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A penchant for ceremony is one of the marks which her upbringing has left upon her. She makes sure to enter the city via Rivington, across Wyrm’s Crossing, past the hawkers and storefronts to the Basilisk Gate—the way they came back then, in those whirlwind days before the dice settled, when all their fates hung by the same fraying thread.
Beyond the gate, the city is a riot of colors and smells, strident voices and sharp elbows. A young half-orc boy waves broadsheets at prospective customers. The shouts of Flaming Fists at drill carry over the garrison wall. It all surprises her. She feels, absurdly, that they should still be tallying the dead. The streets should still reek of blood and fire and fear. Instead she smells pastries, horse dung, sun-warm skin.
Two years have all but erased the scars of the Absolute’s near-cataclysm. The rubble has been cleared away, and new buildings erected in its place. And the people! The constant stream of new arrivals must have all but made up for the casualties. Baldur’s Gate is alive.
That ought to make her happy, and for a moment, it almost does. Then the sun catchesa young woman just so, burnishing her auburn hair, and Shadowheart’s nascent smile dies on her lips. She pulls the hood of her cloak up and walks on, staring fixedly ahead.
No one in the crowd spares her a second glance. No one suspects that one of the saviors of their city walks among them. That suits her fine. She is in no mood for a hero’s welcome.
She lets her feet steer her, and finds herself standing before a familiar building, one that predates the destruction and subsequent feverishreconstruction. Even at this hour, chatter and music spill like sweet wine from the Elfsong’s open door. Shadowheart’s mouth is dry. She badly wants a drink. But not here.
She goes to find someplace where she won’t have to speak to anyone while she waits out the day.
*
The streets of Baldur’s Gate are paved with gold, or so people who have never been here like to say. In this glory of sunlight, one can almost pretend it’s true.
Shadowheart drinks sour wine and watches the shadows change, separated from the street by filthy panes of leaded glass. She thinks of dawn on the roof of the Elfsong: the sun rising behind the masts of the Gray Harbor, its first fragile light questing over the rooftops. She thinks of the clouds breaking after the defeat of the Netherbrain, of red scales turning gold. She drains the last of her wine in one long swallow, and signals the barkeep for another bottle.
Only once the sun has set does she leave the tavern.
*
The seasons of neglect have left their mark on her destination. Birds nest in its eaves, and of the little herb garden out back, nothing remains but a snarl of weeds. Enterprising Baldurians have stripped the interior of its furnishings—but nobody has taken up residence here, or torn the building down to raise something new in its stead.
This doesn’t surprise her. There is a heaviness in the air here, a melancholy that keeps the world at arm’s length. From the veranda, Shadowheart can hear the nocturnal noises of the city—the rumble of a cart, the clang of a watchman’s bell—but they are distant, like echoes from another world. They cannot penetrate the stillness that girds the House of Grief. This place has filled itself with absence, and no one has had the stomach to encroach upon it. Until now.
By the time she arrives, the new moon is rising at a stately pace, a silver sickle trailing its Tears like an arc of silver blood. How many times, in the past two years, has Shadowheart stood gazing up at it just like this? As always, she experiences a curious doubling feeling, as though she is split down the middle. One half sees the great eye of her goddess, but the other has eyes only for the Tears.
Somewhere up there, among that bridal veil of stone, lies Creche K’liir, where Lae’zel was born and reared. But Lae’zel is not there anymore. She has gone somewhere more distant still, somewhere far beyond Shadowheart’s reach.
How fitting that the moon should weep. For what has been done to Lae’zel, and for what Shadowheart is about to do.
In a voice scarcely louder than a breath, she says, “Moonmaiden, forgive me.”
There is more, but the words catch in her throat. Saying them feels like pageantry. They are only words. There is no conviction behind them. Her grief has long since swallowed her faith.
She sets her jaw and turns her back on the moon.
*
The gathering took place precisely six months after the day their group disbanded, the day Lae’zel took to the sky on a red dragon’s back. Shadowheart, having received Withers’ summons well in advance, spent the intervening tendays barely able to sleep, a weightless feeling of anticipation and apprehension in her chest.
On the appointed evening, when she arrived at their old campsite, she found it full of music and light and warmth. The scents of spices and roasting meat hung in the air, mouthwatering despite her lack of appetite, and the wine flowed freely. It reminded her of the night when they had feted the Elturian refugees, all those months ago—the first night she and Lae’zel spent together.
And the guests! The lengths to which Withers had gone to collect them! Wyll and Karlach, back from Avernus, battle-scarred and brimstone-scented and larger than life; Gale, ascended to actual, literal godhood, descending upon the gathering in that ridiculous toga—
Shadowheart barely noticed them. Her blood was rushing in her ears.
One of their number was missing.
*
It’s funny, the way the mortal races walk so fearlessly beneath the sky, trusting the ground underfoot to bear their weight. Pretending it’s solid through. Everyone believes their footing is secure until the earth yawns open and swallows them.
The plain fact of the matter is that Toril is riddled with holes. There is a whole world underground, under the feet of the unwitting surface-dwellers, a world of horror and strange beauty and, above all, of darkness.
There are so many places the light has never touched. But the darkness is everywhere, always, ever-patient, waiting for the light to die.
It has waited two years for her.
She finds the passage at the rear of the House, and goes down. The House may have been ransacked, but the cloister beneath is untouched. Air which has gone unbreathed these past two years stirs at her passage. Her footsteps echo in the silence.
The last time she came down this way, she had Lae’zel at her side, and the rest of their band of desperate heroes at her back.
When she spoke to Withers that night, he told her, not unkindly, that Lae’zel was gone. That was the word he used—gone. She felt it settle in her stomach like an icy weight, and she protested, but only feebly. There was no doubt in Withers’ voice, no passion or mockery or jest. Only the deep certainty of the grave.
She left the gathering soon after, without bidding any of the other guests goodbye, and spent the rest of the night wandering, numb and unthinking. It was only as the sun rose that it occurred to how similar her fugue of grief had been to the sacred trance of a Sharran adept.
Lae’zel had always spoken of ascension. It was her fondest dream, her only ambition. To hear her tell it, it was a glorious thing—a beginning, not an end. Had she ever suspected the truth? If she had, might Shadowheart have swayed her from her path?
To be ascended is to be consumed—so Withers said. Fifty thousand of her subjects, he claimed, the Lich Queen had snuffed out. And one of them was Lae’zel.
So that was it. That was the fate of the great Lae’zel of K’liir: to be a statistic.
It must have been like swallowing the sun. Shadowheart hopes she burned Vlaakith’s throat going down.
*
She heads past the doors of the upper-level rooms, the interrogation chamber and the armory, to the grand staircase which leads down to the cloister proper. Hanging lanterns burst into purple flame, keeping pace with her descent. She is not alone down here, in this empty place. There is something here which has long awaited her return.
The flames do not banish the darkness so much as texture it, deepen it, but Shadowheart takes the stairs without stumbling. As she descends, she takes one of her hands in the other, and runs her thumb across the palm, feeling the faint scar there.
They say time heals all wounds. This, Shadowheart knows from personal experience, is a lie.
The weeks turned to months, and she waited to grow around the pain—waited for time to build a hard shell around it, the way an oyster produces a pearl. She wondered who she would be, with that hardness inside her. It never happened. Instead, the grief hollowed her out, filled her with absence, until she had room for nothing else.
She took to the road. At first she traveled aimlessly, then with greater and greater focus. Her goal crystallized over the span of several months, so that she often didn’t know what she was looking for until she found it. The knowledge she sought was forbidden, but she had been taught the arts of subterfuge and ruthlessness and asking painful questions. Like the opening of some vile flower, the lore of lichdom revealed itself to her.
Liches, undead creatures of vast arcane power, are created through rituals of unspeakable malignity, and even after they have attained their tainted immortality they must feed on souls to sustain themselves. Vlaakith, in this respect, is no different.
And the souls upon which a lich feeds…
I should try to find her, she said to Withers, just for something to say while the earth dropped out from under her feet. And he replied: Perhaps thou could. Only that, and nothing more. She thinks, now, that he held his tongue out of kindness. They cheated death so many times, their little group, but this…
If Lae’zel had truly ascended, as she understood the term—if she had traveled the Astral Sea on a red dragon mount, an ageless goddess in flashing silver plate, and if her mind had been too bent on loyalty to her queen to ever spare Shadowheart another thought—
Or if she had passed on, gone to some afterlife which Shadowheart would never reach, a distant bittersweet memory—
If Shadowheart had known Lae’zel was somewhere out there in the infinite cosmos, still burning bright like a distant and terrible star—
Then the grief might have been bearable.
But she isn’t.
Lae’zel is gone. Erased. Consumed. All that she was, all the beauty and strength and stubborn scoffing arrogance, all the hidden softness, the eyes that lingered on the sunrise in unguarded moments, the fingertips which had traced Shadowheart’s skin, Lae’zel, gods, Lae’zel…
Lae’zel is gone.
*
Shadowheart, raised by the Nightsinger’s faithful, knows a good deal about torture. Sometimes she tortures herself with memories: the nights at camp, the days on the road, the thousand thousand moments when she might’ve said something to alter her lover’s doomed trajectory. Other times, her knife of choice is the bone-deep conviction that nothing she did differently would have mattered, that Lae’zel’s fate was fixed long before they ever met.
Everything they did, all the impossible odds they overcame—and yet she failed to save Lae’zel from herself.
Their courtship, at first, was a simple matter of mutual convenience. A slaking of thirsts; a connection purely physical, all bruises and hard-edged need. How could it have been otherwise? What few memories Shadowheart had were all of hurt and fear and darkness, and Lae’zel’s wounds were no less deep.
And yet, somehow—little by little, with tentative hands and faltering words—they went from nights spent grappling out of earshot with their companions, to that morning on the Elfsong’s roof, when she proved that githyanki, too, can smile.
Was that the moment? If Shadowheart had said something different then, might she have changed Lae’zel’s course? Or later, as Lae’zel bestrode the dragon that had come to take her away, and her eyes sought Shadowheart’s, and just for an instant there was something in them like sorrow, like doubt? A part of Shadowheart had wanted to cry out: Don’t go, please, stay with me…
But she held her tongue. The moment passed. Lae’zel sat straight-backed atop her mount,stern and beautiful, full of savage triumph. The bright sun, breaking through the clouds, turned her hair the color of burnished copper.
And then the red wings flashed, and Shadowheart’s lover disappeared from her life.
Source of my joy, Lae’zel called her, only once, in the soft light of dawn on the Elfsong’s roof. There was a softness in her, long suppressed, unpracticed, but all the softer for it. A yearning for a gentle touch, which she always denied, and which Shadowheart did not have the courage to indulge—except for that precious, fragile hour, before the walls came up once more in Lae’zel’s eyes.
Does Vlaakith know? Could she taste the tenderness, the sadness, the loneliness and fear which Lae’zel never quite dared to show? Did she savor it?
Did she get closer to Lae’zel than Shadowheart ever could?
Shadowheart feels sick.
*
Down here, at least, all is as she left it.
She drifts through the cloister as if in a dream. The bones of the sect that raised her lie where they fell two years ago, when she and her companions brought death to this place. A skull, pale in the gloom, peers up at her with a slack-jawed grin. Only by its robes is she able to identify the skeleton as having belonged to Viconia DeVir, the late Mother Superior.
That feeling of melancholy hangs even heavier down here, like toxic gas escaping from the earth. Her skin crawls with it, but in the pit of her heart there is an awful hope: the hope for relief.
Shadowheart presses on, into the cloister’s inner sanctum, where she took her parents’ lives. She intended it as an act of mercy. Mercy is a funny thing, she is realizing. It rarely comes in the shape one expects. To the outside observer, it can look very ugly indeed.
She reaches the far end of the room, and falls to her knees before the Mirror of Loss.
*
She is in a dark place. There is a surface underfoot, smooth and hard and cool like polished stone, but she can make out no walls or ceiling, only night-deep blackness. She is not frightened. For the first time in two years, she feels something resembling peace.
She rises to her feet. In the darkness ahead, at the very edge of visibility, there is an answering movement. She makes out the shape of a person, but little else; the shadows swallow all detail. It reminds her of Grymforge, and the idol of black stone which she found down there.
When she shifts experimentally, first to her left and then to her right, the figure mimics her movements precisely.
A voice speaks. It is horribly familiar, though its tone is not. Shadowheart can hear in it none of the scorned fury she remembers. The voice is soft, low, all but tender.
So, my daughter, you have returned to me.
“Yes, Lady.”
I knew that you would. All things return to me, in time. Tell me what you have learned, little one, during your pilgrimage in the world of light.
Shadowheart swallows, fights through her revulsion to speak. She cannot turn back now. She needs this. “I learned that your teachings were true. That there are some hurts which cannot be borne. That sometimes, emptiness is kinder than the alternative.”
Yes, Shar says, only that and nothing more, with satisfaction as deep as a moonless night.
A lump is forming in Shadowheart’s throat. “Do with me as you wish,” she says, her voice thickening. “Punish me. Destroy me. Just… help me.”
Punish you? the Nightsinger echoes, playing at shock, as cruel and indulgent as a mother mocking her child. Whyever would I wish to punish you? I am pleased that you have returned, my Chosen.
For an instant Shadowheart’s revulsion is almost too much to bear. She should never have come here. She has made a terrible mistake. But she swallows the feeling down. She can weather the crawling of her skin for a few moments more, if blessed relief will follow.
And then Shar says: In fact, I wish to reward you.
And the figure in the darkness steps forward, revealing itself just enough that the recognition is like a spearpoint to the tenderest part of Shadowheart’s innards. The serrated ears, the imperious tilt of its chin—
Of course. How like her Dark Lady, to make her reward a thousand times more painful than any reprisal.
Shadowheart makes a strangled noise, and staggers towards the apparition on legs that have lost all sensation. She falls into Lae’zel’s arms, and they tumble to the floor, which is no longer cold stone but midnight-black sheets of the softest silk.
The arms enfolding her, lean and firm, are just as she remembers them. The skin is tough and warm, like leather worn smooth by years of wear. Gods, she even smells right.
“You’re not real,” Shadowheart sobs against the apparition’s chest. “You’re not real.”
“Do you mistrust the evidence of your senses, my joy?” Lae’zel murmurs, and gods, that voice, she never thought she would hear that voice again.
“You’re not here. You’re dead.”
She feels rather than sees Lae’zel shake her head. “All things return to the Lady of Sorrows. All things lost and forgotten are her domain. I am with her, lost as I am. I am safe in her embrace, and now so will you be—”
It’s wrong. The voice, the diction, hells, even her phrasing—these are all Lae’zel’s. But the words belong to Shar. Shadowheart doesn’t want to hear any more empty promises, so she turns her face up, blindly seeking Lae’zel’s lips, and kisses the empty shell.
They lose their clothes in the endless sea of dark silk. Their coupling is gentle and urgent all at once, and blessedly silent but for their hitching breaths. Pressing close, Shadowheart feels Lae’zel’s pulse—as always, slightly out of phase with hers. The Lady of Sorrows has gotten even that detail right.
The simulacrum makes love just as Lae’zel did: giving pleasure and taking it with great methodical focus, with the same determination and passion with which she approached everything. She was good at it. Lae’zel of K’liir excelled at most things at which she tried her hand.
Shadowheart loses herself in her pleasure, in the feel of her lover’s skin, in the smell of her, the taste. For a while, she can pretend. For a while she feels almost whole.
But afterwards, she feels hollowed out by her climax, and the pain rushes in to fill the empty space. “I’m sorry,” she sobs, pressing her hot face into the crook of Lae’zel’s neck. “Lae’zel, forgive me. I failed you. I killed you. If—if I had tried harder to save you—if I had only—”
But the simulacrum strokes the nape of her neck, touching her more gently than the real Lae’zel ever dared, and murmurs into her hair: “Be at peace, source of my joy. Your suffering is at an end. Now comes solace at last.”
And a great black wave wells up inside Shadowheart, and roars with obliterating force through all the chambers and corridors of her being, and it wipes her mercifully clean.
*
The Mother Superior throws herself into her work.
She dedicates herself to restoring the Dark Lady’s presence in Baldur’s Gate. She sends word to other cloisters of her penance, of her return to the fold. Little by little, the faithful trickle back—old devotees and fresh acolytes, all of them steadfast soldiers in Shar’s eternal, secret war.
The cloister grows in power with each passing night.
Insofar as she feels anything, the Mother Superior feels a sense of deep satisfaction. Few in this wretched world are as fortunate as she. She is where she is meant to be. Her mind is uncluttered by the disarray that afflicts even her most zealous subordinates; she is a vessel, empty but for the holy darkness of her mistress. She is Shar’s Chosen, and she intends to earn the title.
Only, sometimes, when her surreptitious work takes her aboveground, and she walks among the unsuspecting citizenry of Baldur’s Gate—sometimes, the light of the sun will catch some stranger’s auburn hair just so, turning it the color of burnished copper, and she feels a pang she cannot explain.