Avernus Interludes

[closeyourfist]

https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Letter_from_Hope (The state of the House of Hope post-Raphael)

The suggestion to ask a blacksmith to come along had come from Kael and several others in his party, but Gortash immediately saw the logic in it. Dammon had experience with Avernus as a former citizen of Elturel, but more importantly, he knew how to work with Infernal metal and engines. In fact, he'd been in charge of Karlach's upgrades since her return from the Hells. The once-human, however, had only knowledge of the initial prototype, so he didn't have a complete base to work from, much less a desire to get within swinging distance of the Tiefling, for both their sakes. It created a comfortable bridge, and a possible go-between if information needed to be relayed and couldn't without a potential fight.

Distance was the only way Gortash was going to survive Avernus if she was there. He had no easy answers for her, nor any real desire to make anyone feel as though his presence was a burden. Dammon was therefore an easy solution, and Gortash found himself more at ease with someone to just bounce ideas off of.

Then there had been Hope. Hope, who was the same as she had been all these years. Never aging a day. Neither her nor her sister. She was a distant facet in the House of Hope he had known in his youth, but Raphael had kept his page close once or twice when visiting her. She was defiant and as ever, hopeful, and her refusal to break, even as the edges of her mind frayed, was what kept Raphael from killing her.

But she had looked on a little boy abandoned with pity in her eyes. Even as she could see how a child like him survived under the yoke of his Infernal keeper -- through careful observation, and not lying so much as knowing when to speak, whom to speak to, or speak of, and much too young to have already mastered such things -- Hope herself kept her light burning through the exact opposite. She was straightforward, just as much in her open disgust for the cambion as her platitudes.

He would never understand her bravery. To this day the sight of her filled him with confusion and awe. Not only did she risk torture and ruin at every step for her own sake, but she even once had the means to escape forever. He never knew how she came to have it -- perhaps, he would think later, that Raphael had left it within reach on purpose, knowing she would never leave without her sister. A portal that would carry only one.

When Raphael sent him to feed her a supper, laced with nightmares, after hunger striking, she slipped salvation to him and for the first time in nearly two weeks ate her fill.

Enver Gortash, like too many others in the planes, had been soured to the idea of heroes when he went too long without one to come for him when it was most needed. Until the very last, it seemed. It left him with a quiet, secret reverence he never really came to terms with. Probably because when he saw her again after all those years, and she recognized him, tearfully welcomed him and the rest, with space promised to do their work, he realized what he had needed had not been a hero at all.

He had just been a child who needed someone to act like a parent, for once.

Comments

[once_human]

It wasn't "My, how you've grown" or "you haven't changed a bit!" that she said. None of the things a normal person, at a normal reunion would hear from a person that last saw them as a child. It was "you grew up."

Not an observation like the others, that might be managed when other words failed. It was her recognizing something she saw as extraordinary. The one thing she wanted in giving him that chance to escape this place.

Her chance.

The changes he had been through did not stop her from recognizing him.

"That's quite the trick, though," she added with a wink.

The House beyond had been slowly transforming, but still a lot in just the short time since Enver, Wyll Ravenguard, and Karlach were last there. Paintings and statues gone, many of the draperies in cooler colors. Furniture had disappeared. There was no time to walk the Halls and explore them fully at first, and Hope's changes had only just begun.

Probably why it was so easy for her to outfit a space for Gortash's work, especially when he brought along two of her saviors. He set up a place to sleep in his workspace, some section of the former Archive that would eventually become an art gallery.

Hope did not question why he would not wish to sleep much at all, and certainly not in the former dungeons. Parts of her mind seemed permanently broken, moments where she didn't quite know how to control the volume of her voice, times when what she was meant to only think and not say out loud were stated plainly, and also the opposite, where in response to a question she would only stare and smile, not realizing that she had not answered.

But she was more lucid than she appeared. And in moments where she would watch Enver feel his way through processes he had not followed in full for years, she was quietly (and sometimes not quietly) encouraging. "We're the both of us beginning again from here," she confided once. "And I know more than anybody what a difficult decision that is to make."

Karlach and Ravenguard turned their attentions to hunting in the perimeter lands around the house, protecting it from onslaught where needed, but in the House of Hope there was a surprising amount of peace. Whatever pacts Raphael made with Zariel to keep his territory his own appeared to be holding, even with his demise.

In the months to come, the House of Hope started to become the place of refuge that it always play-acted at being before. Excursions to hunt for the Sword of Avernus and the fiery barbarian became search and rescues, meeting lost souls who had braved the pilgrimage to those vaunted halls, and with Dammon making regular supply runs always had the means to pay for portals to and from Toril when asked (and one of a pair of sending stones for Enver, a token of encouragement with a letter from Kael). The servant of Mammon had full pockets and a treasure from the remains of Raphael's vault, and everyone had a way home that needed one. Beds were full but never overfull the way that bellies were.

And Enver Gortash, who was unsure if he was even still Gortash anymore, took to his tools and schematics and studies in a way that he had not since Bane had become his patron. The work of an artificer over time became something that was beneath his Chosen, with more worthy pursuits awaiting him in politics. That kind of inventiveness was wasted on labor, you see. Guile had never been something that he was without, and it took time, not just drawing up his plans and then handing them off to (often indentured) others to do the work, but building again. Repairing. Feeling old magic and creation in his fingers that had long ago been replaced with the boons that the Black Hand had fashioned for him.

Fitting that it begin here. For all the horrors this house had wrought on him as a child, it was the first place where he had been able to study.

Not with permission, at first. But catching him reading was one of the few things Raphael was unbothered by if he wasn't shirking other duties.

There was still some "outsourcing," of course. It just seemed more prudent that the work he did on Karlach's engine have another pair of hands to apply it. He had the good sense to understand what kinds of lines it would cross to insist anyone had to tolerate not just his presence but physical contact with him in order to get something they needed.

For everything he could own about his deeds, that was never him, and it was not about to be.

Because of this careful distance, it was Wyll Ravenguard that had to approach him. "She wants to talk to you."

[once_human]

"Is she aware you are initiating this exchange on her behalf?"

He wasn't sure why it was this question he immediately responded with, whether the answer actually mattered, or perhaps there was the small hope it would deter the son of the Grand Duke from persisting. Keeping this arrangement as he had been so far, allowing the bulk of the interactions in this project to be handled through a neutral go-between, created a comfortable distance.

It staved the risk of any explosive confrontations, sure, but it also stopped him having to form any strong thoughts on what led the both of them here. The truth of the matter was that it was not lost on him that this, the action of finding some way to fix Karlach's engine, would largely be viewed as some manner of penance first. Part of the price he paid for tolerance enough to just disappear rather than face prison or worse.

But again, that was just the action. No matter how optimistic one could be about the outcome, it was still just a series of tasks. That was the easiest way to get it done.

Karlach appeared accepting and satisfied with that if it might promise an earlier-than-planned exit from the Hells without dying. Everything under the surface of that series of tasks and the expected outcome was muddled and uncomfortable, however.

Enver Gortash had done more than a few things that the rest of the city at large would consider criminal. Evil. He was not about to argue that point. It was not a defense to say that every decision had been done with reason and forethought. Reason did not change the nature, and sometimes that reason could be as simple as It is required for X plan.

Bombs in toys for refugee children? Yes, terrible. It was also supposed to be. A machine set in motion as soon as there was even the possibility that Orin might not be reliable enough to sew enough doubt and fear in the population. Proof that the plan would be moving forward with or without cooperation from the Temple of Bhaal.

The trouble came when the reasoning for an awful thing was never as simple as My deity decrees that it be done, and attempts to cover the more complicated bits only made the blanket explanation even worse.

Karlach, and his deal with Zariel, was not a simple evil. And having any sort of conversation about that would mean unraveling all of it -- their previous relationship, how it ended, and where it stood now. It would mean being expected to supply answers that he was not yet completely certain of.

Except for the simple ones. The ones that did not explain everything. The ones that existed solely to brush off attempts to have a deeper discussion.

Those answers were more easily on his lips when he was still the Archduke of Baldur's Gate. When there were more important things happening and no time to dwell on past grievances.

And right now, "simple answers only" would take the difficult truth that he did not know how he felt or why and whittle it down to "I feel nothing about this and you are wasting your time thinking I ever will," which, whether he realized it in the moment or not, would be a lie.

So it was poor luck that Wyll Ravenguard had no intentions of being bullied into letting him off easy. "If you think she'll take issue, then you can bring it up with her," he said. There was a haughty confidence to his tone, a lilt of youth that surely grated his father some but not at all uncommon given the people he had taken to surrounding himself with since all this began.

A bereaved sigh. "Say your piece, then. I have work to do." Despite that, Enver stopped what he was doing and made eye contact while he spoke. A sign he was affording the respect of his undivided attention but also that he would not suffer having his time wasted lightly.

Wyll regarded him with an uneasy acceptance. It had been neither of their decision that this was where everyone stood now, not really. If it was for anyone, it was for Kael -- that everyone from the party and their surrounding allies would move forward no longer regarding Enver Gortash as an outright enemy, that the consequences of his actions be handled as though the man had fully died and no longer existed, and that Gortash himself would do as little as possible to make that grace more difficult to grant.

But in this instance, part of this leg of the adventure also rightly belonged to the tiefling barbarian who did not belong in the Hells.

"You are doing something very important, and whether you feel your efforts here are required of you or not, it is acknowledged. And it's not for me to say but I don't think it will undo what happened. And I don't mean the Cult of the Absolute."

"I know that."

"Let me finish, please." That last word, a delay. Some vestige of Wyll remembering his own age, perhaps. Something of previous encounters bleeding into his tone. "No one is asking you to account for everything that recently happened to the city. We could, though. You're alive and we are within our rights to make such a demand. That's not what this is about. Whatever all this became doesn't change that before you were ever Archduke, you were someone important, to her. The engine is the bare minimum at this point -- she deserves an explanation. Did that someone change? Did she have it all wrong from the start? If you don't have an answer, you at least owe it to her to tell her that."

And for a minute there are flashes of conversations. Enver Gortash had wanted to know why once, too. Why what happened to Enver Flymm had been the way that it was. He wasn't sure it was ever really about closure or looking for something to forgive; he would accept just hearing it said and owned plainly, and his mother had wasted no time in that regard.

And his parents did owe him that much.

Shame that he didn't come away from that encounter telling himself he couldn't do that to another person. Instead, it just reinforced a reality for him: There were times where you were going to be more desperate than mindful of another person's soul.

It would have been much easier, when it came time to experience that himself, from the other side, if when Bane's voice in his mind told him to put away any misgivings he had afterward, his parcel had been as empty as Dravo and Sally Flymm's seemed to have been. But put it all away he did; a deed was done and he took one more step toward his eventual conquest. At least they left him with some idea what the mask should look like when fitted over his own features.

"If she approaches me, I will speak to her," he relented at last. He raised an eyebrow. Will there be anything else?

Wyll Ravenguard gave a nod that was nearly a bow as he took a step back from the chamber. "...Thank you."

[once_human]

The start of negotiations are about as tense as he expects them to be. Whether Karlach has been accepting enough of everything up to this point, it does not remove the fact that when given an opening to be angry, she is going to be. Enver is uncertain in the moment whether it is in line for him to remove himself when he has had enough, or if he is merely meant to sit and take it while time is wasted.

And this is before any words are even said. The only reason she doesn't seem intent on tearing the room apart are likely factors that have little to do with him. She could damage something that stalls progress on her engine, and probably more to the point, she doesn't want to offend Hope.

Enver doesn't stand from his workstation, but he indicates another seat if she wishes to take it -- he doubts she will and opt instead to pace and loom at her leisure.

"Based on the schematics Dammon has shown me, I've been making adjustments to the next revision. Once he's back with the necessary materials, it shouldn't take long to finish."

Opening with business seems the easiest place to begin. Something is said and if Karlach wants to change the subject she can, but at least they are not sitting in silence.

Of course Why? was the first question asked, and he did not insult her intelligence by assuming she meant the project at hand. He takes a breath -- he left the door open for this, so he needs to answer with something. But he knows whatever comes too quickly is not going to be sufficient.

This is time enough for her to press.

"You said, at your coronation, that there was more at play than I could understand." Her voice simmers, that memory coming to the forefront to tamp down that initial blaze that led her all the way back to Baldur's Gate from the depths. "Maybe I won't. But say it anyway." Something pulls at her expression then, a thought occurring? "Can you?"

He blinks, "Pardon?"

"I know sometimes when people make deals with devils, part of the agreement is not being able to talk about it. Was that part of yours?"

The artificer shakes his head. "Even if it had been, I imagine that would have effectively ended when--" He looks at his hands and around himself. "That seems to be the case with most pacts I made before. But that would have been a believable lie to escape an uncomfortable conversation, wouldn't it?"

Karlach glowered. "Am I supposed to take that as a promise you've been telling the truth?"

"No. If I were going to promise that, I would do so directly. You don't come out of a plot where you were posing as a god and then claim to always be honest; that's ridiculous." He crossed one knee over the other, turning to fully face her. "But I promise I can think of no reason to lie right now. It is your decision whether to accept or reject that."

The fact that she doesn't leave says enough of where she stands. "So what made you decide to do what you did?"

There's a long, pregnant silence. Each answer that comes to mind feels incomplete, and there is nothing new to supply hidden in her gaze, or in the room around them. "I wish there was just one what to answer that, Karlach. I truly do. And partly I only know that because when I try to bring it down to one thing, it feels dishonest."

She finally sank into the chair across from him. "Then we'll start with one and keep going until we've both had enough."

And that was what they did. He started with the most blatant answer: It meant revisions made to his prototype that would eventually lead to the completion of the Steel Watch, and Infernal materials with which to fashion them. For her there seemed to be some satisfaction in that -- confirmation that things were just as slimy as they could be when she imagined the worst.

In an hour or two, with Dammon returning but quietly sequestering himself elsewhere to give them privacy, they reach a conclusion. But the contents of that exchange are...exhausting.

Over time, the less obvious reasons started to feel comfortable enough to peek out. Enver mentioned that he very likely could have gone another way to get the same result; he could have not made a deal with a devil to carry this out. But he'd had it impressed upon him that it would afford him some manner of protection.

He didn't say everything, but she did interject enough to say that she knew about his parents and Raphael, so he didn't need to put more of that in than he wanted to. With some reprieve there, he didn't need to recount the sordid tale of childhood things that he was trying to avoid. He also did not open the door to the revelation that Bane likely nudged him in this direction so he wouldn't question why Raphael never pursued him until he was good and desperate enough to take a risk.

You didn't go reaching for old, broken toys when they could be possessed by an angry god of Tyranny.

But they did stay on the subject long enough for him to acknowledge that said past, perhaps, had some bearing on why it felt like a matter of "how things are" to let go of Karlach so easily. Karlach, who had done her work admirably, and had been an addition to his entourage that he had liked. He would not have kept her as close as he did if he secretly did not like her.

And inwardly he had to wonder if Bane believed that to be reason enough to want her gone. Until the alliance, all of Gortash's ties maintained a careful amount of distance after that.

What he never said in that time, that took some doing for her to accept, was that while it would be easy to tell her it was something she had done? That she had failed him in some way? (And he would have resorted to saying that, as a weapon.) It just wasn't true.

It didn't exactly reassure anyone; that meant that no matter what he was accepting he was responsible for his own decisions and not placing any of the ownership on her, sure. But he could. At his worst, he would have. Just to brush it off as quickly as possible to stop thinking of it. To hurt so that the discussion would be closed. Let her wallow in it.

That didn't serve either of them at this juncture.

Flames crackle around her impressive frame as she stands. A huff of breath through her nostrils like an agitated bull. "I still hate you. I'm probably always gonna, but you ain't wrong about shit being complicated. Just one more question."

He nods stiffly, feeling a little drained, but he gestures for her to go on.

"Can you get me home? You're not just biding time here."

"There would be no point." If he comes up empty-handed, it will be known, especially if there is evidence he knew from the start it was going to come to nothing. "It was my design. Or it was, once. If anything is going to work, this is where it has to begin."

That seems to satisfy. Seeing Dammon hovering nearby, sensing now is about as good a time as any to interject, Karlach removes herself without much more to say.

Enver waves the tiefling smith in. Work to continue, and he's glad of it.

He can do this. He just has to get as close as he can to what he was back then. That's the hardest part. Is he even anywhere near that?