enough that even that simple touch makes her jolt. She goes to open the central gusset on her pants. Minthara swats her hand aside and pulls at her leg instead, yanking it over her shoulder.

Minthara usually eats her out with exacting precision, drawing out her pleasure with a swordsman’s masterful touch. All that control is gone now, but there is something in her frenetic eagerness that makes it all the more pleasurable. The texture of wet linen against her c*nt makes her toes curl; the edges of Minthara’s teeth are blunt through the fabric. Hasdrubal steadies Minthara with a hand to the back of her neck and grinds against her face until she comes.

She has to sit down afterwards, loose-limbed and floating. Minthara sways towards her, and Hasdrubal takes her cloak off, folding it into a makeshift cushion so Minthara won’t have to rest her head on sharp metal. They stay there for a while, with Minthara’s head in Hasdrubal’s lap. Hasdrubal plays with the tendrils of hair that have fallen from her bun. They feel like silk thread between her fingers, so fine that they would make lace worth ten times its weight in adamant.

“I now understand why you spend all our gold on healing potions,” Minthara says.

Hasdrubal laughs. She watches as Minthara sits up and redoes her hair, pulling it back into its usual sleek style. Minthara pushes herself to her feet. She holds out a hand to Hasdrubal, and Hasdrubal takes it. They resecure all their armor before dismissing the stone wall and heading out to where their friends are waiting. Both Astarion and Wyll are eyeing them with a gleeful sort of suspicion.

Minthara passes Hasdrubal a handful of gold with a smirk. “Since you were so kind to use your scroll,” she says.

-----

That night, Minthara takes out her dagger from its sheath when they undress each other. She wraps Hasdrubal’s fingers around the hilt. Hasdrubal presses the blade against her lips; the metal is still warm from being pressed against Minthara’s thigh. Minthara watches her with a small, content smile before pulling Hasdrubal onto the bed. The dagger gets set on the nightstand next to another scroll, one of Hold Person. Minthara climbs on top of her. They make out for a while, trading gentle, sipping kisses while their hands wander.

Hasdrubal scrapes her nail over the hollow of Minthara's throat before pulling back. “Are you ready?”

The corners of Minthara’s mouth twitch up. “I am yours.” At Hasdrubal’s snort, she rolls her eyes. “Come to me, little hero.”

Hasdrubal lays Minthara out on their bed, arms clasped loosely above her head, legs spread. She kisses her, tracing her nails in aimless patterns up and down her ribs. Minthara’s sensitive there; she twitches at the random touches, heels shifting back and forth on the sheets. When Hasdrubal reaches down and grazes her mound with her fingertips, Minthara shivers. Her eyes slip closed. Hasdrubal casts the spell and watches as it spreads through Minthara’s body—from her arched throat, down her arms and chest, through her hips, which judder and then still. There is a psychic imprint when a target yields to a spell; it is a release of pressure, a floodgate being unbolted. Hold Person lasts for a minute in a fight. Here, it will last until either one of them ends it.

Minthara’s mouth is caught open in a gasp. Hasdrubal leans down and tongues at her slack lower lip for an indulgently long time. Under the spell, she can’t move, but Hasdrubal is close enough to her that she can feel when Minthara wants to move, the small, involuntary spasms born from instinctual desire which the spell cannot control.

The skin beneath her breasts is pale, the shade at the center of a morning glory bloom. Under the touch of the dagger, it splits open, beading blood. Hasdrubal feels her awareness of the world narrow to herself, the woman before her, and the blade between them. Not even the heat of battle can make her feel so focused, or so steeped in control. It verges on intoxication without tipping over into senselessness. She could do anything to Minthara—so she will treat her with care. With gentleness. With precision. Hasdrubal draws the blade in a neat curve, then cuts across the curve in three short nicks. Blood trickles down Minthara’s side, a treasury’s worth of rubies. Minthara deserves nothing less than perfect precision.

She knows the runes by heart—before you can cast a spell, you have to learn how it taps into the Weave, the symbols used to harness that connection. She cuts them now into Minthara’ skin: safety, mirror, return. Long, interlocking arcs following the lines of her ribs; a sharp, shallow slash bisecting her sternum for the Weave anchor. Then, a graceful coil. She doesn’t need any god for this. The moment the final stroke of return is finished, the runes flash gold, and the knife can no longer draw blood. Hasdrubal laps up the blood that’s pooled on the surface of her skin. She shoves her hand between her legs and brings herself to a quick, messy climax with the taste of hot copper in her mouth.

A noise is building in Minthara’s throat, but her vocal chords are slack by force, unable to form it. Hasdrubal pulls her fingers out of herself and trails them over Minthara’s thigh, drawing over the scarring. The hilt of the dagger is wrapped in a grip of fine, buttery leather, with a gold cap and crossguard. It slides easily into the clutch of Minthara's body. Hasdrubal rests her head on Minthara’s chest, sighing in satisfaction as she f*cks her with it, deep and lazy.

Time seems to stretch into a sweet, metallic blur. The noise in Minthara’s throat builds to a frustrated whimper, wholly subdued before it can be voiced. Hasdrubal can feel the vibrations against her cheek more than she can hear any sound. As it turns into a constant, pleading whine, she releases concentration on the Hold Person. Minthara comes the moment it drops, arcing off the bed with a hoarse scream.

She collapses back down. Every muscle in her body unspools. Her eyes blink open, and the red of them puts any jewel to shame. Her chest heaves as she tries to recover her breath.

“Do you want to use the blade?” she asks. Her voice is muzzy, indistinct, but still intent.

“I do.” The long cut in the Sanctuary runes is welling up again. Hasdrubal licks the red up, humming at the taste. The spell should keep Minthara from getting cut, but it does not blunt any dagger’s edge. “Do you still want it?”

“I do.” Minthara pants.

Hasdrubal flips the dagger in her hand, closing her fingers around the slick grip. “Hold still,” she says.

Hasdrubal holds her down with one hand low on her stomach. She is so wet that Hasdrubal can pull the blade over her mound without catching on any skin. She grazes the point of it across Minthara’s cl*t, feather-light. Her abdomen jumps at the sensation, and Hasdrubal presses down harder. “Still,” she reminds her.

That simple word settles over Minthara with the force of the last spell. With a shiver, she closes her eyes and obeys. It sends a thrill down Hasdrubal's spine. She keeps playing with her cl*t, tapping the flat of the blade against it until Minthara is pushing against her hold with mindless little jerks of her hips, despite her struggling to hold herself steady. Hasdrubal has to take a deep breath to steady her hands before slipping the tip of the dagger between Minthara’s folds. Minthara’s breath is shuddering in and out of her; everything about her is still except for the frantic rise and fall of her chest. Hasdrubal pulls the dagger out. She casts another cantrip, letting frost spiral out across the blade. As she leans over Minthara’s body, she presses the flat of the chilled blade hard against her, right as she clamps down on the slope of her neck with her teeth. Minthara’s whole body spasms as she comes again.

Lay on hands is an indistinct term. It doesn’t have to be the hands—it can be any point of contact, any covenant generated by the touch of skin on skin. Hasdrubal lies down on the bed and brings her tongue to Minthara’s blood-hot c*nt. The radiance flows through them both.

Chapter 11: Sanctuary

Chapter Text

The trail of deaths in the Gate leads them to a parody of a tribunal run by the monster Baldurian parents use to scare their children into behaving: eat your vegetables and say your prayers, or Sarevok Anchev will turn you into his thrall. He is not a monster at all, but a miserly wretch of a man who ravaged his own family for his god’s favor. Minthara is a cyclone in the battle against him, a torrential monsoon of light. No matter how much time they have spent together in combat, Hasdrubal can never tear her eyes away. The closer they get to Orin, the more viciously she smites, tearing through foes with a sharp-toothed, tightly-held smile. They send Sarevok back beyond the veil and make their way to the temple of Bhaal, where Orin is waiting. Minthara hesitates before the threshold, and Hasdrubal wonders if she should offer to let her stay back. She knows what the answer will be, undoubtedly, but she still wonders if she should ask.

Minthara hefts the greatsword they looted from Sarevok’s body. They go on.

Orin falls. Bhaal reaches through the planes to disgrace her in death, stripping away her long braid, her hungry grin—even the many limbs of her guise as the Slayer. She is nothing save a heap of red-glossed bones, broken beyond resurrection. The rest of the cultists let them walk away without raising a knife. Hasdrubal thinks of the tieflings who worship in Asmodeus’ precinct. She wonders what they see when they look at the emblem of their god.

When they get back to the Elfsong, Minthara goes to their closet of a room and closes the door. She does not join as they break open the good wine for dinner, even though Karlach had bought Marsember ice wine specifically for this moment. Hasdrubal takes a cup of it over to their room, along with a plate of slow-roasted rothé ribs from a drow-owned restaurant in the Strand. She knocks on the door. “Can I come in?”

A moment of quiet, and then Minthara’s voice comes. “I see no reason to stop you.”

Hasdrubal opens the door to see her sitting on the bed, half in her armor, as though she had started on taking it off and lost the spark to finish halfway through the task. She looks at the food in Hasdrubal’s hands and turns her head at the sight of it.

“Do you want to eat?” Hasdrubal asks. “It’s rothé ribs. Marsember wine.”

“I can see that for myself,” Minthara says tightly.

Hasdrubal hesitates and then sits down on the far edge of the bed, away from Minthara. She sets the food between them and taps the door closed with her tail.

“Are you going to sit there and watch as I eat?”

“If that gets you to eat, I will.” Hasdrubal folds her hands in her lap. “But if you tell me to leave, I will.”

Minthara stares at the wall. She starts to eat. She doesn’t say anything to Hasdrubal, but she doesn’t tell her to leave, either. The plate is cleaned methodically, mechanically. The wine is drunk. Hasdrubal goes to take the plates out. Minthara’s head snaps over. “Stay,” she says.

There are tear trails on her cheeks. Hasdrubal moves the dirty plates over to the nightstand and sits back down where they had been on the bed.

“I have no particular inclination for rothé ribs,” Minthara says at last. “Or Marsember wine.”

The ridiculousness of the lie—the pettiness of it—makes Hasdrubal laugh now. “Well, I’d never tried them before. And they were pretty good.”

“They were fine.” Minthara shakes her head. “Perfectly, utterly fine. A beacon of mediocrity.”

Hasdrubal bows her head and waits. Minthara’s hands are balled on her thighs, working the fabric of her pants back and forth.

“Orin brought me food from the Underdark as rewards for good behavior,” she says. “Sometimes, it was rotting and maggot-ridden; sometimes, it was dosed with mind alterants—succubus spittle, angel dust, paralytic poisons. And sometimes, it was fine. Perfectly fine.” She starts laughing. She touches her fingertips to her cheeks as though she hates the sound and wants to claw it all out. “And there were times when the last was the worst of all.”

Hasdrubal winces. Minthara suddenly darts closer to her, taking her face between her hands. “There is nothing in my mind she did not touch, Hasdrubal,” she says, each word punctuated with vehemence. “There was nothing in me Bhaal’s bloodletter did not remake on her own whim. I can always feel her touch. If I thought that scraping my brain from my skull would flense her from my mind, I would consider it, but I do not think I would escape her even then. Today should have been the end of it. I saw her body. I struck her; I saw her crumble, I saw her flesh turn to dead bone. But when I close my eyes—”

She trails off. “Orin is not going to f*cking touch you again,” Hasdrubal says softly. “I’m sorry she ever did.”

“You say everything so easily,” Minthara says. It is half-resentful, half desperate.

“I believe it. Wholly.”

“You don’t know how to do anything otherwise.” Minthara leans her head on Hasdrubal’s shoulder. “What I would give to feel that belief. Gods, Hasdrubal. I want things to be quiet. To not have to think about Orin—or any of this. Only for a little while. And you—”

Hasdrubal can feel Minthara’s lips working against her shoulder, but nothing comes out. “You’re not Orin,” is the only thing that she says in the end. “You’re not Orin.”

Hasdrubal takes a deep breath and nods. “Alright,” she says.

She helps Minthara take the rest of her armor off and change into her sleeping clothes. They both sit back down on the bed. Hasdrubal lifts Minthara’s head, cradling it in her hands. Smites are usually called with a weapon in hand. It feels strange to do so now with Minthara’s cheeks between her palms, thumbs resting on the closed lids of her eyes. A web of veins branches beneath the thin skin there, finer than lace. Hasdrubal lets sunlight, bright enough to be blinding, race through her palms and out her fingertips. Minthara shudders as the light passes into her. When she opens her eyes, they are gold-clouded and blank. She startles, panics. Hasdrubal soothes her, stroking her cheeks with her thumbs in slow, gentle circles.

She moves one of her hands to Minthara’s shoulder to cast the next spell, drawing the sigil on the slope of her neck and whispering the invocation into her ear. A globe of silence falls over the two of them. Minthara’s lips are moving, but Hasdrubal can’t tell what she is saying. It’s three words, over and over again. She clamps her arms around Hasdrubal’s shoulders, so tightly that it aches. Hasdrubal shifts so the two of them are pressed together, as close as they can be. She presses her face into Minthara’s hair and holds her just as tight. Little by little, the tension seeps from Minthara’s body, leaving her limp in Hasdrubal’s arms.

In the window behind them, dusk sets the sky ablaze. The embers of the day fade into darkness. Hasdrubal lets the globe of silence drop. The noise of drunk people in the alleyway below slowly filters back into her ears.

Minthara keeps her eyes closed. Hasdrubal casts one last spell: a promise, a prayer, an act of faith. She holds Minthara all through the night, until the morning dawns.

-----

The road to Baldur’s Gate—to a solution—to the end of the journey had seemed endless when they first set out, telescoping infinitely to the horizon. Like many grand things, that endlessness turned to be an illusion. This tenday, they will get the Orphic Hammer from the House of Hope. The next, they will confront Gortash. And then—

Freedom. Peace. Whatever those words mean.

Hasdrubal is looking at Orin’s netherstone. She flips it back and forth between her hands, checking every facet. Gale has expounded their magical properties as arcane tethers many times before, but they’ve never been anything more than shiny rocks to her. Minthara appears at her shoulder, peering at the netherstone. Hasdrubal gauges the caliber of her curiosity for a moment before setting the stone down on the desk, gesturing for her to examine it. She picks it up and holds it to the sunlight which streams through the windows. It glows a rich purple, like stained glass.

“To think we nearly have the Crown of Karsus in our hands.”

Hasdrubal inclines her head. “Aye.”

The carefulness in her voice does not slip by unnoticed. Minthara glances at her. “What would you do if I took the Crown, Hasdrubal?”

Hasdrubal glances down at the table. She thinks of Minthara, her rage and her conviction, the ease with which she claims power. The way power is an instinct to her, as familiar as any armor. She thinks of Balduran and Ansur. “I would still love you,” she says. “And I would do everything I could to stop you, all the while.”

She does not want a love that haunts, but that is better than no love at all.

“I would expect nothing less,” Minthara says. She rolls the netherstone between her fingers before setting it back down on the table. “I hope—I believe—it will not come to that.”

Hasdrubal turns in her seat. She looks at Minthara, not daring to speak.

Minthara smiles at her, a little ruefully. “After Orin, all I knew was that I would never let anyone control me again. No rulers, no chains. The cult of the Absolute would allow me to secure that reality. But—” her words become very quiet. “You were right, Hasdrubal. Hundreds of thousands stripped of their autonomy. A world brought to its knees by a parasitic force. I still do not think that power would have been an awful thing to wield, but there is no safety in it. No security.”

Hasdrubal spends a moment weighing out her words. “I understand why you wanted it, though.”

“Desire is not always reasonable. And the reward—would not have been commensurate. Not with the price.” Minthara shakes her head. “For so long, I knew what I wanted. That clarity buoyed me. Now, I don’t know what I want.”

She sounds lost as she says that, and maddened by that same absence. Hasdrubal tries to come up with a time when Minthara has had the chance to choose her own path. She was glad to serve Lolth in the Underdark—had entered her service with eager, blood-forged devotion, even—but that was not the same thing as a choice. And she had gone from there into the dominion of the Absolute.

“Are we talking about—now?” Hasdrubal asks. “Or the further future?”

“For now, I want a hot meal,” Minthara says. “I want good wine. I want you. Those desires are very simple. But as to the future—”

She trails off. Hasdrubal allows herself the wild flight of fancy of imagining the life they could build together, all the mundane trivialities they could face: taxes, mildewed thatch, bedbugs, and all the rest. They’d be horrible at it. A drow matron and a hero for hire, they’d be banned from every town within a tenday. But—they could also swim in the Chionthar under the moon, that is the greatest treasure Hasdrubal has ever tried to picture.

“Menzoberranzan holds no place for me,” Minthara says. “Not as I am now. And neither does this city, though I know it still has your heart.”

“I won’t be staying, either,” Hasdrubal confesses. “Karlach will have to go back to the Hells. I want to go with her.”

Minthara nods, like she had expected it. “It won’t just be you, either. Where the tiefling goes, her devoted Blade will follow. And where the Blade goes, his spawn will come along. You will be traipsing through Avernus with a whole circus troupe.” The scorn bleeds from her voice, leaving behind something sore and tender. “Like a hermit crab, with your home on your back.”

Hasdrubal wants to rush to offer her another path to take. Her fantasies shift to hiking with Minthara through lava flows, running from demons, fighting on obsidian plains. It is a more realistic fancy, but a fancy nonetheless—and it would be another attempt at filling the well of Minthara’s desires with wishes that are not her own.

“You can come with us,” Hasdrubal says hesitantly. “If you want to.”

Minthara regards her for a long moment in silence. “I don’t know,” she says at last. “That is the precise question I cannot answer.”

“That’s okay.” Hasdrubal nods. “Just know—I would gladly wait however long it takes to hear your reply.”

She rests her head against Minthara’s hip. Minthara runs her fingers through her braid. The two of them look on the light as it catches on the windows lining the street, setting them alight as mirrors.

-----

Between the different stages of the world’s end, Hasdrubal finds the time to visit the temple in the Lower City. She hands a couple gold to the doorkeeper as alms and bows at the threshold before stepping over. The ruby-headed mace lies on the altar, pulsing with an infernal glow.

I’m back, she thinks.

The voice comes, one she has known as well as her own since she was seventeen. I never doubted it.

The temple to Asmodeus is built on top of older ruins, which are in turn built on a sanctuary even older. After paying her respects, Hasdrubal wanders to the very edge of the temple precinct, where an old altar still stands. Nothing survives of the inscriptions on it; the once finely chiseled reliefs are worn wholly smooth. No one knows anything about the god who had been worshiped here when the city was young. It’s lost to time. It’s unimportant. It might have even been a shrine to Tyr.

She brushes off the moss that’s grown since the last time she came. Each time she comes, more of the altar has been eroded away, by moss and rain and ivy. She sits down at the base of it and leans her head against the stone.

That first day she swore her pact, she told Xartaza that she was still looking for a god. She told Xartaza everything—that she did not believe in her allotted god, that she did not want to tie herself to either good or evil, that she did not know whether she would ever believe as she should. Xartaza had told her then about a deity of true neutrality, the god of civilization. She had been the only of the Prime Deities to maintain a relationship with Asmodeus, because there too were people in hell.

She liked questions, like you, Xartaza had said. But she never had an answer.

Her name was Erathis. Asmodeus’ temple was built on the foundations of hers—or so Xartaza wished her to believe. Hasdrubal followed Xartaza’s directions to the ancient ruins and found nothing but worn stone.

Nothing has changed since that day. Hasdrubal has never felt any divine presence here; it’s just an abandoned shrine. Each time she comes, she sets down gold on the altar, but she can see the children in the area divvying it up among themselves the moment she turns her back. She’s taken to leaving some candies as well whenever she comes. The first time she prayed here, she felt as if the void in her chest would swallow her whole. She knelt for hours, and there was nothing except a yawning lack. She stayed past sunset. The temple precinct began to close while she was still there. The priests of Asmodeus took off their robes and masks and dimmed the torches, chattering among themselves about the latest edition of the Gazette. Children ran to their parents, wheedling for a couple coppers to buy spiced nuts from the cart a street over. The bard hummed as they counted all the alms they collected. The doorkeeper saw her in the back and beckoned her over. Temple’s closing. We’ll be open again tomorrow.

She stumbled as she got up, legs numb and clumsy. I’m sorry, she said. I didn’t know.

Come on, they told her. Grab a drink with us. There’s a good ale in the tavern down the street.

She swore an oath that day—to what, she cannot say, and there are days when she feels nothing but emptiness where her oath should be, but she feels something now, as surely as the sun rises, as surely her lungs need air: a flute being played, a bard singing a ballad, fires crackling in braziers. She hears the sounds of children playing. The sounds of life, holy, holy, holy. Between Heaven and Hell, between good and evil, there are the people of the realms. Living as they must, trying what they can.

She looks up to the sky—that perfect, aching blue—and begins to pray.