In the heart of a temple, hidden from the watchful eyes of the city, a boy sits alone, his mother’s blood having hardly dried on his fingers. A butler, more a grotesque than a goblin, cleanses him and sings his praises. The sound of it is unfamiliar. This creature is full of promises of who he will become, and they fall on Syryth’s ears like cool rain. The boy straining his developing musculature hauling sacks of fungal flour and carts of bricks and stones an hour outside Menzoberranzan is dead. Prodding at animals and flaying them open to study their innards is below his station. His mother’s head mounted outside his family home is only the beginning. Sceleritas Fel scrubs his clumsy, amateurish violence from his body with a fragrant soap and a brush that’s too soft for his taste. The adopted drow, the one who bears servant’s tattoos from his false family, is born anew. Long live the son of Bhaal.

Syryth’s days are spent in a strange education. His new surrogate father, who he towers over at such a young age, pulls him through the halls that will become his. The upper levels are cast in finery, and the lower in piety. The cycle is the same for all of them: action, discipline, prayer, reward. It’s a set of adjustable parts that Syryth understands more than the fog of favour, reciprocity, or altruism. He learns who is valuable and why, he learns that the gears of the city are always in motion, and he learns there is no string too taut or thick to be pulled, if one is deft enough. 

Syryth requires no training in killing. Only in cleaning up. 

And despite the promises of power and encouragement of his darkest gifts, something shifts restlessly beneath Syryth’s skin, and sits stony and obtrusive in his stomach when he sleeps. 

When the night casts long shadows in the Temple of Bhaal, Syryth, like a cat filing down its claws, practices his brutality. He takes victims no one will notice are gone, or at least not care. Sometimes, he takes those followers of Bhaal who have transgressed far enough to have been lined up for punishment anyway. There is no scream he can hear, no skin he can peel or bone he can break that settles him. In three years, Syryth devises hundreds of ways to take a person apart and put them back together, more still to break a mind or a spirit. The practice that started in his own room moves to one adjacent, and then a pocket in the temple’s lowest floors. He doesn’t want them close. Mortals make Syryth’s stomach turn past what use he has for them— and while Syryth plies his emerging sexuality with live victims, he prefers dead ones. The thrill of the first pet lessens with each successive try no matter what he does. It is only the kill that brings him pleasure with the ecstatic rush of his Father’s divine love. 

At eighteen, Syryth is getting closer to the mantle of Bhaal every day, and still turning over awake in his bed, wondering if the hollow ache beneath his sternum would fill if he cut it open. 

— — —

A young woman’s tail drags on the stone floor as she walks. It has been a day’s journey without any indication of the sun moving. Mud builds on her boots, the leather of which has soaked through over hours, sending shocks of cold up her agile legs. A creature the likes of which Carmen has never seen before, clothed in the garb of a butler, pulls her forth by the hand, still babbling with enthusiasm after so many hours have passed. He apologizes profusely for a discomfort that never shows on her face, explaining that the above-ground doors to her new home only lead to those far below her station. Carmen had known, among her fellow guardsmen, that she was the most proficient in taking down an enemy. This creature knows the depths to which she craves the violence she passed off as service, and calls her prowess her birthright. Despite the strange company and the icy layer of water beneath the city, Carmen feels warm with familiarity. She had killed her family for the freedom to pursue her talents. Finally, the world is noticing that she is exceptional. 

In a week of adjustment, Carmen luxuriates. There is much that needs to be cleaned from her, not just the lower city’s dirt but its mannerisms. Sceleritas is her perfect attendant, brushing her hair and laying out her clothes, and gleefully accepting each time she tires of him enough to rip him limb from limb. In this time, Carmen receives persistent visions from her Father. She witnesses herself, elegant in her efficiency, tearing through flesh with blades and claws and teeth. She watches a thousand faceless bodies fall in worship at her feet. And in each of these dreams, a shadow presses at her right shoulder, an inexplicable heaviness that obscures her peripheral vision on one side. Carmen is certain that it knows her, and finds herself waking most days with a hand behind her, as if it was seeking out the presence. 

Carmen wakes one day to find a set of armour instead of robes. The symbol of Bhaal is laid into its breastplate, but the rest gleams like moonlight made into metal. Sceleritas lovingly fastens the interlocking plates, standing atop the lavish, wine-red sheets to do so. Carmen is led down a new hallway today. Arched stone leads to a room with a magnificent dining table, where animated, invisible hands lay down a feast. The scent is rich and overwhelming, though quickly pushed aside at an unexpected presence. 

Someone sits at the end of that table, his back high above that of his chair. He wears her same armour, and drums gauntleted fingers against the armrest. His head picks up from where his gaze was trained on the floor— he appears to lack the interest in a good meal that Carmen possesses. 

Two gazes meet, steely white and bloody red. Eyes widen in an instant. Syryth’s chest lifts. The shadow in Carmen’s dreams begins to take shape. Syryth’s hand falls flat and limp on the table. Carmen’s arms swing uselessly at her sides. They observe each other, slack-jawed, for a long moment. Their veins rush with a confusing, shattering recognition. 

I have always known you. 

She knows that her existence was as much of an accident as it was by design.

So when she dreams of others, she's not afraid. The Dark Urge was never just her, it had always been Father and his will. They're tied, intrinsic.

She exists by design, but who she is is coincidental.

Had Bhaal desired a body, she might have been born a man. Had he desired another child, she might have been human. Had he wished for his bride to be drow, elven or even githyanki, she would have been so.

So when she sees them--humans and elves and men and women and neither and both--it doesn't scare her. They exist from Father's will. Molded to be his in any way he might wish.

And when she dreams of a man--human like Father had been--she lets him come close. Wants to ask if it's the first time he’s dreamt of other Urges, but knows from his eyes that it is.

"Who are you?" he asks in a voice both strange and familiar.

And, love how he rolls that cute eye🥰

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In the ensuing weeks, Syryth keeps his distance from his new partner. Sarevok impresses upon him that Carmen is important, that they bear the same responsibility, and Syryth won’t hear it. She is years late to claim her birthright, and thus years behind in training. He doesn’t know what to make of her temperament, which is often sinister, quiet, and not precisely inviting. When she speaks up, she can be deeply arrogant. She’s always commanding, ordering attendants and followers as if she had always had a place here. When faced with an audience outside of the inner sanctum, Carmen carries herself like she is already being worshipped.

The veneer of Syryth’s distaste for her is admittedly thin. When she commands another, something within Syryth feels compelled to listen. Occasionally, her particularly cruel orders sent a shock of static down to his fingers, where he itches to unsheathe his sword– to strike the recipient, that is. It’s a feeling that his conscious mind doesn’t metabolize as jealousy, but it is jealousy nonetheless.

His walls seem to crumble at the lightest tap. He trails around her like a curious animal, in glimpses between his duties. He begins to suggest that they can take their meetings with Sarevok together, then their meals, and eventually their prayers. 

And then there is the first hunt. As they strike out together, they seem to align not just in thoughts but in their bodies, responding to each other’s movements on a cellular level. Syryth and Carmen stalk dark alleys like twin currents commanding a river of carnage. Their blades move as if they share the same hand. Their bodies never stumble. With the smallest glance or touch, they move into place on either side of a victim. They know who steps forward and who stays behind. What was meant to be a meager handful of sacrifices becomes a giddy, childlike slaughtering spree, lacking the usual care that at least Syryth would take to choose those souls no one would miss. Their muscles tremble with adrenaline and ecstasy, minds filled with a dizzying fog of their Father’s approval. 

As the sun begins to rise, Carmen leans back against a stone wall, and Syryth falls to his knees. Somehow, she knows she isn’t having a vision alone. In a field of endless, hazy red, they watch a hand, at once a stranger’s and intimately familiar, claw a single drop of blood from its body. It hangs in the air, scarlet and shimmering, until the other hand comes to split it into two. The blood swirls and swells, blooming into viscera that wraps itself with ropelike muscle, then ribbons of taut skin. One drop, one soul, two forms. They don’t need to watch the full transformation of this gnarled flesh into mortal bodies to understand what they see. 

They move into the same chambers within a day.

— — —

Their joined room has to be newly made, by Sceleritas’ insistence, and he babbles incessantly about how lovely it is to see them get along. Two opulent beds are placed in it, on the back wall but truly as the centrepiece. No expense is spared; it is subtly gold-laced and less subtly bedecked with tailor-made furniture and fixtures. And it becomes their sanctuary.

Syryth takes to chatter and endearments. He has a playful side, often leaning over to face her and battering her with questions, promises.

I often feel like the smaller piece of what we are, and I believe this means you’re destined to consume me.

I would wade neck-deep across an ocean of flame if you had left a single earring on the other side.

When I die, would you hold the blade? I dream of it, you know. 

Carmen is less inclined to talk, and perhaps less initially convinced of a grand destiny, but she grows fond of her brother’s strange devotion, if only internally.

They bathe together. Syryth takes special pleasure in scrubbing the day’s waste from her body, buffing her heels and cleaning her nails, and most especially brushing her hair. He enjoys the ability to make her sigh when his hands are scratching her scalp or working the tension from her muscles. 

Carmen’s head feels cottony when she looks at Syryth. She finds it difficult to answer his questions at times, and finds herself ignoring him frequently in her overwhelm. His efforts to pledge himself to her only increase when she gets distant, which further fuels her nerves and confusion. There is something she feels, perhaps many things, and she feels she’d need the hands of several people to pick whatever it is apart. 

Syryth is nothing if not patient. He believes that one day, only they will exist, and he will belong to her utterly, and she will acknowledge him in all the ways he craves to be acknowledged, including punishment for his faults. His soul is hers, and they have the lifetimes of generations of mortals for fate to embrace them. So he lives in service without reward, save the ability to make her crack a smile and permission to be close to her. 

It feels lucky for Carmen that they’re not together all the time. As leaders-to-be, Carmen takes a more active role in regular slaughter, while Syryth is mostly in charge of making connections. The space he jokingly calls his war room is kept meticulously with endless lists and notes on contacts, constant flows of schemes in the works, and enough diagrams to fill a small museum. He has a scale model of Baldur’s Gate, although it doesn’t see much use. His plans are detailed, to say the least— always a contingency plan for every contingency plan, and a chain of dominos that, if toppled, would fall far from the cult. He floats all of his plans past Carmen, and always includes her in the big ones— especially if there is to be a massacre. 

Carmen has more of a face within the cult itself, demanding more active worship and keeping those subjects who get the privilege of witnessing her from getting too high on themselves. Her innate bloodlust combined with her training as a soldier gives her a gift for training ranks of new killers, who can efficiently and discreetly spill blood for their lord. 

Eighty years pass in this dance of closeness, a proximity to each other far more powerful than their ties to any other person or thing on the mortal plane, but a proximity that never spills over into something that’s spoken aloud or explored more deeply.

One thing, however, is immutably true: the Cult of Bhaal hasn’t enjoyed the level of power or influence they’ve given it in centuries.