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Karlach's boots scuff restlessly on the wood of the dock, kicking up little splinters occasionally where the boards have been cracked by pieces of falling brain matter. "Gods, what a stink, huh?" she says, eyeing the bulbous form of the dead Netherbrain floating out in the water. "If it smells this bad now, imagine how the whole harbor's gonna reek when that thing starts to rot."
It's not directed at anyone in particular, and so nobody answers. Most of the others are gone, anyway, off to their soft, comfy beds in whatever inn is still standing, off to the rest of their heroic lives. Even Wyll is gone, off to find Helsik, if her shop's still standing, and shake her down for their passage into Avernus. She's almost alone, and it's a bitter thought; she told Wyll she'd go with him, but all the same it'd be tempting, right now, to just let go, let the engine have its way and go up like a candle flame, and let her ashes blow out over her city and come to rest among the wreckage.
But she can't make Lae'zel watch that.
The githyanki is the only one left, standing in the shadow of a fallen bit of masonry and running one hand in slow, idle strokes over the muzzle of an enormous red dragon. But wondrous as her new companion is, her eyes are fixed on Karlach instead, those yellow cat's-eyes with the glimmer of green on the edge of the pupils, always hard and unblinking in the most difficult moments.
The silence feels oppressive, and so Karlach speaks again, not out of much eagerness to hear her own voice but because her thoughts are exhausting. "He's a big fucker, isn't he?" she says, nodding to indicate the dragon.
"Quulos," Lae'zel says. Her tone is as flat and matter-of-fact as ever, but Karlach can hear the hollowness in it, the grief answering her own. "The Prince's Fang. One of those that carried Orpheus."
"And now he's gonna carry you." Karlach musters a slight grin. "Step up, in my book."
Lae'zel does not smile. She has only rarely smiled, in all the hours they have spent together, and only when she thought Karlach was not watching, in the darkest hours before dawn. "If fate is kind, I will one day feel myself worthy of the honor," she mutters. "But k'horas htak zech... battle does not wait for the heart. Be I ready or not, I must rise on Quulos's wings and follow my fellows into the Astral, and see Vlaakith torn from her throne."
Karlach follows her gaze upward, over the rooftops of the city and towards the portals still ripped in the sky, the shimmering vista of the Astral Plane beyond. Some of the githyanki forces are still circling, but one by one they have begun to disappear back into the realm from whence they came.
"Well," she says, with a low, guttural laugh. "Nice to have a plan, huh?"
Lae'zel stiffens, her mouth drawing into a tight line. "You jest, as if I speak of a matter of nothing," she snaps. "Is it so easy for you to watch me turn away?"
Karlach flinches. "Easy?" The flamelight in her chest ticks a notch brighter abruptly and her fists clench at her sides. "You think it could be easy for me? After all we've been through? After what you mean to me?" Her voice doesn't really sound like hers; it sounds distant and flat, all the color leeched out of it. Rotting gods, she's so tired... "Fuck that."
"Then why do you make jokes?" Lae'zel rasps. "At this precipice we stand on, why do you--"
"Cos I'm fucking scared, Lae!" The words break from her mouth and as she speaks them she knows how real they are. She claps a hand to her mouth as if she could draw them back, stifle their truth, but it's too late. She hunches over as the fear grabs her by the scruff of the neck and twists, and the engine roars with a pain like it's charring her insides...
She is scared. She can feel death so close and when the time came to face it and die clean, she balked. She told Wyll she'd go to Avernus with him, and she's holding back the heat in her chest with every ounce of willpower she has, and she doesn't know if it's dying or living that she's frightened of. All she knows is that she can't just go home, back to the ragged old flat in Heapside where she'd spent her first coins, the place she spent a decade dreaming of. There's no home for her.
"Fuck," she mutters, staring down at the dock boards until they blur with the tears springing into her eyes. "I thought I was ready, y'know? I thought I had it all figured out. But it just doesn't fucking stop. Why can't I just fucking stop?"
"Shhh..." The touch of fingers on her cheek is so gentle that for a moment she doesn't quite recognize it. Lae'zel is many things, fierce and smart and loyal and surprisingly deep, but Karlach can count on one hand the number of times she has been gentle. Their lovemaking is always a raw rough thing, leaving behind scratches and bite marks and unspoken words. But she is gentle now, closing the gap between them and cupping Karlach's cheek in her palm, the pad of her thumb pressed steadily over Karlach's lips.
"You are a warrior," she says, and her voice is as unusually soft as her touch. "One worthy of praise that reaches to the Astral and beyond. But you seek rest as I sought ascension, and both were lies. There is more that must be done."
Karlach tries to laugh softly, to find some joke to break the tension of the moment, but it emerges as a wet, miserable sort of sigh, a choked-off sob not quite voiced. "I don't want t' go, Lae. Don't want to leave the Gate. Don't want t' leave you…”
She swallows, feeling the words hovering on her lips, aching to be voiced. "I--"
"Do not say it," Lae'zel says softly. "Do not say it. It will only be harder for us both..."
She's right, of course. "What is it the gith say?" Karlach whispers. "Zhak..."
"Zhak vo'n'ash duj. Zhak vo'n'fynh duj," Lae'zel answers. Her thumb twitches against the corner of Karlach's mouth. "The source of my bruises. The source of my joy. But it is not the gith who say this. It is only me. It is only you."
Karlach shudders with the sudden urge to sob. "I didn't want it like this," she says, a sort of desperate cry under the words. "I was ready to love you, y'know. With my whole heart. Even if it's just this fucked up hunk of steel. But I can't. I can't. I was ready to see the world again, every stupid and beautiful corner of it. But I can't. Wyll'll come back, and then it's off to Avernus, and I just get to cook in that fucking wasteland killing devils forever..."
Lae'zel studies her in silence for a while, drifting her fingertips along the ridged scar that runs down the side of Karlach's neck. "When we met on the nautiloid, I told you that only with me you could survive. That there was no arguing it. Now I must tell you the opposite truth, and I find it much harder to bear," she says at last. The rasp of her voice has an edge in it that Karlach has never heard before - the edge of answering tears. "What a new comet we would have made, your heat and my fury, blazing a path across the Astral in Orpheus's name. But it is not to be. Your path must stray from mine, if you are to live. It is not fair..."
Karlach smiles weakly. Even in this moment of agony, she loves Lae'zel, loves that fire she gets in her eyes when something has wronged them. The gith's love lies in that fire, a heat that burns much more sweetly than the one inside her chest. But it's not enough to save them, not now.
"It's not fair," she echoes thickly, leaning her head into Lae'zel's palm. "It's not fucking fair at all."
The silence stretches a moment, broken by the soft lapping of harbor water against the dock. Then Lae'zel shifts, her fingertips flexing gently into Karlach's skin, pressing a subtle brand at her temple that fades as she draws away. "Come with me," she says abruptly.
Karlach blinks, her confusion briefly clearing the tears away. "Lae... I can't," she says haltingly. "We just--"
"No, I-- No," Lae'zel says. Her bearing is suddenly stiff, with her gaze flicked over Karlach's left shoulder in the military air that she retreats into when speaking of something difficult. "Not forever. I know we cannot have forever. But Wyll must search the city. It will be hours. You know this. Come with me. Let me--" And now her voice really does crack, just the once, before her iron control reasserts itself. "Let me show you my home, Karlach."
Karlach remembers riding a horse, once, not too long before she was packed off to the Hells. Gortash had some business with a smuggler in Beregost and it was very important he looked powerful in the exchange, and so he had Karlach and his other bodyguards all on horseback with him, trotting along at his heels. She remembers very little of the actual journey, after so many years, but she does remember the horse - a sturdy Calishite mare, deep brown with a black mane, who kept trying to yank the reins from Karlach's hands to go chew on bushes at the side of the road. It was a strange feeling, that muscular strength in the body between her legs, so tangible and so fundamentally animal, hungry and eager.
Riding the dragon... is not like that.
"Whoa--" Karlach grunts, gripping tightly onto Lae'zel's waist as Quulos kicks off from the ground. His wide, powerful wings beat a drum rhythm through the air, sending the smoke curling around them in arcing waves. She can feel the creature's rumbling breath resonating through her whole body; his eyes roll back in his head briefly to study her, and she's momentarily overwhelmed by the keen intelligence in that gaze even at this odd angle.
This is not a horse. This is a person, far wilder and older than anything Karlach has any experience with.
"He, uh-- he doesn't mind?" she asks Lae'zel, gulping down a mouthful of the wind whipping into her face.
"He is my ally," Lae'zel says. Her voice is as steady and crisp as ever, but Karlach knows her well enough to hear the thread of exhilaration under it, the dream fulfilled after so long. One of her hands is resting on the dragon's neck, just under one of the tall, sharp spines, the other reaching back to anchor herself behind Karlach's thigh. "The red dragons have been ever our comrades and steeds ever since Vlaakith and Tiamat first forged their pact eternal. But just as Voss has turned to follow Orpheus, so too has Quulos. So too will all those who will flock to our side."
Karlach smiles. TIpping her head forward, she rests her chin on Lae'zel's shoulder. "I meant, doesn't he mind third-wheeling our date?" she says, softly teasing.
Lae'zel blinks, her head cocking to one side. The corner of her mouth twitches subtly, though with amusement or regret, it is hard to tell. "I have explained the matter to him," she says.
The dragon shrieks and surges upward, each beat of his wings carrying them higher. Karlach turns her head and her eyes widen as she sees the Gate stretched out below her in all its shattered glory: the Upper City, with the burned-out husk of High Hall at its center, and around it the ragged streets of the Lower City bleeding down towards the water, the Outer City sprawling out into the wilds. "Oh, my gods..." she whispers.
Ahead of her, Lae'zel shifts subtly in her seat. "It will not burn forever," she says gruffly. "Grave as the destruction is, your home will rebuild."
"No, that's--" Karlach swallows. "That's not what I meant. It's... so beautiful."
She's still watching the fires burning in the place she grew up when the portal swallows them into sudden silence.
For a moment, her head swims with vertigo, and she clings frantically to Lae'zel against a sudden terrifying feeling of falling. The very air around them seems to have lightened abruptly, pulling her upward off of Quulos's back. "Fuck..." she mumbles, steadying herself, peering around cautiously as they emerge from the teleportation fog.
What she sees stuns her breathless.
If the vista of Baldur's Gate from above was beautiful, the Astral Sea is... sublime. She remembers glimpses of it, of course, in their visit to the Emperor's pocket plane, but she realizes now that it was a pale imitation, a condensed, compressed version that hardly compares to the sprawling starscape that opens before them. Light swirls around them in an endless display of colors, and looking down - if there is a down - reveals a dizzyingly endless gulf of ever-shifting patterns, marked here and there by islands of solid ground.
Karlach swallows. "Well," she says cautiously. "It's not the Gate. But it's not bad."
Again that almost-smile tugs at Lae'zel's lips. "I know this to be praise indeed," she murmurs. "For the Gate is your home. And this, now, is mine."
She lowers her head, murmurs in the gith tongue to the dragon. "I'vrant, Quulos... chak'ka..." As always, her words in that language sound a little like a chant, a prayer, rather than a command. The dragon arches his back, dives forward through that blank and ever-shifting opalescence, a low rumble like a purr rattling his ribs. Occasionally he lets out a wild, violent roar, and in the distance, Karlach can hear the answering sounds of a hundred, a thousand other dragons - Orpheus's army rising, regrouping.
Slowly, slowly, Karlach loosens her death-grip on Lae'zel's torso. "Damn," she mutters. "Hell of a view. Hell of a view..." The grief and despair still sit so near, but they are muted by the sheer wonder of the vista around them. "How's it feel to be here at last?"
Lae'zel doesn't answer at once, but murmurs again to Quulos, sending him in a corkscrewing dive to skim past some of the floating islands in that endless sea. "A dream fulfilled," she says after a while. "And yet... skewed. The Astral remains as it ever was; it is I who have changed. This is the apotheosis I was promised, but in a form I did not prepare for - a war for the fate of my people, for the children of Gith. I could ask little more, were it not for--" She stops abruptly. Her hand, still resting on Karlach's thigh, tightens, then releases.
Quulos cups his wings, slowing to a stop in that thin and unmoving air. The silence around them is absolute, so utterly still that Karlach can almost hear Lae'zel's heart thundering against her ribs.
"What monstrous cruelty," Lae'zel murmurs, "that we, of all people, should forge such a bond. On the one hand, your life. My duty on the other. What heartless fate molds this universe. What brutal chance..."
She trails off, turns her head slightly, her lips a breath away from the corner of Karlach's mouth. "For you I would turn around," she says, her voice low enough to be almost inaudible even in that utter silence. "For you, I would leap from Quulos's back, and it terrifies me."
Karlach swallows, studying Lae'zel's face, reading the frantic intensity there. Instinctively, she cups a hand to Lae'zel's cheek, and Lae’zel shudders into the contact, her pulse jumping under Karlach's fingertips. Before she can speak again, Karlach kisses her, a single fierce and crushing contact.
Lae'zel gasps against her mouth, leans closer, hungry, pleading-- but Karlach draws back again, shakes her head. "I know," she mutters, lower, gentle. "And gods, I wish it was the right answer. But it's not. You know it's not.” She smiles crookedly. "Because you know who you are, Lae'zel of Creche K'liir."
She tries to laugh, though the sound comes out shaky. "Always admired that about you, you know? No matter how fucked up the path, you always acted like it was flat road, if it was going some place that mattered.”
She feels the certainty harden into her gut, painful and sour as if she'd swallowed a rock, but inescapable all the same. "And I guess maybe now I’m trying to do the same. Because living's a lot scarier than dying... but maybe there's still something left for Karlach of Creche Cliffgate left to do."
When she looks back, Lae'zel's eyes are damp. Karlach has never seen her cry, and she doesn't now, but she grips Karlach's hand with painful ferocity, and there's a hoarse savagery in her voice as she answers. "One day, when the fighting is done, I will bring you back to me."
Karlach shivers involuntarily. The future ahead has no certainties, and perhaps it never did. But in this moment, she can almost believe it, based purely on that fire in Lae'zel's eyes, that fire that will one day drive a god-queen from her throne.
"I know you will," she answers, fighting to keep her voice steady. "While I'm off in Avernus beating the shit out of every devil in my way... I'll think about how my girlfriend is off saving the world. How she's gonna come sweep me off my feet one day.”
She turns her head, staring out at that endless, swirling brilliance. "And about how she lives in a place that's so quiet and peaceful, even when there's so much work to be done.” Her hand finds Lae'zel's, squeezes it tightly. "About how she showed me her home, so I can dream about it in hell."