Chapter Text
Shadowheart has made of herself a tomb for memories. Resting deep in her soul is a graveyard, wherein whoever she might have been before has been laid to rest. In her years spent in the Lady of Sorrows’ service, she’s made many offerings to her goddess – of blood, sweat, toil, and yes, her very thoughts and experiences. In her most blasphemous moments, thankfully few and far between, she wonders at the starkness of that loss. Who was she, before Mother and her Lady found her and took her into their solemn embrace? Why had she been in the woods that fateful night?
With each of those meditations comes the agony. A brand of ice, frigid cold as Cania’s crags, an inferno to rival the very heart of Avernus, spearing into her palm. It sears past her admittedly disturbing threshold for pain, burns away all that is Shadowheart, eking her down to the dregs. With every merciful lance of torment, she is reborn, a blank slate to mould in Shar’s image. This is what worship means to her: to give up all, to forsake this plane, its joys and many wonders, in exchange for her Lady’s favour.
It is all she knows, all she loves. It is her sole purpose for existing.
Strange, then, that this befuddling paladin shows no such reverence to her own deity.
Shadowheart faintly remembers seeing tieflings in the city. Like the ghost of an echo of a memory, she recalls the whispers that ere followed the devil-kin people wherever they walked those cobbled streets. Unsettling, they were called. Unnatural. Unholy. To have fraternised with the infernal strata of the pantheon was anathema to most people, even the unwashed, unlearned peasantry. Superstition trumped all good sense, and no more so was that ignorance unleashed than with those of diabolical blood.
But Nazella, to Shadowheart’s quiet consternation, is possibly the most beautiful woman she’s ever laid eyes on – that she can recall, anyhow. Mostly entombed in the scales of steel and maroon and black tabard of her armour, what little skin that shows is a clear, cool grey. Freckles and sunspots line her cheeks, touched by long, curved lashes that rest above golden eyes. Hair as deep a shade of black as it is possible to be, darker still than the dead eve that Shadowheart so loves, is pulled into a bun and braids, the rest falling to her shoulders in light curls.
If the woman is entrancing at rest or on the march, she is doubly so in a fight. Much of Shadowheart’s time in their brief scuffles so far has been spent simply watching Nazella glide around the battlefield, longsword in one hand, shield in the other, unleashing upon the weak, paltry foes they’d been set against: a trio of intellect devourers and a small outfit of bandits looting through corpses near the ruins.
The tiefling fights as if in a dance with her enemy, each parry and counter simply following the tempo of the song. For every give, there is a take; step, lean, parry, strike. Step back, deliberate, re-engage. Repeat ad nauseam. It was during their last scrap that Shadowheart had caught sight of the amulet set against her neck: a set of balanced scales held aloft by a warhammer.
An aspect of Tyr. God of justice, order, and war. Very typical, Shadowheart thinks, except that the icon is broken, the hammer cracked right in twain down the middle. That in itself seems – portentous, is a good word – and so she decides that, for today, discretion being the better part of valour is set to the wayside to make way for her burning curiosity.
“So,” she begins, quietly so as to not allow the others to hear her. She isn’t quite sure how she feels about Astarion or Gale just yet – the wizard is proud and talkative, and the thief preens far too much for her liking - but she has made her opinion of the gith well known over the last hours of their hike. Shadowheart would prefer to be unheard. “Does the Eyeless One not demand your fealty?”
Without missing a beat, the tiefling responds. “For His clerics and those who perform works in His name, yes.”
“But not you, specifically?”
Nazella turns her head just enough in her direction to peak out the corner of her glowing eyes, the harsh golden hue of them so eerily lupine they make her shudder. The tiefling gives an expression of mixed impatience and amusement. “I follow no gods, Shadowheart.”
Her brow furrows. “You are a paladin, yes?”
“Like my father before me, and his before him.”
Shadowheart hums mildly, belying the very real irritation she feels at the nonanswers. Mother had often reprimanded her, from what little she can remember, for her ever-constant curiosity. Those memories, she can recall with crystal clarity. All of her failures lain out for her perusal, decades upon decades of her unworthiness set out on display. Even so, and without the Mother Superior here to chastise her, she allows herself that vice unrestrainedly.
“I was under the belief that most paladins drew their strength from divinity, much like clerics,” she says, laying a palm against her chest.
Nazella nods, eyes pinned to the trail before them. They’d long since abandoned the burning beaches and blackened, sandy pits in favour of a thick, forested cavern system. All sounds echo, streaming staccatos of falling pebbles and shifting stones keeping them all very much on high alert. Shadowheart herself hasn’t relinquished the vice grip on her mace since the crash.
Astarion had denied the opportunity to scout ahead, and she was sure he regretted that decision now, open and exposed as they all are. Their tiefling…leader, she supposes, for all intents and purposes, shares in their wariness. Her gloved hand remains gripped to the hilt of her blade. Still, she deliberates her answer, and gives it to Shadowheart without hesitation.
“When I was a girl,” she begins, either unknowing of the fact that all of them are now listening intently or simply uncaring of it, “my grandfather baptised me in Tyr’s temple. My family has followed Him for generations, paladins devoted to justice and order. I was showered with oils and divined by the Evenhand’s skálds. Destined for glorious combat, they sang. A spurred shield against all fell workings. But once I began training, it became clear that Tyr’s sight was not upon me. I could hardly hold a rapier, much less a greatsword. My strikes were weak, my conviction shattered. I brought shame to my family.”
She stops, and the group halts at her heels, somehow already a well-oiled machine. Astarion nocks a bolt, the tip shimmering with noxious verdant poison, into his crossbow just on their periphery. Gale’s staff crackles with arcane lightning. Lae’zel unsheathes the flaming greatsword, taken from the corpse of that fiendish commander on the nautiloid, from her back. Shadowheart herself already has an incantation resting on her tongue.
But rather than calling for an attack, Nazella simply kneels, strong fingers sifting through disjointed soil and rock. She traces small, deceptively heavy footprints with her eyes, still speaking.
“My father sat me down one evening - I was… thirteen, perhaps - and told me that I would find no resolve in the workings of the divine. Tyr’s justice would not slake my thirst, Tempus’ bloodlust would never give me a heart bent for justice. Neither Selûne’s grace nor Shar’s dark caress could heal me. I left home not long after, with a friend of the family, and I soon found what I had sought for so long: purpose.”
She rises into a crouch, chain mail tinkling from the movement, and follows the trail. She is a hunter, Shadowheart realises; not quite a holy protector, nor an agent of the natural order. The gleam in Nazella’s eyes is a dangerous thing, nothing at all akin to what she’s read about the paladins of old, those holy paragons of devotion and righteousness. She preaches nothing, holds naught of the group’s myriad sins and secrets against them. She asks only for their help, and so far they have given it freely.
They come upon a slaughter long since abandoned. The two tieflings who had captured Lae’zel lie in pools of blood, some of it already soaked into the earth. Their bodies have been desecrated, deaths unsanctified, and left to rot in the summer heat. The stench is nearly unbearable, but Nazella rises fully and strides forward. Shadowheart watches on, wary but entranced, as her jaw clenches hard enough to crack. Her eyes blaze in fury.
When she reaches the bodies, she kneels, apathetic to the lifeblood seeping into the cloth of her tabard. She reaches a hand out, closing the woman’s eyes. Lae’zel steps forward and hands Nazella a pair of moth-eaten sheets they’d taken from a cart, meant to be a base for their bedding.
The interment takes only a short while, long enough for their retinue to rest from the hike. Nazella wraps the corpses up with the sheets, and Shadowheart, feeling a queer desire to do something, performs funerary rites from rote memorisation. She calls for Shar to take these two pilgrims into her umbral heart, to allow them the sanctified eternity of her darkness. If Nazella hears the words she speaks, who she speaks them to, she says nothing about it.
Instead, she continues her tale.
“In every town and village across the Coast, every miniscule hamlet or forgotten fishing burg, there is strife.” She wraps the final vestment here, and where once there were two destroyed bodies, now rests a small cairn rooted with a carved boulder. A marker, Shadowheart thinks, so that these two unfortunates will not be forgotten. “All of you, save Lae’zel, have likely seen it yourselves. Some men simply seek death and violence for its own sake; they want to watch this world burn. And so, they kill, they steal, they rape and murder.
“Who, then, avenges their victims? When the local militia arrives too late, when the last cottage has burned to cinders, when the screams of widows and children echo into the aether… what then? I found my purpose in their pain. The gods give me nothing. I have no need of them. My power comes not from the divine, nor the infernal. It has but one source, unending and ever-flowing…”
Here, she stands, stalking, powerful steps taking her to the edge of the clearing. A small spattering of dark crimson marks the soil, and Nazella reaches down to grab at something there. She turns to face them, and within her grasp is a shortbow - crude in design, littered and lashed in bones. Goblin-made.
Shadowheart’s gaze is drawn from the goblin bow and to Nazella like a moth to a great pyre. At her right, Lae’zel’s stance goes rigid, militaristic, expectant. She is a soldier here and now, in this moment, awaiting orders. Even Gale and Astarion, avatars of ego as they are, remain silent. They all know what has happened here, and what they are about to do. There is no question of it, no complaint that this is not their problem, though that would arguably have been quite true.
Her question has long since been answered. Perhaps not quite in words, however long-winded and expository Nazella’s explanation had become, but in action. It is answered in the faint tremors in Nazella’s clenched fist, in the baring of her fangs, in the hateful, wrathful glow of her eyes. Sung unto her is the song of Nazella’s inborn divinity. It is known to her now, this paladin’s source:
Vengeance.
Nazella glances to the northwest, where a short distance away a trail of grey smoke rolls through the cloudless sky, and rolls her shoulders.
“Come,” she commands, and breaks into a run.
They follow.
They come upon a scene of outright chaos.
The grove is a massive, natural construct of rock walls and high outcroppings. Shadowheart muses on its effectiveness absently, even as the small trio of human fighters ram their weapons against the high gate, screaming to be allowed entrance. Atop the battlements, horned figures in various states of armament scatter and scamper, leaning down to see what the fuss is all about. Shadowheart hears names called, pleas for aid and their answers. From the far end of the clearing comes a clamour of rattling metal and harsh, gurgling cries in a cruel tongue.
“We should check it out,” she murmurs at Nazella’s right. The tiefling nods, moving ahead, but Shadowheart stops her with a soft hand on her bicep. “But be careful.”
“Naturally,” replies the paladin. Her sharp eyes flicker over the landscape, taking in the terrain and the advantages it could give. “Astarion, Gale, make for that cliff-face. Stay out of sight and prepare for an ambush. Shadowheart, you cover us from below. Lae’zel, with me. Be ready for anything.”
And so they split into their groups, frantically and quietly climbing the rocks. Astarion finds himself a particularly large and round bush and practically leaps into it, with only a faint rustling to give away his position. Gale smiles at her and rubs his hands together.
“This is all very exciting, is it not?” the wizard asks. Shadowheart says nothing, knowing without fail that he will answer his own question shortly. He doesn’t disappoint. “One step closer to finding answers, or even better, a cure. If we can but get past this minor obstruction first, of course.”
Shadowheart gives a hum of agreement, eyes glued to Nazella and Lae’zel as the pair make their way to the gate. She is far enough away that Shadowheart cannot hear her words, but they somehow halt all activity atop the wall. A tall tiefling man in finer armour and angry, curved horns growls at the tiefling gatekeepers in Infernal and leans down. When he lays eyes on Nazella, he flinches as if struck.
Curiouser and curiouser, Shadowheart thinks.
And then, with little fanfare, the goblins strike.
It is a small force, all told. No more than a hunting party of nine goblins – a few skirmishers, a handful of booyahgs, and a more heavily-armoured leader – but they are assisted by a snarling, gnashing worg and a massive creature riddled with mangy brown fur. A bugbear, seven feet tall and unnervingly unarmoured, slams its morningstar against the earth, sending up a poof of rock and soil, and bellows.
A groaning rumble resounds across the clearing, drawing her gaze. The tieflings upon the ramparts have begun to open the gate, and Shadowheart watches as one of the goblins nocks, aims, and fires twice in rapid succession, skewering the young tiefling in the chest.
A heart-rending scream. “Kanon, no!”
Nazella, at the head of the awaiting party, bangs her sword against the body of her shield in reply, eyes alight in a crimson glow, and lances the tip of her blade at the bugbear in challenge. The clearing falls silent as the grave.
Someone – Shadowheart isn’t sure who - twitches. And then all hell breaks loose.
The fight is long, tiring, and bloody. Shadowheart feels less than she once was at all times now, even at rest, but even more so here in the heat and fire of combat. She thinks that she might have once been more in tune with her goddess, able to call down more of Shar’s divine essence. Perhaps the apparent failure in her mission had led to her losing much of her Lady’s favour. Still, she does her part to the best of her ability, bestowing vitality to Gale after a particularly nasty blow to the side catches him off-guard mid-spell. She calls down a lance of radiant light, rending the goblin leader’s armour just in time for Lae’zel to skewer it through the chest with her flaming greatsword.
Distantly, she notices a new, unknown party at the edge of the skirmish. A human man, dark of skin and eldritch in power, wields a rapier and fights like a showman. He dances on light feet in and out of the melee, melodious voice echoing incantations and jeers. But he is lost from her sight in the din, and there are far too many enemies to try and keep track of someone she doesn’t know, and therefore doesn’t care about.
Astarion leaps in and out of the shadows, few though they are, and fires off crossbow bolts that hit vital organs with pure precision. Gale whispers into the Weave an arcane lullaby, glimmering violet light hypnotically placing a few skirmishers to an unwilling slumber, allowing Lae’zel to pick them off. Nazella finds herself surrounded by a trio of booyahgs, their staves rattling with bones, and simply digs her boots into the ground and arcs her blade in a wide circle, decapitating them all in one stroke.
They are nearly done, the fight nearly won. And, to Shadowheart’s delight, not one of them has suffered anything grievous. Just as she sees Astarion’s shot pierce the worg’s eye, killing it cleanly, it happens.
The bugbear that she’d assumed dead leaps to its feet and sprints recklessly straight at Nazella, whose back is turned. Before Shadowheart can even shout, before any of them can react, the creature winds its arm back, morningstar points glinting with lethal intent, and crashes it into the tiefling’s side. Shadowheart hears the woman’s armour rend with a sound like thunder, and she falls to her knees.
As one, their unit leaps into action. Shadowheart thinks she hears someone above shout the paladin’s name, but ignores it. Unthinking, she practically flies down the cliff, breath heavy and terrified, and Astarion follows on her heels. Lae’zel, who had been picking off the dying goblins a few dozen feet away, curses and sprints to defend their leader. The three humans, who had taken wounds of their own, fly into a fury and race back into action. And yet, their fears prove unnecessary in the next moment.
The end comes not with a whimper or a bang, not even with the shrieks and screams of the slowly dying, but with something Shadowheart has never been witness to: judgement.
Nazella returns to her feet, left hand abandoning her shield in favour of latching onto the bugbear’s wrist, still grasping the morningstar embedded into her side. The creature writhes, scrambles, and scratches, trying to flee, but it is of no use. Shadowheart watches with sacrament in her eyes as Nazella raises her sword to the sky, chanting in an unknowable tongue; watches the steel begin to glow and warm with divine radiance, soaking in all the surrounding light; watches when the paladin roars with such fury that it boils the blood in Shadowheart’s veins, and brings the gleaming blade down like a guillotine. It is like watching a meteor strike the earth.
The explosion tears at Shadowheart’s senses, and she flinches away from it, covering her eyes with bloodied palms. When she looks again, the bugbear lies smouldering, its charred corpse smoking, a dozen feet away. Nazella stares at the body with fire in her eyes, panting, snarling with blood on her teeth, and only when she grimaces and groans aloud in pain does Shadowheart scurry over to assist.
The paladin tries to wave her off, but she is insistent in her efforts.
“I could do little else besides,” she argues, “and you are exhausted. Allow me this, at least.”
Nazella has little rebuttal to give after that stellar example of self-pity. The tiefling remains silent as Shadowheart murmurs her prayers to Shar, hums uncomfortably as her flesh knits itself back together. The bruises and aches will remain, but the worst of her wounds are gone, thankfully. Shadowheart doles out a few potions of healing to the group, who drink them without complaint, and is satisfied. All around them is a scene of complete chaos, over half-a-dozen bodies in various states of ruin, and blood everywhere.
Lae’zel speaks up willingly for the first time since they’d set out from the ravaged beach. “That was…magnificent. Even in my time spent away from K’liir, never have I seen such fury condensed into power. You say you learned this ability on your own?”
Nazella wags her hand in a teetering motion, taking hesitant steps toward the looming gate ahead.
“I had a teacher,” she says eventually. “The friend I spoke of earlier. He taught me much of what I know now, but I feel…drained, ever since the nautiloid. Lesser, somehow.”
“I feel much the same,” Shadowheart exclaims with uneven breath. She’d hoped to not have been the only one diminished because of the tadpole. “My spells come to me less willingly, my magic is sluggish and hesitant. I’d feared the worst, but if this is something we all must contend with...?”
There is a muttered smattering of confirmation from the others, and the matter is laid to rest for the moment as they pass beneath the opened gate. By some unspoken agreement, none in the party are willing to speak up about the tadpoles where others can hear. Nazella leads them over a rise, and almost immediately Shadowheart hears shouting up ahead once more. She rolls her eyes, tired of this place already.
Nazella, it seems, shares her opinion. She stalks ahead, murmuring under her breath in irritation. “Pig-headed, lackwitted fools.”
At the grove’s entrance they come upon a powder keg set to explode. The armoured tiefling man from before stands stalwart against the fighters, berating them for leading the raiding party to the gates. Two of the three, a long-haired blonde half-elf and a brunette human woman, stand to the side, leaning heavily against an errant cart while they catch their breaths. Their leader, a curly-haired human, stands rigid and furious as the tiefling lays into him.
“There are children here, you fool!”
“We was running,” the human huffs, grasping at a stitch in his side, “for our lives.”
“You led them straight to us!” The tiefling glances about, gesturing wildly. “And you let them take the druid, too. Unbelievable!”
Shadowheart comes to a stop at Nazella’s right. The paladin stands, arms crossed over her chest, watching the argument keenly. Her eyes flicker between the human and the tiefling bickering back and forth with increasing animosity. It is only when the human, who the tiefling named as Aradin, makes a disparaging slur about foulbloods, that her companion makes her presence known.
Striding forward, she takes a firm grip on Aradin’s shoulder. Shadowheart can see the pressure laid into the human, the flicker of true fear in his eyes, as Nazella hardly wastes a glance at him before speaking to the tiefling.
“He is human,” she says, emphasising the word as if it is the deepest, cruelest insult she can think of. “Bigotry comes as natural to them as breathing. Be the better man.”
The tiefling man startles, clearly in some sort of distress, but soon nods and sighs deeply. “Forgive me, young one. I…forgot myself.” He turns to Aradin, and with marginally more authority in his voice, continues. “Enough squabbling. This argument is pointless. The goblins will soon realise one of their patrols is missing. We must prepare.”
Aradin and his companions soon depart with fumes pouring out of their noses in anger, or perhaps grief. Nazella waves the group forward, still focusing on the tiefling man before them. He is older up close than Shadowheart realised, wrinkles marring his scarlet face with age. Scars litter his chin and cheeks, bruises line his hands, and there is an obvious droop in his stature, the bearing of a man with far too great a weight placed upon his shoulders.
And the way he’s staring at Nazella has their hackles raised.
“Why?” the woman asks without preamble. Shadowheart shares a confused glance with Astarion, who merely shrugs and steps in closer.
“After Zariel released the city back to the prime material, the humans laid the blame on our shoulders,” the tiefling says. “Thavius Kreeg was dead. Zariel’s essence was chained once more in Avernus. But the tieflings…we were the common enemy. The whole city turned on us. You were not there, Nazella; you did not see. We were attacked in the streets. Bex’s mother was assaulted. We had no choice but to leave.”
Nazella’s jaw clicks shut, teeth clenched. “You know perfectly well why I was not there.”
“I do; of course, I do,” the man says with hands raised in surrender. “I’m not trying to antagonise you, dear heart, only to explain.”
“How can you explain this?” Nazella demands, raising her arms, gesturing toward the wounded tieflings not-so-subtly eavesdropping on their argument, their meagre possessions, the scraps of food being shared by dozens. It is as bleak a sight as Shadowheart has ever seen. “Elturel was our home. You would risk our people, our kin… What would moth—“
“Terribly sorry!”
Astarion steps up, fanged smile false as summer snow, and leans around the bulk of Nazella’s frame. Though irritating, Shadowheart cannot help but be thankful for his timely interruption, as she feels as though she’s missed several necessary conversations in the span of these few traded words. Still, the pale elf gives the tiefling a simpering sort of smile and leans in close to Nazella.
“I feel as though the rest of us are lagging just a tad bit behind,” he says, pinching his fingers together closely. “Nazella, darling, you know this man?”
“Ah.” The paladin clears her throat, pallid skin flushing a darling shade of red, and raises a jittery hand toward the man. “Everyone, this is, ah, Zevlor — commander of the Elturian Hellriders —”
“— Former commander,” Zevlor cuts in, just as awkwardly.
Nazella glares at the man. “Former commander of the Hellriders… and my father.”