Enver Gortash (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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blueprints_bloodstains2024-09-18 08:31 am
closeyourfist) wrote in blueprints_bloodstains2024-09-18 08:31 am
Avernus Interludes
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.
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.
no subject
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."